White Bluff Presbyterian Church (USA)

Recent Sermons

Astounded

Acts 10:44-48

Eric Beene

May 12, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I think we can get a lot from this passage of scripture we just read if we do something a bit different than we might want to do at first glance.  At first glance, we read through Peter’s question, and we think it is simply a rhetorical question.  “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”  It sounds when you first read it like the kind of question that someone would ask when they know what the answer is.  “No, Peter.  Of course not!  No one can withhold the water!”

But what if it is a serious question?  What if there really were people around Peter at that moment who could think of a lot of reasons to withhold that water?  The fact is that, up to that point in the history of the people who were followers of Jesus, just about anyone could withhold the water, and, in fact, many still thought that it was their responsibility to withhold the water from baptizing those people.

Those people who had received the Holy Spirit were Gentiles.  In fact, they were about as Gentile as you could get.  They were all part of the household of Cornelius, and Cornelius is described in the first verse of Acts 10 as “a centurion of the Italian Cohort.”  He was a Roman military commander, so not only was he not born as a Jewish person, but he was a representative of the empire that had held the Jewish people under occupation for several generations.  At best, he would have been considered an outsider; at worst, he was the enemy who would have been thrown out long ago if he didn’t command a superior military force.

So who would withhold the water for baptizing Cornelius and his household?  Anyone who followed the Jewish law would have withheld the water, because a person who was not Jewish was a threat to the purity of the relationship between God and God’s people.  And anyone who resented Rome’s occupation of the Jewish lands would have withheld the water, because she or he would have been furious to even be in his presence.  And anyone who was trying to make nice with the other Jewish people in Judea and Samaria would have withheld the water, because they wouldn’t want to have any of those kind of people in their community for fear that others would avoid them or accuse them of colluding with the empire.

So, likely as not, it was a serious question that Peter asked.  And I think it was a serious question because of the way that the writer says the people reacted when they figured out that the Holy Spirit had fallen on Cornelius and his household.  The writer says that “the circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded” at the sight.  “Astounded” is quite a word.  They were astounded, with their mouths hanging open and their eyes as big as dinner plates and their feet starting to back them up, away from the shocking sight, ready to turn around run in fear and in shock and in confusion about what they were seeing.  Peter asked the question because the people around him were astounded, and he would have wanted to make sure everyone else was seeing the same thing he was seeing before he went ahead with baptizing those people.

Peter had been astounded, too, that he ever found his way to Cornelius and his household.  According to the rest of chapter 10, which sets up the little scene we just read about, Peter had made his way from Joppa, where he was staying with a friend, up the coast to Caesarea, where Cornelius lived, against his own expectations.  Early one afternoon, he saw a vision of a picnic blanket of sorts being lowered down from the heavens.  On the large sheet were a whole bunch of animals that all had one thing in common:  the Jewish law forbade God’s people from eating them.  A voice spoke to Peter, telling him, “get up…kill and eat.”  As a good Jew, Peter objected; there was no way that the voice was God’s voice, because God would never tell him to eat those things.  But the voice insisted by saying, “what God has made clean, you must not call profane.”  This same vision was repeated three times.

Peter still wasn’t convinced.  But right at that moment, a knock came at the front door of the house where he was staying.  Some messengers from Cornelius were there.  Even though Peter had never met Cornelius, and there was no reason Cornelius would have ever heard of Peter, the messengers asked for him by name.  He heard an assurance that the Holy Spirit of God had sent them, so he left with them.  After the two-day journey to Caesarea, he met Cornelius at his house.  And not only did he meet him, but he explained.  “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile,” Peter said to Cornelius, back in verse 28.  “But God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”  And Cornelius explained that he sent for Peter because an angel of God had told him to send for him and listen to what he had to say.  Peter obliged; he spoke about Jesus, and about what he had witnessed as he and the others had followed Jesus around, and about Jesus’ death, and his appearances after his death, and about the judgment of Christ, and about forgiveness and belief.

And then, the Holy Spirit fell on Cornelius and his household.  And everyone who had come with Peter was “astounded.”

They were astounded because the Holy Spirit was doing something unexpected.  They were astounded because people whom they thought were not supposed to be part of their community were suddenly given the same grace they had received.  They were astounded because the Holy Spirit could use people they didn’t think could be used.

Now, especially in the last generation or so, the sermons on this passage have usually talked about the kinds of people that the Holy Spirit might fall on whom we would just as soon not have as a part of our community of faith.  Depending on when and where you are hearing that sermon, the preacher might tell you that you ought not be astounded that the Holy Spirit has fallen on people who do not look like you, or who do not talk like you, or who do not act like you, or who have not been educated like you, or who do not live a lifestyle like yours, or who in some other way do not conform to your idea of who should be accepted in your church.  After all, as Peter said, “God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”  And that is a good sermon, and a good message, and I believe this is one of the most radical parts of the whole New Testament because that sermon flows so logically and faithfully from this passage.

But this morning, I think there is something else that can astound us here in this room.  I think this church might need to be astounded by the movement of the Holy Spirit, not on the people who are different from us, but on the people who are here.

I hear a lot of reasons why our church is not adequate.  I hear people here saying that the people in this congregation are too old, or we are fewer in number than some of the other churches in town, or we are too limited in our knowledge or our skills or our energy or our time or our understanding of what God really wants, to embrace any new work of ministry in Christ’s name in this community.  I hear us saying that we don’t have enough young people, or we don’t have enough children, or we don’t have enough people who are in the workforce, or we don’t have enough people who enjoy certain kinds of work.  But if you spin out the logic of that lament, then you have to say that the Holy Spirit could never move in useful, exciting new ways among people like us.  The astounding message for us of what we just read is that none of that is true.  The Holy Spirit can fall on anyone:  on the Gentiles whom we think are not a part of the people of God, and on the people who are too old or too inexperienced or too unsure or any of those other things, just like us.

One example has stuck with me for the last several weeks.  Recently, we celebrated the life of Nellie Hodges in this sanctuary after she passed away.  Many of you know that, in about the mid-1980s, Nellie and two other ladies in this church organized themselves to start visiting people who just needed some friendly encouragement.  They visited people in our congregation who were sick, in the hospital, or recovering at home.  There is a whole scrapbook of photos over in the church library of visits they made to new babies in the congregation and their parents.  They visited church members who were in nursing homes, and when there was no one in the congregation to visit, they visited other people they met in those same nursing homes who seemed to just need a friendly face.  Three Wednesdays out of four, they would go out visiting.  When the other two ladies were not able to visit any more, Nellie found some others to go with her.  Over the course of two and a half decades, Nellie and the other ladies made something like over 5 thousand visits to people who needed a friendly face and a bit of prayer.

But you know what I realized as we were preparing for Nellie’s funeral?  Nellie had to have been about 65 years old when she started going out with the visiting ladies.  And the women who started going with here were probably 15 years or so older than she was when they started that important ministry of our congregation for all those years.  So you think that we’re too old to respond to the movement of the Holy Spirit in this congregation?  You would be astounded at what the Holy Spirit can do and will do.

And the same goes for all of the other excuses.  We could find plenty of reasons why certain kinds of people cannot or should not be considered useful by God.  We can find plenty of reasons why we can withhold the water from baptizing people, and we can even find plenty of reasons why we can withhold the water and deny our own baptism.  We can find plenty of reasons why we cannot serve God in bold, new ways.  But the astounding fact is that the Holy Spirit is not as limited as we might think.  The Holy Spirit is poured out even on the Gentiles, or the old people, or the working people, or the people with children, or the people without children, or I could go on and on.  And if you cannot work with the children, you can work with the Food Pantry, or you can help with the yard work, or you can bring some food to an event, or you can tell your neighbors or colleagues or friends about this great little church you go to, or you can go and visit someone who is sick or alone, or you can call someone on the telephone, or if you cannot do any of the rest of that, you can pray for us all, seeking God’s guidance and wisdom and compassion for the ministry that we are doing here together.  If you are not sure what you can do, then just do something, and we will see how the Holy Spirit is poured out through it.  We are not too old, we are not too small, we are not too lacking in knowledge or any other kind of resources.  You would be astounded at what the Holy Spirit can do.

I pray that we may be so astounded by what the Holy Spirit will do.

