Psalm 133
The month of June holds many important dates in my life as an American citizen. June 14, 1775 is the birthday of the United States Army. On the same date two years later was our first Flag Day. On June 12, 1898, (Pista Sai Nayon) the Philippines were freed from the Spanish rule only to endure many more years of foreign rule until she received her independence from the United States. On June 6, 1944, the Allied Forces stormed onto the Normandy beaches to free Europe from the Axis powers. Having served my country for 36 years in the United States Army, you can understand why these dates are so meaningful to me.
This coming Saturday is Flag Day. You have heard me lament the fact that I don’t see our nation’s colors displayed prominently in my community even on national holidays. As a matter of fact, I have voiced my concerns over the fact that we overlook flying the United States flag even on holidays here at Immanuel. When I was a student at Polytechnic High School here in Los Angeles, raising and lowering the flag was a daily activity, reserved for the boys in the Knights, an honors service organization. Even when I became a Knight, seniority prevailed.
I have always looked forward to Flag Day so I can experience a special flag raising ceremony in a school yard. But I have not seen this event being observed at my neighborhood schools in recent years. However, I can still relive the experience of bygone years…seeing in my minds eye the little ones standing straight and proud under the flag with their hands over their hearts as they recite the pledge that many of them barely understand.
These recollections have caused me to wonder, for over 50% of these children in my neighborhood aren’t Americans, at least not yet. However, they represent the next generation that will make their mark on the world, either here in the United States or elsewhere.
There was an article in the Los Angeles Times about ten years ago which told of a visit by fifth grade students from the Ivanhoe Street Elementary School to our nation’s capital. This school is a few miles from us here at Immanuel. Each child was required to keep a diary of the day’s events and record his or her reflections of the activities. It was very interesting to read what the various sites, such as the White House, and the several Memorials meant to them. As I was preparing this message, I was wondering what their reflections would be today in light of the events that have taken place in world… 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq.
What a wonderful opportunity it was for these children to be included in that historical learning process. I hope that their experience will help them to live as good citizens in the coming years.
Have you ever thought of what you might say if asked by these children about our nation’s flag?
I think I would like to tell them that on the first Flag Day, George Washington said, “We take the stars from the heaven, and the red from the Mother Country, separating it by the white stripes, thus showing we are separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing liberty.
I imagine I would tell them about the homemade flag that flew over Fort McHenry on that September 14th in 1814, outlined against the rocket’s red glare; and pointing out that the flag consisted of 15 stars and 15 stripes (2 more than needed).
Would these children be thrilled to hear of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders storming San Juan Hill and planting our flag over a century ago? Would these youngsters be proud of the six U.S. Marines raising our flag on Iwo-Jima, during World War II? And what about Sunday, July 20, 1969, at 11:45 p.m., Eastern Time when Colonel Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, Jr. and civilian Neil A. Armstrong touched down on the moon and subsequently planted our flag there, 240,000 miles from earth?
Our flag has been planted in many places, but perhaps no better place than in our schools, for children to learn their first stumbling lessons in what it means to be an American. With its red for courage, white for liberty, and blue for loyalty, the flag stands for a heritage we’ve been given, and a future we’re making.
The flag is but one symbol of our nation.
For thousands of years, the eagle has been admired for its grandeur, its grace in flight, and its great size and awesome power. The soaring eagle is also a stirring picture of the true meaning of liberty. Assisted by his powerful wings, the eagle glides effortlessly to an altitude of over 2,400 feet and is capable of using his wings to carry other eagles to safety. Turbulent winds only cause him to fly higher and faster.
The eagle’s keen eyesight enables him to be sensitive to approaching danger and to protect himself and family. The eagle displays the sense of responsibility that is a genuine companion of true liberty. He mates for life and returns to the same nest each year, making necessary repairs and additions. He takes an active role in providing for his family and in teaching the young to fly.
In so many ways, the eagle illustrates the life, victory, power and freedom that Jesus Christ came to give those of us who place our faith in Him.
The eagle also pictures many of those character qualities that made America great and that must be reinforced in our generation if we are to preserve for our children and grandchildren the freedom which God has so graciously entrusted to us.
PRAYER: Father, a new generation looks to us to see what it means to be an American. Let our actions show them it is a good and proud thing to be a part of a nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Amen.
June 25, 2008
June 8, 2008 + Infectious Holiness + Elizabeth Gibbs Zehnder
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
MP3 File
In this text we get a series of rapid fire vignettes – each one is nice on its own – Jesus calling Matthew the disciple, Jesus healing the woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, and Jesus restoring life to a 12 year old girl. Each encounter is worthy of its own sermon – yet today I want us to look at what they mean as they sit together in the 9th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Because as we take them as a whole, a theme emerges. Matthew is teaching us about Jesus’ understanding of holiness.
So in this sermon about holiness – I want to start with infection – disease – this will come in very helpful in just a bit,
How do you feel when the person before you in line at the buffet sneezes over the food? Or the person behind you in line coughs so hard that your hair moves and you feel the mist of it on the back of your neck? Or when your co-worker’s eyes are red and weeping puss and she says, oh this pink eye again! Can I borrow your cell phone?
As a society we have some common understandings about how illness is transferred. Germs thriving on a door handle, bacteria suspended in the air from a sneeze. Usually our response to curtail the spread of the disease is quarantine. Our strategy is to isolate the infection to stem the spread. So you miss a day of work or your kid stays home from school. As we order our life together in community, we agree that the inconvenience of the individual is better than the pandemic sweeping through the whole collective.
Over the years different communities have believed different things about what exactly is contagious. In hindsight they might seem so silly, but when its our strategy that we believe to be true we know it on every level of our being.
At one point the night air was thought to be responsible for malaria – so mothers closed the windows at night, and only a few years ago, it was believed that HIV/AIDS could be caught from just being close to some one with the disease, so those who were stricken with it were shunned. Fear of illness and sickness works at more than just the rational level – I remember when my brother-in-law was in his last round battling cancer. He was swollen and his skin had turned yellow, he was coughing for breath and it was all because of the cancer in his body, but I still felt a catch in my stomach about letting my kids draw near to him. Death was hovering so close, it frightened me and I wanted to protect my kids.
Keep this body awareness with you as we enter today’s text.
In Jesus’ day, the prevailing attitude about holiness was that it was in need of constant protection – like the boy in a bubble with out an immune system - holiness was forever using hand sanitizer, opening bathroom doors with her elbows, never eating out in restaurants, keeping her toothbrush six feet from the toilet. There were all kinds of laws and customs that sought to protect personal and corporate holiness. These laws didn’t hover on the edge of life, they saturated every aspect – what people ate, how they prepared food, who they ate with, where they worked what they did, who they were friends with, who they spoke to, bought from, sold to….
So Matthew gives us these three pictures of Jesus in action and together they give us the heart of how Jesus understood holiness - the power and person of God. To the early readers of the Gospel – people who had internalized the myriad of holiness laws, as they read today’s text, its as though Jesus is licking the hand rail on the subway stairs.
In the first story, Jesus is calling Matthew, the tax collector to be a disciple. We know the story so well it can be hard to feel the shock of it – Jesus is not at the Harvard Divinity School Job Fair looking for fresh, spiritual leaders for his movement. No! Jesus is trolling for disciples at the tollbooth?
In the Bible tax collectors are often grouped with sinners and prostitutes and gentiles – not the best of company, certainly not the holiest. The reason was that they were the front line of the Roman occupation – they occupied the place in daily life where people were regularly confronted with the humiliation and burden of the Roman occupation. Already in Israel, there was a temple tax on basically everything. When Rome invaded and occupied Israel, they added another layer of tax on basically everything and then some. The tax collectors worked in sort of a franchise arrangement, where they had to pay Rome the basic taxes they collected, but anything that they could get over and above was theirs to keep. Obviously this created a system rife with corruption and extortion. So as the average working person came up to the toll booth and had to surrender another 10% of the value of the goods they were bringing to market, they had a fair amount of bitterness and suspicion that they were getting robbed, sort of like how we’re feeling these days at the gas pump. A tax collector was considered unclean because they represented the political power that was recklessly disregarding the Temple, the law, and in fact God.
