Matthew 10:40-42
As lectionary passages go, today’s reading from Matthew is confusing, in part because it essentially drops us in on the last two minutes of an hour-long speech. For the whole of chapter 10, Jesus has been talking to his disciples. Finally, after following him and witnessing all that Jesus can do, the disciples are sent out on their own to start spreading the good news of the gospel in word and in deed.
That’s the good news Jesus delivers at the beginning of chapter 10 - he empowers his followers to do God’s work. The rest of the chapter, up until these three final verses we read, is the bad news.
The disciples will get to do this important work but they won’t get paid, they can’t take any supplies, and they can pretty much count on being arrested Wait, there’s more!This work that they are doing will turn family members against each other and create huge rifts in their own families.
Finally, Jesus tells them, only those who love him above everything else in their lives, only those willing to take up their cross and follow him, are worthy of him.
Then come today’s three verses, which sound downright pithy in light of everything that has come before: whoever welcomes you welcomes me and the one who sent me.
Of all the disturbing things about this chapter of Matthew, this verse might be the most disturbing of all, for in it, Jesus makes one thing perfectly clear: when Jesus’ disciples go out into the world to do gospel work, the people they interact with will not just encounter the disciples, they will encounter Jesus. And when people encounter Jesus, they encounter God.
Last week, the Boston Bruins beat the Vancouver Canucks in the seventh game of a seven-game series to win the National Hockey League championship known as the Stanley Cup. To add insult to injury, the Bruins beat the Canucks, not in Boston, but on the Canucks’ home rink in Vancouver.
But the big news story the next day wasn’t the Canucks’ loss; it was the appalling behavior of some disappointed Vancouver fans. First a few bottles were thrown, then some fistfights broke out, then flames erupted when a car was set on fire. Rocks were thrown, windows were broken, more cars were set ablaze, the ER of a local hospital was over-run with patients.
It was terribly embarrassing to the city of Vancouver. One Canadian who lives in Vancouver, but isn’t a native, noticed that many Vancouver natives were “desperate to convince others that the rioters were not ‘real’ Vancouverites.”
Associating with groups -- sports teams, schools, religions -- is a natural human tendency. What’s also natural is that when members of that group do things we don’t approve of, we tend to want to exclude them from the group: those weren’t “real” Vancouverites who started those riots; those weren’t “real” Ohio State football players who sold memorabilia; those weren’t “real” Americans who took part in the anti-war rallies; those weren’t “real” Christians who participated in the Crusades.
Whether consciously or unconsciously we know that when we identify ourselves with a group, the behavior of other members of the group reflects on us -- and our behavior reflects on them. (1) But what Jesus is saying goes beyond this -- when his disciples go out to do his work, they don’t just represent him, they are him.
Not long ago, the actor Michael Douglas appeared on Oprah. He talked a bit about his father, the actor Kirk Douglas, and he shared this story:
Dad called me the other night. He said, "Michael, I was watching myself in an old movie earlier tonight and I didn't remember making it."
"Well, Dad, you made 75 movies and you are 94. Don't be so rough on yourself."
"No, Michael, you didn't let me finish. I realized halfway through that I was watching one of your movies."(2)
Pachomius was a man who lived in Egypt in the fourth century. He was one of a group of people kidnapped by roving gangs and sent down the Nile River to work as a slave for the Roman army. The group was imprisoned in the city of Thebes. When Christians in Thebes heard about the prisoners, they brought them food and water. In the hospitality extended to him by Christ’s followers, Pachomius experienced Christ. Eventually, he converted to Christianity and became a leader of a monastic movement. (3)
Will Willimon has served as the bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church for several years now. One of the churches he oversees is Highland United Methodist Church in one of Birmingham’s trendy downtown neighborhoods. Highland began a series of ministries to the homeless people in the area, feeding them and providing them access to washers, dryers, and post office boxes. The ministry has expanded to the point where the church has actually hired homeless people to run the ministries.
But one Highlands member, who actually lamented out loud that her once-beautiful church looked like a city bus stop, went around to local merchants and got them to oppose the church’s ministry to the homeless. A front-page article in the local paper detailed their complaints.
In response, Willimon wrote an op-ed piece to the same paper that said, “I love it when the United Methodist Church makes front-page news not for losing members or fighting over some social issue, but for being the church and doing what Jesus commanded us to do.” (4)
When the church reaches out to the world, it doesn’t just represent Jesus -- it is Jesus. It is God to a world that knows little of the ways of God. When the church does this, when we do this, people encounter the living God.
And this means that the work we do is serious business, because it is God’s work.
Matthew’s gospel isn’t easy, because our faith isn’t easy. Last week, we looked at the Beatitudes and discovered that the first step on the path of discipleship is admitting our need for God. Once we’ve done that, there are all kinds of new laws that Jesus actually seems to want us to follow -- like if anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer him the other to hit; if someone takes your coat, give him the shirt off your back as well. If your hand causes you to sin then cut it off. And now here -- when we go out into the world, people who encounter us encounter Jesus and God.
No pressure.
But if we look at the rest of these verses, maybe there is a way we can understand our call to be God in the world that we won’t find completely paralyzing to our life of faith. After informing us that we are Jesus to those we meet, Jesus goes on to say that, “whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple--truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward.”
“Whoever gives even a cup of cold water...”
I can do that. And so can you.
A cup of cold water to someone who is thirsty is all it takes. A gesture this simple is the work of discipleship. Sure, what the Highland church in Birmingham did for the homeless in its neighborhood was wonderful, but our actions don’t have to be that grand. And yes, reaching out to someone who became a leader of a monastic movement is pretty cool, but we don’t have to hit a home run to be Jesus. Giving a cup of cold water to someone in need is all it takes for someone to encounter Jesus, to encounter God. After all, Matthew’s gospel is also the one where Jesus tells the parable that ends, “When you did this for the least of these, you did it for me.”
Last week, as I stood outside the sanctuary door about to go into worship, Frank walked in. I met Frank a few weeks ago. He came to the church looking for help and we helped him. Last Sunday morning he was distraught. The friends he’d been living with had kicked him out and he had slept on the streets. Could we help him again? I welcomed him to the church, invited him to stay for worship and said I’d talk to him afterward.
But I’ll admit: I spent the whole church service trying to figure out what I was going to do. Here I was, preaching a sermon on the Beatitudes of all things, and there was a man -- obviously aware of his need for God -- waiting right outside the sanctuary doors for some help from Jesus’ disciples in this church. And I couldn’t figure out how to help him turn his life around.
Well, it turns out I wasn’t the only one trying to figure out what to do...two members of our church stayed with Frank during the service and finally decided that they had to do something for him. So they fixed him a bag of food from our pantry and scraped together a few bucks from their pockets and Frank thanked them and left. But still, they were worried. Had they done the right thing?
When they asked me that question, my response was this: when he came into this church Frank experienced people who cared, people who helped him however they could. Was a bag of food and a few bucks enough to turn his life around? Probably not. But in their hospitality, Frank experienced the love of God. Frank encountered Jesus.
