“God’s Place of Business”

Jacob is a fugitive on the road, with only a stone for a pillow on a bitterly cold night in the wilderness. Jacob lays down to sleep, alone and without a friend in the world, without even so much as a rote prayer before bedtime. (Genesis 28:10-19a)

            And right there, at the strangest, loneliest, most apparently God-forsaken moment in his life, God comes to Jacob. As if often the case in the Old Testament, God comes to Jacob in a dream.

            In that dream, there is a stairway to heaven – but it is not a stairway that Jacob buys or even builds, and it is not a stairway that he climbs to meet God somewhere up in the clouds high above. It is a stairway that reaches down from heaven to earth, and upon which angels are going up and, more importantly, down. Angels, in Jacob’s time, were thought of as spiritual beings who were God’s messengers.

But then Jacob realizes that the Lord God is standing right there beside him, and the next thing you know Jacob is being given the same blessing and promise that had been given to his father before him, and to his grandfather, Abraham, before him: a blessing of land, and a future of untold generations who will in their turn be a blessing to the world.

And then there is even more: a promise that this fugitive, alone and on the run, would never again be alone, for his God would be with him, guiding and protecting and bringing him back safely to that very place.

            The claim of this account of Jacob and the stairway from heaven is this: that God’s place of business is right here, and that we are God’s business. We all – even the ones who grasp and trick and steal from our brothers and sisters and who flee like fugitives and even forget to say our prayers or come to church – we all are God’s business, right here, right now.

You may have come to church this afternoon because you thought you were about reaching out to God, reaching up to God. But the account of Jacob and the stairway tells us that God is just as busy reaching out to you, that God’s place of business is not up there somewhere, not on the 964^th floor of a skyscraper whose top lies nestled in the clouds, but right down here,

on the shop room floor,

 in the cubicle with you and your laptop,

in the kitchen at dinner time,

in the bedroom as you discuss the events of the day with your spouse.

In each and every one of those places, you might accurately echo Jacob’s astonished gasp, “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it!”

 This is the meaning of the account of Jacob and the ladder from heaven – this is God’s place of business.

And more than that, just as Jacob, with all his faults, with all his lack of faith, with all his flawed life and wrong choices, was God’s unfinished business, so too we, with all our varying degrees of faith, with all our pasts of wrong choices, with all our flaws and defects of character – so too we are God’s unfinished business.

It is the meaning of the incarnation, of our Christmas celebrations – that God came to us as Jesus to save the world and everyone in it; and it is the meaning of Pentecost, that God sent to us the Holy Spirit to help us in our journey. Because we are God’s unfinished business.

You may have the recently released film “Soul Surfer”, which is based on actual events. Brittany Hamilton, a teenager living in Hawaii, was a successful surfer who was on the cusp of dominating the professional surfing circuit when one day a shark took off one of her arms. Surfing was her life, and so she believes there is nothing left for her. But after recovering, she learns to surf with one arm, and determined to make a comeback, enters a surfing competition – where she is thoroughly beaten by her rivals. Devastated, on a whim she goes off on a mission trip with her church youth group to Thailand, where to compound her despair she learns that her lack of an arm makes her pretty useless on the construction site. But then, on a day off from the work, she finds herself down at the beach, and learns that she has a gift for teaching – she finds a surfboard, and teaches a young child to get over his fear of the ocean through learning to surf.

On her return to the states, she finds that her home is snowed under my mail – fan letters from around the world. She cannot understand it at first – she had failed in her comeback attempt at competitive surfing. But then she starts to read the letters, and finds that her attempt had inspired other-abled folk around the world, inspiring them to find ways to make new lives despite the setbacks that had been visited upon them. Far from being a failure with nothing to live for, Brittany discovers that she is a gift that gives hope to countless others who face their own struggles with disabilities.

Brittany Hamilton had thought her life was over when she lost that arm, but God had unfinished business with her.

And God has unfinished business with you as well.

No matter what your past, no matter what your faults, no matter the catalog of excuses and lists of back-sliding, no matter the bad habits and the repeated failures – God has unfinished business with you.

God loves you, and God loves you just the way you are – but God also loves you too much to leave you that way.

Thanks be to God, you are God’s unfinished business.

"What is It? -- God does not always come as we expect..."

The Hebrews knew God and God’s ways. They knew that God had come to them in their captivity, and that through mighty deeds of power – through all those plagues sent down on Egypt, through that miraculous passage through the Red Sea waters – they had been brought to freedom and new life. But now they are enslaved to a different master, to hunger, and of the God they think they have come to know they can see no sign. (Exodus 16:2-15)

            And then they wake up one morning and stagger out into the desert and find a layer of dew spread all over the ground, and when it had lifted, a sticky, flaky, whitish substance on the ground. They scratch their heads, look at one another, and say in Hebrew man-hu, which means “What is it?”

