Sermon Blog

AND THE BEAT GOES ON

Mark 9:2-9

It was a typical late summer day in 1977, and I had the world by a string.  About to start my senior year of college at Wellesley, I was spending my last two weeks trying to earn some extra cash, and so I was workingundefinedno kiddingundefinedas a hodcarrier for a local bricklayer friend of mine.

       We had a job in Idaho Springs, and we were riding down I-70 near Genesee in pouring rain, and I was at the wheel of my 1973 candy-apple red Kharmann Ghia.  A semi sped past me, throwing a wall of water onto my windshield.  The last thing I remember was a caution in my head, saying, “Just pump your brakes.”  I was hit by a truck behind me that hydroplaned into my rear bumper, sending my car across the other lanes of the highway and end to the rear of a parked semi on the shoulder.

       I was ejected through the front windshield, and my friend was pinned inside the car.  I fully awoke some 17 days later to a blazing headache, a mixed-up brain, and various pains throughout my battered and bruised frame.  It took me a long time, but slowly I regained my ability to speak, read, and walk correctly.  This accident is a part of my history, and I can tell my story today out of my healed scars, but some of the parts of the story I tell about my accident come from other sources filling in the blanks for me, and some of the things I tell may not have happened just so.

       If you ask my father about my accident, his version of this history is quite different from mine.  He never jokes about it the way I can now.  His story starts with the phone call he received from a Colorado State Trooper telling him to come to Lutheran Hospital to his critically-injured daughter, who “might not make it through the day.”  As he tells it, time stood still for him at that moment.  He remembers nothing about how he got to the hospital or what was specifically told to him there.  He only remembers wanting to see me, and being forbidden to do so because of the efforts being employed to save my life.  He vaguely remembers my mother and my sisters being there, and later my fiancee.  He can’t remember any of the conversations they had.

       My father’s history of the same event describes the same scene, but with a very different perception.  He was praying that I would live; once I woke up, I am sure I prayed that I would just die so as to stop the pressurized pounding in my fractured skull.  My father was praying that I would recover and be like I was “before;” I was praying that I would regain my memory and know exactly what happened.

       The fellow who ran into the back of my car told the State Trooper yet another story.  He said that I panicked when the water covered my car, that I stomped on the brake, causing the accident with him.  While he hoped that I would be alright, he was praying that he wouldn’t be found at fault for the wreck; he was hoping that he wouldn’t be fired from his job, sued by me, or charged with a traffic citation.

       My passenger stayed awake through the whole of the wreck, but he never wanted to talk about it.  He had three surgeries for a broken shoulder, and he could never lift his arm over his head again.  He didn’t know God and he didn’t pray, but he found it in his heart to forgive me and to forgive the driver of the other car, and he chalked up his history to fate.

       That incident was, of course, pivotal for my life, but the way I perceived it at the time, and have remembered it and re-remembered it over these past 35 years has been different from the way others perecived it and remember it.  All of the stories concerning my accident are true, however.  And I respect them allundefinedI have to.

       Truth #1:  Mine and my passenger’s injuries would not have been nearly as serious if we had been wearing our seatbelts.  But I was nineteen, and invincible, and well, it just took too darn long to put that thing on, I guess.  Here’s how I know from this careless act that God works in all things for goodness.  Ten years after I was nearly killed on I-70, I was on the bench as a judge in criminal court, talking to kids about wearing their seatbelts, telling them my story, and helping them to realize the enormous risk they were taking by ignoring the safety features present in their cars and on the roads and highways.  Wow.  Some of my doctors believed I would never talk again in complete sentences.

       Truth #2:  We take our lives for granted much of the time.  My father had gone for some time without spending time with me, upset over some life choices I had made.  For him, the story of my accident was in what he nearly lost, and in the opportunity given to him to spend a whole lot more time with me in the weeks and months of my convalescence.

       Truth #3:  People will go to great lengths to protect themselves.  Often the inability to tell the truth arises out of fear, not out of anything personal towards another person.  The driver who hit me took advantage of my brain injury to protect his own hide.  His truth and THE truth did not see eye-to-eye.  I am grateful he did not have my death on his conscience.  Perhaps he is a more careful driver today as a result of my misfortune.  I pray so.

       “The following story is true, even if it did not really happen.”  I love that bit of Native American wisdom.  The truth is in the message; the truth is in the lessons learned out of our experiences, even if we disagree as to the facts and sequences of what happenedundefinedor did not happen.  For me, that is how I can remain transfixed by the scriptures, by the stories of Jesus found in the Gospelundefinedeven though their accounts don’t always agree and even when their story-telling has an underlying agenda.

       Mark was the first of the Gospel writers, but he did not know Jesus personally.  All his stories are from oral traditionundefineda source called the Q source, for example.  We don’t know who Mark is, so we don’t know his credentials as a reporter or journalist.  We don’t know who the Q source is, or even if it is one source, so we can’t test the facts.  For a person who requires proof, who cannot dabble in matters of faith, the Bible is maddening. 

       So what is the truth?  For me, truth is found in the metaphors that leap out from the pages of the Biblical stories.  In the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus, the scene is perceived differently by the players.  For James and John, the sons of Zebedee, they are dumbstruck.  They are there.  They are said to witness the metamorphosis of Jesus from merely human to adopted son of God, yet they say and do nothing.  We don’t know the history from their mouths or actions.  Perhaps they are in the story to symbolize everyman.  Perhaps they are too overwhelmed to speak.  We are left to construct their history to suit our reading.

       Peter, on the other hand, can’t stop talking.  He busies himself with his reaction to the event before ever thinking about its meaning, its purpose, or the effect on him.  He, too is everyperson, just in a different way.  His perception of what is happening appear4s to him to require a verbal and acted-out response.   Finally, God interrupts his prattle, validates Jesus as the son of God, and orders the three men to “listen to Jesus.” 

       We are not told how Jesus reacts to God in this event, and we are left to wonder about that, but we instead learn that

A movie that stars Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a must see for me.  I remember his courageous performances in years past in movies such as “Men of Honour” (about Carl Brashear, the first African American, and then the first amputee US Navy Diver), and “Radio” (a true story of a mentally-challenged man and a local high school football coach).   So even though the title of his new movie, “Red Tails” did not particularly attract me, I looked closer because he was in it, and I found a gem.

          “Red Tails” is the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, African American fighter pilots serving in World War II in the European theatre.  The story starts with the men already stationed and segregated in a rundown airstrip in Italy.  Before 1940, African Americans were banned from flying in the US military forces, but in 1941, the ban was lifted and the first squadron of pursuit flyers shipped out from training in Tuskegee to Italy.

It is not the focus of the movie to show how the program came into being or how the pilots and crew were trained.  We are, instead, immediately drawn into the heart of the war and into the battle for social justice within the war.  The well-trained and highly competent flyers and their support grounds-men are eager to get into the real fight, to fight and to die, if necessary, for “their country.”  But they are relegated to the most inconsequential of missions, kept out of the main war effort, and given hand-me-down aircraft long past their prime.

  Their frustrations boil over while their African-American commanders try to convince those in charge of the European air effort to give them a chance at real combat.  So they go into the air to find their source of healing.

          I love movies such as this.  I love to learn the history within a context that both challenges and inspires me.  I love Bible stories like this, tooundefinedones that challenge me and inspire me.

          The leper, in the ancient world, was both afflicted and disenfranchised.  Leprosy was a condition that was horrible to have and horrible to see.  A bacterial condition attacking the skin and the external nervous system, it caused gaping skin lesions, great deformities, and chronic pain mostly to the areas of the face, hands, and feet.  It rendered the victim incapable of working or performing the daily functions of life, and even the slightest touch to the skin was enormously painful.  We actually still have cases of it todayundefinedit is called Hansen’s Diseaseundefinedbut it is successfully treatable with antibiotics now.

          In the time of Jesus, due to the slow course of the disease over many years and the disabling deformities it caused in its victims, lepers were thought to have been cursed or punished by the God of the Jews or by the pagan gods.  It often appeared in family members, and so it was thought to be generally contagious.  Now we know that susceptibility to the disease is nearly always inherited and 95% of the population is naturally immune to the leprosy-causing bacteria. 

Lepers in the first century were segregated from the general population, and were the responsibility of the religious authorities since it was seen to be a divine curse rather than a medical condition.   You sinned, or someone in your family sinned, and this was your judgment for your sin.

 Hence, the term “unclean” was applied to lepers in the Bible, meaning that they were ritualistically impure as well as physically afflicted.  They were the ultimate disenfranchised of the dayundefinedseparated physically, shunned, and denied entrance to the Temple.  Lepers were relegated to a separate small chamber in the synagogues, 6 feet x6 feet x10 to watch goings on through vertical bars, but they were denied any access to the rabbis or the scrolls. If they entered a home, the home had to be thoroughly cleaned.  If a person brushed up against a leper, the garments of the “clean” person had to be ceremoniously and thoroughly burned.

