The Kingdom Zone (sermon, January 24, 2010)

Matthew 6:1-12

It may not surprise you to hear that the golfer Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open golf tournament in 2008. But if you watched that tournament, then it was, if not a surprise, then nothing short of an incredible physical feat. Having recently had surgery on his left knee, it was obvious to anyone watching that Tiger was playing in considerable pain. But only after he won a sudden death 19th hole after an eighteen-hold playoff round against Rocco Mediate did the public discover the extent of pain he suffered while he played. It turned out Tiger was not only playing on a knee that had recently been operated on; he had also suffered a double stress fracture in his left leg during his rehab from the surgery.

It was impossible to watch this event without marveling at Tiger’s mental and physical toughness. Appropriately, there was also a commercial that played over and over during the tournament, an ad that showed shots of Tiger playing golf over the years accompanied by a voice-over by Tiger’s father. “I would do all kinds of things to mess Tiger up,” his father said. “Just as he began to swing, I’d drop my whole bag of clubs and he would stop and look at me and grit his teeth. And then he would strike [the ball] and turn around and look at me. Never said a word, but that look said “take that!” And I said, Tiger, I promise you, you will never meet another person as mentally tough as you in your entire life. And he hasn’t and he never will.” (1)

Given the recent revelations about Tiger’s personal life, it appears that even for someone with Tiger’s remarkable physical and mental toughness, something’s got to give. Still, that 2008 U.S. Open was a truly incredible performance. Clearly, as Tiger Woods played the ninety-one holes that it took to achieve victory, he was in the zone.

Now not one of us here today may have the talent or skill for any activity that Tiger Woods’ has for golf, but in spite of that, I bet we all know what it feels like to be in the zone, to experience what psychologists call “flow,” that feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the performance of an activity. A musician might achieve flow during a concert when she hits every note perfectly and effortlessly and when there is an unspoken connection with all the other musicians, so that the performance itself is almost an out of body experience. A writer might achieve flow when he sits down and a poem pours forth from him in a way that feels completely natural -- there is no searching for the right word or tinkering with different phrases; he gets it perfect the first time. If you can think of anything that you love to do--anything from making a presentation at work to meeting new people to preparing an after-funeral luncheon for a hundred people--then you can probably relate to the feeling of being in the zone, on the ball, in the groove, in a state of flow. Getting into that state requires first a mastery of the activity itself, so that you don’t have to concentrate too much on the actual doing, you can let your muscle memory take over; but it also requires paying attention to and looking forward to a goal.

The second petition in the Lord’s Prayer is this: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And in this petition we state our goal: for God’s kingdom and will to come to earth. This is the goal of our faith.

Here are some of the ways the kingdom of heaven is described by Jesus: as a mustard seed--a tiny seed that produces a huge bush; as yeast--just a little of which is enough to make a whole loaf of bread rise; as a treasure hidden in a field; as a place belonging to the poor in spirit and to those who are punished because they dare do the right thing. And then there are a few more complicated comparisons: the kingdom of heaven is like a vineyard whose owner hires workers throughout the course of a day and then at the end of the day, pays them all a full day’s wage; the kingdom of heaven is like a wedding feast which the original guests choose not to attend so, instead, people off the streets are invited to come to the party.

Apparently, trying to put into words what the kingdom of heaven is like is as difficult as trying to explain to someone what it means to be “in the zone” if that person has never experienced it for themselves. So what exactly are we praying for when we pray to God “your kingdom come?”

Once again, Eugene Peterson’s translation of the Lord’s Prayer helps us see this request in a different light. This is how Peterson puts it: “Set the world right. Do what’s best--as above, so below.”

“Set the world right.” Whatever it is the kingdom of heaven looks like, we can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that it doesn’t look like the world we live in. And so we find ourselves again begging God in this prayer to do something to make this world look more like that place called heaven--wherever heaven may be--that place where God’s ways reign. “God: set the world right!” No wonder Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a treasure buried in a field or to yeast stirred into a bowl of bread dough -- because it is that hard to find, that difficult to hold onto, that challenging to spot in the world.

But what if...what if...this prayer is not just about asking God to do what we think a holy, omnipotent God ought to to do? What if this prayer is about offering ourselves to God in service to this undefinable kingdom of heaven? What if we are to pray this prayer like a kid dying to be picked for the team, raising his hands above his head and shouting out to the captain, “Pick me! Pick me!”