            And then, like in that old cereal commercial, one of them gets their younger brother Mikey to try it, and Mikey says “I like it”, and next thing you know they gather the manna up in baskets and bake it and find that once again they have been freed to new life.  They were not, as they had thought, alone and forgotten. God was with them, and God would provide.

            Their story is our story, a story that is often repeated in the lives of God’s people. It is a story that gives us hope when we find ourselves seemingly alone and feeling abandoned in our own personal wildernesses. A story that happens at those times when we must make the move from “What is it?” to “It is a sign that God is with us!”

            I was counseling a couple this past week in preparation for their wedding, and the bride-to-be related how she had lost her mother three years ago.  That must have been terrible, I said, and hard not just on you but on your relationship as well. It was hard, she said, but he was terrific through it all, and the hard times really brought us closer together.

            What is it?  The power of death to divide, or love to grow?

            I was listening to sports talk radio awhile back, and the hosts were commenting on a story that had just broken in the papers, about how on the eve of her wedding day the bride-to-be was accidently pushed into the shallow end of a swimming pool by a bridesmaid, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the neck down. What the hosts found incomprehensible was that the groom went through with the wedding. They were apparently unable to understand that loving another, through sickness and in health, might not be a duty, but a privilege, not a burden, but a calling.

            What is it? The end of promises made, or the beginning of living into new possibilities?

            Michael Piazza, writing in his blog this week, tells of Valerie.

     “Valerie was 34. She remembered that day last year like it was yesterday. She sat on the sofa stunned, unable to move. She had gone to the doctor to get the results of some tests. She assumed he would tell her she was anemic and needed to take vitamins or something. She wasn't remotely prepared to hear him speak of death, especially her death. She was 34. She had a good job, lots of friends. She did volunteer work for the crisis center and went to church. How could she be terminal?
     Now, a year later she sat on that same sofa amazed at all that had happened in that year. Her body clearly showed the wear of someone fighting to survive, but there was something inside of her that had never felt so alive. It was amazing the changes that had come over her since she learned that she might die sooner than later. Valerie wrote in her journal:

     I'd always been the cautious one, afraid of my own shadow. I wouldn't take risks or do unexpected things. Now, that I have had to face the fact that no one gets out of this life alive, I've been saying “boo” to all of those ghosts. It is amazing how easily all of the things you fear disappear when you are willing to confront them. If you are going to die anyway, why let them keep pushing you around? I just wish I had remembered sooner that I was going to die anyway.
     I've always been afraid of what people would think of me. As a result, I was cynical, condescending, and judgmental of others. It is funny how that works. But, today, when I went downstairs for lunch, I took a handful of quarters and walked up and down the street putting money in parking meters that were about to expire. The meter maid must have thought I was nuts, but today I wasn't afraid of what she might think of me. Now, my biggest fear is that I might waste a single moment of this precious life. Nothing makes me feel more alive than doing random acts of kindness.
     I wish I could tell everyone that if you have to be afraid of something, don't let it be what people might think. Be afraid that you might let a day slip by without really living it, without doing some good. That's the only thing worth fearing. The fear of wasting your life can make you more alive than you ever dreamed of being. I only wish I had some way to tell people before it is too late for them.”

      What is it? An unfairness that makes everything thereafter meaningless, or a wake-up call to an abundant life that is there for the taking each and every precious day?

Back in January, in response to declining worship attendance particularly among young families, we had an all-church off-site retreat to see if we might discern a new way forward. Once again the old adage “Watch what you pray for, you might get it” was proved true, because one of those young mothers we had taken pains to invite finally spoke up and said, “Why don’t we have a Saturday afternoon service?”

Now I had all sots of answers running through my mind, beginning with “But that’s something that Catholics do!”, continuing on with “And where will we find the money?”, and ending with “But Saturday is my day off and my wife will kill me!”

But she went on to explain how hard it is for young families to make it to church on Sunday mornings, what with sports games and practices, drama rehearsals, Chinese lessons and so on, never mind that they would like to have an occasional morning to just lounge around the house. So we put together a planning team, and the enthusiasm and ideas and participation have been over the top, and the word of mouth is spreading and all sorts of folk other than young families are telling us that they want to come, and now we are gearing up for a kick-off service on October 1.

What is it? More “stuff” that just has to get done, or a chance to experience the winds of the Spirit gusting through a three-hundred years young Meetinghouse?

Friends, the lesson for us all is clear. People with the gift of faith are as those with a new set of contact lessons, able to see that there is no wilderness in which we might travel that God is not with us, an abiding, empowering, healing, gifting, liberating presence. We can see that what others might view as a barren, inhospitable desert can be transformed by God into a fertile, nourishing garden.

God will come, but not always in the ways we expect, in the form we want, or on the timetable we would demand. But God hears, and God answers, and God comes.

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Is Multiculturalism a Failure? Should it be?

    

When I was a child, my parents took me to the New York World Fair, way back in ’64, where there was an enchanting exhibit called “It’s a Small World”, a celebration of the variety of peoples and cultures of the world. But multiculturalism was more of a theory that a reality way back then, with the United States largely separated from the rest of the world, and primarily white and mainline Christian, albeit with a small but significant African-American population, much of which was segregated from the white majority.