Friends, Christ is risen!  Christ is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!  Amen.

A Picnic on the Beach

John 21:9-17

Eric Beene

May 6, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Before we get to the story we just read, we have to back up a little bit.  This story actually started earlier in the day, before daybreak, in fact, when a few of Jesus’ disciples got together and headed out for the beach.  I imagine there were a number of reasons a small group of Jesus’ disciples were up before daybreak.  Part of it might have just been that some of them were fishermen, and fishermen just get up earlier than most of the rest of us do.  But I think there was more to it than that.  They had been through the most traumatic experiences of their lives:  accompanying Jesus into Jerusalem, watching as he was arrested, tried, crucified, and buried, and then watching again, not once but twice, as he stood in front of them and showed that he was no longer dead.  The ups and downs of those events had to still be bouncing around in their heads.  He had washed their feet, and told them that the best thing they could do was to love one another.  One of their friends had betrayed him, and they had each run away, abandoned him, and denied ever knowing him.  And then there was that whole resurrection thing; it took some of them a couple of times at that before they could even believe it was really him and not a ghost, much less make sense of what had happened.  You don’t just sleep peacefully all night when you have been through what they had been through.

So they were out on the beach before daybreak, and Peter decided to go fishing.  A few of them went along with him.  And then it happened again:  Jesus appeared, on the beach this time.  The disciples didn’t recognize him.  He started calling out advice to them on where to go to find the best haul of fish, and the best haul of fish is exactly what they found.  Then, they recognized him.  And they panicked.  Peter jumped out of the boat.  The others had the presence of mind to take their breaking nets and haul them to shore, but they were clearly beside themselves.

As one preacher said about texts like these, the disciples were scared when they saw Jesus because, frankly, Jesus is scary.  The whole resurrection thing is scary.  That scene was filled with mystery and confusion and surprise and shock and doubt and, well, fear.  And it gives a whole new sense of truth about everything Jesus had said and done, and most of that stuff was scary, too.  He did things that people weren’t supposed to be able to do, sure, but he also did things that would make most people uncomfortable.  He talked to the wrong kind of people, he was constantly picking arguments with the people everyone else looked up to, and every once in a while, when he got angry enough, he would start turning the tables over and telling people they weren’t doing things the way God wanted them to do things.  Jesus is kind of scary, and his resurrection made him even more frightening.  If I was one of the people who had abandoned him and denied ever knowing him while he was being tortured, I would have especially frightened to see him, but the fact is I think I would be scared to see him anyway.

The disciples were scared.  They were confused.  They were filled with angst.  And as they came ashore, they might have expected him to relieve their angst, to answer their questions, and to say just the right thing to relieve their fears.  That is what I would expect my savior to do.  But Jesus simply stoked a fire.  And instead of profound words of comfort, or of wisdom, or even of challenge, as they got out of the boats that morning, he greeted those disciples with instructions on cooking breakfast.  All he said to them was, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.”  And all the angst and confusion and fear that might have been in their minds was supplanted in John’s story by those fish.  There were exactly 153 of them, John said, but they didn’t break the nets.  Then Jesus spoke to them again, with an invitation:  “Come and have breakfast.”  They had some questions burning in their minds, John says, but “none of [them] dared to ask him.”  He gave them bread, he gave them some of the fish, and they just ate together.

Jesus offers grilled fish and fresh bread instead of all of the answers.  The fact is that Jesus is scary, and resurrection is scary, and the answers really wouldn’t help us that much.  The answers aren’t easy, and they would probably do more to confuse us than to relieve us.  We probably aren’t really ready for the answers, or at least not all of them.  And frankly, we haven’t put all the effort we could into understanding the stuff we have already been told, so why should he tell us something more?  So the answers may come eventually, when we are ready, and when we are open, and when we put some hard work into it all.

But until then, Jesus sets out a picnic and invites us to be a part of it.  Because what we really need is not answers.  What we really need to relieve our angst and our confusion and our fear is a set of relationships.  We need a relationship with Jesus, and we need relationships with other followers of Jesus.  And what better way to form relationships than over food.

Jesus keeps on going, further proving the point.  After breakfast, he took Peter aside, and he told him three times what he had to do.  Peter started to get a little annoyed at the repetition, but most folks just reading along figure out that it is no coincidence that Jesus said the same thing to Peter three times.  After all, just a week or so before, Peter had been asked three times if he knew Jesus, if he had traveled with him, if he even knew anything about him.  And all three times, Peter had said no.  Peter was especially scared, and so his angst and confusion and fear was unique. When Jesus spoke those three times, he again didn’t answer all the questions or tell Peter just how everything was going to work out o.k.  He talked about food.  “Feed my sheep,” he said.

And that might have seemed odd, except that it isn’t.  Instead, it is exactly what the church does today when we are at our best.  When we are at our best, we know when someone in our community is hurting:  when they are sick, when they are grieving, when they are hurting.  And when we know someone in our community is hurting, when we are at our best, we show up, and we bring food.  We are at our best when we don’t try to find the right words to say, because there probably aren’t any right words, and even if there are, our brother or our sister who is hurting probably isn’t ready to hear them.  We are at our best when we just offer our presence, we offer the grace and forgiveness and peace of Christ that the moment needs, and we offer a casserole, or a nice ham, or a pie we baked that morning, or even a package of Oreos and some milk we picked up at the store on the way over.

And when we are at our best, too, we come together and have a picnic.  We know each of us here this morning has something that scares us, and each of us has something that makes us sad, and each of us has something that we really wish we didn’t have to face every day.  We can’t solve all of the problems of the people here.  Those problems are a part of the wisdom of God, so those problems are beyond what any of us can understand or explain or control.  But we can come together around this table over here, set like Jesus might have set the table on that morning when he showed up on the beach to grill some fish and have a picnic with the disciples.  And we can receive his invitation, not to understand it all, and not to solve all of our problems, but just to come on and have breakfast with him.  And then, we can walk into that Social Hall over there, and load up our plates with baked beans and fried chicken and macaroni and cheese and whatever you call that dessert with the blueberries and the whipped cream, and go out under the trees and get to know each other a little better.

The fact is that Jesus is scary, and resurrection is scary.  We can’t figure it all out.  Jesus knows that, and at some level, we know that, too.  So my prayer today is that we can just do what Jesus invited those disciples to do that day on the beach:  not to try to find all of the answers, but to “Come and have breakfast.”  Have a bit of bread and a little something to drink.  Have some grilled fish or fried chicken or whatever it is you please.  Join us for a picnic, and I think we can discover together what we really need.

Friends, Christ is risen!  Christ is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!  Amen.

Witnesses

Luke 24:36b – 48

Eric Beene

April 22, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

This is the third week in a row that our scripture lesson has involved an appearance by Jesus after his resurrection.  In fact, the story goes almost the same as last week’s scripture lesson from John.  The disciples are huddled in some room somewhere in Jerusalem, Jesus stands among them, and they are amazed.  He shows them his wounds to prove it really is him and not some imposter, or some ghost, and then he says some other words to them.  It starts to feel like a formula sometimes.

For today’s reading, though, the folks who suggested that we ought to look at this familiar-sounding text today, on the third Sunday after Easter, did something a little bit odd.  They cut the reading off in the middle of a paragraph. And not only is the end of the passage right in the middle of the paragraph, it is also right in the middle of Jesus’ speech.  He goes on to tell them something about staying in place until they are “clothed with power from on high.”  But the people who put together our lectionary didn’t seem to think that command was particularly important for us today.  Instead, they stop our reading just after Jesus tells his followers, “You are witnesses of these things.”

To me, this odd place to end actually might be part of the point of reading this story, even though it seems so much like all of the other stories of Jesus after he was raised from the dead.  If we went on to the promise of being “clothed with power from on high,” we might be tempted to spend all of our time trying to figure out just what that might mean.  Rather than succumbing to that temptation, the people who put together the lectionary seem to want us to dwell for a bit on what it means that Jesus’ followers are witnesses of “these things.”