Stanley Hauerwas once said: “The Lord’s prayer is a lifelong act of bending our lives toward God in a way that God has offered--‘thy will be done, thy kingdom come.’ We have quite enough teaching in the various modes of achieving our will in this world. We build our kingdoms all over the world and the wreckage is all around us.” (2)

Yes, the wreckage of our kingdoms, of the achievements of our will is indeed all around us. Broken relationships, ineffective government, staggering poverty, racism, genocide, and war after war after war. Time and again, both individually and collectively, we find that our will, our kingdoms are deeply flawed. So how might it change things if we see the Lord’s prayer as an act of bending our lives toward God? When we pray for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will be done, we acknowledge that we human beings are free and responsible for our own actions, which means that all too often, we have let our will and our kingdoms prevent God’s kingdom from coming and God’s will from being done. And so we beg God to bend our will and align it with God’s.

Although the exact definition of God’s kingdom may not be totally clear, we cannot deny that a defining element of the kingdom of heaven is justice--God’s justice--where the poor are cared for by the rich and the strong look out for the weak and everyone shares their resources so that each person has at least the basic necessities of life. This kind of justice requires a bending of our wills, our lives, so that they are move in line with God’s will and God’s kingdom. If we are going to pray for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done then we had better be ready to play our part in that kingdom, even if it goes against our individualistic, capitalistic natures.

If we have a part to play in bringing God’s kingdom here then we need to develop the skills required to participate in this kingdom. If we want to get in the zone of doing God’s will then it’s going to take practice. We need to get flexible enough that God can bend our lives toward God in ways that reveal God’s kingdom on earth.

In his commentary on the book of Matthew, Dale Bruner offers us a work out for our life of faith that is one way we can try to align ourselves with God’s kingdom. Bruner divides the passage we heard today, the beatitudes, into three groups: the first is the Need Beatitudes -- blessed are the poor in spirit...blessed are those who mourn...blessed are the weak...blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; these are blessings for people who are failures, both in the world’s opinion and probably also in their own, people who have been broken by poverty and suffering. The second group is the Help Beatitudes--blessed are the merciful...blessed are the pure in heart...blessed are the peacemakers; people who, rather than being empty like those in need, are full, satisfied, and from their fullness they “reach out to the world in imitation of the One who has reached down to them.” Finally, there are the Hurt Beatitudes--blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness...blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you because of me; these are the people who “take flack for trying to bring Jesus’ blessing into a strangely resistant world.” (3)

When he talks about this in a classroom, Bruner likes to illustrate these three groups by drawing stick figures on a blackboard. First he draws a figure on its knees with its hands reaching up to heaven -- that represents the blessed poor. Then he draws a figure standing up with its hands reaching out to the world to represent the blessed helpers. Then he draws a figure flat on its back with its hands reaching back up to heaven again to represent the blessed persecuted. Put all together, Bruner calls this sequence the aerobics of discipleship. (4) First we are on our knees in need; then, after Jesus picks us up, he sends us out into the world to reach out to others in need; but inevitably this work means that we’ll be thrown flat on our backs in persecution, placing us once again in a position of need, and from there Jesus will lift us up again and the cycle starts over. This movement from receiver to giver to persecuted to receiver to giver to persecuted is the basic work out Jesus requires of those of us who pray “God: set the world right,” and who want to participate in bringing the kingdom of heaven down to earth. And when we have done this work out so many times that it is part of the muscle memory of our faith, then we can get to the place where we are in the zone, where we can pray: thy kingdom come, thy will be done, and at the same time know that we are participating with God in bringing that kingdom here where we are.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”(5) But he said it not to make his hearers complacent in the face of intractable prejudice but to inspire them to bend their wills and their actions in line with the arc of the moral universe. And so it is when we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” We are not just passively asking God to come make things right here and now, we are proclaiming our intention to get in the kingdom zone with God, to live out our faith, whether from a place of need or fullness or persecution. We are proclaiming our desire to work with God, to bend our will toward God’s so that we can bring this world more in line with what we so desperately long for and what God intends...heaven here on earth. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. Watch the commercial here.

2. Willimon, Will, Stanley Hauerwas, and Scott Saye, Lord, Teach Us: The Lord’s Prayer and the Christian Life. Abingdon Press, 1996.