The journey of discipleship is sometimes confusing, often disturbing, and always mysterious. Today’s passage is all of these things. When we encounter people in need, all of whom are God’s children, we are Jesus to them. We are God. It’s an overwhelming responsibility, to be sure, except when we remember that all God calls us to do is extend the smallest gesture of kindness. A cup of cold water turns out to contain more than enough of God’s love.
Endnotes:
1. Ryan Dueck, “Real ______ Would Never Do That!”, June 20, 2011.
2. retold by Alyce McKenzie in her commentary on this passage
3. This story was retold by Paul Galbreath in his book Leading from the Water, Alban, 2011, p. 21.
4. Jason Byassee, “The Bishop’s Dashboard,” The Christian Century, May 31, 2011.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Matthew 4:23-5:12
What pictures do you carry with you?
Many of you, I know first-hand, have pictures of your grandchildren
or even great-grandchildren.
But however we keep them -- in our wallets or on our cell phones --
most of us have a picture or two of people we love
that we carry with us all the time.
There’s another picture we carry around, too,
not a physical picture
but one that is just as real
it is a picture of God.
What does your picture of God look like?
A benevolent old man with a white beard
--Santa Claus minus the red suit?
Or maybe in your picture God looks stern
or even angry
God is just waiting for you to mess up.
Maybe your God looks like a young man,
more like we might imagine Jesus.
Or maybe you have a picture that looks nothing like those conventional ideas.
In the book The Shack, God is depicted in several different guises,
but primarily, God looks like a
generously proportioned African American woman
who loves to cook. (1)
For many people, this was shocking, even heretical!
Often we don’t realize what pictures of God
we are carrying around
until we see someone else’s and
discover it is completely different from ours.
You’ve got to figure that’s what happened to the disciples
when Jesus started painting a picture of God and God’s kingdom
that looked completely different than what they had imagined.
The Beatitudes come after Jesus has begun his ministry of healing.
And remember whom he was healing: the sick, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics.
In a culture that assumed any kind of illness was a punishment for sin
Jesus was practicing a radical ministry to “the least and the lost.”
And then, as if to explain this crazy behavior,
he takes his disciples away from the crowds
and pronounces the highest blessings on the very people
the culture has designated the lowest of the low:
the poor
the grieving
the humble
those trying hard to do the right thing
those who extend mercy to others
those trying to bring peace to a violent world.
The problem for us is that it’s all too easy to hear Jesus’ words
as conditions of our faith.
As in, if only we are
poor
sad
meek
righteous
forgiving
peace-making
then we will receive the gifts God wants to give us
then we will be blessed.
Well, the good and bad news of the Beatitudes is this:
Jesus isn’t offering us a recipe for earning God’s favor
he is simply telling us who already has it.
The Beatitudes
reveal the fullness
and the mystery
of God’s grace,
a grace which is unconditional
which cannot be earned
and which is showered upon those who least expect it --
who also happen to be the ones our culture thinks
least deserve it.
In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,”
Mrs. Turpin is an excessively judgmental woman
who sizes up everyone and everything she sees,
placing them neatly into categories:
white trash
blacks
ladies and gentlemen.
At night, she sometimes occupies her mind by
naming the classes of people.
The way she sees it,
so-called “colored people” are at the bottom of the heap
just one step above are the white trash;
above that are the home-owners,
the class to which she and her husband belong;
on top are people with lots of money and bigger houses and land.
What bothers her, though,
is the awareness that things are more complicated than that,
for some people with a lot of money are,
in her eyes, “common”
and some people below her had “good blood.”
In the story, she and her husband enter a doctor’s waiting room
and Mrs. Turpin quickly passes judgment on everyone there.
As time passes, she begins to voice some of these judgments out loud,
until finally, a young college girl who has been reading a textbook
and shooting Mrs. Turpin dirty looks
finally has as much of Mrs. Turpin as she can bear.
Fed up, she hurls the textbook across the room at Mrs. Turpin,
hitting her right above the eye
and then attacks her, strangling her, shouting
“Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog!”
Ruby Turpin is shaken to the core.
Later that night as she remembers the incident,
wondering why someone would say such a thing to a
good and respectable person like herself,
she sees a vision.
It’s a highway in the sky,
and upon it
“a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven.
There were whole companies of white trash,
clean for the first time in their lives,
and bands of blacks in white robes
and battalions of freaks and lunatics
shouting and clapping and leaping...
And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people who,
like herself and her husband,
had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.
But as she looked closer at this group,
she could see by their shocked and altered faces that
even their virtues were being burned away. (2)
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus begins his first sermon by turning everything upside-down.
It’s a hard message for the disciples to take in
and it doesn’t get any easier over time.
It’s the same message Paul had to deliver to the church in Corinth
when he wrote to this congregation
that cared an awful lot about social status
who was “in” and who was “out”
Paul informed them that God looked very different than they thought:
“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;
God chose what is low and despised in the world,
things that are not,
to reduce to nothing things that are,
so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”
The core of this message,
the core of the gospel
is that we are blessed by God
at the very moment when we discover we need God most.
Some have suggested that Matthew’s first Beatitude
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” really means
Blessed are those who realize their need for God.
Not just the poor who lack material things
but even those of us who have all the “things” we could ever need
and them some
but who recognize that without God
we have nothing of value.
Blessed are those who realize their need for God.
This blessing sets the tone for all the blessings that follow,
but notice there are no Beatitudes,
no blessings
for those who think they can help themselves.
For the last year, Heather Hendrick and her husband and four children
have been serving the people of Haiti.
Recently, they returned home to Texas for the summer.
Except they no longer have a home of their own to go to.
Heather is grateful to be following God’s call to serve the poor,
but at times she struggles mightily with how her life has changed.
“One year ago we were homeowners,” she writes. “[My husband] had a fantastic job. We had two vehicles...We were the ones people called when they needed help. When their car broke down. When they needed a place to stay. Or live. Our house had the extra bedrooms. We were the ones that offered security to others when things fell apart in their lives. They could count on us for meals, a listening ear, to loan them money, to watch their kids at the drop of a hat when an emergency came up...We were the ones with answers. Secure. Steady.
She continues, “...[E]verything....every single thing....about living the life of a "missionary" is uncomfortable. Not just the actual living in Haiti part. In so many ways, I want my old life back...my mortgage payment, [my gas-guzzling car], that feeling of control and that we're responsible. I liked being the givers instead of the takers.” (3)
In his extensive commentary on Matthew,
Dale Bruner calls the first four Beatitudes the “Need Beatitudes.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit
Blessed are those who mourn
Blessed are the meek
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
These blessings that Jesus pronounces
are “for those who cannot help themselves”
those who have no help apart from God.
What follows these “Need Beatitudes” are what Bruner calls “the Help Beatitudes.”
Blessed are the merciful
Blessed are the pure in heart
Blessed are the peacemakers.
These are the blessings Jesus pronounces
for “those who try to help others”
those who recognize that the only faithful response
to an experience of God’s grace
is to draw alongside others
especially other suffering human beings
and offer them love and support
which is nothing less than what God has commanded us to do.
Finally, Bruner names the last two Beatitudes “the Hurt Beatitudes.”
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on Jesus’ account.
