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          I want to start today by inviting you to take a minute and think about one thing you believe about God.  Once you’ve decided on it, write it down.  We’ll come back to it in a bit.

          The last six weeks I’ve been teaching an online course called “Thinking Theologically in the 21^st Century.”  The course is part of a program of theological education sponsored and run by our own Southeast Conference in the UCC.  Rochelle Lofstrand is one of the 13 people enrolled in the course.  Other participants live in Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee.  The main goal of “Thinking Theologically” is learning to think critically about our ideas about God. 

Ideas about God.  We all have them; every person sitting in this room has ideas about God.  Look!  You’ve written one of those ideas down…and I’m guessing that you have many more thoughts about God.  But here’s a question:  Are they truly YOUR thoughts?  Is the thought written on that paper really YOUR thought?  Or is it something you’ve picked up along the way from parents or friends or society or Facebook or Miss Janet in Sunday School? 

Not that picking things up from Miss Janet in Sunday School is a bad thing…in fact, Miss Janet is a great source for ideas about God.  The thing is, though, until we take our God-ideas out and look at them, analyze them, and compare them with others’ ideas, until we do the hard intellectual work of figuring out just what we believe, our ideas about God aren’t our ideas at all.  They’re simply someone else’s ideas that we’ve adopted as our own.  If we are to know and act out of what we really believe, we have to do our own hard work of critical reflection.

The theological ideas we hold, these assumptions we’ve absorbed by osmosis from our parents and church and society and Miss Janet…in our class we’ve called those ideas “embedded theology.”  Embedded theology isn’t good or bad…it’s just what we’re given and what we take hook, line, and sinker without judging whether or not we actually believe it.  We just believe it, not questions asked.   

If “embedded theology” is what we have before we reflect critically on our ideas about God, “deliberative theology” is what we have after we’ve reflected.  I’m talking about critical reflection like it’s just another math or reading assignment.  In truth, reflective work about our God-ideas can be hard.…really hard.  Our ideas about God are so deeply-ingrained, they’re so close to who we are that lifting up those ideas and looking at them, analyzing them, seeing the places at which they’re adequate–and inadequate—that can be a grueling process.  To quote one of the participants in the class:  “Deliberative theology is only for the brave.”   Indeed.

It’s worth the work, though.  Because what happens once you’ve done the hard work of thinking deliberatively about your theology, is that your beliefs about God truly become YOUR beliefs.  The things you believe after the process of critical reflection might be the same things you believed before reflecting critically.  The difference now is that those beliefs are YOUR beliefs.  They aren’t the beliefs you absorbed from your parents or your church or society or Miss Janet.  They are YOUR beliefs, won through hard, intentional, intellectual work.

Okay.  Look at the belief about God you wrote down a minute ago.  Where did that idea come from?  Why do you believe it?  Does it make sense to you that you believe it?  Congratulations!  We’ve just done some deliberative theology.

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with today’s passage from Isaiah.  A lot, actually.  What we have in today’s text is a bit of deliberative theology. 

The prophet addresses the people of Judah after they’ve been taken into exile in Babylon.  Remember a couple of weeks ago when we talked about Abram?  Remember the two promises God made to Abram?  God promised Abram a ton of descendants and “a land I will show you.”   That promise of land had become central for the Jewish people.  If God gave them the land, they reasoned, then the land must be where God resided.  That translated into a belief that– as long as we’re in the land, we’re with God.  That idea was part of their embedded theology.

          But now, 900 or so years later, they’d been taken out of the land…to Babylon…in exile.  If your theology is grounded in, well, the ground of a particular place, what’s going to happen when you no longer have access to that ground?  It’s going to make mincemeat of your theology, isn’t it?  If you’ve always understood God to behave in a certain way and to be in a certain place, maybe even to look a certain way…when none of that is in place any more, when everything you’ve ever believed about God is pulled out from under you, what’s going to happen?  You’re going to feel lost.  Devastated.  Afraid.  It might even move you to atheism. 

          That’s pretty much where the people in exile in Babylon were.  The things they’d always assumed about God had changed; their embedded theologies no longer were adequate to their circumstances.  Without a new way to think about God, they were going to lose faith.  Which is why the prophet steps in to do a little deliberative theology with them.  He invites the people to rethink their ideas about God in the hope that a new understanding of God will make it possible for them to continue believing.

          Is there something going on in your life right now that is shaking your faith in God?  Is everything you’ve ever believed about God being questioned?  Are you about to lose faith?  If so, hear what the prophet does for the exiles in Babylon.

          First, he reminds them that God has been with them and helped them in the past.  Listen:  “Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick.”  What’s the prophet talking about here?  (The exodus.)  Exactly.  He’s inviting the people to remember a time in their history when things seemed utterly hopeless, but when—with God’s help–things turned around.

          Can you remember a time when you felt God’s presence in dire circumstances?  A time when your faith was strong?  A time when things made sense?  Take a moment to remember a time in the past when you knew that God was with you.

          So, the prophet reminds the people of a past event when God had been with them.  In light of that, the next thing he says seems contradictory:  “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.”  But this isn’t a word about God’s past action he’s calling the people to forget.  It’s their ideas about how God is supposed to act that the prophet is challenging them to let go.  Because if we have set ideas of how God is supposed to act, what will happen?  If we think God is supposed to act in this one particular way, then we won’t be able to see God working when God acts in a new way, will we?  If we’re only looking for God to do the old things, we won’t be able to recognize it when God is doing something new.

          Which is why the prophet speaks this next word from God to the disheartened people:  “I am about to do a new thing… I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.  The wild animals will honor me… for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.”  Basically, the prophet is saying that the new thing God is going to do is going to be SO new that the world is going to turn upside down—a path in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, wild animals tamed.

          We began this self-reflective journey of Lent in the wilderness.  Three weeks ago we looked at how much we can learn about ourselves and about God if we separate ourselves from the distractions of the familiar.  Two weeks ago, we gave ourselves permission to question God.  A strong faith is a questioning faith, we decided.  Last week, we considered what it might be like to rest in God.  As Augustine said, “Our souls are restless until they find their rest in God.” 

          Today, the self-reflective process continues not by questioning God, but by questioning ourselves about what we believe about God.  Is the God you have right now adequate to the circumstances of your life?  Is God waiting to do a new thing in your life but is prevented from doing so because your ideas about God are too limited?  If so, then maybe it’s time to change your ideas about God.  Maybe it’s time to shift your perspective. 

          Over the last month and a half in the class I’ve been teaching, perspectives have been shifting all over the place.  One person began to experience God’s love—like, really to feel it– because of a new idea about God.  The idea that God might change was revolutionary to others.  One person’s ideas about Jesus shifted pretty drastically.  Another participant had described Jesus as “an example of what God hopes for us.”  “Wow!” the person wrote.  “Previously, I was all, “Jesus is an example of what God expects from us, and we FAIL to meet that expectation every day.  And God tracks that, you know.”  But now, I’m…well, I’m still that way.  But I’ve been shown a new possibility, and I’m headed toward it.”

          Toward what new possibilities might you be headed if your perspective about God shifted?  What embedded ideas about God need to be dislodged and re-thought?  What new thing might God be waiting—just waiting–to do in your life?      

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2013

Isaiah 43:16-21

The songwriter asks:  “What’s it gonna take to save the day?  What you gonna need to feel ok?  If you close your eyes what would you pray?  What’s it gonna take to save the day?”  What’s it gonna take to save the day for you?  What will make you feel okay?  A winning lottery ticket?  A new car?  A new job?  A new house?  A new spouse?   For what do you most long?  For what does your soul thirst?

          If I were asking these questions at Children’s Time, the children would shout the answer together:  “God!”  Not so much because they had read Psalm 63, but because the answer to most of the questions I ask at Children’s Time is “God.”  The kids are on to me!

          If you’re like me, you suspect that the answer to the “for what do you long” question really is God.  There’s something inside us that senses that the thing that will satisfy all our longings is connecting with God.  As St. Augustine said in the 4^th c. “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”   I don’t know how it is for you, but for me, knowing that God can satisfy my longings doesn’t always translate into actually trying to connect to God.  In fact, I often find myself searching for satisfaction from any source BUT God.  Does that ever happen to you?

          In some translations, Psalm 63 begins with the inscription:  “A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah.”   David.  Now, there’s someone who, from time to time, looked for satisfaction in places other than God.  He looked for it in power; he looked for it in placating his children; once, he even looked for it in a fling with his neighbor’s wife.

          As he was doing these things, each one seemed like it would solve all his problems.  In each moment of temptation, something inside David told him the thing he desired would be the one thing that would make everything fall into place for him, the one thing that would make everything okay, the one thing that would “save the day” for him.

