Adjusting Our Glasses

How much do we know? I mean, how much do we REALLY know? Sometimes we think that we know, but what we think we know isn't reality at all. If that makes even a little bit of sense, you might want to read this sermon. You'll find out that even Jesus didn't always know what he thought he knew -- and neither do we!

What words would you use to describe Jesus? Humble? Compassionate? Wise? I’d use all those words, and I imagine that you would, too. But how many of us would describe Jesus as rude? Abrasive? Arrogant? That’s not the Jesus that we know! But in this little story that you just heard (Matthew 15:21-28), all those descriptions could apply to Jesus. Now, we usually clean that story up quite a bit. We soften the tone of Jesus’ responses, and we make his interaction with the Canaanite woman a polite one. But let’s take another look at that story. It’s actually an emotional interaction, and a powerful commentary on the fact that we don’t always know what we think we know!

As the story begins, Jesus and his disciples are in foreign territory, up the Mediterranean coast to the north of Israel. That’s not Jewish territory. That’s pagan country! Jesus’ reputation must have preceded him, because a woman appears out of nowhere. She’s not a Jewish woman. She’s a pagan. In fact, she’s called a Canaanite. That name is loaded with negative baggage! In the Old Testament, the Canaanites insisted on worshipping Baal, the fertility god of that area, even when they knew about the God of the Israelites. That made the Canaanites worse than dirt! So when any Jew said the word “Canaanite,” it was said with a curled lip and a sneer. This person who wanted to see Jesus was not only a Canaanite, but a Canaanite woman, one of the lowest of the low. And she wanted Jesus to do her a favor! How brassy could she possibly be?!

Oh, she was brassy, all right. She kept yelling at Jesus until the disciples were sick of her. “Hey, Jesus! Son of David! I need your help! Hey, you! My daughter is possessed! Hey! Hey! Over here! HEY!!” Finally the disciples asked Jesus to do something about her. But Jesus continued to ignore her, this woman who was yelling for help with all the power of her lungs. And what did he tell his disciples? “She’s not my responsibility. I wasn’t sent to help some pagan woman. My job is to help the Jews; and she isn’t a Jew!” Wow! That’s a rude response! It makes us wonder what in the world Jesus was thinking! The answer is that Jesus was thinking exactly what his culture had taught him. We are all products of what we have been taught; and Jesus grew up believing that the Messiah would be sent to help the Jews! Remember that Jesus was human as well as divine. And humans believe what they have been brought up to believe. We do that every day of the week. We believe what people have taught us; and sometimes those beliefs aren’t very good ones. Five hundred years ago, people believed that women couldn’t think for themselves; they needed men to take care of them in every way. Two hundred years ago, people believed that African-Americans were inferior to whites; and that slavery was ordained by God. Today, some people believe that every single Muslim man and woman is a terrorist. All those beliefs are simply wrong! But we seldom stop to really examine what we believe and why we believe it until something – or someone – stares us in the face and forces us to take a second look.

That’s exactly what this Canaanite woman did to Jesus. She made him take a second look at what he had always assumed. The text says that “the woman came and knelt in front of him.” I doubt that their meeting was that calm and polite. I think that, instead, when the woman saw that Jesus was ignoring her and walking away, she ran after him until she caught up with him. Maybe she even threw herself down in front of him so that he had to step over her! He couldn’t avoid her; and this time, her cry of “Lord, help me!” was right in his face. Surely Jesus would take note of her now! And he took note of her, all right. But his response to her was not only rude; it was downright insulting! It was so insulting that, quite frankly, I’m surprised that this story ever made it into the gospel. Jesus called this Canaanite woman – this mother who only wanted help for the daughter she loved so much – Jesus called her a “dog.” His exact words were, “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Now, the impact of this insult is lost on us today. Calling someone a “dog” is no big deal in our society. Why, some sports fans even call themselves “dogs” (notably the Cleveland Browns fans who sit in “the dawg pound”). But in Jesus’ day – and still today, in some places in the Middle East – calling someone a “dog” is very similar to calling an African-American “the n-word.” The worst thing that we might call a woman today is the word that begins with “b” and ends with “itch.” And even that insult pales in comparison with being called a “dog” in Jesus’ day.

I can’t help imagining Jesus abruptly turning on his heel and walking away from the Canaanite woman, leaving her open-mouthed in shame and anger and frustration. But as he was walking away, happy to be rid of this irritating woman once and for all, she yelled something after him. She turned being called a “dog” on its head, and made a comment that was impossible for him to ignore. “Yeah, yeah, well, OK… You can say what you want to. But even the dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall off the table!” And her comment stopped Jesus dead. I can see him in my mind’s eye, frozen in his tracks, the impact of her words shattering what he has been brought up to believe. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” When Jesus turned and looked at her, he saw her in a whole new light. This woman – this person whose ancestors had been Baal worshippers – this person with no status at all in Jesus’ estimation – had cut through all the rhetoric and gone right to the heart of the matter. Either all people are worthy of God’s grace, or no one is. Jesus had believed that he was sent only to the Jews, but this pagan woman had opened his eyes to a greater truth. “Oh, woman, your faith is amazing,” Jesus replied. “Your request is granted.” The text tells us that her daughter was healed from that very hour.

Jesus had the glasses of tradition firmly in place when he met the Canaanite woman; and those glasses showed him a woman who wasn’t even worthy of his respect. But after their encounter, Jesus saw someone very different. He saw a fellow human being who was in need. Jesus realized that the glasses through which he saw the world were a little bit fuzzy. Our glasses are fuzzy, too. Are we as willing to adjust our glasses as Jesus was to adjust his? Every one of us needs to adjust the glasses through which we see the world every now and then. If we don’t, our vision will become more and more distorted, and we will wander further and further away from the truth. Now, it’s hard to adjust our glasses! We all get used to looking through distorted lenses. But, ah, how much clearer things become when we do that hard work!

