Coming to Jesus

Acts 16:9-15

John 14:23-29

Today’s scripture is part of Jesus’ final speech to the disciples before his arrest and crucifixion.  It is a small part of a much longer speech in which he repeatedly says that if they love him they will follow him, love each other, do what he tells them to do.  He also repeatedly tells them that he is leaving them, and then he reassures them with promises that the Spirit will come to be with them.  Today I want to focus on this second part – Jesus’ telling the disciples that he is leaving and his reassurance about what is to come.  

Has there ever been a time in your life when you felt abandoned or left?  I imagine there have been times for all of us when we have felt that someone has left us.  If that someone is someone we cared about deeply, that loss, that abandonment can be devastating.  Sometimes those feelings of abandonment might not even seem logical to us, but still they come.  A loved one must leave on a work trip, or leave on a military deployment.  Or a person dies.  But even then, even when the loved one does not choose to go, it can still feel like abandonment when it actually happens.  We can still feel that we have been left, that they left us and as a result we can feel angry, hurt, devastated.

This feeling doesn’t just happen with people.  Have there been times when you have felt abandoned by God?  That God is somehow not there for a time when things are hard?  It is not sinful to feel that way.  As we will talk about when we do our series on the psalms, all of these feelings are normal and natural and acceptable to God, too. That’s why we have so many psalms that express these feelings.  They give us permission and words to express feelings of pain, of isolation, of abandonment, that are just plain normal at times.  Sometimes it is hard to feel God’s presence.  Sometimes God’s presence comes to us in different ways, ways we might not recognize as easily.  And I think that when we are feeling abandoned by a person or by people, it is especially easy to feel that it is actually God who has left us.  That somehow, if God really loved us, we would not have been left by the person we love, that they would have lived, or wouldn’t have gone away, or wouldn’t have moved or wouldn’t have rejected us.  And again, while that may not be logical, it is a very human experience.  It is very human to feel that it is God who has left when it is in fact a person whom we love who is no longer present with us in the same way.

I think about C.S. Lewis’ book, A grief Observed (New York: Seabury Press, 1976). C.S. Lewis, as many of you know, was a remarkable Christian author who wrote both novels such as the Narnia series as well as theological conversations such as “The Four Loves” and “Surprised by Joy”.  In 1945 he experienced the death of a close friend.  About this death he said, “The experience of loss (the greatest I have yet known) was wholly unlike what I should have expected.  We now verified for ourselves what so many bereaved people have reported; the ubiquitous presence of a dead man, as if he had ceased to meet us in particular places in order to meet us everywhere...” he continued, “No event has so corroborated my faith in the next world as Williams did simply by dying.  When the idea of death and the idea of Williams thus met in my mind, it was the idea of death that was changed.” 

But 15 years later, in 1960, his wife of very few years, Joy, died. And that experience was also unexpected for him - but in the complete opposite way. As he said in the journal he kept following her death, “After the death of a friend...I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance about Joy. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.” And in contrast to the experience of the presence of his friend’s death changing his faith for the better, after the death of his wife, his faith was tested beyond measure.  As he continued, “Go to (God) when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside.  After that, silence.  You may as well turn away.  The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.  There are no lights in the windows.  It might be an empty house...not that I am in much danger of ceasing to believe in God.  The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.  The conclusion I dread is not, ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but, ‘So this is what God’s really like.  Deceive yourself no longer.”

Deeply disturbing words of pain and despair from a deeply faithful man.  Have any of you ever felt that way?

God knows and understands this very human experience.  God expects and anticipates this very human experience.  It is for this reason that Jesus spends so much time telling his disciples what is to come and offering the reassurances he does.  Jesus is about to leave them, he is about to be crucified.  For all of our experiences of abandonment by friends or family, how much worse for those who knew Jesus?  Jesus was not only their friend, he was their Lord, their Savior, their God.  He taught them.  He fed them.  He cared for them.  He gave their lives new direction, new purpose, new meaning.  He opened up life for them, he touched them and connected them with God in a real, concrete, new way.  He became their all, their everything, their reason for being and living.  But now he tells them that he is leaving and asks them to be happy about it because he is going to God the Father.  He tries to add more reassurance.  He tells them he is sending the Spirit.  And he tells them he will send them off with his peace.  He tells them to not be afraid.  And he tells them to not let their hearts be troubled. 

And so, what do you think?  Do all the reassurances make it all okay?  Does it work for Jesus that because he has said all of these words, the disciples are therefore at peace when he is killed and are happy for him to be with God?  Are they untroubled and unafraid when the crucifixion comes?  Do they “believe” because he has reassured them and laid out for them what is to come?  Well, as we talked about last week and as we can imagine in the aftermath of today’s reading….Not so much.

The truth is that we are connectional beings.  We are people to whom loving and being loved are as important and crucial as food, water, and even air.  Babies who are not held and touched die.  If they have no one to whom they form an early attachment, they struggle to connect normally to others throughout their lives.  We witness this with other creatures, too.  There was an experiment some time ago in which some monkeys were offered food and water, but no care at all, while other monkeys were given stuffed animals and even others were held and cuddled and comforted.  The monkeys who were just offered food and water languished and died.  The ones with the stuffed animals did better, but still could not relate to other creatures.  Only the monkeys who were offered care and cuddling thrived and became “normal” adult monkeys. 

There is also the story I shared with you two weeks ago of Owen and Mzee.  Owen was a baby hippopotamus who was a sole survivor of a terrible storm.  He was rescued and put in a reserve with a bunch of other animals.  Immediately upon being released into the animal refuge, he attached himself firmly and completely to a cranky old tortoise named Mzee who wanted nothing to do with Owen for the first 24 hours.  Owen followed Mzee around and cuddled up next to Mzee and Mzee tried again and again to walk away from Owen.  But after only about a day, Mzee somehow got it that the hippo needed him, and maybe Mzee discovered that he needed the hippo, too.  The two became completely inseparable, eating together, sleeping together.  Both thrived through that connection, through that attachment.  And we experience this sense of abandonment with our pets, too – even those who appear to not like each other “grieve” when another family pet dies. 