          After giving in to each temptation, though, it became clear to David that the thing he thought would save the day—and maybe his soul—in the end, only created heartache and complications and really big messes.

          It’s while he’s in the wilderness—perhaps after one of those failed attempts at finding happiness—that David gains a crucial insight.  After looking for it in many other places, he comes to realize that the only thing that ever truly will satisfy him is God.  Money’s not going to do it.  Power’s not going to do it.  Sex is not going to do it.  A new job is not going to do it.  The only thing, the only thing that will truly and completely satisfy his soul is God.

          And so out in the wilderness of Judah, a place with little vegetation and few sources of water, a place he has gone—perhaps—to escape from another mess he’s made, David cries out: ¹”O God, I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water”  And then he remembers:  “Y²our steadfast love is better than life…⁵ My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast…^*67 you have been my help….  ⁸ My soul clings to you.”

          To what does your soul cling?  Is whatever you’re clinging to satisfying your soul “as with a rich feast?”  Or is it leaving you feeling empty?  Yet again?

          A couple of weeks ago in Sunday School we talked about giving up things for Lent.  I talked about giving up French fries…about how hard it is.  A couple of us mentioned things we couldn’t give up because it would just be too hard.  In response to all this, someone said a startling thing: “We’re all addicted to something.”

          When she said it, my first thought was “Uh uh!  Not me!  I’m not addicted to anything!”  But then I started thinking about French fries.  About how much I miss them.   About how much even smelling them sends me into a tailspin.   About how many times I’ve thought about giving up giving up French fries for Lent…and how I would have done just that if I hadn’t gone and told everyone in Sunday School that I was giving up French fries for Lent.  Community can be so annoying…as can wise statements from others that hit the nail on the head. 

          We’re in the process of retooling our spiritual memoir reading group.  The new version of the group is going to involve a book blog and quarterly lunch conversations.  (Stay tuned.)  This month’s memoir is by novelist and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner. 

          The thing to which Fred clung for much of his life was unspoken grief about his father’s suicide when Fred was ten years old.  After his father’s death, Fred and his family never spoke of the death or even of his father.  It was as if his father had ever existed.  

Fred’s years of clinging to the silence surrounding his father’s death took a heavy toll on him well into adulthood, especially in his relationships with his children.  He admits to closing his “eyes for years to the secret that [he] was looking to [his] children to give [him] more than either they had it in their power to give or could have given without somehow crippling themselves in the process” (Telling Secrets, 75).

          It was while visiting one of those children in a hospital across the country, a young woman who had nearly starved herself to death, that Fred began waking up to just how spiritually starved he was.  He writes:  “My anorectic daughter was in danger of starving to death, and without knowing it, so was I.  I wasn’t living my own life anymore because I was so caught up in hers.  If in refusing to eat she was mad as a hatter, I was if anything madder still because whereas in some sense she knew what she was doing to herself, I knew nothing at all about what I was doing to myself.  She had given up food.  I had virtually given up doing anything in the way of feeding myself humanly.”  (Telling Secrets, 25)

          Fred began dealing with his addiction, if you will, to his role as father when he joined Al-Anon, a 12 step group designed to help family members of alcoholics.  In Al-Anon he began to see his “clinging” to his daughters for what it was:  a way of avoiding dealing with his father’s abandonment, first by his drinking, then by his suicide. 

After a time, Fred slowly began to recognize his true need—not his need to be the perfect parent to his daughters (at which he was failing anyway)—but his need to be a whole human being.  His need to recognize just how much God loved him.  His need to rest in God.  It was only when he stopped clinging to his daughters that Fred’s soul finally was able to begin clinging to God.  It was only then that his restless heart found its rest in God.

I don’t think I ever really understood—much less experienced—the idea of resting in God until I started going to the monastery.   If you’ve never been to a place where they stop and pray at regular intervals every day—“praying the Hours” it’s called—it can be really annoying.  You feel like you just get started doing something when the bells chime and it’s time to go back to prayer.  Again.

After a while, though, you begin to look forward to the bells…because you know that for 25 or 30 minutes you’ll get to rest from everything and just be with God.  You’ll sit, you’ll pray, you’ll sing.  That’s it.  You don’t have to do anything except show up and be in God’s presence. 

On one trip to the monastery, I took with me an index card with your names on it.  I had planned to pray for you while I was at the monastery….but oh, I was tired!  It was two days after Easter and I was beat.  But I had told you I was going to pray for you and pray for you I would! 

So, my first morning at prayer, I arrived at the chapel early and pulled the folded index card from my pocket, ready to pray.  But the oddest thing happened as I began unfolding the card—I heard a voice.  It said:  “I will hold them.”  I looked around.  Nothing.  As I straightened the index card readying myself to pray, I heard the voice again:  “I will hold them,” it said.   

By the third time, I figured out that maybe it was a God thing, that maybe God was saying God would hold you all while I used the time to pray for myself.  I argued with God.  No!  I told them I’d pray for them!  Let me pray for them!  “I will hold them,” the voice kept saying.  In fact, it didn’t quit saying it until I refolded the card and slipped it back into my pocket.

I know.  It sounds strange, nutty, even.  But for 4 days, I heard that voice every time I tried to take the card out of my pocket.  On the fifth day, the voice was gone.  That was the day I started praying for you all.

It’s not four days, but I invite us to take the next few minutes to rest in God.  David will sing.  You don’t have to do anything except be.  Just be.  Just be who you are and allow God’s love to wash over you.  Let God hold everything else that’s clamoring for your attention right now…all that stuff will be waiting for you again when David finishes singing.  You’re welcome to go back to worrying then.  But for now, just for these few minutes, let God hold everything else and allow yourself, allow your soul to cling to God.  [David sings “You Are Mine.”]

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2013

A Psalm of David, when he was in the Wilderness of Judah.
¹ O God, you are my God, I seek you,    my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,    as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
² So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,    beholding your power and glory.
³ Because your steadfast love is better than life,    my lips will praise you.
⁴ So I will bless you as long as I live;    I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast,^*
   and my mouth praises you with joyful lips
⁶ when I think of you on my bed,
   and meditate on you in the watches of the night;
⁷ for you have been my help,
   and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy.
⁸ My soul clings to you;
   your right hand upholds me.  

          Have you ever felt like that?  Have you ever wondered if God—or someone—is really out there, if there are reasons for anything that happens, if God really knows your name?

          One of the greatest challenges to believing in God in modern times is the Holocaust.  If there’s a God and if that God is good, how in the world could something like the Holocaust happen?  Six million people murdered, most of them Jews…1.5 million of them children.  How can something like that happen in a world in which a loving God exists?

          Among the most articulate witnesses to the Holocaust is Elie Wiesel.  Raised in a locale that was sometimes called Romania, sometimes Hungary, teenager Elie and his family were taken to Auschwitz in May of 1944.   

          As soon as they disembarked from the train at Auschwitz, Elie’s mother and little sister were marched away with the women.  It was the last time he ever saw them.  Elie and his father followed the men to a work camp, where they remained for 11 months.  Just before liberation, many of the prisoners from Auschwitz were taken to Birkenau.  Elie’s father died only days before the camp was liberated by US troops. 

          Elie recounts his experiences at Auschwitz in the autobiographical novel, Night.   It’s a hard book to read—so much evil.  So little concern for human life.  Such unrelenting cruelty.  You read Night and think, There’s no way this actually could have happened.  People simply aren’t capable of sustaining the kind of cruelty it would take to kill so many millions of people.

          And yet, it did happen.  The Holocaust happened.  People were killed—by the millions.  And much of the world did nothing.

Not surprisingly, many people who experienced the Holocaust came out the other side of it atheists.  Elie Wiesel did not. 

Fellow Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi, later questioned Elie about his continued belief in God.  Elie writes:  Primo “refused to understand how I, his former companion of Auschwitz, could still call himself a believer, for he, Primo, was not and didn’t want to be.  He had seen too much suffering not to reel against any religion that sought to impose a meaning upon it.  I understood him, and asked him to understand me, for I had seen too much suffering to break with the past and reject the heritage of those who had suffered. 

“We spent many hours arguing, with little result.  We were equally unwavering, for we came from different milieus, and even in Auschwitz led different lives.  He was a chemist; I was nothing at all.  The system needed him, but not me.  He had influential friends to help and protect him; I had only my father.  I needed God, Primo did not.”  (Memoirs, 82-3)

Which explains how a person in Auschwitz could believe…but once he was out of Auschwitz, what made it possible for Elie to keep believing? 

The thing Elie did—and still does—that keeps his faith alive is this:  He questions God.  He rages at God.  He calls God to account for what transpired in Europe in the 1930s and 40s.  Elie’s approach is not original.  When the circumstances of their lives don’t coincide with God’s promises, people of faith—from the beginning–have questioned God….people like our biblical ancestor Abram.    