The Hurt Beatitudes let us know what Heather Hendrick has discovered,
that following Jesus is not going to be easy,
should not be easy.
In fact, being faithful disciples probably means
we are going to end up just like Jesus
persecuted
ridiculed
hated
In other words,
desperately aware of our need for God. (4)
Which is perhaps not such a bad thing,
because remember: “blessed are those who know their need for God.”
The Beatitudes,
the first sentences of Jesus’ first sermon
reveal to us that following Jesus
is a lifelong endeavor
that looks more like a circle than a straight line.
It is a kind of cycle of faith.
And as soon as we take that first step,
we are somewhere on that cycle.
I like to think of this cycle as a ferris wheel.
Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down.
But you cannot experience the ride if you don’t get on.
And according to Jesus, the cost of this ride
is nothing less than admitting our need for God.
Until we do that, we haven’t really begun to follow him at all.
The Beatitudes are not a recipe for earning God’s favor;
the Beatitudes are a reminder that
in the life and cross and empty tomb of Jesus
God’s favor has already been poured out upon us.
But in order to receive it we have to be willing to admit that we need it
even though needing God’s grace
means we will be required to share it
knowing it will cost us nothing less than what it cost Jesus...
our very lives, given up for the sake of God.
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Wm. Paul Young, The Shack. Windblown Media, 2011.
2. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978, p. 508. Thanks to Mark Ramsey in his sermon “Reality” (Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, January 30, 2011) for the connection of this story with these passages.
3. http://allthingshendrick.blogspot.com/2011/06/fever-induced-honesty.html
4. F. Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, Vol. 1: The Christbook. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004.
Matthew 4:23-5:12
What pictures do you carry with you?
Many of you, I know first-hand, have pictures of your grandchildren
or even great-grandchildren.
But however we keep them -- in our wallets or on our cell phones --
most of us have a picture or two of people we love
that we carry with us all the time.
There’s another picture we carry around, too,
not a physical picture
but one that is just as real
it is a picture of God.
What does your picture of God look like?
A benevolent old man with a white beard
--Santa Claus minus the red suit?
Or maybe in your picture God looks stern
or even angry
God is just waiting for you to mess up.
Maybe your God looks like a young man,
more like we might imagine Jesus.
Or maybe you have a picture that looks nothing like those conventional ideas.
In the book The Shack, God is depicted in several different guises,
but primarily, God looks like a
generously proportioned African American woman
who loves to cook. (1)
For many people, this was shocking, even heretical!
Often we don’t realize what pictures of God
we are carrying around
until we see someone else’s and
discover it is completely different from ours.
You’ve got to figure that’s what happened to the disciples
when Jesus started painting a picture of God and God’s kingdom
that looked completely different than what they had imagined.
The Beatitudes come after Jesus has begun his ministry of healing.
And remember whom he was healing: the sick, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics.
In a culture that assumed any kind of illness was a punishment for sin
Jesus was practicing a radical ministry to “the least and the lost.”
And then, as if to explain this crazy behavior,
he takes his disciples away from the crowds
and pronounces the highest blessings on the very people
the culture has designated the lowest of the low:
the poor
the grieving
the humble
those trying hard to do the right thing
those who extend mercy to others
those trying to bring peace to a violent world.
The problem for us is that it’s all too easy to hear Jesus’ words
as conditions of our faith.
As in, if only we are
poor
sad
meek
righteous
forgiving
peace-making
then we will receive the gifts God wants to give us
then we will be blessed.
Well, the good and bad news of the Beatitudes is this:
Jesus isn’t offering us a recipe for earning God’s favor
he is simply telling us who already has it.
The Beatitudes
reveal the fullness
and the mystery
of God’s grace,
a grace which is unconditional
which cannot be earned
and which is showered upon those who least expect it --
who also happen to be the ones our culture thinks
least deserve it.
In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation,”
Mrs. Turpin is an excessively judgmental woman
who sizes up everyone and everything she sees,
placing them neatly into categories:
white trash
blacks
ladies and gentlemen.
At night, she sometimes occupies her mind by
naming the classes of people.
The way she sees it,
so-called “colored people” are at the bottom of the heap
just one step above are the white trash;
above that are the home-owners,
the class to which she and her husband belong;
on top are people with lots of money and bigger houses and land.
What bothers her, though,
is the awareness that things are more complicated than that,
for some people with a lot of money are,
in her eyes, “common”
and some people below her had “good blood.”
In the story, she and her husband enter a doctor’s waiting room
and Mrs. Turpin quickly passes judgment on everyone there.
As time passes, she begins to voice some of these judgments out loud,
until finally, a young college girl who has been reading a textbook
and shooting Mrs. Turpin dirty looks
finally has as much of Mrs. Turpin as she can bear.
Fed up, she hurls the textbook across the room at Mrs. Turpin,
hitting her right above the eye
and then attacks her, strangling her, shouting
“Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog!”
Ruby Turpin is shaken to the core.
Later that night as she remembers the incident,
wondering why someone would say such a thing to a
good and respectable person like herself,
she sees a vision.
It’s a highway in the sky,
and upon it
“a vast horde of souls were tumbling toward heaven.
There were whole companies of white trash,
clean for the first time in their lives,
and bands of blacks in white robes
and battalions of freaks and lunatics
shouting and clapping and leaping...
And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people who,
like herself and her husband,
had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.
But as she looked closer at this group,
she could see by their shocked and altered faces that
even their virtues were being burned away. (2)
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Jesus begins his first sermon by turning everything upside-down.
It’s a hard message for the disciples to take in
and it doesn’t get any easier over time.
It’s the same message Paul had to deliver to the church in Corinth
when he wrote to this congregation
that cared an awful lot about social status
who was “in” and who was “out”
Paul informed them that God looked very different than they thought:
“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;
God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;
God chose what is low and despised in the world,
things that are not,
to reduce to nothing things that are,
so that no one might boast in the presence of God.”
The core of this message,
the core of the gospel
is that we are blessed by God
at the very moment when we discover we need God most.
Some have suggested that Matthew’s first Beatitude
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,” really means
Blessed are those who realize their need for God.
Not just the poor who lack material things
but even those of us who have all the “things” we could ever need
and them some
but who recognize that without God
we have nothing of value.
Blessed are those who realize their need for God.
This blessing sets the tone for all the blessings that follow,
but notice there are no Beatitudes,
no blessings
for those who think they can help themselves.
For the last year, Heather Hendrick and her husband and four children
have been serving the people of Haiti.
Recently, they returned home to Texas for the summer.
Except they no longer have a home of their own to go to.
Heather is grateful to be following God’s call to serve the poor,
but at times she struggles mightily with how her life has changed.
“One year ago we were homeowners,” she writes. “[My husband] had a fantastic job. We had two vehicles...We were the ones people called when they needed help. When their car broke down. When they needed a place to stay. Or live. Our house had the extra bedrooms. We were the ones that offered security to others when things fell apart in their lives. They could count on us for meals, a listening ear, to loan them money, to watch their kids at the drop of a hat when an emergency came up...We were the ones with answers. Secure. Steady.