I’ve shared with you before the wonderful story of the difference between heaven and hell.  In hell, there is a big feast spread out on the table, but the people sitting at the table have no elbows.  They desperately try to feed themselves, but are unable to get the food to their mouths because they cannot bend their arms.  In heaven the picture at first glance looks very similar.  There is a big feast spread out on the table, and again the people sitting around the table have no elbows and are still unable to feed themselves.  The difference, though, is that at the table in heaven, everyone is feeding each other.  And while this story points out that it is only in caring for one another that we are fed, that it is only in caring for one another that we are truly and deeply fed, there is another message here, too, and that is about the importance, the necessity of community.  We picture heaven as a place where our loved ones who’ve passed are waiting for us, a place where we can connect with those we love and stay connected.  Where loss, death, abandonment are no more. 

            But in the mean time, we have to face it.  Every human relationship will end in its human form.  We will lose everyone in one way or another.  People move, people change, people have tragedies happen and ultimately everyone dies.  So whether we are doing the leaving or being left, in human form, we will lose everyone.  And each one can feel like abandonment.  I don’t want to just ignore that, or lighten it, or push it quickly aside.  Those feelings are real, and they deserve our attention, our care, our time.  I think about what C.S. Lewis also wrote about situations in which well-meaning friends could not tolerate his pain, and how much damage that inability to sit with his pain caused..  They couldn’t tolerate it, and so they tried to shove it away with trite quips.  His favorite was “Well, she will live forever in your memory.”  And he found this created nothing less than an intense rage within him as he struggled to grasp, daily, that she was no longer alive, no longer with him in a way that he could recognize while he was in the midst of his deepest grief.  To tell him that she would live in his memory did nothing for him but make him feel completely alone in his grief - in other words, it had exactly the opposite effect of what was undoubtedly intended.  It did not make him feel better.  It made him feel misunderstood, isolated, and alone.  I do not want to do that by rushing through the real and tangible feelings that we have as we grieve.

That being said, I am also called upon on Sunday mornings to deliver the Good News.  And the good news in this is huge.  First, we are reassured that death and separation are temporary.  No matter how it feels, no matter how bad it feels, we are connectional.  God created us this way and I believe God will return all of us to connection.  Also, even in this life, we have Jesus’ reassurances, which are not just about his leaving, but ours as well.  “My peace I leave you” Jesus says.  And “I will send the Spirit to be with you.”  That spirit is our advocate, our comforter, our companion when we are lonely and alone.  “Do not be afraid” he tells us.  For there is nothing to fear – God is with us.  And finally, “I am going away, AND I am coming back to you.”  The end is not the end.  Death is not the end.  Connection will continue.  God will continue.  Christ will and does continue.  And through Christ, we, too, continue in connection with God and with our loved ones.  Amen.

A Reassurance of Life

Revelation 1:4-8

John 20:19-31

            The story of Thomas is a wonderful story about God’s coming to be in relationship with us where we are.  I have preached before on what an amazing gift it is that when Thomas doubts, Jesus does not leave him or abandon him there, but goes to him, brings to Thomas his very self for Thomas to touch, reconnect with and believe in.  But today I want to focus on the other disciples, on what they were doing, what their lives were like following this revelation of Jesus’ resurrection. 

Today’s story from John immediately follows the announcement from Mary to the disciples that Jesus is alive, that she has seen him, that Jesus has sent her to them.  And yet, despite this announcement, where are the disciples?  They are hiding, we are told, from the Jewish authorities.  They are behind locked or closed doors (the Greek word is actually “closed” but I think many of the translators use the word “locked” to indicate that it was a way of shutting others out) out of fear.  Jesus has arisen, which tells us that there is nothing more to fear – everything can be overcome, even death itself.  And yet, even though the disciples have heard this news, they remain terrified to the point of hiding.  It isn’t just Thomas who is doubting because he hasn’t seen.  As a matter of fact, Thomas is an interesting contrast to these other disciples who are hiding.  Because Thomas, we are told, was not hiding with the other disciples.  He was out and about, not in the locked room!  He is the one who has reentered the world, continued living, refused to be trapped behind in fear, while the others, though they have all heard the news, remain in hiding.

            So, Jesus comes and shows himself to the hiding disciples, those who cannot yet believe, those who have heard the good news but remain afraid.  He shows himself and they believe….maybe.  Except that then we are told that eight days later they are still, or maybe again, in the same house, again with the doors closed or locked.  In other words, now after having seen Jesus, they are still hiding!!  And this time Thomas is with them.  Jesus comes again.  And this time when Jesus comes to them, he says something very interesting.  He says, “Do you believe because you see me?”  I think most of us have always heard this phrase to mean – “oh, so now you, Thomas, believe in the resurrection because you see me?”  But I heard this differently this week.  This time, I heard the phrase this way, “Do you actually believe? - because you have seen me.”  And I don’t think it was just aimed at Thomas.  The disciples are not behaving as people who believe.  They are not LIVING into the good news!  They are not so excited about the Good News that Jesus is alive that they are out preaching the word and sharing it!  They are not living as a people filled with joy and released from fear.  So he is asking them, “now that you have seen, NOW do you believe?”  He has come to see them a second time, and yet, they still have not understood the message.  And then he continues, speaking, again, to ALL of the disciples – “Happy are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.”

            As we know, and as we see through all of this, belief is not as simple, even, as seeing.  Even seeing does not guarantee belief, not real belief, in the meaning behind what is being seen.  Many believe who have not seen, and many see who do not believe.  No, it is not seeing that causes belief.  So, what does create belief in us?