So Jesus befriends this Tax collector, calls him to be a disciple, and again, take note, Jesus is NOT taking Matthew as a diamond in the rough, he is not saying, oh Matthew, you’ve got so much spiritual potential, let me take you away from this terrible life and get you cleaned up and holy-ed up. This is not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, putting it all behind her. Jesus and the other disciples actually go to Matthew’s house and attend a dinner party – eating and drinking with all of Mathew’s tax collector, sinner friends, laughing at their irreverent jokes. They get to see Matthew close up – noting his quirky taste for expensive Merlot and his extensive collection of Bionic Man posters, his love for life and his generous heart. Jesus is embracing the whole of who Matthew is…
The next two pictures Matthew gives us are interwoven. The leader of the local synagogue comes to Jesus and tells him that his daughter has just died, and asks Jesus to bring her back to life.
That’s a big ask! – not only in the bring back from death respect, but in Jewish law, to touch the dead was a HUGE breach of the purity code. Holy people didn’t rub shoulders with the dead and dying. By touching a dead person, Jesus would be putting his own cleanliness, his own holiness at risk.
So the leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus and asks him to go lay hands on his daughter it’s a very bold request. And Jesus doesn’t dodge it – let’s go! He says. Its pretty shocking that he said yes and a group of people went along to see what would happen.
In the middle of the crowd, a hemorrhaging woman worked her way up to Jesus and touched the tassel of his cloak. Again, a HUGE breach of the purity code. Women who were bleeding – menstruating or hemorrhaging, were not supposed to circulate socially. Her move to get close to Jesus was also very bold. And again Jesus doesn’t dodge her - he stops right there in the street (he could have just chalked it up to someone stealing a healing from him) – who touched me? And then Go my daughter! Your faith has made you well.
Have you seen the man with the oozing wound in his leg, and he’s sitting by the side of the off ramp at Crenshaw? He’s older, clearly in need of medical care – so we give him some change and then go when the light turns green. Or we write a check to help AIDS orphans in Africa or we cast a vote for immigrant rights. All good things, all good, AND that is not what Jesus is doing here – he is not saying you are healed now go back to where ever it was you said that you came from and let me get on with my holy man agenda – he is saying My Daughter – he sees her as a beloved child of God, not an outcast.
Here is the big reveal that Matthew has for us – Jesus’ understanding of holiness runs counter to the prevailing attitude. For Jesus it’s not the sin that is contagious, its holiness that is contagious. He understood that holiness possesses a transforming power over uncleanliness.
When he is answering the Pharisee’s critique for his affiliation with Matthew, Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea as he describes what God is after “I want mercy not sacrifice”. This is a bit cryptic to our ears
On one hand we have sacrifice - Sacrifice was the means of restoring relationship under the purity laws. Once holiness had been threatened, sacrifice was what was done to remedy the situation – like antibiotics getting pumped in by an IV.
Sacrifice was the prescribed way of maintaining holiness and purity. A system of tithes and offerings that prescribed how to right a wrong and restore the purity. Like every system, it could become an end in and of it self and could be hijacked to perpetuate the very wrongs it was supposed to condemn.
Mercy, “hesed” on the other hand, which is also translated, compassion, comes from the Hebrew root for womb – The mercy and compassion, the love that I have for the one in my womb. Mercy is what God desires.
Because God is compassionate, forgiving, accepting, nourishing of both the righteous and the sinner – the rain falls and the sun shines on everyone, because God accepted them, God’s people were supposed to go and do likewise.
Jesus understood that holiness and purity were infectious, contagious and transformative - this freed him up to include those people who had been excluded and quarantined under the purity laws.
So he goes to the home of the dead child and touches her and restores her to life. And the bleeding woman touches him and is healed and ends 12 years of isolation and he takes the disciples over to Matthew the tax collector’s house and they get to meet his tax collector friends.
So you’re thinking the take away from this morning’s sermon is – let bleeding women touch you, its ok to touch dead people, and have a tax collector over for dinner. Pretty manageable and pretty irrelevant, I don’t know any tax collectors, and honestly, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about them.
As we seek to live into this passage, the edge comes when we start to dig around to find out who our modern day our tax collectors are. Who are the people that we as a society marginalize for the good of all concerned? I imagine that there might be some general categories of people that would be hard to bring into our community – people who kill, people to harm others. Ed was telling me that smokers get a fair amount of hazing across the board…The edge comes into stark focus when we factor in our individual experiences.
– So a person who has been falsely charged, arrested, and thrown in jail reaching out to a police officer?
– Or a person who grew up with a father who abused alcohol and sent the family into financial crisis reaching out to a drunk who was doing the same to their family?
How to we embrace those people who represent the things and people who have wounded us the most?? How do we extend “hesed”/ compassion?
At one level it is beyond complicated how we work through our own wounds to reach out to others – it takes all the wisdom and strength God can give us.
At another level – it is the most straightforward thing. We know we need to do it, so we start by doing what we can – we put a coin in the man’s cup, we hold our tongue instead of lashing out with venomous words, we beg God to change our heart, change the situation, to and then we come back the next day and see what it is that is in our power to do.
Matthew is telling us that Jesus operated as though holiness was contagious and in its embrace what was broken is transformed and made whole. Jesus didn’t huddle inside his holy apartment with the security bars on the windows and six deadbolts on the door. He opened it all up – with reckless, divine love.
Jesus is saying, I am going to embrace sin when I find it with a bear hug of holiness. I am going to surround it with the transforming power of God’s purity.
So when Jesus walks up to us as we are sitting at the tax collector booth, and he strikes up a conversation with us – we can trust that he isn’t the kind of guy who is going to date with an agenda to change who we are, he’s not going to constantly be nagging and fixated on all the ways that we fall short.
But he comes to us, celebrating who we are – a child of God, and in his genuine embrace what is broken in us becomes healed, what is unclean is made pure, and we become more fully who God created us to be. And we move from our place on the edges to a seat at the table, a place in God’s family.
MP3 File
In this text we get a series of rapid fire vignettes – each one is nice on its own – Jesus calling Matthew the disciple, Jesus healing the woman who has been bleeding for 12 years, and Jesus restoring life to a 12 year old girl. Each encounter is worthy of its own sermon – yet today I want us to look at what they mean as they sit together in the 9th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Because as we take them as a whole, a theme emerges. Matthew is teaching us about Jesus’ understanding of holiness.
So in this sermon about holiness – I want to start with infection – disease – this will come in very helpful in just a bit,
How do you feel when the person before you in line at the buffet sneezes over the food? Or the person behind you in line coughs so hard that your hair moves and you feel the mist of it on the back of your neck? Or when your co-worker’s eyes are red and weeping puss and she says, oh this pink eye again! Can I borrow your cell phone?
As a society we have some common understandings about how illness is transferred. Germs thriving on a door handle, bacteria suspended in the air from a sneeze. Usually our response to curtail the spread of the disease is quarantine. Our strategy is to isolate the infection to stem the spread. So you miss a day of work or your kid stays home from school. As we order our life together in community, we agree that the inconvenience of the individual is better than the pandemic sweeping through the whole collective.
Over the years different communities have believed different things about what exactly is contagious. In hindsight they might seem so silly, but when its our strategy that we believe to be true we know it on every level of our being.
At one point the night air was thought to be responsible for malaria – so mothers closed the windows at night, and only a few years ago, it was believed that HIV/AIDS could be caught from just being close to some one with the disease, so those who were stricken with it were shunned. Fear of illness and sickness works at more than just the rational level – I remember when my brother-in-law was in his last round battling cancer. He was swollen and his skin had turned yellow, he was coughing for breath and it was all because of the cancer in his body, but I still felt a catch in my stomach about letting my kids draw near to him. Death was hovering so close, it frightened me and I wanted to protect my kids.
Keep this body awareness with you as we enter today’s text.
In Jesus’ day, the prevailing attitude about holiness was that it was in need of constant protection – like the boy in a bubble with out an immune system - holiness was forever using hand sanitizer, opening bathroom doors with her elbows, never eating out in restaurants, keeping her toothbrush six feet from the toilet. There were all kinds of laws and customs that sought to protect personal and corporate holiness. These laws didn’t hover on the edge of life, they saturated every aspect – what people ate, how they prepared food, who they ate with, where they worked what they did, who they were friends with, who they spoke to, bought from, sold to….