Here’s the story thus far…Abram is getting on in years.  He and his wife, Sarai, have just bought into a retirement tent community in their hometown of Ur.  They haven’t had any children, but other than that, they’ve done okay.

          Then, boom.  God says to pick up and go “to a land I will show you.”  Kind of hard to plug that into the GPS…nonetheless, Abram does “go.”  He goes west to the Negev then south to Egypt…and in the process, becomes a wealthy man. 

After all that, God comes again, says that the divine presence will be with Abram, that his reward will be great.  This is the second time God has talked about a “great reward,” which in that culture meant one thing:  descendants.  Have I mentioned that Abram—and more to the point—Sarai—were old?  They were old.  And God was promising descendants.

To this point, Abram has been following God, no questions asked.  But with this second iteration of the promise, Abram starts questioning.  After all, neither he—nor Sarai–is getting any younger.  “How can I have a great reward when I have no descendants?” he asks.  God says the heir will have Abram’s DNA.  Then God takes Abram outside and invites him to count the stars.  “THAT’s how many descendants you’re going to have,” God says.  That last bit must have done the trick, because we’re told that Abram believed.  God promises descendants and Abram trusts God to provide them.  Excellent.  Moving right along…

Next, God says:  “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur, to give you this land to possess.”   Another divine promise, this time of land… but that’s okay.  I mean, Abram trusts God now, right?  Let’s hear his trusting response:  “How am I to know that I shall possess it?”  Oh.  Well, he did trust God… at least he did a minute ago.  Now?  Abram asks another question.

Abram has lots of questions, doesn’t he?  Even after he’s been following God for a long time.  Even after years of asking no questions at all.  Even after he comes to trust in God.  Even after all that, even from a place of profound faith, still, Abram questions God.

What do Abram’s questions get him?  This might disappoint you, but what they don’t get him is answers.  He asks how he’s going to get descendants when he’s so old.  God tells him he’ll have his own biological heir, but doesn’t give any hints as to how it will happen. 

Then Abram asks how he can know he’s going to possess the land God says will be his.  This time, God responds by inviting Abram to participate in an elaborate ritual.  The ritual in no way shows Abram how the land will be obtained.  No maps or battle plans or to-do lists emerge from the ashes of the offerings.

What the ritual does do, though, is it promises Abram God’s presence.  The scene enacted in Genesis 15 is an ancient version of a contract.  By enacting the ritual, both parties agree to stay in relationship with each other.  By participating in it, God is saying, I will continue to be with you.  I will do what I have promised. 

And what elicits this gift of divine presence?  Abram’s questions.  It’s only when Abram questions God that God proposes the covenant ritual.  It’s only when Abram questions God that the promise of presence is formalized.  You see?  It’s Abram’s questions that keep him connected to God.  It’s Abram’s questions that keep his faith alive.

That might sound strange to those of us who grew up in faith communities where questioning our faith was a sure sign that we didn’t have any.  If this story of Abram is to be believed, though, questions don’t preclude faith, but are central to it.  A strong faith is a questioning faith.  Asking questions of God can be the very thing that keeps us connected to God.

That’s what Elie Wiesel has learned.  “I have never renounced my faith in God,” he writes.  “I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it.”  (84)   It is because he questions, that Elie is still able to believe. 

Last week, we began the self-reflective work of Lent by learning what we could from living in the wilderness.  We talked about how when we find ourselves in a place of barrenness, a place of trials, a place—quite frankly—we’d never choose to be…when we find ourselves in the wilderness, we can learn a lot by questioning ourselves in that barren, trial-ridden place.  It’s in questioning ourselves that we learn just who we are and what we’re made of.

This week, we’re learning that in addition to questioning ourselves, a key piece of the spiritual journey is questioning God.  When we question God, it means we take God’s promises seriously, it means we take faith seriously, it means we take ourselves seriously.

Do you have questions for God?  Have you been afraid to ask them?  The good news today is that your questions don’t indicate a lack of faith, but rather are evidence of strong faith.  God honors your questions!  God wants to hear them!  And God promises to be present with you as you wrestle with them.  So, what’s keeping you?  Ask away!  It might just be the most faithful thing you ever do.

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2013

To learn more about Elie Wiesel, visit this link:  http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/eliewiesel.aspx

Genesis 15:1-11, 17-21

Do you know who you are?  Do you know who you are to your family?  To yourself?   To your church community?  Do you know who you are to God?  Would you like to?

It’s Lent.  Lent sends some people to the hills or to the beach or to Starbucks…to any place but church.  The purple paraments are pretty, I guess.  But the songs seem sad and there are no Alleluias and, well, even if you don’t know much about Lent—or even that it’s called Lent—you do at least know that Jesus’ crucifixion is coming…and let’s be honest.  That’s a real downer of a story.

So, lots of people take a break from church during Lent and don’t return until the story turns happy again on Easter. Then we’ll sing happy songs (with Alleluias!), and hear the trumpets, and wear pretty clothes, and break out the lilies and azaleas.  Easter is the biggest party day of the church year! 

I’m not knocking Easter.  (You’re glad to hear that, I’m sure.)  Easter is great…but Easter can mean so much more if we commit ourselves to the work of Lent beforehand.  What meaning can resurrection possibly have if we don’t have anything to resurrect from, right?

So, the fact that you’re here and aren’t in the hills or at the beach or at Starbucks suggests that you might be up for the work of Lent.  Before you commit yourself, though, perhaps we should talk about what the work of Lent entails. 

In a nutshell, the work of Lent is self-reflection.  We spend so much of our lives trying to be what other people need us to be—spouse, parent, co-worker, boss, happy person, smart person, holy person…We spend so much time trying to be who other people need us to be that we sometimes lose track of who we are for ourselves, who we are for and to God.

Lent gives us the chance to get back to ourselves, to slowly peel away the layers of who we are to everyone else and remember who we are at our most authentic.  Lent gives us the chance to locate our true selves—wherever and however we are on our life’s journey—and, as our true selves, to experience God’s unconditional love and acceptance. 

The sermons and services during Lent are designed to help us do just that.  Each week we’ll look at another aspect of the reflection process that can help us get more honest with ourselves about who we are and help us connect more deeply with God.  If we do this hard work of Lent, if we take the time to figure out what parts of us are feeling flat or weak or even dead, then just imagine how joyful we’ll feel when we experience resurrection in those parts!  We might even feel like throwing a party come Easter!

Nobody’s left the building yet.  That’s a good sign…a sign that you really might be up for the self-reflective work of Lent.  If we are up for this work, where might we begin?  A good place to start is where Jesus did—in the wilderness.

He’s just been baptized and has committed himself to doing God’s work when the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness.  Strange.  You’d expect here at the beginning of his ministry for God to send Jesus out on the road, evangelizing, sharing the good news, healing people, all that Messiah stuff.  After all, at his baptism just a few verses before, God had told Jesus, “You are my child, the beloved.  With you I am well-pleased.”  I mean, if that wouldn’t fill you up with passion for doing God’s work, I don’t know what would.

So, why doesn’t God immediately send Jesus out on the road?  Why does God send Jesus, instead into the wilderness?  Maybe we should look at what happens to him there. 

Luke tells us that in the wilderness Jesus was tempted for 40 days, this, while he fasted.  (Kind of puts giving up chocolate or ice cream in perspective, doesn’t it?)   Then after the 40 days, when Jesus is his weakest, the temptations become even more intense—the temptation to turn a stone into bread (which must have been truly tempting after 40 days with no food)….the temptation to worship something other than God (which also might have been tempting, considering God was the one who’d driven him into the wilderness)….the temptation to test God, to dare God to perform supernatural miracles (who wouldn’t want to do that?). 

Why this testing?  And why does it come before Jesus has even gotten started with his ministry?  Perhaps the story of a woman who called herself Peace Pilgrim will shed some light.

At the 1953 Rose Bowl Parade, Peace Pilgrim began walking for peace.  She said she would keep walking until world peace had been achieved.  Peace walked until–ironically–she was killed in a car wreck in 1981.   She was on her 7th trip across the US.

I find Peace Pilgrim’s story fascinating.  When I read her writings, she sounds like a very wise person, another Gandhi, even.  When I think about what she did, though—walking for nearly 30 years with nothing but the clothes her back, taking no food until it was offered, using no lodging until it was offered… sometimes I find myself wondering if she was, well, crazy.

Whether crazy or enlightened, this much is clear:  Peace Pilgrim was very certain about her calling…and she lived that calling until her death.

But the idea to spend the rest of her life walking the US didn’t come to Peace all at once. In fact, it took her 15 years–15 years!–to figure it out.  She knew it involved simplifying her life; she knew it involved being of service to others.  But beyond that, she didn’t have a clue.  So, for 15 years, she prayed, she slowly got rid of her possessions, she engaged in service to others, she worked for peace politically.