     The United States, and the world for that matter, are far different today. The States have become far more diverse in every sense: ethnically, racially, religiously, culturally, and so on. Where once the United States was often thought of as a “melting pot”, we now more and more resemble a “salad bowl”. And no longer are the religious options here limited to Christian, Jewish, and none-of-the-above; now in addition to those we also have vibrant and visible Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Muslim, and Mormon communities of faith, plus a variety of others as well.

            A rise in multiculturalism has been happening in Europe as well, with large flows of immigrants, including Muslim immigrants, coming in from eastern Europe and Africa.

            While there are many who celebrate the rise of multiculturalism, there has been, particularly recently, vocal and even violent opposition. A week ago a Norwegian citizen, identified by police as a right-wing fundamentalist Christian obsessed with what he saw as the threat of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration, exploded a bomb in central Oslo, then went on a killing rampage at a youth camp on a nearby island. He simultaneously released on the internet at 1500-page “manifesto” detailing what he saw as the dangers of multiculturalism and Muslim immigration and the need to abandon dialogue and take up armed resistance.

            It would be dangerous to believe that this man’s horrific deeds are simply the work of a mad man, divorced from a wider cultural and religious context. In recent years leaders from across Europe have trumpeted the alleged failure of multiculturalism, particularly with respect to Islam and Muslim immigrants. Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, said in October 2010 that attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany had "utterly failed", stating: "The concept that we are now living side by side and are happy about it does not work”, and that "we feel attached to the Christian concept of mankind, that is what defines us. Anyone who doesn't accept that is in the wrong place here."  The United Kingdom’s Prime Minister David Cameron has echoed her remarks, as has Australia’s ex-Prime Minister John Howard.

            And we in this country are no strangers to anti-multiculturalism sentiment, particularly with respect to religious bigotry. Herman Cain, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination, told a reporter a few months ago that he would not be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet; he expanded upon that thought in a subsequent television interview saying that his discomfort was due to the intention of some Muslims, and I quote here, “to kill us.” Moving from this absurd generalization to advocating a blatant violation of the Constitution of the United States, he supported opposition to the construction of a mosque in Tennessee on the grounds that “Islam is both a religion and a set of laws, Shariah laws”, which he claims is different from “traditional religions where it’s just about religious purposes.”  Never mind that Judaism and Christianity, to name just two other world religions, are also structured around religious laws, beginning with those same 10 Commandments that conservative Christians keep wanting to have posted in classrooms and court houses.

            The Chancellor of Germany claims that the Christian concept of mankind, as she puts it, requires that those who don’t share the same heritage, culture, and religion of traditional Germans don’t belong in their country. A self-proclaimed Christian in Norway believes that multiculturalism and immigration by Muslims are such dangers to Norway and such abominations that they justify mass murder. An American presidential candidate, an associate minister in his Baptist church in Atlanta, openly advocates bigotry against Muslims. So well might the world ask, so might we ask, what does our Christian faith have to say about the challenge of multiculturalism?  What does Christianity have to say to us about how we ought to approach the religiously other?

            We could, of course, start with Scripture, which brings us back to Paul in Athens. For Paul, there is no note of religious superiority, no claim that God has favored any one set of the world’s peoples, privileged them or set them above all others. Listen again to what he says:

“The God who made the world and everything in it . . . made all the nations to inhabit the whole earth; and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him – though indeed he is not far from each of us.” (Acts 17:24-28).

The effect, theologian and preacher Brian McLaren says, is to shatter the traditional us-them mind-set:

“People of every language, culture, and religion are given a place in God’s world, and no nation is given permission to crush, annihilate, dominate or assimilate others. In so doing, Paul unifies everyone in a singular “us” – people created by God, people who have a God-given right to life and land, people who are being invited to seek God right where they are, people to whom God is already near, people who are already living and moving and having their being in God, people who are already God’s children.” (A New Kind of Christianity, p.211)

            Paul is not saying anything new here, nothing that does not follow the trajectory of Scripture beginning with Abraham and running through the prophets and right through to Jesus.  Abraham was called by God to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth.  The prophets spoke of how while God loved the Hebrews, God’s love extended to the other nations as well – I think here of Amos, through whom God said, “Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O people of Israel? Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Captor and the Arameans from Kir?” (Amos 9:7). Jesus made explicit that his message was not just for the house of Israel, but for the world, reaching out to a Samaritan woman, a Roman centurion, the Greek friends of Andrew and Philip. The early church, beginning with Peter and his message that God shows no partiality, continued that trajectory affirming that we all have a place in God’s world.

            The backlash against multiculturalism is driven, of course, by fear. By anxiety that immigrants will take our jobs, by worries that the increased presence of those unlike us will threaten the ways we have always done things, by concerns that “they” might lay claim to that larger portion of the pie which we by historic accident and luck of place of birth have enjoyed.