So Matthew gives us these three pictures of Jesus in action and together they give us the heart of how Jesus understood holiness - the power and person of God. To the early readers of the Gospel – people who had internalized the myriad of holiness laws, as they read today’s text, its as though Jesus is licking the hand rail on the subway stairs.
In the first story, Jesus is calling Matthew, the tax collector to be a disciple. We know the story so well it can be hard to feel the shock of it – Jesus is not at the Harvard Divinity School Job Fair looking for fresh, spiritual leaders for his movement. No! Jesus is trolling for disciples at the tollbooth?
In the Bible tax collectors are often grouped with sinners and prostitutes and gentiles – not the best of company, certainly not the holiest. The reason was that they were the front line of the Roman occupation – they occupied the place in daily life where people were regularly confronted with the humiliation and burden of the Roman occupation. Already in Israel, there was a temple tax on basically everything. When Rome invaded and occupied Israel, they added another layer of tax on basically everything and then some. The tax collectors worked in sort of a franchise arrangement, where they had to pay Rome the basic taxes they collected, but anything that they could get over and above was theirs to keep. Obviously this created a system rife with corruption and extortion. So as the average working person came up to the toll booth and had to surrender another 10% of the value of the goods they were bringing to market, they had a fair amount of bitterness and suspicion that they were getting robbed, sort of like how we’re feeling these days at the gas pump. A tax collector was considered unclean because they represented the political power that was recklessly disregarding the Temple, the law, and in fact God.
So Jesus befriends this Tax collector, calls him to be a disciple, and again, take note, Jesus is NOT taking Matthew as a diamond in the rough, he is not saying, oh Matthew, you’ve got so much spiritual potential, let me take you away from this terrible life and get you cleaned up and holy-ed up. This is not Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, putting it all behind her. Jesus and the other disciples actually go to Matthew’s house and attend a dinner party – eating and drinking with all of Mathew’s tax collector, sinner friends, laughing at their irreverent jokes. They get to see Matthew close up – noting his quirky taste for expensive Merlot and his extensive collection of Bionic Man posters, his love for life and his generous heart. Jesus is embracing the whole of who Matthew is…
The next two pictures Matthew gives us are interwoven. The leader of the local synagogue comes to Jesus and tells him that his daughter has just died, and asks Jesus to bring her back to life.
That’s a big ask! – not only in the bring back from death respect, but in Jewish law, to touch the dead was a HUGE breach of the purity code. Holy people didn’t rub shoulders with the dead and dying. By touching a dead person, Jesus would be putting his own cleanliness, his own holiness at risk.
So the leader of the synagogue comes to Jesus and asks him to go lay hands on his daughter it’s a very bold request. And Jesus doesn’t dodge it – let’s go! He says. Its pretty shocking that he said yes and a group of people went along to see what would happen.
In the middle of the crowd, a hemorrhaging woman worked her way up to Jesus and touched the tassel of his cloak. Again, a HUGE breach of the purity code. Women who were bleeding – menstruating or hemorrhaging, were not supposed to circulate socially. Her move to get close to Jesus was also very bold. And again Jesus doesn’t dodge her - he stops right there in the street (he could have just chalked it up to someone stealing a healing from him) – who touched me? And then Go my daughter! Your faith has made you well.
Have you seen the man with the oozing wound in his leg, and he’s sitting by the side of the off ramp at Crenshaw? He’s older, clearly in need of medical care – so we give him some change and then go when the light turns green. Or we write a check to help AIDS orphans in Africa or we cast a vote for immigrant rights. All good things, all good, AND that is not what Jesus is doing here – he is not saying you are healed now go back to where ever it was you said that you came from and let me get on with my holy man agenda – he is saying My Daughter – he sees her as a beloved child of God, not an outcast.
Here is the big reveal that Matthew has for us – Jesus’ understanding of holiness runs counter to the prevailing attitude. For Jesus it’s not the sin that is contagious, its holiness that is contagious. He understood that holiness possesses a transforming power over uncleanliness.
When he is answering the Pharisee’s critique for his affiliation with Matthew, Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea as he describes what God is after “I want mercy not sacrifice”. This is a bit cryptic to our ears
On one hand we have sacrifice - Sacrifice was the means of restoring relationship under the purity laws. Once holiness had been threatened, sacrifice was what was done to remedy the situation – like antibiotics getting pumped in by an IV.
Sacrifice was the prescribed way of maintaining holiness and purity. A system of tithes and offerings that prescribed how to right a wrong and restore the purity. Like every system, it could become an end in and of it self and could be hijacked to perpetuate the very wrongs it was supposed to condemn.
Mercy, “hesed” on the other hand, which is also translated, compassion, comes from the Hebrew root for womb – The mercy and compassion, the love that I have for the one in my womb. Mercy is what God desires.
Because God is compassionate, forgiving, accepting, nourishing of both the righteous and the sinner – the rain falls and the sun shines on everyone, because God accepted them, God’s people were supposed to go and do likewise.
Jesus understood that holiness and purity were infectious, contagious and transformative - this freed him up to include those people who had been excluded and quarantined under the purity laws.
So he goes to the home of the dead child and touches her and restores her to life. And the bleeding woman touches him and is healed and ends 12 years of isolation and he takes the disciples over to Matthew the tax collector’s house and they get to meet his tax collector friends.
So you’re thinking the take away from this morning’s sermon is – let bleeding women touch you, its ok to touch dead people, and have a tax collector over for dinner. Pretty manageable and pretty irrelevant, I don’t know any tax collectors, and honestly, I don’t have any strong feelings one way or the other about them.
As we seek to live into this passage, the edge comes when we start to dig around to find out who our modern day our tax collectors are. Who are the people that we as a society marginalize for the good of all concerned? I imagine that there might be some general categories of people that would be hard to bring into our community – people who kill, people to harm others. Ed was telling me that smokers get a fair amount of hazing across the board…The edge comes into stark focus when we factor in our individual experiences.
– So a person who has been falsely charged, arrested, and thrown in jail reaching out to a police officer?
– Or a person who grew up with a father who abused alcohol and sent the family into financial crisis reaching out to a drunk who was doing the same to their family?
How to we embrace those people who represent the things and people who have wounded us the most?? How do we extend “hesed”/ compassion?
At one level it is beyond complicated how we work through our own wounds to reach out to others – it takes all the wisdom and strength God can give us.
At another level – it is the most straightforward thing. We know we need to do it, so we start by doing what we can – we put a coin in the man’s cup, we hold our tongue instead of lashing out with venomous words, we beg God to change our heart, change the situation, to and then we come back the next day and see what it is that is in our power to do.
Matthew is telling us that Jesus operated as though holiness was contagious and in its embrace what was broken is transformed and made whole. Jesus didn’t huddle inside his holy apartment with the security bars on the windows and six deadbolts on the door. He opened it all up – with reckless, divine love.
Jesus is saying, I am going to embrace sin when I find it with a bear hug of holiness. I am going to surround it with the transforming power of God’s purity.
So when Jesus walks up to us as we are sitting at the tax collector booth, and he strikes up a conversation with us – we can trust that he isn’t the kind of guy who is going to date with an agenda to change who we are, he’s not going to constantly be nagging and fixated on all the ways that we fall short.
But he comes to us, celebrating who we are – a child of God, and in his genuine embrace what is broken in us becomes healed, what is unclean is made pure, and we become more fully who God created us to be. And we move from our place on the edges to a seat at the table, a place in God’s family.
June 24, 2008
June 4, 2008 + Your reasonable stewardship + Hayward Fong
1 Timothy 4
“Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophetic utterance when the elders laid their hands upon you” (1 Tim. 4:14).
In the preceding verses, Paul tells Timothy “...set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim 4:12). “...attend to the public reading of scripture, to preaching, to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13). You’re probably wondering, “What does Paul’s admonition have to do with me? I’m not a pastor; some of you might say, ‘I’m not even an elder or a deacon.’” However, as Christians, we should be guided by the first part of verse 14, “Do not neglect the gift you have...” James tells us, “Every good endowment and perfect gift comes from God.” So, as stewards we should use them to glorify Him.