It wasn’t until a trip to the wilderness at the end of her 15 years of reflection that Peace’s calling solidified.  In 1952, Peace hiked the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one season.   (She was the first woman to do so.)  Peace’s time on the Trail was difficult; wilderness treks usually are.  But the clarity she gained, the certainty that she was on the right track with her calling, was worth all the difficulty.  

The austerity of the Trail gave Peace the time and space and separation from distractions she needed to clarify her calling.  The trials of the Trail showed Peace that she had the strength to fulfill it.  As she said later, nothing about the next 30 years was ever as hard as hiking the Appalachian Trail.  If she had done that, she knew she could do anything.

Maybe the austerity and trials of Jesus’ wilderness experience were exactly what he needed, too, to get clear about his ministry and to learn just how capable he was of withstanding any trial.  A couple of weeks ago, we looked at the scene that comes after Jesus’ time in the wilderness.  Do you remember the one where he went home, taught in the synagogue and so enraged the homefolk they tried to kill him?  I wonder if Jesus would have preached so prophetically had he not gained clarity in his time in the wilderness?  I wonder if Jesus even would have survived his trip home if he hadn’t gotten clear during his time in the wilderness that he really was strong enough to withstand any trial.

How clear are you about what work God has called you to do?  Are you engaging that work with passion and confidence and a sense of purpose?  If so, great!  You are released from your obligation of listening to the rest of the sermon.

If you’re not clear about the work God has for you to do, if you’re not clear about who you are, especially to yourself and to God, you might like to follow Jesus’ or Peace’s example and take a trip to the wilderness.  Find an austere place with few distractions, a place where you will be tried and tested, a place where you can learn who you are and what you’re made of.  It could be a place of no chocolate or alcohol or TV or French fries or whatever you’ve decided to give up for Lent.  Giving something up for Lent is a way of creating a little wilderness for ourselves.  Giving something up removes a distraction from our lives.  Released from that distraction, we have the chance to gain clarity about ourselves.  The trial of giving up something we love, perhaps even something we feel we need, also toughens us up.  It—eventually—convinces us that we can overcome most trials that are set before us.

Of course, some of you might not need to find or create a wilderness at all—you’ve already taken up residence there.  In fact, you’ve been in the wilderness so long you’ve started paying taxes and are thinking about running for mayor.  Maybe you’re in a place where you feel deprived of the things you really like, perhaps even need.  You find yourself in a place where the trials are unrelenting. 

If you feel like the wilderness is your new address, if you feel like you don’t know how you got there or if you’ll ever find your way out, you also might take a page from Jesus’ and Peace Pilgrim’s book:  Perhaps you can learn from your time in the wilderness, even though you might not have chosen it.  When you miss something you want or need, ask yourself why you miss it—What role does that thing play in your life?  When a trial comes, do everything you can to overcome that trial….then celebrate the fact that you did.  If you are able to attend to what’s going on in the wilderness, uncomfortable though it might be, the payoff in terms of self-knowledge and strength for the spiritual journey is potentially significant. 

So, do you know who you are?  Do you know who you are to yourself?  Do you know who you are to God?  Would you like to know?  Would you like Easter to have real meaning this year?  If so, a good place to start your journey is the wilderness.  Peace Pilgrim learned a lot in the wilderness.  Jesus also learned a lot in the wilderness.  Who knows?  You might, too.

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness. Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2013

Hear a story about Peace Pilgrim—and actually hear Peace herself!—that aired on NPR last month:  http://www.npr.org/2013/01/01/168346591/peace-pilgrims-28-year-walk-for-a-meaningful-way-of-life

Luke 4:1-13   (NRSV)

The Temptation of Jesus

4Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, ²where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished.  ³The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.’  ⁴Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, “One does not live by bread alone.” ’

5 Then the devil^* led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  ⁶And the devil^* said to him, ‘To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please.  ⁷If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.’  ⁸Jesus answered him, ‘It is written,
“Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.” ’

9 Then the devil^* took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here,¹⁰for it is written,
“He will command his angels concerning you,
to protect you”,
¹¹and
“On their hands they will bear you up,
so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” ’
¹²Jesus answered him, ‘It is said, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” ’¹³When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

 Intro to Communion

In Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts of Jesus’ time in the wilderness, after the temptations are over we’re told that angels came and ministered to Jesus.  Isn’t that a comforting image?  That after all the privation, after all the temptation, after all the testing, there was rest, there was ministry, there was nourishment.

As we begin our Lenten journey, as we find ourselves in or just emerging from the wilderness, this meal can remind us—it does remind us—that regardless of any trial, God always stands ready to minister to us, to help us rest, to nourish us.  May we be so nourished today.

 Random sentence that I liked, but didn’t make it into the sermon 

What true meaning does resurrection have if you don’t have anything to resurrect from, right?  We can’t know the true joy of Easter until we experience the stark reality of the dark parts of life, the dark parts of ourselves.

Have you ever had a mountaintop experience?  A time when you suddenly saw things clearly?  A time when you felt God’s presence?  A time when you felt connected to everything?

Some of the people who attended the women’s retreat a couple of weeks ago describe it as a mountaintop experience.  The place we stayed in Dillard was more big hill than mountain, but our time together helped many of us to see things more clearly, to feel God’s presence, and to feel more connected to everything, especially to each other.

The thing about mountaintop experiences is that—unless you’re a hermit who lives in a cave on top of the mountain—there’s life before the trip up the mountain and life after.  The mountaintop experience—as great as it is—only gains meaning when you look at it in the context of the rest of your life, with what comes before and after….

The same is true about the mountaintop experience we’ll hear about in a minute.  We’ve come to call the story the Transfiguration —there will be visions and bright lights and a booming voice from heaven.  Oh, it will be a grand scene!  But the thing that will give it meaning will be setting it in context, looking at what comes before and after it.

The story begins with Jesus giving his disciples “power and authority over all demons” then sending ²“them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal.”   They return brimming with stories of ³¹⁰“all they had done.”   When Jesus takes the disciples aside for a time of reflection, the crowds find them.  Jesus welcomes them and begins teaching.  After a while, the people become hungry.  The disciples miraculously feed them with two fish and five loaves of bread.

Good news shared, people healed, crowds miraculously fed.  Amazing things happen before the disciples scale the mountain!  And the good news doesn’t stop there.

After feeding the 5,000, Jesus asks the disciples ¹⁸“Who do the crowds say that I am?”  ¹⁹They answer, “John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.”  ²⁰He says to them, “But who do you say that I am?”  Peter answers, “The Messiah of God.”   ²¹Ding! Ding!  Ding!  Right answer!  Yet another amazing thing happens before the mountaintop experience:  one of the disciples gets something right.

Now, you’d think Jesus would applaud Peter’s insight, his grasp of a deep spiritual truth.  But no.  He “sternly orders them not to tell anyone.”  Then Jesus says²², “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.”

Wow.  They had been having such fun!  Healing and feeding people, figuring out deep, spiritual truths….but this death stuff?   That’s no fun.  But, as we’ll see in coming weeks, Jesus’ suffering, rejection, and, yes, death, is part of real life down below the mountain.

It’s in the context of all these things—both the good things and the hard realities–that today’s mountaintop experience happens.  I think we’re ready to hear it now.  Matthew/Chip?

“²⁸Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray.  ²⁹And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.  ³⁰Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him.  ³¹They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.  ³²Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him.  ³³Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” —not knowing what he said.  ³⁴While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud.  ³⁵Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”  ³⁶When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.   And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

We could parse this passage.  We could look at why Jesus appeared with Moses and Elijah, why it happened at this point in Luke’s story.  We could talk about the significance of the light and of the repetition of the words spoken to Jesus at his baptism “This is my son, my chosen…”  The thing about mountaintop experiences, though, is you kind of have to be there to completely “get” them.  Ask anyone who went on the retreat a couple of weeks ago.

Suffice it to say– whatever happened on that mountain, it was a holy moment, a time when Peter, James, and John saw things more clearly, felt closer to God and to everything else.  The moment was so holy, in fact, they wanted to build a shrine and stay there.  (A similar sentiment echoed through the halls of the chalet in Dillard:  “Let’s do this every year!”)

But as with all retreats, it had to end some time.  At some point, you have to come down from the mountain.

Even so, how different their lives must have looked after their mountaintop experience!  The disciples must have been floating!  They must have been even more capable of sharing good news and healing people than they had been before going to the mountain!

You’d think so, wouldn’t you?  But you’d be wrong.  The disciples and Jesus come down from the mountain and immediately are accosted by a man whose son is seized by a demon.  The man tells Jesus, “³⁷⁴⁰I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not.”