But it should not, and must not, be fueled or justified by claims that the Christian faith supports such bigotry. Angela Merkel has it completely wrong – the “Christian concept of mankind”, as she puts it, speaks of love of neighbor, not his exclusion and eviction. Herman Cain has it completely wrong – Jesus has no room for discrimination against those whose groping for God, as Paul put it, is done in the name of Islam. And the Norwegian domestic terrorist has it completely wrong – nothing in Christianity endorses the cold-blooded mass murder of innocent men, women and children, and certainly not in pursuit of keeping a country pure from immigration by those of another faith.

            This, instead, is what our Christian faith calls us to do:

To love, not hate, our neighbor – to feed, tend, and care for God’s children, recalling the risen Christ’s command to Peter: “feed my sheep.”

To repent of our tendency to divide the world into us versus them, to think of insider versus outsider, but instead to see that we are all our God’s children, and all have a place not in our world, but in God’s world.

And finally,  to trust so securely in our faith and in Jesus’ abiding love for us that we can both humbly offer that faith to the world as a gift, and at the same time receive as a gift from others their experiences of the one God who holds us all in the palms of his hands.

Climbing out of Hell(-Roaring Canyon)

If you had asked her at the time, our daughter Julia would have said that she was the one to suffer. She would have been right, up to a point, but the rest of us had it hard as well. It was my fault, really. But the guide to hikes in Yellowstone National Park had made it all sound so inviting, even if the name of the hike, “Hell-roaring Canyon”, should have given us pause.

            And yes, maybe it was a mistake to start after a big lunch; maybe it was a mistake to set off in the heat of a late-summer’s afternoon. And maybe we should have noted more carefully that the initial leg of the hike was all downhill, meaning that the return hike was going to be a lot more difficult.

            The hike was as beautiful as advertised on the way into the canyon. Down we ambled through a Douglas fir forest, the pine needles cushioning our footfalls, the chipmunks scurrying onto the path in the hope of a handout, the rays of the sun scattering through the branches overhead. Soon we emerged onto a steeper section, too steep for trees, and down a series of switchbacks we went, sagebrush high all around, the vista opening up wide before us. The trail descended sharply until it reached the canyon floor and once again disappeared into the forest. Across the valley rose a series of mountains; the river, which we could hear but not see, obviously lay somewhere in the trees at the base of those mountains.

            The first sign of trouble came when we arrived at the valley floor. Julia, who at the time was six years old, had been lagging behind, and now came to a stop. “I’m hot. I’m tired. I want to go back.” I gave her a swig of water, cheerfully pointed out that the river was probably just ahead through the trees, and off we went. The roar of the river grew louder and louder, and then suddenly there we saw a steel suspension bridge; below it, a hundred or more feet straight down, the river, suddenly constricted by sheer canyon walls, rushed in a whirl of white water over and around boulders the size of small trucks. The noise it made was deafening – Hell-roaring Canyon was aptly named.

            It was a fine place to stop for a snack and some more water, and so we found a place in the shade to sit and gird ourselves for the trek back.

            It did not take long for trouble to rear its head on the way back up. Julia was hot; her feet hurt; she was tired; she couldn’t go a step further. We tried reasoning with her; we tried cajoling her; we tried threats (“We’ll leave you here for the coyotes to eat!”). Nothing was working, and so finally I sent Katie and Christie, with Camden in a backpack, on ahead. I would work on getting Julia up.

            It was work. Hard work. I tried everything to get that girl up the trail. Like, “Okay, let’s take it in small bites – can we make it to that next piece of shade twenty-five yards up ahead?” That worked for a while. And then, when we reached the section of switchbacks, and we could see the rest of the family ahead, I tried playing on Julia’s competitive nature: “Heh, if Katie can do it, you can, too.” But after a time the heat and the exhaustion were getting to my little six-year old; she was running out of gas. So I went to the bottom of my bag of tricks.

            “If you could have anything to drink or eat, or you could do anything once you got to the top, what would it be?” I asked. Without hesitation she replied over her shoulder, “I would dive into a swimming pool filled with a root beer float!” “That sounds great,” I answered, continuing the slog up the trail behind her, “But I think I would drink an ice-cold lemonade the size of a water tank before diving into the ocean.” And back and forth we went, trading visions of what awaited us at the top of the climb, putting one foot in front of the other, clawing our way out of Hell-roaring Canyon, until suddenly there we were, at the top.

            How often is it that we find ourselves, either through our own doing or simply by chance, at the bottom of our own personal Hell-roaring Canyon? When we find ourselves trapped in a destructive pattern of behavior that takes us round and round, an addiction, a cycle of blame and recrimination, a morass of self-pity, an eddy of aimlessness. Or a tragedy strikes out of the blue – a child dies, cancer strikes, the company folds, the hoped-for deal falls through, the word “divorce” is first spoken.