Those followers were only a couple of days past the death of their teacher, their friend, their healer, and their hope.  Their grief was still sharp; some of them might have still been in shock.  Some of them might have still been wondering if it could really be true that he was gone.  Some of them might have let themselves speculate that maybe all of the terrible, terrible things they had been through in the previous few days were really just some kind of nightmare which they would wake up from at any minute.  Probably for most of them, the feelings of acceptance, and sadness, and nostalgia, and other feelings that often come after a person has been grieving for a while had not come yet.  Probably most of them were feeling the heavy guilt, or the resentful anger, or the plain denial that come just after a shocking loss.

And so, I imagine that most of the people who were in that room that night were still at a stage when, if you asked them what they really wanted, they would have told you some variation on the same thing.  I think I can imagine what they wanted because it is what many people who are going through a time of heavy grief want.  They would have said that what they really wanted was for everything to go back to the way it was before.  “If only we had never left Galilee…” they might have said.  Or, “if only things could be like they were when we were in this room the last time, when we had the Passover meal together…”  “If only we could have stopped them from arresting him and taken him out of the city…”  Or, “if only he were still here, then we could just keep following him.”  “If only things could be the way they were before he was taken from us, then everything would be o.k.”

Most of them probably just wanted things to go back to the way they were before he was crucified.  So when he showed up among them and said, “Peace be with you,” I imagine that desire was a part of what Luke tells us they felt.  “They were startled and terrified,” he says.  And after Jesus had assured them he was not a ghost, but was a real human in a real human body, Luke says, “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering…”  In that instant, they had this jumbled up mix of feelings of jumping with fright, of quivering with fear, of weeping with joy, of furrowing their brows with doubt, and of jaw-dropping awe, all at the same time.  But somewhere behind all of that mix of feeling, I suspect that, if they had time to think about it, at least some of them would have just been relieved because it seemed like everything could go back to the way it had been before all of this mess had ever started.

Just to prove that he really was a real human, in a real body, and not some apparition or ghost, Jesus asked for some food.  And while he ate it, everyone had a chance to catch their breath.  Then, Jesus started to teach them.  He reminded them of the words he had spoken to them numerous times, about his work, his purpose, and his destiny.  He showed them in the Bible where it said that what happened was just the way God knew things would happen, and even that it was the way things were supposed to happen.  He reiterated the meaning his life carried:  “that repentance and forgiveness of sins” somehow comes from everything he was and everything he did and everything that was done to him.

I imagine that at least some of the disciples were probably still sitting there at the end of all of that thinking to themselves, “O.k., you are the Messiah.  Great!  Wonderful!  Now when do we get out of here so was can go back to Galilee and keep doing what we were doing before?”  And what Jesus said next must have been something of a confusing disappointment.  To make things very, very clear, Jesus stopped teaching them about himself, and about how God was at work in him, and he looked straight at them to make it very clear they had a role in this, too.  “You are witnesses of these things,” he said.

And that was how he showed them the stark reality:  things would never be the same again.  He would never be the same again.  He had fulfilled his God-given purpose.  He had done his work.  He had been transformed into something that he had never been before, and something the world had never seen before.  He was not a ghost, but he was also not just like any other person.  He had died, and then come back alive.  No one had ever done that before.

But more than that, those followers would never be the same again, either.  They had seen him die, and now they saw that he was alive again.  No one had ever done that before, and no one had ever watched anyone go through that before.  They knew things other people did not yet know.  They understood things other people did not yet understand.  They had a story to tell that no one had ever told before.  They had work to do that they had never had to do before.  They could not just go back to Galilee; their lives were changed forever.

“You are witnesses of these things.”  We are in that room, too, when Jesus speaks those words, because we are Jesus’ followers, too.  But it is different for us, living 2,000 years after the scene Luke describes.  We celebrate Easter every year.  So we don’t have to go through the awful mixed-up jumble of grief and sadness and anger and denial that those followers went through in the days after Jesus’ death.  And that is just as well; those are painful things to go through.

But because we have heard these stories again and again, it is easy to think that Easter doesn’t need to change us.  Maybe we don’t have the same shock, wonder, and even doubt.  But the fact is still true that Jesus had died, and then come back alive.  And the fact is still true that no one has ever done that, before or since Jesus did.  And the fact is still true that we are witnesses of these things.  We know things and understand things that make us different.  We have a story to tell and work to do that we have not had before.  Our lives are not meant to ever be the same again.

And we are changed, not because the story is different, but because we have changed.  Even in the past few months, things have changed for each of us.  Some of us have lost loved ones; some of us have started new relationships.  Some of us have new understandings of the limits of our bodies; some of us have tried to do something we had never done before.  We have changed.  And the stories of Easter get told again and again because, with all of the changes in our lives and in our world, we are tempted to want things to just go back to the way they were.  But they will not.

So we have to start asking ourselves questions:  what has changed for us in the past few months?  What have we lost, and what have we gained?  So many of us are grieving the loss of people whom we have loved, who have taught us and been with us and shown us in their own ways something of the joy and goodness of following Christ.  And those people also represent to us the way things used to be in our personal lives, in our families, and in our church.  They make us nostalgic for the times when our children were little, and we were active in our careers, when things were steady and stable, and it seems like we didn’t need to be afraid.  We long for a time when the answers seemed more clear, and we understood what was going on in the world, and we were more able to get up and do something about our problems and our worries.  What has changed for you?

And what does Easter mean in light of whatever is changing for you?  How is this year different, not because the stories are different, but because you are different?  How do the words, “Christ is risen!” sound to you this year?  What feelings and pictures in your mind do those words evoke?  And why?

Friends, you are witnesses of these things.  You are witnesses of Jesus’ death and his coming back from the dead, not so that life would go on as before for his disciples, but so that he could show he was not like he was before.  He was dead, and now he was raised from the dead.  You are witnesses of these things.  You understand things that you never understood before, and that others do not yet understand.  You have a story to tell that no one has ever told before, and that story can proclaim the grace of God in Jesus’ name to the whole world.  You are witnesses of these things.  You cannot go back; your life will never be the same.  You have new work to do.  You are witnesses of these things.

Friends, Christ is risen!  Alleluia!  Amen.

To Believe

John 20:19-31

Eric Beene

April 15, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I’m going to be honest with you.  Last week was Easter, and Easter is one of those times when we have a lot going on around here.  Don’t get me wrong; I wouldn’t miss it for anything.  The opportunity each year to live together through the stories of Jesus’ last days, his death, and finally the wonder of his empty tomb, is very meaningful to me, and I have heard many of you say that it is very meaningful to you, too.  But it means we spend a lot of time here.  And this year, many of us have spent even more time here as we have had an extraordinary number of funerals in the past few months.  Funerals are another of those kinds of things that we wouldn’t want to miss.  They speak to the best of what a congregation is:  shared hopes, shared grace, and an opportunity to share in sadness, not to be depressing, but to affirm that each life has meaning, and each person here has value, and that all of that meaning and value comes from the God whom we trust to hold onto the people we love, in this life and in the life to come.  But funerals are a lot of work, too, and having a lot of them together leaves us tired.  And so, I am tired.

And I have struggled this week to find something else meaningful to say today.  This is the second Sunday of Easter, and the story we read in scripture starts in the evening of the same day when a couple of the disciples had claimed that they saw Jesus raised from the dead.  The other followers of Jesus naturally had some doubts; people are not just raised from the dead.  So, they weren’t really going to believe any of those stories until they saw for themselves.  And see for themselves they did.  Jesus came and stood among them, despite the locked doors in the place where they were, and despite the doubts of his followers.  He showed them his hands and his side, where he had been injured.  And he spoke words of peace to them, and he shared the Holy Spirit with them, too, as they sat there slack-jawed, staring at their teacher and friend raised from the dead.

But one of them wasn’t there.  Thomas was apparently out running some errands or something that night.  So the whole story had to repeat again: the disciples told Thomas they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, he said he wouldn’t believe unless he saw it himself, and then, about a week later, it all happened again.  Thomas believed, making one of the most straightforward confessions of faith in the whole gospel of John when he said, directly and unequivocally, that Jesus was no mere teacher and friend, but he was, “my Lord and my God.”