  Enlightenment, education, or profession of faith could not improve the leper’s lot.  He or she was seen as a contaminatedundefinedand a contaminatingundefinedpresence.  Only a miracle healing could restore a leper to personal health and religious purity.

Now, Jesus’ reputation as a miracle healer had preceded him throughout Galilee.  His disciples told him, “everybody’s looking for you,” and Jesus said in response, “Let’s go to the rest of the villages so I can preach there also.  This is why I’ve come.”

   When Jesus came into the village near a leper colony, the leper of Mark’s Gospel took a great risk in approaching him, a risk only a desperate person would take.  Healing did not come to him where he lived in an isolated and horrendous existence, so the leper went into the forbidden place to find his source of healing.

You will notice that Jesus did not go seek out the leper; the leper took it upon himself to seek out Jesus, and once finding him, then to ask for what he needed to be restored to wholeness.  Likewise, no one came to the Tuskegee Airmen and suggested that they take a bigger, more active role in the air over Europe.  They made their own opportunities, and once seen, they leaped into the fray of their own justice mission. 

          Dietrich Bonheoffer was a Lutheran theologian directly affected by the war in Europe.  In fact, the Nazis executed him in 1945 for his active participation in planning to assassinate Adolph Hitler.  Just before the start of World War II, Bonheoffer penned a book entitled, The Cost of Discipleship.  In this book, he wrote about God’s unconditional grace bestowed on the creation.  He called this “cheap grace,” the type of grace given freely by God and accepted freely by the human creation, without condition, without discipleship. 

He then contrasted cheap grace with “costly grace,” that grace that “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus.  It comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and contrite heart.  It is costly because it compels one to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: ‘My yoke is easy and my burden is light.’”

What is the message in the Gospel story?  What is the lesson learned from the experience of the Tuskegee Airmen?  What is Bonheoffer trying to say within his context of Hitler’s rise to power and the apathy of a nation in response?  It is that we must embrace the healing grace of God wherever it may be readily found.  We must be the instruments of our own healing.

          We have all called on God at some time in our life for healing.  We have all asked God, “Why?”  Why me?  Why my child, my spouse, my parents?  Why was I born this way?  Why do I suffer this addiction?  Why don’t I learn from my own mistakes?  Why is this happening to me?”  Sometimes, we are met with what seems like silence from God.  “I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed some more, but God did not answer my prayers!”  If we haven’t all said this, we have all heard this lament somewhere in our lives.  If God is Still Speaking, why is God not speaking to me, to us, to our need?

          I attended a class this week on the basics of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, as I am currently living this journey with a family member.  One of the byproducts of the condition of progressing dementia is that the victim loses the ability to hear.  I have already experienced this frustration.  But the surprising clarification of this statement was that hearing aids would not help.  The loss of ability to hear is based on the lost ability to decode what is being said.  The messages can’t get through the sticky plaque and tangles in the brain cells, and so the person stops active listening.

          Hearing aids will not help us either when we stop being able to hear how God is speaking to us.  God speaking louder, God enunciating better, God being closer to our ear will not cure our inability to decode the message.  Maybe your have heard the folk story about the minister preaching in a cloudburst that becomes a flood:

 Everyone scatters to his or her cars, and they beckon the preacher, but the preacher says, “Don’t worryundefinedGod will save me.”  The rain keeps a coming, and the preacher now is standing in three feet of water, when a power-boat comes by and a man says, “Preacherundefinedget in!  You’ll drown!”  But the preacher keeps on preachin’ and says to the man in the boat, “don’t worry about me!  God will save me!”  Well, the rain intensifies, and soon the preacher is standing in 5 feet of water.  A helicopter comes to rescue him, and the would-be rescuer yells down to the preacher to grab the rope so as to avoid drowning.  But the preacher keeps on jibber jabbering, saying, “Don’t worry about me!  God will save me!”  Soon after, the preacher is consumed by the water and drowns.  The preacher wakes up in heaven to a vision of God standing nearby.  The preacher says, “God!  Why didn’t you save me back there?”  And God replies to the preacher:  “I sent you a car, I then I sent you a boat, and then I even sent you a helicopter!  What else do you want from me??”

In actuality, we often don’t want to hear what God is saying to us, what God is saying to our church.  We don’t want costly graceundefinedwe want that cheap grace promised to us and freely given, and that will make everything better.

          But the leper knew he had to tug on the hem of Jesus’ cloak.  He had to get Jesus’ attention and ask what he wanted.  The African American pilots knew they had to tug on the very fabric of the social order of the day, that they had to get the attention of those that were in a position to give them what they wanted.  They all had to embrace God’s gift of grace, God’s gift of healing.  It would not do to sit back and wait for that grace to be gift-wrapped and delivered at their door.

          Fast forward to this time, in this place, in this church, a church hurting, a church wounded, a church eager to find  healing.  Who is to be the deliverer of your healing grace?  In what form will Jesus show up here and choose to restore you to wholeness?  In what face will justice appear here and speak truth?  In what words or actions will you find comfort?

          Remember our Call to Worship today?  It was adapted from a poem written by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, Reverend Mpho Tutu.  The poem is entitled, “An Invitation to Wholeness,” and it is found in their recent book, “Made for Goodness,” a book which I highly recommend to you.

          Remember the words you spoke earlier in this service:

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Match your pace to mine, imitate me.

You are free to choose; you can choose to be like me.

Wherever you are you can create beauty.

Moment by moment you can create joy.

Instant by instant you can offer kindness

Now and always you can make me seen.

You can be as I created you to be,

The visible likeness of the invisible.

Do you hear God speaking to you through these words?  Can you feel how to be God’s visible presence in this room as an instrument of your own healing?  Can you be the living reminder of Jesus’ message so that others in this room and currently avoiding this very room might also be healed?

          Healing will not come alone from this pulpit.  I do not --  and nor does any future pastor who stands here-- possess the power to to be the instrument of your healing.  Healing will not come alone from the Association, the Conference, or the National Church either.  The broader church can support you, encourage you, pray for you, and provide resource materials for you, but it cannot be the instrument of your healing.   Nor can your Church Council be the sole instrument of your healing, and to pass off to them the entire burden of the health of this church is unfair and ultimately will not result in its restoration.

No, none of these will be the ones to heal this church.  So look around this room.  Look to the right and to the left.  You must individually, and collectively choose to embrace the healing grace of God, a grace unconditionally given to you.  You can take this grace cheaplyundefinedshow up to church occasionally, lend your financial support casually and irregularly, let others volunteer with the children, with the mission projects, with the music, with the set up and break down of the worship space, with the hospitality, and with the management of church business.   You can light on out of here right after the worship service and avoid the workshops.  You can do that, and nobody will take your cheap grace away from you in punishment.

But you can choose the course of costly grace, too.  You can lend your time and talents to this church’s life, you can lend consistent and meaningful financial support to it, you can attend the workshops and lend your voice and energies to the mission and future of this church family.  Like the Tuskegee Airmen, you can fly into the air in search of your healing.  Like the leper, you can kneel at the feet of Jesus and be intentional in seeking your own wholeness.

On the front of your bulletin you have either the number 1 or the number 2 circled.  Please stand up or wave your bulletin in the air if you are a “2.”  I am asking all the number “1”s go seek out a “2”, and if there is not an even number, a group of three is fine.  Now, “1”s, look the person you have just encountered in the eyes, and say, “If you choose, you can heal me.”  And now you who have been challenged look your challenger in the eyes, and reply, “I DO so choose.”  “2”s, go find another “1”.  Now say to the person you have just approached, looking them in their eyes, “If you choose, you can heal me.”  And those who have been challenged, say, “I do so choose.”  I invite you to now let the healing beginundefinedwith you.

Amen.

“IN A PERFECT WORLD”

Genesis 37:1-4; 12-28

        Sometimes a situation comes along in my criminal court judging life that forms into a story that must be told in churches.  The following is one such story:

        A man well into his seventies owned a house in a jurisdiction where I serve as judge.  I will call him Mr. Steingold, though that is not his real name.  Mr. Steingoldundefined“Sam” to his friends and the neighborhood folks who knew him, was a kindly gentleman, though quiet and introspective.    He had been a shopkeeper of modest means, a tailor by trade.  A widower, he had a son about 45 years old and two grandsons.  The grandsons stayed with Sam often and their lifestyle was not that of Sam’s.  The grandsons partied a lot.   They had both dropped out of high school and neither one worked on a steady basis.  Their friends were of dubious character, but Sam always had an open door policy towards his unruly grandsons and their equally unruly compatriots, allowing them frequently to crash in the livingroom of his home.  He tried to add meaning to their lives by being a true and steady role model for them.

        Sam developed terminal lung cancer, and he announced to his family that he was going to be moving to Florida to live with his sister, as he would not be able to take care of himself much longer.   He could not wait in the current real estate market for the house to sell,  so he made the difficult choice to give the home back to the bank.  Knowing that his grandsons were having trouble getting a start in life, he told them they could take the furniture and furnishings from the home for help in setting up their own apartments.  Sam left Colorado just after the turn of the year.