Loren Hollander, renowned musician, was found following an evening concert, practicing at the piano. It seemed strange to this person who had just attended the concert, so he asked this great pianist why he was back at the piano practicing. This great master shared his philosophy with the man. Great musicians are not exempt from training and discipline that others must submit to. Gifted people must submit to the same training and discipline or the gift will be wasted and lost. The gift is from God and the one who receives it has a solemn responsibility to discipline and develop it so the potential for sublime achievement can be fully realized.
It has been almost twenty-eight years since I retired from the Los Angeles County Road Department and U.S. Army Reserve, and almost twenty years since my retirement from the City of Gardena. For many years I continued to serve on several engineering committees, where I saw former colleagues on a regular basis. They would often greet me with, “How’s retirement; playing a lot of golf?” My answer was usually, “I haven’t swung a club in years though I still keep a 7-iron in the trunk of my car. Quite honestly, I’m so busy, I haven’t figured out how I found time to work at my job before retirement; although I must confess, I’m not as efficient as I use to be.” Incidentally, the golf club is still in the trunk of my car.
God gives us many gifts and talents, but there is one common gift, though of different lengths, and that is the gift of TIME. From the pen of an anonymous writer: “Birth is the point of initiation of the chain of life. Time determines its length. The value of the chain is determined by accomplishments. Failure to enjoy it is its waste.”
Retirement has brought me a gift that we don’t often think about, the gift of TIME, with endless choices on its use: Time to learn, to explore, to listen; Time to gain a sense of calm, quiet trust, to grow closer to loved ones, and to serve the Lord and His children.
From time to time, I run into retired people who have found life boring because they don’t have anything to do. Several years ago, I attended a luncheon meeting of the Women’s Club of Hollywood. My host asked if I would sit with some visitors from out of town. I was seated next to a retiree and I asked her how she was enjoying retired life. My question opened a “can of worms.” She complained there was nothing to do and then went through a litany of what was wrong with retired life. It was only a few days before that Irene Ells had told Dorothy and me about the joy she derives from reading to the children at the local library. So, I suggested to this lady that she might find reading to children an enjoyable and fulfilling activity. She replied that she has had her fill of volunteer work and wasn’t going to spend her retirement doing the same. I thought to myself, “How sad!
At my stage of life, I’m attending many funeral and memorial services of people I’ve known over the years. Last Saturday as I was planning today’s worship service, I received a telephone call from Betty Shishido, one of my former secretaries at the County Road Department. It was seven years ago that I attended the memorial service for her husband, Harry Shishido. The Lord had called him home most unexpectedly. There were over four hundred people in the church. Harry had retired some time earlier after working forty-two years with the Defense Department, interrupted by service in World War II. I knew Harry had always led a busy life, father of two daughters, with his wife’s mother having been a part of the household for decades and his wife being blind for the preceding ten years. None of this slowed Harry down in his retirement. He made time for his grandchildren, taking them to school, outings together and serving on the PTA as he had done when the girls were growing up. He served as a leader of the V.F.W. from the local post to the national level. He had time for people – his family, his community, his church, his country.
It has been hard for Betty to adjust to the loss of her husband, most especially being blind. However, she has not allowed her visual impairment be an impediment. She learned to use the computer; her old machine has gone to its Valhalla and she now has to learn how to use the new computer. She comes in from Monterey Park to the Braille Institute here on Vermont Ave., attends various classes to increase her independence, volunteers her secretarial abilities, but finds time to learn fun activities. She has learned to swim and play the piano. The swim classes are held at St. Agnes Catholic School down at Adams and Vermont. In return for their hospitality, the Braille people present a monthly music program at which Betty plays piano accompaniment.
My mind turned to various people in history, who did their greatest work in what we term retirement years...Plato learning at 50 and then teaching at 60; Goethe starting his writing of Faust at 60 and continuing until he finished it in his 80's; Gladstone serving as Prime Minister of Great Britain at 82.
Then I thought of people closer here at home...Ruth Beck continuing to serve her Lord until called to be with Him in her 90's; Liz Morgan faithfully carrying out her myriad of volunteer activities on all sixteen cylinders into her 90’s until her eye sight slowed her down ... to name but two.
Accompanying William Baxa’s letter in Immanuel’s stewardship mailing was an article I wrote about my stewardship here for the past sixty plus years. I mentioned some of what Dorothy and I have done with the gifts that God has endowed us over and above the material things. I attempted to point out as stewards, we are entrusted to look after and take care of that which God has entrusted to our care, which is all His Creation. It encompasses all His gifts…time, talents, money, and earthly opportunities. We are formed in God’s image to represent Him on earth so that all the earth, in turn could glorify Him better and better. It is axiomatic, if we don’t use our gifts for His sake, we will lose it. “It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful” (I Corinthians 4:2).
Retirement from work is not retirement from life. It only means more of His gift, TIME; TIME to be His hands and feet in sharing His message of love and salvation.
PRAYER: My Lord and my God: There is so much to be done in Your name. Don’t let me waste one precious moment. Amen.
“Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophetic utterance when the elders laid their hands upon you” (1 Tim. 4:14).
In the preceding verses, Paul tells Timothy “...set the believers an example in speech and conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim 4:12). “...attend to the public reading of scripture, to preaching, to teaching” (1 Tim. 4:13). You’re probably wondering, “What does Paul’s admonition have to do with me? I’m not a pastor; some of you might say, ‘I’m not even an elder or a deacon.’” However, as Christians, we should be guided by the first part of verse 14, “Do not neglect the gift you have...” James tells us, “Every good endowment and perfect gift comes from God.” So, as stewards we should use them to glorify Him.
Loren Hollander, renowned musician, was found following an evening concert, practicing at the piano. It seemed strange to this person who had just attended the concert, so he asked this great pianist why he was back at the piano practicing. This great master shared his philosophy with the man. Great musicians are not exempt from training and discipline that others must submit to. Gifted people must submit to the same training and discipline or the gift will be wasted and lost. The gift is from God and the one who receives it has a solemn responsibility to discipline and develop it so the potential for sublime achievement can be fully realized.
It has been almost twenty-eight years since I retired from the Los Angeles County Road Department and U.S. Army Reserve, and almost twenty years since my retirement from the City of Gardena. For many years I continued to serve on several engineering committees, where I saw former colleagues on a regular basis. They would often greet me with, “How’s retirement; playing a lot of golf?” My answer was usually, “I haven’t swung a club in years though I still keep a 7-iron in the trunk of my car. Quite honestly, I’m so busy, I haven’t figured out how I found time to work at my job before retirement; although I must confess, I’m not as efficient as I use to be.” Incidentally, the golf club is still in the trunk of my car.
God gives us many gifts and talents, but there is one common gift, though of different lengths, and that is the gift of TIME. From the pen of an anonymous writer: “Birth is the point of initiation of the chain of life. Time determines its length. The value of the chain is determined by accomplishments. Failure to enjoy it is its waste.”
Retirement has brought me a gift that we don’t often think about, the gift of TIME, with endless choices on its use: Time to learn, to explore, to listen; Time to gain a sense of calm, quiet trust, to grow closer to loved ones, and to serve the Lord and His children.
From time to time, I run into retired people who have found life boring because they don’t have anything to do. Several years ago, I attended a luncheon meeting of the Women’s Club of Hollywood. My host asked if I would sit with some visitors from out of town. I was seated next to a retiree and I asked her how she was enjoying retired life. My question opened a “can of worms.” She complained there was nothing to do and then went through a litany of what was wrong with retired life. It was only a few days before that Irene Ells had told Dorothy and me about the joy she derives from reading to the children at the local library. So, I suggested to this lady that she might find reading to children an enjoyable and fulfilling activity. She replied that she has had her fill of volunteer work and wasn’t going to spend her retirement doing the same. I thought to myself, “How sad!
At my stage of life, I’m attending many funeral and memorial services of people I’ve known over the years. Last Saturday as I was planning today’s worship service, I received a telephone call from Betty Shishido, one of my former secretaries at the County Road Department. It was seven years ago that I attended the memorial service for her husband, Harry Shishido. The Lord had called him home most unexpectedly. There were over four hundred people in the church. Harry had retired some time earlier after working forty-two years with the Defense Department, interrupted by service in World War II. I knew Harry had always led a busy life, father of two daughters, with his wife’s mother having been a part of the household for decades and his wife being blind for the preceding ten years. None of this slowed Harry down in his retirement. He made time for his grandchildren, taking them to school, outings together and serving on the PTA as he had done when the girls were growing up. He served as a leader of the V.F.W. from the local post to the national level. He had time for people – his family, his community, his church, his country.
