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Splagchnistheis

Mark 1:41-45
Eric Beene
February 12, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

If you have been around here a while, you may have noticed that I don’t often drop Greek words as I am talking about the Bible. Some of my resistance to dropping Greek words in sermons or lessons has to do with the fact that I completed my last class in New Testament Greek about 12 years ago, so my Greek is a bit rusty at best. But I also don’t drop Greek words because I don’t always find it helpful when other people do it. I am keenly aware that sometimes peppering one’s talk with Greek words sounds a bit pretentious, as if the most important thing which could be communicated is not the meaning of the Biblical text, but instead is simply that I have taken some classes in New Testament Greek and you probably have not. But sometimes, lifting out a word in the original language of the gospels is actually helpful in understanding what is going on in the story, and in understanding, too, what is important in the life of faith. In today’s story, there is one such word.

The word comes at the beginning of verse 41. In our English translations here in this sanctuary, the word is translated in three words: “moved with pity.” Other modern English versions translate the same word, “filled with compassion.” So, the translated story goes, “Jesus was moved with pity” for the leper who had come up to him, begging to be healed. In that translation, Jesus seems to look at the man with leprosy with a sadness in his eyes, seeing the man as a vulnerable and helpless victim. It sounds like the way someone would look at anyone who is sick, from a child with a cough that keeps him up all night, to a grown person who has been diagnosed with some dread condition or disease which no one really wants. And others get that same kind of look in our culture: people who have lost their jobs, people whose families are going through a rough time, people who have faced some other devastating loss. I have known plenty of people who are going through such a tough time in their lives who have said they bristle at such pity; it makes them feel all kinds of things about themselves that they do not want to feel, and do not need to feel. Although they appreciate the help people offer, they do not want to be seen as helpless victims. Instead, they seek affirmation of their dignity, and their strengths, and the abilities they have to take care of themselves and their families while dealing with their problems. Pity is a loaded word, but it is the English word which Jesus is saddled with here.

But in the Greek word, there is more to what Jesus was feeling in that moment than simple pity. The Greek word at the beginning of verse 41 is the word that is listed in the bulletin as the title of my sermon this morning, mostly just so you can see it spelled out. And lest you are intimidated by the word written in Greek letters, we are going to say the word together. The word has three syllables. The first is the most complicated: splagch … The second is much easier: nis … the third is also fairly easy: theis . So, say it together with me now: splagch – nis – THEIS. Good; now you can say you have learned something new today.

Naturally, as the English translation that he was “moved with pity” communicates, this is a word filled with emotion. But the emotion is more complicated than that sadness which sees another person as vulnerable and helpless and victimized. There is another element which welled up in Jesus which is communicated in the word “splagchnistheis.” That element is a feeling of being upset which recognizes that things aren’t right with the world because of the condition which the man begging Jesus for healing finds himself in. It has been described by others as a kind of frustration, or even anger. In fact, some of the oldest written versions of the gospel of Mark use a different Greek word here which is more clear; instead of saying that Jesus was “moved with pity” or “filled with compassion,” they use a word that says very clearly that Jesus was “moved with anger.”

Jesus felt sorry for the man, but he also felt angry that the man was in the position he was in. The man had leprosy. According to the Old Testament laws, which we can read in Leviticus 13-14, the priests were supposed to exile anyone who had a skin disease such as leprosy. That person was supposed to be isolated from others. And anyone else who touched a person with leprosy was also considered unclean. The only way that anyone who had been declared unclean for such a skin disease could be called clean again, and restored to full participation in their family’s life and community’s life, would be to show the priest that they were free of the disease, to participate in a ritual which was supervised by the priest, and then be declared by the priest to be once again clean.

So the man was cut off from their family and friends, forced to live outside the village, and not allowed to come into the synagogue or the marketplace. Notice he didn’t come to Jesus in the middle of a town or village; he came up to him while he was out in the open countryside. And the man didn’t dare to reach out his hand or make any other move to touch Jesus; instead, he just called out to him, begging for Jesus to claim the authority to say that he was clean. No one else had tried to help this man. No one had cleaned him up or put any kind of salve on his wounds. No one had tried to help him be restored to the community: not his family, not his neighbors, and not even the priest. The local priest was the only one who could have changed the fact of this man’s isolation and loneliness, his discomfort and his pain, by examining him, and advising him, and when he was ready, by leading him through the rituals to be made clean again. But that priest was a part of a system that was set up only to condemn the man, to isolate him, and to refuse him any hint of dignity or ability to contribute to the life of his family or community.

All of these facts of this man’s condition were fueling Jesus’ feelings when the man came up to him begging that Jesus make him clean. And Jesus did not just look at the man like we look at a child who is up all night coughing. Jesus was stirred by an anger deep in his soul, an anger which was directed toward the systems which kept the man isolated and helpless.

And so, he reached out his hand and touched the man. And in that act of touch, he did so much more than simply taking away the man’s skin condition. He broke all of those systems which were set up in God’s name to condemn the man. He broke the power of the priest to grant or deny the man the label of “clean.” He broke the power of the law to force the man to be isolated from his family and his community. He broke the power of the tradition to ignore him or look away from him or to do anything to pretend that he was just not there, he was not loveable, he was not able to contribute to the care of himself, his family, and his community, he was not a child of God.

After he reached out and touched the man, breaking through all of those barriers that had been imposed on him by well-meaning, pious folks, Mark tells us that Jesus spoke sternly to the man and told him something which has baffled people ever since: “…say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.” But there is a compelling idea out there that the sternness in Jesus’ tone was not directed at the man he had just touched. Instead, Jesus was speaking sternly because of the people who upheld the systems that had aroused the strong feelings which are communicated in the word, “splagch-nis-THEIS.” Jesus spoke sternly because he was indignant toward the priests who were supposedly representing the will of God. Jesus did not touch that man because he wanted to be known throughout the countryside as a healer, or to be raised up as a hero in the situation. He touched the man because he wanted to confront those systems that kept the man unclean, and condemned, and isolated, and lacking in dignity.

So what is so important about all that is communicated in the word splagch-nis-THEIS? And what does it mean that Jesus himself felt such a strong emotion: not simply feeling pity, which looks at someone only as vulnerable and helpless, but splagch-nis-THEIS, seeing that he was caught up in a system that wrongfully condemned and isolated people? What are we to learn about our own systems which help good, pious folks pretend that some people aren’t there, and some people aren’t loveable, and some people aren’t able to contribute, and some people aren’t fully a child of God? And what are we supposed to do with our own emotions when we encounter such a person and such a system?

I don’t know. Because sometimes the people that come begging to me are hard for me to understand and hard for me to love. Sometimes it is easier to simply pity people: to look at them sadly, to consider them helpless, to let their vulnerability define who they are in relation to me, and to ignore their potential to care for themselves and contribute to their families, their community, and the kingdom of God. Sometimes the risk can seem really high, and my fear that I will be deemed unclean myself is too much for me to consider. Sometimes I know that I cannot get angry at every system which isolates or condemns or otherwise mistreats people because that anger would become overwhelming, and if I really let myself feel it, I am not sure I would have enough energy left to be able to get out of bed in the mornings.

But I do know what Jesus did with everything that is communicated in the word “splagch-nis-THEIS.” He reached out his hand, and he touched the man. He chose to break the power of the law and the tradition and the systems that were set up in God’s name to condemn and isolate. He broke through all the barriers which were set up by well-meaning, pious people, and he spoke a testimony against the crux of the problem.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can consider Jesus’ action, and we can consider how we are supposed to act, too. Jesus let himself splagch-nis-THEIS, to be moved not only with pity but also with frustration and anger at the systems. And Jesus let his feelings move him to act: to reach out with a simple, defiant, risky, compassionate human touch, and to break all kinds of rules and barriers, to welcome the man as a child of God. That man remained in that village as a witness against all of the traditions and customs sanctioned by the religious folks because of what Jesus felt, and what Jesus did with his feelings.

May we be so moved. Amen.

Selective Hearing?

Isaiah 40:21-31
Eric Beene
February 5, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

One person whose comments I read this week on this passage from Isaiah says that he wonders if we suffer from theological amnesia. Have we forgotten everything we know about God? It would make sense. We don’t talk about God in our daily lives much. We can tell you an awful lot about the strategies likely to be used by the two coaches whose teams will play in the Super Bowl tonight, or even about the personal lives of the two quarterbacks. We know all of this stuff because it is what we are surrounded by all the time: at work, at home, in the media, even in the grocery store, where displays of goal posts are surrounded by piles of chips and salsa. It is easy to forget God amid all of that salsa.

That commentator’s question was meant to provoke us to reflect on our own spiritual lives, but it comes out of what Isaiah said to the people around him in his time and place. They really did suffer from theological amnesia, and for good reason. The people of God were in their time of exile in Babylon. A generation before, they had been forced to leave their homes, their land, their work, and their temple and live in a foreign land. They were spread out among people they didn’t know who lived with different customs, spoke different languages, and worshipped different gods. Specifically, they worshipped various gods who they believed created the world, or who ruled various parts of the earth and heavens: the seasons, the stars, the movement of the sun and moon, and all kinds of other parts of the way the world works.

As the people were forced to stay year in and year out in their exile in Babylon, they would have forgotten more and more about their lives before they were forced to leave their homes. Sure, they would have told each other stories to remind them about their own customs, their own traditions, and their own faith, but their everyday lives were not lived with people who cared very much about their ways at home, and they probably didn’t talk about God very much. And over time, just as they forgot more about their lives at home, they would have gone deeper into a place of hopelessness. It would have seemed like they were never going to get back to their own origins, their own homes and land, their own ways of doing things, and their own ways of seeing the world. It would have seemed like they were abandoned to live forever in their exile in that foreign land.

Along came the prophet Isaiah, and he had a job to do among those people who were a long way from home. His job was to offer them comfort; that is the command he received from God at the beginning of verse 40: “Comfort, O Comfort my people, says your God.” But mostly, his job was to keep them from giving up hope.

And the way he did that was by railing against idolatry. I know that might not be the strategy I would choose to comfort the people and keep them from giving up hope, but in many ways, it made sense. The strongest tools which the prophet had for encouraging the people were the stories of their past. Those stories could remind the people what made them different from their Babylonian neighbors, and more importantly, they could remind the people of all the ways their God had saved them before. If the people remembered what made them different, and what allowed them to be saved in the past, then they would remember what made them different and what could save them in their own present time. The antidote to their amnesia was to remind them of the past; the antidote to their hopelessness was to remind them of what had given them hope before.

So, Isaiah launched into a diatribe to provoke their memories. He started with some questions; while they might have sounded a bit condescending, they certainly would have gotten the attention of the people: “Have you not known? Have you not heard?” The answer, of course, was supposed to be “Yes.” “Yes, we have known; yes, we have heard; yes, there are stories which have been told to us our whole lives, and in fact, those same stories have been passed down to us from the very beginning of the world.” Those stories are about the place of God and the place of humans in God’s creation. They are stories which proclaim as true some things which fly in the face of these Babylonians: their gods did not fight with each other and somehow make the world in the process, as their stories say they did; our one God singularly created the world out of nothing at all. And their stories about how the stars came to be in the heavens, and how the sun travels across the sky, and how the moon rises and sets, none of those can be true, because our God “brings out” all of the heavenly bodies “and numbers them, calling them all by name,” and thus claiming some power over them, like the power of a parent to name his or her child.

And, Isaiah’s logic goes, if our God created the world, and our God rules over the world, then their kings and generals and other rulers certainly do not have the last say about how the world will be run. Our God, Isaiah reminds the people, “brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” Our God has the last say, and so our God will be the One to deliver us.

And so, Isaiah asked those exiled people of God who were suffering from amnesia and losing hope one more time, “have you not known? Have you not heard?” And he told them what they needed to hear, not only to remember the past, but also to understand the present and have hope for the future: “The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable.” And then, Isaiah launches into some words which just jump off of the page in the ways they can comfort and inspire us: “he gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless…those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Isaiah wrote these words to people who were suffering a theological amnesia; they had forgotten what they knew about God, and so they had begun to lose hope. But I wonder if we are in the same place. Is our problem really theological amnesia? Maybe it is; after all, we know how easy it is to forget about God amid all of that salsa. But I wonder if there is something more to it than simply forgetting. I wonder if, instead, our problem is more of a theological selective hearing.

We hear these last two or three verses of what Isaiah has to say to the exiles, and we are touched by them. And rightfully so; they are encouraging on those days when we are feeling weary, and faint, and powerless, and like we could really use renewal of our strength. And so we remember those words, and we might even hum one of the songs that include them in our heads. But those songs drown all of those other words which Isaiah is trying to say to us.

If what we take away from this is that God will strengthen us, and God will renew us, and God will make us run when we can barely put one foot in front of the other, then we have made this passage all about us. It starts to sound like we are the whole point, and even, perhaps, like God’s whole purpose and existence is to benefit us.

And that, my friends, is why I am not sure our problem is so much amnesia, but selective hearing. This passage is not about us; it is all about God. It is all about the ways God has acted in the past, long before we ever came along. And it is about how God controls the present, where there are a lot of things going on which are not about us, and God controls the future, too, when we will be long gone from this life.

What does it mean that God is the Creator of the ends of the earth? It means that we are not the creator of the earth, and while we can be creative, building things of great beauty and usefulness, we are only using gifts we have received, and we cannot take full credit. What does it mean that God has made the stars, and numbered them, and called them by name? It means that we cannot pretend that we can hide from God, or pretend that any of the things we do, or any of the reasons we do them, are not seen by God. What does it mean that God “brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing?” It means that all of our wranglings over which candidate is the best, or which issue is the most important, or which strategy for winning the election is the most effective, are not where the answers to our world’s problems lie.

When we affirm God’s strength, we must also affirm our weakness. When we affirm God’s role as Creator, we must also affirm that we are the original source of anything which is worthy of praise. When we affirm God’s power, we must also affirm the silliness of our efforts to try to wrest power away from the other party, or the other candidate, or the other side of any particular issue.

Once we make those affirmations, then we have really heard what our faith has told us. We can overcome our amnesia, if that is our problem, or we can open our ears, if we are suffering from selective hearing. We can look past ourselves and our own self-centeredness to see the beauty of what Isaiah affirms through eyes filled with wonder. God alone is strong, God alone is powerful, and God alone is the Creator of the world and everything in it. Yet that God is not aloof; that God renews those who see that their future is in God alone. The power of God is the source of our hope, and the content of our hope is only found in hearing the whole truth of God.

People of God, have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God! Praise be to that which is everlasting!

Amen.

They Left Their Nets

Mark 1:14-20
Eric Beene
January 29, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Most of you know that I have learned a whole lot more about parenting in the past five years than I had ever known before. One thing I learned early on is the value of distraction. When baby is doing something you do not want him or her to do, you don’t start by scolding and punishing and taking things away. Instead, you distract baby with something else so she stops doing whatever you do not want her to do. For instance, in a situation that most modern parents will recognize, when little Jimmy gets a hold of your cell phone and starts dialing Uzbekistan, you find a favorite toy, you start playing a game of “pattycake,” or you sing a song to get the sweet child’s attention off of the cell phone and onto something more age appropriate. Then, after the child is engrossed in that toy or activity, you can quietly hang up the cell phone, put it away, and make a mental note to look closely at your next bill to make sure you are not going to have to drain the college fund to pay Verizon.

Mind you, I am talking in the abstract here; nothing like that has ever happened to me personally.

The advantage of such a strategy is that the incident, ideally, does not end with the child screaming bloody murder. You do not actually have to take anything away from the child until long after she or he loses interest in it. After all, no one likes to have something that they are interested in taken away from them, right?

People who talk about change in organizations say the same thing. If you are in a position of leadership in any kind of organization, business, government, or other group of people and you want things to change in some way or another, you are better off if you do not try to take things away from people. Instead, you add something new, and if it satisfies your constituents’ needs, you will have created change. For instance, in a business, if you want to introduce a new product, you do not do so by first removing the old product; anyone who remembers the whole kerfluffle over New Coke in the 1980s will know what I am talking about. The Coca-Cola Company wanted to change the way they made their product, so they eliminated the old product and introduced the new one. They only satisfied their loyal customers, however, when they brought back the old product, calling it “Coke Classic,” and marketed it alongside the new product. People don’t like to have something they like taken away from them, right?

The same thing is true in churches. People are more willing to accept something new in their church if they do not feel like the parts of their faith community which they love have been taken away from them. For instance, churches who introduce new, “contemporary” worship services to reach out to people who are not currently in church are much more likely to succeed if they do them in addition to, not instead of, their traditional services. If you want to start a new mission program, you do not start by ending a program that has been going on for years which people are committed to. If you want to establish a tradition of a new, annual fellowship event, you should make sure you continue doing all of the same annual fellowship events you have done in the past. No one likes to have something meaningful taken away from them.

Thinking of all these ideas about parenting and change in organizations, there was something that came screaming off of the page when I read this scripture lesson this week. As we just read, Jesus started his ministry by proclaiming that there was something new going on. “The kingdom of God has come near!” he declared. Jesus’ followers have been trying for 2,000 years or so to figure out exactly what he meant by that, so I have little doubt that the people who first heard him say it did not understand right away. But he went on with more specific instructions: “repent, and believe in the good news.”

Jesus established that something new was happening, and he told people they were invited to be a part of it. All of this sounds just fine so far. But then, right away, he had to illustrate exactly what he was asking people to do. He went walking one day along the Sea of Galilee and called out to a couple of folks there. “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” Later, he called some others, presumably with some similar words. While the exact meaning of “fishing for people” is far from clear to me, it is clear that Jesus did not just have some announcement about a cosmic change that was simply going to happen to people. He was asking people to become a part of that change.

None of that is a surprise; it is one of those stories that some of us have been hearing since we were little children. But I see anew that what Jesus was asking of those fishermen was remarkable. Mark tells us that those first two fishermen to whom Jesus spoke “immediately…left their nets and followed him.” And he says that those next two fishermen “left their father Zebedee in the boat…and followed him.” All four of them immediately, without hesitation and without regret, gave up things that were profoundly meaningful to them.

I am not sure we can underestimate just how important these things which Jesus was taking away from them were. Fishing was their livelihood. They could not support themselves without their nets; their only other choice was to become dependent on someone else. And no man in their culture would voluntarily put himself in a position to be dependent like that. Sure, the Bible is full of people who had physical or mental or emotional difficulties that made them dependent on others. But their lives were miserable. And even those who were dependent usually could only really depend on their fathers. So when those fishermen left not only their nets, but also their father, they were not just making a career move; they were abandoning anything they could depend on.

Those fishermen’s nets and father were profoundly meaningful to them. And yet, by calling them to change and follow him, Jesus was taking those meaningful parts of their lives away from them. Those who know anything about strategies for change would never do such a thing. And sure, you could say that they gave them up voluntarily, but I am not so sure. Jesus was offering them something new, but in the way he offered that invitation to those fishermen, he was also taking something away from them. They could not remain with their nets and follow Jesus at the same time; they could not hold onto their partnership with their father and respond to Jesus’ call.

And I wonder what that means for us. When we accept the call of Jesus, do some things get taken away from us? Sure, there are some things that we are not supposed to do as followers of Jesus, like all those things prohibited by the 10 commandments, or like holding onto anger instead of offering forgiveness, or like coming to worship instead of hanging out in our pajamas on a Sunday morning. But most of those things are really not meaningful to us. Most of those things are, in fact, bad for us, and we know it, so it is not hard to give them up.

But maybe some other things are taken away from us. Maybe our relationship with Christ is not like our relationship with the company that makes our favorite soft drinks, and we can’t expect that we will get our Coke Classic back when things don’t taste just like they used to. Maybe our relationship with Christ is not even like our relationship with the church, or at least the way our relationship has typically played out. Maybe when something is not like it used to be, we don’t just get to complain and stomp around and make a fuss and say we’re just going to leave if things don’t go our way. Maybe we don’t get to demand that we make all the choices. Maybe we have to be ready to give up some things that we think are important, and things we have always held onto tightly, and things that make us independent and self-sufficient and respected by others.

All of that seems on the face of it like bad news. But do you remember what Jesus was doing when he called those disciples to change, then started taking things that were meaningful to them away from them? Jesus started the whole enterprise by saying, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near.” The people did not know what he was talking about, but he was assuring them that whatever that kingdom is, it is more than what they have now. And that was the point. If they were willing to trust God, then they could be a part of something more than they had ever known is possible before. Something more glorious than could be put into words was coming near. Something more lovely than they had ever experienced was at hand. Something that was promised from the very beginning, the full potential of the world as God created it to be, was finally going to be fulfilled. And they could be a part of it.

If we are going to follow Jesus, maybe we have to be willing to be changed, not just to change because it is convenient or pleasant for us, but to be changed into something we haven’t been before. And maybe that is not bad news. In fact, if we are really willing to trust the One who is calling us to be changed, then it is the best news we could ever hear. Because it means that we, too, can be a part of that glorious, lovely, promised potential of the world as God wants it to be, if we are willing to give up our independence and our control and a whole lot of other things that we have made so meaningful in our lives.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can be willing do something that the experts don’t think we are willing to do. My prayer is that we can be willing to change, even if it means something is going to be taken away from us. My prayer is that we can treat our relationship with Christ differently than we see our relationships with businesses and organizations, where we get to demand whatever we want and never let it be taken away from us. My prayer is that we can trust God, and embrace the Kingdom of God, and participate in all its glory and love and promise as it comes near to us.

Amen.

A Second Time

Jonah 3:1-10

Eric Beene

January 22, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Today’s scripture lesson might lead us to a sermon about all that we can achieve when we follow God’s call. The story we have in front of us is really rather simple. God told Jonah to do something specific: “Get up, go to Nineveh,…and proclaim to it the message that I give to you.” So, Jonah went, and he delivered the message. And the people of Nineveh changed their ways so that they began to live as God wanted them to live. On the face of it, we could say that Jonah is the best evangelist in history, and his success was simply due to the fact that, when God told him to do something, he followed God’s call. “And,” the sermon would wrap up, with a flourishing finish, “if we would do just like Jonah, then we, too, would be successful in accomplishing God’s work.” It would be beautiful and uplifting, inspiring and relevant, just like everyone always says a sermon should be.

It would be one of those sermons which draw on a great tradition of Biblical heroes: Abraham, who followed when God told him to leave his homeland, and Moses, who stood by that burning bush as God told him to save the Hebrew slaves from evil Pharaoh’s oppressive system. It would evoke God’s conversation with Samuel, which those of you were here last week heard all about, when God spoke Samuel’s name in the middle of the night. It could even draw on the disciples who accepted Jesus’ invitation to follow, or on Paul, who was struck blind on his way to Damascus while God detailed the work which God wanted Paul to do. There is a fine tradition in the Bible of God calling individuals, and those individuals responding to do important work for God. And this sermon about Jonah could be yet another inspiring message about that Biblical tradition of following God’s call.

There would be one problem with that sermon, though: it would be a lie. More specifically, such a sermon could only be preached if we leave out an important detail of this story we just read. In the opening line of the story, the writer says, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time…” And that tells us that our sermon will not be complete unless we know something more about what happened the first time the word of the Lord came to Jonah.

The first time the word of the Lord came to Jonah is a story filled with a bit less inspiration and nobility. The first time the word of the Lord came to Jonah, the Lord told Jonah to do almost exactly the same thing that the Lord told him to do the second time. “Go at once to Nineveh,” the word of the Lord spoke that first time to Jonah, “…and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” God was quite clear about what Jonah had to do.

Jonah knew what to do, but he did just the opposite. After God spoke that first time, Jonah went down to the coast and hopped on the next boat to Tarshish. Now, that may not mean much to you until I explain to you that Nineveh was to the east of Israel; in fact, it is across the river from Mosul in the northern part of modern day Iraq, which for a time was a center of the recent, bloody war in that country. Tarshish, on the other hand, was probably somewhere near the southern part of modern-day Spain. Basically what Jonah did was to look on a map, to see where God was sending him, and then to head as quickly as possible to the opposite end of the known world.

Why did he flee? Because the work was unpleasant. Nineveh was a big city, it was an important city, it was a wealthy city, and it was the capital of the Assyrian empire. The Assyrian Empire was the enemy of God’s people, and they were forever threatening and attacking and taking land from the Israelites. So Jonah headed for Spain instead of Iraq because God told him to go to a place that no Israelite would want to go: a place filled with foreigners, with enemies, with people who didn’t think or speak or believe like Jonah and his people thought and spoke and believed. And God told him he actually had to speak directly to the people there, and who wants to speak directly to their enemies? And the news he had to deliver to the people was not good news: God was angry with the people of Nineveh, and God was going to punish them. No one wants to deliver bad news, particularly to people who are going to steal their land. Jonah had plenty of reasons to run the other way from the work God had for him to do.

Jonah ran the other way. And I have always wondered what was really going through his mind. I suppose it is possible that he really thought he could get away from God. If I just go far enough, he might have thought, then I will get lost in the crowd, and after a while, God will stop looking for me, and stop hounding me, and just leave me alone. There is a logic to that; I know a lot of people who spend whole periods of their life wishing that God would just go away and leave them alone, because frankly, life would be a lot more simple that way. But I also like to think that Jonah knew better.

Anyway, whether it was a real belief on Jonah’s part that he would be able to escape from God, or if it was just a wish that he was willing to act on, Jonah ended up on the high seas, sailing in the direction opposite that of Nineveh and the message he had to deliver to its people. And many of us know what happened next, because it is the stuff of Sunday School lessons and church camp songs. A great storm arose, and it battered the boat Jonah was sailing on. And even if Jonah had thought that he could get away from God, both he and his fellow sailors soon realized he couldn’t. The source of the battering storm was traced back to Jonah and his attempts to run away from God. Jonah himself insisted that the crew of the ship needed to throw him overboard in order to escape doom in the storm, and they went along with his plan, happy to try anything that would save them. Jonah ended up in the belly of a big fish, the story goes, which was provided by God to protect Jonah, and he stayed there for three days and three nights.

Then, and only then, did the word of the Lord come to Jonah a second time. This time, as we read a few minutes ago, Jonah did what God called him to do. He made the unpleasant journey, he encountered the enemy people, and he told them the bad news. And he was far more successful than anyone could have imagined. The people listened. The enemy king declared a national repentance. Even the livestock were to be dressed in sackcloth, and fast, and cry out for forgiveness from God. More importantly, everyone in that horrible city was supposed to “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.” The plan worked! Jonah was successful! The enemies of God’s people repented, and their change of heart was so complete and so sincere that God forgave them!

I think we would all like to believe that we are like those Biblical heroes who hear God’s voice and immediately follow God’s calling. We would rather be like Abraham or Moses or Samuel or Peter or Paul, who see a blinding light, listen to their burning bushes, respond to their name being spoken, drop their nets, and move their households to some place they have never been before. But I am glad those are not the only people called in the Bible. Because we are probably more like Jonah.

Most of us don’t really have personal enemies, but if God spoke to you today, and told you to speak to that person who just seems to make life rough for you all the time, would you run straight for his or her house, or would you try to put that job off as long as possible? If God told you that you had to be the one to warn someone, even someone you love, that their way of living is going to destroy them, would you get that message to them right away, or would you find an excuse to put it off? If God told you to head straight for Mosul, Iraq, because you have the power to bring about reconciliation in one of the most violent parts of the world, would you go? Or would you book yourself on the next cruise to the Hawaiian Islands, literally on the other side of the earth from where God was calling you, because you think you have done your time, you have worked hard in the past, and you think that where God is telling you to go is not where someone in your place in life ought to be spending their vacation?

The good news of Jonah is that God calls us to participate in God’s work, and God doesn’t give up on us. God doesn’t let us get lost in the crowd, and God doesn’t just leave us alone. We might think that life would be a lot simpler if God would leave us alone, and we may be right. But by the grace of God, that is not the way God works. We are never left alone; we are called again and again to do the work which will help bring the word of God to whoever God needs to hear it.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can be inspired by this story of a person who was called by God, and who got it right the second time. My prayer is that we can recognize that God doesn’t give up, and God doesn’t just leave us alone. My prayer is that we can succeed in doing what God calls us to do. Mostly, my prayer is that we can be willing to go to wherever God sends us, if not the first time, then certainly the second time.

Amen.

Here I Am

1 Samuel 3:1-11

Eric Beene

January 15, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

There is a bit of information at the beginning of this passage of scripture we just read which probably seemed inconsequential to the person who first wrote this story down. Among the background information about Samuel, the work he was doing, and who his boss was at the time, we have this sentence in verse 1: “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”

It seems like an inconsequential piece of information, casually mentioned as a part of the background. But to me, it speaks volumes about what actually happened when God called out Samuel’s name in order to let the boy know that God had work for him to do.

The fact that the word of the Lord was rare at that time speaks volumes to me because I think so many of us understand what that means. We read these stories in the Bible, and they seem so foreign to us. God is speaking all the time to people in the Bible. All the way from Adam and Eve’s first evening stroll through the orchard, through the sagas of Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and Moses and on and on, God is telling people left and right exactly what they should do, how they should do it, and what will be the result if they fail to do it just as God commanded.

There is a certainty in these Bible stories. Everyone seems to know exactly what God wants them to do. Even those who do not do as God would have them do are making a conscious choice. They are not acting out of ignorance; they all seem to have heard God speak to them, and they choose to ignore or disobey God.

By pointing out that there was a time when the word of God was rare, and visions were not widespread, this storyteller might help us understand our perceptions of our own time. Because I would imagine that, for many of us, it seems like right now is a time when the word of God is rare. Oh, sure, there are plenty of people who are willing to speak for God right now, and tell us all exactly what kind of behaviors God likes, and what kind of people God doesn’t like, and which political party we should vote for to avoid the wrath of God on our country.

But beyond the blatantly self-serving political interests, we recognize our time is a very complicated time. Issues come up that earlier generations never had to deal with. People are talking about things that have never been talked about before, at least not in public. The economy seems both more powerful and more fragile than it has ever been before. New gadgets and new sources of information and new ways of doing everyday tasks seem to be taking over, and as soon as someone develops something new, they seem to take away the old things that have been working quite well for us, thank you very much.

And with everything changing around us, it is hard not to think that there used to be a time when things were so much clearer. The answers about the way things ought to be were clear to everyone. Maybe to some that time of clarity was an earlier decade; say, the 1950s, for instance. For some, it wasn’t a time as much as a place; things seemed so much easier to understand, and what we needed to do about them seemed so much clearer, in the small town, or surrounded by the simple farm life, or living among the neat, ordered, well-manicured lawns of the suburbs. That was where everyone knew how to behave, and everyone knew how to speak, and everything was just taken care of, without all the questions and fuss we have here and now. Back then, there was certainty and clarity; everyone knew the word of the Lord, and everyone shared a vision for God’s will, and no one was out trying to question or change it.

And back then, too, you didn’t know anyone who actually had cancer. And in that place, everyone around us had a stable, steady job that lasted until retirement, and then a pension to take care of them beyond that. And no one ever had any problems getting along with their spouses or their children, at least that they would let anyone else see. And no one got under water on their mortgage. And everyone knew exactly which school to send their kids to. And parents always took good care of their children, and children never had to figure out how to care for their parents.

Our nostalgia for a simpler place and a simpler time, for clarity and certainty, makes it even more apparent that this is not a time like that. Now, we are surrounded by noise and fog, and it is hard to figure out just what to do. Like in the time of Samuel, the word of the Lord seems rare in these days, and visions of what God wants for us and for our world are not widespread.

Our story says that the word of the Lord was rare in those days, and visions were not widespread. Then, one night, Samuel thought he heard something. So, he got up, he went in to his teacher, and he said, “Here I am, for you called me!” It might seem odd: he was a boy sent to serve in the holiest of all places. So, if he heard a voice in the night calling his name, we might think he would know it was the Lord who was calling. But the word of the Lord was rare in those days, and Samuel had a job to do, and he had a responsibility to pay attention to his teacher, and anyway, Eli was the only person around who had ever spoken his name before. I imagine Samuel was just doing what was normal to him; he had probably been awakened in the night by his teacher before.

But, of course, it wasn’t Eli who had spoken Samuel’s name, so the old man sent his student back to bed. This happened twice more, and finally, Eli got it. He realized that God was the one doing the speaking. So the teacher told his student what to do. You have to go back, he said. Go back to that place of silence, and wait, and listen again. And if you hear the voice again, then don’t do what you usually do, and don’t expect what usually happens, and don’t rush away. Just be ready to listen, and to serve.

The word of the Lord was rare in those days, and visions were not widespread, but that didn’t mean God didn’t have work to be done, and it didn’t mean God didn’t speak, either. It only meant that folks didn’t know what they were hearing when God spoke their name. It only meant that they had to sit in silence, and wait, and listen again and again. It only meant they had to recognize the unexpected as it happened, and to resist the urge to do what they always did. It only meant they had to be ready to listen and to serve.

So we come back to our own time, when it seems like all we have around us is noise and fog, and when we are searching, maybe more than ever, for the word of the Lord to be spoken, and the vision of what God wants for us to be shown. Maybe the problem is not that God never speaks. Maybe the problem is that we don’t know what we are listening for. Maybe we just keep doing what we always do. Maybe we just keep expecting what usually happens. Maybe we rush away too quickly. Maybe we even contribute to the noise and fog.

Maybe we just need to sit in silence for a while. Maybe we need to tune out the political pundits, and the talking heads on TV, and the noise of the newspaper, and the constant flashing of the internet. Maybe we need to wait. Maybe we need to resist the urge to stay busy all the time, and to rush from one project to the next, and to see ourselves as valuable only because of what we can do. Maybe we need to listen, again and again. Maybe we need to pause in our constant telling God what we want, and what would make us happy, and even what God could do to keep us from worrying. Maybe we need to recognize that such listening is not a task we can do one time, but rather a skill we can cultivate, like practicing the piano or riding a bike.

Once Samuel heard Eli’s instructions, he went back to his room, and he sat in silence, and he waited, and he listened. And he heard his name again, “Samuel, Samuel.” And when he heard it, I imagine he took a deep breath, because he knew something was going to happen which would change his life, because something big usually happens when God speaks. He drew up his confidence, he remembered what his teacher had told him, and he said, maybe boldly and maybe hesitantly, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” Then the Lord spoke again, “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.” The Lord was speaking, and anyone who was quiet and waiting and listening could hear something that would dazzle them.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can likewise wait for the word of the Lord. My prayer is that we can avoid the temptation to rush away, and to expect the usual, and to do things just like we always do. My prayer is that we can sit in silence, and wait, and listen, again and again. My prayer is that we may see the visions God has to offer us, and that we can hear things which will make both ears tingle, as God speaks our names, and we respond, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

Amen.

Reflection for Baptism of the Lord

Mark 1:4-11 and Ezekiel 47:1-12

Eric Beene

January 8, 2012

The vision Ezekiel has for the restoration of God’s people involves a river. The river he describes flows all over the land. It rushes down the Jordan River valley, the same Jordan River where Jesus was baptized 500 or so years later. It changes the brackish water of the Dead Sea, which cannot do much to support human life or agriculture in the arid desert. That water is transformed into fresh water, where fishers can fish, where all kinds of trees can grow and offer their abundant fruit for food, where people who are thirsty can just get a drink. But it doesn’t change the marshes around the Sea; those are needed for salt. Take heart, Ezekiel tells God’s people in describing this vision of a river; God is in charge, and not only will our time of exile end, but because it is our God who will restore us, everything will be more glorious than you can imagine.

And those waters which flow to restore God’s land and God’s people do not just gush up from nowhere. They come from the temple. They gurgle and bubble up from under the thresholds; they seem to come from the foundations itself. They flow from under the temple bigger and faster, until they are enough to cover the whole world, deeper and deeper, until you can’t even stand up in them. These waters are God’s waters; they come from the house of God, and they restore the people of God.

I have loved this vision of the restoration of the world, through the waters which flow from the font of God’s own temple, ever since I first studied them several years ago. There are a lot of things to learn from this vision of how God uses water to restore the world. But I particularly love these words as we remember baptism, both Jesus’ baptism and the gift of baptism to the church.