3. F. Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, the Christbook, Matthew 1-12. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007.

4. Ibid.

5. Watch one of the many sermons/speeches in which MLK used this phrase here.

God Revealed (first sermon in a five-part series on the Lord's Prayer, January 17, 2010)

Luke 11:1-13

Some years ago, Ed Bradley interviewed a family on 60 Minutes. The family consisted of a religiously devout mother in her thirties, an almost painfully shy father, and their ten year-old daughter who was confined to a wheelchair by spina bifida. Each year of their child’s life, the family made a pilgrimage to Lourdes in France, a place renowned for the physical healing that has occurred there.

Bradley was giving the family a bit of hard time; clearly, he found them gullible and impressionable. At one point he turned to the girl and asked her, “When you pray, what do you pray for?” Without hesitation, she answered, “I pray that my father won’t be so shy. It makes him terribly lonely.” That stopped Bradley for a moment, but he quickly recovered and forged ahead, questioning the family’s priorities and their wisdom, suggesting that it was a bit ridiculous to pay thousands of dollars each year to go to Lourdes when they still had no miracle to show for it.

But the mother, looking at her beloved daughter, simply answered, “Oh, Mr. Bradley, don’t you get it? We already have our miracle.” (1)

What do you think Ed Bradley expected that family to pray for? What would we expect such a family to pray for? Was their prayer answered, even if the answer was that the whole family had an unshakeable faith and that a young girl who could have so easily focused only on her debilitating physical condition, instead had the deep love and insight to pray, not for herself, but for her father? Was not the miracle here a family praying the way they live—with faith and hope and love—and living the way they pray?

We live as we pray. Which begs the question for all of us: how do we pray? What do we pray for? What do we expect to happen when we pray? What does it look like to have our prayers answered?

Maybe it is a comfort to know that these questions which we find so difficult to answer were questions Jesus’ first followers struggled with too. In Luke chapter 11, the disciples have been watching Jesus with a growing sense of excitement and amazement. They have seen Jesus teach, heal, cast out demons, and calm raging storms. They have asked him questions and listened to the questions others asked him, but he never seems to give anyone a clear answer; instead he offers parables, which only leave them more confused.

But the disciples also observe that Jesus is a man of prayer. Before he chose the twelve disciples, he spent a whole night on a mountain in prayer; later he went up to pray on another mountain and while he was praying he transformed in front of them, becoming lit up from the inside so that his face and clothes glowed. Before meals. After them. At night. During the day. Clearly Jesus knows something about prayer, and the disciples could only hope that he might share it with them. And so they ask, throwing in a little peer pressure for good measure: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

And for once, Jesus gives them a simple, straightforward answer: “When you pray, say this:”

“Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sin,

for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

What a relief it must have been to the disciples to finally get crystal clear instructions from Jesus. And, compared to what faithful Jews were used to when it came to prayer, this prayer was a piece of cake. At that time, Jews prayed three times a day, at sunrise, at 3p.m., and at sunset. They prayed, not sitting down, but standing up, to demonstrate their reverence toward God. The prayers consisted of a series of the same eighteen prayers, always said in Hebrew, no matter the native language of the person praying. So this prayer Jesus offered his disciples was a breath of fresh air. Short, easy to remember, and in their own language!

But just when the disciples thought Jesus had offered them something they could get their heads around, something they could easily understand and share with others, they discovered, as they began to pray this prayer, that it was far from simple.

And no part of this prayer is more complicated, more challenging to get our minds around, than the very first phrase: “Father, hallowed be your name.” Or, as we typically pray it and as the gospel of Matthew records it: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.” In this very sentence resides the paradox of the Christian faith, that our God—who has come to be one of us in an intimate, personal way—our God resides in heaven—and is the very essence of holiness.

This prayer Jesus offers his followers does nothing to solve the mystery of faith; instead it reveals that God is more mysterious than we ever imagined. To our question of whether God is our intimate, loving father or a deity entirely removed from us, residing in some heavenly realm, Jesus simply answers “yes.”