The, Jesus said something else which he had not said to the others.  He said, “Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  And many folks have noticed something.  Those words, which come at the end of Jesus’ ministry, and at the end of the gospel, echo a theme from all the way at the beginning of the gospel.  In fact, the very first words which Jesus spoke in the gospel according to John were back in chapter 1, verses 38 and 39.  “What are you looking for?” Jesus asked two people who were following along behind him.  And when they responded by asking him where he was staying, he said, “Come and see.”  At the very beginning of the gospel, in the first words he spoke in the whole story, Jesus talked about seeing.  And in the very end of the gospel, he talked about seeing again, blessing those of us who have not seen and yet have come to believe in him anyway.

And so, I am going to take that reference as a cue for us today.  We are tired, we have spent a lot of time here in this sanctuary lately, and the story we have is, frankly, kind of repetitive.  So, I want us to ask you to think about your answer to Jesus’ question:  what are you looking for?  If you have been to every service we have had here in the past two weeks, why do you keep coming back?  And even if this is your first or second time ever in this sanctuary, why did you come this morning?  What are you looking for?

And to let you know that I am serious about this question, we are going to take a few minutes of quiet time to answer it now.  There is a piece of paper in your bulletin this morning, and that piece of paper is a place for you to actually write the answer to the question that is printed on the top of it.  I want you to dig that piece of paper out now and write down your answer.  If you need a pen, the Deacons have a few and would be happy to bring one to you.  If you need more space to write, the back of the sheet of paper is blank for that purpose.  And don’t worry about the quality of the writing, or the grammar or punctuation; just spill out onto the sheet whatever comes to your mind in whatever way makes sense to you.  So, What are you looking for?

…

There is something else to notice about this story, though.  When Jesus appeared after his resurrection, it was always to a group of people.  Well, that’s not quite true; his first appearance, in the paragraph before the ones we read today, was to Mary alone, but his instructions to here were to go and tell the others.  Then, when all the others were gathered in the room behind the locked door, Jesus came and stood among them.  Even when he appeared to Thomas, to satisfy his need to see for himself, Jesus did not appear to him as he was in a room by himself.  Jesus came and stood among the community of people.  The risen Christ was seen not by individuals, but by a community of people who were bound together in fellowship because of their shared experience of seeking Jesus and seeing him.

And so, I think it would serve us well if we could share our experiences of seeking, and even of seeing, our risen Lord.  And so I want you to share something of what you have written with each other.  You don’t have to say everything; some of what you wrote may need to remain private.  But whatever you are comfortable sharing, I want you to talk with the people around you in the pew about.  Go ahead and find two or three people who are sitting near you in the pews; turn around if you have to, or move over so you can join in a group nearby.  But get together, and share something of what you have written.

…

What are we looking for?  The words of Jesus at the end of the story, just after he was raised from the dead, were, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  And that blessing of those of us who did not see for ourselves sends us back to the first words of Jesus in the gospel: “What are you looking for?”  Whatever each of us is looking for, we are swept up into Jesus’ blessing:  we have come to believe, even though there are things we have not seen for ourselves, and because of our belief, we are blessed.  We are blessed with the presence of the risen Lord.  We are blessed with the chance to be in fellowship with each other, and we are blessed because we can continue to look for what we need.

May you be blessed in the presence of the risen Lord.

Friends:  Christ is risen!  Alleluia!  Amen.

Terror and Amazement

Mark 16:1-8

Eric Beene

April 8, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Mark has a funny way to end his gospel.  In Matthew, the women ran and told the other disciples, and then Jesus appeared to them and spoke the Great Commission:  “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them all I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you to the end of the age.”  They are beautiful, inspiring words, both challenging in the sense of purpose they give to the followers of Jesus, and elegantly comforting in their assurance of the presence of the risen Christ.  In Luke, we have a couple more stories of Jesus appearing to the disciples, teaching them, sharing food with them, before he is lifted up from their presence into the clouds.   In John’s gospel, we again have some more stories of Jesus appearing to his disciples, first in the upper room where they had gathered the night when he was arrested, and later on the beach, broiling some fish for the guys and charging Peter to “feed my sheep.”  Those stories of the resurrected Jesus talking with, laughing with, eating with, and praying with his disciples round out the gospel stories and give a fitting ending to the magnificent stories of such a holy man.

But not Mark.  As one person said, it is as if Mark was interrupted by a ringing telephone or a salesperson at the door, and he never got around to finishing his story.  People who wrote and spoke in Greek were always rearranging the words in sentences for dramatic effect, but Mark takes the cake.  He ended the whole gospel with the word “for;” my experts tell me this is technically a dangling conjunction, but whatever it is, it is an odd way to end a sentence, let alone a story.  As you can see in the editions of the Bible we have in our sanctuary, there are a couple of endings to Mark’s gospel which were tacked on over the years, with stories like we have in the other accounts:  Jesus appearing to the disciples after he was raised from the dead, making up after they all abandoned him while he was on trial and his death sentence was being carried out, and having conversations to instruct and comfort them.  But these were most likely added later when someone else looked at the end of Mark’s gospel and thought, “it really shouldn’t end there.”  Some of the old manuscripts we have of Mark’s gospel have those endings but note that they probably were not original, and the best copies we have of Mark’s gospel have the story ending just where it ended when we read a few minutes ago.  Most people think that, in the end, Mark just left us dangling.

“Terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.”  In some ways, this ending of the story makes sense.  After all, if they were really seeing what it seemed like they were seeing, terror and amazement are just about the only reasonable reactions.  The women didn’t start out that day in terror or amazement; they started out that day simply in sadness.  They had seen their teacher go through the most painful of deaths.  In fact, there was almost no kind of pain which Jesus did not endure there at the end.  The physical pain, of course, of being beaten, then having the nails driven through his hands, then having the weight of his entire body hanging on those nails, is beyond my imagination.  But there was also the pain of being humiliated in public, stripped naked, tormented and teased and mocked by the guards and by the crowds, with nothing to assure him that his life and his work had any kind of meaning at all other than to provide fodder for those who were calling him a fool.  And there was also the pain of being abandoned and alone:  his friends all fled, he heard his most trusted disciples say that they didn’t even know him, and he had no one who would defend him, or at least show publicly that they were on his side.  The pain for Jesus was unimaginable, and those women knew what he went through.

They were sad.  They were sad in that way which pities someone who died such an awful death, tortured and humiliated and lonely.  They were sad in that way which misses someone they loved; after all, Mark said, these three women had followed Jesus and provided for him in Galilee, making him food, making sure he had a place to sleep at night, and taking care of his other physical needs as he taught and healed so many people.  And they were probably sad in that way which admits some regret after someone has died:  maybe we should have tried to stop them, maybe we should have tried to save him, maybe we should have at least called out to let him know as he was dying that someone loved him, maybe we could have done something to at least lessen the pain.  Those women were immersed in grief.  Mark simply says they went to the tomb to undertake the customary yet intimate task of anointing the body of a person who had died so it would be ready for burial.

But as they went along, they were also a bit puzzled because they knew that they were not going to be able to roll away the heavy stone that blocked the entrance to the tomb.  When they approached the tomb, they saw an unexpected answer to their problem:  the stone had already been rolled away.  Their sadness was supplemented by confusion.  They went inside, and they saw a young man in a white robe just sitting there, and Mark says they had a feeling of alarm to add to their sadness and confusion.  Then the young man spoke:  “he has been raised, he is not here…but go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  And they left, and their sadness and grief, their puzzlement and confusion, their alarm was replaced in their minds and their spirits now by simple terror and amazement.

Terror and amazement were really just about the only kind of feelings that made sense.  If what the young man in the white robe was saying was true, then Jesus wasn’t dead anymore.  But they knew he had been dead; they had watched from a distance as he uttered his last, pitiful cry from the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  They watched him breathe his last, and they watched the soldier who was standing there confirm that he was dead.  And hours later, they watched as another one of Jesus’ followers came back with the guards, who again confirmed that Jesus was really dead, then took his body down, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and had it carried to the tomb.  At any point in that journey, many different people had plenty of opportunities to notice if Jesus was still breathing, or if his heart was still beating, or if he still had any other sign of life left in him.  He was dead.  They knew he was dead.