In our church, we keep the waters of baptism in that bowl over there. We want to have the water here to mark the forehead of the person being baptized, just enough to let them know that something important has happened, but not enough to make a mess. We want to contain the water, so that it is orderly, and doesn’t stain the carpet. On one level, there is nothing wrong with our efforts to keep the water under control as we use it in this sanctuary. But in reality, we have to acknowledge that is not the way God works with water.

That water, if it is really here to signify God’s water, cannot be contained by that bowl. God’s water bubbles up, as if it is coming out from the foundation. God’s water flows freely, like a river running down the mountain. God’s water spills all over the place: all over the carpet, all over the furniture, all over the bread and the cup over there, all over each and every one of us who receives that gift of God’s restoration. God’s water gets us all wet: when we wade through the water of God’s restoration, we look down, and we find our ankles getting wet, and then our knees getting wet, and then our waists getting wet, and then we find that we are in it so deep that we can’t stand on the bottom, but we can only swim in it.

And this vision teaches us, too, that God’s water doesn’t just stay in this building. God’s water flows, starting from the font but washing right out of here, and sweeping us away with it. When we receive the gift of God’s water in baptism, God’s people roll from that font over there right out into the world, testifying with our whole lives to the depth of God’s love and the power of God’s healing and the nourishment of God’s power and the freshness of God’s new life.

God’s water cannot be tamed, or made neat, or contained. God’s water is messy, it is abundant, and it is overwhelming. But it is the only kind of water which can really restore this brackish, dry, and desolate world. And that is the water, God’s water, which is offered to us as a gift in that bowl over there, and if we receive that water well, it will wash us all away from here.

I pray that we can remember what God’s water does. I pray that we can be touched by such water in this place, and I pray we can feel ourselves washed into the world to be a part of God’s restoration. I pray that we can experience God’s water.

Dedication

Luke 2:22-40

Eric Beene

January 1, 2011

Since we have this, um, unique opportunity this year in which both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day land on Sundays, I spent some time this week looking at how Christians have celebrated the New Year in worship. By far the most common answer traces back to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. In his understanding, we, as Christians, are called by God to continue to work to become more perfect people through the course of our lives. To do that, part of the church’s role is to provide accountability for people: to challenge each of us to ask ourselves how we have been making progress on that goal of becoming more and more Christ-like. In Wesley’s church, small groups of church members were supposed to meet regularly to hold each other accountable for their progress in spiritual improvement.

And so, it was natural for John Wesley to encourage the folks in his churches to re-commit themselves sometimes to their attempts to become closer and closer to perfect. So, he came up with a liturgy for what he called a Covenant Renewal Service. The service Wesley designed was centered around a renewal of the believer’s covenant with God: a complete dedication to living as God would have the person live. Such a service could happen at any time of the year; in fact, the first one was probably held on a Monday evening in London in early August of 1755. However, over time, many of the Methodists started to think it would be good to have such a service around the beginning of the new year, probably because that is a time when many folks are examining their lives and making new commitments. If people are so willing to make resolutions to improve the health of their bodies, minds, or relationships, then why not re-connect with practices that improve the health of our spirits, too? So, they began to schedule their covenant renewal services for either the last or the first Sunday of the year.

Over time, for a variety of reasons, the practice of covenant renewal services faded from the Methodist tradition. However, the climactic prayer from Wesley’s original service is still in the United Methodist hymnal, and it remains an important devotional tool for many Methodists. The words of that prayer are pasted at the end of this sermon.

I was struck when I came across this prayer this week. Before I actually read it, I only knew Wesley had a famous prayer for the New Year, and I started looking for it so we could say that prayer together as a unison prayer today sometime in our worship service. But when I read the prayer, I realized I was not prepared for it. This is the sort of prayer that one should not pray casually, just following along with the words as they are printed in the bulletin, like we do with our Call to Worship or our Prayer of Confession each Sunday. Those words are powerful, too, but we are used to the kinds of things they say, so they do not always have the kind of impact they might. The words of the Covenant Renewal prayer, though, are powerful words. They are words which express a faith in God, and a trust in God, and a surrender to God, which I think few of us are really ready to embrace.

Most of the time, many of us pray to God to make things better for us. We pray for an end to our sickness, or for healing in our bodies, for instance. Or, we might pray for healing for another person, or for someone who is going through a really rough time. Sometimes, we might even pray for God to guide us: to show us what to do in a particular situation, or to let us know how to guide someone else so that they will have a better life. All of those are good things to pray for. Such prayers show that we trust God: that we know God has the power as well as the will to heal us or the people we love, and we know that God has the wisdom to guide us and our loved ones.

But the Covenant Prayer is not that kind of prayer. The Covenant Prayer takes trust in God a few steps further. It is a prayer of complete surrender. It expresses a commitment that God gets to be in charge of our life, which means that we no longer will ask for anything we want. Instead, we will only want what God wants. Therefore, it does not ask that God make things better; in fact, it acknowledges that God might need to make things worse for us. When we are led by this prayer, we don’t simply pray that we would be full; we also pray that we would be empty, if that is God’s will for us. We do not pray that we will have the things we want; we pray that we would have nothing if that is what it would take to completely belong to God. We do not even pray that we would do meaningful work for God; instead, we pray, “let me be employed for Thee, or laid aside for Thee,” acknowledging that a prayer for meaningful work still has some degree of self-interest at its heart. “I am no longer my own, but Thine;” those are powerful words, and the Covenant Prayer does not dance around their power.

Those words evoke the story what Mary and Joseph went through as they presented their baby in the temple for the rituals appropriate for a first-born son. The holy parents were simply following the prescriptions of the law in dedicating their son. All the way back to the time of Moses, the people of God were told to remember the way God saved them from their lives of slavery by striking down the first-born sons of the Egyptians. God spared the sons of the Israelites, so they were supposed to give everything that was first-born back to God, including their own sons.

When Joseph and Mary went to the temple in Jerusalem to do their duty with Mary’s first-born son, they were met by Simeon. Simeon had been waiting a long time to see the Messiah, and when the Messiah finally came through the temple courtyard, snuggled in his warm jammies and wrapped up in a baby blanket, Simeon scooped up that baby and praised God. But then, he spoke to Mary, and his words were something more serious than the typical congratulations to a new mother. “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many,” he said. The child is “a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” This was no statement about, “oh, isn’t it nice you will have someone to care for you in your old age.” This was no greeting of “I bet he’ll be a good carpenter, just like his dad.” This child was dedicated to God. Because of His special place in God’s work, this child was going to experience both the heights of human joy as well as the depths of human suffering. And he was not just going to help people; he was going to turn the world upside down. And any time something gets turned upside down, someone ends up at the bottom who isn’t used to being there.

And then, as if he wasn’t clear enough, Simeon looked more directly at the baby’s mother. “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too,” he said. Mary was not immune from pain just because of who her baby’s Father was. Mary was committed to God, and that commitment required total trust, even if it meant suffering for her child and for herself. As she left the Jerusalem temple, after receiving Anna’s additional praises, I can just imagine how hard it must have been for Mary to digest those words of Simeon. And I imagine that, over time, as she trudged the road back to her home town, something like the words of the prayer from Wesley’s Covenant Renewal would have formed in her mind: “Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to Thy pleasure and disposal.” What choice did she have but to say words like that to God?

We have a choice. We can choose to orient our lives to surrender more fully to God’s will, or we can choose to continue simply to show our trust in God in the ways we always have. We can continue to pray for healing, wisdom, and guidance, or we can pray, “I am no longer my own, but Thine.” We can seek comfort and wholeness for ourselves in our relationship with God, or we can anticipate that our relationship with God might feel more like a sword piercing our souls. Both are fine choices, and I believe that both are faithful and legitimate steps in our journeys of faith.

But as we find ourselves in worship on this first day of a new year, I thought it would be good to present the challenge which Simeon’s words, and the words of the Covenant Renewal Prayer, offer. They challenge us to a deeper faith, a greater trust, and a more complete discipleship. We may not be ready to utter them exactly as they are written. We may not be ready to anticipate that soul-piercing pain which the mother of Jesus went through as she played her role in saving the world. But they are offered to us as a gift today to challenge us in our discipleship.

Are we ready to take the next step of seeking the mind and heart of Christ? Can we resolve to trust more, to surrender more, to seek our own interest even less? Are we closer to uttering those words, “Thou art mine, and I am Thine,” and if not, what would it take for us to get closer? Can we make resolutions not only to practices that will improve the health of our bodies, our minds, and our relationships, but also our spirits? These are all good questions on New Year’s Day, and they are all questions evoked by Simeon’s words at Jesus’ dedication, as well as by the Covenant Renewal Prayer.

And so I am not asking us to say the Covenant Renewal Prayer together today. I don’t think all of us are ready for that; I am not even sure I am ready for that. Instead, I am praying today that God will deepen our ability to commit as disciples, in whatever way we each need, and in whatever way we need together as Christ’s church. I pray we can trust God more. I pray we can surrender more of ourselves to Christ. I pray we can go deeper into our lives of faith and our commitment as disciples of Jesus. And I pray we can anticipate that our covenant with God may lead us in directions we would never choose. Because isn’t that the point: to surrender ourselves in total trust, in the deepest kind of commitment, and in a willingness to participate in whatever would accomplish God’s will?

Amen.

The Covenant Prayer

I am no longer my own, but Thine.

Put me to what Thou wilt,

rank me with whom Thou wilt.

Put me to doing,

put me to suffering.

Let me be employed by Thee

or laid aside for Thee,

exalted for Thee

or brought low for Thee.

Let me be full,

let me be empty.

Let me have all things,

let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things

to Thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine, and I am Thine.

So be it.

Amen.

Endurance

Mark 13:1-2, 24-37 and Isaiah 40:6-11

Eric Beene

November 27, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

The words Jesus speaks in the section of Mark’s gospel we just read are terrifying.  Almost since he spoke these words, people have been afraid of what he was describing.  “The sun will be darkened … and the stars will be falling from heaven,” he told his disciples, and I can just see them:  wide-eyed, looking at him but, with their minds’ eyes, seeing things that were a thousand years away from him.  They thought he was going to be the leader of the Occupy Jerusalem movement, throwing out the corrupt local leaders, the economic systems that kept their people struggling, and the imperial power that directed it all.  Here, he was talking about a transformation of the world that was so much bigger than a change in politics.  Quoting the ancient prophetic writings of their people, he was talking about the sun and the moon and the stars and the sky:  changes to the cosmos that were so much more fundamental than any change they had ever imagined.  And the changes he described did not sound positive; the sun and moon and all the rest were to be destroyed, Jesus said.  All in all, these did not seem like comforting words.

And Jesus acknowledged the terror of his words.  As if the prospect that the earth and sky would be destroyed was not enough, he also told them that it could happen at any time.  So, they could not relax; their fear would have to stay with them.  “Beware,” he told them, “keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come.”  Things will change, they will change suddenly, no one knows when they will change, and all you can do about it is to watch out.  These words are terrifying.

Jesus spoke these words to the disciples at a time when they were seeking some comfort.  They had just entered Jerusalem the Sunday before, and Jesus had been teaching in the temple all week.  Well, we say he had been teaching; what he really had been doing was making enemies of the temple authorities.  He was questioning the religious practices of the day, and he was being challenged by the people whose job it was to maintain and defend those practices.  The disciples seemed to be in awe of the whole thing, almost sounding at the beginning of chapter 13 like enraptured tourists looking at some attraction.  Surveying the temple buildings, they commented to Jesus, “look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!”  They had had a stressful week, they were hearing and seeing things they didn’t really know how to make sense of, so they really just needed to talk through some of their fascination at the place and the power of it all.

I wonder if there are people here who can relate to those disciples at this point.  I wonder if there are people whose utterance to Jesus right now is some of that same kind of awe.  That kind of awe, I imagine, is not a fascination for the sake of fascination.  I think that kind of awe the disciples were expressing is a fascination which is masking a whole lot of stress, and grief, and anger, and confusion, and fear.  It is the kind of fascination which talks about moving on, or about keeping one’s chin up, or about trying to stay positive; those words say one thing, and they are what we tell people who are kind enough to ask about our situation.  But the feelings behind them would be better expressed with screaming, or shouting, or groaning, or crying, or just telling everyone to go away and leave me alone.  It is the kind of fascination which leads someone to say cheerfully, “well, the surgery they are going to perform is really interesting,” or “the lawyers say they have come up with some good arguments,” or “we can’t make plans, but we are just going to see what will happen.”  When a person says something like that, I often wonder if what they really want to say is, “I am terrified out of my mind that I am going to die, or I am going to lose everything that matters to me, or even worse, that I am going to have to endure something more painful, more mysterious, and more out-of-control even than what I have already been through.”  The disciples’ fascination is made fragile by the feelings behind it.

And Jesus’ words to the disciples don’t seem to help.  When they commented with such fascination that the buildings and stones were big, he said, “Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”  Then, in the ensuing speech, he detailed suffering and trials, and then threw in that talk about the sky falling in and the sun going dark.

Those words don’t seem to help, but the truth they speak is such a gift, both to the disciples and to us.  Jesus’ quote about the destruction of the sun and the moon and the stars and the sky can lead us to find other words from the prophets.  And the words we read this morning from Isaiah seem to speak here.

Isaiah was also speaking in a time of terror for his people.  They had been in exile for a whole generation.  They had witnessed the destruction of their temple, the torture of their king, the dispersal of their ruling class, and finally, their forced march to live in a foreign land.  Everything they depended on had been utterly wiped out by the invading Babylonian armies.  And yet, at the end of it all, Isaiah’s job was to speak to them these words which God had told him to speak.  They were intended as words of comfort, and assurance, and hope.  He drew a comparison:  your enemies are like grass and flowers, Isaiah said.  And like grass and flowers, he said, they will wither and fade.  But there is one thing that will never wither or fade.  He said, “But the word of our God will stand forever.”

With that truth, the mood has to change, Isaiah said.  “Get you up to a high mountain,” he commanded the defeated people.  “Lift up your voice with strength…lift it up, do not fear!”  Fear has to be replaced with hope.  All that terrifies you doesn’t just disappear.  But the stress and grief and anger and confusion and fear that lies just behind those fragile words you tell people is answered with the truth.  The word of our God is the only thing that will endure; everything else is grass and flowers.  Your enemies are like the grass and the flowers.  The great big temple Jesus’ disciples looked at, and the stones and the authorities that held it up, are like the grass and the flowers.  Even the sun and the stars and the sky are like the grass and the flowers. Suffering and trials and exile and defeat and terror are like the grass and the flowers.  “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever!”

Today we are starting the season of Advent.  This season is meant to remind us of what Jesus told his disciples:  the world as we know it will be destroyed.  The sun will go dark, the stars will fall, and the sky will fail.  The grass will wither and the flowers will fade.  The light of the world will die.  These words at first seem terrifying.  More importantly, they don’t seem to have anything to say about everything in our lives that makes us want to scream or shout or groan or cry or just tell everyone to go away and leave us alone.

But really, these words are a gift.  Because after all of that destruction, and all of that withering and fading, and all of that terror, we have been told, death itself will cease.  And what will be left is only what is really enduring:  the word of our God.

We don’t know how the stories of everything that terrifies us will end.  We don’t know how our stress will end, or how our grief will end, or how our anger or confusion or fear will end.  I know there are a lot of feelings like that in this congregation right now, just below the surface, waiting to explode.  This year has been one in which many people here have found themselves in situations they did not expect and they did not want.  If each of us haven’t been directly affected by pain and grief and sadness in our own lives or our family, we have watched what is going on around us in our church and in our world, and we have felt the stress of it all.  And I think the toughest part is that we still don’t know how most of those situations will end, or what new stuff will come up next.  But Advent reminds us that we do know how the bigger story will end.  And Advent is a time and a space set aside for us to believe in the gift of God’s word again.  And Advent is a time and space set aside for us to keep alert, and to wait, and to watch, and to hope once again.  I think that time and space is a gift we need right now.

There is so much going on in our lives and our congregation and our world right now that terrifies us.  I pray that this season will be a time and a space for us to believe Jesus’ promises again, and live into the hope they invite us to.  A lot is happening.  A lot is going to happen, a lot will terrify us.  We have to watch, and to beware.  But at the end of it all, everything that terrifies us now will not endure.  Only God will endure.

The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever.  Alleluia!  Amen.

On Sowing, Reaping, and Giving Thanks

2 Corinthians 9:6-15

Eric Beene

November 20, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I have this package of spinach seeds here.  It has never been opened.  I bought these spinach seeds last spring, at the urging of my wife.  And how much spinach did we grow in the Beene garden with these seeds?  Yes, that’s right:  none.

I can explain.  We bought these seeds when they first showed up in the little display racks right by the front door of Home Depot.  You know how it is:  the weather starts to warm a bit, the days start getting longer, and you look at the ground and see that it is aching to be raked over and nourished with compost and readied for planting.  And I think the stores know the aching of my soil, and they exploit it for all it’s worth.  We probably went to Home Depot for something else, like screws, maybe, or light bulbs.  But those seed display racks were set up right by the door, filled with little packets like this one, overflowing with things that seemed just right to sooth my poor, aching soil.  So, into the cart they went.

Convinced by our hope that we would spread them like antibiotic ointment on our aching garden soil, we brought the seeds home.  But that day, there were light bulbs to install and screws to put to use, and we didn’t get the seeds planted.  Planting time came, and we went back to Home Depot to complete our garden with those cute little sprouts of tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, and broccoli.  We even saved some space for the spinach, but the package was in the garage, and our little boy was finding the work tedious by then.  We ran out of energy and time that day, and we had other things to do the next day, and one thing led to another.  And for the past six months at least, every time I have passed this package of spinach seeds in the garage, I have looked at them, and I have felt guilty.

I think of these spinach seeds when I read this part of Paul’s letters to the Corinthians.  Among his other work, Paul was collecting money from the churches in the regions around Corinth to take back to the church in Jerusalem, which could not care for all of the poor in the Christian community there without outside help.  As we read, Paul had some things to say to the folks in Corinth about how they should think and even feel about the request to give to this offering for the Christians in Jerusalem.  He started subtly with a metaphor:  “the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”  And I feel like I need to just apologize right here to each and every one of these spinach seeds.  But Paul went on, without explaining that metaphor, to give more direct advice to the Corinthians about how much they should give to the offering.  “Each of you must give as you have made up your mind,” he said.  The decision is up to you how much you should give, bearing in mind, of course, all that stuff about sowing and reaping.  But whatever you give, you should feel nothing but joy while you do it; you should give “not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.”  He continued, “you will be enriched in every way for your great generosity.”

Now, that might have been good advice for those who participated in that first collection for the Missionary Society, and it might not have been good advice.  I don’t know how those Corinthians who first heard these words received them.  But I do know that these words have been trotted out through the intervening centuries time and time again when it was time to prepare the church budget for the coming year.  Each year, someone points to these words, or some modified version of them, thinking they will be a good way to advise all of us about how to think, and even to feel, about our regular giving to the church.

And I don’t know what goes through your mind, but what goes through my mind is something like this.  When I hear someone quote, “the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and the one who sows bountifully will also reap bountifully,” I know the not-so-subtle message is that I am not sowing bountifully enough.  Then, when someone says, “each of you must give as you have made up your mind,” I feel like there is a “but” which comes right after, followed by some statement like, “but make up your mind to give a whole lot more than you are giving because we need your money to pay the bills.”  Then, when we get to that time-worn quote, “for God loves a cheerful giver,” I think, with no small amount of resentment, “I’m up to hear with guilt that I can’t give more, fear that giving more will mean I can’t make the rent, anger that I am being badgered again and again about this, and did I mention the guilt?, and now you are telling me I am supposed to be cheerful about all of this stuff?!?”  And that is usually the time I realize the thought of giving to the church makes me a huge jumble of mixed-up thoughts and feelings, and I think about how well that pledge card would work as a coaster under a nice, soothing cup of tea.

It is something like my spinach seeds.  We have good intentions.  We want to do the right thing.  We want to respond to the joy and hope that well up in us like a warm spring day.  We see the vision of the bounty that is everywhere in God’s creation.  We want to do our part in sowing abundantly so that the harvest can be abundant.  We want to soothe the aching of the world.  But other matters press on us, too, and other fears demand our attention.  We run out of resources before we are able to follow through on our good, faithful impulses.  And, well, the season passes, and we never sow the seeds.  Then, other things start to grow in us, like guilt, and blame, and frustration, because we just can’t do everything we want to do and we think we ought to do.  Weeds start to grow in that space we left for the spinach.  And it’s all just a big mess.

It is easy to hear these words of Paul and get swept up into that big, jumbled mess of our feelings when pledging time comes around in the church.  But if that is all we hear in Paul’s talk here about giving in the early church then we are missing something.  Paul goes on in the next paragraph to explain another way to think about what it means for those Corinthian Christians to give to the offering for the church in Jerusalem.  When you give, he explains, something important happens:  other people are given a reason to be thankful.  “…Your great generosity…will produce thanksgiving to God through us.”  God will be glorified and praised not only through your act of giving, but also through the act of receiving the gifts.  Relief and hope will be felt.  And then, quickly, gratitude will be felt.  And the fact is that gratitude turns quickly not only into happiness and joy, but also into praise, and into worship, because to really be thankful, you have to be thankful to someone or something.  God will be glorified in a very real way because of your giving:  not just in your obedience, but also in the thanksgiving of those who receive your gifts.

And in pointing to this effect of gratitude which comes from our giving, Paul does something important.  He shifts us out of a self-centered focus.  Our guilt, and frustration, and even fear are at their root self-centered feelings.  They focus our attention on ourselves.  But Paul wants us to focus our attention on the people who receive the benefit from our giving.  And ultimately, Paul wants us to focus on God, and the way that our giving can lead others to praise God and worship God and, especially, be thankful to God.  And if that is our focus, then it doesn’t matter if we are able to live up to all of our good intentions or not.  What matters is only that we are giving, so that others can be grateful to God.

I have been asked more than a few times before how much someone ought to give to the church.  And I have given a variety of answers, depending on who was asking and why.  The fact is, Jesus tells us that we have not given enough until we have literally given everything we have away.  Several times in the gospels, he makes it clear that we will not be able to meet the complete demands of discipleship until we have left everything that is of any value to us and followed him.

That is a tough thing to do, and fortunately, I also believe Jesus makes it clear this is a standard which at least some of us are called to live up to over time, not all at once.  Because the fact is, I am not yet ready to give away my house, my car, my pension funds, my comfy bed, and my reliable air conditioning system.  So, in an effort to make progress in discipleship, we look for other Biblical standards.  In the Old Testament, God’s people were told to set aside the first 10% of everything they produced as their offering to God.  This was called the tithe, and for those of us who want to live in denial about Jesus’ demand to give everything away, it has long been considered the next best standard for giving.

And frankly, Mary and I aren’t there yet.  But we have set 10% of our income as our goal for giving to the church, and we are working in that direction.  Last year, we gave about 7% of our income to the church.  This year, we are pledging a little over 8%, and we are hoping to be able to do more throughout the year.  Next year, we plan to increase again.  When we get to 10%, we plan to set another goal to increase our giving and start working toward it.

The point is not whether any of us is giving enough.  We are not giving enough; until we have given everything away, we will never give enough.  The point is that we are seeking to give more, so that more can be received, and more gratitude can be felt, and more praise and glory can be given to God.  And so my prayer this morning is that we can sow and reap, just like Paul says we ought to do.  My prayer is that we can acknowledge our feelings about the giving conversation, and we can move past the self-centeredness of those feelings, too.  My prayer is that we can scatter whatever seeds we can scatter, more perhaps than before, and less than we will in the future, all so that God can receive praise and glory and thanks.

Amen.

Reflection for All Saints’

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-18

Eric Beene

November 6, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

All Saints’ Day is something that a lot of people probably wouldn’t understand.  Why would you have a day to remember all the dead people?  Some might think that our practice of remembering the dead is a bit morose.  Some might wonder if there is something wrong with us:  do we get some sick pleasure out of reliving our sadness?  Do we only see the world through some kind of lens of sentimentality?  Are we simply not able to let go of what used to be, so we are stuck in the past and unable to cope with the present or embrace the future?

But those questions miss the point.  The point for us as Christians of remembering those who have died is not to dwell in the past, or to stew in our grief, or to long for a return to the good ol’ days.  The point of remembering those who have died is, in fact, not mostly about those who have died.  The point of remembering those who have died is to learn how to live well.

The story we read from Joshua this morning illustrates what we are doing when we remember those who have died on All Saints’ Day.  Joshua is the one who led God’s people to finally enter the Promised Land.  They had left Egypt a generation before, escaping as slaves in the night after a long, bitter, and tragic battle between Moses and Pharaoh.  The people had famously crossed the Red Sea, received the Ten Commandments and all that information about how God wanted them to live, and then traveled through the desert for 40 years.  By the time they were ready to enter the land which God had promised would be theirs when they were back in Egypt, virtually all of those original slaves had already died, and it was their children and grandchildren who were settling in that Promised Land.

After they divided up the land, and after they had gotten settled in, and after they had homes to live in and starting bringing in crops and livestock to eat, the people of God were called together.  At that gathering, Joshua challenged them to recommit themselves to living by the law of God.  And he challenged them not by trying to prove that God was the right God to choose by some kind of logical argument, or by trying to tell them that they simply have to follow God’s law because that’s what good, upstanding, moral people do.

Instead, he told them they should follow God because of what they learned from the people who came before them.  Those people had taught Joshua and all of the other settlers in the Promised Land what horrible, horrible treatment they had to endure as slaves.  They had told the stories of how God had appeared to Moses and told him to go to Pharaoh and demand their freedom.  They had told the stories of the resistance Moses faced, and the plagues God had sent to force Pharaoh to take the slaves’ demands seriously.  They had told the stories of that dark night when they had escaped, and the fear that had kept them running all the way to the Red Sea, and the relief they felt when Pharaoh’s army was thrown into the sea.  They had told the stories of receiving the law and of the way God wanted them to honor God and live well with each other.  Those people had taught the settlers about their encounters with holiness, and their deep gratitude for being saved by that holiness, and their faithfulness to the God who had done the saving.

And so, Joshua told those people, you have to make a decision.  You have to decide whether you will follow that God which had saved your parents, or if you will not.  You have to decide whether you will continue on the same spiritual path which brought us out of slavery and into the Promised Land, or if you will try to forge your own path.  You have to decide if you will humbly recognize the wisdom of the way those people who came before you tried to live, or if you will arrogantly refuse to recognize any wisdom beyond your own.  “As for me and my household,” Joshua said in the dramatic finish to his speech, “we will serve the Lord.”

That is the challenge which informs our recognition of the saints.  We are not simply trying to be morose, or to be sentimental, or to be stuck in the past in remembering the saints we will name in a few minutes.  Instead, we are naming them so that we can remember the stories they told us:  stories about their own lives, stories about their encounters with holiness, and stories about their gratitude for being saved by that holiness.  That way, we can remember why we have made the choices we have made:  to continue on the path they started on, to recognize the wisdom of someone besides ourselves, and to serve the Lord.  Instead of keeping us stuck in the past, then, our celebration strengthens us for the present and helps us to face the future with bold decision, humble service, and an awe-filled wonder at the wisdom of the ages.

That is why I am glad we get to celebrate communion today, too.  In our communion service, we come together around this table as the people of God.  Even though we pass the elements of communion around on trays, I always imagine that communion is an actual gathering of God’s people around an actual table.  And the people I imagine gathering around the table are all of the people in this room, as well as all of the people who are a part of this congregation who cannot be here today.  But I also imagine that this table is big enough to gather around it people who are important in my faith life but who live in other places.  And this day especially, I also imagine this table is big enough to gather around it people who have been saints to all of us but have long-since died:  those who have taught us about the faith, and those who have shown us what it means to be faithful, all receiving this little bit of bread and little bit of juice and little bit of grace which Jesus offers us at this table.

And what is beautiful about that image for me is not just that we are joined around this table with people who have taught and nurtured us and who we miss.  What is beautiful is that those people are joined in a real way around this table with us.  We are among the saints now, too; we have heard the stories, we have made the decision to serve the Lord, and we are the ones to carry on the faith.  So this day is not primarily about remembering the dead; this day is about remembering the life they have passed on to us, and this day is about remembering the Lord whom we worship and serve, together with the saints of every place and of every time, remembering what God has done in the past, living well in the present, and making the decision to commit our future to God, too.

And so, in gratitude to God, in celebration of their service and presence in our lives, and in faith that they guide us still, we light a candle to mark the presence of the saints among us, and we name some of our saints as we remember this day…

Body and Soul, in Life and in Death

Psalm 107:1-9

Eric Beene

October 30, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Most of us have grown up in a time of tolerance.  We have been taught to get along with everyone as much as possible.  In order to do that, we try to minimize our differences with other people.  Many of us have learned, for instance, that Presbyterians really are not all that different than Lutherans, Methodists, or even, at a basic level, Roman Catholics.  We have even learned to smooth some of the differences with people of other religions; we are all taking different paths up the same mountain, some might say.  And we have taught that ethic of tolerance to our children and others.

That kind of tolerance can be good.  It can allow us to have peace with our neighbors, which is a part of Christ’s call to us.  It has allowed us to live as a church which opens its doors to everyone, no matter who you are or what your background or what you have done or haven’t done.  And that kind of tolerance is not wimpy, either; in fact, I have had conversations with many leaders here about the risks that are associated with tolerance.  Particularly in the political and moral culture of the last few years, it seems like folks want to be confrontational; even our political leaders make public statements like “you are either with me or against me.”  And in this atmosphere of confrontation, we can see that intolerance of different political views and moral choices, not to mention religious or racial identity, has not produced a climate where we can be particularly effective in solving social problems.  Tolerance can be constructive.

But there is a tradeoff.  Tolerance of others can lead us to be casual about knowing ourselves.  When all we know to do is to find common ground with others, we forget how to examine ideas deeply, evaluate arguments that others make, and come to our own understandings of truth.  Our proclamation of truth is therefore weakened; we forget how to be bold in helping others to see the goodness of the Good News.

Believe it or not, it has not always been this way.  Good, upstanding Protestants have not always just gone along to get along.  In fact, there was a time in our history when each believer had to study and pray, to think and listen, and finally to decide.  And their decisions had consequences:  depending on the truth you believed, you could be putting at risk your standing in the community, your means of making a living, and even sometimes your life.

The Palatinate region of Germany is nestled in the western part of that country, just over the border with France, and not very far from the Swiss cities like Zurich and Geneva.  The capital of the Palatinate in the time of the Protestant Reformation was a town called Heidelberg.  And in 1559, the right to rule in Heidelberg and the Palatinate fell to a 44-year-old man named Frederick.

Frederick had grown up being taught by devout Catholics.  When Frederick was just two years old, Martin Luther made his famous, public challenge to the church authorities to debate a whole host of problems he saw in the church, most of which had to do with the church’s practice of telling people they could only be forgiven if they paid the right price.  By the time Frederick came of age, his world was divided among the Lutherans and the Catholics.  And when he was 22 years old, Frederick married a firm Lutheran named Maria, and within a few years, he had converted to Luther’s way of seeing things.

But when Frederick and Maria moved into the castle in Heidelberg, he found that life still wasn’t simple.  There was a new conflict that threatened to split the town, if not the region, in two.  And it was a theological conflict.  Specifically, it was a conflict about the nature of the elements in the Lord’s Supper:  are they actually the physical body and blood of Christ, as Luther taught, or are they just symbols that help us remember Christ who is only present in heaven, as some others taught?  Or is there another way; could the bread and the wine bear the presence of Christ, but only in a spiritual way, and not in a physical way?  That third way was the way taught by John Calvin, who for almost 20 years had been the highest church official in the Swiss city of Geneva.

Poor Frederick had to figure out how to keep the people in his new region from coming to blows over this issue.  More than that, he had to discover not just what would let him go along to get along, and not just what everyone had always thought, but he had to discover the truth which he could defend with his life.  He spent days at a time locked in his room, studying the scriptures.  He wrote to church leaders asking them to tell him how he could settle the problems.  He brought in theologians and pastors he respected and asked them to debate each other so he could hear their arguments.  He worked hard to figure out for himself what was the truth.

Finally, he made his own conclusions.  And what he came up with was not what other folks wanted to hear.  He asked the professor of theology in the local university to sit down with the pastor of the main church in town and come up with a new document to proclaim the biblical truth and teach that truth to the people in the churches.  What they developed was the Heidelberg Catechism, which we will read from in a few minutes as we affirm our faith.  All of the ministers and teachers of the Palatinate came together, spent eight days in prayer, study, and discussion, and at the end, they all signed the new Catechism to show their affirmation of what it taught.

But there was a problem.  The Catechism was generally agreeable to just about everyone, except that it clearly sided with John Calvin’s position on the nature of the elements in the Lord’s Supper.  The other local rulers in Germany had all subscribed to a different theological statement which affirmed Martin Luther’s position on the Lord’s Supper.  So, the new Catechism put Fredrick in opposition to all of those other rulers.  There were three years of debates, arguments, and threats to try to force Frederick to change his mind.  But he would not go along to get along; he was convinced that the position spelled out in the Catechism was the position of Scripture.

Finally, he was summoned before the Emperor, Maximilian II.  There was a very real threat that he would not leave that meeting alive if he could not justify his position in a way that the other rulers could accept.  These folks took these matters seriously, and they defended them passionately.

When the charges of heresy were read, and Frederick was told to turn from the principles of the Heidelberg Catechism or be banished from the empire, he carefully explained the truth as he saw it.  And he was persuasive, both in the arguments he presented and in the passion with which he presented them.  The other rulers, while they did not change their minds, understood his reasoning as well as his passion.  The charges were dropped, and he was allowed to return home with the Heidelberg Catechism intact.  The Reformed theology of the Palatinate region became a third, legitimate expression of Christianity in Europe, alongside Catholicism and Lutheranism.

Most significantly to me, Frederick and his people were bold in proclaiming the good news as they understood it.  They did not set out to offend anyone; they set out to discover and teach the truth as it was expressed in Scripture.  They came to a conclusion which was not popular, and they defended that truth with passion and conviction.  They took their faith seriously, seriously enough that they were willing to do more than just go along to get along.  They were serious enough they were willing to live and to die for it.

After Frederick died about 10 years later, things did not go well for the Palatinate region of Germany.  As new rulers came to the thrones of France and Germany, the region was swept into the center of land grabs and religious conflicts.  The weakened people who lived there endured some particularly harsh winters that led them to be even more desperate.  Eventually, the English noticed that the people of the Palatinate were smart farmers and hard workers, and they gave them incentives to come to the colonies in North America.  Some of those people from the Palatinate came to Georgia, worked as indentured servants, and then were granted land in a village being called Vernonburgh, a few miles south of Savannah.  Within just a couple of years of clearing their land and planting crops, they petitioned the Trustees of the Georgia colony to have appointed to them a minister to preach the gospel for them.  That community formed themselves into a congregation, and that congregation is the congregation which we are a part of today.

The psalmist reminds us in the scripture lesson we read a few minutes ago that it is not always easy for God’s people to praise God.  God’s people have had to endure all kinds of trouble:  hunger and thirst, distress and desolation, and times of wandering, so we can find the settled place where God will protect us and provide for us.  We have been gathered from east and west and north and south so that we can be delivered by the hand of God.  But in all times and in all places, we praise God, and we thank God, and we make our bold proclamation of the truth of God’s presence with us.  And this week, as we celebrate the anniversary of the day when Martin Luther made his protest against the settled church and in favor of the true gospel of Jesus Christ as he understood it, I pray for us.