Do your glasses need adjusting today? Did you learn things when you were a child that don’t seem quite so right today? Is there a Canaanite woman in your life that you are rejecting just because of something you were taught long ago? I can’t help but remember the lyrics of a song from the musical South Pacific: “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade. You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.” This morning, I invite you to start adjusting your glasses. I don’t know exactly how you need to adjust them; but I know that if you ask Jesus, he’ll be glad to help you. He is the only one who knows the fullness of truth, and he knows how distorted our glasses really are. After all, he has adjusted his own glasses. And he knows something else. He knows how very liberating it is to be able to see clearly at last.

The Wide Angle Lens

You can't capture the awesomeness of a vista without a wide-angle lens. That's true where our faith is concerned, too. If we don't look through a wide-angle lens at God every now and then, we'll end up focused only on our problems. If you're not sure what I mean, read my sermon!

I grew up with cameras. My father was a professional photographer; and so, my childhood vocabulary included “film speed,” “f-stop,” and “darkroom.” I knew how develop photographs while I was still in grade school, and I could use an industrial photographic drier long before I could drive a car. But photography has changed a lot since my dad was in business. These days, cameras are digital, photos are stored on a computer, and negatives don’t even exist. In fact, the kind of film that I used to use isn’t even made any more! But some things haven’t changed at all. Taking a good photograph still involves more than standing in front of a tourist attraction and holding up a selfie stick! In fact, some of the best photographs aren’t of ourselves at all, but of the world around us. And although capturing images of what’s around us no longer means holding up a light meter and fiddling with camera settings, it still involves some choices.

One choice that we still have to make is what to use as the focus of the photo. Are we going to focus on something very small, something very large, or something in between? Usually our photos are those in-between shots – a photo of the gathered family in front of the Christmas tree, for example. From time to time, we decide to take a picture of something very small. I took a recent photo of a tiny grasshopper that had settled on the windshield of my car; and it was a good enough picture that I could see the ridges on the little guy’s hind legs when I enlarged it. (It was a very lucky shot!) And every now and then, we want to capture a whole vista. Those are the photos that have the potential to take our breath away! Who doesn’t stand in awe of a picture of the moon rising over the ocean; or of the snow-capped Rocky Mountains? Ansel Adams was a master at taking those kinds of photos. It’s tough to get that kind of photograph with a pocket-sized digital camera. To really capture the vastness of a landscape, you still need a camera that has a wide-angle lens. That kind of lens captures a wide field of view, the kind of view that we don’t often stop and enjoy. Oh, when we’re on vacation in the Great Smoky Mountains, we might park the car at a pull-off spot and look around in awe. But every day? No, we don’t look through a wide-angle lens every day. But maybe we should, especially on the days when everything seems to be going wrong. On those days, we tend to bury our noses in our problems and ignore what’s all around us. And there’s a good reason for that. We concentrate on what’s bothering us because we want to figure out a way to get rid of it! If you’re walking with a blister on your heel, you’re not very likely to be thinking about the beauty of the scenery along the way! But even – maybe especially – in the middle of difficulties, we should be looking through that wide-angle lens every single day!

Let me tell you why a wide-angle lens is vital to our spiritual health. Come back with me to the Middle East in the year 586 BCE. In that year, the Babylonians conquered the nation of Israel, burned the city of Jerusalem, carried off everything that was in the Temple, and dragged the people off into exile. The kingdom of King David and King Solomon that had lasted over 400 years suddenly was no more. Imagine how the Israelites must have felt! Their nation was gone. Their holy city, Jerusalem, was gone. The temple that had stood in Jerusalem was gone. They were afraid that their god was gone, too. And they had to endure the sarcasm of the Babylonians who reminded them again and again that their gods were stronger than the god of Israel! If you read Psalm 137, you will catch a glimpse of their despair. It begins like this.

“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplar trees we hung our harps.
There our captors asked us for songs; our tormentors demanded songs of joy.
They said, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’
How can we sing the songs of the Lord while we are in a foreign land?”

But in the middle of that Babylonian exile, an amazing thing happened. One day, somebody lifted his eyes out of the dust and looked through a wide-angle lens. That somebody started saying things like, “God is still here! God’s temple in Jerusalem may be gone, but God is still here! The heavens are still here. The earth is still here. God will get us out of this mess, even though I don’t know how that will happen!” And from the time of the Exile comes the text that we heard just a few minutes ago (Isaiah 40:21-31). “Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? God reduces the rulers of the earth to nothing! Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all of these? Why do you complain, ‘My cause is disregarded by my God’? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth! He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. They will soar on wings like eagles! They will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not faint!”

“Look through your wide-angle lens!” Isaiah is saying. “Stop focusing on your problems and look around! God has everything under control even if we can’t see it.” Isaiah even compares human beings to that little grasshopper that rested on my windshield last week. People are tiny things when they are compared to the God who spoke creation into existence. Even a great nation like Babylon is like a piece of dry leaf that the wind whisks away. “Why are we so worried?” Isaiah asks. “God is bigger than any problem that we have. Remember to look through your wide-angle lens!” That isn’t a bad thing for us to remember now, either, as we are sometimes overwhelmed by our own problems. And today’s church does have problems. We are split into hundreds (if not thousands) of denominations, most of whom don’t even talk to one another, let alone work together. We have differing opinions on how to understand the Bible, and because of that, we have differing opinions on what to do about social problems – both here in the United States, and around the world. In some places, Christians are persecuted for their faith. You can’t even carry a Bible in North Korea; and in the places that gave birth to our faith, Christians are being murdered every day by Muslim extremists. Local congregations have problems, too, don’t they? Many churches are operating at a deficit. Our own income hasn’t been enough to cover our expenses since the first of the year. We have very few young families, and no young children at all who attend church on a regular basis. And our congregation is getting older. Who is going to carry on our mission here as the years go by?