How often is it that our world, never mind our personal lives, seems closer to hell than to heaven – as poverty continues its grip on so much of the world, as we continue to be mired in two foreign wars, as our communities continue to struggle with issues of crime and homelessness, as schools become increasingly run down, and the list goes on and on.

We wake up one day and see that things look a lot more like hell that like the good life, and while we want to get back home, the way there is long and hard and all uphill, and we are not sure how to make it out. And we find that we can be paralyzed by despair, frozen by fear, disarmed by the apparent insignificance of  our puny abilities to cope or to make a difference.

And yet, if we raise our eyes and look up ahead, we can see that we are not in this alone – we can see that others struggle on up ahead, that the ascent can be made, is being made, by others like us. We can see that a friend has found a way to cope with the loss of a spouse, that an acquaintance has learned to find life worth living even with the limitations of a disability or chronic illness, that a co-worker had been able to move out of apathetic indifference to engage life in new ways. And this gives us hope.

And maybe we can see also that there are not only those who walk the same road up ahead of us, but also those who walk at our side, encouraging us onwards, telling us that we can do it, that we need but put one foot in front of the other. That what is important is this one day, and that we can leave tomorrow to God. And this give us hope.

And then maybe if we venture that one step, and then another, we might soon find the welcome shade of a sheltering tree, or the refreshing waters that might slake our thirst at least for a bit, refueling us for the trail and the trials ahead. And this also gives us hope.

But in the end, what gives us the ability to see the journey out of Hell-roaring Canyon through, that allows us to persevere even when the shade trees are few, the companionship scarce, and those who have gone before hard to see, is the vision of what awaits us at the end of the trail. And this gives us a hope beyond all other hope.

Psychologists tell us that hope is fundamental to human life. We hope for a good grade, for praise, for an upturn in the stock market, that our children will be safe, that the cancer will be cured, that love will last.

But there is another hope as well,  transfinite hope, the hope that goes beyond the tangible, hope that is placed in subjects that go beyond our physiological sensing and the material world. Transfinite hope extends the horizons of our vision beyond what we might see.

This is the hope that Paul is talking about in his Letter to the Romans. “Now the hope that is seen is not hope . . .  But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” The hope that he is talking about is the hope we have which is grounded in the character of God. We have hope not just in things, but in a relationship. We have hope based upon a relationship with a good shepherd who promises to lead us beside the still waters, to feed us even in the presence of those we believe to be enemies, to restore our souls, and to dwell with us forever.

Today Alana Bell will be confirmed. One can be tempted to view confirmation as a sort of graduation, and indeed if one were to take that view, one might look at this sermon as a sort of graduation address. If so, I suspect you would find it sadly lacking, seeing how most graduation addresses seem to be centered around two topics: first, how wonderful the graduates are, how mighty in deeds and accomplishments and character; and, second, some advice on how those same remarkable people might go out into the world and succeed.

But this is not, Alana, a graduation, for the life of faith is a journey, a life-long project, and not a destination. And my message is not about you and how wonderful you are (although you are all of that, and more), and it is not about your future successes (although I am certain there will be many for you).

It is, instead, about those times in life when it all looks like failure, when it seems you have come to the end of your rope, when you are parched and exhausted and wonder how you can keep on keeping on, how you might ever climb out of your own Hell-roaring Canyon. It is, thanks be to God, about hope, a hope that comes to you as a gift and a promise.

A hope, and a promise, that with the one in whose name you were baptized standing right beside you all the way, all will be well, and all will be well. Amen.

Out of Step

Being out of step, I learned at a tender age, can be an embarrassing, even dangerous thing.

Perhaps because my mother saw that I was an awkward, gawky child, and perhaps because she wished I might somehow learn to move with even a modicum of grace, she signed me up for the 4^th grade dance class at the local church. So off I went, penny loafers, newly-ironed trousers, dress shirt and tie, a kid who would rather have been anywhere else in the world but on the hardwood floor at the parish house trying to learn to waltz and fox trot with – yech! – a girl.

It was an order of magnitude too complicated – worrying about what Betsy would think about my sweaty palms, trying not to step on her feet, straining to hear the shouted instructions, trying to keep a beat in my head and feet at the same time. For awhile I thought being out of step was only a danger to others, to my partners who suffered from crushed toes and bruised shins, from those who I bumped into. But one day I learned otherwise as we were taught to square dance.

I admit that I was worse than usual, never could figure out the difference between a promenade and a do-si-do, which might explain why Amy just stood there tapping her toe and glaring at me, refusing to dance. Undeterred, when the caller yelled out over his fiddle “twirl yer partner”, I obediently extended my arm and moved forward towards her, seeking to engage her arm. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back, looking at the ceiling and wondering why my head hurt so much, and how a tiny 4^th grade girl could have picked up kung fu moves at that age.

The cost of being out of step.