I pray that we can be bold in our faith.  I pray that we can discover the truth through our own study and prayer and conversation.  I pray that we can defend that truth with our words as well as our passion.  Mostly, I pray that we can get over the impulse to just go along to get along; not to purposely offend our neighbors, but to take seriously our understandings of the nature of God in the world.  I pray that we can live up to our legacy in this congregation; I pray for the boldness of Luther, and of Frederick, and of those settlers who first worshipped God in this place, who affirmed with their very lives that we belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

The Things That Are God’s

Matthew 22:15-22

Eric Beene

October 16, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

So today, I get to stand up here and talk about politics and money.  Those of you who are kind enough to resist your urge to run screaming from the room right now might think that this sermon will follow some predictable pattern.  Whenever the preacher talks about politics, he or she usually seems to push an agenda or a platform or even a party which no reasonable human being who actually lives in the real world would ever believe, right?  And whenever the preacher talks about money, all he or she has to say is that you are supposed to give more of it to the church, right?  So my message is simple this morning:  either give all of your money to the church and go have yourself a tea party, or give all of your money to the church and go occupy some street or park somewhere.  Thanks for coming out today.

Politics and money surround us all the time.  You cannot go anywhere without the talking heads of CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News yapping at you, depending on where you hang out.  I can’t even take my son to his favorite pizza buffet for lunch without images flashed across a screen of whatever political button is currently hot.  And when we aren’t being barraged by talk of politics, we are worrying over money:  how to get it, what to do with it once we have it, and how to keep as much of it as we can.  Politics and money are all over our lives and our world, and if one doesn’t make us anxious, the other one is there to make us sick with worry.

I am talking about politics and money today, though, not because I want to, but because that is what our scripture lesson is about.  First, the politics:  Jesus had been teaching in the temple for several days.  He had a bit of a following.  He had already had several run-ins with the Pharisees and temple officials.  And folks were talking.  They were talking enough that the Pharisees were starting to get a little bit anxious about the possibility that Jesus was more powerful than they were, and that he might lead the people into something those Pharisees didn’t support.

We know just how anxious those Pharisees were getting because of what they did.  Matthew says they sent their supporters to try to trick Jesus “along with the Herodians.”  And that tells us they were either being very strategic or very desperate, or maybe both.  The Herodians were the people who were supporters of Herod, who was the Roman ruler in Jerusalem.  Herod was there to force the people of Jerusalem to maintain their loyalty to the Roman emperor.  Herod was there to make sure that the people of Jerusalem paid their taxes to the emperor, and to make sure the people didn’t revolt against the emperor’s army, and to make sure that the people didn’t worship in any way that contradicted the worship of the emperor as a kind of a god.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, saw it as their mission to preserve the pure worship of their God, and so the Herodians were probably not the kind of people which the Pharisees normally agreed with very often.

But, as I learned when I was taking training classes as a community organizer, one of the primary principles of trying to gain more power is that you can have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies.  Whether you agree with most of what they have to say or not, when you and another party share some kind of mutual self-interest, you work with them to promote those self-interests.  And both the Herodians and the Pharisees both had an interest in keeping Jesus and the rabble who were following him from becoming too powerful in the hearts and the minds of the people, so they conspired together to make a fool of him.

They came to him with a political question, and if the politics of it all was not enough, they threw money into the whole thing as well.  Money and politics come together in questions about taxes, and so they asked Jesus about taxes:  “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”  Taxes are a sure way to get everyone riled up.  Do the wealthiest people need to pay more in taxes?  Does the middle class pay too much?  Does the system tax the poor at a rate that is unfair?  If we increase corporate taxes, will the government be able to spend more, or will the corporations hire fewer workers, and what will ultimately help the economy finally turn around?  I could go on, but you have probably already felt your blood pressure rise a bit, so you get the point.

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?”  Some people there expected Jesus to say yes.  Yes, it is your duty to be a respectable, law-abiding citizen who doesn’t cause any trouble.  Others expected Jesus to tell those Herodians no.  No, it is not lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, because the emperor is evil.  But either way, he was caught in a trap:  he had to answer either yes or no, and someone there was going to arrest him no matter what he said.

But Jesus didn’t exactly answer the question.  Instead of a yes or a no, he simply said, “show me the coin used for the tax.”  The coin would have been a denarius, and it would have been rather overt in showing the contrast between the way the Jews saw the world and the way the Romans wanted the Jews to see the world.  On one side of the coin was a picture of the emperor, Tiberius.  On the other side was an inscription that said something like, “Tiberius Caesar, august and divine son of Augustus…”  This was a violation of at least the first and second commandments, as well as a good portion of the rest of the Jewish law, too.  And it was a symbol of the oppression of the Jewish people by the occupying Roman Empire.

Jesus pointed this out by asking an obvious question:  “Whose head is this, and whose title?”  Then, he had more to say, but he still didn’t answer the question about whether or not it was lawful to participate in the tax system.  He still didn’t say yes or no; he said, “give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus didn’t answer the question that was put to him.  Instead, he transformed the whole conversation.  He transformed the conversation about the hot political issues of the day.  He transformed the conversation about what to do with your money.  He transformed the conversation by talking about images.

The money bears the emperor’s image, and therefore belongs to the emperor.  But that is not what belongs to God.  What belongs to God, the logic follows, is whatever bears God’s image.  And what bears God’s image?  You may remember:  on the sixth day, “God said, ‘let us make humankind in our image’…God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”

We bear God’s image.  You bear God’s image, and I bear God’s image.  From the hairs on our heads to the lines that swirl around the pads of our heels and toes, we bear God’s image.  Your smiling face bears God’s image.  Your furrowed brow bears God’s image.  The places on you where the tears flow from bear God’s image.  The hands you use to wipe away someone else’s tears, or to serve a snack or a meal, or to build a safe and comfortable place for someone else to be, those hands bear God’s image.  That spot on your forehead where you received some time ago a splash of water, baptizing you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, is God’s image written on you.  That place where you taste the little morsel of bread and sip of juice, which are for us the body and blood of Christ, is God’s image within you.  We bear God’s image.

And, Jesus said, we owe to God whatever belongs to God, and whatever belongs to God is what bears God’s image.  And if we take what Jesus has to say seriously, a funny thing happens.  Politics and money get put in their place.  We are surrounded by a thousand yapping heads who are forever getting us worked up about politics, or heightening our fears about money.  And it is overwhelming, and it is fearful, and because it’s all around us all the time, it seems really, really important.  But if we take what Jesus said seriously, we come to recognize that politics and money really don’t deserve the time and attention we give them.  What deserves our time and attention is the image of God which we bear in us.  What deserves our time and attention is the ability we have to give back what belongs to God.  It’s not that we disengage completely from the world; part of our giving to God is making sure that we promote justice and peace in our world and make good decisions about what happens to our money.  But the wrangling for power and the grasping to hold onto the dollars that come into our possession are far surpassed when we tend to the God whose image we bear.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can give to God those things that are God’s.  My prayer is that we can recognize the image of God, and recognize that each of us bears that image.  And as we tend to that image, and as we give back to God the things that are God’s, my prayer is that we can watch as those other things seem to fade in importance.

Amen.

Surpassing Value

Philippians 3:4b – 14

Eric Beene

October 2, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I enjoy receiving communion.  I especially like it when I am in a worship service when I can get out of my seat and move to another place in the sanctuary to receive communion.  That’s the way we will receiving communion this morning; it’s been the way this congregation has served communion on World Communion Sunday since sometime before I came here.  We will all get up, come to the front of the sanctuary or go to the back, tear a piece of the bread, and dip it in the cup before we eat it.  Some call this serving by intinction; the actual word “intinction” really just refers to the act of dipping the bread, instead of drinking directly from the cup or from the little cups we use when we pass the trays in this congregation.

What is really different in this way of serving is that we ask everyone who feels comfortable doing so to get up and move.  From what I understand, that’s the way things were done in the earliest days of the Presbyterians.  In the time of the Reformation, some churches had everyone come forward to pass by the table, receive the bread at one end and the cup at the other before returning to their seats.  In the early days of the Church of Scotland, which is one of the branches that make up our Presbyterian family tree, the people would actually go and sit or stand around a very long table in the front of the sanctuary, where they would be served the bread and the cup before returning to their seats, reenacting what it must have been like for those first apostles who received Jesus’ last supper from him.

At various times in my life I have had different reasons for appreciating the act of moving somewhere to receive communion.  At this point, I appreciate it because I like getting in line with everyone else.  I enjoy feeling a part of a community in which everyone is in the same line, from the most prominent people, whom everyone knows and everyone respects, to the person whom no one knows at all.  Everyone falls in line, everyone takes his or her turn, everyone receives, no one goes away without being served.  Even folks who cannot stand in a line for one reason or another get served from the same loaf and the same cup.  Whether they have everything together in their lives or not, everyone is equally humbled in the wonder-filled presence of Christ in the bread and the cup and the life-giving power they signify and seal in our souls.

I am thinking about communion today, of course, because it is World Communion Sunday, when the table in front of us here is the center of our view here in worship this morning.  But I am thinking more specifically about how it feels to stand in line with everyone else this morning because of this section of Paul’s letter to the Philippians we read a few minutes ago.  Paul was writing to the Christians in the cosmopolitan city of Philippi to convince them to keep the faith and live as good followers of Christ.  And of course, like any time any one of us communicates to a group of people with the goal of persuading them, Paul had to do whatever he could to build his credibility with the people receiving the letter.  If they didn’t think he was worth listening to, they wouldn’t have any reason to believe him and what he had to say.

So I find what he does in this section of his letter to the Philippians remarkable.  He starts into a predictable list of his background and accomplishments.  He is from the right kind of family:  he knows his lineage all the way back to the Jewish patriarchs.  His family followed the Jewish law to the letter, making sure he was circumcised just at the right time so he could be known to be a good Jewish boy.  And he didn’t just rely on his pedigree; he worked hard to be a good Jew, too.  He was a Pharisee, and although we do not necessarily consider that to be a positive association, it would not have the baggage to the earliest Christians it has to us.  It meant he studied, and studied hard, and studied with the right teachers, and studied in the right kinds of places, in order to really know the Jewish law well himself.  It meant he had some authority in the highest circles of the Jewish faith to be counted on not only to know what the law said, but to be able to interpret the law faithfully.  I was talking recently with someone who got their undergraduate degree at Harvard University, and we both admitted that sometimes it is convenient just to slip a mention of a Harvard degree into conversation, just to lend some credibility to ourselves.  My friends call that “dropping the ‘H’-bomb,” because it is something that all Harvard graduates do sometimes, and it usually works to get folks’ attention in most places outside of eastern Massachusetts.  Paul’s talk of his family’s lineage as well as his status as a Pharisee served the same kind of purpose for him.

But he went beyond that in talking about his righteousness.  Besides his lineage and his previous work, he had even more to say about just how committed he was to being righteous.  “As to zeal,” he said, he was “a persecutor of the church.”  He was so convinced that his interpretation of the Jewish law was the right one that he was willing to persecute the followers of Jesus.  And the fact that he could persecute the infant church was evidence of just how close in he was to the inner circle of the Temple.  Those of us who are studying the book of Acts will get to the first scene where Paul appears in the Bible in a few weeks.  It is one of the most horrifying scenes to imagine:  one of the leaders of Jesus’ followers, Stephen, gets stoned to death for blasphemy.  And Paul was right there leading the charge to hurl rocks at him.  Paul’s zeal got him noticed by the temple authorities; he was no small player in the power structures in Jerusalem.

So Paul’s very respectable résumé makes what he said next even more remarkable.  He laid out his background for the Philippians, and then, in the very next breath, he said, “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss…”  He later calls his family background, his own impressive studies, and his remarkable accomplishments as “rubbish,” yesterday’s used coffee grounds and greasy pizza boxes, which are only fit for the landfill.  That’s a big statement to make.

And how can he talk about his family connections, his education, and the accomplishments listed on his résumé as “rubbish?”  Because for him, all that mattered was “the surpassing value of knowing Jesus Christ my Lord.”  For him, the experience of knowing Jesus Christ was more important than anything else he could do or be.  That experience alone was what he believed any righteousness he had was based on.  In fact, it was so important that it was the only thing he wanted to focus his time, his energy, and his attention to.  His background faded in importance; he found himself, in his words, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead.”  His relationship with Jesus Christ gave him a value and a purpose that he had never found while he was basing his credibility on his family name or his prior work experience.

Paul is not motivated by polite modesty, trying not to seem self-important in front of the people of Philippi while holding onto his own ego.  He is simply making a confession of faith, “because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus.”  And that faith is remarkable to me.  It is remarkable because Paul was in a position where he should have been puffing himself up to make himself and his instructions to the Philippians seem important.  But it is even more remarkable to me because it is such a contrast to what we do in our everyday lives.

In our everyday lives, we work hard to prove ourselves.  We work hard to build our résumé, making sure that we highlight where we went to school, or what degree we have, or what kind of position we held in the military, or our training, or whatever we need to get folks to pay attention to our qualifications so we can impress them.  And it doesn’t stop there; we have to continue to prove ourselves at work, making sure that the bosses know when we have done something really exceptional, trying to get ourselves assigned to the right projects, and talking up our virtues with our co-workers to get their respect.  Even at home, or in the community, we try to do the right kind of volunteer work, make the right kinds of connections, and do what else we have to do to let our neighbors and friends know that we are good, upstanding citizens, and to get the resources we need from the schools or the city or even the church to help our families.   Even when we retire, we keep striving to prove our capability, trying to make sure we have the respect of the folks around us, to make sure no one doubts our ability to live independently, or at least to get good enough scores in our golf games to avoid being embarrassed in front of our friends.  It is not necessarily the way we would choose to live, but it is what we do, and most of the time, we do it because we have to.

But when we see this table spread in front of us, we know we don’t have to do anything to prove ourselves.  We just get in line with everyone else, no matter who we are, and no matter who they are.  We can leave our résumé at home, we can quit talking about where we work or where we went to school or what our family name is.  In fact, in this place, in that line to come around this table, we can throw all of that striving, all of that proving ourselves, all of that wondering what other people think about us in the garbage can.  Paul regarded his background as rubbish because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.  And we can do the same thing, seeing value not in who our family is, not in what we have done, not even in whether our lives are perfect all the time or if we have had to weather a few embarrassing bumps along the way.  We can see the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus, of coming here, of receiving this little bit of bread and sip of juice from him.  And we can see that value because he really is the bread of life which feeds the hunger in our souls, and he really is the cup that holds our salvation, pouring itself out all over us.  And yes, when Jesus Christ is poured out, it will leave a stain, but who cares?  Our clothes, our social status, our education, our accomplishments are of no value here; there is a surpassing value in receiving what Jesus alone has to give us.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can appreciate the experience of falling in line this morning with everyone else:  all the folks in this room as well as all the folks all over the world who receive this sacrament today.  My prayer is that we can forget what lies behind us:  all the striving to prove ourselves that we have to do all the rest of the time.  And my prayer is that we can press on toward what lies ahead of us in that line:  the surpassing value of that bread and that cup and the one Lord who gives them to us, offering himself to feed our souls and spill out the salvation of the world.

Amen.

Do We Really Mean It?

Matthew 21:23-32

Eric Beene

September 25, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

It never ceases to amaze me just how well Jesus seems to know God’s people.  Jesus is particularly good at showing just how well he knows us when he is in an argument with someone.  Take the scene we have in our scripture lesson today.  Jesus was in the argument of his life; the end of that argument would come a week later when he was raised from the dead and the world changed.  He was in Jerusalem.  The day before, he had gone into town on a donkey, and then gone straight to the temple, the geographic center of everything that was important to God’s people.  He made some trouble there, turning over some tables, telling the people that he was not too pleased about how they were exploiting the piety of the poor people who were just trying to keep up with all the rules about making offerings to God.  The scene we just read about was his first appearance in the temple the morning after that incident.

And Jesus knew just what the leaders of the temple were up to.  They were trying to be clever and catch him in some kind of trap so he would look like a fool in front of all of those people who were following him.  They challenged him by asking him a question.  But Jesus knows God’s people, and Jesus knew that these leaders of the temple were trying to undermine his power and put him in his place after the turning-over-the-tables episode the day before.  So, Jesus eluded their question by asking one of his own, putting the temple leaders in a trap of their own.

And so far, we’re in the cheering section.  “All right, Jesus!” we say.  “Stick it to them.  Show those pompous temple leaders what you have!”  But then, Jesus starts spinning a parable, and we should know by now that, when he starts talking in parables, he often has something to say that is much more significant than simply putting the finishing touches on the humiliation of those temple officials.

In his parable, Jesus talks about a man with two sons.  The setting of the story is the man’s vineyard, and we realize that a vineyard is a common Old Testament image of the people of God.  The vineyard is where God works:  God tends the vineyard, God prunes the vineyard, and God expects good fruit to be produced in the vineyard.  So this man asks his two sons to work in the vineyard for the day.  The first one responds with an insolent, “I will not.”  I imagine this son to be a teenager, mostly because I remember being a teenage boy.  Your parents are forever asking you to do things you really don’t want to do, and usually they are things that, in your adolescent wisdom, you realize could just as easily be done tomorrow, or the next day, or sometime in the next millennium, for all their importance.  I have to say, if I had responded to my father with an answer like that, I would have heard about it.  But whatever the father’s response was to that young man and his adolescent wisdom doesn’t seem to be important to the story, because Jesus just moves on.  After dad has left, the son reconsiders, and he goes out and gets to work.

Then, Jesus said, the father went on to the second son.  I think he was a teenage boy, too, although for different reasons.  He responded with a very obedient, “yes, sir!” but then, Jesus said, he didn’t go.  Maybe he got distracted.  Maybe he didn’t even pay attention to what his father said in the first place.  Maybe he knew what the right answer was, and he just wanted to make his dad happy, or at least get the old man off his back, so he just said what he knew his dad wanted to hear.  I understand children do that to their parents sometimes; anyone here who has been a parent ever had that happen to you?

What is interesting, though, is what Jesus said next.  “Which of these two did the will of his father?” he asked those leaders in the temple.  And then we realize this is not just a cute story about someone else.  It’s not even just about turning the rhetorical tables and making fools out of those temple leaders.  Instead, it is about what it means to live the way God wants God’s people to live. And the way the story is structured, it means that the members of Jesus’ audience are either one son or the other.  And since Jesus’ audience includes those of us hearing this story this morning, the temple leaders fade into the background, and we are standing there with Jesus.

So, which one are you?  Are you one of those people who tells God no all the time?  Usually, we are not as direct as that first son.  Usually, we don’t just say, “I will not.”  Usually, our response is more complicated than that.  Usually, it sounds more like, “well, not right now,” followed by some excuse or another, like “I’ve got a lot going on in other parts of my life,” or “I’ve done that before,” or “I want to let someone else who is younger, or smarter, or wealthier, or wiser, or healthier, or less afraid of messing up, or otherwise better suited than me do it.”  Now, even when we utter those words, we know how absurd they must sound to God.  To say that we have too many things in other parts of our lives, for instance, is nothing more than to admit that there are parts of our lives we think are outside the power and call of God.  To say that we’ve already done our time makes it sound like we think the call of God is a prison sentence.  And to say that someone else is better equipped to do what is being asked is to say that God doesn’t know what God is doing in calling us.

Or sometimes our “I will not” sounds more like, “I don’t have anything more to give right now,” as if we don’t trust God to give us what we need in order to follow God’s call.  Or sometimes it is even more nuanced; sometimes, we actually find ourselves saying, “well, why can’t we just keep on doing the same thing we are doing right now and hope things will get better.”  That’s a particularly clever one; it makes it sound like we are on board with what God is doing, but it also says we are not willing to do any kind of work that we aren’t doing right now.  So, it’s a great way to keep on standing around in the shade testing the wine, even if the good fruit is about to start rotting on the vines!

So, are you that son, the one who tells his father “no?”  Or are you the other son?  Instead of telling his father “no” straight out, he tells him, “I go,” and then, just to butter the old man up a bit, he even calls him, “sir.”  But then, he doesn’t move.  Again, we all do that sometimes.  And when we find ourselves in that position, we usually have the best intentions.  We are trying to be polite.  We are trying to fit in.  We are trying not to make waves, or to make others think that we think it is o.k. to be disobedient.  We have good intentions.  But then the “To Do” list grows long with other, more pressing matters.  And things just slip our minds.  And we get tired.  And we get discouraged, because the work gets hard, or it means we have to go places we haven’t gone before, or no one else seems to think it is important, or we find we need that time or money or energy for something else.

So Jesus makes us look at ourselves and ask, “which one am I?  Am I the one who says “no” to God, or am I the one who says “yes” to God but gets distracted?”  But Jesus doesn’t stop there.  In fact, Jesus carries us, as we are standing there being confronted by him, into a different place altogether.  Jesus asks a different question about the two sons:  “which one of the two did the will of his father.”

And that is what matters.  What matters is not whether we say “yes” or say “no.”  What matters is whether we do what God wants us to do.  Period.  And there is so much grace in that fact.  God’s people are a funny bunch.  And Jesus seems to know it.  We can refuse to do what we know God wants us to do with the most sophisticated of responses.  Or, we can give the most enthusiastic and believable “yes,” and then just never follow through.  Jesus seems to know that most of the time we are, at the bottom, really just a mixed-up, confusing heap of intentions and limitations, ideas and actions, desires and disappointments.

And, thanks be to God, all of that stuff that is mixed up inside of us which comes up in what we say when God asks us to do something doesn’t matter to Jesus.  All that matters to Jesus is whether we do what we are asked to do or not.  When God tells us we need to pray without ceasing, it doesn’t matter to Jesus if we think we are too busy, or if we forget sometimes.  There is grace; we just need to do it.  When God tells us the only way we can better shape our way of living to the ways of Jesus Christ is to really, seriously study God’s word, it doesn’t matter to Jesus if we think we already know everything there is to know, or if our enthusiasm is oppressed by so many things going wrong in our lives; we just need to do it.  When God tells us that the church is the way God wants us to live out our calling as disciples of Jesus Christ, it doesn’t matter to Jesus if we are afraid to give more of our time and energy and money, or if we were really just joining because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.  We just need to give the time, energy, and money we can to live out our calling.  What we say doesn’t matter nearly as much as what we do.

And the amazing, wonderful, beautiful, grace-filled part of it all is that, because what we said in the past doesn’t matter, we can always change what we do.  Whether we said yes or said no, whether we followed through on our decision before or not, we can always choose to do the will of God.  We can recommit.  We can change our habits.  We can overcome our fears.  We can have new faith.  We can reprioritize.  We can always, always receive the life God wants for us.  That’s just the way God works.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can take advantage of the grace of the way God works.  My prayer is that we can recognize what doesn’t matter:  the limitations or the intentions, the prior actions or the old ideas, the unfulfilled desires or the shame-filled disappointments.  My prayer is that we can simply do what God asks us to do.  My prayer is that we can shape our ways to the ways of Jesus Christ, and receive the life God wants for us.  My prayer is that, no matter what we say, we can do the will of God.

Amen.

Enough

Exodus 16:2-3, 9-21

Eric Beene

September 18, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Just imagine what it must have been like to be among the Israelites in the wilderness.  That generation of God’s people had never known anything but slavery, just like their parents’ generation, and their grandparents’ generation, and all the generations before them for something like 400 years.  They worked hard labor, but they never profited from their work.  They were subject to the whims of their Egyptian masters, and whenever the political or economic winds shifted, they were the ones who had to work harder, with longer hours and less equipment, to increase production and drive up the profit margin.  And if they refused, they were punished with whips and sticks like so many cattle.

So just imagine you are an Israelite who had witnessed all of those plagues that allowed you to escape slavery, been guided across the Red Sea in that Cecil B. Demille-kind of way, and only been on the trail a few days after escaping.  And you find yourself complaining about the whole situation, saying to your leaders, “If only we had died … in the land of Egypt.”  If you had died there, you never would have been free; all you would have ever known was that horrible, horrible life of a slave.  What would it have taken for you to make a complaint like that one?

Slavery is horrible, and from what the book of Exodus tells us, the slavery of the Israelites was particularly horrible.  But there is one thing a slave gets that most free people don’t get:  they get food regularly.  It may not be enough food to make them as fat as their masters.  It may not be the kind of food they would choose to eat if they had a choice.  It may not be well-balanced nutritionally.  But it was provided for them.  Their masters would have to know at some level that without food, they would be too weak to work, so those masters would make sure their slaves had what they needed to sustain life.

So, after all that the Israelites went through to escape slavery, they found themselves complaining about being free.  And their complaints came from their bellies, not from their heads, because they no longer had someone to give them food.  They were hungry.  Just imagine how hungry they must have been to complain about being free.

And just imagine how God felt when God heard their complaining.  Freeing them had been no small effort, and it had required no small bit of anguish as well as a deep love and sympathy for them because of what they were going through as slaves.  As annoying as it might have been for God, God responded to their complaints and provided them with food:  quails in the evening, and some dewey kind of stuff for in the morning.  That stuff was called “manna.” The kids in Vacation Bible School this summer were quite amused when we told them what the word manna means; roughly translated, it is, “what is it?”  We had a good time going back and forth, in a who’s-on-first kind of way, with asking the kids, “what did God give the Israelites to eat,” and them answering, “what is it?” so we could ask them again, “what was it?” and on and on.

Imagine being told by God to eat this “manna” stuff.  The Israelites had no idea what it was.  They didn’t know if it was safe to eat, or if it would taste o.k., or if it would be enough to give them energy for a full day of traveling.  But they didn’t have much choice other than to just eat what God provided, whatever it was.  When God heard their complaining, and God provided manna and quails for them to eat, the Israelites understood in a new way their utter dependence on God.  No one in that band of escaped slaves had anything.  They were headed into a desolate place where there was nothing.  God was their only source of food.  They were dependent.  Their situation evokes that line in the prayer which Jesus would teach to his followers generations later, when we are told to ask God to “give us this day our daily bread.”

There is something interesting about that line in the Lord’s Prayer.  One commentator said that, in his experience, a lot of modern folks live as though Jesus taught us to say, “give me this day my daily bread.”  In our minds, that petition for daily bread is personal; each individual imagines himself or herself receiving whatever food we receive from God.  But that is not the way Jesus taught us to pray, and it is not the way God’s people lived when they had just escaped from slavery to the Egyptians.  The gift of bread, of food, of the only thing they could depend on to sustain their life, came to the whole community, all at once.

And it came in quantities so everyone would have just enough for that day’s needs.  The fascinating thing about the bread which God gave those escaped slaves in the wilderness is that it was just enough.  It was almost magical; the story goes that Moses told them to gather an amount that was just enough for each person.  But when they went out, they didn’t seem to listen; some people got all of their buckets and baskets and filled them all with as much as they could carry.  And since some people got more than their share, others got less; some people were slower, or not as efficient, or not as strong, or didn’t have as many buckets they could fill.  But then, everyone took what they collected home, and they found that the people who had gathered too much had just enough, and the people who had not gathered as much had just enough, too.  Everybody ended up with the same amount; no one had more than they needed, and no one had less than they needed, either.

And even if people were inclined to hold onto that food, to save it, to put a little bit of it away just because you never know when you might need it, their plans didn’t work.  Moses commanded the people, speaking for God, “let no one leave any of it over until morning.”  And soon, the people found out why God commanded that:  the manna would last for one day, and no more; if they held any over for the morning, the Israelites found that the manna had, in the holy words of scripture, “bred words and become foul.”  I can only imagine what that smelled like.  So hoarding a big pantry closet full of it, just in case you might need some more later on, wouldn’t do anyone any good.

The people depended on God for their daily bread, and God provided it.  But when God provided it, God gave the people just enough for everyone, making sure that no one would have less than they needed, and no one would have more than they needed, either.  Apparently, when people depend on God, that is the way God runs things.  And so I wonder if we can imagine not only what it would have been like to be one of those Israelites, but also would it would look like for us to live the way God would have us live now.

Just imagine.  Just imagine if no one had so much food in their freezer or in their pantry that they had run out of room, while others don’t have enough food to put out a decent dinner for their family.  Just imagine if no one had a house so big that they complained about how much work it is to clean all that space, while others have to cram the parents and the children all in one or two small bedrooms.  Just imagine if no one had so many clothes or shoes that they have to build bigger closets just to fit them all, while others have to wash every day or two just to have enough decent clothes to go to work.  Just imagine if no one had so much furniture, or so many toys, or so many little knick-knacks that they didn’t know what to do with them, while others are struggling just to get the basic needs of their families met.

Just imagine if the workers and the supervisors all received about the same amount on their paychecks:  not too little to feed a family, but not so much more than they need, either.  Just imagine if the generals and the foot soldiers got the same pay.  Just imagine if the educated people and the high-school dropouts got the same.  Imagine if the doctors and the managers got the same as the nurses and the teachers.  Imagine if the disabled and the very-abled all got the same:  enough, but not more than they need.

Just imagine praying, “give us this day our daily bread,” and really meaning us:  not keeping a picture in mind of me, or my family only, but of all of us, of everyone on your block and everyone in your neighborhood and everyone in our city and everyone in our nation and even all over the world.  “Give us this day our daily bread.”  Just imagine.

What we see as we imagine living as a part of that group of God’s people who had recently escaped from slavery is nothing less than a vision that could transform our lives.  It is a vision of the way God runs things when people depend on God, and I think that makes it a vision of how God would have us live if we want the best of what God can give us.  It is a vision of living with enough:  not too little, of course, but not too much, either.  It is a vision which invites us to examine our own lives, and the stuff we have, and the ways we use the things we have, and seeing if our lives could change.  And it is a vision which encourages us to see how we could better experience the peace, the joy, and even the dependence which God would have us experience as a part of the full, free, and abundant life which God promises us.

And encourage is a good word.  Because living like people lived when they really depended on God would take a lot of courage.  It takes courage to look honestly at our lives now.  It takes courage to confess that we are dependent on God.  It takes courage to examine the barriers we have to greater trust, which is the foundation of our ability to really admit that we depend on God.  It takes courage to see what it would take for us to live differently.  It takes courage just to utter that one, timeless petition:  “Give us this day our daily bread.”  The kind of work we would need to do to live the way God would have us live is hard work.  But it is good work, and it is Godly work, and it is work that will get us closer to the kind of peace and joy, the kind of fullness and freedom, the kind of abundant life God wants for us.

And so my prayer this morning is for courage, and for encouragement.  My prayer is that we will imagine the way things were for those Israelites:  utterly dependent on God for everything, even for their daily bread.  My prayer is that we will imagine what it was like to live among them when God did things the way God wants:  when everyone had enough, and no one had too little, and no one had too much, either.  My prayer is that we can imagine how our lives could be transformed to live that way, too, with enough:  not too much, and not too little, and mostly with a sense of depending on God.  And my prayer is that we may be encouraged by our imaginings, so that we can have the courage to seek that kind of life together.

Amen.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Matthew 18:15-20

Eric Beene

September 4, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Anyone who has never been a part of a church might puzzle over these verses from Matthew’s gospel.  Jesus was just talking one day with that small, ragtag group of folks who had been following him for some time.  He was just a teacher; they were just his disciples; no one had even mentioned anything about a formal organization, with structures and order, with committees and boards, with motions and discussion and “all those in favor say ‘aye’” kinds of votes.  He had not yet been crucified and raised from the dead; the disciples had not yet had to have any discussions about how they would choose their leaders, whether everyone would have to follow all of the food purity rules, and what to do about the guy who was, um, having improper relations with his stepmother.  All of that stuff is detailed much later, in the book of Acts and Paul’s letters.

So why does Jesus start talking here about conflicts in the church?  He tells the disciples exactly what they should do when someone offends them.  “If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.”  It seems pretty straightforward:  if someone does something wrong, you have to tell them, and it is better if you don’t drag a bunch of other people into it right away.  If the person won’t listen to you, just get one or two other folks involved.  If the person still won’t listen, then go ahead and ask the whole community to help resolve the problem.  If the person keeps on doing wrong, then we can talk about what the community ought to do.  Mostly, just remember that whatever you do, there are some eternal consequences to the way you handle disagreements.  It might seem trivial, but you need to take this stuff seriously.

I think Jesus launches into this discussion about the way to handle conflict in the church, long before there is even a church, because Jesus knows his followers.  Jesus knows that, whenever any group of people gets together and tries to do something significant, there will be disagreements.  Jesus knows that, in the midst of disagreements, or even just in the normal course of life together with other people, there are going to be some things that are said that are misunderstood, or there are going to be some things that some people like and others don’t, or there are going to be some juicy pieces of information shared which we really, really want to tell to our friends.  Jesus knows that church folks all have their own tastes, and those tastes come out when we have to make a decision about big things, like how we can best use our resources to share the gospel, and little things, like the color of new carpet we should choose for the aisle.  I remember a colleague one time early in my ministry telling me that she sat through a meeting in which a group of church people spent something like 45 minutes trying to decide what color the napkins would be at a dinner they were planning.  This friend said she found she had something else to do when the group invited her to their next meeting.

And I think Jesus knows that what he told his followers to do here is not the easiest way to deal with a problem.  If someone says or does something that bothers me, it is not easy to explain to that person what they did and why it offended me.  It is so much easier for me to call my friends and tell them how mad I am.  It is so much easier to go to the pastor and convince him that it is his job to settle the problem (not that anyone here would ever do that…).  It feels so much better to just complain and gossip.  Really, we can be honest here; those kinds of behaviors are gratifying.  They build up our own egos when we are down by convincing ourselves and others that we are not as morally reprobate as someone else.  They give us room to make sense of a situation that is very difficult by letting us tell our side of the story to someone who we know is likely to support us.

But the problem is, they don’t take care of the problem.  My friend who had the privilege of witnessing the epic napkin debate knew that the disagreement had nothing at all to do with the color of the décor for the dinner.  The disagreement had to do with years of offenses made and received and never talked about.  They had to do with blame the people there wanted to level at someone, anyone, because their congregation wasn’t what it used to be, and their neighborhood had changed, and their kids didn’t go to church, and all of those troubles were deeply felt but had never been expressed.  They had to do with a whole lot of things which needed to be talked through, but which no one had the courage or the energy or the honesty to bring up.  So, instead, every little thing was blown way out of proportion, including the shade of teal or pink which people would use to wipe their mouths at the dinner.

Jesus didn’t want it to be this way.  Jesus didn’t want church life to be tedious.  Jesus didn’t want us to dread every committee meeting, every social event, every chance that we might run into Mrs. So-and-So in the hall of the Sunday School building (did you hear what she said about me to her sewing club last year?).  Jesus certainly did not want any of us to go around with aches in our hearts and tears in our relationships because of years of misunderstandings and crossed purposes and jealousies and all those other things we hold onto.  And I can tell you, without a doubt, that Jesus didn’t want the church’s energy and time and other resources to be taken up with church members complaining to each other about what the pastor did or didn’t do, or about the decisions the Session made, or about how the Deacons are taking care of the shut-ins, or about how the Sunday School is being run or how the organ is being played or how the phone is being answered.  These are important issues; we all have a role in making sure the church is offering its absolute best to God and our neighbors.  But the way to address these issues is not by talking about them with people who are not involved.  The best way to address these issues is by speaking honestly and lovingly to the ones who have offended you, with mutual understanding and patience, respecting that all of us are working together for the greater good.

What Jesus wanted was for his followers to experience together the joy of human fellowship, the care of human companionship, and the compassion of human love.  Jesus wanted those disciples to understand that what they do has eternal consequences:  the way they treat each other can make it easy or difficult for anyone to experience the presence of the risen Christ in the church.  Jesus wanted those disciples to live in a community where everyone can experience compassion and grace.  And Jesus knew that would take significant effort, and it might be difficult sometimes, and it might lead to some of those tough conversations, where everyone is nervous about what will happen, but everyone is also committed to being honest, and being fair, and seeking to bring out the best in all of us.

And so, as we come around this table this morning, my prayer is that we will know Christ’s presence here.  My prayer is that we will understand the wisdom of what Jesus tells us:  that it takes energy and effort and maybe even some uncomfortable conversations to build the kind of church that he would have us be a part of.  But more than that, my prayer is that we can experience the kind of church Jesus would have us experience:  one where we can gather around this table, and we can each have a share in Christ here, and we can make sure that everyone else is fed, and we can all together experience the grace of God.