I don’t have a solution to any of these problems. But I do have a suggestion. Let’s take a look though our wide-angle lens. Let’s focus not on what’s wrong, but on what’s right! Let’s focus on the fact that God is way bigger than we are, and God has promised to remain faithful to us. Let’s focus on the strengths that God has given us, the kinds of strengths that allow us to run and not to grow weary. We all have gifts, talents, and resources, and those allow us to do the ministry to which God is calling us. If we lift our eyes out of the dust, we might even see opportunities that God has put right in front of our noses so that God can guide us into the future!

Yes, we need to look through that wide-angle lens now and then, especially when we start saying “Woe is me!” It’s always a good thing to listen to what Isaiah said so long ago: “Why do you think that God doesn’t care about us anymore? Don’t you know? God is everlasting. God never gets tired. God understands everything! God gives us strength even when we don’t think we can go on another step. In fact, God gives us so much strength that one day we will fly like eagles” as God’s Spirit carries us aloft and bears us along on the wind!

Prophets, Cheerleaders, and Comforters

Ministry is hard work! That's why all God's people, not just the pastor, should do some of it. Why, even Moses needed some help! If that surprises you, read my sermon to learn that story and to find out what you might be doing to help minister to God's people.

I can really identify with some of the characters in the Bible! Maybe you feel that way, too. Some of them just jump out of the pages of the Bible and reassure me that I’m not alone in what I’m feeling. I can identify with Mary, Martha’s sister in the gospels. I know how she feels when she just wants to sit at Jesus’ feet and learn, but her sister nags at her to get up and do something useful! (Does that sound familiar to anyone?) I can identify with Jeremiah. When God called him to be a prophet, his first reaction was, “But I don’t know what I’m doing!” I’ve said that many times myself. But the character who resonates the most with me is Moses. Now, Moses is one of the most revered characters in the whole history of Israel. Moses is liberator, pastor, prophet, and priest. He is God’s right-hand man; the one who talks with God like a close friend. Deuteronomy tells us that he is one of a kind; that “no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.” I can’t claim to be anything like that! But the Moses in this story (Numbers 11:4-6. 10-17, 24-30) isn’t Moses the liberator, Moses the law-giver, or Moses the high priest of Israel. No, in this story, Moses is the overworked and the frustrated! And that I can sure identify with!

In this particular story, the Israelites are complaining – again! They have complained ever since they left their slavery in Egypt; and they’re still complaining! This time, they’re complaining about the food that they have to eat. The miraculous manna that God provides isn’t good enough for them; they want the kind of food that they remember from Egypt. They remind me of three-year-old Mindy who wants a box of crayons. But she doesn’t want just any crayons, she wants crayons just like her friend Samantha has! So her mom looks all over town to find those crayons – spends a whole afternoon, in fact, looking for the crayons that she wants – and brings them home in relief.  But when Mindy’s mom gives her the crayons, she lifts up pleading eyes and says, “But I wanted a package that has mint green in it!” It makes you want to give up and cry, “Just take me now, Lord, I can’t do this anymore!” And that’s pretty much what Moses said to God, because he’d had it up to here with the Israelites! “Why have you brought this trouble on me?” he asked God. “Why did you tell me to take care of all these people? I can’t carry all these people by myself; the burden is too heavy for me!” Can’t you just hear the frustration in his voice? “I’ve done my best,” he’s crying, “and it never seems to be enough!”

So God in God’s wisdom spread the workload around. God called for seventy elders to come to the Tent of Meeting, the place where Moses went for executive conferences with the Almighty. When the elders arrived, God gave some of the Spirit to them, too, so that they could share Moses’ load of caring for all the people. Even two elders who didn’t go to the Tent of Meeting were given a share of the Spirit! What a relief for Moses! God gave power to a whole bunch of people to share the workload and to help with the people’s needs!

I think that every pastor feels like Moses at one time or another. Now, I don’t mean to suggest that every congregation complains about their lot in life!  On the contrary, I think that most congregations are loving, grateful, and even affectionate. But everyone has problems, the workload is heavy, and there’s always something more that should be done. We Christians have the very same needs that the Israelites had. We need guidance in the wilderness that we call life; we need encouragement that we can keep on keeping on; and sometimes, we just need somebody to listen to us when we are more than a little nervous about what the future might hold. Oh, yes, caring for God’s people is more than a full-time job!

It seems to me that God’s answer for overloaded, frustrated Moses is a pretty good one for us, too. No one has to do the work of ministry alone. Moses didn’t have to do it by himself, and no one today has to do it alone, either! I don’t think that God ever intended anybody to do ministry alone. And we’re way ahead of the Israelites! We don’t have to ask God for a share of the Spirit, because we Christians already have that! We may have different abilities given to us by that Spirit, but we’re all capable of doing the work of ministry in one way or another. We’re can all help in the work of ministering to the people of God, and of helping to meet their needs. One of my colleagues is convinced that there are really only three main tasks of ministry. We need prophets; we need cheerleaders; and we need comforters. I agree with her, and when the church works as a team on these tasks, their ministry is the most effective. No one person can do every task of ministry all the time. Even Moses needed some help! So, what are those jobs all about, anyway?