I’ve shared with you before what Frederick Buechner has to say about faith.

“…Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession.  It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all.  Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway.  A journey without maps.”

            He goes on to say that we can’t test what we believe, like, for example, we can’t test the friendships of our friends, without damaging those very relationships.  But we trust our friendships because we are engaged in them.        

And what this says to me is, again, that faith does not come about through seeing.  Faith, real faith, comes about through our relationships.  We believe in our friends when they ACT like friends.  And we believe in God when we experience a relationship with God. 

            We are called to live in the faith of the Good news.  The Good News, Jesus’ resurrection, tells us that even death will be overcome, that the last enemy has been defeated, and that because of that, we have nothing to fear, and can really live and can be free to work for life for all people, too, without fear of the consequences.  But, I repeat what I said, many who have seen do not yet believe, whereas many who have not seen, do believe and live out their faith.

            I think about the story in Mitch Albom’s book Have a Little Faith, in which we learn that the Rabbi lost his young daughter to illness.  When he returned to the pulpit he shared with the congregation that he’d yelled at God, screamed for an answer.  There was nothing in being a Rabbi that had kept him from the tears and misery of never connecting with his young daughter again.  But he also said that his faith was the only thing that soothed him.  It was a reminder that we are all part of something bigger.  And he believed that he would see her again.  But I also believe from what I read that it was the relationship he had with God that got him through the crisis.  It was a relationship that was strong enough that it allowed him to express his anger at God, and held him in the belief that God’s love was big enough to be able to handle that anger.

The thing is, belief, faith, is an act of will, and not a feeling.  And as much as we would want it to, seeing does not guarantee that belief.  I think about the movie, The Polar Express.  One of my favorite scenes in that movie is when the main character, a young boy who is struggling with faith in Santa Claus, is walking across the top of the moving Polar Express Train, looking for a friend of his whom he believes had also walked across the top of the train.  He finds on the top of the train a man who appears to be a Hobo, playing music next to a fire while he heats coffee and dries his socks over the fire.  And he has an interaction with the man where the man says, “You want to believe but you don’t want to be hoodwinked, bamboozled, scammed!”  We, the viewers of the movie, know that the man, the hobo is a spirit, or a ghost. But what is most interesting to me is that he says to the boy, “you want to believe, but seeing is believing, right?  So just one more question…do you believe in ghosts?”  The kid shakes his head “no” to which the ghost responds, “interesting,” and we are left, again, to ponder the reality that seeing is not always believing.  Even in the Polar Express we experience that the child’s faith (in Santa Clause in this case) comes about through his relationships and his experiences, and not through his seeing.  And we understand that child’s faith, we come to understand his faith change when his relationships with others change. 

            There is another part of Mitch Album’s book Have a Little Faith (p.47) that I want to share with you:

Mitch asks his Rabbi, “How do you not get cynical?” And from the book:

            “There is no room for cynicism in this line of work.”

            But people are so flawed.  They ignore ritual, they ignore faith – they even ignore you.  Don’t you get tired of trying?

            … “let me answer with a story,” he said.  “There’s this salesman, see?  And he knocks on a door. The man who answers says, ‘I don’t need anything today.’

            “The next day the salesman returns.

            “ ‘Stay away,’ he is told.

            “The next day, the salesman is back.

            “The man yells, ‘you again!  I warned you!’ He gets so angry, he spits in the salesman’s face.

            “The salesman smiles, wipes the spit with a handkerchief, then looks to the sky and says, ‘Must be raining.’

            “Mitch, that’s what faith is.  If they spit in your face, you say it must be raining.  But you still come back tomorrow.”

            To me, this story is talking more about what really makes faith happen: and that is, again, relationships.  You stay engaged, just as God will stay engaged with you every single time.  You also step out of your fear and choose to be in the world, no matter what the world is handing back to you.  That is faith.  Choosing to act “as if” even when we can’t feel it.  Faith is a choice.  It is a decision.  It is a way to be in the world that says, “I will not act on my fear.  But I will act on my faith, even when I don’t feel it.  I will choose to believe into seeing even when I cannot believe because of what I see.”

It is easy to be like the disciples, like Albom in his tendency towards cynicism, - seeing and still not believing.  The good news for us is that Jesus keeps coming, again and again, until we really do believe.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t times for all of us of struggle with faith, of doubt about who God is, that the love is really there, that it is enough.  I think about the book Life of Pi.  One of my favorite quotes: “Faith in God is an opening up, a letting go, a deep trust, a free act of love – but sometimes it was so hard to love.  Sometimes my heart was sinking so fast with anger, desolation and weariness, I was afraid it would sink to the very bottom of the Pacific and I would not be able to lift it back up….Despair was a heavy blackness that let no light in or out.  It was a hell beyond expression.  I thank God it always passed…The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart.  I would go on loving.” (p209) 

Jesus didn’t leave the disciples alone.  He didn’t leave Thomas alone.  He showed up again and again and by doing so he rebuilt his relationship with them until their faith was strong enough that he could leave and trust them to live in the Good News.  God does the same for us.  God will show up again and again for us as well, until we, too, finally find that, because of our relationship with God, not because of what we have heard, and not even because of what we have seen, but because of our relationship with God, we, too can have the faith that moves into true belief and therefore into action. Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Mother's Day

John 13:31-35

Luke 13:31-35

Mark 3:31-34

               From Wit and Wisdom from the Peanut Butter Gang by H. Jackson Brown, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 1994):

 “When you mother is mad and asks you, “Do I look stupid?” it’s best not to answer her.”

“I’ll never take my mom’s car out again until I can do it legally.”

“If your mom’s asleep, don’t wake her up.”

“It’s no fun to stay up all night if your parents don’t care.”