Amen.

Ten Years

Romans 12:9-21

Eric Beene

August 28, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

In the next two weeks, our nation will be talking a lot about remembering.  I fully expect that, after Irene has blown her way off the pages of the newspaper, we will not be able to turn anywhere without seeing something about our national remembrance of what happened on September 11, 2001.  In fact, it has already started; I have seen statements in the local paper inviting readers to go online to share their memories of September 11 and the days and weeks following it.  In the spirit of this season, then, I invite you to think about it for yourself silently for a moment:  what do you remember about September 11 and the aftermath of everything that happened that day?

When I remember September 11, 2001, the text we just read haunts me.  I had just graduated from seminary three months before, and I was still living a few blocks from the university.  Some friends went to a prayer service in the university church in the days after the attacks.  The preacher that day used this text from Romans to try to help the faithful people in the congregation that day think about what happened.  But my friends and I realized that it was just too soon.  The people flocking to churches in those days were not ready to hear admonitions like “be patient in suffering” or “do not repay anyone evil for evil,” or “never avenge yourselves.”  We needed some time to lament, to mourn, to tear our clothes, and to cry out before we were ready to think about how to respond.

In the weeks that followed that horrible, horrible day, Paul’s words to the Romans continued to ring in my ears, though.  They seemed to be the way that many people were trying to live.  Paul told the Christians in Rome that they would live well together if they would “let love be genuine,” and “hold fast to what is good.”  And further down, Paul admonishes those Christians to “rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”  And there seemed to be genuine love and goodness and honor all over this country in the face of the tragedy.  Volunteers flocked to Manhattan to help however they could.  The Red Cross had too much blood donated.  People reached out to their neighbors who were personally affected by the tragedy, either because they knew someone who was killed or injured, or because they were simply terrified and worried that something similar could happen in their own community.  Money came pouring out, benefit concerts were organized, and funds were set up for the families of those killed and injured.  As awful as the attacks were, they also brought out the best in people.

But then, things changed again.  National leaders could not dwell long on helping people deal with their shock and grief; something had to be done.  Our leaders chose to talk about what they planned to do in terms of war.  This was a different kind of war:  there was no defined enemy state, only groups of people who had organized themselves into cells and blocks and other loose organizations like that.  Maybe you agree that things were handled well; maybe you think it should have been done differently.  Either way, the language of war assumes that there is an enemy, and these words from our Bible troubled me again.  Paul believed that, as Christians, we live out what God’s grace really means when we “bless those who persecute you” and we “live in harmony with one another.”  And there’s a simple, elegant, Godly logic to Paul’s commandment, “do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”  Such words evoke the consistent commandments of scripture, and almost seem to echo what Jesus said we should do when someone strikes us:  to turn the other cheek.  And I was deeply disturbed, because the responses that our nation and allies were making, whether they were appropriate or not, seemed impossible to reconcile with the commandments of Jesus.

And these words have continued to haunt me in the intervening years.  A couple of years later, I remember when I was getting ready for worship one Sunday morning at the church I was serving at the time, and one of our church leaders came in.  “Did you hear that we got ‘im, Pastor!?” he said, and after some questions, I realized that Saddam Hussein had been captured.  I recognize why people in Iraq and in other places celebrated that day.  But then, the pictures started to be shown on the news, and I began to see something I did not expect to see.  Yes, Saddam Hussein had committed some horrible, horrible violations of basic principles of humanity over many years.  But stripped of his position and all that came with it, those photos showed that he was also just a human being.  They showed him bruised and disheveled and vulnerable.  I could look at those photographs and wonder in a new way how God looked at that man.  And all of the celebrating that came after his arrest, his trial, and his execution were colored by these words which Paul quoted from the Proverbs:  “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink.”  Mostly, even as I knew it was a good thing he was captured and prevented from hurting anyone else ever again, I also wondered if all of that celebration over his condemnation and death were really appropriate for the followers of Jesus.

And there have been plenty of other ways this text has haunted me in the past 10 years.  Immigration reforms and stereotyping of our Muslim brothers and sisters from all over the world seem to clash with Paul’s exhortation to “extend hospitality to strangers.”  And yet, the testimonies told over and over again to the courage, dedication, and selflessness of the firefighters and other first responders evoke Paul’s words, “do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit.”  The international shame we have faced as the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has remained filled with people who have been arrested but not given a trial contrasts sharply with Paul’s admonition, “take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.”  And the new understandings that some Christian leaders and churches have found as they have continued to build on relationships with their Muslim neighbors in the age of fundamentalism and terrorism evokes Paul’s words, “so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”  The attacks on New York and Washington, DC, and all that has happened in the US and all over the world since then in reaction to those attacks, have brought out both the best in us and the worst in us.

These words of scripture are haunting as we look at what happened on September 11, 2001, and all that has happened in the 10 years since then.  They remind us of the ways people proved the ability to live with love, with honor, with compassion, and with generosity.  But they also remind us of the ways people prove that we fail to live as God would have us live.  And so, more than anything, I wonder if these words can serve as a reminder to us of the importance of God’s presence and God’s grace with us.  These words give us an ideal to live up to as Christians:  leading our neighbors in showing honor and service and hope, and advocating in our nation and our world for anything which will lead to harmony, peace, nobility, and mercy for enemies.  Sometimes we live up to that ideal, and sometimes we witness others living up to it.  But sometimes, we also see how people fail to live up to those ideals; sometimes, we even fail ourselves.

There is one more thing I remember from the days following the horror of September 11, 2001.  I read a story somewhere a few weeks later about a Presbyterian minister somewhere who, like many of us, found it difficult to preach on September 16, 2001, the Sunday following the attacks.  So what this preacher did was to get up in the pulpit that morning and tell his congregation, “I don’t have any words to say today.  There is not going to be a sermon.  Instead, we are all going to go outside and plant tulip bulbs, as a symbol of hope and faith in the beauty of God’s steadfast love and abiding presence.”  And I have carried a picture in my mind for 10 years of what I imagine that looked like that Sunday:  ladies in their dresses and heels, men in their neatly pressed pants or khakis and nice shirts, all streaming out of the sanctuary with trowels and rakes and tulip bulbs.  All those good Christian folks lining up in the yard, digging small holes, and dropping in the ugly, brown roots.  And along with their efforts, those people bore with them their confusion and their anger, their grief and their pain, their fears and their frustrations, and all of those other swirling emotions which bedeviled many of us in those days and weeks after September 11.

Flower bulbs seem like the right thing to plant because they are a symbol of hope and faith.  They are placed in the ground, they are tended and nurtured, but ultimately, it is beyond the gardener’s control whether they grow and bloom, or they die and rot.  Paul’s admonitions to us from his letter to the Romans which we read today are like that, too.  Sometimes they are easy to live up to.  Sometimes they are difficult.  Sometimes we see the best come out in people, and sometimes we see the worst.  But in the end, God is in control, and whatever we do is not beyond the power of God to use.  God can bring beautiful things out of a tragedy like September 11.  God can also let us rot in our anger and hatred and all the other things that come with it.  But even when they rot, flower bulbs can feed the roots of other plants which can grow in beauty and strength on the failures of others.

And so, as we begin this season of remembering that horrible, terrifying day, I am going to greet you as you leave this morning, not with a handshake, but with a daffodil bulb and some directions for planting it.  And I am going to encourage you to plant it sometime in the next two weeks in your yard, or if you don’t have a yard, then in someone else’s yard, or in the church yard, or, if you really want to be bold with hope and faith, in some public place where others can see.  Maybe you will plant it this afternoon, while the idea is fresh, or maybe you will wait until some point in the next couple of weeks, when the media frenzy heightens, and the remembrances flow freely, and the feeling of it all starts to seem like it will overwhelm us again.  And I want you to plant this daffodil bulb as an act of hope and faith, recognizing that it might grow and bloom, or it might rot and fertilize some other plant, but either way, it can be used to reveal the glory of the God who made us.

And my prayer this morning is that we can continue to be haunted by these words of scripture.  My prayer is that we can continue to strive for the best that is in us:  genuine love, honor, zeal, service, hope, patience, generosity, and all the rest.  My prayer is that we can continue to push our neighbors, our nation, and our world to living in harmony, in mercy, in nobility, in peace, and in goodness.  And mostly, my prayer is that we may continue to hold fast to hope and faith in the God who has made this world and everything in it.

Amen.

Planting Daffodils as a Sign of Hope and Faith

Choose a sunny or partially shaded location.  Plant the bulb with the pointed side up about 6 inches below the surface of the soil.  Water well after planting.  If you can, add some bone meal or bulb booster fertilizer to the hole when planting.  While you are planting, pray for faith and hope to grow…

“Why do you worry…consider the lilies of the field, how they grown; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these” (Matthew 6:28-9)

Confession

Matthew 16:13-20

Eric Beene

August 21, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Yesterday, some of us spent our morning in this sanctuary listening to the Rev. Dr. Margaret Aymer talk about the Presbyterian Women’s Bible Study for 2011 – 2012 which she authored.  She talked mostly about the Beatitudes, which is the subject of the study this year.  But she also talked about another component to the study:  confession.  As a part of the study, Dr. Aymer has created a way for each women’s circle to write their own confession this year.

Now, that word “confession” has a certain amount of baggage.  It is rare for anyone outside the church or law enforcement to even use the word confession.  In law enforcement, confession is what a person does when they admit they have committed a crime.  In the church, that is most often what we think of.  Those of us who have never been Catholic only think of what we see in the movies:  some dark corner of the sanctuary, some old wooden box with a dusty curtain in it, some mumbling priest on the other side of that curtain asking provocative questions and doling out penance like a clerk passing out hamburgers at a fast food restaurant.  I know the sacrament of penance is not really like that in the Catholic Church, and I know plenty of people who have found it a helpful part of the rituals of their lives as they seek to be better disciples of Jesus Christ.  But Hollywood has to make a living, right?

In our church, confession is something we do together, but again, it is associated with sin.  Confession comes near the beginning of the worship service, after we have reminded each other why it is we have come here.  We are here to praise God, and we begin by remembering just how glorious God is.  But when we remember just how glorious God is, we cannot miss the fact that we are, shall we say, not so glorious, so we confess that we are self-centered, lazy, hypocritical sinners.  In some congregations, folks have decided that people who are not used to being in church would find such a confession too much of a “downer,” so they don’t have a prayer of confession anymore.

I’m not sure I follow that logic, not because I want us to come away from here feeling bad about ourselves, but because I think that is a misunderstanding of what confession is.  Confession is used in the church in another way.  In the Presbyterian Church, we have a Book of Confessions, and that book is a collection of 10 theological documents prepared by the church at various times during the past 2,000 years.  We usually use those in our worship, too, when we affirm our faith as a response to the proclamation of God’s word in the Bible reading and the sermon.  The Apostles’ Creed, which is what we usually use here for the Affirmation of Faith, is one of the documents in our Book of Confessions.

What Dr. Aymer is asking our Presbyterian Women to do this year is not just to write prayers of confession as they study the Beatitudes, making themselves feel bad each month as they talk about who is to be “blessed,” or “greatly honored,” in her translation, by the followers of Jesus.  She is asking our women to do something more like what is done in our Book of Confessions:  to say what they believe, based on the scripture they are studying, and what they are going to do about it.

But really, confession of sin and confession of faith are not two different things.  They speak to the same meaning of the word confession.  To confess is simply to speak the truth.  A criminal confesses by telling the truth about what she or he did.  A worshipper confesses by telling the truth about our imperfections in the face of God’s perfection.  A document confesses the faith of the church by speaking the truth about who God is and why that is important in a particular time and place.  And our women will confess by speaking the truth as they see it about God in light of what they are studying in the Bible.  To confess is simply to speak the truth.

That is why this story we read in scripture this morning is usually called Peter’s confession.  Jesus is at a critical point in his ministry.  He has fled Galilee and has found himself in a town called Caesarea Philippi.  He’s not in Kansas any more.  Instead, he is in a very Roman area, a town that was first built by a Roman governor to serve the purposes of the Roman empire.  And it is in that town where he chose to turn to his disciples one day and ask them, “who do people say that the Son of Man is?”  What are folks saying about me, he asked.  So they responded by speaking what they had heard:  maybe he was an important figure from the glory days of Israel who had been brought back to life, or maybe he was even some sort of reincarnation of John the Baptist, who had been killed by Herod by that time.  But then, Jesus changed the question.  Instead of asking about the gossip, he demanded a confession from those disciples.  He invited them to speak the truth about him.  He asked, “But who do you say that I am?”

There may have been a long pause for those disciples to think about what Jesus was asking, and there may not have been.  Matthew doesn’t say.  But Peter was the first to respond with his confession.  However long Jesus waited for an answer, Peter was the first one ready to confess:  “you are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”  Peter spoke the truth as he saw it by using these two phrases to describe who Jesus was:  the Messiah and the Son of the Living God.

I appreciate the challenge that Dr. Aymer has given to the women participating in the Bible Study this year because I think it is something that we are not asked to do very often.  It is not very often that we are asked to speak the truth.  Strangely, the kind of truth that a confession of faith requires is often considered very private.  So, it is considered impolite to ask someone to speak that kind of truth.  Maybe such truth is considered private because we might disagree about it, and so we do not want to foster any kind of conflict.  Maybe such truth is considered private because it cuts too close to the kind of truth we speak in a confession of sin, and we worry that the truth we speak will reveal too much about things we would just as soon not have everyone know.  Maybe such truth is considered private because it speaks to thoughts and feelings deep in our soul, based on experiences of the world and of relationships and of love and trust and hope that we simply cannot describe it all in words.  There are a lot of reasons why we may not want to ask someone else to speak the truth, possibly because we do not want someone else to ask us to speak the truth.

And speaking the truth can be dangerous.  During yesterday’s presentation here in this sanctuary, someone from another congregation said that they are concerned that the study of the Beatitudes will make their group’s conversations seem too political.  And Dr. Aymer had no choice but to remind all of us that anytime we talk about Jesus, we are talking about political things.  Peter’s own confession, his own act of speaking the truth about Jesus, was full of politics.  He said first that Jesus was the Messiah.  In the thinking of the people who were following Jesus, the Messiah was a very powerful figure.  The Messiah was expected to be in the line of the powerful kings like David and Solomon and all the rest, who were nothing if not political rulers of Israel.  And, the Messiah was also supposed to pick up the tradition of the prophets, who were forever telling the kings and other leaders of the people how they had messed up in doing God’s will.  But Peter didn’t stop by calling Jesus the Messiah, which was a political title in the mind of the Jewish people.  He also called Jesus the “Son of the Living God.”  That was what the Roman Emperor called himself.  It was one of the titles that Augustus Caesar and his line used to consolidate his own power.  So for Peter to stand in a very Roman city and say that not only was Jesus the political leader of the Jews, but he was also more powerful than even the Roman Emperor was to make a political claim.  Peter’s confession had political implications.

Those political claims are an important part of Peter’s confession, though, and they point us to why speaking the truth is one of the most important things we can do as people of faith.  The world around us doesn’t hear the truth very often.  The world around us only hears politicians of all parties and persuasions telling everyone who will listen just how good they are, and wealthy people telling anyone who will listen how they do not have any responsibility to care for those who are not as wealthy, and talking heads on TV spinning the truth to anyone who will listen to suit their own purposes.  It is very rare to hear someone say things like, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  It is very rare for someone to say in public, “blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”  It is very rare for someone to speak a truth like “you are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”

But that kind of confession is what we are invited to do by our scripture lesson today.  We are invited to speak the truth, even if it is personal, even if it is controversial, and even if it is hard to put into words.  We are invited to speak the truth even if it is risky, and even if it might make some people angry.  We are invited to speak the truth because we don’t get to very often.  We are invited to confess the glory of God, to confess our shortcomings, and to confess what we believe.  We are invited to confess as an essential part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

And our scripture lesson invites us to confess, too, how our lives are going to change because of our confession.  After Peter made his confession, Jesus kept on with him.  He gave him a new nickname, which is the name he is known by today, “Peter,” which is a play on the word for “rock.”  And Jesus said to him, “on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”  And based on Peter’s confession, he gave to his disciples “the keys to the kingdom of Heaven,” which is to say, he gave them authority to understand God’s will.  This is not light stuff.  This is life-changing stuff.

And that is what our confession is meant to be:  life-changing.  If we really believe that the poor are to be greatly honored, Dr. Aymer reminded us yesterday, then we have to decide to live a little differently.  If we really believe that Jesus is both the Jewish Messiah and more powerful than the Roman Emperor, then we have some new work to do.  If we really believe the truth we speak, then we have to be willing to step up, and to serve, and to love, and to do some work we never thought we would have to do.  Speaking the truth changes our lives.  Our confession will take us into places and positions and forms of service to others and to God we never thought we would do.

And my prayer this morning is that we may accept the invitation which this story offers.  My prayer is that we will be ready to make our own confessions, whether through the PW Bible Study or through our own study of scripture, our own life of prayer, and our own engagement in the church.  My prayer is that we will take the risk, and accept the challenge, of speaking the truth:  the truth about Jesus Christ, the truth about the glory of God, the truth about our own lives, and the truth about what we need to do.

May it be so.  Amen.

Yeasty

Matthew 13:33

Eric Beene

July 31, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

When we were choosing the stories that we would use for each of the days of Vacation Bible School last spring, the Christian Education Committee and I sat down with a long list of possibilities.  We knew we wanted to have all of the stories relate to the theme of bread, and the ways God provides everything for us, especially things as basic as food.  We thought of some of the more common stories, such as the miracle when Jesus fed a huge crowd with only a few loaves and some fish.  We thought of some more obscure stories, such as the time God used filthy vultures to bring food to Elijah after he was chased out of town.  We thought of the most sacred of stories, like the story of the Last Supper which we repeat every time we serve communion during worship.  We even thought of a rather grotesque story or two, such as the time John the Baptist’s severed head was the centerpiece at Herod’s dinner party.  And out of that long list of stories about bread and feasts, we knew we had to choose only five.

One of the choices we made from that long list of very fine stories was the verse we read a few minutes ago.  In this verse, Jesus compared the kingdom of Heaven to yeast that a woman mixes into three measures of flour.  Last spring, we thought that would make a wonderful story to tell the young children on Tuesday of Vacation Bible School week.  And it was about 3:00 Monday afternoon when Cheryl and I were in the office, both of us preparing for the following day’s lessons and activities, that she looked at me and asked, “why did I agree to have this as one of the stories for Vacation Bible School?”  And I looked at her and told her, “well, I thought it was a bit of a strange decision all along, but I thought everyone else really wanted it!”  And we laughed, and we agreed that if anyone ever thought it was a good idea to do something like that again, we would both refuse outright.

It really was a horrible idea.  It is just one verse in the Bible, and we were trying to build three whole hours of programming for young children around it.  We had to come up with craft projects, snacks, games, music, and other kinds of activities about yeast.  The verse doesn’t even really tell a story; it is a metaphor, and we laughed teasingly with Renée, who was responsible for telling our story each morning to the whole assembly of the children.  After all, she was the one who had to explain to a group ranging in age from 5^th grade all the way down to the 2-year-olds what a metaphor is.  Actually, as my wife pointed out, it is a simile, comparing one thing to another thing using the word “like” or “as.”  But the two things being compared were nothing that children that age could wrap their minds around.  The subject of the comparison is the kingdom of Heaven, which even the sharpest theological minds throughout the past 2,000 years have not been able to explain in terms that are anything but abstract.  And what that kingdom of Heaven is compared with here is yeast mixed into flour.  Many modern children didn’t know much about flour, much less about yeast, because most young families are too busy or too tired or too stretched in too many directions to spend hours every week baking bread at home.  The kids didn’t understand yeast, and if they didn’t understand yeast, then the whole thing fell apart.  Whoever thought it was a good idea to include that “story” in our list for Vacation Bible School (and I admit, that “whoever” might have been me) ought to have his or her head examined!

But it was Monday afternoon, and there was nothing we could do about it.  So, the next morning, the children all gathered, Jackie and Glenda and Ruth and Sylvia and Dana and the other shepherds and helpers did their faithful best to keep them in some kind of order in the pews, we sang the fun songs that Ms. Vicki had for us to sing, and we were all a little nervous that the whole day would turn out, if you will pardon the pun, flat.  Renée got up to tell the story, or explain the metaphor, or whatever she was going to do.  After explaining the concepts to the kids about as well as anyone could, she challenged the children with something.  She said that when their parents or grandparents or other caregivers asked them after Bible School how they are doing, they should tell them, “I’m yeasty!”  And that, at least, caught the kids’ attention, and it gave all of us something to focus on as we were trying to explain to the children the comparison between the kingdom of Heaven and yeast mixed into flour.

So the question became, “what does it mean that we are yeasty?”  In the time that Mary and I spent with the children, which we call “circle time,” we retold the story and did some fun games and activities to help the children get the point.  To try to help them understand this story, we showed them what yeast looks like when it comes out of the package.  We mixed up some yeast with flour, sugar, and warm water in a clear plastic bag and watched it start to bubble.  We did any number of other things to try to get the children to understand what it might mean to be “yeasty.”

But mostly, we talked about what the kingdom of Heaven is.  Most children, including those who were at Bible School, hear the word heaven, and they immediately point to the sky.  They think of heaven as some place up there, and they think it is a place where we go after we die.  But that is probably not what Jesus was thinking about when he talked about the kingdom of heaven.  Sometimes, Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, and most of the people who know a lot more about this than I do think that he meant more or less the same thing with that phrase as he did with the phrase “kingdom of heaven.”  The kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God, is any place or time where God rules.  It is where God is in charge, and not only is God in charge because God is more powerful than anyone else, but it is where God is in charge because people acknowledge that God is in charge of them.  It is where people live implicitly as followers of God by the way they behave with as much integrity as they can.  And, the kingdom of God is a place where people live explicitly as followers of God by the kind of stories they tell other people and the reasons they give for living as they do.  It is where people seek to live as God would have them live.  And that, of course, means more than just following the rules; it means living with joy, and with peace, and with a genuine love, freely given to the people around them and freely received from the people around them.

And the point of this metaphor is that such a kingdom can exist in some form in any time or place.  Jesus brought with him the kingdom of heaven, and he taught his followers to live as a part of that kingdom.  He taught his followers to acknowledge that God is in charge of all creation, and to live implicitly and explicitly as those who acknowledge God’s power in their own lives.  And, he taught his followers what that means:  to live with joy, and peace, and genuine love.  Living that way can happen in any time or place; even if the world around is not living that way, Jesus’ followers can live that way.  And, just like yeast that is mixed in with a big measure of flour, the kingdom of heaven can spread as the followers of Jesus are dispersed throughout the world.  As Jesus’ followers, we can fill the world around us with that same breath and Spirit of God that has led us to those joyful, peaceful, and love-filled lives.  Together, we can not only rise ourselves, but we can leaven the whole lump, rising together with the whole creation around us.  As much as this is a horrible story to try to build a whole day of Vacation Bible School around, it really is a great image for God’s people to help us understand the kingdom of Heaven and our place in it.

I am still not sure how much the children got out of the story that day.  I do know that some of the children went home and told their parents proudly that they were “yeasty,” and the reason I know that is because several of the parents talked with me the next day and asked what on earth their children might mean.  But I want to share one more picture for our whole church to take with us as we leave another week of Vacation Bible School behind.  When Isaac was younger, we discovered just how much he delighted in playing with a balloon, and we have noticed that such joy has not left him.  And so, we used balloons with the groups of children to try to help them understand the metaphor of the yeast.  You see, we explained, when you think of a balloon that you can play with and have fun with, you think of a big, blown-up, round thing.  But that is not how a balloon starts.  A balloon starts flat and plain, and it doesn’t become interesting or fun to play with until you blow some air in it.  And that is how the world is, we explained; just like the yeast puts air in the lump of dough to make it rise, and just like we put air in a balloon to blow it up, so God puts us in the world to raise the whole world to a new life of joy and peace and love.

And then, we started blowing up more and more balloons, until that whole Narthex back there where we had our circle time was full of kids bouncing and running and giggling, chasing balloons, flicking them into the air, trying to keep them from hitting the ground, and having a great time together.  And when one child started to look sad because he had lost control of his balloon, the other children helped to make sure he got it back.  And when another child’s balloon went sailing into a pew or too far out into the porch, the other children made sure she could get to it.  And when it was time for it to all be over, we had a group of smiling, out-of-breath children who knew what joy was, and what peace was, and even, we could see, knew something about what love is, and I think they got the message for that day the best way we could get it to them.

And I pray our church can share in that message.  I pray that as the church we can see ourselves as yeast in a world of flour, ready to be mixed in, ready to leaven the whole lump, ready to make the whole world rise with the life that God wants for everyone.  I pray that we, too, can proclaim in everything we do and everything we say to anyone who asks that we are yeasty.

Amen.

Nothing

Romans 8:31-39

Eric Beene

July 24, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

“Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus!”  We say it to each other almost every week in worship here at White Bluff Presbyterian Church.  Those words are a part of our Assurance of Pardon, which follows immediately after our Prayer of Confession.  Like everything Presbyterian, the structure of our worship service is very orderly and decent.  We begin by assembling during the Prelude and Announcements.  We then use the words of scripture and a hymn to remind ourselves of God’s glory and tell each other that, because God is so glorious, we need to worship God.  As we bring to mind just how glorious God is, we cannot help but see that we are nowhere near as glorious; in fact, as we behold God, just about all we can do is to say what the prophet Isaiah said when he found himself in the presence of God:  “Woe is me!…I am a man [or woman] of unclean lips!”  So, we turn our attention to our faults, our failures, our limitations, and generally everything that makes us so much less than God.  We pray a prayer confessing our shortcomings.  Then, in this congregation at least, we declare these words to each other:  “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”  We remind each other once again that God is not only glorious in power and beauty, but God is also glorious in God’s miraculous, mysterious, super-human ability to love us no matter how much we come up short.  And we sing again:  “Glory be to the Father…”  Finally, put in our place, humbled in the presence of our glorious God, but aware nonetheless of the constancy of God’s love for us, we are ready to let God speak to us through the Scriptures.

I have chosen throughout my ministry to plan worship using the same words for that Assurance of Pardon almost every week.  It is nice to change it up a bit for some variety, maybe for a special season, or when another preacher comes to proclaim God’s word to us.  But in general, I like for us to speak these words to each other in worship as often as we can.  In fact, I hope we speak these words in worship often enough that they are burned forever in our memories, like a phone number we call a lot or a line from a song we have heard over and over again:  “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”

I want God’s people to know these words.  I want us to remember them.  I want them to forever be a part of our being, burned in our minds as well as in our hearts and souls.  I want them to be the first thing that comes into our minds when we are worried, and when we are frustrated, and when we are angry with our spouse and angry with our children and angry with our parents and angry with the world, because someone has to be to blame when things get so lousy.  I want them to be what bubbles up inside of us when we are profoundly sad, grieving and crying and full of that pain that feels kind of hollow but at the same time really heavy in our guts.  I want those words to push out all of those other words that come up in our minds when we are doubting, not just doubting something intellectually, like whether or not God really exists, but when we are really doubting:  doubting that things will ever get better, doubting that anyone could ever really love us, doubting that we really have any skill or wisdom that will make a difference in the world.  It is in those times that God’s people need to know that “Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”  And if we are to remember those words in those times, we need to say them over and over and over to each other, all the time.

Those words are an abbreviated version of words from the section of Paul’s letter to the Romans that we just read.  In the letter, Paul writes, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  And in the larger picture of Paul’s letter, this passage functions in a way similar to the way those words function in our Assurance of Pardon each week:  they are the “takeaway message” of a much larger truth which Paul had spent at least the previous 3 chapters, if not all of the previous 8 chapters, carefully detailing for those first Christians in the city of Rome.

Paul had spent pages and pages explaining to the Roman Christians how to view their lives and the world through the lens of Jesus Christ.  He helped them to see what it means that they are saved, and how that had come about.  He helped them understand how Jesus could share the nature of God but also die at the hands of tyrants and ideologues.  He helped them honestly confront their sinfulness.  He helped them make sense of their own suffering, particularly of the ways they suffered because they had chosen to be Christians, but also of how they suffered because they were poor, or they were slaves, or they were powerless in any number of other ways.  He helped them have hope, and to see that hope is not just a positive outlook on life, but hope is based on the very real ways that they share in the life, suffering, death, and resurrected life of Jesus Christ.

And then, he summarized his argument thus far with this series of rhetorical questions:  “If God is for us, who is against us?”  “Who will bring any charge against God’s elect?”  “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?”  And it is with this last question that Paul elaborates an answer with much more than just a pithy sentence.  He begins to list some things that might feel in the moment they are happening like they will separate a person from God.  And what’s funny is that in this list, we realize he is talking to us as much as he was talking to those early Christians in Rome.

Will hardship separate us from the love of Christ?  We know about hardship.  We know what it is like to have to separate some of the bills out because we just can’t pay them this month, and hope that the companies that sent them will be kind enough to carry us until we have the money.  We know what it is like to have to ask our in-laws for help with the house payment or with buying school supplies.  Some of us might even know what it is to skip a meal so that our children will have something to eat, maybe even to flat-out lie to them, saying, “no, I’m not really hungry right now; you go ahead and eat.”

Will distress separate us from the love of Christ?  It seems like it.  Most of us probably know what it is like to have a really big fight with our spouse, or our parents, or our children.  You feel awful afterward, like you are confused and angry and misunderstood and maybe you don’t even deserve to be loved.  Fights like that bring out all of the stress in us, and in the other person, too:  all of the things we fear, and all of the things we worry about, and all of the things that have gone wrong, whether they have anything to do with what we are fighting about or not.

Will persecution separate us from the love of Christ?  It’s horrible when people seem to hate us.  It’s horrible to have grown up with a parent who never knew just how much their put-downs and anger hurt us.  It’s horrible when we remember all of the friends who we thought were close to us but then rejected us in some way or another.  It’s horrible to realize that we cannot stay in a job, or we cannot stay in a relationship, or we cannot stay in a community, because the way we are being asked to live is so contrary to what we know is the right way to live.

Will famine or nakedness or peril or sword separate us from the love of Christ?  We look around at everything going on in the world today, and it seems overwhelming:  wars being fought all over the globe, an economic downturn that isn’t going away any time soon, new reports of famine in Somalia, suffering continuing in Haiti; the news is relentless in painting a picture of the horrors that people face every day.  And at some level, way in the back of our minds, where we don’t like to let ourselves explore around very often for fear that we will never get out of the depression of it all, we know that we share in the blame for many of those horrors.  We take advantage of the huge selection of inexpensive food in our grocery stores, but we know those sales mean that there are workers out there who don’t get paid much.  We vote for politicians who we think will protect our interests, but that means they get locked in ridiculous showdowns to try to grandstand their way to reelection instead of really trying to protect people who are vulnerable.  We allow our emotions to get swept up into a fury when some picture of someone who looks like a terrorist is shown on TV, so that the leaders of the world spend billions of dollars bombing each other’s countries instead of doing what is wise and reasonable and merciful.  The list could go on and on; the point is that it seems like Christ is so far away from all this complicated mess that the separation will never be bridged.  “As it is written,” Paul says, quoting Psalm 44, “‘for your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’”

But as real as Paul’s questions are, to the Roman Christians and to us, they are still rhetorical questions.  The answer to those questions is something we just know; the answer is burned somewhere inside of us, and it comes welling up on our souls:  No.  None of those things will separate us from the love of God in Christ.  In fact, Paul answers his own questions this way:  “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors,” not on our own power or through our own ability; not through forgiveness that comes from ourselves or justification that comes from the world around us.  “We are more than conquerors,” Paul says, “through him who loved us.”  Therefore, he says, his whole sense that God’s news is good news rests on his conviction that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  That is our assurance.  That is our gospel.  That is the good news burned into our minds and our hearts and our souls.  Those are the words we repeat to each other, over and over again, week in and week out, when we come here to worship that glorious, miraculous, mysterious, super-human God of ours.  That is our reason for singing out loud, “Glory be to the Father…”

I pray that we may know the truth, in all times, in all places, because it is written in our hearts and minds and souls:  that nothing, not hardship, not distress, not persecution, not famine or nakedness or peril or sword, nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Amen.

Abba

Romans 8:12-25

Eric Beene

July 17, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

As I was reading the scripture lesson for this week, I got to verse 15, and I saw what Paul said there:  “When we cry ‘Abba!  Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness, with our spirit, that we are children of God…”  And then, after reading the critical commentaries and scholarly ruminations on this scripture passage, I did what any self-respecting member of my generation would do:  I went online to YouTube and did a search for old videos of the 70s pop music group Abba.

As I went through my extensive research, which involved watching a minute or so of the videos of several of Abba’s most famous songs, I came to realize that the Swedish group really was just a pop band.  Most of their songs are little more than love songs set to the disco beat that was trendy when they were performing.  They are not profound enough to really transform anyone’s views of the world, or to motivate anyone to really care for their neighbors.  But those songs are very expressive:  as a body of artistic work, they are excellent at describing the thrill of falling in love, the heartbreak of disappointment, the fear of being alone, the desire to have a life filled with optimism and dance, and the wish that I think we all have at some level to simply witness a storybook happy ending, watching a dancing queen, young and sweet, only 17, and having the time of her life.

Now, the pop group from the late 70s got their name by stringing together the first letters of the first names of the four members of the group.  They even turned one of the b’s around so they could have a symmetry in their band’s logo.  Their name has nothing at all to do with the word that Paul used in this section in the middle of his letter to the Christians in Rome in the first century.  Paul’s word was an Aramaic word which, as he repeated it in Greek, seemed to mean “Father.”  But the English word “Father” doesn’t really express the meaning of the Aramaic word “Abba.”  Abba isn’t the same thing as the biological term denoting the male parent.  There is an intimacy expressed in the word “Abba;” it is more like talking about “my dad.”  It is the word which Mark says Jesus used to address his Father at one of the most vulnerable times of his life, just before he was arrested, when he was in a garden praying:  “Abba, …remove this cup from me, yet not what I want, but what you want.”  Some scholars have also said it is the word that Jesus would have used to start the prayer which he taught his followers to pray:  “Our Father, who art in heaven…”  It was not some detached figure that Jesus taught us to pray to; it was certainly not a distant emperor or a fickle deity, which is what the world around Jesus taught that everyone should pray to.  It was “our Father,” one who knows us intimately because he has been with us since before we were born, dreaming of what we could be, raising us to live well, and loving us as only a parent can love his or her child, whether we do what he wants us to do or not.

Paul used this word to tell the Roman Christians, and to tell us, about the relationship between God and those who are a part of the Christian church.  Paul said that all those who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.  We have become so intimately connected with God like a parent is intimately connected with his or her child.  And that connection has been made on the initiative of God:  God wanted to love us, and so God sent God’s Spirit to make us a part of God’s own family.  And so, this word, “Abba,” when it passes our lips, is not even spoken by us, Paul said.  It is spoken by that Spirit which God put in us when God made us a part of God’s family, and it wells up deep inside of us, connecting with our own hearts and our own minds and our own voices, causing us to confess, beyond our own ability to speak or even understand, that God is so much more to us than a distant ruler or fickle deity.

Paul went on to say that, because we have been adopted by God, we are now joint heirs with Jesus Christ.  We get a share of everything Jesus received from God.  Especially for Paul, we share in Jesus’ death, when deep loneliness and pain and suffering nonetheless condemned sin, resulting in an end to the power of sin.  And we share in Jesus’ new life, his resurrected life, too, with an empty tomb heralding an end to the power of death, and an end to the power of the empire to control who we pledge our allegiance to.  As Paul says, “we suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him.”