First, we constantly need to reevaluate where we are headed as the people of God. Where are we going as a congregation? What activities should we spend our time and talents on so that we serve God the best that we can right here? In other words, what are the goals of our ministry here at Nashville UCC? The prophets among us can help us to discern those goals. Now, lots of folks have the idea that prophets are wild-eyed, ragged people who stand on street corners shouting out a warning that the world will end tomorrow! But that’s actually not the Bible’s idea of a prophet. A prophet was simply someone who spoke for God, someone who could help remind the people who God was calling them to be. I know that there are prophets in this congregation. Some of you are men and women with a vision for the future, and a willingness to talk about it to get other people on board. And you may be a little frustrated right now, because not many of us are paying any attention to you! But I hope that you’ll keep talking, because you are excited about the ministry of this congregation, and you are willing to work to help move us along!

A second task of ministry is to encourage, to help others believe that they can and will get where they want to go! The people who do that are the cheerleaders. Just like cheerleaders who lead the crowd in cheering for the football team, cheerleaders in the church are those saints who always have an encouraging word for the rest of us. Their cheers are a little bit different from the ones that the high school cheerleaders use. Instead of yelling loudly, “Hold that line!” they whisper quietly, “You’re doing a great job!” Or they say “Thank you” for the work that we do. And sometimes they even say, “You know, you really have a gift for that. You are a blessing in my life!” We have cheerleaders here at Nashville. One gives me a hug every single Sunday and tells me “That was a great sermon!” It’s always reassuring to hear that, especially on days that I think I’ve done a miserable job. And did you know that our peanut brittle brigade has their very own cheerleader? If you help with that fundraiser, you know who she is! At every single session, she says “We can do more! Let’s work another half hour! This is going to raise money that other people need!” I can’t tell you how much I owe to the cheerleaders in my own life – and I’ll bet that you do, too.

Finally, the church needs comforters. Comforters have ears that are always ready to listen when someone is afraid, or troubled, or grieving. They take time for us when we need someone to talk to. They listen when we want to share joys, sorrows, frustrations, and fears. Comforters have open arms, too. They give hugs when others are feeling down. They send cards to folks, and they go to visit members who are home bound. And they always know when we would appreciate a phone call “just to check in.” This congregation is full of comforters! Many of them are in our prayer ministry. Those folks are ready to drop everything and kneel in prayer for someone else when the need arises. And lots of others aren’t in any organized group. We just know that we can always go to them when we’re troubled and they won’t turn us away.

Have you recognized yourself yet? Whether you’re a prophet, a cheerleader, or a comforter, we’re all part of this wonderful ministry team that we call the church! So, team, let’s get going! Prophets, clean the lenses of your binoculars! Cheerleaders, pick up your pompoms! Comforters, open your ears and your arms! We’re travelling together towards the Promised Land! Our journey won’t be easy; and we know that we’ll hit some speed bumps along the way. We’ll make it in the end, though, because Jesus is our coach, the Spirit is our power, and our creator God is traveling with us wherever we go. We’ll going there together, and we’ll get there together! And hopefully, along the way, we’ll even enjoy the journey.

Plans and Potential

Does God have a plan for my life? And does God have a plan for our church? Absolutely! But how we live out that plan is, in large part, up to us. If you'd like to know more about that, you might want to read this sermon.

Back in June, a group of us from our church enjoyed a Dayton Dragons game on a Sunday afternoon. Although it was a hot day, we had a great time! It was a memorable game for me because it was the first time we had ever taken our grandson Tanner to a baseball game. And he liked it! He liked the hot dogs; he liked the ice cream; he liked the “baseball men” who wore numbers on their backs; and he especially liked the bounce house in the children’s area!

After the game was over, all the children were invited to come down to the playing field and run around the bases. They even got to high-five the dragon mascot Heater at second base! Of course, Tanner was thrilled; and he scampered around those bases like his pants were on fire! As I watched him run, my imagination took over. I saw Tanner not as a four-year-old, but as a grown man, a professional baseball player, heading from first base to second after hitting a line drive right between the third baseman and the shortstop. I imagined the crowd roaring, and his team cheering him on in the dugout. And then, I returned to the present. Tanner was once again just a little boy wearing a Cincinnati Reds jersey.

We do that all the time, don’t we? We imagine our children as adults. And whether we see them as farmers or bankers or doctors or dancers, we envision them as successful. And it’s not just parents who do that – grandparents and uncles and aunts do it, too. In our eyes, the future is rosy and full of potential, because our children are full of potential. Nothing is going to keep them down! And the best parents allow their children to decide what their own futures will be. Their parents don’t dictate those futures; they help them to shape it. Now, some parents are obsessed with molding their children into the image that the parents want. Maybe it’s a father who insists that his son play football when that son would much prefer to take art lessons; or a mother who insists that her daughter go to cosmetology school when what the girl really wants to do is take pre-med classes. That rarely works out very well. In the very best case, the interests of the child, the potential of the child, and the wisdom of the parents all work together to guide that child into a future that is fulfilling and rewarding.

God works with us the very same way. God doesn’t dictate exactly who we should be, or exactly how we should live our lives. God directions to us are actually rather general. “Love God before all else. Love your neighbor as yourself. Follow the example that Jesus gave us. Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” Those are our instructions: love, humility, and justice. We can do those things in all kinds of ways! But that’s where the rub starts. We’re never sure exactly how to follow God’s instructions. The good news, though, is that God wants to partner with us as we discern exactly how to live out our Christian lives. And God is the kind of parent who knows our potential, listens to what we want, and then guides us into ways of living that are not only right for us as individuals, but also right for us as Christians! The old saying “There are many roads to Rome” is absolutely true when it comes to living Christian lives!