“Despite all the loving and caring relationships in the world, there is nothing more loving than the feel of my mother’s hand on my forehead when I am sick.”

“You should never laugh at your (mom) if (she’s) mad at you.”

“If mom’s not happy, nobody’s happy.”

“You only have one mom and you should take care of her.”

And finally, “Parents don’t get enough appreciation.”

               As you know, today is Mother’s Day.  And while the worship committee asked that we do a service that really and truly centered on Mother’s Day, and while I agreed to do it, I actually find Mother’s Day to be one of the hardest days of the year for pastors and one of the hardest subjects to preach on. 

               Mother’s Day is difficult because it is a loaded day for so many people, for so many reasons.  If you had a great childhood, but your mother is now passed on, it can be a day of deep sorrow as you miss your mother.  If you had a terrible childhood it can be a day of anger and a day to remind you of the difficult things that you experienced as a kid.   This is made even worse if you suffered abuse at the hands of your mother, or if your mother failed to protect you from the abuse of other family members.

Mother’s Day can call up feelings of guilt since most of the time sermons on Mother’s Day focus on appreciation for and the need to care for our mothers.  If you cannot do that for your mother, or even if just couldn’t do it all the time, this can be a very difficult and challenging day.

If you were adopted, it can be a day of confusion: who do I really count as my mother and how do I feel about both my biological mother and the mother that raised me.  If you have struggled to have your own children and were unable to do so, it can be a day of deep grief as you mourn never having the opportunity to be a mother.  If you have lost a child it can also be a day of deep grief as you mourn the loss of that child or those children.  If you raised your kids and they are struggling, it can be a day of real regrets: regretting the way you parented or specific things that you said or did in your parenting. It can be a day of anger at the judgements of others on your parenting, including pastors in Mother’s Day sermons.  (Did you know that one of the top reasons women pastors leave the ministry is because of all the unsolicited judgments and advice they are given on their parenting? 80% of all pastors feel ministry negatively impacts their families).  If you aborted a child, Mother’s Day can bring up all kinds of feelings: grief, fear, anger, etc.  If you have never been a mother and had or have no desire to be a mother, it can also be a hard day as the expectations of being a mother can feel so pressing and there can be so much judgment around that decision too.

  Mother’s Day can be a day to avoid the world for some people, and especially to avoid a church service which may be honoring the very people who damaged you in some real way, or a situation that you can’t or don’t want to be a part of.

In the midst of all of this, then, we have Mother’s Day.  And I picked three passages, all of which I feel have something to tell us about this day, about God’s relationships with us and about our relationships with one another. 

We start with the John passage and we are told that our biggest command, our final command, Jesus’ central message is that we love one another.  We are to be known as Jesus’ disciples by the way that we love, fully and unconditionally, despite differences, despite whatever we have been through, despite the way others treat us.  We are to be known through the way that we love.  And I believe that the best way that we know how it is to love in the way that God calls us to love is by reflecting the way that good parents love their kids.  Whether or not we’ve had good parents, whether or not we’ve been good parents, whether or not we’ve experienced that kind of deep and unconditional and abiding love, we all know what it looks like when a good mother loves her children.  There is nothing that will come in the way of that love: no belief, no choice, no action.  No matter how we are treated, no matter which of our deepest values our children reject or denounce, no matter if they mess up, lead lives that we don’t understand and can’t support, do unspeakable things or put us through hell, we continue to love them, fiercely, with all that we are and in such a way that we would easily and quickly give up our own lives for them.  That is what it is and what it means to be good parents. 

Jesus mirrors this understanding when he says in today’s passage from Luke, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”  Even in the face of our pain, of rejection from our children at times, good mothers love and want to protect their children.  God who reflects God shows us this kind of love and calls us to love all people in the same way. 

There is one other passage that always comes to mind for me when I think of what it is to be a mother.  And that passage is John 19:26-27.   Jesus is dying on the cross.  And we are told, “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.”  Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”  That passage to me is profound in so many ways.  But to me it is more than simply the obvious: “take care of my mother because I love you both.”  It is also a more universal statement.  We are all deeply connected.  We are all children and parents to one another.  We are all called to love one another with the fierceness of motherhood, to care for one another, to bring those who need it into our spaces, into our homes, to see them as family and to love them with all that we are as if they were our own flesh and blood.

The people who are our true mother and brothers, as Jesus points out in today’s passage from Mark, are those who treat us in this way.  Sometimes those are the women who birthed us.  Sometimes those are the parents who raised us.  And sometimes, as Jesus himself says in this passage, they aren’t.  Sometimes they are other people, who raise us and embrace us and love us with that fierce unconditional love that God calls us to. 

I think about all the strange stories of animals that have adopted other animals.  The crow who found a kitten and took care of it by bringing it worms until the kitten was big enough to start hunting on its own.  This crow continued to watch over the kitten until it was a full grown cat, leading it to food sources and just staying nearby in case anyone tried to threaten the kitten.  I think about the Leopard who attacked the baboon, discovered that the baboon had a baby on it’s back, and the Leopard adopted the baby baboon, watching over it and keeping it warm at night.  Completely unexpected and counter intuitive, but there it was.  Do you remember the story of MZee and Owen?  Owen was a baby hippopotamus who was separated from his family by a tsunami.  He was rescued and brought to a refuge where there was a tortoise named MZee.  The tortoise was 130 years old and very much a loner.  But Owen attached to MZee, following him around, and within a very short time, MZee took Owen under his care, watched over him, took him in as a mother would. 