And with this talk of adoption, Paul intends to do what the pop group Abba never did.  He intends to transform the lives of the people in that church in Rome.  Those people probably had desires much like those expressed in the love songs:  desires for a chance to fall in love, desires for a chance to come away unscathed when their beloved let them down, desires for a happy, fairytale ending, desire to dance and jive and have the time of their life.  But they also had real needs.  The people were from all parts of the social world of Rome.  We know there were Jewish people in that community.  They were living a long, long way from the place where their people could follow their law on their land, so they had to make do the best they could.  They certainly could never follow all of the requirements of the Jewish law; the temple was too far away for them to go and make the required sacrifices, and the kinds of things required to follow the law, everything from items to be offered in sacrifice to time off from work, were just simply not available.  So, they had to make the best of it, but they always knew they were living as sinners.  We also know that there were Roman people who had never been Jewish in that church in Rome, and those people probably ranged from a few very wealthy people to a larger number of people who were not so privileged.  Paul used slavery as a metaphor to show what he did not mean by adoption as children of God, and he would have only used that metaphor if there were people hearing the letter who knew what it meant to be a slave.  As a slave, you were a part of the family’s household, and the head of the household had a responsibility to make sure your basic needs were met.  But you were also subject to the whims and even the abuses of the head of the household, depending on whether your master was kind or cruel.  And you were never an heir; it was very clear that you would never actually be a part of the family, able to live with the respect of your neighbors or the freedom to make your own choices about where to go and how to live in the world.

And so, to those people who were a part of the Roman church, Paul’s message that they were adopted as God’s own children would not just make them happy, like a pop song might make us happy.  Paul’s message was intended to change their lives.  They would understand, maybe for the first time, that with the Spirit of God which God has given them to fill their hearts and minds, they would have a whole new identity.  They would no longer just be reprobate Jews; they would be the children of God.  They would no longer just be someone’s household servant; they would be joint heirs with Christ of the highest glory the world will ever know.  And no one could take that love and that inheritance and that acceptance and that new identity away from them, because it came from God, by God’s own choice.  This news that they were adopted as children of God could change their lives if they let it.

And I love that image of adoption for our own world, too.  In my own life, whenever someone talks about adoption, there are a bunch of stories that come to my mind, most of which have to do with friends who have adopted children from another country.  I have had friends who have gone to places like Chechnya, Ethiopia, Korea, Guatemala, and many other places to pick up the children they have been blessed with the privilege to be able to adopt.  They have taken on the huge responsibility of being the parents of children without knowing those children’s family histories, their susceptibility to medical or psychiatric disorders or behavioral problems, or any history of abuse, neglect, drug addiction, or any number of other factors.  They know very little about how the children have been cared for, how they have responded to the people who have cared for them, and how they have lived with structure and discipline.  These friends have spent thousands of dollars to buy plane tickets to travel to meet their children, and thousands more on a plane ticket to get the child back home.  They have faced the prospect of many hours when that young child will be confined to an airplane seat, and they have gone into those long plane rides armed with only a few snacks which the children may or may not turn out to like and a few small toys and books which may or may not turn out to hold the children’s attention.  Once they have gotten home, they have discovered things that other parents do not have to deal with:  their child can’t sit at a table and feed himself because he was made to stand and eat at the orphanage, and he was scolded if he got his hands dirty by touching the food.  Or, their child cannot sleep at night, not because she has bad dreams or wants to be next to mommy, but because she is not accustomed to sleeping on anything other than a pad on the floor.  Or, their child who had always just been treated as clumsy because he ran into walls and tripped over toys really has a serious vision problem that would have to be corrected with special treatments and glasses.

But I will caution you of something:  never, ever, tell those adoptive parents I know that their child is anything other than a full part of their family.  They love their children as sons and daughters, fiercely, from the moment they meet them.  Their children share in every part of the family’s life from the moment they are allowed to make that journey home:  they participate in every family event, they appear in every family photo, they are expected to do their part in the work of the family, and they share ownership of every bit of the family’s property.  The children are supported by their family, and they support their family in return.  They are nothing less than a full son or daughter in that family, and they never will be.

I believe that is what Paul means when he said, “when we cry ‘Abba!  Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”  I believe that is what he meant when he told the Roman Christians, “you did not receive a spirit of slavery, to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.”  And I believe that this news, that we are adopted as children of God could change our lives if we let it.  And I pray that we will let it.

Amen.

To Deal with Sin

Romans 8:1-11

Eric Beene

July 10, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

“I just know that if you talk with anyone long enough sooner or later you get back to this pervasive sense of not being worthy.”  That is what one person writing about the meaning of this scripture passage said.  You may or may not relate to that sentiment, but I suspect that it is true.  All of us carry with us somewhere deep inside some sense that we are not good enough, that we don’t deserve to be happy, that we are inadequate, that no matter what we do, we are going to fail somehow.  And that feeling of not being worthy comes from a keen awareness of all of the times we have failed before.  We have failed to be perfect parents.  We have failed to be perfect spouses.  We have failed to be loyal and honest in our friendships.  We have failed to follow through on our commitments at church.  We have failed to meet the expectations of our jobs.  In all the areas of our lives, we have failed to do what we know we ought to do at some time or another.

Sin is so pervasive in our lives that we have to deal with it at some time or another.  We do things we know we shouldn’t do, and we fail to do the things we know we should do.  And sometimes, we don’t know what to do:  we want to help another person, we want to deal with a problem in the most appropriate way, we rack our brain asking ourselves, “what would Jesus do,” and the whole situation is so complicated that we cannot come up with an answer.  So, in our fear and helplessness, we fail to do anything.  That is a sign of the power of sin, too.  We become frustrated, and we become angry because of our frustration and fear of doing the wrong thing, and in our anger, we find it hard to forgive the people around us and to forgive ourselves, too.  And then we feel more confused, and more inadequate, and more fearful, and more frustrated, and more angry, and sin spins out of our control, and it is like it takes on a life of its own.

Paul says in the paragraph just before the passage of his letter to the Romans which we just read that he felt like sin had taken on a life of its own.  More specifically, using an image that he and his readers would be personally familiar with, he felt like he had been sold as a slave to sin, and he suspected that the folks who were reading the letter he wrote felt the same way.  “For,” he said, “I do not understand my own actions.  For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”  Do you understand what he was talking about?  I sure do.  I righteously proclaim to anyone who will listen how I hate it when others do such-and-such.  But then, I find myself doing the very same such-and-such.  Paul went on, “if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.”  When we fail to do the right thing, it starts to feel like there is some force, some power, some thing outside of our selves that takes us over and makes us do “the very thing [we] hate.”  “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self,” he said, “but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.”  That force and power and thing that causes us to fail to do what we know is right has taken over our bodies, or our flesh, as Paul puts it, and is fighting a war inside of us.  And more often than not, sin wins that war, and we are left as a big, confused, fearful, frustrated, and angry mess of failure.  It is as the commentator said:  “I just know that if you talk with anyone long enough sooner or later you get back to this pervasive sense of not being worthy.”  Amen and amen.

And we bring this mess of sin and confusion and anger and failure and unworthiness to church with us.  And we bring it with us to our prayer life.  And we bring it with us when we study the Bible, and when we try to do whatever else we do to learn about God.  And in worship, and in prayer, and in study, and in serving God in other ways, we often have a goal in mind:  we want God to tell us to do the right thing.  We come to God seeking a reminder of that beautiful, delightful law of God:  that spirit of wisdom and truth, of compassion and care, of grace and beauty and freedom.  We seek from God an opportunity to show just how much we love that law of God, and a chance to do the right thing for once.  Paul said that he delights in the law of God, and we do, too, and we want more than anything to do what is right.  But we know just how often we have done what is wrong, so we come to God looking for a reminder to do what is right.

That is why this passage of scripture is so shocking.  Paul had been going on and on about this war within himself, between his own desire to follow the law of God and this sin that seemed to have invaded his flesh and prevented him from doing the right thing.  And the people reading the letter would have been able to relate to what he was saying, and they would have expected Paul to remind them to do the right thing, so that next time, they could try to get it right, and overcome their failure, and feel worthy.

But that’s not what Paul did.  Instead, Paul jerked the people leading his letter in a whole new direction:  “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  Huh?  No one saw that coming.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  You are worthy, Paul said, not because you get to try again to do the right thing, but because God has condemned sin.  You are worthy, not because you have stopped being a slave to the power of sin, but because God freed you by the power of the Holy Spirit.  You are worthy, not because you have followed the law, but because God has satisfied the justice of the law in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on your behalf.  And so this war that seems to be going on within you, between the desire of your mind to follow the law and the sin that seems to live in your flesh, has been transformed:  it is no longer a war going on inside you between sin and you, but between sin and the Holy Spirit of God.  And the Spirit of God wins every time.  God has not condemned you as unworthy; instead, God has condemned sin, so that you can be free of the whole mess.

It is as if Paul looked around this room.  This room has been neatly vacuumed by the custodian, and tidied up by the members of the worship committee.  This room is full of people who have taken a shower this morning, and combed our hair, and put on some of our nicer clothes.  In general, this is a pretty clean place.  But in this section of his letter, Paul brought in a great big trash can, and he set it in the middle of the room, and he told us that God is in that trash can.  Because he knows what we all know:  that no matter how much soap and deodorant and hairspray we used this morning, there is nonetheless a lot of ugliness here.  And no matter how hard we scrub, we will never be able to clean ourselves enough to get rid of all that sin and guilt and confusion and anger and fear and pervasive feeling of not being worthy that we all carry with us in our souls.  Our trying to clean ourselves to get rid of the dirt is the same thing as our trying to follow the law as a way to get rid of sin:  it’s never going to work, really.  Instead, God has taken care of our sin in Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.  “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

God has not condemned you as unworthy.  Instead, God has condemned sin, so that you can be free of the whole mess.  The sin and death of the flesh has been replaced in us by the peace and the life of the Spirit, not because we have succeeded in doing everything the way God would have us do it, but simply because the Spirit of the God who dealt with sin in Jesus Christ dwells in us.  This is not the message we expect; this is shocking news, in fact.  My prayer this morning is that we will be shocked by this news into believing its truth.  My prayer is that we will be shocked into receiving its gift.  My prayer is that we will be able to cease seeing ourselves as under the power of sin:  as unworthy, frustrated, fearful, angry slaves to sin.  My prayer is that we may begin to see ourselves as God sees us in Jesus Christ:  freed from sin, freed from death, freed for new life with the Spirit of God.

Amen.

Losses and Gains

Matthew 10:34-42

Eric Beene

June 26, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

This would be a good week for me to be able to deliver a nice, upbeat sermon that doesn’t make too many demands on us.  Something gentle, like a nice description of how Jesus is like a shepherd, or some kind of statement of Jesus about the peace he offers, which passes understanding, would be great.  Some statement about how God will take care of us, and our family members, and our friends, and our church, and all the people of the world – that would be a wonderful thing for me to be able to proclaim today.

I want to offer such a sermon today because I know we all need it.  There has been a lot going on in the lives of the people of this congregation in recent weeks and months.  I could stand up here and offer a long list of what has been happening, but I don’t think you need me to do that, because you know what has been going on in your own life, and the life of your family, and the lives of your friends.  A blog post that has been making the rounds of the internet recently said something like, “Some of us wear our brokenness on the inside, others on the outside.  But we’re all broken.”  I know that speaks to many of us here; it seems like right now there is more brokenness than usual.

And there are stresses in the church, too, and some of them may be projections of the stresses in our own lives, while others have a life of their own.  The Social Hall project is still going on, with a lot more work to do, and some of you have already given a lot of time and energy and are growing weary of the work.  The church finances, like most finances in all kinds of different organizations, are still feeling precarious.  The exciting things that go on around here this time of year, like the Sizzlin’ Summer Suppers and Vacation Bible School, nonetheless require a lot of time and energy from all of us.  And to top it all off, Ann told me this week when I came back from my vacation that the computer in the office is giving her trouble, so we may need to go through the process of replacing it, as if we don’t have enough other things to spend our time, energy, and money on.

It would be nice in the middle of this time of so many projects, so much brokenness, and so much stress and worry and sickness and struggle, to stand here in this pulpit and say simply that God loves us, and God will take care of us, and God will provide for us whatever we need.  I could do that, because it is true, and because God’s love is a truth that is so important to remember when we are overwhelmed by all that is going on around us.  But when I looked at the Bible passages suggested by our lectionary for our worship today, that was not the message which came through.

Instead, something came through that, on the face of it, sounded like more demands on our time, our energy, our emotions, and our other resources.  Jesus was talking with his disciples, and in a long, long speech, he was telling them exactly what it meant for them to follow him.  And this piece we read a few minutes ago is the culmination of it all.  Jesus begins, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth,” and all of our hopes for a nice, easy, Jesus-loves-you kind of sermon melt away into the ether.  We want a message of peace right now; we need a message of peace right now.  But that is not what Jesus offers us right now.  “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”  Yikes.

A sword is an interesting image.  It is an image of violence, of course.  You don’t usually use a sword for much other than for fighting.  But the function of a sword is really pretty simple:  a sword is used to cut something in two.  I am reading a novel right now that is set during civil wars in England in the Middle Ages, and there are some pretty gruesome descriptions in that book of what a sword can separate.  The was Jesus used the image of a sword was not from hand-to-hand combat, but was as a metaphor for what he would do to families.  He said that he would be like a sword which would separate a father from his son, and a mother from her daughter; his disciples would find themselves cut off from all kinds of family members because of their decisions to follow him..

This truth may not have been comforting in itself for Jesus’ followers, but it probably was accurate in describing the situation of the people reading Matthew’s gospel.  When Matthew was writing down his version of the story of Jesus’ life, the followers of Jesus were being cut off from their families and friends.  Their Jewish neighbors told them that they were not allowed to participate in their community’s life because they worshipped Jesus.  Their Roman neighbors and rulers told them that they were living outside the law of the land, which ordered them to participate in the worship of the emperor.  Jesus’ followers were being cut off from all of the important relationships which they had always enjoyed; it was like a sword was violently slashing their connections with their families, their friends, and their neighbors.

So Jesus’ words here, although they were not terribly comforting in themselves, offered the people who heard them some real comfort.  Jesus’ words assured them that what was really important was their decision to be a follower of Jesus.  In fact, if they loved anything more than they loved Jesus, then they were not worthy of Jesus.  “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it,” Jesus said, and by losing their lives, Jesus seemed to mean losing everything:  their jobs, their homes, their security, and even their families.

What Jesus gave those people who were losing everything was a clarity of purpose.  The purpose of their lives was not to simply maintain their easy relationships with their families, and to participate in their religious community just like they always had, and to keep up with their Roman neighbors just like everyone else did.  Their purpose was not to be comfortable at all.  Instead, their clear purpose was to follow Christ.  Everything else fell into the background.

Most of us are not facing the same kinds of stresses.  Instead of turmoil in our families, our friendships, and our communities that comes as a direct result of our decision to follow Jesus, our troubles are more complicated.  We are not suffering from constant aches or painful medical problems because we are followers of Jesus.  We are not watching as our lives seem to be unwinding out of our control because we go to church.  We are not in jeopardy of losing our job, and we aren’t upside down on our mortgage, and we aren’t dipping into retirement savings just to pay the bills, because we have made the decision to follow Jesus.  Even those of us who find ourselves separated from our families and close friends are not in those situations because we identify as Christians.

But I wonder if what Jesus has to offer his disciples, and his later followers who read these stories as Matthew wrote them down, is also what he has to offer us.  Maybe Jesus acknowledges all of our brokenness, all of our fear, all of our hopelessness, all of our conflict, but then he takes it all a step further.  Maybe he also needs to remind us, just like he reminded those people first hearing these words, that there is a clear purpose to our lives that is much, much bigger than all of the brokenness in our lives.  Even though our stresses are not a direct result of our decision to follow Jesus, maybe we need to fix our thoughts on that decision anyway.  Maybe all of these other things are just problems to deal with, or to live with, as long as we remember that the most important thing we can do is to love Jesus, and take up our crosses and follow Jesus, and even to be willing to lose our lives for Jesus’ sake, so that we may find the meaning and even the joy for our lives that Jesus has to offer.

So what does that look like?  Jesus gave his followers a pretty clear idea as he went on with his statement to them.  Loving Jesus can mean something as simple as welcoming his followers, and his messengers, and the people who are striving to live their lives as he would have them live.  Loving Jesus means providing hospitality to those people who also love Jesus.  Loving Jesus can even mean something as simple as giving a cup of cold water to someone who is thirsty.  It doesn’t have to be complicated; it doesn’t have to be elaborate; it simply has to reflect that we have made a decision that following Jesus is central to the purpose in our lives, and the other stuff we face is not as important as those simple acts of welcome and hospitality.

And that makes me think of our Social Hall project again.  Hanging on the wall in the kitchen of the Social Hall is a wooden box with a clear front.  Inside the box there hangs a ladle and a small plaque which states that the ladle is there in memory of Ola Hinely.  Of course, I never met Mrs. Hinely; I know some of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren fairly well, though.  But that ladle and plaque in her honor reminds me of all of those people who were here in the generations long before we came along.  The Hinelys and the Walls and the Cramers and the many other families who were here undoubtedly had some serious struggles in their lives.  They lived through countless conflicts in their families, and ups and downs of financial markets, and job losses, and times when they were scared they might lose their house or lose their livelihood or even lose the people they loved.  They lived through bad medical news, and they lived through aches and pains in their bodies.  They lived through times when they had to make decisions, hard decisions, decisions which they didn’t want to have to make.  And through all of it, they used things like that ladle which hangs on the wall over there to welcome the saints and the prophets and the righteous people who were a part of this community.  I imagine they used it to serve soup, and I imagine they used it to put sauce on the spaghetti suppers, and I imagine they even used it sometimes to give some folks a cold cup of water.  And despite all of the stresses and strains they went through, they taught Vacation Bible School, and they worked hard to put out the suppers, and they built these buildings.  They found in their commitment to follow Jesus a purpose that gave them the energy to work through or confront or even just ignore their other fears and conflicts and pains and brokenness, at least for a time.  And somehow, in losing their lives in their decisions to follow Jesus, those same people found life that was meaningful and even joy-filled.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can receive the comfort we need right now, even from these demanding words of Jesus.  My prayer is that we can find a clarity of our purpose in his instructions to the disciples: love me, take up your cross and follow me, lose your life for my sake, so that you may find the life I intend for you.  My prayer is that, as we focus on those purposes for our lives as Christ’s followers, we can see our fears and our hopelessness and our conflict and our brokenness as something we simply deal with as we express our love for Jesus.

Amen.

Looking Up

Acts 1:6-14

Eric Beene

June 5, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I heard once of another church that would celebrate the day when we read the story of the Ascension by going to a park together to fly kites.  When the Christian Education Committee members and Cheryl and I started planning for Ascension Sunday, we thought of butterflies.  It’s also a good day for helium balloons, or really just about anything else that makes us lift our chins and gaze upward.  Ascension Sunday is a day to look to the clouds because that is where Jesus led his disciples’ gaze.  After he had been brought out of the tomb alive, the way Luke tells the story, Jesus stayed with his disciples, teaching them every day.  Then, forty days after Easter, Jesus “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

There are plenty of things this act of ascending might mean.  Some say that the heavens were the location of God, so Jesus was simply going to be with God.  He had come from God, and he returned to God, this line goes, as if his 30 or so years on earth was simply an extended vacation away from his true, eternal home.  Others point out more specifically that the sky is the place from which God rules the world.  By ascending into the heavens, Jesus was going to take his place as the ruler of the cosmos, at the right hand of God, more fully sharing God’s power over all things.

Either way, the disciples are left behind, gazing into space.  And so, there is a bit of irony involved in using other things that ascend to celebrate Ascension day, like kites or balloons or even butterflies.  They draw us to stare off into space, just like the disciples did.  But they make us look just about as foolish as those disciples looked.  Just imagine walking across that hillside after Jesus left.  You would encounter a group of grown men standing in the middle of a field, looking kind of dumb, just staring off into space.   [stare into space]

In fact, throughout this passage, the disciples looked a bit foolish.  As the scene opened, the disciples came together around Jesus, and they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  They were still looking backward, back to Jesus’ earthly life, back to the hopes and dreams and expectations they had pinned on him, back to the time before he was arrested, tried, and crucified.  Through his trial and death, he showed that if restoring the kingdom to Israel was his goal, he was really not very good at doing what needed to be done to accomplish it.  Mostly, he showed that his goal was the kingdom of God, which is revealed a lot more through lives lived in peace and generosity and grace than in any kind of empire or political kingdom.  But the disciples had apparently not understood that.

And this week, I have been wondering if we, as the church, are more like those disciples than we really want to admit.  The church sometimes misunderstands, and sometimes even gets caught staring into space.

The disciples greeted Jesus with the words, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  Although we would not use those same exact words, we may find ourselves asking a similar question of Jesus:  “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the church to its Golden Age?”  “Is this the time when you will bring back all of those people we had here 15 years ago?”  Or, perhaps, “is this the time, Lord, when you are going to make things like they were in the 1950s, when everyone was Christian, and no one questioned the moral authority of the church, and it was just expected that you went to church, and everyone volunteered to teach the children and help with the rummage sale and run the other programs because households didn’t require two incomes and you could afford to buy and house and a car without going in to enormous amounts of debt?”  That seems to be what we long for:  a return in the church’s life to something that never will be again.  But there is a problem:  that return to the golden age of the church’s social and cultural prominence doesn’t seem to be Jesus’ goal, because the culture around us has been declining away from that for at least two full generations.

And so, as Jesus goes ahead and does something new, the church is left staring into space.  We are looking up in the clouds, kind of lost, kind of aimless.  We look as if we are waiting for something to happen to us, as if we are incapable of doing anything unless there is someone to tell us exactly what to do and when and how to do it.  Things are never again going to be what they once were, but we are not sure what to do instead.  And so our denominations fight over who can and cannot be ordained, and our seminaries mistake teaching about ancient history for teaching about faith in Jesus Christ, and congregations all over the place wring their hands about not having enough money to pay the bills and not having enough people to fill out the choir and not having enough children to make the Sunday School work like it used to.  And really, to people outside the church, and even to people who are in the church, we look like a bunch of people standing in the middle of a field staring off into space.

Now, I recognize that I am painting with broad brush strokes here.  And, I recognize that this is not a complete picture of the church, and most especially not a complete picture of White Bluff Presbyterian Church.  But there are times, even here, when I wonder if we are waiting for something to happen to us, or waiting for someone to tell us what to do and how to do it, because we can’t do what we have always done before, and we can’t do things the way they were done even 20 years ago, so we are not clear what we are supposed to be doing.

But the story goes on.  When the disciples had been shaken out of their upward gaze, they remembered that they really were not lost, even though Jesus had just gone sailing off on a cloud.  They were not lost for a few reasons.  They were not lost because they had everything that he had already taught them.  All those miracles, all those sayings, all those parables, all those lessons about loving God and loving your neighbor, even all those confrontations with the religious establishment of his time, all of that was still with them.  All they had to do was to go back and remember those things.  Taken together, they paint a pretty clear picture of what this kingdom of God, where lives are lived with peace and generosity and grace, is all about.

Those disciples staring into space were not lost because they had everything Jesus had taught them in the past.  They also were not lost because Jesus promised to send them the Holy Spirit in the near future.  As the disciples were questioning whether Jesus was ready to start the revolution they expected him to start, he told them, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.”  Jesus gave them a good sense of the work they were going to do, and Jesus also promised a Spirit to empower them to do it.  If you want to know more about how that all worked out, I suggest you come back next week.  If you can’t wait that long, or if you really want to know it well, I suggest you read chapter 2 of the book of Acts as soon as you get home this afternoon.

So, the disciples had everything Jesus had taught them, and they had the promise of the Holy Spirit to empower them to do the work they had to do.  But they had something else, too, and that was each other.  They went together back to the room where they had been staying ever since they came to that city.  I am not sure, but I like to think it was the same room where they gathered on the night when Jesus was arrested, and he sat at table with them, and after giving thanks, he took the bread and broke it and gave it to them.  Whether it was the same room or not, it is the same principle:  they got past their punctured expectations and disorienting confusion and visionless staring into space by gathering together, and sharing meals together, and praying together.  In fact, Luke says, they were “constantly devoting themselves to prayer” together with other folks who loved Jesus just as much as they did, and who were probably just as confused as they were.

And I wonder if the church can find our way forward with those things.  I wonder if we can remember for ourselves, and teach to each other, about what Jesus said and did.  I wonder if we can receive what Jesus has promised us:  meaningful work to do, bearing witness to that kingdom of peace and generosity and grace which Jesus brought with him to all the ends of the earth.  And I wonder if instead of staring off into space waiting for someone else to tell us what to do and how to do it, we can look to each other, not because any of us has all of the answers, but in order to gather with each other, and break bread with each other, and especially to pray with each other.

That brings to mind our Sunday School.  This week, we are making the switch from the regular teaching year of our children’s Sunday School to a different kind of feel for the summer.  And so it is a good time to recognize the folks who have helped with Sunday School this year.  I wonder if the following folks could please stand if they are here:

Cheryl Slusser

Susan Collins

Jenifer Paul

Sylvia Gellatly

Jackie Morgan

Jessie Garten

Glenda Johnson

Cassia Magnone

Sue Jonas

Deb Beusse

Mike McKenna

Bev McKenna

Sandra Bowen

Patty Windeknecht

Joan Maceyko

Molly McCarthy

Conni Connan

Barry Windeknecht

Karl Branch

Ed McCarthy

Zach Haas

Ian Thomas

These people have helped in big and small ways to lead our children through some new adventures.  Some have been with the children every week, and some have simply helped to decorate the rooms or accomplish a specific project.  If you ask them, they would probably tell you that they had some point in their ways of helping when they were not really sure what they were doing, or how to do it, or even why they were doing it, other than that Cheryl asked them to.  But what matters is that they have not just stood in the middle of the field and stared up to the sky.  They have done something.  They have taken another look at those stories of Jesus and done their best to show our kids what those stories mean.  They have relied on a power greater than themselves when they were not sure how to be Christ’s witnesses.  And they have gathered together and broken bread together and prayed with and for our children together, and so they have shown the children what the church is all about.

The church doesn’t need to long for things to be restored to the way they used to be.  The church doesn’t need to stare off into space, waiting for someone to come along to tell us what to do and how to do it.  We have what we need:  everything Jesus teaches us, every power of the Holy Spirit, and we have each other, too, to gather with, to break bread with, and to pray with.  And so my prayer is that we may celebrate these butterflies today not as a distraction, making us lift our chins upward and look foolish, but as a symbol of the transforming beauty and power of God.

Amen.

Advocate

John 14:15-21

Eric Beene

May 29, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Westboro Baptist Church.  If you have been following local news over the past several weeks, you know something about who that is, and you probably have feelings about it.  If you have not been around, or if you have not been paying attention to the local news, then you may not know anything about that group.  This supposed church is from Kansas, but the members travel all over the country staging protests.  They believe that most of the bad things that happen in this small part of God’s creation that we call the United States is due to sinful behavior, and they believe that it is up to them to inform all the rest of us of this message.  Perhaps their most notable and most disgusting activity is protests at the funerals of people who are killed in military service.  They believe, or at least they say, that the deaths of members of the military are God’s punishment for acceptance of homosexuality, abortion, and a whole host of other realities of modern life.  This past week, a few members of the Westboro Baptist Church were in Savannah with their picket signs outside of some local churches and schools with more or less the same message about what they consider immoral behavior that provokes the wrath of God.

It doesn’t take much research to see that the reality behind the group is a bit more questionable.  The Westboro Baptist Church is really made up of one man, nine of his ten children and their families, and a small number of other folks.  The man was an attorney who has been disbarred, and he has no qualifications for professional ministry other than a role of leadership he granted himself.  The church is not and never has been affiliated with any kind of Baptist organization.  And most telling, most of the money the group uses to support its protests is gained from lawsuits it brings against people who counter-protest against them.  The so-called church includes an attorney or two who are experts at making claims that counter-protesters or local authorities have infringed on their right for public protest.  Instead of pressing criminal charges, they file lawsuits and collect damages from those groups.  By all accounts I have read, it is a lucrative business plan, and it keeps the Westboro group living well and traveling to interesting places.

The Westboro Baptist Church is an easy target for preachers.  Clearly, the group does not speak for any God I am willing to worship and serve, and they ignore most of the Bible, including almost everything it says about the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as they seek a theological justification for their protests.  But it is easy to see a group like that as something completely different from ourselves, something not only unchristian, but even almost not human.  In fact, I think it is too easy.  And I want us to spend just a little bit of time trying to understand something about that group and why they provoke so much attention with everything they do.

Behind all of their blatant self-interest, their clear grasping for power and influence beyond their own little sect, and their complete lack of basic human sensitivity for the people on the receiving end of their protests, the group has chosen to give an expression to some feelings that are not all that strange.  They look around at the modern world, and they are scared.  They are confronted, as we all are, by messages and images and ideas that, in previous generations, were more easily overlooked or ignored.  Women no longer are willing to be confined to certain roles and subject to the power of men.  Gay and lesbian people no longer hide themselves in closets, but seek to be recognized as people who are just as loving and lovable as anyone else.  Behavior that once would get a person shunned is now tolerated.  Elected leaders, business leaders, and even religious leaders now not only can but must be honest about the mistakes and missteps they have made in the past.  Images that once were only available wrapped in plain brown paper are now all over every billboard you pass on the highway.  The world has changed, and the changes do not make everyone very comfortable.

And we begin to wonder things:  why have those things that used to be hidden now become acceptable?  why do people think they can talk so publicly about those things that make us uncomfortable?  if those things have changed, what will change next?  what does God think about all of these changes?  And it does not take long for those questions to lead to other questions:  what else has changed, and is there any correlation between those changes?  can we see cause-and-effect links between the things that make us uncomfortable and the death and destruction we see all the time?  The answer to that last question is an obvious no; the world is not that simple.  But the folks from Westboro Baptist Church are a lot of things, but I wonder if one of the most important things they are is afraid, and maybe even afraid in ways that perfectly reasonable people are afraid, too.

Jesus’ followers were afraid, too.  Things had changed rapidly for them.  Through the signs Jesus showed and the ways he taught them, they had come to believe amazing things, things they never would have believed before.  They had seen that water could be turned into wine, and blind people could be healed, and that a dead person could come walking out of his grave.  They had learned that healing on the Sabbath was not the worst thing someone could do, and that blindness was not necessarily caused by sin, and that the Pharisees’ skill at interpreting the law did not translate into a skill at knowing God’s will.  Most importantly, they had discovered that the light of the world, the bread of life, the way, the truth, and even the life itself could be found in human form.  What they had learned changed not only the way they saw the world and understood the world; it changed the world itself.

And things were getting ready to change again.  These words of Jesus we just read were delivered on that last night he spent with them, during the meal they shared together.  He had just told them and shown them something else that changed things:  that if they were going to follow his lead, they had to become humble servants, even deigning to wash one another’s filthy feet.  He had told them that his command for them was simple:  that they love one another as he had loved them.  Through everything he said and did that night, it became abundantly clear to them that he was, in fact, going to die.  In the midst of their profound sadness, I am sure that they began to wonder things:  what does it mean that he will die?  have we placed our trust and faith in the wrong man?  has he done or said something that did not please God?  They had plenty of reasons to be afraid.

Jesus spoke to their fears by reminding them what faith really is.  Faith is not believing in a simple logic:  that when we do something to displease God, God will kill us; that we can see a clear cause-and-effect link between the death and destruction in this world and a change in attitudes about women’s roles, gay and lesbian rights, or some other new tolerance for behavior that was once considered shameful.  Faith is also not assuming that everything will always remain the same.  Instead, faith is knowing something beyond what we see.  Faith is knowing that God abides with us, and in us, all the time, in every circumstance.  Faith is love for God, such that we do everything we can to keep that commandment Jesus gave us:  love one another as we have been loved by him.  Faith is receiving a Spirit which the world cannot receive, and knowing that Spirit brings truth and knowledge and experience and feeling and all kinds of things that link us with Jesus.

And faith is knowing that we have an Advocate.  It is an interesting word Jesus uses here.  Usually we just assume that Jesus is talking about the same thing that we see talked about in other parts of the Bible:  the Holy Spirit.  But there is a unique word here.  The word that is usually translated “Advocate” is a legal term.  It is an attorney, someone who is supposed to represent one of the parties in a court case.  An advocate does not take care of you and heal you and comfort you.  An advocate does not make flames dance over your head or make you speak in tongues.  Those are some of the many roles of the Holy Spirit in other parts of the Bible.  Instead, an advocate is there to make sure that truth is both spoken and heard.  An advocate represents someone else by telling the facts of their story.  An advocate does things very similar to what the disciples had experienced from Jesus:  teaches them that God has the power to show great signs, and that knowing God’s will is not the same thing as following the rules with a foolish consistency, and that light and nourishment and life and truth are not so much rules to memorize but a being to follow and to love.

Jesus promised his disciples that when they could no longer see him, he would nonetheless be present in this other Advocate.  In other words, we do not have to go it alone.  We are not orphaned, abandoned, and left for dead by God.  Faith means knowing that, and living in such a way that we show the world that we know that.  We have nothing to fear:  we do not have to fear any change that the world can bring upon us.  We simply have to have faith.

I think that is one of the places where the folks from Westboro Baptist Church go wrong.  They seem to lack faith.  They do not seem to believe that God is working in ways that are beyond anything we see.  They do not seem to understand that God is abiding with us, all the time, in every circumstance.  They do not seem to know that God really just wants us to love one another as we have been loved, just like Jesus told us to do.  They do not seem to live as if they trust in the Advocate to show signs of grace and abundance and life, to reveal God’s will, and to be a being to follow and to love.  Instead, they simply live in fear.

And their fear is a caution to us, because on some days, usually not the good ones, we become afraid, too.  And the antidote to that fear is in the gift of the promises Jesus gave his disciples that night before his death.  The antidote to our own fear of changes in the world, and changes in our lives, and changes in our bodies, and changes in the way the world seems to work, is faith, real faith, true faith, faith revealed by the Advocate for the people of God.  The antidote to such a horrible fear is the knowledge that Christ would never leave us orphaned; that we can receive the Spirit of truth the rest of the world cannot receive.  The antidote to fear is the knowledge that Christ is in us and God is in Christ and we are in Christ and all together there is love and truth and nothing at all to fear.

I pray for such faith for all of us:  a faith that takes seriously Christ’s promises, a faith that bears witness to Christ’s ongoing, eternal, abundant presence with us, a faith that has courage to love others as we have been loved.

Amen.

Rocks

Acts 7:55-60 and 1 Peter 2:4-10

Eric Beene

May 22, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Rocks are all over the scriptures.  There are some stories of rocks and stones that stand out for me in particular.  Some stones in the Bible are simply there to remind people of significant encounters with God.  For instance, according to Genesis, Jacob was on a journey in the wilderness, and the only thing around for him to lay his head on to sleep one night was a rock.  That night, he had a dream with angels climbing and descending a ladder between the wilderness and the heavens, and he heard God’s voice repeat to him the unexpected promises of prosperity and blessing God had made to his grandfather, Abraham.  Jacob set that stone up and anointed it to remind all of God’s people of the promises God made in that place.  Similarly, the people of God piled twelve rocks on the edge of the river Jordan as they entered the promised land, reminding them to tell all the future generations of the way God delivered them on that day.  And what about the stone tablets with the laws of God, “written with the finger of God,” which God gave Moses?  The people of God carried those tablets with them in the ark of the covenant through their years in the wilderness, as they entered the promised land, and as they fought battle after battle with their enemies.  Finally, when the great temple was built, those stone tablets rested there.  Stones were often ways God’s people remembered their encounters with God.

Stones also represent God’s protection in the Bible.  The Psalm which was paraphrased as we called ourselves to worship God this morning is a great example.  “Be a rock of refuge for me,” the psalmist wrote in Psalm 31.  And we can understand what the Psalmist was asking for.  There are times when storms batter us, or enemies chase after us, or we just need a place of safety for a while.  God shelters us in those times, protecting us and hiding us, so that we can breathe, and we can rest, and we can strengthen our bodies and our souls, and we can have the courage to face whatever we need to face. A modern hymn writer picked up the same image of God when he penned the words, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in Thee.”