It has been hard for Betty to adjust to the loss of her husband, most especially being blind. However, she has not allowed her visual impairment be an impediment. She learned to use the computer; her old machine has gone to its Valhalla and she now has to learn how to use the new computer. She comes in from Monterey Park to the Braille Institute here on Vermont Ave., attends various classes to increase her independence, volunteers her secretarial abilities, but finds time to learn fun activities. She has learned to swim and play the piano. The swim classes are held at St. Agnes Catholic School down at Adams and Vermont. In return for their hospitality, the Braille people present a monthly music program at which Betty plays piano accompaniment.
My mind turned to various people in history, who did their greatest work in what we term retirement years...Plato learning at 50 and then teaching at 60; Goethe starting his writing of Faust at 60 and continuing until he finished it in his 80's; Gladstone serving as Prime Minister of Great Britain at 82.
Then I thought of people closer here at home...Ruth Beck continuing to serve her Lord until called to be with Him in her 90's; Liz Morgan faithfully carrying out her myriad of volunteer activities on all sixteen cylinders into her 90’s until her eye sight slowed her down ... to name but two.
Accompanying William Baxa’s letter in Immanuel’s stewardship mailing was an article I wrote about my stewardship here for the past sixty plus years. I mentioned some of what Dorothy and I have done with the gifts that God has endowed us over and above the material things. I attempted to point out as stewards, we are entrusted to look after and take care of that which God has entrusted to our care, which is all His Creation. It encompasses all His gifts…time, talents, money, and earthly opportunities. We are formed in God’s image to represent Him on earth so that all the earth, in turn could glorify Him better and better. It is axiomatic, if we don’t use our gifts for His sake, we will lose it. “It is required in stewards that a man be found faithful” (I Corinthians 4:2).
Retirement from work is not retirement from life. It only means more of His gift, TIME; TIME to be His hands and feet in sharing His message of love and salvation.
PRAYER: My Lord and my God: There is so much to be done in Your name. Don’t let me waste one precious moment. Amen.
June 1, 2008 + Synchronicity: Words and Deeds + Frank Alton
Matthew 7:21-29
MP3 File
The rabbis tell a story about a rabbi and a soapmaker who went for a walk together. The soapmaker said, “What good is religion? Look at all the trouble and misery of the world after thousands of years of teaching about goodness, truth and peace – after all the prayers, sermons and teachings. If religion is good and true, why should this be?” The rabbi said nothing. They continued walking until he noticed a child playing in the gutter. Then the rabbi said, “Look at that child. You say that soap makes people clean. But see the dirt on that youngster. Of what good is soap? With all the soap in the world, the child is still filthy. I wonder how effective soap is after all.” The soapmaker protested and said, “But Rabbi, soap can’t do any good unless it is used.” “Exactly”, the rabbi replied. “So it is with Judaism, or any other religion. It is ineffective unless it is applied and used.”
In this morning’s Gospel lesson, a rabbi named Jesus concluded an extended sermon with the same thought: the positive impact of his words can only be known by those who act on them. That is the way Jesus lived his life. The real reason for Jesus’ impact – both immediate and lasting – is that there was a seamless connection between his words and his deeds. From the opening scenes in the Gospels through the crucifixion itself, people noticed that Jesus taught with an authority rooted in synchronicity between his words and deeds.
But we often get it wrong right here. When Jesus says “everyone who hears these words of mine” we substitute words for religion, which we understand as a set of rules and principles to live by. Think ten commandments & Sermon on the Mount. Today’s passage is, in fact, the end of the Sermon on the Mount. When we read it we realize it’s much more than principles or a set of rules; it’s certainly not a call to religious piety. It seems like we all want to live by principles even when we can’t pull it off. Yet that’s precisely what Jesus didn’t seek to do. That’s what got him in so much trouble: he questioned everything that makes people feel safe with religion.
In his life and teaching, Jesus lightly, almost cavalierly, cast aside the many legal distinctions the Pharisee labored to maintain. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the Pharisee as "...the one to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life…Every moment of his life is a moment where he must choose between good and evil.” (Ethics, p.30) Every action, every judgment, no matter how small, is permeated with the choice of good and evil. The Pharisee can confront no one without evaluating that person in terms of good and evil (Ethics, p.31). All judgments are moral judgments. No gesture is immune to moral condemnation.
Jesus refuses to see the world in these terms. He bids his disciples to eat on the Sabbath, even though starvation is hardly in question. He heals a woman on the Sabbath, although after eighteen years of illness she could seemingly wait a few more hours. Jesus exhibits a freedom from the law in everything he does, but that doesn’t mean his behavior is arbitrary. It follows the law of love – loving our neighbors & loving ourselves. That leads to simplicity and clarity.
Unlike the Pharisee, Jesus is unconcerned with the goodness or badness of those he helps, unconcerned with the personal moral worth of those he meets, talks to, dines with, or heals. He is concerned solely and entirely with the well being of another. He exhibits no other concern. He is the paradigm of selfless action toward others - the exact opposite of the Pharisee. The Pharisee tries to be principled rather than compassionate. Jesus is compassionate above all.
Followers of Jesus are supposed to live in the same way. The responsible person is a selfless person, who does God's will by serving the spiritual and material needs of another, since "...what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one's neighbor" (Ethics, p.136). The selfless model of Jesus is the only guide to responsible action. There is no a priori right way to do that. It must be realized in the moment. Jesus is saying that if you've been doing your "Lord, Lord"-ing, and fail to care for an immediate need, you really haven't done a very good job of "Lord, Lord"-ing. Otherwise your eyes and ears would have been tempered or energized to see and hear what needs doing. The rules keep changing, as they did for Jesus, so we need to be willing to keep moving our foundations.
I was reflecting on this as I roller bladed at Venice Beach on Friday. I was watching homes being built and remodeled and some just sitting there. I couldn’t help but think about the message I’d been hearing about global warming. We’ve been told that the oceans will rise a few inches in the coming decades. I realized that at least the first floor of all these homes would be flooded – not a very good investment. That doesn’t mean the owners are foolish. But they will be foolish if they don’t do something different now. The same is true for us in many areas of our lives.
Jesus’ way of seeing religion as a way of responding with compassion at every moment rather than simply acting out of a prescribed list of rules is uncomfortable at best. In the culture I was raised in, I came to read Jesus’ parable about the house built on rock or sand through the lens of the story of the three pigs. For those of you who were not raised on that story, it speaks of three pigs who each built a house to protect it from the big bad wolf. The first two pigs built flimsy houses that were easily destroyed by wind, rain and fire, and both were eaten by the big bad wolf. The third pig built a strong house that couldn’t be easily destroyed, and thus survived. With that background the meaning of Jesus’ parable was clear to me. I must build my life on discipline, hard work and strong materials that will resist attacks from the big bad wolf. I must put myself into positions of strength from which I negotiate my way through life. The firmer the foundation, the less vulnerable I am. I imagine pouring a slab of concrete and then building a fortress on it, equipping it with all the conveniences I want, arming it with ballistic weapons, insulating myself from all those who aren't bright enough to build in the same way.
The problem is this interpretation doesn’t fit very well with the words Jesus has just spoken, which are, presumably, the words we must put into practice if we wish to build our lives on firm foundations. If we go back and read these words we learn that Jesus is suggesting that those who build on rock are poor in spirit, meek, and persecuted for righteousness' sake. We shore up our foundation by turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and forgiving as our God forgives. Then we should stop worrying about what we will eat or wear, avoid judging other people, and ask God for those things that we need. This rock we are supposed to build a house on is a pretty strange rock. It sounds more like building a house on a foundation that is purposely designed to bring down the house as soon as the wind picks up or anyone approaches us. I think I like the third pig’s house a lot more than Jesus’. (Andrew Marr THE HOUSE BUILT ON THE STUMBLING ROCK: http://andrewmarr.homestead.com/files/housebuilt.htm)
But then, of course, when I take a second look, I realize that maybe Jesus did have it right. When we forget to show mercy to the poor, we build our house on the sand. When we put the flag above the cross, or equate the flag with the cross, we build our house on the sand. When we pray for the safety of our countrymen and for the destruction of our enemies, we build our house on the sand. When we get complacent about millions who are infected with AIDS or other infectious diseases, we build our house on the sand. When we spend every last dime we have on ourselves, or save it for a rainy day, while neglecting those in need, we build our house on sand. (Tod O.L. Mundo Progressive Blog)
Whether you grew up with the three little pigs or some other story, most of us are not inclined to hear Jesus’ words as clearly as we may at first think. We can hardly imagine a religion that is not based on a set of rules we are supposed to follow at all costs. But no matter how difficult it is, it is critical that we get it right, because the consequences of getting it wrong are tearing the world apart. Two of the direst consequences of perceiving God’s will as a pre-defined set of rules are judgmentalism and fear. We end up judging others and set ourselves up as righteous. We hesitate to do what we think God wants us to do because we’re afraid it will be or will be perceived by others to be sin.