        Police were called to the home some weeks later by the bank representative who had gone to take possession of the surrendered property.  As it turned out, Sam’s grandsons and their friends had done their best to destroy the inside of the home.  They had ripped the banister off the staircase, and had then used it to smash interior windows and doors.  Other doors had been ripped off their hinges and marred beyond repair.  Holes had been burned and pounded into walls; obscene words and images were drawn on countertops, cabinets and on the carpets.  Shaving cream cans were strewn about, their contents having been sprayed into the heating vents and appliances.  Swastikas had been drawn with black markers on the livingroom walls and hallways, the largest measuring 5 feet in diameter.  There was more damage, but you get the picture by now. 

        The case was investigated and the responsible parties eventually were charged with destruction of property.  After a time, the young adults admitted to the crime.  One of them stood before me for sentencing.  He presented with an attitude of indifference.  He was dressed in old jeans and a wrinkled T-shirt.  On his feet he wore flip flops.  His hair was long and unkempt.  He slouched in front of the podium as I asked him if he had anything to say before I sentenced him.  He then started his statement by claiming that his conduct was “not intentional.”

       

The scriptural text presented to us by the Bible story today is not a happy one.  Joseph’s half- brothers are insanely jealous of him.  They wish him out of the family picture, as he is the favorite of their shared parent, their father Jacob.  Jacob has given his young son a coat of many colors as a symbol of his love and favor.  The brothers are enraged at this act, and they grow to hate Josephundefined“they wouldn’t even speak to him,” we are told in the text.

        The brothers are with the flocks and Jacob, a/k/a “Israel,” sends young Joseph to check up on them.  But when the brothers see Joseph coming toward them, some of them conspire to kill him.  They all agree to hide his body in a cistern and then lie to their father about how Joseph had met his end.  The planned crime was unspeakableundefinedunthinkableundefinedundeserved certainly.  As the story progresses, the brothers decide their financial interests are better served by selling Joseph as a slave to some passing foreign traders for 20 pieces of silver.  Then they dip Joseph’s coat in goat’s blood and present it to their father, leading him to believe that Joseph was killed by a wild animal.  Even Reuben, the one brother who argued for Joseph’s life, joins the conspiracy and lets his father believe the story of the wild animal attack.  There is no remorse on the part of the brothers for their crime.

        Where is the justice in either of these stories?  Where is love, hope, and healing to be found?

        It is a miserable place to in which to live, that pit where you are sure God has abandoned you.  You can be the best person you know how to be, and you can suddenly find yourself abandoned by those you had trusted, injured by those who supposedly should love you, unappreciated for the good person you are.  The pit can be of your own making, as when you make a greedy choice and it backfires or when you ignore your inner voice of wisdom and do that thing that you know will bring you down, but it feels good at the time and you just do it.  You know what I mean.  We have all been in that place of hindsight and its 20-20 vision.

        But sometimes, the pit finds YOU and you cannot help but fall into it.  Like when a good friend tells you she is moving out of town.  Or when a nagging health situation becomes a diagnosis you don’t want to hear.  Or, there’s this pit:  You lose your job and cannot replace it.

        Disruptions in the church can feel like a fall into a pit.  Just when you think things are going along somewhat smoothly, problems arise.  There can be money problems, or disagreements about where the church is heading theologically and socially.  There can also be the problem that feels like a fall into a pit when the pastor leaves.  You get used to one style of leadership, one style of preaching, and then here you go, you have to switch gears and listen to someone else, work with a new pastor.  Maybe you feel like you don’t have the time or energy to deal with this again.

        When I was a young teen, I was very active in my church here in the Denver area.  Life was good, summers were fun.  My sisters, brother, and I traveled to fun places like Disneyland and Washington DC with our parents.  We had a swimming pool that we practically lived in during the summer, and the neighborhood had all sorts of fun activities, tons of kids and happy parents.  I went to church camp, youth group and I taught Sunday School each week during services, after which we would go to our grandparents’ house for homemade milkshakes.

Life was goodundefinedand then it wasn’t.  The world crashed in on my sisters and me.  My parents separated and my sisters and I were divided between the two households.  My brother left town.  The family home was repossessed, as were the cars.   There was no money to pay for the things we all neededundefinedclothes, food, school supplies.   My sisters and I were neglected and we both witnessed and suffered abuse.  I became convinced that God had left us, too, and I left Church, disillusioned with a theology that no longer made sense, no longer informed me or protected me.  I stayed away for 25 years.  I was in a pit to be sure.

You may be feeling just this way today.  You are here, but you are thinking about leaving, throwing your hands up, walking off disgusted and dejected.  I encourage you to resist that way of handling the problems here at this church.  God won’t abandon you and God won’t abandon this church.  You can walk away, but God won’t.

        Traditionally, Moses was credited as the author of Genesis, but modern scholarship now credits an anonymous author probably writing during the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews in the 6^th century before the time of Christ.  The Hebrews, having suffered the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the invading Babylonians, being dispossessed from their lands, watching many of their family and their people massacred, and the survivors being marched hundreds of miles from their homelands as captives, needed stories that could bring them hope.

        They needed to write and speak stories of a hero God who was powerful enough to vanquish the enemy, restore the right order, and champion the victims, God’s own people.  In a world turned upside down, the remnant needed to believe that they would be restored.

        Joseph was one of those ancient mythological heroes.  Those of you who know your Genesis story know that Joseph the slave becomes Joseph the most powerful man in Egypt (next to Pharaoh,) and he is eventually reconciled to his brothers and reunited with his beloved father, receiving Jacob’s blessing after all.  The message for the reader (or ancient listener) is that there IS hope.  No matter how dire your circumstances, there is hope.  No matter how ugly your family members get with you, there is hope.  No matter how much it seems that God has forgotten you, abandoned you, given you up for dead, God has NOT left you and you will be restored to a new and better story.

        That is sometimes hard to buy off on in our circumstances lived out not in the pages of an ancient book but on the hard-pounding sidewalk of life.  I am not sure where the redemptive hope is for the young man now serving a jail sentence of mine, but he did write me a letter recently, and I would like to read part of it to you.  Because, you see, I am convinced that even though he is in a pit of his own making right now, God has NOT abandoned him.  God is WITH him in that pit, working for goodness, working to restore this young man’s spirit, his hope, his sense of well-being.     Listen to what he wrote:

                Honorable Judge…Ideally I will live up to my goals of being a successful and productive citizen.  That process begins with addressing the victims’ loss and being able to once again make their property and lives whole.  I do however understand that I must make amends with the courts and serve a sentence worthy of my misdeeds.  I wish to re-enter my private life and dedicate my personal time and money directly to the people whom I’ve hurt.  Since the event, I’ve spoken with the people involved and relayed my utmost apologies, which they have accepted…

The letter goes on, but you get the gist of it.  It is a far cry from the devil-may-care attitude he presented in court, with the statement that his actions were not intentional.  Who knows where life and experience will take this young man?  But God IS working in the midst of his life for goodness.

Just as God worked in Joseph’s life for goodness.  Just as God worked in my life story for goodness, even when I was doing everything I could to shove God away from me.  God does not give up.  God does not abandon.  God does not forsake.  God is never static, but always dynamic. 

        If you are suffering, God is suffering right along with you, and you are not alone.  If you are hurting, God is hurting, too, and YOU are not alone.  If you are in a pit--one of your own making or one of circumstance, you are not alone.  God shares the space with you, working for goodness.  We don’t have God’s patience or God’s understanding of the bigger picture.  But don’t give up.  Keep talking to God; keep looking for goodness; keep the faith.  God will never –God will NEVERundefinedleave you or leave Parker United Church of Christ.  The real question is not whether God is willing to be in the pit with you, working for you, working for your restoration to a flourishing life.  No, the question is:  Are you able and willing to be in the pit with God?

Amen.

Sermon for Parker UCC

Rev. Malcolm Himschoot

January 8, 2012

Mark 1:1-12

 

Before baptism, we don’t know who Jesus is. There is no Christmas story of an infant in Mark. The gospel begins with this adult Jesus who goes out into the wilderness and gets baptized.

Before baptism, we don’t know who Jesus is. At baptism, Jesus is pronounced Beloved by the Spirit of God. After baptism, Jesus raises hell. That’s Mark chapter 1 in a nutshell.

He withstands Satan, does a lot of liberative things, becomes popular, and people are eventually amazed at Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue. And it’s all worth reading about in the book of Mark!

But here is the thing. The Jordan River comes first.

Jesus goes to the river, before he ever goes to the Temple.

---------

 

The Jordan River, way out there in the wilderness, is the river of truth.

People went to John’s river when they were ready to be baptized. To declare something in public that made a difference in their spiritual lives, when they were ready to examine their spiritual lives to make a difference in public. “Confessing their sins” is the term in the text.