Are you kidding me?  They’d been given “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases” and some of them had just had a mountaintop experience!  Didn’t matter.  The disciples could not cast out the demon from this man’s son.

It’s not clear to whom Jesus directs his next words—to the man, to the crowd, or to the disciples—but I’m guessing they were meant for the disciples.  ⁴¹ “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?”   ⁴²Jesus rebukes the unclean spirit, heals the boy, and gives him back to his father.  Before the mountaintop experience, the disciples had had no trouble casting out demons.  Now?  Jesus has to do it himself.

“⁴³While everyone was amazed at all that he was doing,” and rightly they should have been, Jesus says this to his disciples: ⁴⁴“Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands.”  No celebration of the healing he’d just performed…just another reference to his betrayal.  Not to worry, though.  “T⁴⁵hey did not understand this saying.”

Okay.  So, they’d once been filled with power and authority to cast out demons, they’d been to the mountaintop, and now they couldn’t heal anybody or understand anything.  Most people in those circumstances would be doing some serious soul searching, asking Jesus what was wrong with them, how they could get back on the spiritual path.  But these people?  Listen.

“⁴⁶An argument arose among them as to which one of them was the greatest.”  And not only were they fighting about who was the greatest, but then ⁴⁷⁴⁹John says, “Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.”  ⁵⁰ Can you believe that?  He who hadn’t been able to cast out a single demon just a few verses before is ragging on someone who can?

Usually, with mountaintop experiences, you think of things getting better AFTER the spiritual high.  For these disciples, though, it seems like things were better BEFORE the trip up the mountain.  Before the mountaintop they were more humble, they listened better, they had more power to do good.  What happened?

Maybe what happened is that they forgot to look at their mountaintop experience in context of the rest of their lives.  Their trip up the mountain happened in the midst of real life…in the midst of suffering, on the way to confrontations with authorities, on the way to death.  The disciples, it seems, hadn’t made the connection between their mountaintop experience and the real life that was happening down below.  In fact, Luke tells us that “They kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.”

Have you had a mountaintop experience?  Has there been a moment in time when things suddenly became clear and you felt God’s presence and felt connected to everything?  Do you long to return to that place and build a shrine there?  Or are you working to integrate the experience into your real life down below, real life with all its strains and stresses and suffering?

I asked the people who attended the retreat to share their thoughts about what it’s been like coming down from the mountain.  I want to share two responses with you.  They describe well the connection between mountaintop experiences and real life down below.

One person said:  “I initially thought I was going to the retreat for myself; but I realized that my purpose was to learn how I should help others–particularly my grieving sister.  Being among these wonderful women from various backgrounds, sharing our stories of happiness and sorrow, life and death, strengths and weaknesses, gave me a new perspective on how to respond to others’ needs.”

Another person said this:  “I went to the retreat because I thought the topic was about balance. I thought it would be about finding balance in your life in general – I thought I would learn better ways to prioritize, find “me time” and maybe figure out a way not to feel so guilty about the things I do outside my home…like work.  I didn’t learn any of those things.

“What I did learn on the mountaintop was that there is an amazing and wonderful presence of God in everyone [who] was there.  I hadn’t seen that before in those same women that I saw every week in church – not because it wasn’t there, but because I wasn’t looking.  I learned things about those incredible women that allowed me to see beyond what I see in the fellowship hall each week.  I was able to connect their experiences with their character traits and it allowed me to understand them better.  I learned that sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and ask the questions that can mend a friendship, open your heart and mind to someone who may not look like someone you would typically connect with and make sure that people know the positive things you think about them– it could change their life in some small way.  I learned that it’s never too late to make things right and I learned that you can learn more than you would have ever thought from someone whose name you didn’t even know the day before.

“The retreat changed me because I truly look at people differently.  I remember daily that we are all on a journey and while I have no idea what every person I encounter has gone through, they too have the presence of God and if I acknowledge their journey… and look for the God in everyone, it makes me a kinder, more accepting person.  And after that…. The rest of all that balance stuff I thought I was going to learn about really makes no difference at all.”     (Angel)

Have you had a mountaintop experience?  What difference is that experience making to your real life below?  What difference might it make?

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  © 2013

Luke 9:1-51

 Valentine’s Day is coming up, which is—pardon my cynicism here– the best opportunity we have to think superficially about love.  Hearts and sweets and atrocious spelling?   Seriously.  What does any of that have to do with love?  What good is giving my spouse a pretty card on February 14 that assures him of my love for him if I don’t live our everyday life together in a way that respects him and nurtures him and acts him into well-being? 

Love isn’t a once-a-year celebration.  Love is way of life…a way of life characterized by this list Paul includes in his letter to the Corinthians:  “Love is patient and kind; it’s not envious, boastful, arrogant, or rude.  It doesn’t insist on its own way.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends.”  I can be immensely gifted; I can speak with the voice of an angel and prophesy with the best of them; I can buy the biggest bouquet of roses available a week from this coming Thursday (and carry them around in the back pocket of my blue jeans, like that guy I saw at Waffle House this week), but “if I do not have love,” Paul says, “I am nothing.”

          True love is not a surface thing.  Love goes deep….deeper than assumptions, deeper than appearances, deeper even than words, sometimes.  Love goes to the heart of things and sees them as they are…and then, as we like to say around here, acts the beloved into well-being.

          Love.   It’s a key concept in Christian faith.  So, what’s up with Jesus?  When you hear about his visit to Nazareth, it makes you wonder if Jesus got the love memo. 

          He’s been baptized, tested in the desert, and returns home, full of the Holy Spirit to begin his ministry.  Oh, the home folks are so proud of their Jesus!  There he is at worship Saturday morning.  He takes the Isaiah scroll to read it.  Their hearts must have been near to bursting.

          “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he reads, “because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.  God has sent me to claim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  Oh, he reads so well!  He really has that preacher’s voice, don’t you think?  Mary and Joseph must be so proud!

          Jesus rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant and sits down—which is the sign that he’s going to teach.  As he sits, “The eyes of all in the synagogue are fixed on him.”  They are blown away by their little Jesus.

Things start taking a turn with this next bit, though.  “Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”’  Most of the people “spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.”   But somebody there on the back row has been listening more closely…and it finally sinks in what Jesus is saying:  Wait a minute!  “Is this not Joseph’s son?” the person says.  Joe’s son, Joe the carpenter’s son, is calling himself the Messiah!  He’s saying that God’s Spirit is with him and that he has powers for healing and releasing captives.  Isn’t that, like, heresy, or something?

Jesus senses the crowd is about to turn on him, and he responds…. in a way that doesn’t  seem exactly loving.  Listen:  “‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town.”  Here’s where he gets really provocative.  “But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them (that is, to none of our Israelite widows) [but] to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon (a foreigner).  There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them (not one Israelite) was cleansed; only Naaman the Syrian (another foreigner).’ 

What Jesus is doing here is calling his home congregation on their hypocrisy.  Yes, when he reads Scripture and says all the pretty things, they love him—or rather, the him they want him to be.  But when he starts going below the surface of things, when he points out to them that salvation isn’t just for “people like them” (Israelites), when he pushes them to believe and act out of the belief that God’s love is for those who are different from them, even Sidonian widows and Syrian soldiers… when Jesus challenges the Nazareans actually to act others –all others — into well-being rather than simply to talk about it, they don’t like it, to put it mildly.  In fact, they become enraged and try to pitch him over a cliff.

          On the face of it, today’s Epistle and Gospel lessons don’t seem to have much in common.  One waxes poetic; the other reports a near murder.  One’s about love; the other is about social justice.  One’s about treating each other with kindness and patience; the other is about changing social systems to end oppression and poverty.  One is about making connections with and acting kindly toward people we know; the other is about making connections with and acting kindly toward people we don’t know.  One text is about acting others into well-being; the other is about acting others into well-being.

          Wait a minute.  What just happened here?  Did my rhetorical turn get twisted up on itself?  Or are BOTH these passages about love?  The Corinthians text is definitely about love….it does, after all, mention the word love 9 times. 

          But what about this provocative text from Luke?  Let’s look again at that list of things Jesus feels called to do:  bring good news to the poor, claim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, let the oppressed go free…  Those sound like pretty apt descriptions of acting others into well-being, don’t they?  Sharing good news with the poor– acts them into well-being.  Releasing captives– acts them into well-being.  Helping the blind to see– acts them into well-being.  Letting the oppressed go free– acts them into well-being.

It’s great to read these prophetic texts in worship.  It’s great to pray beautiful prayers and read inspirational books about helping the poor.  It’s great to cheer the pastor on and say Amen! when she preaches a sermon about the poor…  But if we only use our words to address the needs of the poor and the oppressed, the captive and the blind, If we only talk about acting others into well-being, then we are no more than noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.  If we don’t seek to do something about the plight of the poor, the oppressed, the captive and the blind, then, to quote Paul:  “We are nothing.”