And now, the young man in the white outfit was telling them that he wasn’t dead, and not just that he was never really dead, but that he had been dead but wasn’t dead any more.  That’s not the way the world works.  When something is dead, it is dead; that’s it, end of story.  This message was not like all of the miracles that Jesus had worked before, healing people of their sicknesses and making the people tormented with uncontrollable spirits calm down.  This was actually an assault on the power of death.  Death was what ended it all, and death was a tool used by governors and religious authorities and criminals and anyone else who wanted you to do something you were absolutely unwilling to do.  Death was the only thing left to be afraid of.  And now, Jesus seemed to have gone through death and come out on the other side alive.  No wonder they fled from that tomb in terror and amazement.  The truth they saw there was amazing, and terrifying.

And that is where Mark ended the story.  We may want the story to go on; we may want Jesus to appear again, just to reassure us that he really is raised from the dead, just to help his followers know that all is forgiven, just to encounter us and feed us and comfort us and teach us some more.  But Mark ends the story with the women fleeing in terror and amazement, and telling no one anything because of their fear.

So, we can conclude that Mark must have gotten a phone call, or the doorbell must have rang, or something else must have interrupted him, and somehow that unfinished draft got sent to the publishers, and that is how it came to be here today for us, a good story, but left dangling there at the end.  Or, perhaps there is another way to look at it.  Maybe Mark left the story dangling on purpose.  Maybe he intended to end on the word “for,” as if there is something more to the story, but he isn’t the one to tell us what that something more is.

If he purposely didn’t finish the story, then he leaves us as readers the freedom to answer a question:  how do you want the story to finish?  Do you want there to be this reconciliation between Jesus and his followers?  Do you want there to be a deeper understanding reached about what Jesus said and did before he was crucified?  Do you want there to be a reenactment of some of your favorite scenes, like the time when he served the disciples a meal and said, “this is my body, broken for you, and this is my blood, shed for you?”

We are left with the question of what more we want from the story, and we are left, too, with a profound truth:  if we want the story to go on, then we ourselves are going to have to intervene.  The women fled, the disciples didn’t know anything had happened, so no one is left in the scene but us.  So if we want there to be reconciliation between Jesus and his followers, then we have to believe that kind of forgiveness is really possible.  And if we want there to be a deeper understanding reached about what Jesus said and did before his death, then we have to go back, earlier in the story, and study some more, and pray some more, and ask some more questions, and seek the deeper understanding we desire.  And if we want there to be a reenactment of some of the favorite scenes, then we have to reenact them in our own lives.  The women fled in terror and amazement and fear; we are the only ones left, then, to pull ourselves together and tell other people and make the story go on.

Maybe Mark left things dangling because he was interrupted.  Or maybe Mark left things dangling because we are something more than an audience to the drama unfolding here.  Maybe we have a responsibility.  Maybe we are the ones left to take all of the sadness and grief and puzzlement and confusion and alarm and terror and amazement and make something of it.  Maybe we are the ones left to go and tell someone, anyone, anyone who will listen, that he was dead but now is risen, that he is with us, that he goes before us, that we will see him.

As we celebrate the great festival this morning, my prayer is that we will accept that responsibility.  My prayer is that we will take the sadness and grief and puzzlement and confusion and alarm and terror and amazement, and we will make something of it all.  My prayer is that we will believe in the possibilities, and seek the understanding, and reenact the beauty of the story of Jesus in our own lives.  My prayer, this day of days, is that we will go and tell anyone who will listen:  he is not here, he is risen, and he is going ahead of us to the place where he sent us!

Friends, Christ is risen!

Alleluia!  Amen.

What Do I Do with This Leaf?

Isaiah 50:4-9a

Eric Beene

April 1, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

I think that at least some people in this room have had a question burning in your mind for at least the last half hour or so.  I think the question might have come up right at the beginning of the worship service, in fact.  The question I imagine at least some of you have been asking yourselves is not one of those deep, theological questions about the nature of Jesus Christ, the omnipotence of God and its implications, or the ways that our relationship with God affects our moral life.  The question I have in mind is of a much more practical nature.  I imagine that at least some people in this room have been asking yourselves, “Now what on earth am I going to do with this leaf that the kids just handed me?”

And so, in a spirit of helpfulness, I titled the sermon with just that question today.  I want to make clear that this is a safe space for such questions, that we will take what is on your mind seriously, and that you can be honest here about your questions.  More than that, though, I think it really is an important question, and if you have not been wondering about what you would do with your leaf, I want to encourage you to do so now.

The question of what to do with your leaf, I think, really is the challenge for all of us this day and this week.  We could set the leaves which the kids handed to us earlier aside.  We could leave it on the pew for one of the worship committee members to come along after the service and pick it up as they are doing their regular work of cleaning up the sanctuary.  Or, we could take it with us, putting it in our cars and forgetting about it until the next time we clean through the pile of Starbucks cups and fast food receipts (I guess I should be careful here about assuming that you all have car interiors that look like mine…).  I look at these leaves, and I can’t help but think what a lovely addition they would be to my compost bin.  But maybe that’s just me.

So what are you going to do with your leaf?  Are you just going to cast it aside, either as litter in the sanctuary or in your car, or as a part of next year’s garden fertilizer?  Are you going to see it as just something that the kids do each year on Palm Sunday, in yet another of those rituals in church that seem really sweet but, if you think about them, don’t make a lot of obvious sense?  Or are you going to let that leaf, and all it represents, become a part of your week, or maybe even your life, and maybe even let it change you in some way?

Because this leaf, and all it represents, could really change you.  It could be said to have changed the world.  The leaf which the kids gave you this morning represents what happens when God’s people really let their hope take over their lives.  God’s people have always been told that there is something more at work in our world which is greater than everything else that comes parading in front of us.  There is some power that can do things we cannot comprehend; there is some truth that works at a deeper level than we can understand.  And in particular, there is a love which feels something much more than we can feel, with a grace that can forgive things we could never let go of.  And when the people lined that road leading into Jerusalem that day, and they took their leaves and waved them as Jesus rode by on that donkey, they were waving because they thought Jesus was finally, ultimately, once and for all time going to do something which would reveal that power, and that truth, and that love which we have always been told is at work.  Those people hoped, and they hoped deeply, that Jesus would change their world:  that he would overthrow the Roman governors, that he would push out the Roman army, that he would cleanse the Roman and Greek religious practices from the temple, that he would finally let God reign again in the land which, it seemed, God had been pushed out of so long before.  They hoped for prosperity, they hoped for peace, they hoped for everything they had been promised which seemed like it was impossible with the foreign occupiers holding control of their city.  When they waved those leaves around at Jesus, that is why they were waving them.

But things didn’t work out the way the people had thought they would.  There is a tradition among some of us traditional die-hard church geeks which says we keep these leaves from the Palm Sunday parade around until next year, and then we burn them and use the ashes to smear on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday.  On that day, we put the sign of the cross in ashes on our foreheads as we say the words to one another, “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  Ash Wednesday is a heavy reminder of our mortality:  of the reality that we are all going to die sometime or another.  And just think about what it means that we will use some of these same leaves from our processional this morning for our Ash Wednesday rituals next year.  These are symbols of the hope and expectations we have that God’s power, and God’s truth, and God’s love really will win out.   But they will be put on the shelf or in a cabinet somewhere, or they will find their way to the work bench in the garage, or maybe just be thrown in the trunk of the car.  And they will wither, and they will turn brown and dry, and they will collect the dust that we all stir up as we go about our day-in-and-day-out lives.  Then, they will become a symbol of our mortality, and of our limitations, and of our dependence on God if our lives really are going to amount to anything of value.

Is that what we really ought to do with these leaves?  Is that an appropriate way to treat these leaves, and the hope of the people of God they represent?

I think it is.  Even if they get tossed out in some fit of summer-time cleaning, I really think that these leaves ought to at least accompany us through the next few days.  And the reason I think that it would be a good idea to keep your leaf with you for a few days is because of what we read from Isaiah this morning.  This passage is one of a set of poems which are usually called the “Servant Songs.”  They are presented as the words of a servant of God.  Many Christians throughout the years have thought that these words could have been spoken by Jesus himself, although Isaiah would not have had Jesus in mind when he first wrote them several hundred years before Jesus was born.  The interesting thing about this Servant Song is that it comes on the heels of a rather explicit description of God’s anger.  The people were not living the way God wanted them to live, and God had some feelings about that fact.  So what did God do?  God told the prophet to speak this servant song. And in this song, God makes it clear that violent anger is not the way God is going to make things right in the world.