We don’t do that. Right? Nice, wholesome, decent American Christians don’t have sins. Phew! Like me! I know I don’t have sins. LOL.

Oh, wait.

 

The truth I would like to say today is that over the past year, I was set on organizational goals, for the sake of new ministry with new people, good motivations to be sure, but I was more set on those goals than I was seeing any particular people who were already here. In some cases maybe this works out. But in other cases it is surely sin.

So there is a Jordan River moment for me in confessing that I’m truly sorry some of you did not have what you needed in a minister for you this year.

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The Jordan River, the river of truth, is there for all of us. Even Jesus. To enter is to acknowledge hard stuff in preparation – in preparation for that moment when, coming up out of the water, you hear and claim the name that is yours from heaven!

 

I look back on the year, this experimental year for Parker UCC. And I wonder if we as a body may have gone to the Temple first, and skipped the River Jordan. I wonder if we by-passed something unintentionally.

 

In March and April, we explored Whole Earth theology on Sundays and in a Bible Study, a WorldCafe and a family social action.

In May and June, leading up to Pride Fest, we followed Carrie’s lead, and Pam’s and Jan’s and Cindy’s, and we attracted four teenagers and 13 new adults to this church on the basis of an Open and Affirming witness. Some of these families, including LGBT families, quickly became leaders, and welcomed other families!

In August and September we had a Just Peace dialogue between me and the veterans of the church, and it led up to a Veteran’s Day service that was very real and very prayerful. And we did a well-attended community Peace Flotilla.

In October we finally got to “God Is Still Speaking!” Of course, October was our lowest worship attendance out of the year.

Any and all of these four values, these four identity statements, which you had before I got here, are big-time Jordan River stuff. Public expression of a spiritual truth. Not easy. Not easy at all.

Give yourselves some credit!

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I offer two stories in comparison.

 

I know a church, in Utah, who would have been the first Open and Affirming church in their part of the state. As you might know, Open and Affirming means something specific. It is UCC language that a congregation chooses to locate itself toward the front of the movement toward acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Some churches are far behind, intolerant. Some churches are merely tolerant, they’re “open,” they accept people, and that is really helpful to some of us! Other churches progress all the way to open and affirming, meaning in the community they are bold about their beliefs, their theological witness to the worth of all God’s children.

Well, this church in Utah inquired about being ONA. We did a whole workshop and everything. But it turned out, this church wasn’t ready to go to the river Jordan. Wasn’t ready to make a public statement. Wasn’t ready to be known in the community for what happened inside their building. They had LGBT members. But as a whole, they were afraid of what their neighbors would say or do if they found out. That fear of reprisal was very real to them.

So they didn’t become ONA.

I respect the Open and Affirming program, a great deal, and in the UCC we always say ONA is two things. It is both a policy, and a process. The process always leads further places, it never stops, it always encourages relationships of further love and justice, further respect and dialogue and healing on sexuality issues, diversity and justice. An ONA policy is incomplete without such a process. And it’s just true that you can’t rush the process.

The Jordan River will still be there, when that church is ready to make their public declaration.

 

As for Social Justice.

This part of the gospel is often perceived as political, whatever that means.

I knew one church in 2007 that was approached by its justice and peace type members to join a community action against banks. Well, not against banks. But there was a scorecard they wanted to give banks to hold them accountable for something most people back then had never heard of – predatory lending. You know, selling people a house and then foreclosing on it 5 years later because there was no way a family could pay the skyrocketing rates of the adjustable mortgage.

These activist members wanted the church to come down to the Jordan River, in public lend its moral voice as a church to discourage predatory lending. The church did not do that. It seemed controversial. And then came the recession of 2008, thanks to decades of lost accountability for the housing/finance market! So the church of Jesus preserved its neutrality, the more traditional people in the church just thought those justice and peace people were way out there. But as it turns out, a moral opportunity was lost. And that moral opportunity had consequences, for the whole country – for the poor and for the rich.

That church’s bottom line is not the same in 2012 as it was in 2007. Make no mistake! Maybe we should go back and read our Bible again, about concern for the poor demonstrating God’s love for all.

 

Anyway, I don’t know if what I’m saying is helpful or not. Open and Affirming, Social Justice…. I suspect that your core values, all of them, deserve more consideration among you, so that you can feel good about what you’re saying as a matter of faith, and so you know the other people in your church will back you up on taking risks related to these values. Not everybody is going to go march on issues! That’s not realistic. Yet, to be part of something with integrity, you want to know and be able to talk about what inspires your worshipping community. And you also want to have truth in advertising for your new folks.

 

Which brings me to my last entry point into the waters of the River Jordan.

 

What does it mean, to want church growth?

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Folks may take it as a given, an assumption. But it is not a given. In fact significant growth is the exception to the rule, in terms of congregations. Few congregations really want to grow. For growth means, paradoxically, counter-intuitively, and painfully as hell, loss. A church in growth sacrifices at least four things: the way things always have been, the idea that any group can be all things to all people, the effort to retain each and every person, and even – necessarily – the role identities of the people from the start who have been the most intimately involved, who carried the ship for a while but are not about to give up control.

My friend Maggie tells about a new church start she helped begin. She was a leader in the congregation, she was not a pastor – I’m under no illusions about who does the real work! Anyway, they grew from a band of 20 to 40, from 40 to 70, from 70 to 150, from 150 to 300. Each size a completely different organization. The story Maggie tells, on the occasion of their 10^th anniversary, is a story of grief. With her friend Al she looked on from the back of the church. As 300 people were there worshipping and singing, she noticed Al crying. “It’s beautiful,” he said. “But it’s not my church.”

What does it take, to be prepared to say that? To be prepared to build something that is not even for you? Maggie and Al were the hardiest of souls. They were the ones who were still there. They were somehow able, at each step of the way, to manage the grief of letting some people go, who helped the church become what it was for a time, and without whom it wouldn’t have become what it did, but for whom it was no longer what it used to be for them.

We’ve had some of that turnover, this year. Not very much, actually. Just enough, to test the true motivations under PUCC’s desire for growth.

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So these are my parting remarks – too long, I know. Or maybe too little, too late. Only questions, really.

 

Fortunately, the Jordan River is always before us, offering cleansing, reviving, offering the new fresh start, but also the moment of confession, the moment of truth. If I’ve offered anything in the way of truth, keep it. If not, return it and keep only my thanks.

For me, riding the wave of your vision for awhile was one of the best experiences of my life. And getting to know you, I met some of the most fantastic people on this planet. I wish only the best for you, and I leave you Christ’s peace.

Amen.

Sermon for Parker UCC

Christmas Eve, 2011 - 7:30 p.m.

Rev. Malcolm Himschoot

 

The children look out the window pane of the cold car, wiping off frost to peer out and say their oohs and aahs at lovely Christmas lights.

We are driving in Denver past one of many churches, which my kids are always adept at noticing, and this church is named Trinity. That is a new word. An interesting word. So they ask, “What’s Trinity is?”

Glad that my master’s degree could come in handy with four-year-olds, I decide to give them a theological answer!

I say “Trinity” means three things about God. 1. God is our Creator and the Creator of all. 2. Jesus called God Father, so we call Jesus “Son of God.” And 3. the Holy Spirit is with us and helps us to pray.

There was a pause, a little bit of a pause. Then my daughter quickly clarified, “And they all live in our heart!”

She really likes hearts. Really, really likes hearts.

So does God.

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I’m sure there were plenty of good answers to the children’s question. And some not-so-good answers too. What would you say if your kids asked you? What does it mean, the Trinity? Why is that important?

This night, of all nights in the year, we focus on Jesus, specifically the baby born and laid in the manger, the preexistent Word, our Savior, Redeemer, Friend and Brother – the second person of the Trinity. We scandalize our monotheistic brothers and sisters in the Jewish and Muslim faiths by claiming that the One God had a human manifestation, that this particular human was one with the divine!

Yet among Christians, this whole celestial-infant-in-the-town-of-Bethlehem – it’s kind of cliché.

What if, tonight of all nights, in the presence of a mystery that did not keep the divine locked up in heaven but enfleshed among us, as one of us – what if tonight, we Christians opened ourselves up to the presence of the Holy Spirit? The third person of the Trinity? Too often forgotten, except by Pentecostals and oh, who else was it, oh yes, Mary herself who brought Jesus into the world?

What if we focused on the Holy Spirit, the one I identified to my daughter as “the one who helps us to pray?”

 

I don’t know what brought you here tonight. Tradition. Custom. Obligation. Ceremony. The thought of poinsettias. The beauty of the lights on the snow. The need to keep the kids busy until bedtime. The draw of friends and friendship. The craving for music, or the caring to provide music!

Whatever it was, I am sure there will be a year – maybe this year – when you come to worship on Christmas out of a deeply unsettled place, sadness, anguish, loneliness, sorrow. To kneel and to sigh and to melt the ice of suffering with the warmth of something holy. In other words, to pray.