And it brings me back to a story by Barbara Brown Taylor that I shared with you before but which embodies this kind of motherhood to a tee.  Barbara Brown Taylor has a silkie chicken which she obtained when one of her hens died, leaving an orphaned guinea chick.  She had heard that silkies were good adoptive mothers, so she bought one and brought it home.  She wrote, “I needed a foster mother for our orphaned guinea chick.  I had heard that Silkies are good mothers, so I shopped around in the Market Bulletin until I found some for sale…  When the Silkie and I got home… first I lay on the grass while she and the baby watched each other through the mesh of the cage.  Then I placed her inside.  Both she and the baby froze.  The baby cheeped.  The hen did not move a feather.  The baby cheeped again.  The hen staed right where she was.  The baby took a few steps toward her.  I held my breath.  The gray hen liften her wings.  The baby scooted right into that open door.  When I checked on them an hour later, all I could see was a little guinea chick head poking out from under that gray hen’s wing….This is counterintuitive, I might add.  If this hen is into the preservation of her species, then she ought to be looking out for her own babies and letting the others go hand, but she does not.  She accepts all comers, no questions asked.  She has neer seen a chick she didn’t like.  I ought to trust her by now, yet every time I introduce her to a new baby with nowhere else to go, I can feel the back of my throat get tight.  Please, please, please, don’t peck this baby, I plead.  It’s so little.  It has never laid eyes on any momma but you.  Then I set the chick in the cage with her, sitting down where I can watch what happens.  The baby cheeps.  The hen does not move a feather.  The baby cheeps again.  The hen stays right where she is.  The baby takes a few steps toward her.  The hen lifts her wings.  Come to momma, honey.  ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem… How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’  Jesus had chicken neighbors too, I guess, and from them he learned about God’s wings.  Watching them, he knew what he wanted to be and do.  One cluck from him, and I know too.”

On this Mother’s day, I invite you to remember that we are called to follow Jesus by loving in the way that he did.  That means loving one another, loving ALL the one anothers, with this kind of love, a Mother’s love.  I invite you to celebrate that love with me by reading together the Mother’s Day Litany that is printed in your bulletins.              

Sunday's Sermon - Listening

Proverbs 19:2-27

James 1:19-25

 Proverbs 18:13:  “Wisdom requires a humble, earnest effort to hear what the others say and a willingness to see our world in the other’s terms.”  Other translations:

New Living Translation: Spouting off before listening to the facts is both shameful and foolish.

English Standard Version: If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.

We are told in today’s scriptures that listening , really listening – not answering before listening and not responding or thinking before hearing – that this is what leads to wisdom. 

But listening to one another, really listening to one another, is hard. 

In many ways we tend to avoid really listening, and instead, when someone else is talking, we spend our time thinking about how we are going to respond.  Sometimes we fail to listen in a more obvious way: we can be trying to multi task, playing on our phone while listening, checking email, or frankly doing anything other than being fully present with the person who is speaking and with whatever they are speaking about. 

I had a week which really brought all of this home for me.  It began when I had to take my daughter to an audition at the Lesher Center.  The auditions are 15 minutes, but when I arrived at the Lesher parking garage, it was clear that they were having a large event in the Center.  When there are such events, the parking in the garage goes from being a very low set fee (free for the first hour, followed by 50 cents for each hour following), to a set $3 charge.  That’s fine, except that I was only going to be there for 15 minutes.  I pulled up to the attendant and said, “I’m not here for the event.  I’m here for an audition for my daughter.”  The attendant was not listening.  She was looking straight at me, but she was not listening in any way.  She responded, “Great!  The event is $3 and it’s on the 2nd floor!”  I paid the $3 and went ahead and parked, but found myself annoyed.  I was not annoyed because I had to pay $3.  I was annoyed because she did not listen or even try to listen to what I had said.  I felt dismissed, unvalued as a human being, invisible.

At church during that week we were being harassed by a woman who wanted to argue with me about theology.  She is not a member of the church, does not come here for any reason, does not live in the housing next door, is just a random person who was demanding my attention.  I asked Sandy to tell her that during lent, meeting with her was not going to be possible.  There was simply too much going on between extra services, mission activities, and people in our congregation needing pastoral care.  But she did not listen and would call the office 3 or 4 times a day insisting that I meet with her so she could set me straight.  Again, so busy talking that she could not hear what any one else had to say.

That same week I had a meeting with a small group of folk at a restaurant.  When I arrived (the first one there), I told the waiter that I needed a table for three of us.  He tried to sit me at a table for two.  I held up three fingers and said again we needed a table for three of us.  He moved me but then said, “Will this then be just for one?” as he handed me a single menu. I was flabbergasted.

When the other two people arrived, I was feeling frustrated and unhappy about all of this, so when they asked me why I was upset, I shared with them my struggles with how little we actually listen to one another.  At that point, one of the other two folk I was with took out his phone and began reading his email and checking Facebook.  He was doing this AS I was complaining that people don’t really listen to one another! 

I’m reminded of the story I have told before of the little girl who was talking to her mother while she was washing dishes.  The little girl insisted that the mother stop and listen to her.  The mom said, “But honey, I AM listening to you!” To which the little girl replied, “I need you to listen with your EYES.”  Really listening to one another requires giving others our full attention, with all of who we are.

As you know, many of us in the congregation have been reading the book Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande (New York: Picador, 2014).  At one point Gawande is describing the two neurosurgeons that his father visited when he had a fatal brain tumor.  One of the doctors was short with Gawande’s father.  He didn’t want to answer his questions and he basically said he was the best person for the job and Gawande’s father could take it or leave it.  But the doctor at the Cleveland Clinic behaved differently.  Gawande wrote this:

The Cleveland Clinic neurosurgeon, Edward Benzel, exuded no less confidence.  But he recognized that my father’s questions came from fear.  So he took the time to answer them, even the annoying ones.  Along the way, he probed my father, too.  He said that it sounded like he was more worried about what the operation might do to him than what the tumor would. … The surgeon said that he might feel the same way himself in my father’s shoes.  Benzel had a way of looking at people that let them know he was really looking at them.  He was several inches taller than my parents, but he made sure to sit at eye level.  He turned his seat away from the computer and planted himself directly in front of them.  He did not twitch or fidget or even react when my father talked.  He had that midwesterner’s habit of waiting a beat after people have spoken before speaking himself, in order to see if they are really done….Benzel had made the effort to understand what my father cared about most, and to my father that counted for a lot. (p198-199)