Literally, the word paradox means beyond thinking or beyond believing. A paradox is a statement that at first seems completely contradictory but upon further reflection contains a kernel of truth. The theologian Soren Kierkegaard believed that faith itself is a paradox, since faith is by definition believing in something we cannot see or prove. If we live as we pray, and we pray the prayer Jesus taught us as Jesus taught it, then we live into this paradox that God is both our Father—our intimate, personal, loving God—“who art in heaven”—who is completely removed, completely other.

In The Message, Eugene Peterson translates the opening phrase of the Lord’s prayer this way: “Our Father in heaven, reveal who you are.” “Our Father in heaven, reveal who you are.” And indeed, the closer we look at these opening words, the more we find that in them Jesus reveals something about the nature of God, something that the disciples had never imagined to be the nature of God. The word “father” was not a new way to refer to God. In fact “our father” is one of the ways God is addressed in the eighteen prayers said three times a day by Jews. But the word Jesus used for “father” was not the classical Hebrew word. Jesus chose a word from the Aramaic language, the native language of Jesus and his disciples, indicating that his followers could address God in their own language, with words that had deep, personal meaning for them. And the word Jesus used was abba, the Aramaic word used to refer to an earthly father.

The author Ken Bailey was once teaching the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic to a group of women in the Lebanese mountains. He described abba as an Aramaic word used two thousand years ago, and when he did he noticed that the class began to get restless. Finally he stopped and asked the women if they had any comments. One woman raised her hand and quietly said, “Dr. Bailey, abba is the very first word we teach our children.” (2)

And so Bailey discovered the word abba was and still is a word with deep significance and meaning in the Middle East. It is used to address a superior, to show respect, but it also indicates a profound personal relationship between the one speaking and the one being addressed as abba. This is the word Jesus told his disciples to use when praying to God, not to suggest that God is a man or that God is simply like a parent, but to show that God’s name is the first word we learn to speak, that God is the first to care for us and provide for us and know us completely.

When I was in seminary, I once attended a church with a few of my classmates. This church had no pews and no organ. The praise songs were accompanied by a band with guitars and drummers and lead singers on microphones. Although that worship experience touched all of us deeply, one of my classmates took issue with the lyrics to the praise songs. “They make it seem like we are all so comfortable with God, like God is our best friend. Something about that just doesn’t seem right.”

It is possible to take comfortable familiarity with God to extremes when we think of God only as our Father, our abba. We live as we pray, and if we only pray abba, father, then we risk becoming too focused on the God who reaches out to us and who longs to establish a personal relationship with each of us, forgetting that this God is also entirely other, that God is holy is ways we can never be.

To help us understand and correctly use this word abba for God, Jesus then tells us we are to affirm God’s holiness, God’s otherness. “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” This phrase reminds us that the God who created and loves and provides for us cannot be reduced to something we can carry in our pocket and pull out when we have need. The God of the universe is truly beyond our comprehension, and we affirm this in our prayer.

Of course, it’s also possible to take the holiness of God to extremes. Martin Luther, a monk in the 16th century, felt the Roman Catholic Church had done just that. At that time, the Bible and all church services were in Latin, not in the language of the people, and salvation was mediated by priests, who were considered closer to God than lay people. Among many other acts that were a significant part of the Protestant Reformation, Luther translated the Bible into the language of the people and argued for the priesthood of all believers rather than a hierarchy of holiness. Luther certainly acknowledged the awesome holiness of God, but he also helped Christians remember that God is Father, abba, to every human being God has created, and that God is not closer to some than others.

So: is God our intimate, loving father or is God so holy that God is entirely removed from us? In the first sentence of this prayer, Jesus answers, “Yes.”

Ken Bailey once met a young Christian woman who had grown up in the communist Soviet Union, which had indoctrinated young people in atheism. He asked this woman how she came to faith.

“Was there a church in your village?”

“No, the communists closed all of them,” she replied.

“Did some saintly grandmother instruct you in the ways of God?”

“No. All the members of my family were atheists.”

“Did you have secret home Bible studies or an underground church?”

“No, none of that,” she answered.

“So, what happened?”