She continues, “...[E]verything....every single thing....about living the life of a "missionary" is uncomfortable. Not just the actual living in Haiti part. In so many ways, I want my old life back...my mortgage payment, [my gas-guzzling car], that feeling of control and that we're responsible. I liked being the givers instead of the takers.” (3)
In his extensive commentary on Matthew,
Dale Bruner calls the first four Beatitudes the “Need Beatitudes.”
Blessed are the poor in spirit
Blessed are those who mourn
Blessed are the meek
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
These blessings that Jesus pronounces
are “for those who cannot help themselves”
those who have no help apart from God.
What follows these “Need Beatitudes” are what Bruner calls “the Help Beatitudes.”
Blessed are the merciful
Blessed are the pure in heart
Blessed are the peacemakers.
These are the blessings Jesus pronounces
for “those who try to help others”
those who recognize that the only faithful response
to an experience of God’s grace
is to draw alongside others
especially other suffering human beings
and offer them love and support
which is nothing less than what God has commanded us to do.
Finally, Bruner names the last two Beatitudes “the Hurt Beatitudes.”
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on Jesus’ account.
The Hurt Beatitudes let us know what Heather Hendrick has discovered,
that following Jesus is not going to be easy,
should not be easy.
In fact, being faithful disciples probably means
we are going to end up just like Jesus
persecuted
ridiculed
hated
In other words,
desperately aware of our need for God. (4)
Which is perhaps not such a bad thing,
because remember: “blessed are those who know their need for God.”
The Beatitudes,
the first sentences of Jesus’ first sermon
reveal to us that following Jesus
is a lifelong endeavor
that looks more like a circle than a straight line.
It is a kind of cycle of faith.
And as soon as we take that first step,
we are somewhere on that cycle.
I like to think of this cycle as a ferris wheel.
Sometimes you’re up, sometimes you’re down.
But you cannot experience the ride if you don’t get on.
And according to Jesus, the cost of this ride
is nothing less than admitting our need for God.
Until we do that, we haven’t really begun to follow him at all.
The Beatitudes are not a recipe for earning God’s favor;
the Beatitudes are a reminder that
in the life and cross and empty tomb of Jesus
God’s favor has already been poured out upon us.
But in order to receive it we have to be willing to admit that we need it
even though needing God’s grace
means we will be required to share it
knowing it will cost us nothing less than what it cost Jesus...
our very lives, given up for the sake of God.
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Wm. Paul Young, The Shack. Windblown Media, 2011.
2. Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978, p. 508. Thanks to Mark Ramsey in his sermon “Reality” (Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, Asheville, NC, January 30, 2011) for the connection of this story with these passages.
3. http://allthingshendrick.blogspot.com/2011/06/fever-induced-honesty.html
4. F. Dale Bruner, Matthew: A Commentary, Vol. 1: The Christbook. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004.
Monday, June 13, 2011
God Revealed (sermon, June 12, 2011)
John 20:19-23
A few weeks ago, as I was getting ready to leave the office
I couldn’t find my church keys.
I looked everywhere, but they were gone.
I figured they’d eventually turn up, so at first I didn’t replace them.
The problem was, I kept finding myself
locked out of rooms I needed to get into.
Which got me to wondering...why are churches so obsessed with locks?
At our last property meeting we talked about
installing a new system for the back door
so that it can be unlocked at the touch of a remote button,
rather than having to walk down the hallway.
But wouldn’t it make more sense
just to leave the door unlocked to begin with?
Well, no. If someone is alone in the building, it’s probably just not a good idea
because you just never know who might try to come in...
or why.
But locking the doors of a church ought to be something we do,
at the very least,
with a great deal of reluctance.
The same is true with my office.
Why does it need to be locked?
I have some books in there, sure,
but frankly, I’d be thrilled if you went in
and picked out something to read.
And as far as all the files full of session minutes and financial reports,
well, if you want them, by all means...!
The truth is, although we may have some good reasons for locking our doors,
we often do so at first based on a healthy sense of fear
but eventually, keeping things tightly locked up
becomes an unbreakable habit.
The reason the disciples locked themselves away after Jesus’ death
is quite clear in the text: they were afraid of the authorities --
which is what is meant here by “the Jews” --
so they hid themselves away
in a top floor,
in a back room,
behind a door closed and locked.
Fortunately, no locked door
or flight of steps
or fearful hearts
can keep Jesus away.
That first Easter night,
as the disciples
are ashamed
and confused
and wondering how on earth they are going to go back
to their friends and family
now that Jesus is dead,
Jesus appears to them
gives them peace,
unlocks their hearts,
and offers them a new way forward.
And he does all this with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus shows the disciples the wounds in his hands and his side
nail-wounds
the very marks of the forgiveness
granted to them by his death.
Then, he gives the most astonishing gift of all
He makes them the church.
“He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
This is the only time this particular Greek word for “breathe”
is used in the New Testament.
It is the same word
used to describe God breathing life into the first human being
in the book of Genesis.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of new life.
Twenty years ago, Magic Johnson heard words from his doctor
that would change his life forever:
HIV positive.
No one would have been surprised if Magic
had abandoned his career
gone behind closed doors
and hidden away in shame and fear
waiting to die.
Instead he went before television cameras
and told the world about his diagnosis.
It was 1991. There was still a huge stigma surrounding HIV.
But when Magic Johnson called his family
to tell them the news,
they didn’t shame him
or hang up on him
or lock the doors to their houses and hearts
to keep him out of their lives forever.
They booked plane tickets.
This is how Magic remembers it:
“My mom hung up the phone with me and got on a plane to come out here.
My dad got on a plane,
my brothers and sisters got on a plane to come be with me.
My aunts, my cousins--they all were getting on a plane.
That’s love, that’s support,
and that makes a world of difference in how well you fight the virus.
I know that’s a large part of why I’m still here today.” (1)
When we think of Pentecost,
we usually have the story from Acts in mind.
Loud wind...
Flames of fire dancing on people’s heads...
Miraculous ability to speak and understand different languages.
This text from John, the other place where the disciples receive the Holy Spirit
is much more subdued.
Like the Acts passage,
it is also about sending the disciples out
to share the gospel
but in this text we discover the
core of this good news.
It turns out that the gospel isn’t just about
Jesus coming to us,
through our locked doors
to where we are hiding with our shame and fear
and forgiving us.
The gospel is about the gift of the Holy Spirit,
and with the gift of the Holy Spirit
Jesus is entrusting the disciples
entrusting us
with the ministry of forgiveness. (2)
Hugh Hollowell pastors a congregation
largely made up of people who are homeless.
Several years ago, while speaking to a secular audience,
he mentioned that he ran a faith-based organization
which helped homeless people.
In that talk, as an aside,
he used the example of gay marriage as a way
that relationships change how we feel about “the other.”
After the talk, while washing his hands in the bathroom,
a young man stood by the door, staring at him.
After a few seconds, the man spoke.
“Are you gay?” he asked Hollowell.
Hugh told him he was not.
“But homeless people who are gay, you help them, right?”
“Yes, I do,” Hugh answered.
“And you’re a Christian, right?”
“Yes.”
The man looked Hollowell in the eye and said,
“I didn’t know you could be a Christian and help gay people.”