When you need it, you will have help to pray, from the one who dwells deep, deep within you, who connects your spirit to God, all-embracing everywhere, who comforts and guides, heals and uplifts, encourages and prods, the one who draws you into God’s heartbeat with every pulse of anger, every beat of joy, every spasm of eros, every circulation of longing and pain and kindness and trust. From the Holy Spirit of God, your sighs and groans will be made into prayer. So will your words, your actions, your questions – all, prayer, by the power of the Spirit.

 

We at Parker UCC have been reading a book, throughout Advent, called The Breath of the Soul. Joan Chittister is the author, and she has 42 reflections on prayer – which you are welcome to keep reading through the 12 days of Christmas, right up until Jan. 6, the last day of Christmas, which is also called Epiphany. She writes about how difficult prayer is – not because God is mean and demanding, not because you have to be an expert at this spiritual practice, but because in prayer you cannot hide from yourself. In prayer is your truest self. And your truest self holds the key to intimacy with God. It also holds the undertow of your life – the confusion, self-deception, the storms of chaos, and your own particular brand of sin, whatever that is for you.

Our church did some work with the Enneagram just before Thanksgiving, just before we embarked on the challenging season of prayer. We learned some things about what we are (each of us) at our best, and what we are at our worst. We heard from someone who is a spiritual director about passage through the wilderness, about wounds and healing.

Well, a leading writer on the Enneagram, Richard Rohr, says that people today are turning a page, in terms of American religion. Away from something quaint and tribal. And toward something intentional and radical – a spiritual transformation into the mystery of God. He says, when it comes to Christmastime, that people of true faith are not seduced by the image of the cute little baby. "Be forewarned,” he says: “the Word of God confronts, converts, and consoles usundefinedin that order. The suffering, injustice and devastation on this planet are too great now to settle for any infantile gospel or any infantile Jesus."

Suffering, injustice, and devastation. Children hurting and abused. 100,000 dead in Iraq. Oceans, rivers, swamps and glacial ice bearing death instead of life.

In the midst of this context, our history, our moment, we are confronted, converted, and then consoled by a certain revelation. Not a cutesy concrete gift in the package of a Nativity crèche. But by our own encounter with a power beyond all powers. By prayer, ultimately. By showing up to God’s presence. And being transformed.

It could be a moment of birth for us, or it could be a moment of suffering, a moment of decision, a moment of conscience, resistance to injustice, or even a moment of death – that breaks into our own personal world the cosmic world. An awareness that we are alone and not alone at the same time. Divine breath breathes in us. Divine angels struggle when we struggle! God is present throughout our days, and all of time is sacred.

That’s the Holy Spirit. The One who connects us to the Beginning and End that has no beginning and no end.

 

It’s not pretend, and it’s not mythological, and it’s not chocolate, and it’s not Santa Claus.

It’s the Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity. We always call Her that. #3. Like she comes last on the totem pole. If we remember Her at all, she’s down on the list after the Head Honcho and the Go-To Guy!

But what if we start with the Spirit? What if, reaching deep down, we identify sacred experience in our own lives and search there for the tracings of the finger of God?

It was the Spirit – ruach – who was there at the beginning of creation, who moved upon the face of the waters. It was the Spirit of God who overshadowed Mary, beginning the process of the birth of Christ. When Jesus grew up, who else but the Spirit of God descended upon him at his baptism. And when he announced his calling from the Temple, he told of the work of the Spirit. When Jesus left behind his friends after his life and death, he told them – “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” There is no plot to Christ’s life drama, no point to the Christian church at all, if not set in the theater of the Eternal Spirit!

 

How odd that we forget to call her name, when we re-tell the Father-Son metaphorical relationship between the Source of All That Is, and the Human One born and laid in a manger.

In fact, we churchy people should praise the Spirit every Christmas, every Easter, and every Sunday in between!

On the other hand, Elizabeth Johnson hints that the Spirit is not overly religious. In the sense of institutional. No, the Spirit - She defies narrative a little bit. She can’t be fought over so neatly. She belongs more to the ever-present and intimate realm, public and communal to be sure, but mysterious and uncontrollable. That’s why she’s good at helping us humans pray. In the midst of chaos, She finds us when we have yet to find ourselves, breathes her breath in us, seals and graces us in the baptism of life, announces our calling when we are ready, and knits us into community.

Present in everyday life, in every secular setting, present as universal grace, the Spirit “orients us toward ultimate mystery and the fullness of coming blessing.” (She Who Is, p. 139)

The Spirit works with us in the direction of our hope. “Like a midwife she works deftly with those in pain and struggle to bring about the new creation. She comes to wash what is unclean; pour water upon what is arid; heal what is hurt; make flexible what is rigid; warm what is freezing; straighten out what is crooked and bent. Wherever she moves, there awakens modest and even bold engagement against the principalities and powers that crush and oppress.” (p. 136)

Throughout history, given the tremendous endless suffering and the tremendous endless power of life, it is the Spirit who whispers to us “more.” Thanks to the Spirit in creation and community, Johnson says, “we encounter the world and ourselves as held by, open to, gifted by, mourning the absence of, or yearning for something: beauty or joy in contrast to powers that crush.” (p. 125)

 

If you are skeptical of religion, or if you are wondering how Jesus means anything real today, if you happen to be hurting from forms of Christianity that like to condense and contain infinite grace, then I encourage you tonight and in the new year to start with Spirit as #1. Pray. Let 2012 be a year of prayer for you. Calling you on, healing you, renewing and empowering you.

God not only enters in – which is the truth of the Incarnation, the child who comes each December 24^th to be with us. God the Spirit, is never absent.

May it be so with you.

Amen.

Sermon for Parker UCC

Christmas Eve, 2011 - 5 p.m.

Rev. Malcolm Himschoot

 

We have just witnessed a baptism, one way of telling our sacred story. Who we are, where we belong. God’s story of love for us.

 

You know the story of Christmas, right? It’s no secret. You’ve probably read it, or seen it enacted, or remember it from past years. By now you know what happens, right? A baby gets born – what’s his name? Jesus. Right! Jesus. And Jesus had a way of telling everybody God’s love story.

 

In fact, Jesus was God’s love story. Everything he did – calling people toward their true purpose, forgiving people, confronting abusers, creating friendship, healing people, redeeming suffering and even death – enacted a divine inheritance that God was eager to share.

The stable behind me reminds me of my favorite way to tell the story. The stable is the place where Jesus gets born. There being no room in the houses of the people of Bethlehem, the “inns” of that day. Check out the stable Roger and the kids made, for this year’s Nativity play. Have you ever seen anything cooler than the hee-haw horse?

Jesus was looking for a place to be born. And he found this stable.

 

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Meister Eckhart wrote, “We are all meant to be mothers of God.” This writer was a medieval mystic. “What good is it to me,” he said, “if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace and if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then is the fullness of time: When the Son of God is begotten in us.”

 

Where is the stable, today? Where is Jesus seeking to be born?

 

We know there are plenty of closed houses, already full. So full of stuff that’s probably gotten through dehumanizing others. Stuff that blinds us to oppression and the possibilities for transformation. Stuff that insulates against vulnerability, stuff that suffocates with privilege. So full. So full. But if you go outside the houses, look up to the starlight, and then look around, you might see a space just empty enough, just warm enough, just humble enough, to receive the Savior.

 

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The Christmas story gets us through the long dark nights of winter, the radiance of its power helping us bide time until we start over with the testimony of the gospels.

Come January in church time, though, people across the globe will pick up the Good Book and tune into Jesus’ teachings, his witness, his life, his offer and challenge to live as children of God! That’s where it all started. Not in Bethlehem. Nobody became a disciple at the manger. That particular story started in retrospect. But during Jesus’ life, people who converted to his Way said it wasn’t just “nice” that he healed sick folks, and fed the poor, and threw out the money-changers. That he preached on the lilies of the field, and the least of these, and the lost sheep, and the traveler and the widow and the child and the day laborer. It wasn’t just nostalgia. It wasn’t just religiosity. Somehow what he did when he touched people, when he invited people to God’s banquet, was enough to change their lives. It was a direct connection to the divine.

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This stable is awfully nice. Mary and Joseph were so glad to find a shelter, after knocking door to door and being turned away that night from place after place! They found an outbuilding welcoming enough for the Son of God. But Jesus still today is looking for a place to be born. What can you offer? Where can you offer Jesus a place to be born today?

This Christmas, remember the stable, the smell of it, the strength of the walls, the warmth of the hay.

From now on, you are the stable. You are the place where Jesus wants to be born. Your life may welcome courage, not mere piety. Your life may be home to the One. It is up to you to tell the sacred story now, in every way that matters.

May it be so. Amen.

Sermon for Parker UCC

December 18, 2011

Rev. Malcolm Himschoot

 

My kids’ birthday was yesterday. It gave me an idea, considering our theme this week is Birth. I asked Mariah if I could show their birth video in church, and for some reason she said no!