She told him that at funerals they were allowed to recite the Lord’s Prayer, having no idea what the words meant or who they were talking to. When freedom finally came, she had the chance to search for their meaning. “When you are in total darkness, the tiniest point of light is very bright. For me the Lord’s Prayer was that point of light.” (3)

As I drove to church this morning, I heard an interview on the radio with the Reverend Billy Kyles who was on the balcony of the Memphis hotel with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when King was assassinated. Reverend Kyles told a wonderful story about Robert Louis Stevenson as a young boy, that he used to sit in his room looking out the window. One evening his mother asked him, “Robert, what are you doing?” He replied, “I’m watching the man knock holes in the darkness.” “What are you talking about?” his nurse asked. She came to the window and saw that a man outside was going from lamppost to lamppost, lighting them with his torch. When he lit the lamppost, it looked to the young boy that he was “knocking holes in the darkness.” (4)

We live as we pray. And as we are bombarded with horrific images from Haiti that break our hearts, as we prepare to celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday tomorrow in a country where so many people still do not know freedom from poverty and racism and bigotry, we pray this prayer that Jesus taught us, trusting that as we pray, we shall also live, reaching out to our fellow human beings in need just as God our holy, heavenly father has reached out to us. It is our way of knocking holes in the darkness, even if, for those who are suffering, those holes look like little more than tiny pinpoints of light. We pray, and we live as we pray, trusting that in the darkness, even the tiniest point of light is very bright. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. from the book Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott, as retold by the Rev. Mark Ramsey in his sermon “Belonging,” published in Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1, p. 20.

2. Bailey, Ken, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. InterVarsity Press, 2008, p. 97.

3. Bailey, Ken, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes. InterVarsity Press, 2008, p. 91.

4. Here is a link to the interview.

Your Name is Precious (sermon, January 10, 2010)

Isaiah 43:1-7

Luke 3:15-22

After church last Sunday, we had a time of fellowship and theological discussion among the active leaders of our church, the elders and deacons. For the last twenty minutes of our time together, we all completed a faith inventory, which means we filled out a worksheet with the answers to these statements: “My first recollection of being in church is...The closest I have ever felt to God in my life was...The time I have felt the greatest doubt or distance from God was...Just before I die I want to be able to say...”

Now these questions would have been challenging enough to answer silently on paper in a room full of people, but after we had all filled out the inventory, I asked the newly-elected elders and deacons, those who will be ordained and installed after today’s sermon, to stand up in front of their peers and read their answers out loud.

This exercise was incredibly moving for all of us there, and what has really stuck with me was how the elders- and deacons-elect finished the statement, “The time I have felt the greatest doubt or distance from God was...” What struck me about these answers is that they weren’t surprising or unexpected. They were a reflection of what it is to be human, to know loss and loneliness and sorrow. Here are some of the answers: The time I felt the greatest doubt or distance from God was when I was in college...when I was in Vietnam...when I lived far from home...when my grandpa died...when my young neighbor was killed by a drunk driver...when my sister died in her thirties...when one of my students committed suicide.

In Isaiah chapter 42, the chapter that immediately precedes our reading today, Isaiah speaks of a time when the Israelites experienced tremendous doubt and distance from God. At this point, the Israelites had been exiled from their homeland for nearly sixty years, an exile they interpreted as a punishment for their failure to stay faithful to God. In chapter 42, the prophet clearly lays out the acts of unfaithfulness: the people had sinned by disobeying God’s law. And so, in the words of the prophet, “God poured upon Israel the heat of his anger and the fury of war.” (42:25a)

Which brings us to chapter 43, a chapter which opens with a new word from God about Israel’s future. And that future begins with two words: “But now...”

“But now...” These two little words indicate that something big has changed. And that something is not the Israelites. In spite of their time in exile, the equivalent to a very long “time out” in the uncooperative chair, the Israelites still had not learned their lesson; even in exile, they have failed to be completely faithful to God.

So it’s not the Israelites who have changed. What’s different now is that God has chosen to focus on God’s love rather than God’s righteous anger.

“Do not fear,” God says to the people. “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.”

Regardless of the ways they have turned away from God, regardless of the doubts that have run through their minds when they couldn’t sleep at night, regardless of how distant they may have felt from God while they have tried to make a life for themselves as strangers in a strange land, these are still God’s people. “I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.” With these words, God, who created the world and all people in it, claims Israel as God’s chosen people, and declares that these people are infinitely valuable to God, more valuable than all other nations or peoples on earth.