I don’t mean to guilt trip anybody.   I know that most us here want to do good, not only to speak of it.  But it’s so overwhelming.  And we have so little time!  How do you choose?  Just look at Jesus’ own list!  How do we help the poor and the captives and the blind and the oppressed?  There are so many needs out there!  Where do we even begin to act others into well-being in the way Jesus is talking about in today’s Gospel lesson?

There are, of course, many ways to act the poor, imprisoned, blind, and oppressed into well-being.  Many of you already are involved in some of those ways.  You provide and serve lunch at MUST; you assist with the Kairos prison ministry and visit death row inmates; you volunteer with at-risk children and youth; you volunteer in hospitals; you participate in home repair ministries, like the project coming up with The Fuller Center.

Today, I want to focus on another way we all—and I do mean all—might “share good news with the poor.”  The poor of which I speak are homeless families with children.  The way we might share good news with those families is by participating in the Family Promise program.

Through its Interfaith Hospitality Network, Family Promise works with congregations to “meet homeless families’ immediate needs for shelter, meals, and comprehensive support services.”  If we choose (as a congregation) to partner with Family Promise, we will house and feed 3 to 4 homeless families for a week at a time, 4 times a year.  Family Promise provides beds and transportation; congregations provide food and people to stay overnight with the families.  The people who stay overnight do not have to stay awake the whole time.  Family Promise provides beds for them, too.  Church members who stay overnight are there to answer questions and to be a liaison with the Family Promise staff.

Yes, there are many ways in which we might “share good news with the poor,” but no other program brings the poor literally inside our doors…no other program invites the whole congregation to work together to meet the needs of homeless families….no other program, quite frankly, makes it so easy for us to serve a population in great need.  You don’t even have to plug a strange coordinate into your GPS to serve!  All you have to do is go to church.  And it’s not a weekly or a monthly commitment—it only happens four times a year.  And we don’t have to do it all ourselves—we can partner with other congregations, even non-Christian ones.

Yes, there are many other ways in which we might “share good news with the poor,” but I invite us all to give prayerful consideration to participating in the Family Promise way…not because I said so.  Not because the Missions Committee asks us to.  I invite us to participate in Family Promise as a way of “sharing good news with the poor.”  I invite us to do it as an act of love.

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2013

I Corinthians 13:1-13

Last Sunday, in some church somewhere, during Prayer Time, a football fan asked the community to pray for his team, who was playing a playoff game later that afternoon.  It was a BIG game.  If his team won, they’d go to the Superbowl.

An innocent request, right?  But the pastor was, for once in her loquacious life, rendered speechless.  Do we really pray for sporting event outcomes?  Many in that congregation somewhere suggested that the oddly speechless pastor had on occasion prayed for a certain college football team.  Her response (once she found her words):  “In public?”

I’d like to relate the story that came to my—I mean, that pastor’s—mind when the football prayer request was made.

In his senior year at a Catholic high school, Bill Huebsch’s football team—miraculously, it seemed—made it to the championship game.  “On the morning of the big game,” Huebsch writes, “I decided to go down to the small chapel [at school] and ask God for victory.  I wasn’t exactly sure God behaved in this way.  I wasn’t sure God intervened directly in high school football games, but I really wanted to win and I thought I’d … cover all my bases.  What could it hurt?

“So I headed down to pray.  But as I pushed open the door of the chapel, I was horrified to find that the entire opposing team was already there!  They beat me to it!  They had asked first, and besides, I was all alone and they were all there; I could see there was no hope!”  (1)     Cut to this past Tuesday.  Tuesday I attended a small gathering of interfaith spiritual leaders at Temple Kol Emeth.  Sitting across from me was Richard Burdick, pastor at Unity North down the road.  When he introduced himself, Richard acknowledged the grief of Falcons fans, then announced with glee:  “I’m a 49er through and through!”

Which, of course, raised significant theological questions:  Were Mr. Burdick’s prayers more effective than mine?  (…if I had prayed, that is…)  Does God like the 49ers better than the Falcons?  Or more troubling, Do the Unity folks have a more direct line to God than we do?

The Game Day Prayer Dilemma faced by pastors across the globe illustrates well the sticky wicket of theological diversity:  Which team has a better connection to God?  Which faith has the more accurate description of God?  Did the Falcons really lose on Sunday because God prefers the 49ers (or because I wouldn’t pray for them)?

Today we get that great “Mr. Potato Head” text in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.  “If a foot would say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body.”  “And if the ear would say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body.”  “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?  If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?  But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as God chose.”

And why?  Because “just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”  Just as our physical bodies need the diversity of their parts to function well, so does the body of Christ need the diversity of its members’ unique gifts to function well.

…and not just our gifts for singing and preaching and organizing..  This community also needs our gifts for seeing God in diverse ways.

True confession:  I hate conflict.  I hate it a lot.  It makes me nervous!  Theological conflict makes me especially nervous….because I’ve seen just how much damage people at theological loggerheads can do to each other…and to innocent bystanders.  When you have to be right about God, when you can’t accept that other people have their own pictures and understandings of God, then—every time, every time—people get hurt.

Which is why in the past, conversations about inclusive language for God, about the most accurate image for God, about just what God does and/or causes in the world have frightened me.  Please!  No more casualties in theological warfare!  Recently, though, I’ve begun to realize that true debate, really open conversation with each other about God is actually a good thing.

Our theological diversity here at Pilgrimage is part of what makes this such a strong community.  What we hold in common—belief in a loving God, who accepts everyone, in particular—is are important.  What makes us really strong, though, is our ability to listen to each other and to learn from each other, especially when we don’t agree.

Despite the rabidly polarized rhetorical world we live in, nothing—no idea, no reality, no issue—is black and white.  We don’t learn more about an issue—or about God, for that matter—by digging in our heels and becoming defensive, or by doing battle with the opposition.   Because the truth doesn’t lie with one person!  It lies somewhere in between people, in the conversation, in the back and forth.

Which is why diversity of thought and theology is so important in a community of faith.  We aren’t here to tell people what to think about God.  We’re not here to proclaim the right way to think about God.  We’re not here to debate and battle out our beliefs about God.  We’re here to listen to each other and to learn from each other and, in our listening and learning, to gain a broader and a deeper understanding of the God we love and worship.

A 19^th century poem by John Godfrey Saxe describes the necessity of theological diversity as well as anyone.  Hear now “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approach’d the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, -“Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” quoth he,
“‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Then, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

MORAL.

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

          That’s the importance of theological diversity in any community of faith.  Because God is God, no one person, no one church, no one faith, can know God completely.  We only get a bigger, deeper, and more accurate picture of God when we listen to each other’s descriptions of and experiences of God.

Which is why meetings like the one I attended on Tuesday with spiritual leaders from a variety of faiths are so important.  No one of us has a complete picture of God.  Our picture of God only grows clearer as we talk with each other and learn from each other about the one God we all worship, each of us from our unique perspective.

It’s a lesson Bill Huebsch learned that day in the chapel at his school.  He writes, “I did finally go into the chapel that morning, still intending to ask God for victory.  I knelt down, realizing I was in the heart of the enemy, aware that I was the only one from [my] team who was present.  The senior captain [of the other team] was leading a prayer.

“But he wasn’t praying for victory!  He was praying for charity, for fairness, and for an honest game.  He asked God for the inner strength to be a humble winner—or a graceful loser—and he prayed that, in the final analysis, our lives together in our community would be made more joyful, that our brotherhood would grow stronger from this contest on the playing field.  He took the wind out of my sails!

“I learned something that day that I’ve never forgotten.  God is love, and the one who lives in love, lives in God and God lives in him or her.  God’s power affects our inner lives, our hearts, and we affect the world.  God’s intervention, if we can call it that, is an intervention of love in our inner lives.  We need but open our minds and hearts to it.”  (Huebsch, A New Look at Prayer, 6)   And, I would add, to each other.

In  the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2013

One Body with Many Members

12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

14 Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many.¹⁵If the foot were to say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body.¹⁶And if the ear were to say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body’, that would not make it any less a part of the body.¹⁷If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?¹⁸But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose.¹⁹If all were a single member, where would the body be?²⁰As it is, there are many members, yet one body.²¹The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you’, nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’²²On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,²³and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect;²⁴whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member,²⁵that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another.²⁶If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.

27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.²⁸And God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets, third teachers; then deeds of power, then gifts of healing, forms of assistance, forms of leadership, various kinds of tongues.²⁹Are all apostles? Are all prophets? Are all teachers? Do all work miracles?³⁰Do all possess gifts of healing? Do all speak in tongues? Do all interpret?³¹But strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.