Well anyway, not many of us can remember being born as babies. We did an amazing thing, by being born, but it’s hard to remember. It would be nice to remember, so we can relate to any process which is terribly hard and painful, but without which no life would exist.

For the baby, it’s hard! Not to mention the mother. I’m not even going to get into a mother’s experience of a birth. But the baby! Do you realize, the baby gets squeezed, millimeter by millimeter, down a canal which does not open until the infant itself forces it open with its own cranium. You know, an infant’s skull comes out pointed because of all the pressure – it gradually softens round, but still. And the heart has to actually stop for an instant, in all the transition from being bathed in fluid to breathing air. For the lungs to work, for oxygen to flow, the heart has to reverse its flow! An infant gets squeezed and smushed, and almost dies. And then it breathes. And then it lives.

That’s amazing.

 

Often, despite everything, it works. Like Jesus’ birth, by a miracle, by the light of a star, in unlikely circumstances, in the hardest and roughest of times. Despite the arduous journey for Mary and Joseph, despite the inhospitable innkeeper, despite social sanctions on the couple, despite Herod’s violence, Christ got born!

So often, in modern times, birth simply works – babies get born!

But other times, they don’t.

 

Babies sometimes don’t get born, or they get born but not alive. This is an experience that millions of mothers have. The statistics are, in the U.S., about 2 million per year, pregnancy loss. Half of those planned terminations, and about half naturally-occuring complications, miscarriages, and stillbirths.

In fertility treatment for the longest time several years back, my partner and I were told by doctors that 1 in 3 fertilized eggs actually pass from the body before the first 12 weeks. That was a hard time – we had some of those kinds of losses. Mariah felt it more than I did. But all I can say is, it totally depends on the situation, when and where and if pregnancy loss is felt as the loss of a baby.

The natural statistic though is enough to make you wonder. I mean, we all tend to focus on the 4 million live births that happen every year. Isn’t that great? And it is! The species goes on. Woo hoo! Plus, babies are cute.

But there is more to the story. Miscarriage and perinatal loss is such a common, almost universal experience for women, over the course of human history, that it’s too bad it’s missing from the male-centered Bible.

It’s missing… except – in this fragment of text repeated in Matthew today.

 

How to express the grief that so many babies were killed in a fit of Herod’s abuse of power? How to call forth the words of rage and pain? Two-year-olds slaughtered by the will of a king. Soldiers sent into homes to spear to death any young boy they see. The recorder of this trauma echoes back to a poem, or a song, already familiar to the people. If you can see, in your Bible, verse 18 is set off in quotes. The text says it comes from Jeremiah, but if you go back to Jeremiah, it is also in quotes. This is a text within a text. It is the citation, I believe, of a lullabye, a song unto itself. “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You could sing it – if you knew the tune, you could sing it – when tragedy strikes your children, whenever tragedy strikes your children.

Rachel’s cry for her “children who are no more” is the pain, feminist scholars say, of exile, war, genocide. It is the lament of mourning whenever life is cut down. And it is also the cry for babies who could be born, unborn instead. It is the cry of stillbirth and reproductive loss. A grief so common, so constant throughout history, as to have its own voice, throughout thousands of years of varying prophecy and religious interpretation.

“Refusing to be comforted, because her children are no more.”

The record of Jesus’ nativity isn’t all sweetness and light and a baby “no crying he makes” in a manger surrounded by a halo! It is that, but his birth story, which we will read on Christmas Eve, is a story set in the context of tragedy.

Tragedy happens. Injustice happens. Loss and death. Jesus’ birth story is placed within the story of so much pain, so much devastation, so much struggle, so that a true live birth can gleam brightly and be treasured for what it is.

 

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There once was a man named Yeager. An aviator, back in the day before anyone had surpassed the speed of sound. He was a pilot who loved to fly. Like everyone else he would get awfully close to the speed of Mach 1, before slowing down. Too much shaking, too much turbulence, too bumpy. Mach .9. Mach .95. Unnerving. Unpredictable.  So the pilots slowed down. What could happen? Would the plane blow up beyond that point? Would it come to pieces? No one knew.

No one had ever broken the sound barrier. Until one day, someone did.

“Everything else calmed down,” said the pilot Yeager. Once he crested that sound barrier, and broke beyond it, all was silent and still and smooth. There was no barrier, anymore.

 

Infants, and aviation records, and all kinds of things that get born, get born in their own time. Like God’s house – the Temple of Jerusalem. David thought it was time and thought he should be the one to build the Temple. God said, it’s not time. And David was not able to birth the Temple – it took another generation. That lost potential was profoundly disappointing in David’s life. Solomon got to see the fulfillment of that dream, but not David.

Birth takes the time it takes.

 “Be born again” Jesus told a rich man named Nicodemus, who was so absorbed in a womb of comfort and luxury, that eternal kingdom-of-God values could not find him there. So Jesus told him to be born again! Come out for air, come out to breathe the air of the Spirit! Nicodemus could not, not that day.

Things get born in their own time, or not at all.

As Joan Chittister reminded us this last week in her book on prayer, “Very few things can really be forced before their time. Love cannot be forced. Growth cannot be forced. Understanding cannot be forced. Acceptance cannot be forced. Like birth, those things germinate in darkness until ripeness comes.”

 

Birth takes the time it takes.

Sometimes it is not our time to be born. Like all the pilots, prior to Yaeger, who could not break the sound barrier. Maybe they were right not to break the sound barrier – maybe those earlier technologies of plane would have broken apart and shattered to bits! But there comes a day when it is right. When there is a fit, and what was not possible before becomes possible. On that day, to dare to Die becomes the call of Life itself.

Only from beyond, from the other side of birth, can you tell that’s what it was! Not a barrier at all.

Simply Mach 1.

 

Sermon for Parker UCC

Rev. Malcolm Himschoot

December 4, 2011

1 Kings 1:1,15-21, 2:1-3 / Luke 2:22-38

 

Last week a wonderful thing happened. Any UCC preacher would be proud. People came up to me after worship, during Fellowship hour, and said, 'I disagree with you!'

This is great. What maturity, what thoughtfulness! What a gift to communicate your own sacred thoughts and feelings! Life with God is complicated enough that good preaching, good theology of any kind, takes dialogue and shared experience. And for that dialogue to go on beyond 10-11 o’clock on Sunday morning is the true measure of a worthwhile conversation.

 

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One thing some of you picked up on last week, was David's God-as-angry-puppeteer theology. After he felt guilt for his child’s death, he believed God punished the child for what he did. It was his fault as the parent. And it was all very black and white.

 

I call that hot air balloon theology. It may fit together, it may look impressive for awhile, it may theoretically afford a great view. But all it takes is one life experience and pow! Shoots a hole right through it. That balloon will be grounded.

 

Even if the Bible sometimes tries to make sense of suffering by saying that everything bad that happens, happens because somebody ticked God off, I don’t believe that. All it takes is one life experience of something tragic happening to really wonderful people and, pow, that theology has holes in it, like a hot air balloon shot through by a bullet.

 

However that may be, David had much to struggle with. And in his case, as a lover, as a parent, he had a lot of responsibility, which he did and did not, learn to use well.

 

Still and all, David became a king. Royalty! And we now have the legacy of counting down the days til the birth of Jesus, by recalling Jesus’ royal lineage. As the ancients tell it, Jesus’ earthly father was the son of the son of the son of the son of the son of David. Who was the son of Jesse. So we get Jesus from 'the root of Jesse.' On that family tree Jesus is the flower, the fruit. He was known as the long-awaited king who would do as David could not do, and rule eternally.

 

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In our first Bible story today, David got old and died. Yet another thing – like his flawed theology – that proved he was human.

 

When he was getting old, David got cold. And could not get warm. I censored that part of the story (thinking we might have kids with us) where the people in the palace found him a young girl to quote ‘keep him warm.’ Pretty clear example of child sex trafficking – very sad, especially in our context, with recent news stories of people abusing their privilege to take advantage of children. This is why we don’t do everything the Bible says!

 

But anyway David the old man is preoccupied. He wants the kingdom of Israel to go to his son Solomon, born to Bathsheba, but all this political intrigue is going on, where there are other ideas, other uprisings, revolts or whatever. David tries to manage all this and set up his desired successor, and so the last thing he does with his days on earth is not play a harp, tend some sheep, write some love songs to God, like he did when he was a young man on Jesse’s ranch. The last thing he does is call his son Solomon to him and press upon him the importance of going the exact same way he did. Doing the exact same thing that David did and ensuring it would go on exactly the same. Obey the Mosaic law, be a strong king, and kill a bunch of leftover enemies.

 

As he approached death, all David could focus on was how to do the impossible – control and continue something beyond himself.

Then David died, and was buried with his ancestors in Jerusalem. And eventually Solomon died too. And then after that the kingdom fell apart, and there are three books of the Bible telling about all the chaos for generations!

 

But yet a thousand years later, a couple of devout old Jews waited in the Second Temple in Jerusalem, watching for a special baby to be consecrated to God. For they looked forward to this baby becoming a new king. A new kind of king! “A light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory to your people Israel.”