I haven’t learned much. Try to follow a guy (God, even tell people about that guy!), who was so out of step that he ended up on a different type of hard wood; who would tell anyone who would listen that true success comes not from fleeing suffering and death, but becoming personally and actively involved in the suffering of the world; who had the crazy idea that to lose your life for others is to gain it.

Guess I really haven’t learned much.

Not a $20 Rolex

     It happened during a confirmation class trip to New York City several years ago. A group of our 9^th and 10^th Graders had made the trek to the Big Apple for an overnight program of education, worship and fun in the world’s largest Gothic cathedral, St. John the Divine. We had some free time the following day, and so traveled south through Manhattan to Battery Park, where we boarded the ferry for a quick trip out to the Statue of Liberty. It was an inspiring and educational event for us all, as we marveled at Lady Liberty from up close, then made a quick stop on the return trip at Ellis Island, the portal to America for many of our ancestors. But our education for the day was not yet over – as we disembarked from the ferry upon our return to Manhattan, we were met by dozens of street vendors hawking their wares, selling everything from postcards to miniature Statues of Liberty to bootleg DVDs to watches and even cameras. We had, I thought, successfully shepherded the group off the ferry and up the ramp, until a quick headcount revealed that we were one confirmand short. To our relief, he soon appeared – proudly showing off his brand-new, shiny, guaranteed authentic Rolex watch – a watch, he boasted, he had been able to get for just $20.

            You know the rest of the story. That watch ran perfectly – for two weeks.

            It was, of course, a counterfeit. A fraud. A piece of junk, a pale imitation of the Real McCoy.

            Our adventuresome and yet naïve young consumer knew what he wanted, the object of his desire was fixed in his mind. A Rolex Submariner. The perfect timepiece, the standard of excellence, a chronometer built to withstand water pressures of up to 100 feet, to keep time to within seconds each year, a symbol of the good life achieved. Or so the advertisements led him to believe.

            He knew what he wanted. He ended up getting much less.

            I often wonder if this is too often who we think we are. A $20 Rolex. Maybe shiny and spiffed up on the outside, but inside, a counterfeit, a fraud.

            Maybe we do this because of how we have been taught to underestimate our worth. Maybe you were abused by someone you trusted, someone who treated you as an object to be used to satisfy their desires, and so you came to similarly undervalue yourself and your worth. Maybe you were the one always picked last to be on sports teams, and you took this as a judgment not on your athletic abilities, but on who you, at core, really are. Maybe you absorbed the message our media continually bombards you with, that your value depends on how many luxury items you possess, how wrinkle free and unblemished your skin is, how youthful and sexy you are, how successful you have been in business, how healthy you are, how able you are to get things done, how independent you are.

                The great actress Dorothy Maguire was appearing on Broadway in Tennessee William’s play The Night of the Iguana. Just before curtain time on a Friday night, the theatre was disturbed by the shrill voice of a woman in the audience shouting, “Start the show! Start the show! I want to see Dorothy Maguire!” The woman was clearly emotionally disturbed, but after a moment of shocked silence, some in the theatre began to turn on her. “Listen, you old bag, get out!” someone heckled. “Throw her out! Start the show!” another jeered. The house manager came to try and reason with the woman, but she pulled away, shrieking, “All I want to see is Dorothy Maguire; then I’ll leave.”

            Suddenly, through the part in the curtains, Miss Maguire herself appeared. She crossed the stage and walked calmly over to the disturbed woman. She spoke quietly to her and then hugged her. The woman, who had recoiled whenever anyone else had touched her, drew close to Miss Maguire, got up from her seat, and together they walked toward the exit. Before they left the theater, Miss Maguire paused and turned to the audience. With grace and kindness she announced, “I’d like to introduce another fellow human being.”

            Dorothy Maguire testified to the truth about this woman, a truth that no emotional illness or abuse from others could take away – she was not a $20 Rolex. She was a fellow human being, a child of God, a citizen with the saints, a member of the household of God.

Just like each and every one of us.

What Happened?

There is a terrible paradox at the heart of Palm Sunday. On the one hand, a hand raised high in exultation and triumph, it is a day of celebration and rejoicing, as we recall how Jesus is welcomed as a king into his capital city, Jerusalem, with the crowd waving palm branches and strewing their coats before him.

On the other hand, a hand clenching at our heart in fear and  shame, even as we sing, “All Glory, Laud and Honor”, we know that this king is on his way to betrayal, desertion, torture, and a cruel and grisly death without honor.

            Doug Davidson, writing in the periodical “The Other Side” (March 2002, p.9), was recently re-awakened to the paradox of Palm Sunday by his young son. He writes,

“Last summer, my three-year-old son and I stopped off at the seminary library to return a book for a friend. Our family has lived on the campus of this Lutheran seminary since Jennifer began classes here a year and a half ago. But this was our son’s first time inside the old stone building that houses the library.

As we stepped through the bright red doors into the darkened vestibule, Elliot stopped in his tracks. There, on the wall to his right, hung a sculpted crucifix, about five feet tall. I watched his young eyes study Jesus’ agonized face, the dying body nailed to a tree, the nails piercing his hands and feet.