          What are your gifts?  What are you really good at doing?  What comes easier to you than anything else?  I’m not asking about your job. Your job and your gifts might coincide, but they don’t always.  I’m asking, What makes your heart sing when you do it?

What are your gifts?  How do you use them?                                                                 

The people in the church at Corinth had gone gift-crazy.  Paul had started the church several years before with people who were, for the most part on the margins of Roman society.  Completely out of the power structures in their civic lives, they had created another power structure in their church life, a power structure based on gifts.

          In this spiritual hierarchy, certain gifts were valued more highly than others.  Take, for example, speaking in tongues.  The tongues speakers were at the top of the heap.  After all, they had been given God’s secret language.                                                                                          *       Which is okay, if that’s your spiritual gift.  Trouble was, when people spoke in tongues during worship, it had become a show.  They didn’t do it to help others worship God; they did it to draw attention to themselves.  The same was true with other gifts.  The Corinthians had chosen to use their gifts to build up themselves rather than to build up the community….

…which was taking a toll on the community.  There was conflict, dissension, tension… people were dividing themselves into cliques and camps.  “I’m in Paul’s group.”  “I’m in Peter’s group.”  “I’m in Christ’s group.”  Instead of the community being a means of sharing God’s love with others, it had become a place of showmanship and distrust and humongous egos.

          Boy.  I wish these ancient texts related more readily to contemporary life, don’t you? 

          Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity and, later, The Fuller Center, was a very gifted man.  Those gifts are evident in Millard’s spiritual memoir, Beyond the American Dream.  One night while reading the book, Allen said, “Millard Fuller could sell anything to anyone!”  Someone else put it a bit more colorfully.  “Millard could talk a bulldog off a meat truck.”  Cypress knees, mistletoe, chinaberries dipped in silver paint…  You name it; Millard could sell it.  He had a gift for business.  When Millard and law and business partner, Morris Dees, set up business in Montgomery, they went from renting one three room office suite, to owning several buildings in the matter of three years or so.  They went from 1 employee to 150 in the same time frame.

          After a while, their business endeavors—which now included selling Christmas wreaths, college phone directories, a university birthday cake service, cookbooks, and tractor seat cushions— were much more lucrative than their law practice.  They gave up law to devote their full attention to the business….which paid off.  (Literally!)  The Fuller and Dees Company soon was worth one million dollars.

          If anyone ever had the God-given gift of salesmanship and business-making, Millard Fuller had it.  And in the beginning, when he was in law school, he had committed that gift to God.  As he contemplated making his first million, Millard said to himself:  “Look, you’ve wanted to make money all your life, but you are also involved with the church, so you’ve got to work these things together.  You’re not going to be the stereotyped greedy rich man.  You’re going to be humble and sincere and generous.  You’re not going to crowd God out of your life in the process of building a business and making money.”  (p. 86)                                  True to his promise, Millard was active in church life.  He used his many God-given gifts to help start and grow a UCC congregation in Montgomery.  The church thrived and Millard made significant contributions to that thriving.

But his heart wasn’t in it.  Despite the gifts he gave to the community, Millard’s number one purpose in life was making money.  By the time he made his first million, Millard had become the “stereotyped rich man.”  He was gifted almost beyond imagining…but he’d used his gifts to draw attention to himself.  He’d used his gifts to build up, not the reign of God, but the person of Millard Fuller.  Once he’d made three million dollars, Millard’s life collapsed.

          After years of neglecting his family, his wife, Linda, left him.  She flew to New York to meet with a UCC pastor friend of theirs and try to decide if there was any hope for their marriage.  Ever the salesman, Millard hopped a plane to New York and eventually convinced Linda (and himself) that he was ready to change his ways and recommit himself to his marriage, to his family, and to God.

          After a trip to Florida with Linda and the kids, the family stopped by Koinonia Farm in south Georgia on their way home to Montgomery.  Koinonia was—and is—an integrated Christian community that seeks to live the principles of peace and justice.  A friend of Millard and Linda’s lived at Koinonia and they stopped to see him. 

          What they’d planned on being a two hour visit stretched into a month.  Millard had become clear that he’d been using his gifts for business in the wrong way…and doing so had cost him dearly in terms of his relationships and his faith.  From Clarence Jordan and the partners at Koinonia, Millard learned how he might direct his energy into more life-giving and kin-dom of God building ways.

          I love conversion stories….Stories about people who were going down the wrong path finally—sometimes suddenly– coming to see the light and beginning to live their lives in more faithful, generous, and life-giving ways. 

Like the Apostle Paul in the Bible… there he was, a self-professed “Jew of the Jews,” persecuting Christians, hauling them off to Jerusalem for imprisonment and worse.  Then he sees a bright light on the road to Damascus, hears Jesus speak to him, and his life changes forever.  Paul becomes the best known of all Christian teachers and prophets.  He undertakes several missionary journeys and starts churches all over the Roman Empire.  The fact that the Christian church exists today is a tribute to the work of Paul.  See what I mean?  Who doesn’t love a great conversion story?

          With Millard’s story and with Paul’s, though, as fascinating as the actual conversion is, what’s almost as striking is what doesn’t change for them.  If you read Paul’s letters—like much of this letter to the Corinthians—he’s just as grumpy and brash as he was when he was persecuting Christians.  Paul’s personality and gifts for organizing and implementing grassroots movements didn’t change much at all after his conversion.  Once he “saw the light,” he simply began using those gifts for a different purpose.

          That’s also what happened to Millard.  Millard’s gifts for business didn’t change one iota after his conversion….he simply began using those gifts for a different purpose.  That’s how he started Habitat for Humanity and, later, The Fuller Center.  Before his “conversion,” Millard had used his spiritual gifts for himself.  After his conversion, Millard had used those same exact gifts, for (more literally than for most of us) building up the kin-dom of God.  Before his conversion, Millard had hoarded God’s gifts of grace to him.  After his conversion, Millard responded to God’s gifts of grace by sharing it with others.

          God has given us so many gifts—wonderful gifts, extravagant gifts, uncommon gifts.  Oh, how good, and fun, and right to use those gifts to make our way in the world.  In fact, God gives us those gifts as the means of making our way in the world.

          But God also gives us those gifts for another purpose, a purpose Paul summarizes well in I Corinthians 12:7.  It’s printed in your bulletin under the sermon title.  I invite you to read it with me:  “To each has been given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good.”

          Why has each of us been given gifts by God?  For the common good.  That’s what Millard had been missing until his conversion experience.  He’d been given beaucoup spiritual gifts by God.  He had received God’s grace but had hoarded it.  He used his gifts for his own glory, not God’s.  It was only when Millard began using those gifts for the common good that things began making sense for him.  It was only when he began sharing God’s many blessings with others that the full impact of the gift of God’s grace resonated through his whole body and spirit and life.  And just look at how the world changed for the better!

          What are your spiritual gifts?  What are you building up with them?  How might using your gifts help you contribute to the common good?  How might using those gifts change the world for the better?  How might you help build the kin-dom of God?

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  © 2013

          Volatile grace.  An interesting juxtaposition of words, isn’t it?  Sounds like an oxymoron.  Grace is one of the biggie theological terms.  It has to do with acceptance, radical acceptance of people just as they are, “wherever they are on life’s journey.”  Because of grace, God accepts us and loves us just as we are.  Our goal in Christian community is to love and accept others just as they are.  Grace.  It’s a nice, calm, sweet word, right?

          The word “volatile,” on the other hand, conjures up unpredictable, combustible, somewhat scary chemical or human reactions.  NOT so nice, calm, or sweet.  So, what happens when we put those two opporsite-sounding words together?  What is “volatile grace?”  And what might it have to do with Jesus’ baptism—which we’re looking at today—and our own baptisms, which ideally guide us every day?

          In most Christian traditions, baptism is considered a sacrament, a sacrament being “an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace” (Miles, 227).  The grace of baptism is the grace of having been claimed by God as a beloved child.  As we hear God say to Jesus in today’s Gospel lesson just after Jesus’ baptism:  “You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  We don’t have to earn it, we don’t have to work for it.  In fact, we can’t work for or earn it.  God loves us just as we are.  Period.  THAT is the grace of baptism. 

          So what makes that grace volatile?  Joan Chittister is the person who came up with this idea of volatile grace.  Yes, God loves us and accepts us for who we are, she says.  God is with us in the here and now; we don’t have to go searching to find God.  God is right here with us every moment of the day or night.  That is God’s gift of grace to us. 

