Sermons

Text: Psalm 112

"... Are you happy?

I admit that I resist this question a little bit – for lots of reasons. I grew up being told that God never meant for us to be happy; content perhaps and faithful for sure but not so much happy. Happiness, after all, was just an excuse for being selfish. So I grew up with a certain amount of skepticism about even wanting to be happy. If I was happy, then something was probably wrong.
On the other hand, I also got other messages. At one point, I stumbled on to the Westminster Shorter Catechism – it’s a long story – and you Presbyterians out there know that the first question of that catechism is: What is man’s chief end? And the answer is: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

I, of course knew about the glorifying God part but I was stunned by the idea that we might actually be meant to enjoy God. Who knew? And this out of the mouths of those stern, doing all things decently and order, Calvinists!

Of course, later in life I came across that quote attributed to that sometime Quaker and great American diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

A few years ago, I was in Denver for a meeting and, as we were driving out of town, I saw this huge church with its name in giant letters on the front of the building, “The Happy Church.” I thought it was some kind of joke but I learned that The Happy Church has a couple thousand members and has just now bought a shopping mall. Apparently, for The Happy Church, happiness is good for business.

And this, of course, doesn’t do anything for my skepticism about happiness. If I look at the world around us, advertisements tell me that happiness is just one purchase away. Happiness seems to be a masquerade for self-centeredness and superficiality. And look around. There is pain. There is poverty. The news coming out of those economic indicators isn’t very happy. And, frankly, I’ve begun to wonder if happiness isn’t a luxury we can no longer afford.

Nonetheless, we also seem to use this question, ‘Are you happy?’ as a kind of test – a kind of bottom line – about life. You might not understand the choices a friend is making but you might ask, ‘Are you happy?’ as a way of trying to move beyond all those other questions to get to what you really hope for that person’s well-being. We hear parents say about their children, “I don’t understand what my children are doing or why they are doing it but I just want them to be happy.”

For all its abuses and misunderstandings, happiness still seems to function as a kind of test of our well-being. ..."

Text: Luke 13:10-17

Text: Luke 12:49-56

"... I realize it’s probably dangerous to talk about time at the beginning of a sermon. Even if you weren’t thinking about what time it is, you probably are now …

When my dad went to pastor his second church, he discovered that there was a clock built into the pulpit. It was a suburban church with lots of busy people and they apparently wanted to make sure the service didn’t go too long. One Sunday, dad was preaching away and, as he was making a point, he slammed his hand down on the pulpit for emphasis. You could hear the crash all the way out in the pews. Dad had smashed the clock. “That takes care of that,” he said and just went on preaching.

By the next Sunday, a giant wall clock appeared on the back wall of the sanctuary so every time dad looked up from the pulpit, he looked directly into the face of a clock.

Churches seem to want their preachers to know what time it is. And, ironically, it is the task of a preacher to ask: What time is it?

Jesus says, “How is it that you can interpret the signs of earth and sky but you can’t tell what time it is?”

When we talk about time, these days, it seems like we mostly talk about it in terms of quantity – and we don’t have enough of it. In modern times, we have gotten really good at measuring it. If I ask you what time it is, you can look at your watch and tell me down to the second. Games and races have been decided by the smallest increments of time. We have the capacity to quantify time in smaller and smaller units. And it makes me wonder if the modern scarcity of time has something to do with dividing it into so many little bits.

In ancient time, people thought about time in bigger chunks. They thought in terms of the natural rhythms of sun and moon and stars and in seasons and generations. And this, it seems to me, with all our capacity for measuring the minute detail of time, is something our modern world is missing. If it was true in Jesus’ day that people whose lives depended on knowing the signs and the seasons couldn’t figure out what time it was, how much more true is it for us?

We seem addicted to the short-term: short-term goals and gain and gratification. It is hard to get us to see beyond the immediate while the tradition of the great native peoples of the Iroquois Confederacy was to mandate that chiefs consider the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation yet to come.

If we thought about time in those terms, then the question, ‘what time is it?’ becomes a question not just of quantity but of quality. You probably know someone who has received a terminal diagnosis and the next question he or she is likely to ask is, “How much time do I have?” It is, of course, a question not only about the quantity of time but about its quality and about priorities and decisions that need to be made.

I have been listening to the conversations about climate change with the fires in Russia and the 100-mile block of ice that broke off the glacier in Greenland and the fears of increasing acidification of the seas. It’s a dire diagnosis and, not surprisingly, people want to know how much time we have. How much time before sea levels rise high enough to inundate our shores? How much time before there are greater stretches of drought and famine throughout the world? How much time before the chemistry of our oceans change and the delicate balance of sea-life is forever disrupted?