I knew the image was a new one to him. Although he’s been raised in the church, the crosses in our Baptist congregation are all clean and sanitized; their Jesuses all resurrected and ascended.

For a moment, I considered hustling him back out the door, trying to shield him from this holy horror in the same way that I “rewrite” the violent plots of his beloved Batman comic books when I read them aloud. But it was too late; he had already taken it all in.

I thought he might cry. Instead, without ever taking his eyes off the dying Jesus, he slowly spoke words filled with great sadness, mystery, and wonder: What happened?”

            “What happened?” It really is a question that cannot be avoided today. If we can’t make some sense of what happened that led to Jesus’ betrayal and torture and death, then how can we even begin to make sense of what happened that first Easter day? If we cannot place ourselves in the triumphal march into Jerusalem, around the table with Jesus at the Passover celebration, in the garden with Jesus as he prays that he might be spared, or with the disciples as they flee after Jesus’ arrest, how can we possibly place ourselves at the empty tomb or on the road to Emmaus with the risen Christ?

            Again, what happened?

n      What happened that this spirit-filled and compassionate soul might be sold out by one his inner-circle for 30 pieces of silver?

n      What happened that this gifted healer became an object of cruel punishment and was subjected to the most exquisitely painful method of execution yet devised? 

n      What happened that this unarmed peasant who preached non-violence so threatened the religious and governmental authorities and their power that they conspired to silence him once and for all?

n      What happened that the joyous “Hosannas!” of the multitudes as Jesus entered the Holy City on Sunday only five days later were changed to blood-thirsty cries of “Crucify him!”?

n      What happened that on Sunday palm branches were strewn before Jesus, but on Friday Jesus was hammered to a tree?

n      What happened that of all those who followed Jesus on that ride up the mountain on Sunday, none stayed by his side on the night of his betrayal, or on the day of his death?

n      What happened that we could kill the incarnate God?

n      What happened that we have become so used to this shocking and tragic and humanity-indicting event that it is only through the witness of a shocked three-year-old that we might be re-awakened to its incomprehensibility?

            The Biblical scholars try to tell us what happened: that Jesus threatened the powers that be, that his over-turning the tables of the money-lenders in the Temple united the religious and business leaders against him; or that his defeat of the powers of death, illustrated by the raising of Lazarus, was too much for those who make out quite well, thank you very much, from the profitable ways of death. 

Yet even as they struggle to explain the depths of perversity in the human soul, or the willingness of humans in all generations to betray Jesus by turning our backs on the hungry and the homeless, the oppressed and the poor, or the ways in which unmet expectations can lead followers to desert and look elsewhere for fulfillment of their dreams, I find myself unconvinced, still wondering, what happened?

            But if human motivation and intent in the death of Jesus are difficult to fathom, how much more so is it difficult to understand and comprehend the faithfulness and love of God as revealed through Jesus.

            For let us not forget that Jesus could have turned from his path of radical obedience to God’s will, he could have turned from his self-giving love of us. Right until the end he could have avoided suffering and death – having been abandoned by his followers, he could have abandoned us; having fought the good fight and labored long and tirelessly to bring a prodigal people back to God, how could he have been blamed for calling it quits on those who had quit him?

And yet Jesus chose to endure it all so that we might know the full height and breadth of God’s love for us, a God who would stoop to take on our common lot and endure what it means to be human right through to the bloody end, a God who would model for us radical obedience and self-giving love, a God who was not content to give 95% and then get out of Dodge when the going got tough, but ran the race right to the end, and in so doing won for us the prize that we on our own could never hope to win, paid the debt we could never satisfy.

            On the cross, Jesus looks humanity’s brutality and cruelty square in the face and says, “I forgive you”.

Even as we pound the nails into his palms and feet, Jesus says to us, “Nothing can separate you from my love.”

Even as we throw dice for rights to his bloody clothes Jesus promises to clothe us with radiant garments fit for a heavenly court.

Even as his arms are stretched out wide on the cross-beam, Jesus freely offers to us an embrace of eternal love.

            What on earth happened? Or, maybe, what in hell happened? Or perhaps even better, what in heaven happened?

Who can comprehend the amazing and wondrous undying love of Jesus?

            Sometimes it causes me to

 tremble.          

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Breath of Hope

(A sermon based on Ezekiel 37 and the vision of the valley of dry bones)

     This valley of dry bones that Ezekiel is led to in his vision seems pretty crazy to most of us, perhaps something out of the opening of a modern sci-fi film – a vast, desolate plain littered by dry and brittle bones. And yet, in our own time and experience, we know the sort of thing he is talking about, this vision is not as strange as we would like to think it is. We have seen them, in news reels and magazines and newspapers and documentaries, the countless trenches dug for mass graves in Germany, in Poland, in Russia, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, silent testimony to man’s violence and inhumanity during the time of war. And time and again we have seen those photos and videos of communities beset by natural catastrophes, earthquakes in Turkey, mudslides in central America, most recently of the devastation wrought by the tsunami in northern Japan, where whole communities were wiped off the face of the earth.