Like the Israelites, Jesus experienced a “but now...” moment in his life. It is a moment we heard about today in Luke’s story of Jesus’ baptism. Luke doesn’t actually describe the baptism itself. He simply writes, “Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized...” Luke makes it sound as if Jesus simply went out in the the wilderness where John was baptizing, got in line with all the other people who were looking for a new beginning, and was dunked under the water like everybody else, in spite of the fact the he was the only one there who had no sin which needed to be forgiven.

As Luke tells it, it’s what happened after Jesus got dunked that was really spectacular: “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “you are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

In this moment, Jesus receives God’s name for him—Son, Beloved—and God’s public claim on his life. Baptism is a “but now” moment in Jesus’ life; it marks the beginning of his ministry, it is a line that divides what came before from what comes after.

This line didn’t simply divide two times of Jesus’ life; it is also a “But now” moment for all of God’s people who weren’t Israelites. Now I would hope that you are feeling a little uncomfortable about what I said before, that in today’s passage in Isaiah God plays favorites. In that passage God makes it clear that of all the people God created, the Israelites are God’s favorite. In fact, in this passage, God even promises to give up Egypt, Ethiopia, and Seba in exchange for the Israelites. “I give people in return for you, nations in exchange for your life,” God says. All other people would be given up so the Israelites could return home to God’s loving embrace. And that should make all of us non-Israelites a little uncomfortable.

It should make us uncomfortable, if it weren’t for baptism, first the baptism of Jesus, God’s beloved Son, and then our own baptism. Especially in Luke, when Jesus simply gets in line with all the other people and is baptized as if he is a sinner like the rest of them, Jesus’ baptism is a “but now” moment, not just for him, but for all humanity. In that moment God declares that no longer is God’s claim limited to the people of Israel, but it has now been extended to all people, everywhere, every man, woman, and child who is precious in God’s sight...precious enough that God would give, not other people or nations in exchange for them, but God’s own beloved Son.

What does that “but now” moment really mean for us? Well, we find out back in Isaiah 43. These seven verses we heard today are a Hebrew construction in which the middle verse is the most important, in the same way that what really defines a sandwich is what’s between the bread. In the middle verse, verse 4, God declares to the exiled, hopeless Israelites, “you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”

The word precious is something we often use casually. “What a precious baby,” we say; or “those earrings are just precious!” We mean the baby is cute or the earrings are beautiful. But the word precious is a serious word; it means valuable, expensive. In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word for precious is most often used in matters of life and death; when someone’s life is declared “precious” it means their life will be spared when it could have been ended.

The movie “Precious” is about a young woman who is called Precious even though she has been tragically overlooked and undervalued for her whole life. At sixteen, she has a four year-old child with Down Syndrome, whose father is also Precious’ father, a man who has sexually abused Precious since she was a child. She is still in junior high school, she can’t read, and when her school principal discovers she has become pregnant again (and again by her father) she is kicked out of school. Precious lives with her mother, who treats her like a slave, regularly abusing her. The degree of tragedy in Precious’ life would almost be too much to bear except that the movie tells the story of her “but now” moment, the moment when she meets people--a teacher in an alternative school and a social worker--who show Precious that in spite of the horrid circumstances of her life she is valuable, she is loved, she is in fact worthy of the name Precious.

Hear again the words God speaks to Israel in the moment of their deepest despair :

“Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;

and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;

when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,

and the flame shall not consume you.”

These words are not just for the Israelites. These words are for us too. They are the words of our baptism, that “but now” moment when water symbolizes the death of our former lives, in which other people determine our worth, and the birth of a new life in which the most important thing is that we belong to God and God loves us. In baptism, God declares that there are no longer any favorite children, but that God names each of us Precious.

As the deacons- and elders-elect so eloquently shared last Sunday, being precious in God’s sight does not mean we will not know tragedy or sorrow in our lives. It does not mean we will not have moments--sometimes very long moments--when our faith is defined by doubt and distance from God. It didn’t mean this for God’s first chosen people and it doesn’t mean this for us. Being named Precious by God means God is with us in all things, through the roughest waters and the hottest fires, declaring “but now” in the face of our despair. It means that we are so valuable that God would exchange his own precious Son to show us the depth of God’s love for us and to extend God’s particular love for Israel to all the world.

In those moments of doubt and distance from God may you hear God whisper “but now.” May you hear God say to you: “you are precious in my sight and honored and I love you.” Amen.

evotional: Thursday, January 7, 2010

As my beloved rector had told me in seminary, being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall. “You probably won’t be much worse than people,” he said, “and you certainly won’t be any better, but you will have to let people look at you. You will have to let them see you as you are.”