With respect to judgmentalism, scribes in their day and media pundits and spin doctors in our day exercise power closely aligned with invoking the Lord’s name. When televangelists shout, "Come out, in the name of the Lord," and bishops or General Assemblies exorcise the demon of homosexual willfulness in the name of the Lord, and offer praise for mighty works of regeneration in the name of the Lord, are all subject to the shifting sand of the moment and its needs. When we say, write or in any way claim that we are doing the Lord's will, that God is on our side, when combating godless communism or secular humanism is the cry, when radical Islamists are invoked as enemies of the Faith, or the claim is made that our position is just because God wills it -- when in other words we invoke the name of the Lord to counter what we consider to be false deities, we participate in the very behavior Jesus condemned in this verse. (The Sign-off to the Moral Nightly News by Mark Harris Saturday, May 21, 2005)
Jesus’ authority was rooted in the fact that he didn’t invoke the name of the Lord to bolster his teaching. He took responsibility for his own teaching: “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” Nothing: simply the words standing there on their own, just waiting for the executioner to come. Likewise, the object for us is to make God’s will real in the world, in our actions and words, not in our piety. The Reign of God is entered by being God’s Word, by being the voice & action of God’s will; not by invoking the Lord’s name.
The second consequence of seeing God’s will as a pre-defined set of rules is that it makes us afraid to act because we might fall into sin. We’ve all been shaped by our culture; and religion is a part of culture. There have been prohibitions against things whose sinfulness is being questioned today. That makes us nervous. When those things get called into question, it feels like our foundation has been pulled out from under us. We’re tempted to go find it again. But that is exactly the wrong strategy – the one Jesus is rejecting here. Jesus is saying that his word is the foundation, and his word is a living word. I remember teachers joking about Paul’s call to present ourselves as living sacrifices. They said, “The problem with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off the altar.” We’re afraid that Jesus is going to move the foundation, so we look for a more solid one and call it Jesus. So we cling to a set of dead words – even dead words that Jesus himself once spoke as living words. But they become dead when we don’t allow them to move. Jesus will move the foundation. But he is the foundation, so his promise is true: “I will be with you to the end of the age.”
One of the ways we put words and deeds together is by putting our money where are mouths are. In the same sermon Jesus spoke the proverb, “where your treasure is there your heart will be also.” If our hearts are rooted in the foundation of Jesus’ word of compassion, part of our treasure will be invested where that is practiced. Immanuel is only one of those places, but for those of us who consider this our faith community, it is a significant one.
As we sing I want to invite you to take your pledge card and bring it up to the communion table as an expression of your heart commitment. This is a personal decision with a communal expression.
MP3 File
The rabbis tell a story about a rabbi and a soapmaker who went for a walk together. The soapmaker said, “What good is religion? Look at all the trouble and misery of the world after thousands of years of teaching about goodness, truth and peace – after all the prayers, sermons and teachings. If religion is good and true, why should this be?” The rabbi said nothing. They continued walking until he noticed a child playing in the gutter. Then the rabbi said, “Look at that child. You say that soap makes people clean. But see the dirt on that youngster. Of what good is soap? With all the soap in the world, the child is still filthy. I wonder how effective soap is after all.” The soapmaker protested and said, “But Rabbi, soap can’t do any good unless it is used.” “Exactly”, the rabbi replied. “So it is with Judaism, or any other religion. It is ineffective unless it is applied and used.”
In this morning’s Gospel lesson, a rabbi named Jesus concluded an extended sermon with the same thought: the positive impact of his words can only be known by those who act on them. That is the way Jesus lived his life. The real reason for Jesus’ impact – both immediate and lasting – is that there was a seamless connection between his words and his deeds. From the opening scenes in the Gospels through the crucifixion itself, people noticed that Jesus taught with an authority rooted in synchronicity between his words and deeds.
But we often get it wrong right here. When Jesus says “everyone who hears these words of mine” we substitute words for religion, which we understand as a set of rules and principles to live by. Think ten commandments & Sermon on the Mount. Today’s passage is, in fact, the end of the Sermon on the Mount. When we read it we realize it’s much more than principles or a set of rules; it’s certainly not a call to religious piety. It seems like we all want to live by principles even when we can’t pull it off. Yet that’s precisely what Jesus didn’t seek to do. That’s what got him in so much trouble: he questioned everything that makes people feel safe with religion.
In his life and teaching, Jesus lightly, almost cavalierly, cast aside the many legal distinctions the Pharisee labored to maintain. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes the Pharisee as "...the one to whom only the knowledge of good and evil has come to be of importance in his entire life…Every moment of his life is a moment where he must choose between good and evil.” (Ethics, p.30) Every action, every judgment, no matter how small, is permeated with the choice of good and evil. The Pharisee can confront no one without evaluating that person in terms of good and evil (Ethics, p.31). All judgments are moral judgments. No gesture is immune to moral condemnation.
Jesus refuses to see the world in these terms. He bids his disciples to eat on the Sabbath, even though starvation is hardly in question. He heals a woman on the Sabbath, although after eighteen years of illness she could seemingly wait a few more hours. Jesus exhibits a freedom from the law in everything he does, but that doesn’t mean his behavior is arbitrary. It follows the law of love – loving our neighbors & loving ourselves. That leads to simplicity and clarity.
Unlike the Pharisee, Jesus is unconcerned with the goodness or badness of those he helps, unconcerned with the personal moral worth of those he meets, talks to, dines with, or heals. He is concerned solely and entirely with the well being of another. He exhibits no other concern. He is the paradigm of selfless action toward others - the exact opposite of the Pharisee. The Pharisee tries to be principled rather than compassionate. Jesus is compassionate above all.
Followers of Jesus are supposed to live in the same way. The responsible person is a selfless person, who does God's will by serving the spiritual and material needs of another, since "...what is nearest to God is precisely the need of one's neighbor" (Ethics, p.136). The selfless model of Jesus is the only guide to responsible action. There is no a priori right way to do that. It must be realized in the moment. Jesus is saying that if you've been doing your "Lord, Lord"-ing, and fail to care for an immediate need, you really haven't done a very good job of "Lord, Lord"-ing. Otherwise your eyes and ears would have been tempered or energized to see and hear what needs doing. The rules keep changing, as they did for Jesus, so we need to be willing to keep moving our foundations.
I was reflecting on this as I roller bladed at Venice Beach on Friday. I was watching homes being built and remodeled and some just sitting there. I couldn’t help but think about the message I’d been hearing about global warming. We’ve been told that the oceans will rise a few inches in the coming decades. I realized that at least the first floor of all these homes would be flooded – not a very good investment. That doesn’t mean the owners are foolish. But they will be foolish if they don’t do something different now. The same is true for us in many areas of our lives.
Jesus’ way of seeing religion as a way of responding with compassion at every moment rather than simply acting out of a prescribed list of rules is uncomfortable at best. In the culture I was raised in, I came to read Jesus’ parable about the house built on rock or sand through the lens of the story of the three pigs. For those of you who were not raised on that story, it speaks of three pigs who each built a house to protect it from the big bad wolf. The first two pigs built flimsy houses that were easily destroyed by wind, rain and fire, and both were eaten by the big bad wolf. The third pig built a strong house that couldn’t be easily destroyed, and thus survived. With that background the meaning of Jesus’ parable was clear to me. I must build my life on discipline, hard work and strong materials that will resist attacks from the big bad wolf. I must put myself into positions of strength from which I negotiate my way through life. The firmer the foundation, the less vulnerable I am. I imagine pouring a slab of concrete and then building a fortress on it, equipping it with all the conveniences I want, arming it with ballistic weapons, insulating myself from all those who aren't bright enough to build in the same way.