Then he explained
how his family had disowned him when he came out to them
how they are very religious
and how, because of them, he no longer wants
anything to do with the church.
“I hate the church,” he said.
“After everything they have done to me and my friends,
I can’t stand their hypocrisy and self-righteous attitude.”
Hollowell said he didn’t blame him a bit.
With tears in both their eyes,
the man hugged Hollowell and thanked him
for being willing to help everybody, including gay people.
He turned to leave, but then stopped and said, “You know, it’s strange.
I hate the church.
You can’t pay me to go back there.
But I really miss Jesus.” (3)
With the gift of the Holy Spirit,
God makes us the church.
It is a huge responsibility.
As the church, we can lock people out with our judgments
our hypocrisy
our self-righteous attitude.
Or we can remember the forgiveness Jesus offered us
and we can be the church
by showing people how forgiveness sets us free.
The Greek word for forgiveness used here also means “to set free.”
To forgive someone is to set them free
and to set ourselves free from grudges and anger.
As Lewis Smedes once said,
“When you forgive you set a prisoner free.
And then you discover that the prisoner was you.” (4)
In 1993 Osheah Israel was a teenage gang member.
One night at a party, he got into a fight
that ended when he shot and killed
another teenage boy.
Oshea was sentenced to prison for second-degree murder.
The mother of the boy shot and killed that night is Mary Johnson.
Twelve years after the trial that put Oshea in jail,
Mary went to visit him at Stillwater Prison.
She wanted to see if he was in the same mindset
that she remembered from the trial when she had wanted to hurt
the boy who had killed her boy.
But Oshea wasn’t that same boy.
He was a grown man,
and to her own surprise,
Mary decided to talk to him about her son.
When it was time to go, Mary broke down and started to cry.
In their own words, here’s what happened after Mary broke down:
“The initial thing to do,” said Oshea
“was to just try and hold you up as best you can --
just hug you like I would my own mother.”
“After you left the room,” Mary responded,
“I began to say, ‘I just hugged the man that murdered my son.’
And I instantly knew that all that anger and animosity
all the stuff I had in my heart for twelve years for you,
I knew it was over,
that I had totally forgiven you.”
“Sometimes,” said Oshea,
“I still don’t know how to take it,
because I haven’t totally forgiven myself yet.
It’s something I’m learning from you --
I won’t say I’ve learned it yet --
because it’s still a process that I’m going through.”
“I treat you as I would my own son,” said Mary.
“And our relationship is beyond belief.
We live next door to one another.”
“Yeah,” Oshea said, “so you can see what I’m doing, you know, first hand.
We actually bump into each other all the time
going in and out of the house.”
“Well,” said Mary, “my natural son is no longer here.
I didn’t see him graduate,
now you’re going to college.
I’ll have the opportunity to see you graduate.
I didn’t see him getting married.
Hopefully, one day,
I’ll get to experience that with you.”
“Just to hear you say those things, Mary,
and [for you] to be in my life in the manner you are
is my motivation.
You still believe in me.
And the fact that you can do it
despite how much pain I caused you
it’s amazing.”
“Oshea, I know it’s not an easy thing
to be able to share our story together.
Even with us sitting here looking at each other right now,
I know it’s not an easy thing.
So I admire that you can do this.”
“I love you, lady.”
“I love you, too, son.” (5)
Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit which, it turns out, is not only the key
which unlocks the doors to the church
so that all may be welcomed in,
It is also the key to unlocking the doors to our hearts
that we might receive and extend
God’s most precious gift: forgiveness.
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Allison Samuels, “Magic Johnson: I Survived.” Newsweek, May 16, 2011, pp. 64-5.
2. Craig Barnes, “Crying Shame,” The Christian Century. April 6, 2004, p. 19.
3. Hugh Hollowell, “The Gift of Tears,” on the Red Letter Christians weblog.
4. quoted in Craig Barnes' article referenced above
5. Heard on NPR’s StoryCorps project. Listen and read more here.
A few weeks ago, as I was getting ready to leave the office
I couldn’t find my church keys.
I looked everywhere, but they were gone.
I figured they’d eventually turn up, so at first I didn’t replace them.
The problem was, I kept finding myself
locked out of rooms I needed to get into.
Which got me to wondering...why are churches so obsessed with locks?
At our last property meeting we talked about
installing a new system for the back door
so that it can be unlocked at the touch of a remote button,
rather than having to walk down the hallway.
But wouldn’t it make more sense
just to leave the door unlocked to begin with?
Well, no. If someone is alone in the building, it’s probably just not a good idea
because you just never know who might try to come in...
or why.
But locking the doors of a church ought to be something we do,
at the very least,
with a great deal of reluctance.
The same is true with my office.
Why does it need to be locked?
I have some books in there, sure,
but frankly, I’d be thrilled if you went in
and picked out something to read.
And as far as all the files full of session minutes and financial reports,
well, if you want them, by all means...!
The truth is, although we may have some good reasons for locking our doors,
we often do so at first based on a healthy sense of fear
but eventually, keeping things tightly locked up
becomes an unbreakable habit.
The reason the disciples locked themselves away after Jesus’ death
is quite clear in the text: they were afraid of the authorities --
which is what is meant here by “the Jews” --
so they hid themselves away
in a top floor,
in a back room,
behind a door closed and locked.
Fortunately, no locked door
or flight of steps
or fearful hearts
can keep Jesus away.
That first Easter night,
as the disciples
are ashamed
and confused
and wondering how on earth they are going to go back
to their friends and family
now that Jesus is dead,
Jesus appears to them
gives them peace,
unlocks their hearts,
and offers them a new way forward.
And he does all this with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus shows the disciples the wounds in his hands and his side
nail-wounds
the very marks of the forgiveness
granted to them by his death.
Then, he gives the most astonishing gift of all
He makes them the church.
“He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
This is the only time this particular Greek word for “breathe”
is used in the New Testament.
It is the same word
used to describe God breathing life into the first human being
in the book of Genesis.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of new life.
Twenty years ago, Magic Johnson heard words from his doctor
that would change his life forever:
HIV positive.
No one would have been surprised if Magic
had abandoned his career
gone behind closed doors
and hidden away in shame and fear
waiting to die.
Instead he went before television cameras
and told the world about his diagnosis.
It was 1991. There was still a huge stigma surrounding HIV.
But when Magic Johnson called his family
to tell them the news,
they didn’t shame him
or hang up on him
or lock the doors to their houses and hearts
to keep him out of their lives forever.
They booked plane tickets.
This is how Magic remembers it:
“My mom hung up the phone with me and got on a plane to come out here.
My dad got on a plane,
my brothers and sisters got on a plane to come be with me.
My aunts, my cousins--they all were getting on a plane.
That’s love, that’s support,
and that makes a world of difference in how well you fight the virus.
I know that’s a large part of why I’m still here today.” (1)
When we think of Pentecost,
we usually have the story from Acts in mind.
Loud wind...
Flames of fire dancing on people’s heads...
Miraculous ability to speak and understand different languages.
This text from John, the other place where the disciples receive the Holy Spirit
is much more subdued.