How much time do we have?  ..."

Text: Luke 12:32-48

"... When I first read today’s gospel passage to prepare for this sermon, I had a flashback to my early days as a Christian in a very conservative, even fundamentalist, Baptist church. This was one of the many “fear” passages. The Master (Jesus) would return and would judge you based on what you were doing or thinking at that moment. Well for a teenage boy, whose thoughts were rarely pure – this was certainly not good news. Jesus seemed all intrusive and almost waiting to catch me at my worst.
And, admittedly, there are some difficult phrases in this passage. The servants are expected to not only remain awake until the master returns, but are expected to be geared for immediate action. And those who abuse their positions or otherwise do not follow the master’s wishes will be severely punished. Just reading it again made me tense and anxious. This passage to me has always been somewhat fear inducing.

I did not realize how deeply ingrained in me this was until I noticed that even after reading through this passage several times, I had missed that the passage actually begins with “Fear not”!
“Fear not!”

This passage which still causes me moments of anxiety actually begins with a call to move beyond fear. In fact the entire section that precedes this is one that admonishes me to cease worrying. The parallel verses in Matthew about not worrying are ones that I often quote to myself in my way to many moments of anxiety.

“Don’t worry!” “Fear not” Great words of wisdom and advice! That is, if one can truly hear them.
From where does this fear and worry come?

A first suggestion comes immediately – sell what you have and give the money to poorer people. Make purses for yourselves that don’t wear out – treasures that don’t fail you – that thieves cannot steal and moths cannot destroy. Let me say a word about the view on the economy during this ancient time. It was thought that the economy was basically static. The amount of wealth did not increase or decrease. Therefore, in order for people to gain more wealth, someone had to be generous and give it to them – or they had to steal it. The writer of Luke spends a great deal of time addressing people’s relationship with money. It is thought that he was writing to a largely well off gentile community. Luke’s Jesus frequently challenges people to examine how possessions control their lives and relationships. It seems that then, as now, the dominant culture acts out of the myth of scarcity. There is a limited amount and I have to hold onto what is mine. The result is a constant, underlying sense of fear that it is somehow going to be taken away or stolen. In light of the recent history of those who controlled banking in this country and around the world – there is certainly a basis for this fear. Those with little or nothing lost what they had – while most of those who had been manipulating the market stayed relatively comfortable. The concept of “kingdom” is very much alive and well. ..."

Text: Luke 12: 13-21

".... You can never have too much cheese, I thought a week ago. I brought home smoked Gouda and discovered a new block of cheddar in the refrigerator as well. Enough! I said to myself. Plenty of cheese I love, and too much of a good thing is wonderful! I grew up with a sense of scarcity—we were always worried there wasn’t enough. I learned to conserve not only emotion, but little dabs of food.

What turns up when I searched for the word enough, and the phrase too much was “You can never have too much fleece” –a website. “You can never have too much sky.” –a quotation from a book titled The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (1985) who writes, “You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad.” Then I found, “You can never, ever have too much Twilight….” That, of course, is for those who travel from Forks all and over the Northwest to find filming sites for the latest blockbuster. If you have to ask what Twilight is, then you can never have too much information.

Our problem is way too much information. Ten years ago there were just under three hundred thousand books published. But this year? One million one hundred thousand—more than three times the number. Then there were only 12 billion daily emails requiring 2.7 hours a week on line. Ten years later there are 247 billion daily emails which require 18 hours a week on line. Is that too much email? Or time on line? Google searches ten years ago totaled a million every day. Today they total 2 billion. Ever tried to fasting from email?

One of my Roman Catholic friends, a nun, was fasting from Papal Encyclicals ten years ago. Now, I imagine, she is fasting from any more news of the Roman Church hierarchy.

What is enough? When should we say when? And about what? Our friend in the parable does not know his exuberant plans to build more grain bins are useless. He cannot know he is about to die. Jesus doesn’t suggest he dies because he plans to build himself more storage, only that he couldn’t know what the future holds and he might have thought differently about his good fortune. His zeal takes no one but himself into account. Might he have thought to share?

Jesus spoke nearly six times more about wealth and abundance and its proper use than about prayer. Wealth is a given, you see. It’s part of Creation. Part of why it is good. Wealth is to be used for the good of all, the common good. Everything life offers are God’s gifts to all of us, not property or landscape we can claim, divide, buy and sell.

Of course we have done just that. But due to the mortgage debacle and distrust for banks, some of us are rethinking the value of home ownership itself. We can have too large a mortgage! Smaller might be better—for us and for the planet. ..."