 

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David had everything to lose, and thus he wanted everything to go on the same. Anna and Simeon had nothing to lose, and thus they eagerly anticipated something new.

 

Anna was a prophet. She was an old woman. I’m sure she got cold too sometimes. She ate and fasted, ate and fasted, and at age 84 she never left the Temple, but worshipped and prayed there all the time. On the day that Mary and Joseph brought baby Jesus to Jerusalem for the traditional ritual of the first-born son, there was Anna. And we are told she immediately “began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

 

These people were looking for something. They were looking for something new. And when it came, the people who were looking for something new were overjoyed!

 

David as an old king wanted to make sure that everything he lived for and everything he accomplished, would last. He wanted to hand down the throne, hand on the torch, pass off the baton. And he wanted to control it and ensure that everything would stay the same.

 

Anna as an old prophet grasped something she had never ever touched before, something she had no control over, something she could barely imagine, but something she’d been ready for because of her prayer to God!

 

That is a whole other way to approach old age, isn’t it? With hope for what will come after!

 

I am reminded of that saying: 'We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.' By looking forward, by willing ourselves to imagine what may be, what might come from a new generation, we will be more hopeful than otherwise. Otherwise, of course we could just despair that what has been, is no more, and all we knew is ending.

 

Two ways of aging. Two ways of taking part in the cycle of life.

A baby Messiah came to those who were ready to receive him and bless him for what he would become.

Anna spent her last days waiting to see a newborn miracle for the first time. And then she did see it. What a powerfully hopeful way to grow old!

 

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Aging is a huge industry today. More and more people are going through shared and recognizable passages, from 70-90. Mobility issues – from more time than ever to travel in retirement, to not being able to drive yourself to the store. Figuring out what to do with stuff, de-cluttering, down-sizing. Dealing with pain or drug prescription insurance plans. Relocating to a variety of housing situations to keep independence as long as possible. All kinds of issues around wealth or poverty – some familiar, some brand new. Having a lot of money and figuring out what to do with it for posterity. Or applying for assistance to just get by.

 

I’m not even talking about family issues around aging. Live with relatives, or not, live near these relatives, or those relatives. The way those relationships may stretch us or compound things that weigh on us even more than worry for our daily bread. Phew!

 

No, I’m just talking about inner outlook, the mental and emotional choices of one individual moving toward the close of a lifetime. What stories do you tell? Are you more likely to feel doom and gloom about the unreliable way things fall apart? Or are you ready to praise God and prophesy about a child who will do something new?

 

The stories you tell have a lot to do with whether you carry hope around with you, day to day. It’s like that motto, “If you think you can or if you think you can’t, you’re right.” Aging often seems to carry a negative connotation, even the world ‘old’ can be disparaged as hopeless.

 

And yet, you have people who in their old age have learned to carry creative hopefulness and pass it on. These folks define the word ‘elder’ for me as one who has wisdom enough to spread around, and who continually learn and access more wisdom.

 

All you have to do is look around this congregation to see some amazing elders. Creative and hopeful people. People who tell their stories – laughing about the past, wondering about the future. People who volunteer where they can be part of an ongoing project, one that goes far beyond them, yet to which they give their service, their passion, their prayers. These old people have parties! These old people count grandkids – their own, or someone else’s. They see children and look out for children. When they look at younger generations, they look to see God’s miraculous movement toward a blessed future.

 

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This is the lesson of Advent. To wait and watch with hope. Because a new promise will come! But if we’re not there watching and waiting, or if we turn away, we might miss it. The Annas, and Simeons, teach us about Advent – about summoning God’s future not by futilely trying to control something but by praying and living with hope.

 

 And because the Annas and Simeons among us grow old with hope, they make the rite of passage of aging one filled with gratitude, and respect, and shared relationship.

 

May it be so. Amen.

Sermon for Parker UCC

Rev. Malcolm Himschoot

November 27, 2011

 

 

 “Rites of Passage” is our Advent theme this year, as we journey the four weeks until Christmas. In the pages of the Christmas narrative are rites of passage for people of all ages, as they wait and prepare for Jesus, who will be a significant happening in their lives. Whether young or old.

 

Let’s start with the rite of passage called Parenthood.

 

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Becoming a parent for the first time is terrifying. The responsibility implied! Not just to care for the body of a helpless baby, but to guide that person’s character as she grows, inevitably making an impact on the wider community by what she chooses to do.

 

As Gary Ezzo and Robert Bucknam emphasize, who wrote a book on virtue-driven parenting: “If you want kindness, gentlenesss, respect, honor, compassion, mercy, and justice shown to you, then live by these virtues yourself.” Well, good thing that’s easy! All parents have to master is the human condition! And, if you happen to mess up, then too bad – your “failure … may severely limit [your child’s] human potential.”

 

Maybe you have seen the refrigerator magnet: “Children Learn What They Live”

If your child lives with criticism, your child learns to condemn.

If your child lives with hostility, your child learns to fight.

If your child lives with ridicule, your child learns to be shy.

If your child lives with praise, your child learns to appreciate.

If your child lives with fairness, your child learns justice.

If your child lives with acceptance, your child learns to like one's self.

If your child lives with love, your child learns to love others.

 

Great list, I’m sure. But if it that simple, it is scary! Makes me eager to share the responsibility of caring for children with a whole community, so that I alone don’t screw it up.

But I do. And we do. A few months back a news story broke: Progressive white parents shocked to find that in a test administered at elementary school, their white children reflect racist thinking! Whoops. Sends us back to our foundations.

Or just recently, as I was driving along, I was hearing my 4-year-olds discuss bad guys, getting a gun and shooting them. “Is that what you do to bad guys?” I ask. They think for a while and decide that putting them in jail is better. But they’re really not satisfied until one of them proposes getting “a garbage truck” to “throw the bad guys away.”

Judged. Our whole society is judged, because you see, that’s exactly what we teach children to do with ‘bad guys.’ Throw them away. And as a parent, I am judged, because I haven’t taught anything different!

By our children, we are judged. Everything we have done or failed to do will become evident in their experience. How’s that for terrifying?

 

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This was David’s problem. He feared that his moral failing would reap upon his child what he himself had sowed. Which it did, in the story we read today.

Recall it is no footnote in the life of Bathsheba, that King David had her first husband killed.

(Was David a good guy, I wonder, or a bad guy? Or both? His story makes a great saga in the Hebrew Bible, and we will inquire into it through these four weeks of Advent just because it contains such ups and downs, such profound choices through every stage of life…)

Anyway, David caused Uriah’s death, and Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba, gave birth to David’s child. Their second child, Solomon, would go on to become king of Israel, very wise and famous. But the firstborn child got sick and died, and David always thought that God delivered that as punishment, because a prophet had told him so. David fasted and prayed and asked God to spare the child’s life. But this is not what happened, and David accepted the guilt for it.

Sometimes, our deeds have consequences in the life of our children, or our grandchildren, or seven generations from now, as environmentalists urge us to remember. Sometimes, there is no way off the hook. We cannot pay the penalty, though by rights it is ours to pay. Sometimes, the harm will land on our children, unless we can turn and repent and do better than our worst.

 

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So David had a hard way into parenthood.  The way into parenthood is not the same, for everybody.

 

Back to Advent. Mary receives the news of her impending parenthood, and she is terrified. What is she terrified of?

 

Bible translators put various English words there, our translation said “perplexed” this morning. Perplexed? Please! It was hardly perplexed.

Here she was, a young woman who had been taught with awe and devotion to wait for a Messiah for Jews and for all of human history! And at the same time… here she was, a pregnant girl in a society that stoned girls who got pregnant out of wedlock. Mary was pregnant. An angel delivered the news. Such a crisis would define her coming-of-age, a girl become a woman, at once alone and independent, at the same time needing and seeking belonging with other people, like all young people still looking for what she could believe in, seeking those whom she could trust.

What the angel said to her wasn’t just mildly perplexing. It was downright terrifying.

 

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I found it interesting last Sunday in the Enneagram workshop that different people – at different points on the circle of nine points – have different fears. Different fears that relate to different core wounds, different fears that drive different distortions in our approach to the world. Of course I would find this interesting – I’m a 5, I love to soak up information. So I got to thinking, what number was Mary on the Enneagram?

 

That day that the angel appeared to Mary, announcing this new, terrific, positive, blessed, magnificent passage toward parenthood, I think the angel touched her core fear, and that’s why she was terrified.

What was that wound? What was that fear?

 

What would it have been, for you?

 

Looking at the Enneagram circle, let’s take 5s, for starters. 5s can be loners, intellectuals, mystics. Bill Gates, Hildegard von Bingen, that weird great-uncle in the family who’s really a hermit! 5s, to risk stereotype but to make the point, fear falling in love most of all. Because love, above all else in human life, threatens any ordered system of understanding. Which is the thing 5s use to compensate for believing they are not truly wanted.