Sometimes in the Bible, stones mark places where God’s people encountered God in significant ways.  Sometimes, stones represent God’s protection and shelter of God’s people.  But stones can also have negative connotations in the Bible.  Our first scripture lesson this morning illustrates that very well.  Stephen had been preaching about Jesus in the city of Jerusalem, and some of the leaders of the people saw him as a threat to their traditions and their power.  So they had him arrested.  After a long speech to the priestly council, they were angry.  But then, he shared a vision of Jesus at the right hand of God, and they had enough; unless one believed Jesus was equal with God, to say he was that close to God was blasphemy, and the punishment for blasphemy was death.  The people took Stephen to the edge of town and carried out the punishment by stoning Stephen until he died.  Those stones are a symbol of rejection and death; they remind me of the stone that was rolled into place to seal Jesus’ crucified, bloody, and broken body in the tomb after his crucifixion.  Whatever else they are, stones are cold, they are hard, and they can be used as weapons or as tombs.

Stones mark the places of significant encounters with God.  Stones represent God’s protection and shelter.  But stones also evoke rejection and death.  And that leads us to one of the richest passages in the whole Bible talking about stones.  In the first letter of Peter, the writer encourages the people of God with images of stones.  The writer here compares Jesus to a stone.  In fact, he takes quotes from the prophet Isaiah to compare Jesus with the cornerstone of a building.  The cornerstone in modern buildings is mostly a symbolic image; in our buildings made of steel, or cinder blocks, or wood, a cornerstone is no more important than any other part of the whole thing to hold the structure up.  But if a building is made of pillars, then the cornerstones are important.  If the cornerstones fail, then the walls fall down, and the roof caves in, and your building will amount to nothing more than a useless pile of rocks.  Jesus is strong enough to serve as a cornerstone, the writer here tells the Christians in the communities he is writing to.

But what he says is not so simple, and that is because the lives of the Christians in those communities was not so simple.  The communities he was writing to were filled with women, and with slaves and servants, and with Gentiles.  None of those people had any status, either in the Roman world or in the Jewish subcultures they were a part of.  All over the letter, the writer describes the situation of those Christians with dramatic language; simply because they had refused to worship the emperor and embraced the good news of Jesus Christ, they were being tested by a “fiery ordeal;” they were “reviled,” and over and over again, the writer acknowledges, they were suffering.  Those people probably related well to stones as symbols of rejection and death.

And so it was not enough to tell those people that Jesus was strong like a cornerstone.  The writer draws on the 118^th Psalm to expand that metaphor a bit.  Jesus is not just a strong cornerstone, the writer says; his story is more miraculous than that.  He is “the stone that the builders rejected.”  He is strong, but he has been rejected; no one recognized his strength, so he was tossed into the scrap heap with all of the slaves and women and other outcastes.  But God had other plans for Jesus, so that stone which everyone else rejected was used by God as the chief cornerstone.  And God had other plans for those reviled and suffering believers, too.  They were to be used by God to build the church:  God’s great construction project creating something strong and useful and beautiful and sacred, anchored in Jesus, to the glory of God.

“Like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house,” the writer says, and notice something important here.  Notice that the writer does not say, “build yourselves into a house.”  The spiritual house is not made through the strength of the effort of those believers.  They are passive; God is the active one, and all the stones have to do is to be open to the work of the builder, and to allow themselves to be put together, and to allow their life together to be used to proclaim God’s love, God’s mercy, and God’s glory.

This is a rich set of comparisons here, and I think they are worth carrying with us.  When you came in this morning, one of the Deacons should have handed you a stone.  Did everyone get one?  If not, raise your hand and someone will bring one to you.  I want you to pull out that stone, and look at it carefully, noticing all the ways it is perfect, and noticing, too, all of the flaws in it.  Roll it around in your hands, and notice the ways it may be cold and hard, and feel it warming up, and feel its smoothness.

Now, with this passage of scripture in mind, I want you to think for a minute about what that stone might be for you.  You may be at a place in your life where you need that stone to represent Jesus.  You may need to be reminded that Jesus will not crumble or break, and that Jesus is strong enough to serve as a cornerstone.  You may need to remember that this stone is not gold or diamond or some other valuable rock.  This stone would be rejected by most people, but it is chosen by God and precious to God, so that it can even be the foundation for your life.

Or, you may be at a place in your life where you need that stone to represent yourself.  You may need that stone to remind you to allow yourself to be used by God.  You may need that stone to remind you that you are a part of something much bigger than just yourself; that you are a part of the spiritual house built on Jesus Christ for the glory of God.  You may even need that stone to tell you that it is not through your own hard work that you become a part of the building; you are called simply to be open and willing to allow yourself to be used, and to acknowledge that God is the one doing the building here.

Those stones are small enough to fit in your pocket or your purse.  They can be deposited in the cup holder in your car or the place in your bedroom where you put your change at the end of the day.  Whatever you need this stone to represent, I hope you will let it be a reminder, just as the people of God marked their encounters with God with stones.  And whatever you need it to represent, I pray that God will use it as a rock of refuge for you:  reminding you of God’s protection, giving you comfort and safety, letting you rest and breathe and be strengthened.

And I pray that we may all come to him as a living stone, “rejected by humans yet chosen and precious in God’s sight,” and that we, too, may all, like living stones, let ourselves “be built into a spiritual house…to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

Alleluia!  Amen.

Life Abundantly

John 10:1-10

Eric Beene

May 15, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I have tried to avoid preaching on this passage of scripture for a long time.  I have tried to avoid it not because there are really complicated theological truths stated here.  I haven’t avoided it because it is one of those tough texts that seems to say something about God that I don’t really want to hear.  I have avoided preaching on this passage because, to be honest, it is about as clear as mud to me.

These verses do not make any sense.  Jesus starts out talking about sheep, and shepherds, and gates, and gatekeepers.  But somewhere along the way, I get confused about what he is saying.  Are we supposed to be the sheep?  If so, who are the other figures in this?  The shepherd seems to be Jesus, calling the sheep, leading them out, speaking to them in a familiar, comforting, and protective voice.  But who is the gatekeeper?  And who are the thieves and bandits?  And then, a couple of verses later, Jesus says, not once but twice, as if this is a really important thing to understand, “I am the gate.”  The gate?  What?  I thought he was a shepherd!  Jesus is a gate?  How does that make any sense?  John helpfully tells us that the people listening to Jesus “did not understand what he was saying to them.”  I can see why.

Now, I recognize that you did not come to church this morning to hear the preacher talk about just how confusing scripture is.  We all know scripture is confusing.  We all know that the matters scripture talks about are so big, and so abstract, that they are hard to wrap our minds around.  We spend most of our time trying to figure out how to get the car fixed, and how to please our bosses, and how to respond to our children’s grades, and how we are going to pay for college or retirement or the medical bills or even next month’s rent.  The Bible doesn’t have much to say directly about those matters.  Instead, it talks about things like love, and faith, and hope, which are hard things to think about.  And it’s not just that the Bible is abstract; it also could use a good editor.  It has all those convoluted sentences that did not make the jump from ancient Greek to modern English unscathed, and it has all kinds of mixed-up images and metaphors, and it even seems to contradict itself in some places.  Can’t anyone tell us how to understand it all?

It’s o.k. to be confused by the Bible, or at least I hope it’s o.k., because it happens to me all the time.  But it’s not o.k. to just ignore a confusing bit of scripture, or to just pretend certain passages aren’t there, or to otherwise avoid them indefinitely.  So, we are considering this passage of scripture this week.

One thing that most folks agree on is that this jumbled up mix of metaphors Jesus makes in these verses is best understood not as a passage in itself, but as the end of the previous story, which began with verse one of chapter nine.  This is the conclusion to the story of the man who was born blind.  You might remember that story:  Jesus and his disciples were walking along the road one day and happened upon a man who had been blind since he was born.  The first thing out of the disciples’ mouth was a question about whether the man’s blindness was a result of his own sin or his parents’ sin.  Their traditions told them that any disability must be have been caused by sin, so the person who came out of the womb blind was a conundrum to them.

After Jesus healed the man, it was the Pharisees’ turn to be in a conundrum.  The Pharisees were upset because Jesus had healed the man on the Sabbath, which was considered a violation of the laws of God spelled out in the scriptures.  They drove out the man who was blind but now could see, but Jesus welcomed him.  Jesus told the man, “I came into this world…so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.”  Then, Jesus addressed the Pharisees and anyone else who would listen with this statement about sheep and shepherds and thieves and bandits and gates.

The disciples and the Pharisees in that story were both missing something.  They were thinking only about small details of the situation of the man whose sight was given to him by Jesus.  They saw a poor man who had no way to earn a living other than to suffer every day the humiliation of having to beg along the road side.  And, they witnessed Jesus perform a great sign which represented his purpose in life.  But then they refused to move on without fitting that experience of the poor man and Jesus’ sign into their narrow idea of what they thought God was all about.  They had all grown up learning the law.  The Pharisees even made their living and held their power because they had a unique right to interpret that law.

And so, Jesus had to get them out of that narrow vision if he was going to help them see what God is really all about.  He taught them all by drawing comparisons with common things which seem to have nothing to do with God:  sheep, and sheep pens, and shepherds, and wolves, and gates.  And through those connections, Jesus began to teach some things about what was really important.  Sheep are easily stolen by bandits, and they are easily attacked by wolves, so for their own protection, they cannot live free out on the range.  Shepherds, or at least the good ones, are so intimately connected with their own sheep that no matter how large the herd or how much those sheep all look alike, the shepherd knows them each by name.  And that intimacy is shared; sheep will not follow a stranger’s voice, but will only follow their own shepherd’s voice.  Good shepherds lead their sheep, moving them to places where they can find abundant food to satisfy their hunger and clear water to satisfy their thirst, but them bringing them home when they need it, too, leading them back to places of safety and comfort at the right time.

In speaking these truths about everyday things, Jesus painted a picture of who he was, what the people of God needed, and how he met those needs.  He gave the Pharisees and the disciples and the blind man and us a sense of what it means that God cares for us.  He let us know what intimacy with God really is.  He offered invitation and opening.  And he got those disciples and Pharisees to think about God in some way that moved them out of their narrow view of just following the rules all the time.  Who sinned, the blind man or his parents?  Why did Jesus heal the man on the Sabbath?  Who cares?  Those questions missed the point.

The metaphors might have gotten mixed up a bit, but the truth Jesus was offering was very clear:  he did not come in order to sort out whose interpretation of all of the minutiae of the rules is correct.  Those kinds of questions steal our attention away from important things, and when they build up too big in our minds, they can even destroy us.  He did not come to keep people narrowly focused on petty questions.  He did not come to tell anyone how to get the car fixed or how to get ahead at work or how to guarantee good grades or how to pay for anything.  People do a fine job of worrying over all those things all by themselves; they don’t need Jesus to teach them how to worry about those things.

No, Jesus came for a different purpose.  Jesus came “that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”  Jesus came to take us deeper into life, and give us a broader vision of what life can be.  Jesus came to offer an invitation and an opening like that offered by an open gate.  Jesus came to provide care and intimacy like that offered by a good shepherd.  Jesus came to call us with his own, unique voice, to make us lie down in green pastures and lead us beside still waters and restore our souls.  Jesus came to take this life that we live every day, narrowly focused on the problems and the rules and the worries and the minutiae, and Jesus came to break our vision wide open, so that we can see beyond the everyday to the abundance of God.  Jesus came to show us that hope and love and faith are not some abstract, pie-in-the-sky, hard-to-grasp concepts, but they are a part of our everyday reality, just as much as all those other things are a part of our everyday reality.  The questions about who has sinned and healing on the Sabbath can steal our hearts and kill our souls and destroy life.  That’s not what Jesus came to do; Jesus came “that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

And so my prayer this morning is that we may learn along with the Pharisees and disciples.  My prayer is that we can allow Jesus to break open our vision, so that we can see past the everyday concerns and the minutiae of the rules and the details.  My prayer is that we will understand that Jesus came to protect us from hunger and thirst and from those things which would steal and kill and destroy.  My prayer is that we will receive what Jesus has to offer:  life, abundantly.

Alleluia!  Amen.

With an Indescribable and Glorious Joy

1 Peter 1:3-9

Eric Beene

May 8, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I have a visceral reaction to some Christian music, and it is not a positive one.  It does not have to do with the type of music; it happens as often with hymns as with rockin’ praise songs on the radio.  In fact, many of the songs on Christian radio are the modern manifestations of the same thing that drove a lot of hymn writers during the revival movements of the 1800s and the Great Awakening of the 1700s, and the same thing that drives me to roll my eyes.

What I react to negatively is well illustrated in the first verse of the hymn we are going to sing in a few minutes:

Jesus the very thought of Thee, with sweetness fills my breast;

But sweeter far Thy face to see, and in Thy presence rest.

These words seem kind of overdone with emotion.  They are little more than love songs to Jesus.  They are the kind of verse that literary critics would scoff at.  They are just dripping with a saccharine piety, a kind of sweetness that just has to be artificial because I can’t believe anyone really thinks about Jesus that way.  And theologically, I cannot say they are unorthodox or bad; they just don’t say anything terribly profound.

Despite my visceral, negative, and perhaps a bit condescending reaction to those kinds of songs, whether they are 18^th-century hymns or 21^st-century Christian rock ballads, I think they express something about our Christian faith that I could learn from.  What they say is not very deep theologically, but that doesn’t mean they do not say something about the experience of faith.

What they say is that faith in Jesus Christ is best when it is felt deeply and joyfully.  What they say is that we are not always called to say something profound about Jesus, but we are always invited to experience an authentic joy knowing that Jesus is present in all times and places.  What they say is that such an authentic, joy-filled experience in the presence of Jesus Christ is not easily put into words or even set to music, but the effort of trying has a value in itself, even if the result of that effort is, frankly, a bit cheesy.

What they try to do is to put into words and set to music an “indescribable and glorious joy.”  That is the way the author of 1 Peter puts the same kind of feeling in his letter which we read from a few minutes ago.  The author opens his letter by acknowledging the blessings of God and encouraging the people receiving the letter to praise and thank God, too.  The writer talks about many reasons to praise God.  He starts with God’s great mercy, and pulls that out theologically:  through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, God has started life over again for us.  But in this new life, we have a hope that is so vivid that it seems to have a life all its own.  The writer talks about an inheritance that is unlike any other inheritance we could receive:  it will never be used up or spent like a trust fund will, it will never be at risk of being broken or damaged, like grandma’s china is.  The inheritance we receive through the resurrection of Jesus Christ is “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.”  The followers of Jesus are protected by God, and they are saved by God, and they will be satisfied when Jesus Christ is more fully revealed in the future.

All of this great mercy and new life and unending inheritance is the basis for the joy of the followers of Jesus, according to the writer of this letter.  The writer goes on and on about this great joy that comes from genuine faith.  This joy permeates all of a believer’s existence.  This joy spills over into praise in every day, with every task that the people undertake.  This joy leads them to sing a Doxology, “praise God from whom all blessings flow,” not because a piece of paper they hold in their hand tells them it is time to sing that response, but because the gratitude and praise is welling up from that genuine faith which is somewhere deep inside them.  This joy is indescribable, hard to put into words that would stand up to a literary critic’s standards of good writing.  This joy is glorious, because it reflects the glory of the God whose profound gifts motivate it.

But nestled into the middle of the paragraph here, almost hidden behind all the talk of joy and hope and praise and glory, in verse 6, the writer says, “…you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials.”  And this little phrase that makes all that the writer is saying much more complicated.  The writer of this letter is not just writing to a bunch of happy, go-lucky followers of Christ in an average, suburban middle class community.  And the people who are reading this letter are not necessarily living the American dream of worry-free home ownership, debt-free buying of anything they want, and stress-free relationships with their spouses, parents, and children.

When we read the letter of 1 Peter as a whole, we learn more and more about what exactly the writer means that the people who received the letter have “for a little while…had to suffer various trials.”  The people in those churches were Gentiles, so they have had to answer questions about whether they could really be considered a part of the people of God.  They were Christian, which means that they were non-conformists in an empire where they were expected to worship the emperor.  At least some of them were slaves, which means they did not have the freedom to worship however they chose and whenever they felt moved.  Some of them were women, which means they had no right to assert any kind of independent thought, but they had to obey the man in their household who owned all of the property, had a right to earn a living, and had the privilege of deciding whether he would be kind or abusive to his family.  It was not easy for these people to be followers of Jesus Christ.  In fact, it was not easy for these people to live in their own households and communities at all.

Those with genuine faith praise God at all times.  Praising God at all times is hard enough when things are going well.  But when things are not good, then praise feels almost impossible, because it seems like it is not possible to have both joy and suffering at the same time.  But I wonder about that.  Is it possible to feel joy, even in the midst of suffering?  Is it possible to thank and praise God, even when everything seems to be going against us?

To answer that, I look to the testimony in another one of those hymns that seems, on the surface, to be nothing more than a sappy, overdone praise song from the emotion-filled revivals of the mid-1800s.  But there is so much more to it than that.  Horatio Spafford was a wealthy lawyer in Chicago after the Civil War.  Then, a fire swept through that city in 1871 and destroyed almost everything he owned.  A couple of years later, the family went to England for a vacation.  Horatio sent his wife, Anna, and four daughters ahead while he finished up some business.  But things went wrong:  the steamship his family was traveling on was struck by another ship and sank.  All four of their daughters died in the tragedy; Anna had to send him a telegram when she arrived in England telling him that she was the only one of the family to survive.  On his trip across the ocean, the story goes, he looked hard for the very spot where the shipwreck took place and his daughters died.  On that trip, he wrote his own verses, and a few years later someone else set them to music.

The first verse starts just like any of those sappy love songs to Jesus, drawing on an overused metaphor:

When peace like a river attendeth my way

But then, things turn on another watery metaphor, and they turn deeply into the depths of Mr. Spafford’s profound sadness:

When sorrows like sea billows roll

But even in those sorrows, the writer remembers what he has learned, and the praise and thanksgiving comes out, even in the midst of his terrible suffering:

Whatever my lot, thou has taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul.

It is well [it is well] with my soul [with my soul]

It is well, it is well with my soul!

I do not want to try to imagine what that journey felt like for Horatio Spafford.  I do not want to put myself in his place of suffering.  I have no doubt that, even as he wrote those words of joy, praise, and thanksgiving, in his gut he had that feeling of being empty but also burning at the same time.  But because of his genuine faith, he could also, in those same days of suffering, find some joy, and a reason to give praise and thanks to God.  I imagine it was as the writer of 1 Peter said:  “even though you do not see him now, you believe in him, and rejoice, with an indescribable and glorious joy.”

My prayer this morning is that we may find the same joy.  My prayer is that, when things are going smoothly, or at least not going badly, we may feel joy permeating all of our existence.  And my prayer is that when we are feeling worry and stress and grief and pain, we may see how joy can meet us in our suffering, too, because of God’s great mercy, because of our new birth, because of the hope that has a life of its own, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Friends, Christ is risen;

Christ is risen, indeed!

Alleluia!  Amen.

(Jars of Clay has a great version of “It is Well;” click here to listen to it)

The Great Picnic

Isaiah 25:6-10a

Eric Beene

May 1, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I one time had a clown serve me communion.  O.k., we can pause here for you to make the joke about the clown that has officiated communion every time it has been served here in the last five years or so.  Now, back to my story.  It was at a conference I attended when I was in college.  It was a very good clowning group, probably from somewhere in the area where the conference took place.  I imagine that someone on the planning team knew of the group, and thought it would be interesting to have them come to lead worship, including serving communion.

I have to admit that, at the time, I was a little bit uncomfortable with it.  It seemed like having a clown officiate the Lord’s Supper did not give due deference to the holiness of that moment.  In our tradition, the Lord’s Supper is a sacrament, which means it bears the sign and the seal of nothing less than God’s love and God’s promise.  We recognize that we receive this meal not from the minister or the elders who serve it, but from Christ himself; the officiant and servers are simply playing the role of table waiters at this banquet.  Such a holy thing must be taken seriously, and if it is to be taken seriously, then it should not involve clowns.

That was a little less than twenty years ago, and as I look back on that experience, I realize that I might have been the one not taking the event seriously enough.  As I have seen and heard about clowning groups, I have come to realize they are very appropriate for leading us in worship, and even for presenting the Lord’s Supper to us.  Clowns are about more than just silliness, and clowning is an art form that has to do with more than the circus.  Clowns get dressed up and put on all that makeup in order to tell a story without using words.  The story may be slapstick silliness, but it doesn’t have to be.  And without words, all that clowns have to rely on are gestures, motions, and expressions.  Therefore, they can particularly express feeling in ways other than simply describing it.  Good clowns can wrench their expressions into a whole range of emotions:  excitement, fear, glee, grief, satisfaction, and even deep sadness.  They can play with each other to express the depths of human relationships with one another.  Even their makeup and costumes can be used to show a wide variety of feelings and personalities.

And such a wide variety of expression is important for serving the Lord’s Supper because the meal itself encompasses a wide variety of truths.  At its simplest, this meal is a reenactment, telling part of the story of one of the saddest nights of our faith.  It remembers the night when Jesus sat at the table with his friends, and he served the meal to them.  But his words when he served the meal added another meaning.  This meal is meant to trigger our memories, too, as we follow Jesus’ instructions:  “do this remembering me.”  And so, as we eat and drink, we think of Jesus, and all that he went through on that day before his death, but also all that he was and is throughout time as a teacher and a healer and a Savior and a Lord.  As we remember, we think of things Jesus said and did, which lend more meaning to the meal.  Jesus said, “I am the bread of life” after he miraculously served thousands of people enough bread for them to eat their fill using only a few crusts of leftover challah and whatever else some kid happened to have in his basket.  So besides a reenactment and a trigger to our memories, the meal is a sign of how Christ provides himself to nourish us spiritually.

The list keeps on going.  Communion is a reenactment and a remembrance and a sign of Christ’s providence.  It is also a place where we recognize Jesus among us, as the disciples who met the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus recognized Jesus only when he sat down to eat with them, took bread, gave thanks, and broke it, and gave it to them.  It is also a way Christ’s people share with each other, as Paul describes in his letter to the Corinthians, when the whole community, rich as well as poor, Jews as well as Gentiles, slaves as well as free people, comes together and shares one holy meal.  There is such a range of truths which this meal expresses, and such a range of stories which those truths evoke, and such a range of feelings which come up when we really pay attention to those stories.  We might as well have clowns serving communion because I don’t know anyone else who can give vivid expression to the breadth and depth of everything this meal means.

But in this season of Easter, there is a particular meaning for this sacramental meal that comes out in a way that it does not in other seasons.  And that is as a party.  In the liturgical language that we will use when we gather around this table in a few minutes, this meal is, among all those other things, a “foretaste of the great feast which God has spread to satisfy the hunger and thirst of all peoples.”  This meal is supposed to evoke for us the image of a great banquet.  Such a banquet is what is described in the scripture lesson we read a few minutes ago.  Isaiah says that the Lord will invite all peoples to come together for this banquet:  the rich and the poor, the locals and the foreigners, the diseased, the lonely, the victims of injustice, and even those who are literally starving to death.

And once all those people are gathered, God will not skimp on the catering budget.  The food God will offer is “a feast of rich food,” the meats dripping with juices, the cheeses perfectly aged, the breads crusty on the outside and soft and full on the inside, spread with butter and maybe even sprinkled with a little fresh garlic for the ones who like that.  God will not skimp on the accompaniment, either; Isaiah says that the wine will be well-aged and strained clear, giving the whole event a flavor and fun that you only get at the best parties you have been to.

God will lay out this spread on the top of Mt. Zion, Isaiah said.  Mt. Zion is the rise in Jerusalem where the Temple was built, so it is one of the most significant locations in all of Scripture.  But I don’t imagine this as an indoor event, with tables crammed in the halls and corridors of the Temple.  I imagine this as an outdoor affair:  on a hillside, with tables set up end-to-end in a line that goes through meadow after meadow.  I don’t know why; maybe because of the number of people involved, and maybe because of the description of the location as “this mountain,” and maybe because I often have to get outside of a building before I can best encounter God, but I imagine this great feast as a picnic.

But the best news about this great feast day as Isaiah describes it is not just the food, and not just the wine, and not just the setting, but it is what comes with it.  God will not only provide the best food and the finest wines, but God will provide so much more.  “He will destroy on this [same] mountain,” Isaiah says, “the shroud that is cast over all peoples…He will swallow up death forever.”  This feast will mark the moment when death no longer has any power, and life can be lived abundantly and freely and eternally in the presence of the God who provides that great feast.  And God is more than a party host here; “The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,” Isaiah says.  The promise is not just of a jolly party; the promise is of an intimate expression of care, personalized and tender, like the care of a parent for a child who is hurt, or like a gathering among close, trusting friends.  God will wipe our tears, personally, no matter what has caused them to flow and no matter why we can’t seem to get them to stop.  That care for each and every party guest goes far beyond anything even Miss Manners would recommend for the hostess with the mostest.

This is a vision for the season of Easter because in the season of Easter, we remember that God has already swallowed up death.  God’s promise was fulfilled in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and so we look with certainty to the time will God’s promises will be more completely fulfilled.  This is a vision for the celebration of communion, too, because when we celebrate communion, we do not only look back at the night when Jesus first served this meal to his disciples.  We also look forward, into the future, toward that meal God will prepare, when we will receive from God everything we need to free our souls and to fill our bellies and to wipe our tears and to have a good, good time.

And so, as we celebrate this meal today, and then as we carry this bread from this table in here out to the tables set up end-to-end through that little meadow of sorts out back over there, my prayer is that we can celebrate the range of meanings this sacramental meal conveys.  I pray that it may be a reenactment, and a remembrance, and a sign of Christ’s providence.  I pray that it may be a place where we recognize Christ’s presence among us.  I pray it may be a place where all kinds of different people come together.  But I pray that it may also be a party, even a picnic, filled with joyous anticipation, festive celebration, and maybe even a clown or two.

Friends, Christ is risen;

Christ is risen, indeed!

Alleluia!  Amen.

With Fear and Great Joy

Matthew 28:1-10

Eric Beene

April 24, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen, indeed!

Easter is hard to put into words.  You can see that with most of the hymns that we sing about Easter.  The words of some hymns tell a story, like “The first Nowell, the angels did say was to certain poor shepherds in fields as they lay.”  Other hymns offer a sincere prayer to God:  “Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart; naught be all else to me save that Thou art.”  Other hymns offer a personal testimony:  “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.”  Still others offer a command to us:  “Praise ye the Lord, the Almighty, the king of creation!”

Most Easter hymns don’t quite do any of that.  Most Easter hymns make an attempt to express the full meaning of Easter by throwing together a series of phrases that draw on all the rich images of what the resurrection of Jesus Christ means.  These phrases are full of beautiful, lofty words, many of which you never hear anywhere but in church, and some of which you never hear any time except at Easter.  Stitched all together, though, the words and images can become overwhelming, jerking us from the bitter loneliness of Good Friday to the triumphant joy of Easter morning, from exultant praises to our loving God to stripped-bare confessions of our unworthiness, from the depths of the grave to the heights of the heavens, all within a few beats.  Many of the hymn writers throw choruses of “Hallelujah’s” in between the phrases or the verses, and I wonder if that is mostly because even they know, at some level, that their proclamations, as beautiful as they are, are nonetheless not up to the task of fully expressing the meaning of Easter.

Don’t get me wrong; I love many of the Easter hymns, and I am glad that we will be singing them not just today but for the next several weeks, as we draw our celebration out through the whole season of Easter.  I love them in part because they attempt to do what is at the heart of our life and work together as the church:  to describe to the world, and, for that matter, to each other, the meaning resurrection of Jesus Christ.  But I also know that the task of Easter hymns is difficult, if not impossible.  Easter is hard to put into words.

The difficulty of putting Easter into words is one reason I like Matthew’s description of the events of that first Easter morning.  Like the other gospel writers, Matthew doesn’t try to put the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ into words.  Instead, he just tells the story:  the women go out to the tomb to finish the customary burial preparations for Jesus’ body; they find the stone rolled away from the entrance to the tomb and the tomb empty; and they encounter an angel or two who tell them what happened:  “He is not here, for he has been raised!”  However, Matthew finds a way to hint at the meaning of the emptiness of that tomb, not by stringing together lofty words and phrases, but by providing some details in his telling of the story.

Matthew describes details of the cosmic drama in his telling of the story.  When the women arrive at the tomb, they do not simply walk in and find it empty.  In Matthew’s telling, they arrive, “and suddenly, there was a great earthquake.”  The earth started moving; rocks were crumbling and splitting, and trees were wobbling back and forth.  I don’t know how many of you have ever experienced an earthquake; growing up in California, I did.  Let me tell you, an earthquake is disturbing:  the otherwise steady floor of the building you are in, or the solid surface of the street or path you are walking on, suddenly starts rolling under your feet.  Nothing feels steady, because nothing is steady; everything is moving.  I know people who have stood in their kitchens and watched as the cabinet doors flew open and the dishes started spilling out onto the floor, and the refrigerator door opened, and food was mingled with the broken glass, and all the while, they knew that the house was moving because the earth it was built on was moving.  An earthquake is terrifying.

The earth was quaking, Matthew says, because an angel of the Lord was “descending from heaven.”  And his description continues with more cosmic drama.  The angel looked to those shaking women in a quaking world “like lightning,” and his clothes were “white as snow.”  The women in Jesus’ time did not know what we know about electricity, and they certainly would not be able to talk in terms of kilowatts to describe its power.  But they would surely know that to witness lightning close-up is to watch the air in front of you fill with power and light.  Lightning is something spectacular.  Matthew says that “the guards” who were supposed to be watching Jesus’ tomb to make sure no one stole Jesus’ body “shook and became like dead men” when they saw the spectacle of the angel whose appearance was like lightning.

The drama Matthew describes was cosmic, and I wonder if he describes it that way to emphasize that the meaning of Easter is cosmic.  It is the stuff of spectacle.  It is the stuff of terror.  It is an act so supreme in its power that it changes the way the world works.  Jesus was crucified by religious leaders seeking to protect their understanding of what is important to God and by political authorities wanting to protect their control over people whom they had conquered.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ showed that the God of justice and mercy and love and life is more powerful than the religious authorities and the political authorities.  And God showed, too, that Jesus had been speaking truth all along, and all that he had said about loving God and loving neighbors, and all he had shown about the desire to make healthy and whole everyone who is broken and torn and rejected filled with all kinds of sin, and all he had promised about the Spirit of peace remaining with us as comforter and advocate, and all that he pointed to as the way and the truth and the life, all of it was true and real.  The world changed that morning, and I think Matthew had it right:  the best way to talk about it was in terms of earthquakes and lightning and other terrifying spectacles.

Easter is hard to put into words, so Matthew describes the drama in cosmic terms.  But Matthew has one other way to describe the indescribable in his telling of the Easter story.  The women stood through the terrifying earthquake, and the spectacular light and power of the angel’s appearance to witness him roll away the stone and sit on it.  They heard his words, “Do not be afraid…he is not here, for he was been raised, as he said.”  They heard his command to go and tell everyone who would care that Jesus was raised from the dead, and that he would be among them again, even though they had abandoned him.  And after all of that, they somehow kept themselves from simply fainting, they pulled themselves together, and they turned to go.  Matthew says that, at that moment, when they were leaving the empty tomb to do what the angel had told them, they were full of feelings.  And I appreciate how he described those feelings.  They left the empty tomb quickly, he says, “with fear and great joy.”

Fear and great joy.  The earthquakes and lightning, the terror and spectacle, the good news of God’s power, all of it left them with a feeling that cannot be described, or at least not described simply.  How can a person be filled with both fear and great joy at the same time?  Fear is feeling the earth shake while watching your kitchen cabinets empty onto the floor.  Fear is knowing that everything you have that means anything at all to you could be taken away from you at any time.  Fear is not knowing what the future will bring:  will it be painful?  will it be filled with regret?  will it be messy?  will it be lonely?  Fear is not joy.  Joy is a party.  Joy is a celebration.  Joy is a lifting of your body and your mind and your heart.  Joy is even a perception deep in your gut that lets you think that maybe even your soul is being lifted up a little bit.  How could those women have been filled with both fear and great joy?

Easter is hard to put into words, and I believe that Matthew knew what he was doing when he described what happened in cosmic terms.  So, I have to trust, too, that Matthew knew what he was doing when he described those women’s racing away from that empty tomb “with fear and great joy.”  And I wonder, too, if it might be important to us, as we try to put Easter into our own words, to find a way to approach this day and this place, this faith and this reality, this font and this table, with both fear and great joy.  If we are afraid, we can find joy here, knowing that whatever the future brings, God has washed us, and God has fed us, and God has brought us into a new kind of life here with this water and this bread and this cup.  And if we want to come to church to feel only joy, then we might do well to spend some time recognizing that there is a lot to fear here.  Because we approach this font and this table right only if we remember that the earth can move under us, and the air can fill with electricity.  In that water and bread and cup, we encounter the God whose power is more spectacular than any lightning and more terrifying than any earthquake, and that same God can also overcome the power of the religious leaders and the political powers and anything else that orders our world.

God can change our world, and that causes us fear; God makes us a part of the life of the risen Christ, and that brings us great joy.  It seems impossible, but Easter is hard to put into words.

Friends, Christ is risen;

Christ is risen, indeed!

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!  Amen.

Announcements

Philippians 2:5-11

Eric Beene

April 17, 2011- White Bluff Presbyterian Church

The bit of scripture I just read is often called “The Christ Hymn.”  Those who call it that look at it as something that is different than the rest of Paul’s letter to the Philippians.  They notice that it is beautiful and succinct in its poetry, and if they read Greek, they also notice that there are a couple of words in there which Paul never uses anywhere else.  So, they conclude, Paul probably was quoting a famous hymn or poem to make a point in his letter to the Christian community in Philippi.  It would be as if I started singing, “All glory, laud, and honor, to Thee, redeemer King!” in the middle of the sermon.

The poetry of the Christ hymn is beautiful.  It tells the story of Jesus Christ in a way that the gospel accounts cannot.  It succinctly tells us what is miraculous about the way God works in Jesus Christ:  not as a God who takes advantage of power, but as a God who “empties himself” and “humbles himself,” becoming human, becoming a servant, even willing to submit to a tortured, cruel, and lonely death in order to be obedient to a desire to save God’s people from whatever we need to be saved from.  If we would only spend some time every day during this holy week reading and re-reading these few verses, we would be closer to God at the end of it all than we are right now.

This hymn gives meaning to what we are going to be doing in the next few days.  And what, you may ask, will we be doing in the next few days?  Those of you who have been around here for a while may have noticed something missing from the beginning of our worship service this morning.  In the rush of the funky little procession into the sanctuary, reminding us in some way of the funky little procession into Jerusalem at the beginning of the Passover festival a couple thousand years ago, it didn’t make much sense to blow a whistle, hold up a hand, stop everything, and say, “So, does anyone have any announcements to make this morning?”

But there is more to our little omission this morning of the friendly, casual gathering time we usually have at the beginning of our worship service.  Because this week, I am not sure that we have any more than one announcement to make this week.

Naturally, every week, our activity together comes from the faith that we share.  We would not do any of the things we do, and in fact, we would not come together as a community at all, if we did not have some sense that God is active in our individual lives, active in our world, and leading us to be a part of this community.  But this week, there is more to our life together than there is in other weeks.  This week, we remember those central stories of our faith in ways that we do not remember them in other weeks.  And so, this week, we have a unique opportunity to do what Paul advised the people of the church in Philippi to do with the words of the Christ hymn.  Before the hymn, Paul said in his own voice, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”  Then, he launched into those beautiful verses about emptying oneself, and humbling oneself, and obedience, and eventual glory to God in and through Jesus Christ.