Like the Acts passage,
it is also about sending the disciples out
to share the gospel
but in this text we discover the
core of this good news.
It turns out that the gospel isn’t just about
Jesus coming to us,
through our locked doors
to where we are hiding with our shame and fear
and forgiving us.
The gospel is about the gift of the Holy Spirit,
and with the gift of the Holy Spirit
Jesus is entrusting the disciples
entrusting us
with the ministry of forgiveness. (2)
Hugh Hollowell pastors a congregation
largely made up of people who are homeless.
Several years ago, while speaking to a secular audience,
he mentioned that he ran a faith-based organization
which helped homeless people.
In that talk, as an aside,
he used the example of gay marriage as a way
that relationships change how we feel about “the other.”
After the talk, while washing his hands in the bathroom,
a young man stood by the door, staring at him.
After a few seconds, the man spoke.
“Are you gay?” he asked Hollowell.
Hugh told him he was not.
“But homeless people who are gay, you help them, right?”
“Yes, I do,” Hugh answered.
“And you’re a Christian, right?”
“Yes.”
The man looked Hollowell in the eye and said,
“I didn’t know you could be a Christian and help gay people.”
Then he explained
how his family had disowned him when he came out to them
how they are very religious
and how, because of them, he no longer wants
anything to do with the church.
“I hate the church,” he said.
“After everything they have done to me and my friends,
I can’t stand their hypocrisy and self-righteous attitude.”
Hollowell said he didn’t blame him a bit.
With tears in both their eyes,
the man hugged Hollowell and thanked him
for being willing to help everybody, including gay people.
He turned to leave, but then stopped and said, “You know, it’s strange.
I hate the church.
You can’t pay me to go back there.
But I really miss Jesus.” (3)
With the gift of the Holy Spirit,
God makes us the church.
It is a huge responsibility.
As the church, we can lock people out with our judgments
our hypocrisy
our self-righteous attitude.
Or we can remember the forgiveness Jesus offered us
and we can be the church
by showing people how forgiveness sets us free.
The Greek word for forgiveness used here also means “to set free.”
To forgive someone is to set them free
and to set ourselves free from grudges and anger.
As Lewis Smedes once said,
“When you forgive you set a prisoner free.
And then you discover that the prisoner was you.” (4)
In 1993 Osheah Israel was a teenage gang member.
One night at a party, he got into a fight
that ended when he shot and killed
another teenage boy.
Oshea was sentenced to prison for second-degree murder.
The mother of the boy shot and killed that night is Mary Johnson.
Twelve years after the trial that put Oshea in jail,
Mary went to visit him at Stillwater Prison.
She wanted to see if he was in the same mindset
that she remembered from the trial when she had wanted to hurt
the boy who had killed her boy.
But Oshea wasn’t that same boy.
He was a grown man,
and to her own surprise,
Mary decided to talk to him about her son.
When it was time to go, Mary broke down and started to cry.
In their own words, here’s what happened after Mary broke down:
“The initial thing to do,” said Oshea
“was to just try and hold you up as best you can --
just hug you like I would my own mother.”
“After you left the room,” Mary responded,
“I began to say, ‘I just hugged the man that murdered my son.’
And I instantly knew that all that anger and animosity
all the stuff I had in my heart for twelve years for you,
I knew it was over,
that I had totally forgiven you.”
“Sometimes,” said Oshea,
“I still don’t know how to take it,
because I haven’t totally forgiven myself yet.
It’s something I’m learning from you --
I won’t say I’ve learned it yet --
because it’s still a process that I’m going through.”
“I treat you as I would my own son,” said Mary.
“And our relationship is beyond belief.
We live next door to one another.”
“Yeah,” Oshea said, “so you can see what I’m doing, you know, first hand.
We actually bump into each other all the time
going in and out of the house.”
“Well,” said Mary, “my natural son is no longer here.
I didn’t see him graduate,
now you’re going to college.
I’ll have the opportunity to see you graduate.
I didn’t see him getting married.
Hopefully, one day,
I’ll get to experience that with you.”
“Just to hear you say those things, Mary,
and [for you] to be in my life in the manner you are
is my motivation.
You still believe in me.
And the fact that you can do it
despite how much pain I caused you
it’s amazing.”
“Oshea, I know it’s not an easy thing
to be able to share our story together.
Even with us sitting here looking at each other right now,
I know it’s not an easy thing.
So I admire that you can do this.”
“I love you, lady.”
“I love you, too, son.” (5)
Jesus has given us the Holy Spirit which, it turns out, is not only the key
which unlocks the doors to the church
so that all may be welcomed in,
It is also the key to unlocking the doors to our hearts
that we might receive and extend
God’s most precious gift: forgiveness.
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Allison Samuels, “Magic Johnson: I Survived.” Newsweek, May 16, 2011, pp. 64-5.
2. Craig Barnes, “Crying Shame,” The Christian Century. April 6, 2004, p. 19.
3. Hugh Hollowell, “The Gift of Tears,” on the Red Letter Christians weblog.
4. quoted in Craig Barnes' article referenced above
5. Heard on NPR’s StoryCorps project. Listen and read more here.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Heavenward (sermon for confirmation Sunday, June 5, 2011)
Acts 1:6-14
For those of you who have managed to stay away
from the social networking site Facebook,
let me take a moment to explain one of Facebook’s many idiosyncracies:
the “Like” button.
People on Facebook can post something called a status update,
which lets their friends know what they are doing
or thinking
or reading
or taking pictures of
at any given moment.
And when their friends read this status update
or browse through the pictures
or take a look at the recommended website,
they can click on the word “like.”
Then everyone who sees the update will see how many people “liked” it.
Once one person “likes” an update,
there’s even a cute little thumbs-up sign under the it
that tracks the number of people who have “liked” it.
As cool as this may sound
there is at least one person who thinks
all this “liking” is not a good thing.
Writer Johnathan Franzen is concerned about the way Facebook has
transformed “the verb ‘to like’ from a state of mind
to an action that you perform with your computer mouse.”
His bigger concern is that this reveals a tendency in our culture
to substitute an easy kind of liking for the more difficult task of loving.
To like something, on Facebook or otherwise,
is to keep a certain distance from it.
Liking is, by and large, a positive feeling.
Love, on the other hand, costs us. It is messy and complicated.
To love someone is to become vulnerable, to risk getting dirty.
Love, writes Franzen,
“is about bottomless empathy,
born out of the heart’s revelation
that another person is every bit as real as you are.” (1)
Without a doubt,
the words and actions of Jesus reveal that he was a man
who loved deeply and suffered all the painful consequences of love.
Seeking out the lonely and the lost,
calling his followers to leave family and secure jobs,
preaching a message of uncompromising demands:
Love your enemies
Turn the other cheek
Bless those who persecute you...
Jesus may not have known much about the superficial, Facebook style of “liking”
but he knew all there is to know about
what author Alice Sebold describes as
“getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” (2)
And Jesus wasn’t afraid to tell his followers that
they were called to do the very same thing.
After all, Jesus was no superhero of love.
He wasn’t even superhuman.
Jesus was the fullest expression of what a human being could be
and how a human being can love.