Instead of just issuing commands, God’s servant is a teacher.  Instead of crushing the disobedient like they were God’s enemies, God’s servant sustains them, recognizing their weariness and offering words of encouragement.  Instead of preaching at people, God’s servant listens to them.  And perhaps most difficult, instead of using the power of God to avoid suffering, God’s servant endures insults and spitting and cruelty and violence, and even embraces it, because it seems to simply be the natural consequence of being a part of God’s work and God’s life, and because, God knows, it is all a part of what everyone else has to go through.  Instead of coercing people or manipulating the situation to his advantage, God’s servant simply waits for the adversaries who will inevitably confront him.  That’s the way God’s servant will participate in God’s work of saving the world.

There is a reason some people have seen Jesus in this description of God’s servant, and that is because he seemed to go through the same kinds of things.  As this week moves on, we will gather again in this sanctuary to remember, and to participate in, and to receive the grace of the stories of Jesus last supper, his arrest, his trial and execution, and finally, the wonder and awe of that moment of approaching his empty tomb.  Really, you should come here to remember and participate and receive the grace of as much of what we do this week as you can.   Because otherwise, you are just going from today’s parade to next week’s party, and you will miss really witnessing how God saves the world.

How God saves the world is by teaching rather than commanding, by sustaining rather than crushing, by listening rather than preaching.  God endures the suffering we endure rather than avoiding it, and God waits for us rather than manipulating or coercing us.  And so these leaves become a good representation for us of what God goes through.  Today, they are crisp and green, filled with the hopes of God’s people.  By Thursday, they will go limp a bit, and by Friday they might start to brown around the edges.  They will wither, and they will fade.  But it is only as it is wilting and drying out that your leaf will be able to represent God’s ways of making that hope real.

And so I hope you will keep your leaf.  I hope you will keep it today, and let it be filled with everything you hope God will do.  I hope you will keep it through this week, and watch as it starts to wilt and fade and turn brown and die.  I hope you will keep it through the weeks and months to come, and let it collect the dust of your day-in-and-day-out life.  Because then it can reveal to you the way God saves the world:  through proving its power, not by commanding and crushing and preaching, not by avoiding suffering or manipulating people, but by teaching, and by sustaining, and by listening, by embracing our suffering and waiting for us.  And then, you can finally burn it, and smear it on you as you confess that you depend on God, because we are all limited, but God’s power endures, and God’s life is eternal, and God saves us to be a part of that life.

And I hope, too, that you will join us here later this week:  to remember, to participate, to receive some grace, and to see how God really works.

Amen.

A Clean Heart

Psalm 51:1-12

Eric Beene

March 25, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

The last time we looked at Psalm 51 was on Ash Wednesday.  That night, some of us gathered with our sisters and brothers at Montgomery Presbyterian Church to remember that we are vulnerable.  We are vulnerable because we will all die someday.  We are vulnerable, too, because we all are sinful, falling short of the glory which God has for us.  That night, we began the season of Lent by imposing ashes on our foreheads, reminding ourselves that we really are nothing more than dust, and we will return to the dust, too.

That night, Psalm 51 seemed like it was prescriptive.  It seemed like it was telling us what we ought to do.  The whole season of Lent is a time to prepare for Good Friday and Easter, when we remember that Jesus died, and then was raised again from the dead.  It is a time of repentance, of trying to get right with God again, of understanding anew our dependence on the power and the grace of God, and of re-aligning our lives to live the way God would like us to live.  In order to do what we are supposed to do in Lent, the logic goes, we ought to plead for God’s mercy the way the writer of this Psalm pled for God’s mercy.

Now, we are five weeks into the season of Lent, and the lectionary asks us to look again at this Psalm.  And here in this time, when we have been at this business of Lent for a while, I noticed something about this Psalm.  There is nothing prescriptive about these verses of prayerful poetry.  There is nothing about it that tells us that we ought to do anything.  This is not a commandment. It is simply the deeply personal, prayerful reflection of one of God’s people.

From the words of the Psalm, we don’t really know much about what the psalmist is reflecting on.  Somewhere along the line, probably long after the psalm itself was written, someone put a superscription on the psalm, which are the little words printed in very small type in our Bibles, right above the first line of the psalm.  “To the leader,” it says, which doesn’t really mean much since many of the psalms have a similar dedication.  But it goes on with a lot more detail:  “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”  Yikes.  That puts a spin on these words.  You may remember the story it alludes to:  David had admired the beautiful Bathsheba from afar, and then decided he had to have her for his own.  He made that happen, and when she became pregnant, he tried to cover up what he did wrong by arranging to have Bathsheba’s husband killed in battle.  It was not a good time for David in his relationship with God.

Most of us probably have not been a part of anything nearly as horrible as that incident between David, Bathsheba, and her husband.  Maybe some of us have, or some of us think that we have done something that bad.  It is clear from the story of the incident, and the story of how God reacted to what David did, that repentance was needed.  But the fact is that, without that superscription, the transgressions which the poet who wrote these words was confessing could have been anything.  And even more importantly, the prayerful poet is not telling anyone else that we ought to echo his words.  This is not a commandment.

And if it is not a commandment, then I think it is an invitation, and I think that invitation is why this is a good time to follow the lectionary’s suggestion and look again at this Psalm, here in the fifth week of Lent.

This psalm invites us to do what the psalmist did.  What is important to me about what the psalmist did was not that he confessed his sinfulness and begged for forgiveness.  If that was all there was to what the psalmist did, I am afraid that it would lead us to a very small view of God.  It would make us think that God is only someone who enforces the rules, so that when someone breaks the rules, then it is God’s job to punish the rule-breaker.  Therefore, when we mess up, like David messed up in his horrendous misstep with Bathsheba and her husband, then our only hope would be to plead with God in hopes that God would forgive us.

Our God is not that small, and the psalmist realized that.  God is not simply in the business of punishing the people who break the rules.  Instead, God is in the business of salvation:  of saving us from living lives that are meaningless, valueless, and limited.  God is in the business of taking our lives and making them a part of God’s life.  And God’s life is eternal, and God’s life is overflowing with value.  God’s life is love, and it is peace, and it is fullness.  God’s life is meant to be a life of joy.

The psalmist realized that God’s life is joy, and that God’s work is saving us so we can share in that joy.  And then the psalmist did some real, honest reflection about what was missing in his life, so that he had lost something in his life.  For this poet, what was missing was honesty.  Or, as he put it in his petition to God, “you desire truth in the inward being.”  You want me to be honest:  the psalmist confessed prayerfully:  honest with myself and honest with you.  You want me to honestly understand what I have done wrong.  But more than that, you want me to honestly understand that anything I do which takes away from your work of salvation is an offense against you and you alone.  That is the way to understand your salvation.  That is the way to understand your joy.

And so, the psalmist pleads, “restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.”  And if this prayerful poem which the psalmist offers is not a commandment (“you ought to confess your sin”), but rather an invitation, then the poet is inviting us to do what he did.

The psalmist is inviting us to recognize that God is not small.  The psalmist is inviting us to recognize that God is more than just an enforcer of rules.  The psalmist is inviting us to recognize that God is in the business of salvation:  of saving us to participate in God’s eternal and abundant life.  The psalmist is inviting us to recognize that life in God is meant to be a life of joy.

And then, the psalmist is inviting you to recognize that there might be something standing in your way, blocking you from experiencing that joy of God’s salvation right now in your own life.  Maybe sin and denial of the truth is what is keeping you from joy; that is what was standing in the way for the psalmist.  But maybe it is something else.  Maybe it is grief.  We have had plenty of reminders in the last few weeks that the people who have always been here for us are not here any more.  And when the people who have always been here are not here any more, then the other things we have held onto start to seem like they are slipping away:  the ways things ought to be done, or the understandings about the way the world works, or the understandings about the ways God works.  If those things are not here any more, then what is left but a big hole?  Our grasping and clinging to the things and the ways and the people who have always been with us can keep it from feeling like there is nothing but a big hole in our lives, in our world, and in our church.  But that grasping and clinging can keep us from experiencing the joy of God’s salvation.  And so we grieve what is gone in order to embrace the new life which God saves us for.