Many people, however, don’t realize that God works in partnership with us. Instead, they think that God is one of those dictatorial parents who decides in advance what his children should be doing, and then sits back and judges us when we don’t live our lives exactly that way. Those folks worry a lot. They don’t want to make any mistake that might make God angry. But God gives us a lot of freedom. God acts a lot like one of those GPS systems that give you directions. These days, lots of new cars have them built right in. When you want to get somewhere, you plug in your destination and a helpful voice suggests the roads you might want to take. But if you decide to take a different turn, that voice doesn’t say, “You idiot! You went the wrong way! I’ll talk to you again when you get back on track!” At least, mine doesn’t say that (fortunately)! Mine simply says quietly, “Recalculating route,” and offers new directions to help me get where I want to go.

So, am I saying that God doesn’t have a plan for us? Of course not! God’s plan includes love, peace, joy, and fulfillment in the lives of each one of us. Those plans aren’t just for God’s favorite few, either. Those plans are for everyone! That’s our ultimate destination, no matter what roads we take to get there. God plans for us to live lives that are loving, joyful, and fulfilled. And God has the same kind of plan our churches, although the destination is a little bit different. God’s plan for the church of Jesus Christ is for it to engage in mission and in ministry. I don’t think that God gives a hoot what kind of music we sing in worship, or how many potluck suppers we have, or even how many rear ends are sitting in the pews on Sunday morning. But God does care that we are spreading the good news of God’s love, and making disciples of those who have decided to follow Jesus Christ. We can partner with God to do those things in the very same way that we can partner with God to live our lives individually.

But how does that work? I’m glad that you asked! Churches can do the very same thing that individuals do when they are trying to discern what path they should follow in life. They listen to their own inner voices, and to the wisdom of others. They take stock of their own potential – things that they are good at, as well as things that they might need a little help with. They look around them at the needs of the world. And then, they try to match all those things. Fred Buechner famously observed, “Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” How better to discern what path we should follow, either as an individual or as a congregation?

We’re going to be doing just those things during the next several months as we join in New Beginnings discussion groups. We’ll be discerning our vocation as a congregation: the place where what we love to do meets the needs of the communities around us. I have no doubts at all that God has called this church to ministry. I have no doubts at all that this church has done great ministry in the past. I have no doubts at all that this church is doing good ministry right now. But that ministry can be improved; and when it is, I also have no doubts that other people will want to join us in doing it! Of course, we have doubts as we look at ourselves. We are concerned that there are very few young people in our congregation. We are concerned that older people are no longer able to be the church leaders that they once were. But I hope that we also see potential. I do! I see energy and enthusiasm for mission. I see people ready to do new kinds of ministry, although they may not be quite sure how to go about it. And I see young adults who are stepping up to be the leaders of the future.

Yes, friends, God has plans for us. God is eager to partner with us as we step out onto new roads that will take us into the future. God will help us realize our potential as we live out God’s plans for us here at Nashville UCC. When God looks at us, I’m convinced that God sees us not only as we are, but also as we might be some day as the Spirit guides us into the future. Thanks be to God!

Heaven Doesn't Wait

What is heaven like? Lots of people are writing books about it. But maybe we can experience a little bit of eternal life here any now! If you choose to read my sermon, you'll find out what I think about that.

There seems to be a lot of interest recently in the afterlife. Actually, people have always been interested in that topic. It’s only natural to want to know where we’re headed when our mortal lives are over. But in the last few years, people have wanted details! We not only want to know where we’re headed; we want to know what it’s going to be like! Who’s going to be there? What will we do there? What will God be like? Will I really meet Jesus? Because we’re all so interested in the details of heaven, quite a few books have recently appeared that claim to be able to describe it to us. For example, I imagine that you’ve all heard of the book Heaven Is For Real. We have a copy in our church library. It’s the story of a four-year-old boy’s experience of heaven after his death during emergency surgery. Many of you have read that book, and some probably saw the movie that was based on it. And there are plenty of other books that are similar to it. One is titled To Heaven and Back: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Her Death. Another is My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life. A very recent one is titled Answers about the Afterlife. It was written by a private investigator who researched this topic for 15 years; and it claims to answer “150 of the most crucial questions about what happens when we die.”

I admit to having mixed feelings about these books. If they help sustain your faith, that’s wonderful. Many of us could use a little bit more confidence in our eternal destination, after all, given the number of atheists who pooh-pooh heaven and anything else connected with Christianity. But in our curiosity to nail down exactly what happens when we slip into glory, let’s not lose sight of something. Despite the experiences of so many people who claim to have experienced the afterlife, I doubt very much if it’s going to be exactly like what we read about in books. After all, the people who wrote those books are trying to explain an eternal experience in terms that limited human beings can understand. That seems to me to be like trying to describe the ocean in terms of a puddle on the front sidewalk. Oh, sure, they’re both made of water; but that’s where the similarity ends! I’m sure that when we finally experience the afterlife, it will turn out to be far beyond anything that we can describe here on earth!

Even Jesus had to remind people that some things are simply beyond describing. In the story that you heard just a few minutes ago (Mark 12:18-27), a group of religious scholars asked a question about the afterlife based on a situation in this life. “Suppose,” they said, “that a wife had seven husbands during her lifetime. Whose wife will she be in the afterlife? Will she belong to this one or to that one? Or maybe to that one over there? Tell us, Jesus. Who will get her for eternity?” I can almost see Jesus rolling his eyes. “Things aren’t going to be like that after the resurrection!” he told them. “No one will belong to anybody else! We will all be like angels: completely different than we are now!” No, heaven won’t be just like our lives are here. The problems that we have here won’t even apply when we are in heaven. And even though we’ll still be us, we won’t be us in the same way that we are now. In Jesus’ own words, it we try to describe the afterlife in terms from our lives now, we are “badly mistaken.” That’s a tough thing to understand. Even so great a writer as Paul had trouble when he tried to explain it to the church in Corinth. “Someone may ask,” he wrote, “’How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?’ How foolish! The body that is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. The trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed!” (I Corinthians 15:35, 36, 42, 44, 52) Some questions simply can’t be answered now. And let’s face it, no matter how many books we read about after-death experiences, we won’t really know until we get there ourselves.