So, what are we doing around here this week?  First, there are a couple of things that didn’t make it into the bulletin.  This week, we are hosting Interfaith Hospitality Network, and we need a couple more people who might be willing to bring a meal one evening, to stay overnight as hosts for the three families, or even just to help set up the rooms after worship today; because we have several groups using the Education Building who usually use the Social Hall right now, we have to adapt spaces that we do not usually use for our guests.  If you can help, please see Ruth, who is going to wave her hand now…  Also this week, the Good News Sunday School class will provide the meal at the Inner City Night Shelter for homeless individuals on Tuesday evening.  I think everything has been organized for that, but I think it is worth everyone knowing that the folks from the Good News class will be going out in the name of White Bluff Presbyterian Church on Tuesday.

All the men of the church should not forget that Tuesday evening is the steak dinner.  I believe you have one more chance to let Karl and Doyle know that you are planning to come so they will have a steak for you; please sign up on the list in the Narthex to let them know what you would like to eat.  And a steak dinner may not seem to reflect very well the emptying and the humility of Christ that we hear from the Christ hymn, but I want to make sure that you all know that the Men of the Church will also be providing the meal on Tuesday for the families who will be staying in our building through Interfaith.  Also, I want to remind the Board of Deacons that you will be gathering after worship to assemble and deliver some Easter cheer to some church members who are sick and shut-in; please go straight to the kitchen in the Education Building after worship so you can get started with your meal and your tasks.

And finally, I want to make sure that all of you know that the building work on the Social Hall has progressed to the point that we need as many helpers to come out to help as we can get.  A crew will gather on Thursday morning sometime after 8 a.m. to keep moving the work forward, and then there will be another work day on Saturday beginning again at 8 a.m.  If you are like me and have come to understand that typically God does not work very well through you at that hour, feel free to come over whenever you are available in the morning and you will be given something meaningful to do.  The more help we get, the sooner we can get everyone back in the Social Hall for their Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, their Boy Scout activities, their dancing classes, not to mention for the community gatherings and fellowship events we have together.

This week, it seems like there is a lot going on.  But this week, more than other weeks, none of it would mean very much if we did not do these activities with an awareness of what the work of God in Jesus Christ is all about.  This week, more than other weeks, we can seek to do our work with an intent to “let the same mind be in [us] that was in Christ Jesus.”  This week, we can know that, when we make the choice to serve here instead of doing something for ourselves or our families, we are reflecting in some small way the choice Jesus made to empty himself, “taking the form of a servant.” This week, when we dutifully show up to provide a meal to homeless people, or to take a spring flower to someone who is sick or isolated, or even to pound a few nails in a room used by so many people who come here seeking simple human fellowship, we can think about how our work reflects the humility of Christ’s obedience, even if it is a far cry from an obedience to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Along with all of that activity to serve, we are worshipping this week, too.  A lot.  As the insert in the bulletin says, we will gather here on Thursday night to remember the last night of Jesus’ life:  his act of service when he washed his disciples’ feet; the meal he shared with them, making it clear that he was emptying himself so that they may be nourished; his lonely prayer; and his friends’ acts of betrayal and denial, putting him in his place of humility and humiliation.  Then, on Friday at mid-day, we will gather again to remember Jesus’ trial, crucifixion, and death.  And finally, on Sunday morning, we will gather in the cemetery among the graves, bearing our grief and pain, and tell the end of the story, or, perhaps more accurately, proclaiming how the whole story begins again.

So that is what we are doing around here this week.  We are hosting the homeless, we are serving the hungry, we are visiting the sick, and we are providing shelter for folks who would otherwise be all alone.  And we are worshipping, too, a lot.  But really, in this holy week, those are not the announcements we make.  We really have just one announcement this week, and it covers all of the other activities we have going on around here.  The announcement we make this week is that Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.  We announce this week that Christ emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness.  We announce through all we do that Jesus, being found in human form, humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.  And we announce, too, that God has also highly exalted Christ Jesus.  And we make that announcement in the whole life of our church so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father.

And as we make that announcement, may we continue with our worship of God.

Amen.

Jesus Wept

John 11:1-45

Eric Beene

April 10, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

For generation after generation, probably ever since someone came along about a thousand years ago and divided the Bible into the chapters and verses we use, there has been one verse that has been a favorite of young Sunday School students everywhere.  Adults might see the righteousness in asking children to memorize things like, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself,” the comfort in asking them to memorize things like, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” and the wisdom in asking them to memorize, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  But when told to memorize a verse of scripture and then left to their own devices, many children subjected to the weekly rigors of Sunday School will choose John 11:35.  In the newer translation we have, this verse has doubled in size, but in older translations, it has the distinction of being the shortest verse in the Bible.  “Jesus wept.”  Say it with me now:  “Jesus wept.”  Once more, on your own this time…  There, you have memorized a verse of scripture today.  Congratulations.

Children appreciate the simplicity of the phrase.  It is the simplest kind of sentence:  a noun and a verb, a subject and a predicate, all pithily wrapped in just nine letters.  But this week, these two words (or four in the new translation) raised an equally brief, if not equally pithy, question for me:  why?  Why did the Lord of all, the long-awaited Messiah, the light of the world and the bread of life, the one man in the history of creation who was equal with God, weep?  What moved him so deeply in his gut and his soul and his heart and his eyes that the tears began to flow?

There was certainly a lot of weeping and wailing going on around him, and for good reason.  The followers of Jesus were confronting the hard reality of death.  A member of their own community, their good friend Lazarus, had fallen sick and died.  I do not know the details, but it seems like his death was sudden and unexpected.  He was probably too young.  He certainly had people around him who loved him, who depended on him, and who were going to miss him now that he was gone.

When Lazarus was near death, the man’s sisters, who were also close with Jesus, had sent a message to him, begging that he come, and quickly.  They were convinced that he could do something; surely God would answer his prayers before it was too late, and death came, and then nothing more could be done.  And how did Jesus respond to their pleas for help when it seemed like he was the only hope?  John says, “he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.”  He waited.

Then, he went to see Mary and Martha and Lazarus, who by that time had died.  And his disciples were confused by his decision.  They knew that Lazarus lived in a place that was dangerous for Jesus to travel.  He had gotten himself in trouble with the religious leaders in that place, and they threatened to stone him for blasphemy.  So, they objected, “are you going back there?”  Their objections made sense to them:  Lazarus was already dead, and Jesus would be in danger, so why should he go there?  When Jesus insisted, Thomas said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.”  The disciples agreed only by steadying themselves to face the danger they knew Jesus was about to face.

Mary and Martha only saw the imminent death of their brother, and they begged Jesus to come before it was too late.  The disciples only saw the danger posed by the religious leaders, and insisted he shouldn’t go after it was already too late.  To respond to Mary and Martha, Jesus waited, and to respond to the disciples, Jesus went anyway.  I wish Jesus would just do as he is told sometimes.

He approached the town and encountered Martha, who met him with the words, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Then, after a conversation with Jesus, she went to her sister, and her sister came out to Jesus, too.  And Mary met Jesus with the same words:  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Those of us who have lost loved ones know just how deep is the emotion in those words.  When we have lost someone we love, it feels like that loss must be someone’s fault.  And so we blame whoever is convenient, but what we are really saying is that we want with every fiber of our being to just have that person back.  By then, a crowd had gathered, and all of them were crying, too.  John says, “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.”  And that is when he began to weep.

Jesus’ encounter with all of that sympathy and grief tells us when Jesus began to weep.  But I am not sure it tells us why he began to weep.  Jesus knew how this story would turn out.  He had told his disciples and Mary and Martha from the beginning of it all that Lazarus would be raised.  He told the messengers from the sisters when they first approached him that Lazarus’ illness “is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”  He tried to reassure his disciples by telling them that Lazarus was asleep.  He knew Lazarus would get up again.  He did not weep for Lazarus.

I think instead that Jesus wept for all of those people around him.  I think Jesus wept for Mary and Martha, who couldn’t see anything other than the death of their brother.  I think Jesus wept for his disciples, who couldn’t see anything other than the danger posed by the religious leaders.  I think Jesus wept for Lazarus’ neighbors and friends, who followed along with the grieving family, reacting to their cries of helplessness and despair.

I think Jesus wept because of the limits of the imagination of the people around him.  All the people around him saw was death and danger.  Death was final to them, and when it happened, there was no more hope.  Threats were dangerous to them, and the people making them were to be feared.  And nobody seemed to notice all the signs of God’s power they themselves had witnessed in their journey with Jesus:  God’s power to restore sight to the blind, and God’s power to feed multitudes of people with only a few loaves and a handful of fish, and God’s power to bring a child who was dying with a fever back to full health, and God’s power to turn plain, uninteresting water into the best wine that the partygoers had ever tasted.

A God who could do all of that was a God who could do a whole lot more.  God could bring new life out of death.  God could bring resurrection after a body was sealed in a tomb.  God could make someone whole who had been ill.  God could unbind a human body from everything that kept it from being completely free.  And with that kind of power, God could re-make the whole world.

But the people closest to him had a hard time believing that.  And why couldn’t they see it?  Why couldn’t they believe?  Why were they missing all of the signs he had shown them, at every turn, in every place they had gone?  With such good news all around them, why did they throw up barriers that prevented them from experiencing the joyous, overflowing, abundant life God wanted them to live?  Why couldn’t they see past the immediate threats of danger and death and let their lives be interwoven with the things that are eternal in the way God wanted them to?  The people closest to him were missing out on the best gifts of God.  And their only witness to the people around them, those neighbors and friends who were trying to care for them in the best way they knew how, was a witness filled with tears and grief.  It was enough to make Jesus weep.

Don’t get me wrong:  there is nothing wrong with grief and tears.  We miss people who are gone.  We wish we could go back and live like we did when things were at their best.  We mourn the opportunities we thought we were going to have, which we now know are impossible.  We regret the bad decisions we have made, and we are angry about the bad decisions others have made that affect us.  At various times, scripture tells us, even Jesus got angry, and Jesus was frustrated, and Jesus felt pain, and Jesus wept.  But Jesus also knows how the story will turn out.  And Jesus knows, too, that without belief to accompany our grief and anger and nostalgia and frustration, we are stuck with a limited imagination that cannot see beyond the stench of death and danger to the reality of new, abundant, eternal life.

And so my prayer this morning, as we move to the end of Lent and the week of remembering many holy things, is that we can have the imagination which Mary and Martha and the disciples and everyone around them lacked.  My prayer, as we move into a season of witnessing Jesus’ last meal, his loneliness and betrayal, and his crucifixion and death, is that we can let our participation in those stories help us understand why Jesus wept.  And my prayer, as we prepare for the good news of an empty tomb, is that we can be ready for that message to bring us new life, resurrection, wholeness, and freedom.

Amen.

He Opened My Eyes

John 9:1-41

Eric Beene

April 3, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

During Lent, the lectionary gives us several long passages from John’s gospel for preaching.  This is our chance to look at scenes from scripture in big chunks, rather than the small bites we usually consider each week in worship.  As this scene opened, Jesus and his disciples happened upon a man who had been blind from the time he was born.  According to John, the disciples and Jesus launched into a theological conversation about whose fault it was that the man was blind.  But note what did not happen:  the man himself didn’t speak.  He didn’t greet Jesus and his disciples.  He didn’t beg them for money or food or mercy.  He didn’t even object to their horribly insensitive conversation, which blamed either the man or his parents for a disability which was clearly no one’s fault, and he didn’t complain that they were rudely having that conversation in his presence without even seeming to acknowledge that he could hear everything they were saying.  But most significantly to me, he never asked Jesus or anyone else to give him his sight.

And I wonder about that.  In so many other stories of Jesus, people asked him all the time to be healed.  Even earlier in John’s gospel, people had begged Jesus to perform miracles of healing.  And Jesus’ reputation had spread, so that everywhere he went, there were whispers about who he was, about what he had said and done, and about the people who were out to get him because of it all.  The blind man should have known, like so many others knew, that Jesus could give him sight.

And I am guessing he would have wanted to be given his sight.  Certainly, he would have known that his life was more difficult because he couldn’t see.  He wouldn’t have been able to have a job or to live on his own.  He had to sit on the street and beg for anything he could get to keep himself alive.  His neighbors obviously did not know anything about him except that he was blind; after he was given his sight, they were asked who he was, and they couldn’t even recognize him, as if all they had ever seen of him was his blindness.  He would have known he was different, and he would have known he had a more difficult life than other people just because of his blindness.  So I wonder why the blind man did not ask anything of Jesus.  Was he silent because he did not know Jesus was coming by?  Had he, as one person in the big city of Jerusalem, not heard of this miracle-worker from the sticks of Galilee?

I imagine it was more complicated than that.  I imagine he did not ask anything of Jesus because he would have been used to things being the way they were.  As difficult as it was for him, he was settled.  He probably had his place to go and beg every day.  He probably had his “regulars,” people who walked by him all the time, on their way to their work or to the market or to their in-laws’ house or to the temple, who would always toss him a coin, or give him a crust of bread.  He probably had his place to stay at night, and his own ways worked out to get food, get bathed, and otherwise take care of himself.

It wasn’t a good existence by our standards.  It probably wasn’t healthy for him, and he probably would not have expected to live a long life, even by the standards of that time and place.  But it was a familiar routine, and, as such, it was comfortable for him.  Everything was working in a carefully balanced way, and he probably didn’t even think to ask that things be changed.

We can understand why the blind man would not have thought to ask Jesus to change things for him.  And it would be similar to the reasons the Pharisees did not want things changed.  They were familiar and comfortable with the way things were, too.  They had been in the temple system for years.  They had grown up learning about Moses and the law, and they had done well in the schools.  Everyone looked to them to interpret the law correctly.  They knew what God wanted, they knew what God didn’t want, and they knew what God could and would do.  They understood their world, and they were certainly not interested in anyone or anything challenging their understanding.  They were privileged and powerful, while the blind man was not, but both the Pharisees and the blind man knew what to expect, and that familiarity would have made them comfortable.

There were others in the story who were comfortable with the way things were, too.  The disciples were comfortable with the common knowledge that the man’s blindness had to be a punishment for sin.  Their question of Jesus was asked immediately when they saw the blind man, and as cruel as it sounds to us, it was not asked just to be mean.  It was in the law, right there in the ten commandments, that sin was punished by things like blindness, and if the parents sinned, then their children would receive their punishment.  Jesus’ disciples knew that, and they were asking their teacher to tell them more about that law.  And the man’s parents were familiar, too, with the way things were.  They knew that the leaders of the people were the ones who got to decide who was a part of the synagogue and who was not, and they knew, too, that if they were thrown out of the synagogue, they would have no friends, their family wouldn’t speak to them, and they would have to live in loneliness and shame.  So, they were unwilling to say anything about how their son was healed when they were questioned by the Pharisees, knowing that to confess that it was Jesus would get them thrown out.  “Ask him; he is of age, he will speak for himself,” they said, not so much to be mean to their son but to protect their own ability to be a part of they community they were comfortable and familiar with.

So everyone in the situation acted in a way that shows us they were comfortable with the way things were.  The Pharisees were comfortable with their knowledge of the way God worked.  The blind man was comfortable with his routine.  The disciples were comfortable with the way things had always been understood to work.  And the parents were comfortable with their community just the way it was.  No one asked for any of those things to be changed.

But then Jesus came along, and without asking for anything to change, the blind man could see.  Jesus used spit and mud, he spoke some strange words, he broke a couple of rules, yet in the process he revealed God’s works to his disciples, to the Pharisees, to the parents, and to the man who had been blind.  The disciples learned that God does not punish sin by making a person blind, but that God can use any situation to show God’s mercy.  The parents learned that they will discover the truth of God’s power, and that truth will put them at risk of judgment and rejection from their neighbors.  The Pharisees learned that God is in charge, and that all the knowledge and study in the world could not limit what God could do.  And the blind man could see for the first time in his life:  he could see his parents, he could see his community; he could see the people around him; he could see what God was really all about.

None of those people asked to be changed.  The ones who had the most to lose certainly didn’t want to be changed.  The ones who had the most to gain didn’t ask to be changed, either.  But everything in this settled scene was turned around.  And I wonder what that means for the church.  We take comfort in what is familiar.  We have learned about God, and we rest in the knowledge that we know what God is likely to do, and what God is not likely to do, and we know, too, what God wants and what God doesn’t want.  We have our routines, and even when those routines are not healthy, they are comfortable, so we continue on with them.  We find our place in this community, and we settle in there.

And there is nothing wrong with any of that.  Jesus did not criticize the disciples, the Pharisees, the parents, or even the blind man himself for being comfortable.  But what Jesus did was to help them to see that God interrupts settled routines sometimes, and God is not unwilling to make us uncomfortable if that is what will reveal God to us.  God can show us that God is not in the business of punishing people in the way we expect that God would, but that God can show amazing mercy for those who are down.  God can show us that all the knowledge in the world does not mean that we can control God.  God can show us that God’s truth is glorious, even if our faith in God’s truth and its glory can alienate us from the people around us.  God can show us that our own blindness can be overcome, and our own eyes can be opened, and we can believe and worship and rejoice in new life.

And God can show us what it means to be people of faith:  when we think we know what God can do and will do, we are blind, and when we are willing to accept God’s real work in our lives, we will see things we never thought possible.

And so, as comfortable as we may be with the way things are, I pray we may expect that Jesus will restore us anyway.  And God only knows what might happen after that.

Amen.

Quarrel and Test

Exodus 17:1-7

Eric Beene

March 27, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Each week during Lent, we have poured water into the Baptismal font during the Assurance of Pardon.  Believe it or not, we have not poured the water only for the purpose of making sure there is a line outside of the bathroom during the anthem.  We have poured the water to focus our attention on the sacrament of Baptism.

Baptism reminds us that God has claimed us as one of God’s people.  In the words that we use when we baptize someone in our church, “in Baptism, God frees us from sin and death, uniting us with Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection.”  And in Baptism, too, God makes us “members of the church, the Body of Christ,” and joins us “to Christ’s ministry of love, peace, and justice.”  If we are going to be honest in our prayers of confession, frankly admitting to God that we have fallen short of what God wants for us, then we also must be honest with ourselves that God loves us anyway, no matter what we do wrong, or what we fail to do right.  We are freed from the consequence of sin, and we will never be thrown out of the family of God, and we have meaningful work to do despite our inadequacies.  All of those truths are sealed by water, and the pouring of the water into that bowl over there is meant to remind us of such truth.

I am grateful that we get to use something as basic as water to remind us of the truth of God’s love, God’s acceptance, and God’s gracious forgiveness.  Because water is one of those things we use all the time, for all sorts of purposes; we do not use something that is hard to find or rare in its use to remember God’s work in our lives.  We encounter water all day, every day:  when we wash our bodies, when we prepare our food, when we care for our lawns and gardens, and when we seek to satisfy our own thirst.

By the time they got to the desert scene we have in the story we read a few minutes ago, the people of Israel craved water.  This was a band of people who had been cruelly enslaved to the Pharoah of Egypt.  They were forced to work hard, and their work was no white-collar job sitting behind a desk, with a phone and computer and a comfy little pad to make sure they did not get carpal tunnel syndrome as they typed on the keyboard.  They did not work in air conditioned classrooms or on job sites protected by OSHA regulations.  They had to toil in the hot sun, they had to carry heavy loads, and they had to do it all to the standards of their taskmasters.  And they had to do that hard work from a very young age, and they had no choices in the matter, and they knew they would never be able to advance out of their jobs doing that slave work.

And so it is no wonder they wanted out.  When Moses told them that God would rescue them from their slavery, they went along, maybe because they had hope where they had never had hope before, or at least because they knew they literally had nothing to lose.  There was struggle; there were demands made to Pharaoh, there was punishment doled out by Pharaoh in response to the demands, there were cosmic signs, and the whole thing turned into an enormous mess that it seemed like no one would win.  If it has been a while since you have heard the story of God’s actions and Pharaoh’s reactions in the story of the Exodus, it would be good for you to go back and read the first 20 chapters or so of the book of Exodus again.  There is a lot of drama in there, and it is drama that is central to understanding what God does, who God is, and what it means to be numbered among God’s people.

The people were on the wrong side of a cruel system of slavery while they were in Egypt, and they struggled fiercely to get out of it.  And finally, they prevailed, or, more properly, God prevailed, through the signs God showed through Moses which put fear into the heart of Pharaoh and the other powerful people of Egypt.  On Pharaoh’s orders, the people left by night; they went out into the wilderness, and they were followed by the armies of the jealous ruler of Egypt.  They were saved in the water of the Red Sea.  And then, they found themselves out in the middle of nowhere, beyond civilization, with only God to take care of them, in a desert called the wilderness of Sin.

God provided them with food out there in the wilderness.  But food is not enough; the people were thirsty.  And so they complained.  On one level, it made sense that they would be upset:  they were in a place where they had never been before, and where few, if any, people ever spent very much time.  It was unfamiliar, and it seemed like a harsh place.  But they were there because that was where God wanted them to be.  And so, on another level, their complaint didn’t make any sense at all.

What they said was directed at Moses:  “Give us water to drink.”  And Moses did what so many people in leadership do when they are tired and not leading well:  he took their complaint personally.  “Why do you quarrel with me?  Why do you test the Lord?”  And I imagine that the people looked a little puzzled; really, their complaint was not about Moses or the God he kept on talking about.  They were just really, really thirsty, and their thirst reminded them that they could not survive without water.  But then they started to think, and they came to realize that their complaint was, in fact, against Moses and God.  And they said something which fascinates me.  They said to Moses, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”  And they were saying a whole bunch of things in that statement.  They were saying they were losing faith in Moses and this God he represented.  They were saying that they were in a place they had never been in before, and they had no idea how to have their basic needs met there.  But mostly, they were saying what so many of God’s people have said in generation after generation since then:  we would choose a slavery that is familiar, no matter how cruel, over a freedom that is unfamiliar.

And their choice baffles me.  As tortured as their existence was when they were enslaved to Pharaoh, they would choose that over freedom in an unfamiliar wilderness.  They would rather work in horrible conditions than live in freedom if freedom meant going to a place they had never been before.  They would rather live without any hope that they could have something better for themselves and their families than to be in a place that they did not know anything about.  They would rather live under the slavery they knew than to live in freedom they didn’t know yet.

And, as Moses pointed out, their choice of familiar slavery over unfamiliar freedom was not just a problem of logic.  It was a theological problem, too.  By saying they wanted to go back to the place where they had been nothing more than slaves, they were saying they did not trust God.  Because it really was not Moses who had brought them out of their slavery; it was God.  God had shown all of those signs.  God had convinced Pharaoh to free them.  God had led them through the waters of the Red Sea, and God had closed those same waters in on the armies which were pursuing them.  God had given them food:  manna, and quail, which they could use to strengthen their bodies enough not only to live, but also to travel further and further away from the land of their slavery.  And God had promised them so much more, too:  a new land, where they could be safe and free to work for themselves and for each other.  Sure, they had never been to that land before, but after all God had already provided good things for them, could they not trust God to continue to provide good things for them?

God wanted them to live in freedom, but they were ready to make a different choice.  They would rather live in slavery than in freedom because they trusted the familiar patterns of slavery more than the unfamiliar freedom of life with God.  How typical.  We would rather live with the familiar ways of the world, even if they drain the life out of us, than to try to live as God would have us live.  We all do it:  we make choices based on what is safe instead of what is faithful because of the risks involved.  We follow the conventional path rather than following the radical, and sometimes crazy, and certainly not worldly, ways of God.  We invest our best time and energy and money in attempts to guarantee a stable future instead of using everything God has given us to build the kingdom of God here and now.

I don’t know as much as other people about treating addictions, but I do know that addicts of all kinds have to deal with this same kind of choice.  People do not continue to drink or use drugs or eat too much food or seek unhealthy sex or engage in risky behaviors of other kinds because they are healthy choices.  They engage in those risky behaviors because they have become everything they know.  Being drunk or high is not always pleasant, but to an addict, it is what is familiar.  And recovery means the addict needs to not simply decide to quit getting drunk or high.  Recovery means the addict needs to embrace a whole new life:  new relationships, new habits, new ways to fill their time, new ways of seeing the world, new ways of seeing themselves, new ways of interacting with the people around them.  And addicts can only recover if they learn to trust that they can handle whatever comes their way without relying on alcohol or drugs or food or sex or anything else to alleviate pain.  There is freedom in recovery from addiction, but that freedom can only be found when the addict chooses to embrace what is unfamiliar.

The people complained against Moses.  They people chose familiar slavery over unfamiliar freedom.  They people did not trust God to provide for them in the wilderness.  The people quarreled with God, and tested God.  And how did God respond?  God told Moses to go to a particular place, and to find a particular rock, and with all of the people watching, to strike that rock with the same staff he stuck in the ground to make the Red Sea part.  And water came gushing out.  Fresh, clean, sweet-tasting water poured all over that desert ground.  Water enough to satisfy their thirst was given to them in quantities they would never have imagined.  Water poured into their bowls to remind them of the truth of God:  God will provide water to quench our thirst, water to satisfy our cravings, water to ease our pain, water to seal in us God’s love and acceptance and gracious forgiveness, water to free us from the power of sin and death, water to free us to work as a part of Christ’s ministry of love, peace, and justice.

And so my prayer, as we continue this journey through Lent, is that we may learn to leave behind the ways of slavery, no matter how familiar they are, and to trust in God to satisfy our thirst and provide us with whatever we need, so that we may embrace the freedom of new life in Christ, no matter how risky and unfamiliar that life may seem.

Amen.

Amazing

Romans 4:1-5, 13-17

Eric Beene

March 20, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

There are many parts of the Bible which are very difficult to understand.  It is hard to understand the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It is hard to understand some of the theological twists and turns of Paul’s very, very long sentences.  It is hard to understand some of the harangues of the Old Testament prophets.  It is hard to understand God’s role in Job’s predicament.  But I would say that the part of Paul’s letter to the Romans which we have today is one of the most difficult to understand, particularly for modern Americans.

A story to illustrate:  In a congregation I was once a part of, the pastor sat with the children for the children’s message on the first Sunday in Lent.  The pastor told the children that Lent is a time of fasting, or giving something important to them up so they could pay closer attention to God.  Some people, she explained, would give up something for the whole period of 40 days.  However, that might be hard, so she challenged the children to think of something they really, really liked and to promise to give that up for a whole week.  The speaker was on in the nursery, and the nursery attendant wanted to support the pastor in developing the spiritual life of the children.  So, when the kids came to the nursery, the attendant made them a deal.  If they gave up their treasured thing for a whole week, then she would bring a reward for them the next week.

Now, on the face of it, that makes sense to most of us modern Americans.  If you do what is expected of you, you are rewarded, and if you do not do what is expected of you, you are punished, or you at least do not receive any reward.  If you do more than what is expected of you, you are rewarded even more.  From the time we are children, it is the way we are taught the world ought to work.  If you eat all of your vegetables, you get your dessert; if you do not clean up your room, you cannot go outside and play.  If you get good grades, you get some money, or you get to go out to a nice dinner; if you fail to get good grades, you are grounded.  If you work hard, you will get a raise, or a promotion, or a bonus.  If you are a good neighbor and good citizen, you will earn respect in your community and work.  When things are not going your way, you just have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work harder, and things will improve.  And that kind of reward-and-punishment logic is so pervasive it seems like it is just the way the world works.

And the assumption that is just the way the world works – hard-working, industrious people are rewarded, and lazy or immoral people are punished – is what makes this one of the most difficult texts in the entire Bible to really understand.  In fact, if you approach this passage of Paul’s letter to the Romans with that up-by-your-bootstraps attitude, you will miss the point entirely.

This section is pulled out of a larger message Paul is trying to convey.  He starts his letter to the Romans by speaking of the core message of Christian faith.  That core message, he says, is that righteousness is revealed only through faith.  In case you don’t get what that means right away, he spends the whole rest of the letter explaining it.  He begins in a way that is very clear:  he says everyone deserves to be judged negatively by God.  “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” he says in chapter 3.  So, then, he asks, how can we be saved from the very justifiable anger of God?

And his answer is faith.  Specifically, his answer is the faith of Jesus Christ.  We are reconciled to God through Jesus Christ alone:  through his faithfulness and obedience to God, and through his willingness to do whatever God wanted him to do.  In Jesus Christ, our relationship with God is restored, and made whole again; we do not have to be afraid that we are going to be thrown out of the company of God’s people, and we can put that fear to rest because of Jesus Christ.

To further his point, Paul talks about Abraham.  You may remember the story of Abraham; it begins all the way back there in Genesis, at the very end of chapter 11.  If you don’t remember, it might be good to read a few chapters of Genesis beginning about there, because the story of Abraham is important in understanding the story of God and God’s relationship with God’s people.  Anyway, the interesting thing about Abraham is that, although he was considered the father of God’s people, he was not an observant Jew.  He lived a good 500 years or so before the Jewish law was handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, with the 10 commandments and all the rules that the Jewish people had to follow and their neighbors did not.  Abraham was the father of the Jewish people, but he himself knew nothing of what made them different from everyone else.

And what is more, we know little about Abraham before he received the promise from God that he would be the father of God’s people.  He really shows up in the Bible out of nowhere.  We are introduced to his father and his brothers, and then Abraham takes center stage.  We know nothing about Abraham’s early life:  we do not know whether he was a hard worker or a bit of a slacker; we do not know whether or not he was kind to his family and neighbors; we do not know if he had any special skills.  All we know is that he lived with his family, including his wife, Sarah, and that they could not have any children.  Then, one day, God chose Abraham.  “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,” God said. “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you,” and on and on it went.

So, Paul points out, Abraham didn’t do anything to deserve to be chosen by God.  He did not follow the Jewish law.  He did not work hard.  He did not get good grades in school, as far as we know.  He did not work long hours to please the boss.  He did not keep his yard well-mowed, and he may not have voted in every election.  He did not earn God’s favor.  He did not pull himself up by any bootstraps.  He simply was chosen, and that was the beginning of his faith, and the faith of God’s people ever after him.

And that, to Paul, is good news.  Our reconciliation with God, overcoming the punishment we deserve from God because we are all sinners, depends not on what we do, but only on the faith which we receive as a gift from God.  “For this reason,” he said, “it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed” to all the people who come after him in the faith of God.  All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but all also can still be loved by God.

And thus, the reward-and-punishment logic that pervades every other aspect of our lives is not really the way the world works.  It is the way we work, and maybe it is effective for us as a management tool, a teaching technique, or a way of raising children.  But it is not the way the world works, because it is not the way the God who created the world works.  God works by grace.  We deserve to be punished, but we are rewarded, simply because God has chosen us.  We deserve to be cut off from God, but we are reconciled to God, simply because God has decided God wants to.  We deserve God’s condemnation, but we receive God’s love anyway, simply because that’s the way God does things.

That logic is very difficult to understand.  It is senseless.  It seems irresponsible.  It might make us wonder if God knows what God is doing.  But, more than anything, it is amazing.  Don’t worry, we will, in fact, sing the hymn, “Amazing Grace,” in a few minutes.  I think the best line of that hymn is the first line of the second verse:  “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved!”  It is a frightful thing to think that God would refuse to follow the logic that we live with every day; it seems like the world would descend into chaos if it was not ruled with the reward-and-punishment logic we are used to.  But we also recognize that, when it comes to righteousness, Paul is right:  we have all fallen short.  So as fearful as God’s grace is, it is also the only thing that can relieve our fears and strengthen our souls.

And so we come back to the kindly nursery attendant trying to help the pastor encourage the children to practice fasting during Lent.  It made sense to that nursery attendant to offer the children a tangible reward for their faithfulness.  But it also brought a logic to the work of the church with its children that is not God’s logic.  I would have preferred if there was a way that the children could have been taught the message of God’s amazing grace.  What if there was a reward every week, whether the children followed the instructions of the pastor or not?  What if there was a playful spirit and generosity that pervaded everything the congregation did for its children?  What if the children could watch as the congregation sought to apply God’s logic in the world, in whatever way they could?  The children would learn something about what it means to serve God, even if they may or may not follow every word of the pastor’s instructions about the discipline of fasting during Lent.

God works by grace.  And that is hard to understand.  We may not yet be ready to try to live that way because it is a way which is foreign to us.  But for now, it is my prayer that we can at least imagine the possibilities.  I pray we can imagine the way God works.  I pray we can imagine how it is different than the way we work.  I pray we can imagine how we might be able to live differently because of God’s amazing grace.

Amen.

Angels Waiting

Matthew 4:1-11

Eric Beene

March 13, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I am fascinated by how this story ends.  At the end of the story, after Jesus had thwarted the devil’s three temptations, “the devil left [Jesus], and suddenly angels came and waited on him.”  What does that mean?  What did that look like?  It happened “suddenly,” so it sounds unexpected, like even Jesus didn’t know that anything like that was about to happen.  So what happened?

Did the angels come to wait on him like a paramedic would wait on someone who had been through a traumatic event?  Were there wounds to bandage, and bruises to ice?  Certainly Jesus was hungry; we already knew that, because from the beginning of the story, we are told that he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward, as Matthew demurely puts it, “he was famished.”  So did they have to bring him something to eat; was it some chicken broth and jell-o at first, just to make sure his stomach could handle it after all he had been through?  If there were no cuts and bruises in his body, were there cuts and bruises on his soul that needed to be tended to?  Is that the work which the angels did when they “suddenly…came and waited on him?”

Or did it look different when the “angels came and waited on him?”  Was it more like out of nowhere there materialized a caterer, and someone to set up one of those big, white tents with an air conditioner cooling the air inside, and a bartender, and a band, and people walking around in pressed, white shirts and black pants carrying trays of little appetizers to offer to the party guests?  Was the scene more of a victory celebration?  Did they sit Jesus at a head table somewhere, as a guest of honor, like a victorious king returned from a battle:  cocky, triumphant, and ready for a congratulatory banquet?  That is another way I could imagine the scene when the “angels came to wait on him.”

In other words, did Jesus’ struggles during those 40 days and nights out in the wilderness leave him exhausted or confident?  Either one would make sense.  And really, I think that maybe it was both.  I think Jesus was both exhausted by his experience in the wilderness, being tempted by the devil, while at the same time feeling a bit triumphant.  And I think that not because of how this passage ends, but how it begins.  At the beginning of the story, Matthew tells us that Jesus went out to the wilderness because he “was led up by the Spirit” to go there.

Before this point in his ministry, Jesus had already heard something about who he was.  It was announced at his birth that he was God’s son, and his parents had received the visit of the wise men which affirmed that he was a king for whom the stars shone more brightly than they do for other people.  As he grew up, hearing those stories told again and again, he would have a picture in his mind of what it all meant.  Then, he approached his baptism, and again, he heard this message that he was something special.  Everyone else lined up behind each other, waiting for John to wash them in the river Jordan, proclaiming their desire to be a part of this new kingdom of heaven.  But Jesus came along, and John recognized him, and bowed down before him.  When he was baptized, he heard a voice that had not spoken when anyone else was baptized:  “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased!”

And so Jesus had every reason to be confident when he went out into that wilderness.  But he did not go out with a cocky attitude; Matthew does not say that he went because it was his idea.  He did not seem to be prepared like a king marching into battle.  He had not made speeches telling anyone that he was sure they could overcome every foe and fight off every attack.  He did not seem to think that his weapons were superior, or his ability to know how to fight off the enemy was the best.  In fact, there is no sense in what I read that Jesus even knew what he would face when he went out into the desert.

And even after he was there, he was willing to let his defenses down.  He fasted for forty days and forty nights, Matthew records.  When the devil came around, he was weak:  he was hungry, and he was lonely.  He had nothing to fuel his body, and little left to fuel his soul.  And so when he met those three temptations of the devil, I have always imagined that he did not stand up tall, and raise his staff, and respond in his strongest John Wayne voice.  Instead, I imagine he was a little weak, speaking in a soft voice that might have been a little bit shaky.  I imagine he was a little slow, taking a while to choose his words carefully.