Text: Luke 10:38-42

"... Those of you who have heard me talk before probably get that I grew up with a pretty literalistic, authoritarian view of the Bible. So, when my God-fearing, Bible-believing mother would get to this story about Mary and Martha and say something like, ‘It’s just not right that Martha gets reprimanded by Jesus for doing her work while Mary just sits as Jesus’ feet,” I had to listen up.

My mom, whose name happens to be Mary, saw herself as a ‘Martha’ – busy with all the household tasks, mostly alone in trying to get all the work done, perhaps a bit insecure about being appreciated. That my mother would read this story and step outside her theological framework to say that Jesus might have gotten this one wrong, should have been cause for all of us to listen up!

And, in fact, when Jane Schaberg writes about this story in The Women’s Bible Commentary, she says, while this story may look like it empowers women, it actually undermines their leadership on two counts:

One, because Martha, whose serving in other places might be described as filling the role of a ‘deacon,’ is instead discounted and, two, because, while Mary is ‘sitting at the feet of Jesus’ and therefore could be authorized as a teacher – as Paul was having sat at the feet of the great Jewish teacher, Gamaliel -- she is, instead, seen as a passive listener, content to sit there soaking up the good news but with no particular mandate to preach it.
So, professor Schaberg says, the only way to infuse this story with the wisdom of the women about whom it presumes to speak, is to include the experience of women themselves who have labored too long – alone – in the work of making a home and to empower women to preach the good news they know.

I’m guessing that my mom and Bible scholar Jane Schaberg may have little in common when it comes to theology or the ramifications of a feminist critique, but it sounds like they are on the same page when it comes to the experience of women and need to listen up!

Which seems, when it comes down to it, the point of the story anyway. Actually, in context, Martha should be the hero of the story. This is all part of a longer passage that begins with Jesus sending out the 72 disciples on a training mission in which welcome is the test. And here Jesus himself is a traveler who enters a village “where a woman named Martha welcomed him to her home.” Martha is demonstrating the very thing Jesus is trying to teach the other disciples about welcome and hospitality – except that he also says (Luke 10.16) “anyone who listens to you, listens to me.” Together, Mary and Martha convey the whole picture; together they are a story of active listening; together they are the teachers of the kind of community those early followers of Jesus were imagining – places of welcome and hospitality and care for those in need … and the priority of listening.

I can’t imagine that the lectionary actually anticipated this, but if you listen to NPR, you probably have heard that today is the first “World Listening Day.” Its mission is to “celebrate the practice of listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and acoustic ecology.” It is an invitation to listen up brought to us by acoustic scientists and environmentalists. ..."

Text: Luke 10:25-37

"... There is a story about four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman’s yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, “Nothing, I just helped him cry.”

A good neighbor.

Jesus tells his familiar story in Luke 10 of a good neighbor who happens to be a Samaritan; which is remarkable not just because of the way ‘good people’ thought about those half-breed, heretical Samaritans but because Jesus himself had just been turned away by a Samaritan village. See Luke 9. Even those who are seen as ‘outcasts’ can do some ‘casting out’ of their own. Of course, as I mentioned last week, Jesus had been thrown out of his own hometown in Luke 4 so Jesus knew that, whether close to home or far away, people can be un-neighborly.

So, remarkable though it seems, Jesus tells this story about a good neighbor who happens to be a Samaritan. It’s not that being a Samaritan is incidental to the story, it’s just that Jesus is trying to make a point about how we see people. And one of the ways to read this story is for the characters: Jesus, the expert in the Law, the wounded traveler, the robbers, the Samaritan, and the priest and Levite who pass by on the other side. Although I have to say that, when I read the story for the characters, I usually end up feeling guilty. When I see someone broken down on the side of the road and I drive by, guess what story comes to mind?

And that seems to be the point of the story: to ask ourselves who we see ourselves to be in relation to those in need.

So another way to read this story is for its questions. The lawyer’s self-justifying question is, “Who is my neighbor?” Perhaps he wants Jesus to tell him who qualifies to be deserving of his compassion. But Jesus turns the question around and asks: “Who was the neighbor?” In other words, not who qualifies to be my neighbor but what kind of neighbor do I want to be?

It’s a rhetorical question because the answer is obvious – a good one, no matter who you are or where you are from.

Lately I’ve been reading this story in terms of distance. A story about “neighbors” is, to some degree, about how we assess the distance between ourselves and others – and even the distance between ourselves and God. The priest and the Levite not only “pass by,” they pass by “on the other side.” They want to keep their distance from the wounded traveler lying on the road.

One of the struggles I have with this story is that keeping your distance isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you’re driving, keeping your distance is important. Sometimes getting some perspective on a situation requires some objective distance. As an American Baptist minister, I had to sign a code of ethics that commits me to have good boundaries around relationships and work in order to keep that professional distance that is necessary for my health and your well-being. While our Mission Statement says, “We will know no boundaries we will not cross,” there are some boundaries that should not be crossed.