But I’m convinced that every now and then we catch a glimpse of heaven in this life, right now. Have you ever considered that possibility? Most people believe that eternal life begins when we die. But if eternal life really is “eternal” – if it exists beyond space and beyond time (and I’m convinced that it does) – then surely we can experience it in this life, even if it’s only a fleeting feeling now and then. The Christian writer Fred Buechner has considered the possibility of experiencing eternal life here and now. He believes that we miss brushes with heaven because of the clamor that’s all around us here on earth. “This side of Paradise,” he writes, “people are with God in such a remote and spotty way that their experience of eternal life is at best like the experience you get of a place [while] approaching it at night in a fast train. Even the saints see only an occasional light go whipping by, hear only a sound or two over the clatter of the rails. The rest of us aren’t awake enough to see as much as that, or we’re mumbling over nightcaps in the club car. But the day will break, and the train will pull into the station, and the ones who have managed to stay with it will finally alight. We think of eternal life as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.” A cartoon in the Sunday Dayton Daily News several weeks back considered the very same possibility. The cartoon was Red and Rover, a comic strip about a boy Red and his dog Rover. In that day’s cartoon, the two of them were sitting in the shade of a tree on a beautiful summer’s day. “Pinch me, boy,” Red says. “Pinch you?” Rover asks. “Nip me on the arm, then,” Red responds, “but not too hard, OK?” “To make sure you’re not dreaming?” Rover asks. “No,” Red says, “to make sure I’m alive – because this is what I imagine heaven to be like.”

Maybe we can experience a little bit of heaven right now. I invite you to use your imagination. First, think about the place where you feel closest to God. For me, that would be on the beach, with the waves lapping on the shore, and the rays of the sun spilling over my shoulders. For you, it might be a starlit night, the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, or even the silence of a cathedral. In my God place, I’m quiet; but some of you will feel God while you are doing something creative – gardening, perhaps, or woodworking, or cooking, or painting Now, wherever you feel God’s presence, and whatever you are doing when you feel it, close your eyes and go there in your imagination. Sit in silence for about a minute, experiencing your God place. How do you feel? I hope that you feel a deep peace way down in the center of your being. While you’re there, you feel time and space slip away; and you feel as though you’re a part of something way bigger than yourself. Maybe you feel a connection with the universe, and the sense that you belong here. And I hope that you feel loved and accepted; because you are! Now come back to the physical place where you are right now. But even though you leave behind your God place, don’t leave the feelings behind! Hang on to the feelings of peace and connectedness and acceptance – because I think that’s a little bit of heaven.

Heaven, you know, is no more and no less than the fulfillment of everything that we’ve ever yearned for deeply. We want peace, security, acceptance, and love. Every now and then, we touch the fringe of that place in this life; and we are indeed blessed if we realize it when it happens. The Welsh pastor and poet R. S. Thomas wrote a poem about eternal life, and the blessedness of realizing what it is when we experience it. I offer it to you now as I bring my thoughts today to a close. The title is “The Bright Field.”

I have seen the sun break through

to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seems as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Getting the Message

Why do Christians sometimes proclaim the message of Jesus so differently? Some of them preach love and acceptance, while others preach only sin and judgment. What's up with that? It might be because of the way they understand the Bible. If this makes you stop and think, you might want to read this sermon.

It is comforting to realize that Jesus’ disciples didn’t always understand what he was talking about. In fact, according to the gospel of Mark, the disciples weren’t really the brightest crayons in the pack. This morning’s text is a perfect example. When this story takes place, Jesus has just fed four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a couple of fish. The disciples are now in a boat with him travelling to the other side of the Sea of Galilee (Mark 8:14-21). On the way, Jesus warns them to “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees and of Herod.” But the disciples don’t understand what he means. They think that Jesus is taking them to task because they didn’t bring along any lunch! They don’t understand that Jesus is contrasting the power of God that just nourished so many people with the oppressive power of the authorities of their day.  Even when he tries to point them in the right direction, they don’t get it. “Do you still not understand?” he finally asks in frustration.

“Do you still not understand?” It is a question that Jesus could very well ask us today. Even people who have grown up in a Christian household and attended church all their lives sometimes misunderstand Jesus’ message. In fact, that message is sometimes garbled beyond recognition! Often, that confusion is because people don’t understand the Bible. Lots of people think that it’s a book of rules that God insists that we follow; when in reality, it is a collection of writings that proclaim God’s love and power of liberation to all kinds of people and in all sorts of situations, with Jesus as the climax of the story. I have to wonder how many people these days even read the Bible. Lots of people don’t. Others just read the parts that they like – maybe the 23^rd Psalm and some of Luke’s parables. Now, I’m not trying to beat up anybody up. We all read the parts that we like. Some of us even have those parts memorized. (I know that I do!) And that’s wonderful, because we can pull up those verses at the moment that we need them! But the Bible is there to do many things: to comfort us, to inspire us, to challenge us, and sometimes even to criticize us! And to let it do its job fully, we have to know something about it. So this morning, I’m going to suggest some important things that we need to remember about the Bible if we’re going to understand it.

First of all, the Bible was written by lots of different people over the span of about 1,000 years. That’s a long time! The earliest book was probably written in the time of King David; and the latest was probably written in about 100 AD. That means that even the most recent book was written almost 2,000 years ago, and the oldest another thousand years before that. In addition, the Bible was written in cultures that are very unfamiliar to us. Think about the ways that we are different from our biblical brothers and sisters. We aren’t a nation of farmers and shepherds like Old Testament people were, scratching out a living within sight of a fortified city where we take cover when the neighboring kingdom decides to attack. And we don’t live under the boot of an imperial power like Rome in which only 10% of the people have any rights. Most of us don’t really understand the times that gave birth to our scriptures.