~ BB Taylor, Leaving Church

During worship this Sunday we will ordain and install elders and deacons in the class of 2012. These members of the church have been identified as those who have gifts for leadership and the willingness to serve. As the above quote suggests, serving as a church officer is not about being a perfect Christian (especially since there is no such thing!); it is about being willing to share yourself and your faith with others through service.

In fact, that is what we are all called to do, in one way or another. Created and blessed by God, we each bring our gifts to this community, enabling the Holy Spirit to work in and through us so that together we make up the body of Christ and together we serve Christ by caring for each other and for the community outside our church walls.

I hope you will join us on Sunday at 10a.m. We will remember Jesus' baptism as well as our own and welcome new elders and deacons into leadership. Worship will be followed by a special coffee hour during which you can enjoy the fellowship of this particular community of faith.

See you in church!

A Human Being Fully Alive (sermon, January 3, 2010)

John 1:1-18

A teacher and his twelve favorite students gathered around a table one night to share a meal. The teacher knew that it would be their last meal together; the students strongly suspected it. They were hopeful, though, that if it was their last meal he would tell them everything they needed to know. They sat at full attention, ready to absorb his words and set them to memory, so that when he was gone, they would have words to remember him by.

But apparently, their beloved teacher didn’t want to just share words with them. Instead, he blessed bread and passed it around, then did the same with a goblet of wine. They ate and drank, but still they waited for what they thought would be the real lesson of the evening, the one the teacher presented, not with food and drink, but with words.

After dinner, they thought, surely then, he would tell them all they needed to know. But instead, the teacher stood up and walked to the side of the room, filled a basin with hot water, and picked up a towel. Then, one student at a time, he knelt down in front of them and dipped their feet in the water, washing off the dirt and grime, then drying the clean, calloused skin gently with a towel.

Finally, when he had washed all twenty-four feet in the room, Jesus offered the disciples the words they had been waiting for all evening. “If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.” (John 13:14-15)

I suppose it would have been easier if Jesus had left his disciples -- and us -- with just words to remember him by. Instead, he gave us things to do that require us to use our bodies just as he used a human body to reveal the heart of God.

This story from John chapter 13 of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet shouldn’t surprise us if we have read John’s first chapter. The disciples, of course, didn’t have that opportunity; when Jesus washed their feet, they were still trying to figure out exactly who he was. But because of John’s first chapter, we know that Jesus is indeed God-in-human-flesh, using his human body to breathe life into God’s grace and truth.

At the very beginning of his gospel, John wants us to understand that Jesus was present with God from the beginning of time, present even before God spoke the words that breathed life and order into the chaos of the universe; before God breathed the breath of life into the first human beings; and that everything that God did from the beginning God did in and through and with Jesus.

But right from the beginning, John also wants to make clear that Jesus is more than just an undefined, mysterious element of the unknowable God; Jesus is God incarnate, God in the flesh. In Jesus Christ the one true God, the Creator of everything there is entered into creation and became one of the billions of animals to be born, grow, eat, drink, and die on earth. This is what the incarnation means, and according to one theologian, “It is untheological. It is unsophisticated. It is undignified. But according to Christianity, it is the way things are.” (1) As Eugene Peterson puts it in his translation of John 1, “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”

And when God “moved into the neighborhood,” when Jesus walked among us, he showed us what it looks like to be a human being totally in tune with God. Jesus showed us this with his body: by reaching out his hands to heal a blind man, stepping out from a boat onto the sea and walking on the water, sharing bread and wine with his friends, washing his disciples’ feet. Jesus didn’t simply tell people about God; Jesus embodied God; he showed us how God intended these bodies of ours to do God’s work and show God’s love.

*****

There is a children’s television show called “Word World,” whose motto is “where words come alive.” The point is to teach children how to read while they think they are just watching TV. In “Word World,” every object is formed by the letters that spell the object’s name. A tree, which looks like a cartoon tree, is actually, if you look closely, four stylized letters: a green, leafy T and R and two brown, tree-trunk E’s. A pig is made up of fat, pink, curvy letters a P that has a snout and pointy ears, a G with a curly tail coming out of it. The trick is, to see the words, you have to look closely. If you don’t, Word World looks pretty much like any other world, well, any other cartoon world, that is, where the trees and rocks and pigs and horses all talk. But if you look closely, you will see that it is the words that give the objects and animals their shape and form.