Even when it comes to love, keeping some distance can be a good thing. I’ve had the privilege to do several weddings this summer and, in the most recent, the couple had chosen a reading from the Arabic poet, Kahlil Gibran, that includes this line: “Let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.” ..."

Text:

"... Now is the time, as none before, to break all binding hate
And hear a Shepherd call us and guide us through one gate …
To peace.

It’s probably safe to say, on this national holiday, that the Shepherd at our national gate … is a lady – Lady Liberty standing in New York Harbor, representing the light of freedom and democracy and the historic friendship between France and the United States. Thanks to the countless waves of immigrants that passed through that harbor and the poem by Emma Lazarus, she has also become a symbol of welcome.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, the poem says,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame … and then those famous lines
… cries she
' With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Notice that Emma Lazarus does not say, ‘Let them come,’ but “Give me, your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.”

Imagine that as an immigration policy: “Give me … Send these.” Imagine this as something more than beautiful words enshrined on a plaque but that the shepherd at our national gate is the Mother of Exiles and the test or our national character is the quality of our world-wide welcome.

And if, in response to this welcome there are those who come and choose to be citizens of this nation, what we will ask of them is a pledge – a pledge of allegiance …
… A pledge, by the way, written by a Baptist preacher, Francis Bellamy, in 1892. Except that the one he wrote is not the one we say. What he wrote was:
I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the republic for which it stands; one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

You notice what’s missing … In 1924, ‘my flag’ was replaced with, “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America,” and, in 1954 by act of Congress, “under God” was added to ‘one nation, indivisible.’

Barbara Bellamy Wright says that her grandfather “would have objected strongly to this change as it changed the fundamental meaning … He had considered that ‘One nation, indivisible’ conveyed the deep meaning that after the Civil War our nation could not be divided,” and the reference to God “tampered with the original meaning of the pledge.” (A. Schlesinger Jr. in July 10, 2002 Seattle PI)

As a Baptist, Bellamy would not have been inclined to mix state and religion – especially in a national pledge that was meant to highlight that we are one nation undivided by all those divisions of race and ethnicity and faith.

I should also mention that Francis Bellamy was a socialist “dedicated to the ideal of a cooperative commonwealth.” His critique of capitalism became so unpopular that he was eventually forced to resign his pulpit at Bethany Baptist Church in Boston, MA. A Baptist socialist wrote the pledge of allegiance -- think of that the next time you recite it. ..."
 

Text: Luke 9.57-62, Galatians 5.22

"... Somewhere over the rainbow /Way up high
There's a place that I heard of/Once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow/Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream/Really do come true….

I don’t believe this, really. But I do like to dream. And in spite of the oil spill, housing slump, unemployment, and war—it’s still good to dream. Out of dreams come new visions and out of visions, new realities. Down here under the rainbow, we can live each day only as it unfolds. There really is no other way. Life is what happens while we’re making other plans. It is a demanding paradox both to accept what is and also to dream how it might be different.

The song Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a classic because we need to dream, and sometimes to escape. We need to escape the old stories of life that reveal we not only compare ourselves to others but build new worlds on the backs of those we can degrade and dominate. In the old story we make the same mistakes, individually and collectively; we create stumbling blocks for yet another group, another culture, one more person we can put down. The old story causes pain and suffering.

We have been taught to inflict pain on others. You know that song, too:
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear;/You’ve got to be taught from year to year
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear /You’ve got to be carefully taught.

Thanks to Harold Arlen and Rogers and Hammerstein we have a graphic picture of the paradox of reality. In my college freshman American History course, these lyrics were on our final exam. The question? How was this true in the 19th century? I was so depressed I asked the professor how he coped with that dark century. How could we handle the despair? Was faith all we had and not influence?

We do have faith. And we have the new story of how faith compels us to live a moral life and live up to those morals in our relationships. Down here under the rainbow we dream beyond the rainbow while we learn to be more loving and to influence the policies and practices of others. We do learn. One of our heroes wrote,
They came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
And then they came for the Jews.
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me
And by that time no one was left to speak up.

Whenever we stand by and ignore, allow, or tolerate others to be shut out, shut up, and shut down, we risk one day being the one shunned. Discrimination against anyone risks discrimination against us all. Yet, prejudice is very natural. We all have it. Regardless that my parents did not discriminate with race, they did with ability. At their table I learned to judge, to criticize and even to demean. In the family story, sarcasm trumped anger, which we suppressed. ..."
 

Text:: Genesis 17:1-9, 15-19, 18:11-15

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