Making the issue even more confusing is that different books of the Bible were written in very different situations. Some of the scriptures were written when Israel and Judah were independent nations ruled by kings, others were written during the Babylonian Exile when the Israelites were prisoners in another nation, and some were written when Rome was their imperial overlord. That’s why different books of the Bible are written from different points of view. God’s concern for his people is expressed in a way appropriate for the time in which it was written. The book of Joshua, for example, takes place during the conquest of the Promised Land by God’s people. In that text, the people of Canaan are the enemies of the Israelites. In fact, the Israelites are told to kill all of them! But Isaiah, which was written many years later, insists that people of all countries are God’s people; and that God cares about everyone. You can’t reconcile those points of view, because they were written in different times and for different sets of readers. And so, it is not enough to claim, “The Bible says…” The Bible says all kinds of things; and some of them simply do not apply to us. You know the saying, “The devil can quote scripture for his own purposes.” The devil did that with Jesus in the wilderness when Jesus was tempted (see Matthew 4 or Luke 4 for that story); and the devil still does that, all the time! To really understand the Biblical message, it is important to know the difference between a “proof text” and a “representative text.” A proof text shows up only once or twice in scripture. For example, “Don’t wear clothing woven of two kinds of material” is a proof text. (Leviticus 19:19) Very few people pay attention to that anymore. On the other hand, just a couple of verses away, we are told: “Don’t go about spreading slander, and don’t do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life.” (Leviticus 19:16).That sounds a lot like Jesus’ instruction to “Love one another as I have loved you.” That is a representative text, and you can find variations of it in many places in the Bible.

And Jesus can help us sort through all of this. If you’re not sure what to believe, go to the gospels. Jesus interprets scripture all the time! In fact, I think of Jesus as the lens through which we see everything else in scripture. He’s like a pair of eyeglasses. Without Jesus, everything we read is fuzzy, and we start to wonder what is important. But when we use Jesus as our glasses, we can judge the message of the rest of the Bible with much more faithfulness. My own rule of thumb is that “If a text proclaims love and liberation just as Jesus did, then I should pay attention to it.” If it doesn’t proclaim either of those things, then I’m probably safe setting it on the back burner.

So, let’s go back to this morning’s story. What is Jesus saying by telling the disciples to “Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees”? Not surprisingly, it involves the Bible. The Pharisees interpreted the Old Testament scriptures. They were famous for telling people to follow all the rules that are found there; and they were also famous for holding people to their own very high standards! And what was Jesus’ opinion of them? “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill, and cumin – but you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy, and faithfulness… You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!” (Matthew 23:23-24) “Don’t you understand?” Jesus asked his disciples. “Don’t you see what is important?” Just a little bit of that legalism will spread through your whole life, just like yeast spreads through a bunch of dough. It’s not important to follow every law in the Old Testament. Jesus didn’t care about that! But it is important to love others, to know that God loves us, and to participate in God’s work of liberation from oppression wherever we can!

The story is told about Karl Barth, one of the most important Christian biblical scholars of the 20^th century. During his lifetime, he authored the multi-volume Church Dogmatics, a work that influenced Christians around the world. It is said that near the end of his career, he gave a lecture to a packed assembly hall of his colleagues. His lecture was complicated and made many fine distinctions. At its conclusion, all the people in his distinguished audience honored him with a standing ovation. He then indicated that he would answer questions. A young graduate student got up. “Dr. Barth,” he asked, “your theology is complicated, and I had difficulty following everything you said. Can you sum up your thinking for me in a sentence or two?” The audience murmured in embarrassment. How could anyone expect Karl Barth to summarize the theology that he had spent a lifetime putting together? But Barth just smiled. Leaning towards the microphone, he said, “Of course. Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so.”

That’s the message of this whole wonderful, confusing, irritating, thought-provoking book. Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so. And Jesus loves everyone else, too! This is the message of the Gospel of John, and it’s the message of the whole Bible, as well: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son, that whosoever trusts him should not perish, but have eternal life. And God sent his son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” (John 3:16-17) I am absolutely convinced that, in the end, that’s the only message that God really cares about.

The Most Difficult Job

Need a new job? Why not be a prophet! Oh, wait... Maybe not. Prophets are rarely popular people, and usually ignored, if not resented or even hated. But they are absolutely necessary to God's people! If you read this sermon, you'll find out why.

Those of you who use Facebook are probably familiar with the quizzes that pop up on your daily feed from time to time. For those of you who don’t use Facebook: these quizzes are just free online entertainment. They claim to tell you who you “really” are by answering a few questions. For example, one that I took recently asked, “Which witch are you most like?” Based on my answers, it compared me to fictional characters like the sea-witch Ursula from The Little Mermaid, the sorceress Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty, and even the three weird sisters from MacBeth. I must confess that I was somewhat disappointed in the result. After clearly stating that I am a bad witch, it concluded that I was most like Glinda, the good witch in The Wizard of Oz. I had hoped for a more exciting character!

I imagine that somewhere online there is a quiz that asks, “Which Bible character are you most like?” If you ever take such a quiz, you can rejoice if the result says that you’re like Paul or Abraham or Ruth, or maybe even Mary or Joseph. But if it says that you’re like one of the prophets, my suggestion is that you run for the hills! You do not want to be a prophet! Prophets have the most difficult job in the whole biblical text. That’s because the job of a prophet is to speak for God. Prophets carry messages from God to the people. And those messages are a mixed bag. Sometimes prophets remind the people of God’s promises. For example, you all know the text from Isaiah 11: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse: from his roots a branch will bear fruit. And the spirit of the Lord will rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding.” That’s a promise of the coming Messiah. But for every uplifting promise, there are many more warnings. This text is also from Isaiah: “Thus says the Lord: Jerusalem staggers, and Judah is falling. Their words and deeds are against the Lord, defying his glorious presence. The look on their faces testifies against them! Woe to them! They have brought disaster upon themselves!” (3:8-9) That’s not such an upbeat message!