If we look closely at the actions of Jesus, we see the many ways Jesus reveals God to us in a way that no one and nothing else does. In particular, the actions of Jesus give shape and form to two words that reveal the very heart of God: grace and truth. “And the Word became flesh and lived among us,” John writes, “and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.”

Grace and truth. These were words of God that Jesus embodied and the time we most clearly see these words wasn’t during his best sermon or his most amazing miracle; the best example of Jesus breathing life into God’s grace and truth is when he washed the disciples’ feet.

The truth: feet are dirty. Especially then, when people walked almost everywhere, on dusty roads, wearing sandals with thin soles and few straps. There was simply no denying the truth that, by the end of the day, feet were covered in dirt and grime. Jesus pointed to that truth when he picked up a basin of water, took off the disciples’ shoes and prepared to wash their feet. But then he put flesh on the word grace: having exposed the filth, he used his own hands -- the very hands of God -- to wash those feet clean.

And then Jesus told his followers that this incredible act of using their own bodies to reveal God to one another was what they were called to do too. He wants them to remember him, not with words, but with actions, by reaching out, one human being to another, and revealing God’s grace and truth and love by how they used their hands and feet and bodies to interact with others. As one commentator put it: “Jesus is not alone in this word-made-flesh business. He has brothers and sisters able to do the works that he does and more...” (2)

How can a bunch of flawed human beings -- the disciples, us -- how can we, like Jesus, put flesh on God’s words? Well, in chapter one, John tells us how: “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God...born of God...From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” Through the grace and faith we have received from Jesus, we have the power to bring God’s words to life as Jesus did.

And so, on this first Sunday of a new year and a new decade, it’s a good time to reflect on the words we embody, both as individuals and as a church. Chances are most of us have a particular word that, more often than not, others would use to describe us. What is the one word that someone who has met you once and someone who has known you for decades would use to describe you? If you can think of it, then that is your word. Is it compassion, justice, hospitality, generosity, patience? All of these are words our faith enables us to bring to life. Of course, there might also be words we bring to life that are not so pleasing to God, such as judgmental, self-absorbed, greedy, impatient. If you’re not sure what your word is, then ask someone, better yet, ask a few people, some who know you well and some who don’t. Even more than the words we speak, it is our actions that reveal the words that are important to us. In this New Year, as we emerge from this season of Christmas remembering that God’s Word lived among us, showing us God’s grace and truth, may we focus on the words within each of us that reveal God’s grace and truth to others.

*****

I heard this story the other day from a friend of mine. It is one of those horrible stories that takes your breath away, the story of a young girl diagnosed with inoperable, incurable brain cancer. When the parents of the girl’s classmates from school heard about her diagnosis, they quickly got themselves organized. No doubt there was flurry of phone calls and emails and texts -- a flurry of words -- but however it happened, just a few days after the diagnosis, those words turned into actions. They all showed up at the girl’s house with food and cookies. They sang carols and then they came inside and decorated the house for Christmas. And before they left, they handed the girl’s parents an envelope containing money they had collected, because they all knew that cancer is expensive and that if it was their kid they would spare no expense. The girl’s stunned parents opened the envelope and found several thousand dollars inside. (3)

That community embodied the words compassion and generosity and kindness, and when they did, they brought God’s grace and truth, and perhaps most importantly, God’s presence, to a family that was feeling terrified and devastated and horribly alone.

Just as Jesus’ disciples hoped at that Last Supper so long ago, Jesus did leave us words to remember him by. But he calls us to do more than remember them, more than speak them; he calls us to bring those words to life. “Preach the gospel always. If necessary, use words,” said St. Francis of Assisi. As we preach with our actions, we reveal that although Jesus is no longer with us in the flesh, God truly is with us still, in our flesh, in the hundreds of ways each day we use our bodies to breathe new life into the Word of God.

“The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Alleluia, and amen.

Endnotes:
1. Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words, p. 169.
2. Barbara Brown Taylor, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1, p. 191.
3. This story was borrowed with permission from a sermon preached at Broad Street Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio by the Reverend Amy Miracle.