And more than that, I imagine he was a little bit confused about just how to respond.  His confidence would have led him to believe that he was supposed to be something special.  And the temptations the devil brought to him would have fed into all of that self-confidence.  The devil started by telling him that he could satisfy his hunger in an instant.  If he really was the Son of God, beloved and chosen, as he had heard all his life, then why should he be uncomfortable?  Why should he have to put up with that aching emptiness in his gut that was the result of 40 days of fasting?  Next, the devil tempted him with power over natural forces, telling him that he could even resist the pull of gravity toward the earth if he wanted to.  And again, if there had been stars shining over him ever since the day he was born, why shouldn’t he put that devil and everyone else in their place, that is, behind him, by doing something spectacular like throwing himself off the peak of the temple?  Finally, the devil tempted him by telling him he could seize control of all the kingdoms of the world.  And who wouldn’t want that?  Who wouldn’t want that kingdom of heaven that John the Baptist and everyone else kept going on about to come swiftly and easily?  And more than that, who wouldn’t want Jesus to be the ruler, right here and right now, so that he could stop the wars and stop the famine and stop the abuse of children and start making sure everyone had enough to eat and start making sure health care was distributed to everyone and start making sure that, when earthquakes happen and buildings fall and waves crash, no one would have to die?  Jesus knew he was destined to bring about this kingdom, so why not make it happen?

Jesus’ confidence would have led him to believe that he was supposed to be able to do all of those things he was tempted to do.  But he resisted, and he resisted because he was seeking to follow the will of God, not the will of those voices which fed his ego and sought a swift end to the troubles of his empty belly and the troubles of the world.  And then, the angels came and waited on him.

And I think he was both triumphant and exhausted.  He had not gone into the wilderness willfully; he had not gone out there because it was his idea, or because he was anxious to prove something to someone.  But he also did not refuse to go out to the wilderness.  Instead, “he was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness.”

And I think that is the best way we can approach this season of Lent.  We have passed through 4 of the 40 days, plus 6 Sundays, of this season of fasting, confession, prayer, and preparation.  We spend these 40 days getting ready to receive the good news of the betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  And during these 40 days, we are encouraged to seek to draw closer to God.  We are encouraged to know Jesus better, and to know ourselves better, too:  examining the way we live our lives, paying close attention to the decisions we make, both big and small, prayerfully reflecting on the attitudes and ideas and ideologies we hold fast to, practicing the art of viewing the world through the eyes of the God who loves us.

We may not enter this season confidently.  We may know that we are limited.  We may not have the strength of spirit that the Son of God had.  That would not be our fault.  But we also do not need to enter this season of self-examination in the light of the glory of God reluctantly.  Perhaps we should simply follow the example of Jesus, who was led by the Spirit into his 40 days of fasting.  It wasn’t his idea, but he also did not resist.  He did not enter it with a cocky confidence, but he also did not require that it be forced upon him.  He was led by the Spirit.

And we too can be led by the Spirit.  We can be led to pray more often, and to study scripture more deeply.  We can be led to ask hard questions of ourselves about our own hungers, and about our own desires to show everyone who will pay attention how great we are, and about our own desires, too, to force the world and everything in it to conform to our ideas of perfection, here and now, rather than faithfully participating in God’s work.  And most of all, we can seek to align our lives with the will of God, rather than trying to align God with our own desires.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can enter this season of Lent led by the Spirit.  Because on the other end of this season, there is a big celebration, where our wounds are bandaged, and our hungers are fed, and the victorious king is welcomed home with a feast.

Amen.

Ash Wednesday

Psalm 51:1-17

Eric Beene

March 9, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

In most printed Bibles, there is some fine print right before each of the Psalms.  These lines of type say something about where someone somewhere along the way thought the Psalm came from.  Some are just dedications, or just a word or two about who might have written the Psalm.  But some carry a lot more information, and whether that information is historically accurate or not, those words can color the way we read the Psalm itself.  Psalm 51 has one of those kinds of lines printed before it.  In the translation we have in the pews, it says, “To the leader.  A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

And once I read that background information, I cannot read the Psalm the same way.  If this was written by King David immediately after the incident with Bathsheba and Uriah, the Psalm can only be all about that incident.  In case you don’t remember, King David saw Bathsheba and was struck by her beauty.  He was so struck, in fact, that he got Bathsheba pregnant, and, in order to cover up the whole mess, he arranged to have her husband killed.  What he had done was sin upon sin, and he had plenty to confess.  “For I know my transgression, and my sin is ever before me.”  Indeed.

When we imagine that setting for this psalm of repentance, it is hard to think of any other meaning to the words.  But as we begin this season of Lent, I wonder if we can see how to take these words as our own anyway.  Lent is a season of repentance:  a time when we are invited to be honest with ourselves, and be honest with God, about how we have failed to live the way we were created to live, sharing love, praising God, and experiencing the full joy of abundant life lived with Christ which is a result of perfect love and praise.  We have failed to live that way, and we have not only failed ourselves, but we have failed God.  And our repentance is not just an exercise in self-flagellation; we are not supposed to spend the next 46 days beating ourselves up.  Instead, we are invited to seek God’s forgiveness  for our shortcomings, seek to be reconciled to God, and seek to receive God’s grace as an amazing, undeserved, but nonetheless freely given gift.

And to begin this season of repentance and reconciliation, we are marked with the reminder that we depend on God for more than just forgiveness.  We depend on God for life itself.  We are dust, and to dust we shall return.  We have no life in us except the life given to us by the God who created us.  And we have no hope beyond our own life except the hope which tells us God is more powerful than death.  We all came from nothing, and we all are going to die, and to return to nothing, except that God loves us, and God forgives us, and God gives us good reason to hope.

And so I wonder if this Psalm can help us to enter this season, and accept this invitation, even though it is set in the context of everything David did wrong in his relationship with Bathsheba and Uriah.  Some of us might resonate with the words of this psalm from the very beginning.  Some of us have specific sins which we need to confess to ourselves and to God.  But some of us might not.  So what might it mean for us to beg God to “create in me a clean heart…and put a new and right spirit within me?”  What might it mean that “the sacrifice acceptable to God is … a broken and contrite heart?”

It might mean that our hearts and spirits are cracked wide open by some great sin, as it meant for David.  But it also might mean that we could make the decision any time to allow our hearts and spirits to break open.  Because we all carry sin with us all the time.  Our sin may not be obvious; it might just be a part of how we think we need to live to survive.  Our sin may not be overt; it might be something we have covered so deeply that we don’t even remember it is there.  Our sin may not be something we can even put into words; it might be nothing more than an awareness that there are horrible things going on in our world, and we are a part of letting those things happen.  Our unexamined, hidden, unconfessed sin can break our hearts and our spirits wide open, too, if we would only let it.

And if we let it, then we can accept the invitation of Lent.  And we can ask God to heal the wounds in our hearts and spirits.  And we can receive the gift of repentance and reconciliation to God.  And the words of Psalm 51 can express our needs:  “do not cast me away from your presence…do not take your holy spirit from me.  Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.”

When we allow our hearts and spirits to break wide open, God comes to fill them up and heal them again.  When we confess our sinfulness and dependence on God, we receive those gifts with joy.  My prayer is that we may accept the invitation to this season which is offered in this Psalm:   that we may allow our hearts and spirits to break open, and that we may allow our tongues to sing aloud of God’ deliverance.  Amen.

Not As They Appear

Matthew 17:1-9

Eric Beene

March 6, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Many of you know just how much I like Chris’s homemade bread which we use for communion here.  On most communion Sundays, I get to stand right behind the table and uncover the bread at just that time when my morning Raisin Bran is starting to wear off and my stomach is telling me it has plenty of room for lunch.  Let me tell you, when I lift the napkin, the smell is amazing:  sweet, yeasty, and satisfying.  I am grateful that we get to celebrate this feast of the Lord’s Supper with such great bread; it reminds us just how satisfying, sweet, and even yeasty is God’s saving presence with us.

When my wife, Mary, was in seminary, she served at a church which did not have such a privilege.  Most often, the pastor would step out of the pulpit, come down from the chancel, and lift the clean, white napkin covering the bread, prepared to lift it to God before the congregation, saying, “this is my body which is broken for you.”  And what was on that brass plate was nothing yeasty or homemade.  Instead, I kid you not, the white napkin would be lifted to reveal…a hot dog bun.  Usually, the hot dog bun had been in the church freezer for several months, and usually (but not always) it had just thawed by the time of the service when all attention was drawn to it.  So it was not even a fresh hot dog bun.  It was a little dried out, a little shriveled, and a little bit freezer burnt.

But despite their appearances, those hot dog buns were just as useful for the church’s celebration of communion as that wonderful bread we are privileged to taste each month.  Because that is the nature of whatever bread ends up on the plate to be used for this holy feast:  there is always more to the bread than it first appears.

Our story from scripture this morning helps me to understand that truth.  The way Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, this scene really appears out of nowhere.  According to Matthew, the disciples and Jesus had fallen into a kind of rhythm and routine in their life together.  They had been moving around the countryside for some time.  They would enter a town or region, Jesus would perform some miracle, like healing people who were sick, casting demons out of people who were afflicted, feeding 5,000 people who were hungry, or walking across the water as people watched astounded.  But he was not alone in doing that kind of work; there were plenty of faith healers or magicians who would wander from town to town making a living by doing tricks that would catch people’s attention.

So magic tricks was not the only part of the show; Jesus would also teach in those towns he visited as a part of the routine.  He uttered wise sayings, like “blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  He spun some fantastic tales for people, like “there was a sower who went out to sow, and some seeds fell on the path, and other seeds fell on rocky ground, and other seeds fell among the thorns, and other seeds fell on good soil.”  Jesus had some comforting words to say, too, to attract those people who were just lonely or desperate to join his merry gang of followers, things like, “come to me all you who are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

And after a while of this rhythm and routine, coming to a new town, performing a miracle, sharing some wise or entertaining or soothing words, then leaving for the next town, there were probably people who knew what to expect from Jesus.  There were probably people who would say things like, “I just see Jesus as a wise teacher,” or, “That Jesus fellow sure does put on a good show!”  And that would be where they would stop; they would see nothing more in him.

But then, just as Jesus had some folks thinking of him as a magician, and nothing more, and just as Jesus had some folks thinking of him as a wise teacher, and nothing more, and just as things had settled into something of a routine and rhythm, we have this story we read this morning.  One day, Jesus and a few of his friends went up a mountain.  And suddenly, just when those friends thought they knew what to expect from Jesus, everything changed.  Jesus’ face shone.  Then Moses and Elijah came and stood beside him.  Then a “bright cloud” overshadowed them, and what that tells me is that no one knew exactly how to describe what was going on, because clouds are not usually dark and dull, not bright. Then a voice spoke, and that voice had more or less the same thing to say as the voice which spoke at Jesus’ baptism:  “This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.  Listen to him!”

Those disciples who were with Jesus, witnessing these fantastic events, were changed forever.  They could never again think that Jesus was just a magical healer, or just a wise teacher, and nothing more.  Jesus bore the power of God.  Only God can shine like Jesus’ face shone that day.  Only God can make important figures from the history of God’s people appear, reminding them of God’s everlasting promises.  Only God can speak through a “bright cloud,” whatever that means, in the same voice that claimed Jesus in his baptism.  And Jesus bore that power.  There was more to Jesus than it first appeared.

And as I realize the change that those witnesses had to make, in their perceptions of what Jesus was, I also wonder:  isn’t there more to each of us than it might first appear, too?  In our rhythms and routines of daily life, we are used to making it seem like we have it all together.  We show others that we are caring parents and grandparents.  We show others that we are competent workers.  We show others that we can keep our house clean and our clothes tastefully coordinated and our dog well-exercised and our laundry done and our car serviced and our dishes washed and our dust bunnies well under control under the bed.  In fact, we spend tremendous energy looking as normal and responsible as we think we ought to be.

But I think that, for many of us, there are times when we recognize there is more going on in our hearts and minds, if not in our homes and families.  There are times when we really don’t know what it means to be a good parent, because things get crazy, and the kids rub us the wrong way, and all of the baggage of our own families comes boiling out of control to the surface.  And there are times when we feel completely in over our heads at work, with situations we couldn’t predict, and co-workers who are unpredictable, and the circumstances of the economy or the political climate or the generation gap or some other sign of the age we live in are like nothing that anyone has experienced before.  And there are times when we don’t have any idea how we are going to get it all done in so few hours and with so little money.  And that’s just when things are going normally; that doesn’t say anything about those times when something just goes wrong, and every bit of planning or balance in our lives gets blown to bits.  There is more to us than it might at first appear.

There is something beautiful about this moment in scripture, though.  There are parts of Jesus that are more than it first appears.  And we spend all that energy making sure that there are parts of us that are not what it first appears.  And what is beautiful is that those parts of us we hide meet those parts of Jesus which are revealed in his transfiguration.  Jesus bears the power of God; we need some power greater than our own.  Jesus bears the power of God to shine like nothing we’ve ever seen before; we are so shrouded in our own darkness that it seems no light can break through.  Jesus bears the power of God to remind us of God’s promises to us; we lose all hope if we don’t remember how God has helped us in the past.  Jesus bears the power of God to speak about love and pleasure; we are so filled with frustration and disappointment and shame and rage that we forget what it feels like to be loved or to experience joy.

The pieces of Jesus that are more than they first appear meet head-on the pieces of us that we keep hidden.  And so we come back to communion bread.  The bread under the clean, white napkins on the table in front of me is sweet and satisfying and yeasty.  But those shriveled-up, stale hot dog buns Mary experienced in another congregation also bear the power and presence of the risen Christ.  They remind us all the same that Jesus’ body was broken for us.  They remind us all the same that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.  They remind us all the same that Jesus has promised a great banquet filled with good foods and well-aged wines.  They give us strength, they give us courage, they give us hope, they give us a word of God’s love just the same.  And when our souls are hungering, that strength and encouragement and hope and love feed us; the miraculous grace of that bread, in whatever form it is presented, meets the hungers in our souls that we spend so much energy trying to hide.

My prayer this morning is that we may look to Jesus as more than a wise teacher, and more than a magical healer.  My prayer is that we may look to Jesus as the One who bears the power of God:  the power to shine, the power to remind us of God’s goodness, the power to speak of God’s love and God’s joy.  My prayer is that we may allow those deeper parts of Jesus to meet those parts of ourselves we spend so much energy trying to hide, and that the grace of the communion bread can feed our deepest hungers.  Because there is more to Jesus than it first appears.

Amen.

Do Not Worry

Matthew 6:24-34

Eric Beene

February 27, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

The motto “In God We Trust” is printed on every bit of currency and coin in our country, and it has been since Congress passed a law mandating it in the mid-1950s.  As someone who is one citizen among 300 million or so in this country, I know there are some problems with that motto.  But as a follower of Jesus Christ, I see the slogan on our money as one of the greatest ironies of everyday life.  I know that I should trust in God with everything, all the time, and in all that I do.  But it sure is a lot easier to trust in money.

I know that I should trust in God in all times and places because of passages in the Bible like the one our lectionary suggests for us today.  This story from Matthew is frequently quoted.  Few of us have not heard the words, “consider the lilies” at some time in our lives of faith, particularly as advice for times when things are stressful.  And few of us who have been in the church for a while have been through a pledging or fundraising campaign that has not at one time or another had someone quoting, “No one can serve two masters…you cannot serve both God and wealth.”

It seems that no one is really clear about who heard these words when Jesus first spoke them, and so it is hard to guess how they would have been received.  But we can guess that the “crowds” who were gathered around Jesus that day, as he sat down to teach his followers on the mount, probably included a good number of people who had some direct experience as servants of masters.  The people listening were probably not all wealthy folks who were there to be entertained by a nice teacher.  There were poor people around Jesus, and those people would have heard what he had to say very differently than many of us who are relatively very, very comfortable.

Imagine if you heard these words of Jesus if you really did not know how you were going to feed your family the next day.  Imagine hearing this if your clothes were torn, and winter was coming, and you were exposed to the extreme temperatures of the desert:  deathly hot in the daytime, but so cold at night that you really could freeze to death.  Imagine if you had spent your whole morning trying to make your way to the front of the line at the well, after the servants of all the wealthy people in town had taken their buckets full of water back to their masters’ houses, where even the servants would have the security of knowing that there was sufficient water in the house to take care of their needs.  Imagine if you had happened along on this guy teaching, with this crowd of people gathered around him, as you had a deep hunger in your gut.  That hunger would not have been like the hunger some of us get about this time of day because the effects of our morning bowl of Raisin Bran are wearing off and we are wondering how long the preacher will go on before we can get to the restaurant.  That hunger would have been there because you did not eat breakfast at all this morning, or supper last night, and you are looking for the one meal you will eat today.  Imagine if you had heard about this fellow who worked all kinds of miracles, healing people of their diseases and curing people of their demons, and you thought you just had to sit through this sermon before he would give you what you came for:  healing, or hope, or even just the ability to get a job.  Remember, they did not have any Social Security or disability insurance in that time and place, and there were no Salvation Armies or Union Gospel Missions to take care of the people who were down or out or addicted or afflicted.  Some of those people in the crowd that day were really, really desperate.

Imagine being one of those people and hearing what Jesus had to say:  “do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or…what you will wear.”  Do not worry?  O.k., but how can I not worry?  I might not eat today.  I might not be able to get water.  I might not have enough clothes to survive the cold night.  Do not worry?

Do not worry, Jesus said.  God will feed you, just like God feeds the birds.  God will clothe you, not just for protection and warmth, but also for dignity and even beauty, just like God clothes the wildflowers.  Do not worry.  God knows you need these things.  God just wants you to work hard at participating in the kingdom of God, and God will make sure you get what you need.  Do not worry.

Just work hard at participating in the kingdom of God.  In the kingdom of God, the people trust that everything they need will be provided by God, their ruler.  But there is more to it than that, which is good news for those people who were crowding around Jesus because they were desperate.  In the kingdom of God, the people of God will only take as much as they need, and then they will share what is left with each other.  Throughout the Bible, that sharing is the marker of righteousness.  In the Old Testament, the law and the prophets are forever reminding the people to make sure that no one has too much, and no one else has too little.  In the New Testament, the followers of Jesus are told to sell everything they have so they can possess everything in common, including their food, their houses, their land, and other things that can guarantee that their needs for food, water, clothing, and other basics are met.  In the whole witness of the scripture, the people of God are called to trust God to provide whatever they need to sustain their lives.

And so, Jesus said, do not worry.  If you are barely holding on, do not worry; God wants you to get what you need.  And if you have a lot, do not worry; God wants you to share what you have with the people around you who do not have enough.  Just work hard at doing your part in the kingdom of God.  Do not worry; trust in God.

And so, in God we trust.  But those are hard words to say, because even though we know we ought to trust God no matter what, and even though we know we are supposed to share what we have with the people who do not have, the worries are nonetheless real.  What if I run out of money?  What if my kids find they can’t go to college because I cannot afford it?  What if the water heater explodes, or the roof starts to leak, or my car breaks down?  What if I lose my job?  What if I cannot afford to retire when I am old and tired?  What if I get sick or injured; how will I keep going?  What if my family cannot afford to take care of me, or is not willing to take care of me like they should?  There are plenty of worries, and those worries are real, and the last thing we want to hear when we are dealing with such practical and real concerns is that our faith is weak if we worry so much.

It is a lot easier to trust in money than it is to trust in God.  It is a lot easier to save our money.  It is a lot easier to spend our money the way we want.  It is a lot easier to let extra money accumulate somewhere safe.  It is a lot easier to worry about whether or not I have enough money for every possible problem.  All of those things are easier than trusting in God and God alone to give me everything I need.

And so what do we do?  We might as well not try to deny our worries and lie about what we trust.  We let our worries about money, and even our trust in money, stand however they will. But at the same time, we can start to live a different way.  Jesus said that we strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness.  And so, as we feel the worries start to grow inside us, we can consciously shift our thoughts to the kingdom of God.  In the kingdom of God, everyone has enough, and no one has more than they need.  And as we think about that kingdom of God, we can start to see what it is to have enough.  We can start to see what it means to have enough food, not too much, but just enough.  We can start to think about what it means to have enough clothes, not more than necessary, not a lot of extra things that we bought just because we thought they were cute or fashionable or slimming or an antidote to the bad mood we were in that day.  We can start to think about what it means to have enough water, not so much that the sources are depleted and the sewers are overflowing into the river.

And when we start to think about what it is to have enough in the kingdom of God, we can start to think, too, about how we can share what we have, because we come to realize two things.  We come to realize that we have more than enough.  And we also come to realize that we can share the extra with the people who would never hear these words of Jesus the way that we hear them, not because they worry about not having enough, but because not having enough is a daily reality for them.  And somewhere along the line, not all at once, because a habit like that one is hard to kick, but gradually, we can start to learn how it is that one would serve God and not wealth.

And so my prayer this morning is that we can really trust in God.  My prayer is that we can embrace the irony of those words on our money:  that we are called as followers of Christ to trust in God alone, even though it is much easier to trust in money.  My prayer is that we can find the joy of God’s kingdom which Jesus describes, lining up alongside the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, trusting God to give us all we need.

Amen.

Choose Life

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Eric Beene

February 13, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

What do you want to be when you grow up?  I remember being asked that question when I was a child and not really knowing what to say.  I knew I was supposed to say the things that children always say to answer that question:  “I want to be a fireman!” or “I want to be a doctor!” or “I want to be a pastor!”  O.k., most young children don’t say that last one.  But I knew that to say something like that would feel like a lie.  I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.  So, I usually played shy, and tried my best not to answer.

The biggest problem was not that I was apathetic about my future.  But I felt that somewhere in the question, I was being asked to commit to something once and for always.  What if I gave the wrong answer?  What if I decided to change my mind?  Would that be possible, or would that make me a liar to all of those people who asked me before I really knew what I wanted to do?  And what if I wanted to do several things in my life?  Was there room to have a bunch of things I wanted to be when I grew up?

And as I got older, the questions didn’t get any easier.  Are you going to college or to work?  What classes do you need to take to get ready for the kind of college you want to go to?  What are you going to major in?  No, really, you only have two semesters until you graduate:  you need to choose a major.  What internship will help you start your career?  Where should you apply to graduate school?  What job will you take so you can spend the rest of your life doing what you have always said you want to do when you grow up?  And the pressure grew, and it started to seem like there were too many decisions, and it started to seem, too, like once I decided, I would be stuck with that decision for the rest of my life.

That pressure, growing and growing with each new year, each new question, each new decision that has to be made, is what comes to mind when I read this scripture lesson we have this morning.  Because it sounds like the life of faith is something like the guidance counselors, the academic advisors, the career center staff, and, perhaps most of all, the parents and grandparents and teachers and friends who kept asking all of those questions when I was young.

This part of scripture is the end of Moses’ farewell address to the people of God.  With God’s help, he had led the slaves out of Egypt.  And Moses had done more than serve as their guide on a journey into the wilderness; he had formed those people into a people.  Before they left Egypt, they were a bunch of slaves who only had their family trees and their experience of horrible treatment at the hands of their masters in common.  The exodus from Egypt was such a profound experience of being saved by almighty God that it changed not only their mailing address and their job titles.  That journey changed their entire identity, as individuals and as a family.  They were no longer slaves; instead, they were the people whom God had saved.  They would never again be the oppressed victims of unjust economic and political systems; they would forever be the ones whom God had chosen.  And so they had to live differently, not only differently than the way they always lived, but differently than the way that everyone else in the world lived.  And it was Moses’ job to teach them how they had to live differently, in response to God’s choosing them and saving them.

The way the story goes, they made it all the way to the edge of the promised land, and then Moses knew he was not going to go any further with them.  So, he gave a long, long, long final speech, detailing for them once again the laws which he had received from God after they left Egypt.  In Greek, this is the deuteronomos, the second giving of the law, which is the book of Deuteronomy in our Bible.  The section we just read is from the end of that very long speech reminding the people of how they were supposed to live as the people of God.

The way Moses chose to end his rehashing of the entire law of the people of God was with these words:  “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity.”  You can choose to obey all of these commandments I have spoken to you, or you can choose to ignore these commandments and live your own way.  But, he said, there are consequences for either option.  If you choose to obey, then the God who chose to save you from the poverty and fear you were living in before will continue to bless you.  “[Love] the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him,” he said, “for that means life to you, and length of days…”  But, if you choose to ignore the God who saved you, and to ignore the commandments that God gave to you, and to live just like everyone else in the world lives, then, he said, quite simply, “you shall perish.”  You will lose your land which God is giving you, and you will die, and your children will have nothing to show for all that you have been through.

So, he advised, “Choose life.”  It is time for you to decide:  Are you going to be the worthy servants of the God who saved you, or are you going to ungratefully turn your back on your God, and suffer the consequences?  What are you going to be when you grow up?

And I start to feel the anxiety growing as the pressure mounts.  “Choose life,” he said.  O.k., but that’s not easy.  It’s hard enough even to remember the first 10 of the commandments, and I’m not even sure I have ever learned all of the others.  Sure, Jesus boiled those first 10 down to “love God and love your neighbor.”  But that’s still not easy.  A friend of mine who is a pastor up north recently had a long-time congregation member send her an e-mail in which the writer asked her, in all seriousness, “We aren’t really supposed to love everyone, are we?  I mean, that’s just not possible!”  Frankly, I appreciated the writer’s honesty.  If the pressure is on for me to make a decision about whether I will choose life through obedience to God or choose death by turning my back on God, it does not help that choosing to follow God is not choosing an easy or popular path.

“Choose life,” he said, and the pressure builds.  “Choose life,” and I am like that confused little boy thinking about what he wants to be when he grows up.  “Choose life,” and it seems like I am about to miss my chance.  “Choose life,” and I just don’t know what to do.

But there is something about this paragraph of scripture you need to know.  Moses ended his long speech with this commanding advice, “Choose life.”  But you know what happened next?  Do you know what the people did or said in response?  Me neither.  No one knows.  Of course, we can read on; we know what Moses said next.  We know that Moses prepared to die, and Joshua became his successor, and the people of God crossed the Jordan River into the Promised Land.  But what we don’t know is what God’s people said when it was put to them so starkly.  The Biblical writers do not seem to think it is important to note whether there was an affirming cheer, or there was a negative boo, or whether there was only the sound of birds chirping, as the people contemplated in stunned silence what Moses was telling them.  Did they choose life that day, or did they choose death?  Did they choose the way of prosperity and blessings that day, or did they choose the way of adversity and curses?  We don’t know.

And the fact that the response of the people of God in that moment is not recorded means something.  It means that the question is still hanging out there.  It means that the people of God can still answer.  It means that anything is possible, still, for those people whom God has saved.  It means that the offer still stands, and the invitation is still open.

It means that the choice does not have to be made once and for ever.  It means that we still have the question before us, here, today.  Will you choose life, or will you choose death?  And even if we make the right choice today, and then we find later on that we are confused about what God commands, and we aren’t sure if it even possible in the modern world to live strictly by the law of God, and we are tempted, and we backslide, and we look at our neighbor and say, “surely Jesus didn’t mean for me to love him!” and we get ourselves all messed up, then the question is still there.  Tomorrow morning, we can wake up again, and make that choice again, because the invitation is still there, waiting to be answered.

And given the fact that the question is not answered, our anxiety can be transformed, too.  Our anxiety about the pressure to make a decision can be transformed into possibility for a response to an invitation.  And what a blessing the possibility is!

Moses has described to us the way of life and the way of death, and has advised us to choose life.  My prayer is that we can make the right choice.  But more than that, my prayer is that we can see the invitation in Moses’ words, not as a pressure, not as a source of anxiety, but as a gracious invitation into the possibility of abundance and blessing and life.  My prayer is that we may be open every day to making the decision to choose life.

Amen.

“The Fast I Choose”

Isaiah 58:1-9a

Eric Beene

February 6, 2011 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I can only imagine what the people who first heard these words thought as Isaiah stood before them and spoke.  Most folks assume that the prophet was speaking to the people after they had returned from their exile in Babylon.  For almost fifty years, the people of God had been away from the land where their families had lived, worked, and worshiped for hundreds of years before that.  They had been scattered, forced to live in another land and to work for other people.  And, when they worshiped their God there, they did the best they could among people who did not worship the same God.

But then, a new ruler came along, and the people of God were allowed to return to the homeland of their ancestors.  What a celebration!  They spent several years rebuilding the cities, getting the farms and orchards in working order, and setting up the economic and political systems of their own nation again.  During that time, they had to remember how it was they were supposed to worship their God.  They looked to the ancient texts to recall the practices of prayer, of making offerings, of special festivals and holy days, and of day-to-day living by the law of God.

Over a few years, things fell into patterns.  Some people owned the land, while others worked for the landowners; some people began to prosper, and others did not.  Undoubtedly, everyone agreed that it was just the way things had to be.  They probably thought that those who did well worked hard, and managed their resources well.  Those who didn’t get ahead, they probably assumed, did not work as hard, or were not as smart or good at making friends and influencing people.  Not everyone could be in charge, so those who were simply accepted it as their duty, and accepted their wealth as fair compensation for doing those kinds of jobs.  And those who were not in charge were supposed to just do their jobs, too, and accept with gratitude whatever they could get for their work.  And everyone, equally, was to come before God, make their offerings, utter their prayers, and participate in the fasts.

Their fasts were acts of confession and humility.  They were meant to tell God that they knew things were not right, and then to ask God for forgiveness.  The big fast was the annual Day of Atonement, when the whole nation of God’s people would go hungry all day.  It was a day of self-denial, of remembering their sin, and of making offerings to atone for their sins.  They let God know that they were aware they didn’t always do things right, and they let God know, too, that they regretted their sin.  Sometimes, other fast days were called to respond to particular crises.  Again, on those days, the hunger in their guts was meant to mimic their hunger for God’s forgiveness; they depended on God, and they had not pleased God, so they wanted to make their apologies in such a way that they could be taken seriously.

These were good people.  They were faithful people.  They were trying to do what the law prescribed.  They were trying to please God, so that God would do good things for them.  They were simply trying to rebuild their lives and their nation, and they were trying to be good, pious people, too.

And then Isaiah got up and smacked them upside the head.  He didn’t literally slap them, of course.  But these words he used were blunt, and they served the purpose of scolding the people for all the ways they were deluding themselves.  God was very clear about what Isaiah needed to tell the people.  You seem to want to know my ways, Isaiah said, speaking for God.  But do you really think I am stupid enough not to see through your self-deceit, your hypocrisy, and your outright lies?  “Look, you serve your own interests on your fast day,” he said.  You only participate in that ritual because you think you can get something for yourself out of it.  Your participation is not a way for you to turn your attention to me, and to my ways, and to the world the way I want it to be; your fasting is only a way to play out your self-centeredness and greed.  Or, in Isaiah’s words, “Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist.”  You think I don’t understand what is going on?  “Is such the fast that I choose:  a day to humble oneself?”

One day won’t make a bit of difference, to you or to me, God says.  One day is not enough to change your ways.  One day is not enough for you to really understand that you depend on me, and that you receive more than you deserve from me.  One day is certainly not enough for you to do your part in making sure that the life of the people of God is ordered in the way it ought to be.  One day is a meaningless, token offering that only serves to show your hypocrisy:  you know what I want, but still, you refuse to really do it.

“Is this not the fast I choose,” the prophet went on, announcing God’s word to God’s people:  “to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free…?”  The way your economic and political systems are ordered are not acceptable.  It is not o.k. for some people to have a lot and for others to have not enough.  It is not ‘just the way things are’ for some of you to control the wealth and the power, and for others to get nothing.  Things don’t have to be that way, and you would do yourselves a favor if you decide right now that things will never be that way again.  That is the fast I choose.  That is the act of piety I want to see.  That is the way things ought to be.

And that was just one verse.  In case they didn’t get it, the rant went on:  “Is [the fast I choose] not to share your bread with the hungry, and to bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”  You cannot just pretend that everyone has equal opportunity.  You cannot just pretend that other people are poor because they deserve to be.  You certainly cannot just pretend that the poor and other victims of your unjust systems do not exist.  And you cannot just delude yourself into thinking that what is yours is yours, and you get to keep it and do whatever you want with it.  Your money, your house, your food, all of it is meant not to be hoarded, not to be protected, not to be held onto for your own self-centered uses, but it is to be given away so it can be shared with others.

You can just imagine the stunned silence.  You can almost hear the sound of crickets chirping, and nothing else, not even a shocked breath inhaled quickly as Isaiah paused.  And you can imagine the thoughts that went through the heads of those faithful people of God.  We can imagine them because they might be some of the same thoughts going through our heads when we hear these words of Isaiah.  Did he really just say what I think he said?  What does he mean?  Did he really just tell us that we aren’t doing things right?  Surely he means someone else!  Doesn’t he know that we are just doing what we think is right, and honorable, and decent, as good citizens and good church folks?  Does he really mean it is more important to “loose the bonds of injustice” and to “let the oppressed go free” than to pray and go to church and even to fast, as it says in the Bible we are supposed to do?  What does it even mean to “loose the bonds of injustice?”  We are supposed to let homeless people into our house?  We are supposed to share the food we have bought with our own money with complete strangers who probably aren’t even trying to get a job?

I can imagine those thoughts started circling around and around in the heads of the people listening to Isaiah speak these words.  And I imagine those thoughts got louder and louder in their heads, and some of them may have even spoken their thoughts to one another, in murmured complaint, in hushed tones, but with a passionate anger and an unbelieving urgency.  And with all the noise of their thoughts circling in their heads and their voices and their ears, I am afraid they might have missed the rest of what Isaiah had to say.

Isaiah went on:  “Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly…Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’”  This was the answer to their prayers.  This was the response they had been looking for all along.  This was what they had been seeking in their pious practices of fasting and all the rest.  But they would only be able to hear it if they could accept that what God really wanted was a generous sharing of their bread and of their power.

These words of Isaiah are hard words to hear, particularly if all we want to hear is a hearty ‘Congratulations!’ for our acts of piety.  They are hard to hear if we think that we are righteous because we come to church, and we offer our prayers, and we put the money we have pledged into the offering plate, and we expect that what we do will be enough to get God’s attention when we want something.  These words of Isaiah are hard to hear if we come to this table and receive the bread and juice expecting that what happens here is about us:  about the fact that we are saved by Christ’s death and resurrection, about the experience that we can have because we encounter Jesus face-to-face here around this table.

This table reminds us of those truths, but it is about so much more, too.  This table is not even mostly about us; it is mostly about God.  It expresses God’s will that all people be fed, here and now, in their bodies, and in their minds, and in their souls.  It speaks the truth that Jesus Christ is present in the midst of this world which God created, and that Jesus’ presence is an expression of God’s deepest desires to draw the whole world to God.  The focus of the attention here is not on us, the participants, but on Jesus Christ, the host, Who bears God in His body and spirit.

And because the focus of the attention is not on us, but on Jesus Christ and His presence as an expression of God’s will for the whole creation, the message of this table is not to tell us to engage in half-hearted, self-centered acts of piety.  This table makes clear the poverty of our offerings and the weakness of our worship.  But it also makes clear the power of God, and the love of God, and the will of God:  that we let ourselves be swept into life with God.  It makes clear that what God wants is for the oppressed to taste freedom, and for the victims of injustice to be unbound.  It makes clear that what God wants is for our bread to be shared, and our homes to be opened, and those clothes hanging in our closets to be used to keep all people warm and dry and living with dignity.

And so my prayer this morning, as we prepare ourselves to come around this table, is that we may hear God’s word:  the worship God desires is that all people live in justice and in freedom.  My prayer is that we may hear God’s command:  to share our bread with the hungry, to bring the homeless poor into our home, to bring warmth and dignity to the naked, or for God’s sake, at least to notice the people around us who are poor.  And my prayer is that we may hear God’s promise:  light will break forth at the dawn, and healing will spring up like the morning flowers.

“Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer,” Isaiah said; “you shall cry for help, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’”

May it be so.  Amen.