Or maybe it is something else that is standing in our way of experiencing the joy of God’s salvation.  Maybe it is boredom.  Maybe we have forgotten how to stand in awe, letting our jaws drop and our eyes open wide and our minds go blank and our hearts burst, as we witness beauty, or miracle, or the simple, calming power of peace.  Maybe we have slipped into a way of being that allows us to take every grace for granted.  Maybe gratitude has just slipped our minds.

Or maybe it is fear that blocks us from the joy of God’s salvation.  Maybe we have let the tragedies of the world that are broadcast all over the news define reality for us.  Maybe we have let Fox News and CNN throw us out of balance.  Maybe we have let them convince us that the endless litany of murder, kidnapping, corruption, and injustice is all there is to the world.  Maybe we have stopped noticing at the realities of love made real, and of grace shown unexpectedly, and of healing which comes in the morning from places we would least expect it, just because the talking heads don’t think that such things will sell advertising time.

The psalmist does not offer a command; the psalmist only invites us into his inner life as one of the people of God.  The psalmist recognizes that God is in the business of salvation, and that the life God saves us for is a life of joy.  And so my prayer this morning is that we can accept the psalmist’s invitation.  My prayer is that we can reflect on God’s life, and how we are made a part of it.  My prayer is that we can notice whatever sin, whatever grief, whatever boredom, whatever fear, or whatever else it is which is keeping us from God’s life.  My prayer, as we continue on this Lenten journey to the cross and the empty tomb, is that we can join our voices with the psalmist, “restore to me the joy of your salvation!”

Amen.

The Message of the Cross

1 Corinthians 1:18-25

Eric Beene

March 11, 2012

The life of faith would be a whole lot easier without the cross.  Yet, we choose to put these crosses all over the place.  Here in the church you can’t turn around without seeing a cross.  They are embroidered in gold thread on the paraments.  There is one cast in copper, I think, at the very top of the steeple on this building.  And you can’t walk into this place without being overwhelmed by the sight of the one hanging on the wall behind me.

But it’s not just here; it’s everywhere.  They are cast in gold and hung around our necks.  They are on almost every church sign all over town.  They are on our stationery, and all over our website, and on bumper stickers on our cars.  The cross is everywhere.  In fact, the cross is so ubiquitous that it seems easy; it becomes just another piece of jewelry hung around our necks, or just another part of the beautifully finished wood furniture in this room.

There is nothing wrong with wearing a gold cross around your neck, and there is nothing wrong with the beautifully polished oak cross hanging on the wall up there.  But if you are going to wear the cross, and if we are going to have it so prominently displayed here, we have to understand what it represents.  Because we can put all of the shiny varnish or 14-carat gold on it we want, but underneath all of that, it is still the cross.

And the cross is a symbol of death.  Everywhere around us, we have decorated our church, and we have decorated our stationery, and we have even decorated our necks with a symbol of death.  That symbol of death is at the center of almost everything we look at in the life of faith.

Fortunately, most of the world outside the church doesn’t really realize that the cross is a symbol of death.  If they did, they would probably just find us gruesome, and we would have to do a whole lot of PR work to overcome the bad press.  The world outside of the church does everything it can to avoid death.  I don’t know; maybe many of us find ourselves avoiding death, too.  A famous 20^th-century theologian said that the cross and what it represents is a problem for most of us because what drives most of us is self-preservation.  We want to preserve ourselves against death, and loss in general.  From the time we are young, we are put in sports leagues and taught that our main purpose is to help our team avoid losing.  We are told to be successful by setting career goals which keep us moving, at the very least, sideways, and preferably up the ladder.  We make decisions about medical treatments which will help us preserve the “normal” life we are used to, even when our bodies are changing forever.  And even our nation’s foreign policy takes preemptive strikes and focuses on homeland security in order to try to keep evil at bay and preserve things just the way they are.  Even in church, we pray constantly that we can avoid suffering for ourselves and our families and friends, and that we can avoid being confronted by death.  Again, there is nothing wrong with praying that we might avoid suffering; we just have to recognize what God is really up to when our prayers do not result in the answer we are looking for.

In the church, we have the cross, all around us, even on our bodies, and that cross is a symbol of death.  And the cross is all around us because the cross is the best way we have to represent the way God does things.  God is not in the business of self-preservation.  God does not just wish death away, or ignore the fact that death is a part of the life God created, or proclaim that death isn’t real, or otherwise avoid death.  Instead, God embraces death.  In fact, God walks through death and uses it as a part of the new life God gives us in Jesus Christ.

That is the message of the cross which Paul talked about in the passage from his letter to the Corinthians we read a few minutes ago.  “We proclaim Christ crucified,” Paul says; our savior was hung on that awful, gruesome symbol of suffering and death.  And that message, that God uses death to bring us new life, Paul admits, is foolish.  If what you are looking for is some kind of sign that God has the power to take away everything bad from the world, then you will be disappointed with God.  And if what you are looking for is some kind of logical explanation of God’s goodness, then you will be disappointed with God, too.  And the cross proves that you will be disappointed.  The cross is an illogical proclamation about how God embraces death.

I know that death seems to be surrounding us at White Bluff Presbyterian Church right now.  It feels like the pillars of this place are crumbling left and right.  People whom we know, people whom we love, people who have loved us, and made beautiful music for us, and provided a steady presence for us, and taught us about the love of Jesus Christ for us, and raised their families with us, and been our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers through the years, have brought death near to us.  And death hurts.  It hurts that people we love have to suffer.  It hurts that people who love us are not here with us anymore.  It hurts that we can see parts of our lives, and parts of our life together, dying with those people.  It hurts that those people’s deaths make us feel more vulnerable, too, because they aren’t that much older or sicker or otherwise worse-off than we are.  Death hurts.  God knows that death hurts.

And what may be most painful is how all of this death around us makes us realize that we cannot choose to avoid death.  Ultimately, we are not in total control of our lives.  We will lose the game sometimes; we cannot keep climbing up the ladder forever; our bodies will stop functioning the way they used to function, and we cannot do anything to really guarantee security in our homeland.  The drive for self-preservation will not end in success.  The world’s efforts to avoid death will fail.  And it would be a whole lot easier if I didn’t have to stand up here and say that.

But even as we seem to be surrounded by death right now, we are also surrounded in this place by the cross.  The cross represents death.  But there is more to it than that.  If God had somehow avoided death, and saved us from ever having to experience death, then death would still have power.  It would be as if God had admitted that death is something to be avoided at all costs.  But that is not what God chose to do.  Instead of avoiding death, in Jesus Christ God chose to go through death on the way to new life.  So the cross for us symbolizes death, but at the same time, the cross proclaims to us that death is not the highest power.  Even death can be used by God, because God is more powerful than death.

If we allow ourselves to be driven by self-preservation, we will miss the message of the cross.  If we keep trying not to lose the ball game, or keep trying not to fall off the ladder, or keep trying not to change our lives as our bodies change, or keep trying not to embrace our vulnerability, we are foolish.  But if we keep the cross in front of us, and all around us, and even keep the cross on our bodies, hanging around our necks, then we might just discover the power of God.  Because the message of the cross is that God does not avoid death; instead, in Jesus Christ, God walks through death, and uses death to bring new life.

“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”  My prayer this morning is that we can keep that in mind as we are continuing through Lent on our journey to Good Friday.  My prayer this morning is that we can keep that in mind as we are mourning the death of several of our sisters and brothers in this congregation.  My prayer this morning is that we can keep that in mind as we are facing our own limits, and our own vulnerabilities, and our own loss, and our own changes.  “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”  My prayer is that we can keep the cross all around us, gilded and varnished or rough and blood-stained, and that however we dress it up, we can understand what it really means.

Amen.

Promises, Promises

Genesis 17:1-7

Eric Beene

March 4, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Abram and Sarai were old.  I mean, they were really old.  I know that some of us feel really old some days, but I do not believe there is anyone in this congregation as old as Abram; maybe some of us are closer to Sarai.  What is important is not their exact age, though.  I think what is important is that we remember that they were at that stage in life when one slows down some.  They were not at the age when you are full of energy and enthusiasm for every new idea you encounter.  They were not at an age when they were full of adventure, or when they were ready to go as soon as someone had an idea for what to do.  They were old.  They were ready to be reflective:  to bring the kids up on their knees and tell them about what they learned in a time which the kids would never experience for themselves.  And they were at an age when they knew better than they had ever known before that they did not have time to waste on any kind of foolish nonsense.