The problem is this interpretation doesn’t fit very well with the words Jesus has just spoken, which are, presumably, the words we must put into practice if we wish to build our lives on firm foundations. If we go back and read these words we learn that Jesus is suggesting that those who build on rock are poor in spirit, meek, and persecuted for righteousness' sake. We shore up our foundation by turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile, and forgiving as our God forgives. Then we should stop worrying about what we will eat or wear, avoid judging other people, and ask God for those things that we need. This rock we are supposed to build a house on is a pretty strange rock. It sounds more like building a house on a foundation that is purposely designed to bring down the house as soon as the wind picks up or anyone approaches us. I think I like the third pig’s house a lot more than Jesus’. (Andrew Marr THE HOUSE BUILT ON THE STUMBLING ROCK: http://andrewmarr.homestead.com/files/housebuilt.htm)
But then, of course, when I take a second look, I realize that maybe Jesus did have it right. When we forget to show mercy to the poor, we build our house on the sand. When we put the flag above the cross, or equate the flag with the cross, we build our house on the sand. When we pray for the safety of our countrymen and for the destruction of our enemies, we build our house on the sand. When we get complacent about millions who are infected with AIDS or other infectious diseases, we build our house on the sand. When we spend every last dime we have on ourselves, or save it for a rainy day, while neglecting those in need, we build our house on sand. (Tod O.L. Mundo Progressive Blog)
Whether you grew up with the three little pigs or some other story, most of us are not inclined to hear Jesus’ words as clearly as we may at first think. We can hardly imagine a religion that is not based on a set of rules we are supposed to follow at all costs. But no matter how difficult it is, it is critical that we get it right, because the consequences of getting it wrong are tearing the world apart. Two of the direst consequences of perceiving God’s will as a pre-defined set of rules are judgmentalism and fear. We end up judging others and set ourselves up as righteous. We hesitate to do what we think God wants us to do because we’re afraid it will be or will be perceived by others to be sin.
With respect to judgmentalism, scribes in their day and media pundits and spin doctors in our day exercise power closely aligned with invoking the Lord’s name. When televangelists shout, "Come out, in the name of the Lord," and bishops or General Assemblies exorcise the demon of homosexual willfulness in the name of the Lord, and offer praise for mighty works of regeneration in the name of the Lord, are all subject to the shifting sand of the moment and its needs. When we say, write or in any way claim that we are doing the Lord's will, that God is on our side, when combating godless communism or secular humanism is the cry, when radical Islamists are invoked as enemies of the Faith, or the claim is made that our position is just because God wills it -- when in other words we invoke the name of the Lord to counter what we consider to be false deities, we participate in the very behavior Jesus condemned in this verse. (The Sign-off to the Moral Nightly News by Mark Harris Saturday, May 21, 2005)
Jesus’ authority was rooted in the fact that he didn’t invoke the name of the Lord to bolster his teaching. He took responsibility for his own teaching: “You have heard it said… but I say to you…” Nothing: simply the words standing there on their own, just waiting for the executioner to come. Likewise, the object for us is to make God’s will real in the world, in our actions and words, not in our piety. The Reign of God is entered by being God’s Word, by being the voice & action of God’s will; not by invoking the Lord’s name.
The second consequence of seeing God’s will as a pre-defined set of rules is that it makes us afraid to act because we might fall into sin. We’ve all been shaped by our culture; and religion is a part of culture. There have been prohibitions against things whose sinfulness is being questioned today. That makes us nervous. When those things get called into question, it feels like our foundation has been pulled out from under us. We’re tempted to go find it again. But that is exactly the wrong strategy – the one Jesus is rejecting here. Jesus is saying that his word is the foundation, and his word is a living word. I remember teachers joking about Paul’s call to present ourselves as living sacrifices. They said, “The problem with living sacrifices is that they keep crawling off the altar.” We’re afraid that Jesus is going to move the foundation, so we look for a more solid one and call it Jesus. So we cling to a set of dead words – even dead words that Jesus himself once spoke as living words. But they become dead when we don’t allow them to move. Jesus will move the foundation. But he is the foundation, so his promise is true: “I will be with you to the end of the age.”
One of the ways we put words and deeds together is by putting our money where are mouths are. In the same sermon Jesus spoke the proverb, “where your treasure is there your heart will be also.” If our hearts are rooted in the foundation of Jesus’ word of compassion, part of our treasure will be invested where that is practiced. Immanuel is only one of those places, but for those of us who consider this our faith community, it is a significant one.
As we sing I want to invite you to take your pledge card and bring it up to the communion table as an expression of your heart commitment. This is a personal decision with a communal expression.
June 21, 2008
May 28, 2008 + Road map to peace: Reality or fantasy? + Hayward Fong
Psalm 10; I Cor. 12:4-13
The last Monday in May has been set aside by Congress as Memorial Day; traditionally, it would be observed this coming Friday, on May 30th rather than the last Monday in May. This holiday commemorates U.S. men and women who died in military service for their country. I think the Monday observance has turned what should be a day of spiritual observance into the make-up of another three-day weekend. Many organizations feel that changing the May 30th observance has undermined the very meaning of the day. I note its observance this year was more in keeping as a day of memorializing the sacrifices that have been our nation’s hallmark and made it a more memorable event, most especially as we hear of our men and women dying daily in Iraq and Afganistan. Perhaps it is due to all the national political campaigning going on.
Memorial Day was an outgrowth of the Civil War, a day dedicated to the memory of the dead, both the Blue and the Gray. After World War I, it was expanded to include the memory of all who had served our country in all of its wars. Those who still observe the occasion take the time to remember family and loved ones who have passed on to their eternal home by visiting cemetaries and memorials. A National Moment of Remembrance takes place at 3 p.m. on Memorial Day. Another tradition is to fly the U.S. Flag at half-staff from dawn until noon local time.
In the years since World War II, we have been engaged in the Korean Conflict, the war in Vietnam and numerous conflicts around the world, both covert and overt missions to overthrow governments in power. The terrorist attack of 9/11 directed our nation towards a new type enemy, not one of national identity, but an ideological one. President Bush has led us into a war in Afghanistan and Iraq which he has designed to locate and destroy this new enemy and in so doing bring democratic rule to these countries. Daily media reports indicate that we are a long way from achieving either objective. However noble our mission may be, these and our numerous military involvements elsewhere have brought America’s foreign policy decisions under both internal and international scrutiny.
Everywhere, people are asking, “What can we do about the struggles we face today, most notably that of bringing our service men and women home safely? What can anyone do? Is there anything one individual can do that will make a difference in these troubled times?” These questions are often accompanied with an air of futility. The implication is that one individual is impotent, that he can do little, that he is an insignificant factor in any situation.
But I believe there is hope. A positive, victorious faith is available to anyone and everyone; it is available for you and for me. This is the kind of faith that will help us overcome all circumstances of life that would otherwise defeat us. But it doesn’t come cheaply nor is it easily attained. It calls for us to sink deeply in our Christianity and allow it to seep deeply into our very being.
We are called to humble ourselves. Pray. Trust in God. Turn to Him in our every need. Develop a deep faith in Jesus Christ, a positive faith that will carry us through all times, especially troubled ones.
These doctrines may seem old-fashioned, but the greatest thing anyone can do is to have the experience of standing up to a devastating situation and saying with all his heart, “I can deal with this with the help of Almighty God!”
Micah identified walking humbly with God as one of the big three requirements for God’s people (Micah 6:8). Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29). The root of the word humble is humus (ground). Our words human and humility come from the same root. Humility is the firm foundation upon which our spiritual life is built. Humility is not underestimating our worth or allowing ourselves to be defined by another. Humility is the opposite of this. Henri Nouwen, in his book Bread for the Journey, puts it this way, “It is the grateful recognition that we are precious in God’s eyes and that all we are is pure gift.” Humility, rooted in gratitude, provides the soft heart in which God may form a new creation, ever new, changed from one glory into another glory. A life in Christ is all about God and others, about how I live in relation to God and to others, not some but all others.