Everybody has a different primary fear, and it comes from somewhere. Somebody fears pain (7). Somebody fears solitude (2).

For someone here, you always wonder whether you truly belong. You’ve been taught you weren’t acceptable, weren’t welcome. Maybe you were beaten, literally, or received aggression you didn’t deserve, maybe you were kicked out of your home. If it didn’t happen so directly, at a young age, you may have seen it happen to someone else, and you formed a protective loyalty. Fidelity and obedience come easy to you, duty and strength. Ah, but by that gate also enters a temptation toward Security, which clamps down hard on creativity, and makes taking risks in faith very, very frightening.

The angel that visits you, on the eve of something new, awakening new possibilities that come with great responsibilities, this angel is going to terrify you to death with your particular fear. How will you choose to respond?

The Enneagram names some different positions so that, if we choose to view ourselves through that lens, we have a tool to step toward the option God will use to make us more whole.

For someone here, your deepest fear is failure. You were taught somehow, wrongly, that you’re only good, you’re only loved, if you’re successful. And so, you inspire people with ambition, prestige, or energy! But if you ever lose that influence, if you ever lose that image of yourself as successful, you are left with deep pain. A love that emphasizes your true worth, not dependent on any transient accomplishment, is the only thing that can go deeper than the superficial, and restore to you true hope. That is the challenge the angel will put to you, when in the night you are told very bad news, which is also very good news, with these words, “The Lord is with you!” That’s all. No guarantees. But the Lord is with you.

For a whole bunch of someones here (it turns out Parker UCC has a high number of “9”s) – your deepest fear is conflict. You come by this fear not by way of great love, for your love leads you toward your best self: decisive action, fair judgments, not only empathetic and understanding but bold and resolved decisions on behalf of the whole group. No, not love, but fear for the 9, comes because once upon a time somebody got you to suppress your own interests, to keep your anger to yourself. Not worth the effort, resigned, you try to please others rather than work for what you believe. With in fact the greatest gifts for community, you are afraid of your own greatness!

What does this angel say to terrify you, when it shows up and says, “Favored are you among all?” … Perhaps it says what Rebekah Simon-Peter says in a time of conflict: "There are benefits to conflict. You never get to clarify your values and commitments except through conflict."

 

Whatever it says, this angel comes. For us all. For we all go through rites of passage where our deepest fears are pressed, poked, unsettled and unearthed. We are all called upon to bear a child of promise, to bring to birth some new manifestation of divine love in our lifetimes.

We all get the choice to say “May it be according to your word” or – not. We also can choose to go in another direction, the direction of our fear.

 

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Now, Mary’s story of parenting had a happy ending. At least for a while. Her baby was healthy, and lived, and grew, and didn’t die until he was about 33 years old. As a mother, Mary did good! And still her teaching, her model of compassion and respect for human dignity, for Jesus, did not come without consequences. He made some enemies, and challenged some authorities, and was punished for it.

In this life, there are no choices without regrets. That is the meaning of responsibility.

 

Parenthood as a rite of passage may symbolize responsibility, like nothing else!

I pray this season of Advent brings some peace on all your passageways that resemble parenthood.

Amen.

Sermon for Parker UCC

November 20, 2011

Rev. Malcolm Himschoot

Matthew 25:31-46 / Ephesians 1:15-23

 

The ‘church universal’ receives Ashton in baptism today. Meaning the ‘whole church.’ Not just us!

If you are baptized, whatever you’re baptized, then you’re considered baptized into Christ. That goes with you, through time, if you journey through Pentecostal or Lutheran, Methodist or Mennonite settings. On the extended family tree, we may not all know where each other is exactly, but we know we’re related. And we’re related across generations, too – we’re all related to the people who fought over the creeds in the 11^th century, or the 4^th century, we’re all related to the people who created prayer books and catechisms, to people who read the Bible in the Middle Ages, to people who wrote down the Bible in the 1^st and 2^nd century.

Our UCC sense of baptism is both personal and corporate – profound for the individual who chooses to die and rise in Jesus, giving their life to Christ. And profound for the whole body, because we become more whenever a new part is recognized and integrated. Wow! It’s having two eyes, instead of one, or the ability to walk instead of sit. Remember that old soap commercial – it’s great for your 2000 parts! I always wondered what all 2000 parts were.

Christ’s body in this world needs all the parts it can get.

Still, Christ’s body, in this world, remains fractured and wounded, with more than scars from suffering. We commune each month and when we do, we remember the very present form Christ’s body takes – this bread is not whole, but broken.

As  Robert Benson says, the church universal is broken. Benson says this:

"We must seek out the things that we have in common and at the same time learn to honor the things that make us different. We must learn to take the things that we hold dear undefined our sense of community, our love for the scriptures, our hunger for prayer, our capacity for worship undefined and work to make them wide enough and deep enough to include others rather than keep them at a distance.

"We must be willing to cultivate humility along with certainty, to practice tolerance along with devotion, to seek patience along with piety.

"We must learn to seek the face of Christ in those who are different as readily as we do in the faces of those who are like us.

"We must learn to love one another."

Modern ‘brotherly love’ across denominations includes space for different groups to carve out distinct niches. The United Church of Christ is known for ‘extravagant welcome, early truth-telling, and evangelical courage.’ Meaning we didn’t wait for the rest of Christianity to affirm women as clergy, or gay people as loved by God, and even in the face of injustice, especially in the face of injustice, we don’t give up our Jesus! We have a distinct witness to the gospel, said one-time UCC President John Thomas. And yet, we United Church of Christ folks – “united and uniting” – are among those most passionate about ecumenical relationships, that ‘church universal’ stuff.

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There was a time when Western Christians were deeply suspicious of the Roman monopoly on Christian faith, and abuses by the Catholic hierarchy. Most of our UCC origins stem from this time, this time of Reformation in Europe. Some of our forebears, the German forebears, kept a reverence and longing for the church universal. Some of our forebears, the English ones called Puritans, and the English ones who lived briefly in the Netherlands before arriving on this land as Pilgrims, didn’t mind separating out completely. They were the ones who developed a theology around the local congregation. The congregation, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is the location of divine leading and divine revelation. The congregation -- not just a collection of people, but a diligent committed group of people, willing to hear one another and seek wisdom together -- is the authoritative body.

 

More than the sum of its parts, in other words. A congregation is more than any individual.

 

Now, those Puritans and Pilgrims gave the United States a mixed legacy. On the one hand, they gave us a pretty good start on democracy, which most people agree is a good thing. On the other hand, they also gave us the Salem witch trials, showing us how easy it is to take on the mentality of mob rule. The lesson being, a variety of spirits move in any community. And any good community depends on true discernment, on individual strength and maturity.

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Today, the United Church of Christ is covenantal. Congregations associate together in wider groups, and talk to each other ultimately in a Synod. Congregational, Christian, Evangelische and Reformed systems came together in 1957, and we are still scratching our heads to figure that out. But when I teach UCC Polity next spring at the Iliff School of Theology, I will teach the understanding that the common thread is covenant.

In a congregational covenant, people commit to each other and to being led by the Holy Spirit together. Because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In the wider church covenant, congregations commit to each other and being led by the Holy Spirit together. Because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In covenant, we are free and autonomous to make our own choices… and in covenant, we risk being transformed in relationship with others.

 

For UCC folks, we live out our Christian path (membership in the church universal) through the spiritual discipline of being part of a community (a local congregation). And we say that the head of the church, everywhere at all times, is no human being at all, but Christ.

From Ephesians: “God’s power was at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and sat him at God’s right side in the heavens, far above every ruler and authority and power… God put everything under Christ’s feet and made him head of everything in the church.”

 

Greater than the sum of its parts, indeed. You and I, and all the eyes and hands and feet and lungs and hair follicles, are not just a collection of tissues and organs. We are the body of which Christ is the head!

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Now – Jesus didn’t use this mixed metaphor. The apostles did.

But consider what Jesus did say: this scripture from Matthew 25. “Do it to the least of these and you have done it to me.” If the church is Christ’s body, and Christ our ruler says, “actually, look for me in the least of these, not on the celestial throne but in the doorway of that building over there, spending the night on the sidewalk” then whoever is found with the chronically homeless guy is found with Christ, and wherever people are serving God’s mission in the world, there is the church, and the true church is found wherever people are serving God’s mission in the world.

 

In other words, the Church is in mission! And if it ain’t in mission, it ain’t the Church.

 

Church, we will always find our greatest purpose in mission. In accompanying people whose lives are changing, in praying and doing what we can for the divine work of salvation and transformation.

We are drawn to mission today in at least three ways – in sharing with the folks who will line up for a Thanksgiving meal down at the Parker Task Force, in baptizing Ashton on his Christian journey, (who knows where that could lead!), and in engaging a risky, potentially transformative kind of relationship with each other this afternoon: talking about spirituality, fleshing out our covenant. Everyone is invited to stay and grow, led by the Holy Spirit.

Amen.