This particular story from Acts, though, of Jesus ascending into heaven,
certainly reinforces the superhero image.
If you go to the Holy Land, you can visit the
Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives.
You can go right up to the place where there is a foot-like depression in a rock,
said to be the exact spot from which Christ left the disciples
and disappeared into the sky on a cloud.
That footprint reinforces this image of Jesus the Superhero,
springing away from the earth with such force that
the very rock under his foot would forever bear the scars! (3)
With this image in mind, can any of us blame the disciples for standing there,
heads craned up
necks tilted back
mouths hanging open
watching their Lord disappear into the sky?
With this image in mind, can anyone blame us
for the persistent myth in our faith and in our culture
that heaven is somewhere up there...
somewhere in the direction of the sky where
the disciples last saw our beloved Savior?
That is where we tend to think of heaven, right?
Somewhere up there.
Of course, in our scientific age, we all know that heaven isn’t really “up there”
any more than hell is somewhere “down below.”
We have accepted that the earth is round, after all,
so that way of thinking just doesn’t work any more.
But still, polls show that nine out of ten Americans believe in heaven
and 85 percent think that they will go there when they die.
As Tom Long puts it,
“In sober moments of reflection,
our culture may find talk of heaven implausible,
but in moments of need, it finds
the hope of heaven irresistible.” (4)
So what if this passage really isn’t about the geographical location of heaven,
but something else entirely?
When the disciples are caught staring dumbly up in the sky,
the men in white tell them,
“This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven,
will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
What is that supposed to mean, anyway?
Theologian Christopher Morse has carefully considered
all the biblical evidence for heaven,
and he comes to the conclusion that
heaven is “not about blue skies or life only after death,”
but that heaven is coming toward us even now from God,
heaven is God coming to us,
“God’s unbounded love breaking in to every situation,
stronger than any loss, even death.
We don’t go to heaven; heaven comes to us.” (5)
It is so tempting for us to read this story in Acts
and conclude that the ascension is a one of a kind moment
that has nothing to do with our every day lives.
Like the disciples, we might stand in awe for a few moments
and then we walk away, shaking our heads,
feeling more than a little confused about
what in the world all of this means.
Confirmation and baptism represent the same temptation.
It’s a festive day, for sure.
It feels like a one of a kind moment set apart from the rest of our lives.
We are here to celebrate with these eight young people
who have worked hard all year
spent time in prayer
labored over faith statements
and ultimately decided to join our church
by professing their faith and being baptized
or renewing their baptismal vows.
It’s a festive day, but one that is all too tempting to leave behind
-- kind of like the ascension --
because, let’s face it,
it just doesn’t seem to have much to do with
life beyond these four walls.
If confirmation was a Facebook status update,
sure, we’d all “like” it...
but “liking” confirmation,
would be about the equivalent of “friending” Jesus,
which is in the end about keeping him at arm’s length,
letting him see just the parts of our day to day lives that we choose to share.
At the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia
there is a baptismal font which is a statue of
“a standing male figure,
looking rather stern and
dressed in a long, bluish-grey robe,
[holding] up a black bowl of water.”
An inscription nearby reads:
“[This statue was once] used as a baptismal font in a church
but was removed when children were frightened by it.” (6)
Whoever carved that statue surely knew
that baptism is by no means just a festive occasion;
it is a symbol of death.
Confirmation is not so different.
Today is not just a day to celebrate, it is the beginning of new life for
Megan and Ryan, Jacob and Dallas, Matthew and Tyler, Alex and Cory.
And new life can only begin after death.
Beginning today,
we are calling these young people in our church to
live every moment and every day differently than before.
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,”
says Jesus, “and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”
That is what the ascension is about,
that is what confirmation and baptism are about:
this promise that when Jesus goes away from us
that’s when the Holy Spirit is going to come
and give us the same kind of power Jesus had.
The power to love.
The power to bring God’s love into every situation.
The power to make heaven real, here and now.
Kate Braestrup’s kids were playing in the backyard
when her cousin George used gasoline to try and ignite a pile of brush.
The gasoline exploded into a fireball that badly burned
all three of them.
In a panic, Braestrup got them into the car
and started driving to the hospital while calling 911 on her cell phone.
Braestrup writes that
“George was cursing and crying because his burns hurt
and because he knew that the fire
that had injured these children was his mistake, his fault.
He was the adult who had decided to use gasoline to start the fire,
and his was the hand that struck the match.
“Are they breathing?” the dispatcher said,
and I held up the cell phone.
George, beside me in the passenger seat, said,
“Oh my God. Oh hell. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”
Zach was sitting behind him in the backseat.
In the middle of his own loud litany of “Oh God” and “Oh hell,”
Zach leaned forward.
He reached out with his burned arm,
an arm blistering and shredding before my eyes,
and put his burned hand on George’s shoulder.
“It’s all right, George,” he said. “We love you.”
If you are living in love,” writes Braestrup,
“you are in heaven no matter where you are.” (7)
Heaven is here now,
not in some far-off place where Jesus flew off to
above the gaze of the astonished disciples,
not in some far-off future
that doesn’t have anything to do with today.
Likewise, these young people are not the future of the church,
and we do them and ourselves a disservice
if we think of them just this way.
They are the church...here, now, today,
and they are not the church by themselves
but with the rest of us, all here together.
Together, as Christ’s church, we are here to make love real,
to push past the superficial “liking” and “friending”
that we can do with a click of a computer mouse
and get down into the pit where real love happens,
a pit that looks a lot like everyday life.
And when we live together in that kind of love,
when we let that kind of love loose in a hurting and needy world,
no matter how messy and painful it may be,
no matter how much it might cost us,
we might just get the clearest glimpse of heaven
we will ever see.
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Jonathan Franzen, “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.” The New York Times, May 28, 2011. Online here.
2. Ibid.
3. Wesley Hill, “Ascension Theology, by Douglass Farrow” (book review), The Christian Century, May 13, 2011.
4. Tom Long, “Heaven Comes to Us,” The Christian Century, April 25, 2011.
5. Ibid.
6. Paul Galbreath, Leading through the Water. The Alban Institute, 2011.
7. Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me. Back Bay Books, 2008.
For those of you who have managed to stay away
from the social networking site Facebook,
let me take a moment to explain one of Facebook’s many idiosyncracies:
the “Like” button.
People on Facebook can post something called a status update,
which lets their friends know what they are doing
or thinking
or reading
or taking pictures of
at any given moment.
And when their friends read this status update
or browse through the pictures
or take a look at the recommended website,
they can click on the word “like.”
Then everyone who sees the update will see how many people “liked” it.
Once one person “likes” an update,
there’s even a cute little thumbs-up sign under the it
that tracks the number of people who have “liked” it.
As cool as this may sound
there is at least one person who thinks
all this “liking” is not a good thing.
Writer Johnathan Franzen is concerned about the way Facebook has
transformed “the verb ‘to like’ from a state of mind
to an action that you perform with your computer mouse.”
His bigger concern is that this reveals a tendency in our culture
to substitute an easy kind of liking for the more difficult task of loving.
To like something, on Facebook or otherwise,
is to keep a certain distance from it.