As I read this, I was struck by a couple of things.  First, what Gawande said about the doctor really looking at his parents was actually about really listening to his parents.  The doctor took the time to fully listen and care about what the other, in this case Gawande’s parents, were saying. It also resonated with me what he said about the “midwesterner’s habit of waiting a beat after people have spoken to speak themselves.”  I experienced this when I lived in Ohio.  However,  my experience of this pause was not so much that people were waiting to see if you were done talking as it was that people there listen to what you are saying and then take a minute to formulate their response.  They are not spending the time when they should be listening in planning or forming what they will say next.    

Sometimes those differences in the way we listen and hear cause problems.  One of the challenges that David and I have been working through is this very different way of listening.  I grew up here, I have spent the large majority of my life here.  I am used to the way people here “listen” which is to say, I’m used to people NOT listening, but using the time that others are speaking to decide what they are going to say.  We tend to talk then in a very quick succession in conversations.  There are no pauses between speakers.  The result is that often in a group it can be very difficult for everyone to be able to have their say.  If you can’t manage to be the first one to squeak out your words in following someone else’s speech, you won’t be heard at all.  People often talk over each other. 

When I was back in Cleveland, I tried to adjust to their different way of speaking.  I tried hard to honor the pause between speakers.  I have to say it wasn’t easy and many people made the comment that I was very “high energy” by which they meant I spoke quickly and jumped from one thing to another rapidly.  But coming back to the Bay Area, the rhythm, while very hurried and rushed, is more comfortable, or natural for me.  It’s what I’m used to.

David, on the other hand, is mostly a Clevelander.  That means that he actually listens while a person is talking, and then pauses while he is taking time to consider what he wants to say in response.  Unfortunately for him, this has caused problems as I have taken the silence to mean that he has nothing to say.  I’ll jump in again into the silence, “not giving him a chance to speak” he says.  In reality, I’m not giving him a chance to LISTEN because we just don’t listen here.

Who is the loser in this game?  Well, we all are.  But I think the people who lose the most in this are we who fail to take the time to really hear one another.  As today’s scriptures say, “Wisdom requires a humble, earnest effort to hear what others say and a willingness to see our world in the other’s terms.”   We lose the chance to grow in wisdom, in understanding when we fail to take the time to listen.

I think about what we did last Sunday afternoon with our “Crossing our Differences” conversations.  For those of you who came, how hard was it to just give a 30 second pause between speakers?  Did that feel like wasted time?  Did that feel like we didn’t need the time because we already knew what we thought, having spent the time while the speaker spoke to listen to our own thoughts rather than their words? 

This is especially hard when we disagree with one another.  We don’t WANT to hear what the other has to say.  We don’t want our thoughts to be challenged.  We don’t want to have to listen deeply enough to care about another point of view.  BUT I find again and again that when people think they disagree, when they actually choose to really listen to one another, they can find a whole lot more common ground than what they might believe they share.  Maybe we don’t want to see that.  Maybe we don’t really want to know that we have more in common than we would think.  But the dangerous truth is that when we start listening with our ears, we may find that we are also learning to listen with our hearts.  And while that may not be comfortable, it is important to try to do.  It helps us build bridges, it helps us grow, it helps us learn.

So how do we begin this journey towards listening?

The first thing is to be intentional about listening to people with all of our being.  In other words put down our phones and our chores and our activities when someone else is talking and really be present with them. 

The second thing is to intentionally take a minute after a person speaks to think about your answer.  If you know that you will give yourself that time when they are finished talking to formulate your response, you can just be listening when the other person is talking and wait to think through your answer after they are done.

The third is to take time to ask clarifying questions, or to repeat back what you think you are hearing so you are sure you are hearing correctly.

Fourth, just remind yourself that it is in listening that we grow and learn, not in talking.  Choosing to listen means choosing to take the better part.

One of the other things we are told in this passage from Proverbs is that Wisdom is gained in community.  In other words, when it is hard to hear one another, the community can help us.  When we are not growing, not gaining the knowledge that can lead to wisdom, the community is there to aid in that process.  And also, one of the true gifts of a faith community that talks together, prays together, and studies together is wisdom, when we choose to really hear one another.

The same is true with God.  I think most of us spend our prayer time talking at God.  And that’s important.  It’s really important to share with God our thoughts and feelings and what is going on with us.  But what I would suggest to you today is that it is MORE important for us to listen.  And then to check in with God about what we think we are hearing.  “Am I hearing you right, God?  Are you really telling me to love that person over THERE??!!  Are you really telling me to speak out about x, y or z?”  Whatever it is, reflect back to God.  Ask God if you are hearing correctly and then listen some more.  God does speak to us in many, many ways: through our experiences, through other people, through nature, through art; through scripture and stories and songs.  But all of it requires taking the time to listen.  Learning to hear God requires intentionally taking time out, daily, to listen.

The good news is that God is there both to listen to us, and to share with us when we are ready to hear wisdom.  That is the good news.  Today and every day. 

Humor Sunday sermon - The Reversal of All Things

Acts 5:27-32,

Revelation 1:4-8,

John 20:19-23

A mother listening to her son praying said to him, “Honey, that’s no way to say your prayers!”

The girl responded, “But mom, I thought that God was probably tired of hearing the same old stuff every night.  So I told him the story of the Three Bears instead!”



Pastor, “So, your parents say your prayers with you every night?  What do they say?”

The boy responded, “Thank God, he’s in bed!”