          But, Chittister writes, “we have been given a grace that is volatile.  To feel it and ignore it, to receive it but reject it…is to be in a worse situation than if we had never paid attention to” it in the first place.  “For disregard of God’s good gifts….for refusing to use the resources we have for the upbuilding of the reign of God, for beginning what we do not intend to complete, the price is high….We lose what is ours for the taking, we miss out on the life we are meant to have.”  (RB, Jan. 1) 

          So, grace is grace—free gift, full acceptance, profound love….but accompanying that gift is a feeling, an urge, a pull, a need to respond to that grace in some way.  And until we do respond, grace is unpredictable, combustible, volatile.  Grace unresponded to soon explodes within us and dies.  Responding to grace keeps it alive, helps it continue, helps it to grow.

          So, what is an appropriate response to grace?  What is an appropriate response to the grace of baptism? 

          One way to respond to the grace of baptism is to take seriously the baptisms of others.  You all do that well here at Pilgrimage.  When a child is baptized in this community, you take seriously your call to help the parents nurture that child into Christian faith.  When I walk around the sanctuary immediately after the baby’s baptism?  There’s not one face in this place that doesn’t have a smile on it.  Nurturing other baptized people?  That is one way to respond to the grace of baptism.

          Another way is simply to receive the grace, to hear God’s words in baptism:  “You are my child, my beloved; in you I am well pleased” and to live as if that is true. 

A story from Sara Miles’ book, Take This Bread, illustrates many good responses to the grace of baptism.  A middle-aged atheist journalist, Sara had no need for church or God or Christian faith.  But then one Sunday morning walking down a sidewalk in San Francisco, she wandered into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, received communion—and was transformed.

          The experience of receiving the bread and wine, the grace of it, was so powerful, Sara felt compelled to respond—she started a food bank that distributed food to the hungry… off St. Gregory’s communion table.

          The first week the bank was open also was the week Sara was baptized.  She said that for her, it was appropriate that the food bank opened the same week she was baptized:  feeding others was her response to having been fed.  Opening the food bank was her response to having received God’s grace. 

          Sara relates another baptism story.  “I was unloading groceries one Friday,” she says, “when I spotted Sasha standing out back by the baptismal font, as if she were waiting for someone.  Sasha was a very small black girl, maybe 6 or 7 years old, who usually came to the pantry with an impatient, teenage aunt.  I’d never met her mother.  Sasha’s hair wasn’t always combed, and this day she had a split lip.  ‘Sweetheart!’ I said.  I was glad to see her again.  ‘Want a snack?  There’s some chips inside.”

          Sasha looked at me, not smiling.  ‘Is this water the water God puts on you to make you safe?” she demanded abruptly, in a strangely formal voice.

          I put down my boxes.  What was she asking for?  Was I being asked to baptize her?  My mind raced, flashing back to when I’d stood at the font for my own baptism just a few years ago.

          Nothing about that water had made me safe.  It had pushed me further out from the certainties and habits of my former life, taken me away from my family, and launched me on this mad and frustrating mission to feed multitudes.  It had eroded my identity as an objective journalist and given me an unsettling glimpse of how very little I knew.  I was no less flawed or frightened or capable of being hurt than I’d been before my conversion, and now, in addition, I was adrift in this water, yoked together with all kinds of other Christians, many of whom I didn’t like or trust.

          How could I tell this child that a drop of water could make her safe?  I had no idea what Sasha was going through at home, but I suspected it was rough.  And baptism, if it signified anything, signified the unavoidable reality of the cross at the heart of Christian faith.  It wasn’t a magic charm but a reminder of God’s presence in the midst of unresolved human pain.

          I remembered what Lynn Baird had asked me, when I was contemplating baptism.

          “Do you want it?” I asked.  Sasha locked her yes on me.  ‘Yes,’ she said.  ‘Yes, I want that water.’”  There was something so serious in her face that it stopped me cold.  I dipped my fingers into the font, and Sasha turned her face up to me, concentrating.  I made the sign of the cross on her forehead.

          I took Sasha into the church and found Lynn, one of St. Gregory’s priests.  I told her what had happened.  Lynn asked Sasha if she wanted a special blessing.

          ‘Yes,’ Sasha said again, gravely.  ‘I want that.’

          Lynn took a small container of oil and showed it to Sasha.  The girl stood very still.  “I’m going to put my hands on you and pray now, if you’re ready,’ Lynn said, and Sasha nodded.

          ‘Jesus is always with you,’ Lynne told Sasha as she finished rubbing the oil on her skin, ‘no matter what happens to you even when bad things happen.  You’re not ever alone.’  Sasha closed her eyes for a moment, then looked down directly at the seated priest, and I saw something flowing between them: the child, crucified, anointing Lynn with the power of her crucifixion, and Lynn, receiving it, anointing Sasha.”

The grace moves back and forth in this story so much it feels a little like a ping pong game.  Sara receives the grace of communion then baptism….she responds to that grace by baptizing Sasha…Sasha responds to her baptism by opening herself to being blessed by Lynn…Lynn responds to the gift of Sasha’s openness with the anointing and the blessing…I’m sure Sara and Lynn talked about the incident later, thus extending the grace even further.

This story illustrates well how we neutralize volatile grace—we respond to it again and again….and thus keep it going and going. 

How will you neutralize the volatile grace in your life?  How will you respond to the grace of your baptism?  How will you share the good news—with others and with yourself—that we are God’s children, that we are beloved, and that God is well pleased with us?

In the name of our God, who creates us, redeems us, sustains us, and hopes for our wholeness.  Amen.

Kimberleigh Buchanan  ©  2012

Luke 3:15-17, 20-22

In preparation for tonight’s service, I looked back through some of my meditations from Christmas Eve services past.  Many of them dealt in some way with the absence of the baby Jesus from the nativity scene.  A couple of years I talked about how very few scenes have a detachable baby Jesus; in most, he’s literally one with the manger.  Last year, I relayed the startling news of a rash (no pun intended) of baby Jesus thefts.  A security company found a creative solution to the problem: GPS.  Attach the GPS to Baby Jesus and, if lost, he could be found with the touch of a button.  While shopping at an antiques store this week, I saw another great image: In the two nativity sets the–detachable–baby Jesus was tied–with twine–to the manger.

In relating these stories, I was suggesting that our obsession with the Baby Jesus–making sure he’s present by hook, twine, or crook–was a sign of just how desperate we are to know for certain that God-with-us is really with us.  In today’s climate of cynicism and waning faithfulness, losing Jesus seems a real possibility.  Then I would point out that “Ta Da!” our Baby Jesus was present in our nativity set.  On Christmas Eve, God-with-us really was with us.  You could see him!

But this year? This year feels different.  I couldn’t put my finger on it until I read a friend’s post on Facebook.  The post began: “For all the parents whose mangers will remain empty this year….”  Then I knew what was so much harder about Christmas this year–welcoming the Christ child when so many children were taken at Sandy Hook School on December 14th.  Suddenly all the concern about ceramic and clay baby Jesuses and their precise locations just didn’t matter anymore…. What’s a simple figurine in the face of such devastating loss?

When children are lost–especially through violence–what does God-with-us even mean?  Where was God on December 14th in Newtown, CT?  If God chose to come dwell with us, as John says, but can’t protect the most vulnerable among us, then what good is God?

I debated about whether to bring up the school shooting tonight…I mean, it’s Christmas Eve, right?  We’re with family, here to celebrate the familiar story, sing the well-known carols as we bask in the glow of candlelight.  If there’s any time to escape from the madness of the world, it would be tonight, right?

But God-with-us isn’t about hiding from the world, its unfairness, its cruelty, its pain.  God-with-us is about God’s deepest desire to be with us during every moment of our lives–the joyous ones marked by the warm glow of candlelight as well as the difficult ones marked by unimaginable violence and grief.  Sometimes human beings choose to do horrific things to each other.  The Connecticut School shooting has to be among the most horrific.  And when those things happen, God wants nothing more than for us to realize that God IS there, heartbroken, weeping, standing ready to comfort and–in time–to heal.

(Take out baby Jesus.) It’s just a piece of ceramic.  He’s been resting under the pulpit all Advent.  I thought briefly of not bringing him out this year as a way to honor the lives that were lost a week and a half ago…but then I realized that, this year more than any other perhaps, we need the Baby Jesus.  Yes, it’s just a piece of ceramic, but what this small figurine symbolizes is crucial for us–especially this year.  Placing the Baby Jesus in the nativity set, setting him there between Mary and Joseph in the little building covered with straw attended by wisemen, shepherds, and animals…it’s a real reminder that God-with-us has come, indeed has been here all along.  Whatever we’re feeling about the school shooting–anger, fear, hopelessness–God is with us. Whatever we’re feeling about our own lives–God is with us.  Whatever we’re feeling about the world–God is with us.  That is the message—and the reality—of this night:  That of all the things God could choose to do, the deepest desire of God’s heart is to be with us….no matter what.

(Kim takes Baby Jesus to the nativity set.)  “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it….And 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…from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” Thanks be to God!