Liking is, by and large, a positive feeling.
Love, on the other hand, costs us. It is messy and complicated.
To love someone is to become vulnerable, to risk getting dirty.
Love, writes Franzen,
“is about bottomless empathy,
born out of the heart’s revelation
that another person is every bit as real as you are.” (1)
Without a doubt,
the words and actions of Jesus reveal that he was a man
who loved deeply and suffered all the painful consequences of love.
Seeking out the lonely and the lost,
calling his followers to leave family and secure jobs,
preaching a message of uncompromising demands:
Love your enemies
Turn the other cheek
Bless those who persecute you...
Jesus may not have known much about the superficial, Facebook style of “liking”
but he knew all there is to know about
what author Alice Sebold describes as
“getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” (2)
And Jesus wasn’t afraid to tell his followers that
they were called to do the very same thing.
After all, Jesus was no superhero of love.
He wasn’t even superhuman.
Jesus was the fullest expression of what a human being could be
and how a human being can love.
This particular story from Acts, though, of Jesus ascending into heaven,
certainly reinforces the superhero image.
If you go to the Holy Land, you can visit the
Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives.
You can go right up to the place where there is a foot-like depression in a rock,
said to be the exact spot from which Christ left the disciples
and disappeared into the sky on a cloud.
That footprint reinforces this image of Jesus the Superhero,
springing away from the earth with such force that
the very rock under his foot would forever bear the scars! (3)
With this image in mind, can any of us blame the disciples for standing there,
heads craned up
necks tilted back
mouths hanging open
watching their Lord disappear into the sky?
With this image in mind, can anyone blame us
for the persistent myth in our faith and in our culture
that heaven is somewhere up there...
somewhere in the direction of the sky where
the disciples last saw our beloved Savior?
That is where we tend to think of heaven, right?
Somewhere up there.
Of course, in our scientific age, we all know that heaven isn’t really “up there”
any more than hell is somewhere “down below.”
We have accepted that the earth is round, after all,
so that way of thinking just doesn’t work any more.
But still, polls show that nine out of ten Americans believe in heaven
and 85 percent think that they will go there when they die.
As Tom Long puts it,
“In sober moments of reflection,
our culture may find talk of heaven implausible,
but in moments of need, it finds
the hope of heaven irresistible.” (4)
So what if this passage really isn’t about the geographical location of heaven,
but something else entirely?
When the disciples are caught staring dumbly up in the sky,
the men in white tell them,
“This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven,
will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
What is that supposed to mean, anyway?
Theologian Christopher Morse has carefully considered
all the biblical evidence for heaven,
and he comes to the conclusion that
heaven is “not about blue skies or life only after death,”
but that heaven is coming toward us even now from God,
heaven is God coming to us,
“God’s unbounded love breaking in to every situation,
stronger than any loss, even death.
We don’t go to heaven; heaven comes to us.” (5)
It is so tempting for us to read this story in Acts
and conclude that the ascension is a one of a kind moment
that has nothing to do with our every day lives.
Like the disciples, we might stand in awe for a few moments
and then we walk away, shaking our heads,
feeling more than a little confused about
what in the world all of this means.
Confirmation and baptism represent the same temptation.
It’s a festive day, for sure.
It feels like a one of a kind moment set apart from the rest of our lives.
We are here to celebrate with these eight young people
who have worked hard all year
spent time in prayer
labored over faith statements
and ultimately decided to join our church
by professing their faith and being baptized
or renewing their baptismal vows.
It’s a festive day, but one that is all too tempting to leave behind
-- kind of like the ascension --
because, let’s face it,
it just doesn’t seem to have much to do with
life beyond these four walls.
If confirmation was a Facebook status update,
sure, we’d all “like” it...
but “liking” confirmation,
would be about the equivalent of “friending” Jesus,
which is in the end about keeping him at arm’s length,
letting him see just the parts of our day to day lives that we choose to share.
At the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia
there is a baptismal font which is a statue of
“a standing male figure,
looking rather stern and
dressed in a long, bluish-grey robe,
[holding] up a black bowl of water.”
An inscription nearby reads:
“[This statue was once] used as a baptismal font in a church
but was removed when children were frightened by it.” (6)
Whoever carved that statue surely knew
that baptism is by no means just a festive occasion;
it is a symbol of death.
Confirmation is not so different.
Today is not just a day to celebrate, it is the beginning of new life for
Megan and Ryan, Jacob and Dallas, Matthew and Tyler, Alex and Cory.
And new life can only begin after death.
Beginning today,
we are calling these young people in our church to
live every moment and every day differently than before.
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,”
says Jesus, “and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”
That is what the ascension is about,
that is what confirmation and baptism are about:
this promise that when Jesus goes away from us
that’s when the Holy Spirit is going to come
and give us the same kind of power Jesus had.
The power to love.
The power to bring God’s love into every situation.
The power to make heaven real, here and now.
Kate Braestrup’s kids were playing in the backyard
when her cousin George used gasoline to try and ignite a pile of brush.
The gasoline exploded into a fireball that badly burned
all three of them.
In a panic, Braestrup got them into the car
and started driving to the hospital while calling 911 on her cell phone.
Braestrup writes that
“George was cursing and crying because his burns hurt
and because he knew that the fire
that had injured these children was his mistake, his fault.
He was the adult who had decided to use gasoline to start the fire,
and his was the hand that struck the match.
“Are they breathing?” the dispatcher said,
and I held up the cell phone.
George, beside me in the passenger seat, said,
“Oh my God. Oh hell. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”
Zach was sitting behind him in the backseat.
In the middle of his own loud litany of “Oh God” and “Oh hell,”
Zach leaned forward.
He reached out with his burned arm,
an arm blistering and shredding before my eyes,
and put his burned hand on George’s shoulder.
“It’s all right, George,” he said. “We love you.”
If you are living in love,” writes Braestrup,
“you are in heaven no matter where you are.” (7)
Heaven is here now,
not in some far-off place where Jesus flew off to
above the gaze of the astonished disciples,
not in some far-off future
that doesn’t have anything to do with today.
Likewise, these young people are not the future of the church,
and we do them and ourselves a disservice
if we think of them just this way.
They are the church...here, now, today,
and they are not the church by themselves
but with the rest of us, all here together.
Together, as Christ’s church, we are here to make love real,
to push past the superficial “liking” and “friending”
that we can do with a click of a computer mouse
and get down into the pit where real love happens,
a pit that looks a lot like everyday life.
And when we live together in that kind of love,
when we let that kind of love loose in a hurting and needy world,
no matter how messy and painful it may be,
no matter how much it might cost us,
we might just get the clearest glimpse of heaven
we will ever see.
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Jonathan Franzen, “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.” The New York Times, May 28, 2011. Online here.
2. Ibid.
3. Wesley Hill, “Ascension Theology, by Douglass Farrow” (book review), The Christian Century, May 13, 2011.
4. Tom Long, “Heaven Comes to Us,” The Christian Century, April 25, 2011.
5. Ibid.
6. Paul Galbreath, Leading through the Water. The Alban Institute, 2011.
7. Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me. Back Bay Books, 2008.
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