               Today we celebrate humor Sunday, the day when we remember that God had the last laugh over evil, and frankly, over all of us as well, by reversing what all of us know to be the only truth we can absolutely count on: that life ends with death.  Instead, death was the beginning: the beginning of the resurrection, the beginning of new life, the beginning of Christianity, the beginning of the faith that we have come to know and follow for the last 2000 years. 

               This should be an amazing and wondrous thing to celebrate and yet we often “celebrate” the resurrection with solemnity and ritual.  It is as if we cannot really accept the irony, the ridiculousness, the JOY of death being overcome, being destroyed, being reversed.  But that reversal of all we know should do exactly that: it should confuse us, it should turn our lives upside down, it should force us to question everything that we have ever known to be true, and to celebrate again with laughter, with humor, with music, with delight that God loves us so much that even death is no longer a solid steadfast rule; that everything we know is up for grabs, but that we need not fear because the God of love has promised to carry us through it all.

On humor Sunday this year we are literally practicing the reversal by reversing the worship service.  I hope that as we go through the service, you will find meaning in doing this.  First of all, it is often only those things which are different and unexpected which catch our attention enough to bring about genuine change.  Since we have not experienced physical resurrection first hand, sometimes we need a little help to remember the scandal of that day and of that experience for the disciples.  Reversing what we know invites us to experience both the confusion but also the possibilities inherent in life being other than what we expect.  That confusion can help us to see differently, to put ourselves in a place to hear in a different way.  The possibilities that open up for us, then, from a place of not knowing, but of seeing anew, can be amazing.

Secondly, I hope that today especially will be a reminder that church is not the goal.  Going to church is not what gives you stars in your crowns.  It is not what pleases God most.  As you may remember from my Amos sermon during lent, God said to Amos, “I hate, I despise your solemn festivals.  But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” What pleases God most is when we follow Christ and do what he has called us to do: be the hands and feet of God, healing, loving, uplifting, feeding, visiting, making the world better for everyone; be the mind of Christ – wise as serpents and gentle as doves; be the heart of Christ, loving those we would call “sinners” because we have hearts of compassion that can do nothing less than treat even our enemies with love and grace.   The point of church is to ground us in the love of God, to center us in the reason for all we do, to remind us of our call and the support we have from God and this community for doing the call, and to feed us so that we can then do the work of the world with energy and passion. 

When seen this way, it is therefore more than appropriate that our “welcome and announcements” lead us into being the church in the world out there; that they come at the end of the service, inviting us into the work of Christ.  It is appropriate that we enter this place with the benediction, and the reminder that it is a temporary leaving of our work for Christ that we do when we come into this place to be fed so that we can go back into the world again at the end of the hour.  It is appropriate that we hear the words of scripture AFTER the sermon so that we can hear whether or not our thoughts and our reflections actually have anything to do with what God is saying to us through the books of the Bible.  It is appropriate that we give of our best gifts in our offering before we have been fed in this place so that it is not somehow a measurement of what the hour has provided us, but instead a pledge to give our best to God no matter how we are feeling or what we face in this moment.  It is appropriate that we greet one another with the peace of Christ: coming into this place as forgiven people forgiving each other before we can hear what God would say to us in this hour. 

And finally, it is very appropriate that we celebrate Christ’s resurrection with laughter, with a recognition of the absurdity of life that ends for most of us in death; and the delight in death that ends with the scandal of life.  We will hear today from the book of John that Jesus’ message to the disciples was peace, was one of sending forth, and was one of forgiveness.  That continues to be Christ’s message for all of us who would follow: to find peace so that we may go forth loving, forgiving and doing the work that God calls us to do in the world.  Christ is the one who was, who is and who will be.  It is in that wake, in that understanding, in that deep and undeniably powerful call that we are told to go and do what he did: healing, loving, freeing, raising up the valleys and bringing the mountains low.  And so we will, as we step forward into our lives from this place.  But before we do that, it is appropriate that we boost ourselves with a bit of laughter, with joy, with celebration.

So towards that end, we begin with the jokes that you have to share.  These two come from Scott Lewis who could not be here today:

Muldoon lived alone in the Irish countryside with only a pet dog for company.  One day the dog died, and Muldoon went to the parish priest and asked, 'Father, my dog is dead. Could ya' be saying' a mass for the poor creature?'

Father Patrick replied, 'I'm afraid not; we cannot have services for an animal in the church. But there are some Baptists down the lane, and there's no tellin' what they believe. Maybe they'll do something for the creature.'

Muldoon said, 'I'll go right away Father. Do ya' think $5,000 is enough to donate to them for the service?'

Father Patrick exclaimed, 'Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus! Why didn't ya tell me the dog was Catholic?”

Father O'Malley answers the phone. 'Hello, is this Father O'Malley?'

'It is!'

'This is the IRS. Can you help us?'

'I can!'  

'Do you know a Ted Houlihan?'

 'I do!'

 'Is he a member of your congregation?'

 'He is!'

 'Did he donate $10,000 to the church?'

 'He will.'