So it is amazing to me that they listened to God at all.  Because God was speaking foolish nonsense.  Just listen again to what God told Abram:  God promised Abram that God would make him “exceedingly numerous.”  “You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations,” God said.  “I will make you exceedingly fruitful.”  God even changed Abram’s name to Abraham, which, roughly translated, means “The father of a multitude.”  God was serious about this promise.

Did I mention how impossible this promise of a multitude of offspring was?  Abram had only one child, Ishmael.  He was the child of his wife’s slave.  That is a story for another time, but suffice it to say that he was not whom God was thinking of when God made all of those promises to Abram.  Otherwise, Abram had no children.  Later on, a couple of paragraphs down the page, God repeated the same promise to Sarai, saying that she would be the mother of this child who would make Abram the father of a multitude of nations.  Did I mention that Sarai was over 90 years old then?  A woman over 90 and a man who was 99 having a baby?  Let’s just say that things don’t usually work that way.  God was speaking a lot of foolishness.

So once he hoisted himself off the floor from laughing so hard, which was certainly no small feat, with his 99-year-old body and all of the aches and pains that come with it, Abraham had a choice to make about this promise God was making to him.  He could simply decide that he did not have time to waste on such foolishness, or he could simply trust God and start shopping around town for the best deals on diapers and onesies.

Abraham chose the second option.  Sure, Genesis goes on to describe some times of doubt and some times of laughter at the absurdity of it all.  But basically, Abraham chose to trust in God’s promises, however unlikely or foolish they seemed.

So many of God’s promises seem unlikely or foolish.  Take the promises of communion, for instance.  When we look at all of the times Jesus broke break and shared it with people, we can see that God promises a whole lot in communion.  As we were called to worship this morning, we were reminded of the story of the time when Jesus fed a whole multitude of hungry people, so much that there were baskets and baskets of food left over, even though he started with only a few loaves of bread.  So part of the promises of communion is that God can feed us in abundance, physically as well as spiritually, so that there will be baskets and baskets of bread, and fish, and love, and truth, and grace left over after we have all had our fill.  It’s foolish to think that someone could actually have that much bread and that much grace.  But it is what God promises.

Later in the gospels, Jesus talked about people coming from east and west and north and south to feast with him in his kingdom.  So another part of the promises of communion is that all different kinds of people, from all different parts of the world, can come together around the truth which Jesus offers:  all races, all social classes, all education levels, all political factions, everyone can come together and not only tolerate each other, but actually have a party together.  And we know that is just not the way the world works; to believe that kind of a promise is absurd.  But it is part of God’s promises.

And even later, on the night when he was actually sitting at the table with his disciples, Jesus promised them that, in the act of eating from the bread he served them and drinking from the cup he poured for them, they were “proclaiming his death until he comes again.”  And that is ridiculous, too; once someone is dead, they are dead; they don’t go anywhere ever again.  But sure enough, on the evening of that first day of the week after he died, Luke tells us that Jesus walked along the road with his followers, who were so confused with grief and fear and sadness they didn’t even recognize him.  In fact, they didn’t recognize him until he sat at the table with them, and after giving thanks, he broke the bread and gave it to them, and then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.  He was, in fact, alive after he had died.  Death was not as powerful as they thought it was.  A promise that sounded to them like a bunch of foolishness was actually unfolding, right in front of them.

As we continue this morning on our journey through Lent, reflecting on our own lives, our shortcomings and our needs, our gifts and our obedience, we get this story of Abraham and Sarah, and their response to the foolish promises of God.  And we also come to this table this morning, we hear more foolish promises.  And we have a choice to make:  we can decide that life is too short, and the problems of the world and of our lives are too great, and we don’t have time to waste on such foolishness.  And before we move too quickly to what you know I am going to say next, I want to make sure we consider this option well.  Because I think that many of us much of the time live as though God’s promises are nice, and they are sweet, but they really can’t possibly be true.  And so we store up money in our bank accounts, and we cling tightly to all of the stuff which we think makes our lives better, and we give in to the impulse to shy away from strangers rather than embracing them, and we let ourselves get overwhelmed with all of the world’s needs and our fears, and we don’t really trust God’s promises.

We could live our lives differently.  We could live as though we believe what God promises us. Sure, like Abraham, we might have our times of doubt, and our times of laughing at the absurdity of it all.  But we can believe, and trust, as if we really think God can do what God has said God would do, however unlikely or foolish it may seem.

My prayer as we continue through Lent is that we will choose that second option.  Because when Abraham and Sarah chose to trust God’s promises, new life came into them, and even though they were already old, they got to experience the wonder and the joy of God’s promises when they were fulfilled.  They had their son, who had his children, who had their children, and they became the parents of a multitude of nations, just like God had promised.  And as we receive this meal today, may we really believe in the promises it seals to us.

Amen.

Worship in Lent

February 26, 2012 – White Bluff Presbyterian Church

Today is the first Sunday in the church’s season of Lent. The word “Lent” comes from the Latin word for Spring. Just as people have always worked hard in Spring to prepare the ground for crops, during Lent, we work the soil of our lives to prepare ourselves to receive anew the gift of God’s death-defying love at Easter. The season of Lent lasts 40 days plus 6 Sundays, and ends with our observance of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.
This morning, as we begin this season of preparation, we will talk about the meaning of the season of Lent. We will also talk about some special things we will do in worship this season as well as offer suggestions of ways to observe Lent in our daily lives. My prayer is that we can use this season to renew our commitment as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Purple Cloth
You will notice this morning that our sanctuary is decorated in purple cloth during the season of Lent. Purple is a dark color, reminding us of times of mourning. But purple is not quite black; it is also a rich color, with many hues, reminding us of the richness of a well-examined life. Purple casts a somber, reflective tone on our worship because this is a time of self-examination, confession, and re-commitment to live our lives the way God would have us live.

Kyrie Eleison
Lent is a time of self-examination and repentance, so it is a time when we confess our sinfulness. During Lent, we will repeat the Greek words kyrie eleison in our time of confession. These words are a simple plea; translated, they mean “O Lord, have mercy on us.” They help us remember that, given our failures to live the way God would have us live, we depend on God to refrain from judging us harshly, and instead to show us unending mercy. In your daily life, you may find it helpful to pray these same words as you recognize your shortcomings and ask God to love you anyway.

Water & Font
As we examine ourselves and our lives in Lent, we remember more than the ways we fall short. We also remember that we have been claimed by God in baptism. During the early days of the church, new converts used the 40 days of Lent as a time of particularly intense preparation for their baptism, which would occur in the first service of Easter. As we confess our sin, we will highlight the waters of baptism, which remind us that God has adopted us and loved us as a good parent loves his or her children. In your daily life, as you use water to quench your thirst and wash yourself clean, you can be aware of the love, forgiveness, and grace of God which permeates your whole life.

Silence
To renew our focus as followers of Christ during Lent, we create space to slow down, remove distractions, and concentrate on God’s Word. We have the opportunity to not only tell God in prayer about our fears and our hopes, but we can also listen for God to speak to us. During worship, we spend some time in silence after hearing God’s word in order to let God speak to us individually. In your daily life, consider carving out some time and space in the next 6 weeks to read and study the Bible, pray for a deepening of your relationship with God, or even just to sit in silence and listen for God speaking to you.

Almsgiving
In many traditions, Lent has been a time for giving up something that an individual believer really likes, such as chocolate or meat. This practice comes from the early days of the church, when some Christians would fast during Lent. They would willingly deny themselves food or other essentials for a period of time to remind themselves of their dependence on God for all things. The money they saved by fasting would be given to the poor. During our observance of Lent, we will talk about the One Great Hour of Sharing offering we will receive on Easter Sunday, which benefits programs to alleviate hunger, recover from natural disasters, and help people develop the future of their own communities. Whether you give to support One Great Hour of Sharing, the church or some of our programs, or some other good work, Lent is a good time to consider the richness of your life and your ability to gratefully give to help the poor.

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)