            Like Ezekiel, we stand before the pit of grief and ask, Can these dry bones live? In a place where it seems like there is no future, can there be new life? In a time when the despair is overwhelming, can there be hope?

            These were our questions last April, when twenty folk drawn from this church, the Cotuit Federated Church, and North Falmouth Congregational Church, drove through the emptiness of neighborhood after neighborhood in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward and its neighboring town, St. Bernard’s Parish. In some areas, decaying, rotting houses, once submerged under nine plus feet of water, still tottered, each marked with the four-quadrant circle spray-painted by rescue teams in the aftermath of Katrina, indicating whether the utilities were still on, whether the house had been searched, whether there were any pets in the premises, whether any human remains were still inside. In other areas, including where we were put to work, the streets were lined by empty foundation slab after empty foundation slab, all that remained after their decaying, mold-infested structures had been bull-dozed away. All this, over four years after Katrina, over four years after the forced evacuations, after FEMA’s bungling, after formaldehyde-saturated trailers, after families and neighbors becoming separated and relocated to housing hundreds and even thousands of miles away, after federal and state red-tape delaying and at times preventing families from returning to rebuild. If these were not our exact words at the time, surely they could have been: “Can these dry bones live?” Can there be a future for this community? Can these displaced folk ever come together again?

            This is the meaning of Ezekiel’s vision. The dry bones, Ezekiel is told, represent the house of Israel. The valley refers to their exile in Babylon, where the dry bones of the once proud nation now lie lifeless and without hope. The question which God had asked Ezekiel at the outset of the vision, “Can these bones live?”, in reality means, “Can this community live once again? Can the exiles ever hope to go home again, be reconstituted, and prosper? If so, how in heaven can this be?”

            How in heaven, indeed. God tells Ezekiel to prophesy, and when he does, the bones come together again, sinews bind them together, flesh covers them. But still they do not live, for one thing more is required – the breath of God. And so at God’s command the wind is summoned – wind being a Hebrew equivalent to breath, to spirit, and the bones live once more, the community is resurrected to new life. In the face of death, where there is the Spirit of God, there is creation, there is new life, there is a resurrected community.

            Resurrection, God tells Ezekiel, is not a privatized, spiritual matter. It is concrete, it is historical, it concerns your existence in the here and now. “Tell the people”, Ezekiel is told, “I am going to open up your graves and bring you up from your graves . . . and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. . . I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil….”

            And all this does not just happen. The message is clear – God is the source of life, and of renewed life, and if God is about anything, it is that God is in the restoration and resurrection business.  God will move God’s people out of death to new life, and God’s spirit will live within them.

            And so the people can live in hope. Appearances are deceiving. When it looks like a death valley, beneath the surface springs of life are preparing to gush up; when all that most people see is a graveyard, those with eyes of faith can see a field getting ready to blossom into new life.

            People who live in hope, who have eyes to see the new reality which even now is almost ready to spring forth, can live differently than those who despair. The despairing might come to the valley of dry bones to lay cut flowers on the ground as a memorial; those with hope bring to the boneyard their gardening implements, getting ready to water and weed and hoe as the new life springs forth. The despairing are disempowered, weakened, sick at heart; the hopeful are filled with the Spirit, energized, emboldened for the work which lies at hand.

            And then this is what they do. They climb out of the vans, put on the work gloves and the knee pads, pick up the sledgehammer and the nail gun and the skil saw and the paint brush, and they get to work.  One day at a time, one home at a time, one small neighborhood at a time, they work to rebuild a community, to hasten the day when once again slabs will lie hidden beneath solid homes, driveways will be full, jumbalaya will be cooking for the weekend block party, and kids will laughingly play tag in back yards and run out front when they hear the ice cream truck coming. They do this work because they have eyes to see that there is a new world a’coming, and because they know that in this work they have not only each other, they also have a divine partner who breathes new life into dry bones and works tirelessly to raise the dead from their graves.

            People who live in hope, who have eyes to see the new reality which even now is almost ready to spring forth, can live differently than those who despair.  People who live in hope can take a look at declining church membership and attendance figures, at trends which tell the story of the increasing secularization of society, at the drop-off in faith among the younger generations, and not despair. And instead of sitting back and wishing for the good old days when church and the wider culture walked together hand in glove and were mutually supporting, instead they can get together, as you have done, and together seek to discern how God is at work beneath the surface of all these trends to prepare the day when new life will spring forth in our faith communities, and, particularly, here at West Parish. And then they try to figure out how we might get in step with this resurrecting God who will not let us just lie down in our graves, how we might take concrete steps in both the short and long term to make this faith community as full of life as it possibly can be. You do this, because God’s breath of hope fills your lives.

            Friends, hear this day the Good News which shall be for you and for all people: “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”