Easter Sermon: Believing without seeing

Mark 16:1-8

Believing without Seeing.CV

4/21/19

Imagine a family of mice who lived all their lives in a large piano.  To them in their piano-world came the music of the instrument, filling all the dark spaces with sound and harmony.  At first the mice were impressed by it.  They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was Someone who made the music - though invisible to them - above, yet close to them.  They loved to think of the Great Player whom they could not see.  Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful.  He had found out how the music was made.  Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths which trembled and vibrated.  They must revise all their old beliefs; none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the Unseen Player.  Later, another explorer carried the explanation further.  Hammers were now the secret, numbers of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires.  This was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world.  The Unseen Player came to be thought of as a myth...But the pianist continued to play. -----------------------

In many ways the questions that arise for us in light of the announcement that Jesus is

risen might be the same.  What an amazing story!  It was an incredible experience to hear that  Jesus is risen.  And yet, this story in Mark only leaves us with the concrete observation that the tomb was empty and that a man wearing white said that Jesus was risen.  The gospel of Mark, especially, leaves us with questions and wonder.  Mark’s gospel originally ended with the passage that we just read.  In most of our Bibles we will find an additional passage that was added to Mark’s gospel about 200 years later (and in your Bible you will find that it will confirm this to be a later addition) because Mark’s original gospel with this ending in which Jesus does not appear for the reader left too many questions, left too much unsatisfied and unanswered for the readers.  Our church forefathers were uncomfortable with only the evidence of an empty tomb and the words of a man in white.  So, they added additional stories to the gospel of Mark.  But if we go back to the original Mark, we are only told that Jesus was risen just as the women in Mark were told.  We read that he had gone on ahead, that the women would see Jesus.  But we don’t find an actual story in Mark in which we see Jesus, hear Jesus, or see how he is upon his return.  Mark was the first gospel written.  So, if we put aside what we have heard from the other gospels and just look at this gospel and this story as the ending to the gospel, we are left with many questions.  And we are possibly left with many doubts.  Who was this man in white?  What gives him the authority to say that Jesus was risen?  What does it mean that Jesus was risen?  Is that simply a way of saying his body was stolen from the tomb but the man caught there didn’t want to get into trouble for stealing it?  Would the women be accused of taking the body and what would happen to them?  And then, what if it really was true that he was resurrected?  What would that look like?  How would he come again?  How would he be when he is met again?  Would he be angry that they allowed the crucifixion to happen?  Would he be gentle and loving?  Would he charge his disciples to go and do as he had done in his life and in his death?  Or would he simply comfort them with the promise of life after death and a God who overcomes every evil, even death itself?  In this his return, would he in fact be the military messiah that the Jews expected, turning over the oppressive Roman rule and freeing the people in his immortal and therefore undefeatable state?  Or would he continue to be the Jesus of the gospel, one who ruled by love and truth instead?  The gospel of Mark doesn’t answer these questions for us.  And because of this it is my favorite gospel, and this is my favorite Easter story. 

It is my favorite Easter story because the women and the disciples in the gospel of Mark were brought to the same place that we are brought every Easter.  We, too, do not meet Jesus in the flesh and blood this Easter.  We are told by these stories, just as the women in Mark are told by the man in the white robe that Jesus is risen.  We believe it because for us the Bible carries the same authority and promise that this man in the white robe carried for the women in Mark.  But we cannot prove it and we do not know what that will mean for us this time, this year.  How can we stand by our belief?  How can we live if all that we do and are is based on a belief that has no concrete evidence?  What does this resurrection and our faith in it mean for our lives?

For the women in Mark, the news that their beloved Jesus has not died for eternity but instead was risen, alive, walked among them and would meet them, TERRIFIED them and we read  that they fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone.  I imagine that this is pretty realistic.  If you were told that someone you deeply loved, trusted, worshiped even, who had been brutally murdered was alive and walking around, how would you feel about it?  Would images of “return of the ghouls” and of revenge scenes from murdered corpses echo in your mind?  Knowing who Jesus was, that he was about love and about God, I might instead find myself recounting everything I ever did and fearing that in a time as miraculous as this, I would be called to account for my choices.  Were they good?  Were they good enough?  And as a follower of Jesus, knowing who he was and what he did, to learn that he really was the messiah, the risen one, what does that mean for our future lives?   Honestly, it is a scary thought.  For if Jesus is truly risen, we will have to live our lives differently, just like he said we would.  We will have to be serious in taking care of each other and our world.  We will have to learn to really love our neighbors, and even those we hate or fear, as ourselves.  We will have to live as a people that have been given a new chance at life, and who are called in all we do to care for others as God’s children.

Is it terrifying to hear that Jesus is risen?  Maybe.  But it is also amazing, awesome and glorious.  That is what our faith does for us.  It enters us into a realm of feelings, both terrible and wonderful that propel us forward into life.  As Frederick Buechner says, “Faith is better understood as a verb than as a noun, as a process than as a possession.  It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all.  Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway.  A journey without maps. ...

“ I have faith that my friend is my friend.  It is possible that all his motives are ulterior.  It is possible that what he is secretly drawn to is not me but my wife or my money.  But there’s something about the way I feel when he’s around, about the way he looks me in the eye, about the way we can talk to each other without pretense and be silent together without embarrassment, that makes me willing to put my life in his hands as I do each time I call him friend. 

“I can’t prove the friendship of my friend.  When I experience it, I don’t need to prove it. When I don’t experience it, no proof will do.  If I tried to put his friendship to the test somehow, the test itself would queer the friendship I was testing.  So it is with the Godness of God....”  ----

Just like the women in today’s story, we have not yet seen the risen Christ, but we believe he is risen.  We believe death has been overcome.  We believe in resurrection.  So how do we enter this faithful future, a future that has a risen Jesus in it, without knowing exactly what it will look like?  We have the whole gospel to tell us - Jesus is about love and our call from him is to love the least of these God’s children, God’s people, God’s creation.  It rests on our faith from that point on.  We have faith that living in the resurrection means we are called to give out of compassion fully, and trust that God will bring new and glorious life out of our gifts of compassion.  Once it is out of our hands, we are no longer in charge of it.  But we have faith that God brings life out of death and resurrection out of endings.  We have faith that Jesus walks among the rejected and outcast. We believe Jesus is present in those we would reject and exclude and condemn: the least of these.  We have faith that God’s coming will catch us by surprise and be glorious and wonderful.  And in the end, we have faith that we too will find the Christ walking on ahead of us, waiting to meet us.  We walk by faith, we walk as a people about to meet and see the risen Christ.  For while sometimes it can be hard to believe without seeing, the most important things in life must be believed in order to be seen.