The reason for the warnings is that God’s people frequently forget how they are supposed to behave. And so, prophets take people to task. Understandably, those people usually don’t want to hear it. And when the prophets’ targets are political leaders, the situation can get very sticky indeed! Many of you will remember the conflict that existed between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Governor George Wallace. While Dr. King preached the equality of the races, Governor Wallace clung to the idea of segregation. That kind of conflict is nothing new. The story that you just heard from the gospel of Mark (6:14-29) is over 2,000 years old; but a lot of it could have happened yesterday.

Let me give you a little bit of background to this story. You won’t understand the players without a scorecard! The Jewish ruler who had authority over Galilee in Jesus’ day was named Herod. (This is the same Herod, by the way, who sings the jazzy song in Jesus Christ, Superstar.) His father was Herod the Great, the bloodthirsty tyrant who was king of Judea when Jesus was born. Our Herod had originally married for political purposes, which was nothing uncommon in that day and age. But then he met Herodias, who was married to his half-brother Phillip. By the way, Herodias was also Herod’s niece – the daughter of another one of his half-brothers. Herod was so smitten with Herodias that he promptly divorced his wife, and persuaded Herodias to leave her husband Phillip and marry him. It sounds like something out of reality TV, doesn’t it? (And you thought that the Kardashians were bad!) John the Baptist was disgusted with their behavior, and he apparently didn’t keep his thoughts to himself. As a result, Herodias went gunning for John the Baptist; so Herod arrested him and threw him into prison.

Let’s stop the story there for a moment, while John’s head is still on his shoulders. Did you notice that Herod had mixed feelings for John? On the one hand, he was madder than a wet hen at the comments John made about his morals. On the other hand, though, Herod respected him. John the Baptist was everything that Herod was not – courageous, eloquent, and moral. John had the strength of his convictions, and the courage to speak out against what he believed was wrong. Mark tells us that Herod “was greatly puzzled” with John the Baptist; and that Herod wanted to protect him. In fact, Herod “liked to listen” to what John had to say. Why do you suppose he felt that way? The story doesn’t tell us; but maybe it was because John awoke feelings in Herod that he hadn’t felt in years – not since he was an idealistic boy growing up in a household that was anything but idealistic! Maybe it was because John held a vision before Herod’s eyes that he secretly yearned to see in reality. Maybe John offered Herod a view of a life that he could have instead of the life that he did have. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann claims that “it is the [job] of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination.” He goes on to say that prophets nourish a perception that is something other than that of the culture that surrounds us. (This quote is taken from “Living by the Word” by Marilyn McEntyre. It appeared on page 18 of the July 8, 2015 issue of the Christian Century.) In other words, prophets offer us a vision of what could be in addition to what is. Prophets ask “What if…?” and invite us to imagine it with them. Martin Luther King offered us that vision when he declared that he had “been to the mountaintop” and seen all races growing up in peace, harmony, and unity. Did Herod secretly wish that he could scrap all the politics and power plays that are part and parcel of being a ruler? Perhaps. He was certainly disturbed by John’s message. And that is part of a prophet’s job – to be disturbing. At their best, prophets shatter our comfort zones, challenge our assumptions, and wake up our consciences. That’s why prophets usually end up in jail – or worse. We don’t much like to be disturbed. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d rather be left alone.

Let’s go back to Herod’s story. You know how it ends. One day Herod gave a birthday party for himself; and part of the entertainment was a dance by Herodias’ daughter. Tradition says that her name was Salome, and that her dance was the Dance of the Seven Veils. The text doesn’t say that; but in any case, it must have been a heck of a dance! Without thinking, Herod blurted out that she could have anything she wanted – even half of his kingdom! But she didn’t want half of his kingdom. Instead, she wanted the head of John the Baptist on a platter. Herod couldn’t go back on the promise that he had made to her – not in front of all those people! So John the Baptist was silenced at last.

No, you don’t want to be a prophet. Prophets are not only called to speak for God, they are called to hold God’s vision for us in front of our eyes – whether we want to see it or not – and to ask us in the bluntest possible terms why we aren’t working towards that vision! Prophets are as counter-cultural as flower children were in the 1960s. They don’t fit in anywhere! As Flannery O’Connor put it, “You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you odd.” Fortunately, not many of us are called to be prophets. But we are called to pay attention to them! We are called to constantly reevaluate the culture around us and what it demands of us and of our fellow human beings. We are called to constantly reevaluate ourselves and to change ourselves when we are following the world’s vision instead of the vision of God. And sometimes we are called to take a risk in order to follow God’s vision. Fortunately, that usually doesn’t end in our losing our heads, or even being thrown into prison; but it can mean risking our social status or our reputation or even our job! Yes, when we not only know the truth, but follow it, that truth will make us odd.

But maybe that’s not so bad. After all, Jesus was a bit odd, himself. He didn’t have a home. He went around with a bunch of rag-tag followers. He ate dinner with prostitutes and tax collectors and all kinds of lower class people. Why, he even associated with women! Maybe it wouldn’t hurt any of us to be a little bit odd like that. In fact, maybe if the church were as odd as Jesus, it would actually do what God is calling it to do – to be a prophetic voice to the whole world, calling it to repent and change its ways. And that wouldn’t be odd at all. That would be wonderful!