Today in our nation this practice of and growth in humility is so countercultural that we sometimes live in confusion and frustration. We take pride in our achievements, our accumulated wealth, things, our power, individually and nationally. And then we find ourselves pushed to the point of breaking the bodies and souls.of others in accomplishing these goals. “Humility begins with our rootness in God – and our recognition that only God and God’s will matter” (What Happened to Humility?, N. Graham Standish).
Archbishop Oscar Romero in his last homily on March 23, 1980 said, “Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can do only as much as God makes us able to do; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be.”
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 brought forth a lot of human emotional responses both here and worldwide ... of loss, grief, anger, fear, confusion, helplessness, vengeance. Proclaiming the need for a ‘war on terror’ our elected leaders found justification to initiate a call to arms in Afghanistan and eventually Iraq. We further justified our actions by invoking Scripture, making assumptions about who God is, who we are and what God wants us to do in the world, proclaiming that since we are a compassionate people, living in a Christian nation, we have God’s blessing to hunt for terrorists and the countries that may be harboring them. Those who disagreed were called unpatriotic, traitors. Pushed by political expediency and emotions, we failed to question the assumptions that were given to justify our military action. “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom” (Proverbs 11:2 NIV).
Our leaders treated themselves as righteous, confidently doing what God wants but in so doing acted like God himself. As a people we cannot turn back the clock of historyand wipe clean our leader’s decisions. Can we, as people of faith, consider the impact of our country’s actions here and abroad and confess our ignorance and naive assumptions that have led us to this international chaos? If so, we can take the small step needed to begin the journey on the road to peace.
Will tomorrow bring an end to our troubled times? Only God knows. But whatever lies ahead, we can count on God’s help. The world can be a wonderful world for all; but this can be accomplished only by the tremendous healing power of God through Jesus Christ working upon people’s souls. Though some of our battles seem lost, I believe America will prevail if only our people will remember, “In God We Trust!” Trusting in God calls us to roll up out sleeves and put our faith into action befitting our name as Christians.
I close with this poem for peace written during World War II by U.S. Navy Wave Gwen Danner Holland. I along with people over the years have found comfort in her words.
The last Monday in May has been set aside by Congress as Memorial Day; traditionally, it would be observed this coming Friday, on May 30th rather than the last Monday in May. This holiday commemorates U.S. men and women who died in military service for their country. I think the Monday observance has turned what should be a day of spiritual observance into the make-up of another three-day weekend. Many organizations feel that changing the May 30th observance has undermined the very meaning of the day. I note its observance this year was more in keeping as a day of memorializing the sacrifices that have been our nation’s hallmark and made it a more memorable event, most especially as we hear of our men and women dying daily in Iraq and Afganistan. Perhaps it is due to all the national political campaigning going on.
Memorial Day was an outgrowth of the Civil War, a day dedicated to the memory of the dead, both the Blue and the Gray. After World War I, it was expanded to include the memory of all who had served our country in all of its wars. Those who still observe the occasion take the time to remember family and loved ones who have passed on to their eternal home by visiting cemetaries and memorials. A National Moment of Remembrance takes place at 3 p.m. on Memorial Day. Another tradition is to fly the U.S. Flag at half-staff from dawn until noon local time.
In the years since World War II, we have been engaged in the Korean Conflict, the war in Vietnam and numerous conflicts around the world, both covert and overt missions to overthrow governments in power. The terrorist attack of 9/11 directed our nation towards a new type enemy, not one of national identity, but an ideological one. President Bush has led us into a war in Afghanistan and Iraq which he has designed to locate and destroy this new enemy and in so doing bring democratic rule to these countries. Daily media reports indicate that we are a long way from achieving either objective. However noble our mission may be, these and our numerous military involvements elsewhere have brought America’s foreign policy decisions under both internal and international scrutiny.
Everywhere, people are asking, “What can we do about the struggles we face today, most notably that of bringing our service men and women home safely? What can anyone do? Is there anything one individual can do that will make a difference in these troubled times?” These questions are often accompanied with an air of futility. The implication is that one individual is impotent, that he can do little, that he is an insignificant factor in any situation.
But I believe there is hope. A positive, victorious faith is available to anyone and everyone; it is available for you and for me. This is the kind of faith that will help us overcome all circumstances of life that would otherwise defeat us. But it doesn’t come cheaply nor is it easily attained. It calls for us to sink deeply in our Christianity and allow it to seep deeply into our very being.
We are called to humble ourselves. Pray. Trust in God. Turn to Him in our every need. Develop a deep faith in Jesus Christ, a positive faith that will carry us through all times, especially troubled ones.
These doctrines may seem old-fashioned, but the greatest thing anyone can do is to have the experience of standing up to a devastating situation and saying with all his heart, “I can deal with this with the help of Almighty God!”
Micah identified walking humbly with God as one of the big three requirements for God’s people (Micah 6:8). Jesus said, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29). The root of the word humble is humus (ground). Our words human and humility come from the same root. Humility is the firm foundation upon which our spiritual life is built. Humility is not underestimating our worth or allowing ourselves to be defined by another. Humility is the opposite of this. Henri Nouwen, in his book Bread for the Journey, puts it this way, “It is the grateful recognition that we are precious in God’s eyes and that all we are is pure gift.” Humility, rooted in gratitude, provides the soft heart in which God may form a new creation, ever new, changed from one glory into another glory. A life in Christ is all about God and others, about how I live in relation to God and to others, not some but all others.
Today in our nation this practice of and growth in humility is so countercultural that we sometimes live in confusion and frustration. We take pride in our achievements, our accumulated wealth, things, our power, individually and nationally. And then we find ourselves pushed to the point of breaking the bodies and souls.of others in accomplishing these goals. “Humility begins with our rootness in God – and our recognition that only God and God’s will matter” (What Happened to Humility?, N. Graham Standish).
Archbishop Oscar Romero in his last homily on March 23, 1980 said, “Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can do only as much as God makes us able to do; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be.”
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 brought forth a lot of human emotional responses both here and worldwide ... of loss, grief, anger, fear, confusion, helplessness, vengeance. Proclaiming the need for a ‘war on terror’ our elected leaders found justification to initiate a call to arms in Afghanistan and eventually Iraq. We further justified our actions by invoking Scripture, making assumptions about who God is, who we are and what God wants us to do in the world, proclaiming that since we are a compassionate people, living in a Christian nation, we have God’s blessing to hunt for terrorists and the countries that may be harboring them. Those who disagreed were called unpatriotic, traitors. Pushed by political expediency and emotions, we failed to question the assumptions that were given to justify our military action. “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom” (Proverbs 11:2 NIV).
Our leaders treated themselves as righteous, confidently doing what God wants but in so doing acted like God himself. As a people we cannot turn back the clock of historyand wipe clean our leader’s decisions. Can we, as people of faith, consider the impact of our country’s actions here and abroad and confess our ignorance and naive assumptions that have led us to this international chaos? If so, we can take the small step needed to begin the journey on the road to peace.
Will tomorrow bring an end to our troubled times? Only God knows. But whatever lies ahead, we can count on God’s help. The world can be a wonderful world for all; but this can be accomplished only by the tremendous healing power of God through Jesus Christ working upon people’s souls. Though some of our battles seem lost, I believe America will prevail if only our people will remember, “In God We Trust!” Trusting in God calls us to roll up out sleeves and put our faith into action befitting our name as Christians.
I close with this poem for peace written during World War II by U.S. Navy Wave Gwen Danner Holland. I along with people over the years have found comfort in her words.
Prayer in Solitude
I stand and watch the golden sun slip quietly away.
The dusk falls all about me, this is the end of day.
A tiny, rippling little stream, a wooden bridge so small.
The chant of crickets fills the air, the iris stands so tall.
This I choose, an altar Lord, a quiet place to pray.
For those we love so far away,where there’s no night, no day.
Courageous men and women facing battle over there.
They strive for peace, then homeward bound. Thou knowest their despair.
The days and nights since they’ve been gone are long and lonely too.
You have them Lord, so let them know Thine own great love from You.
I pray for their safe keeping. I ask for nothing more,
but that you hear this humble prayer above Your oceans’ roar.
The night is come, I’ll close my prayer for joyful peace again.
But thru this war, I pray Oh God, take care of them. Amen.
- World War II Navy Wave Gwen Danner Holland
May 25, 2008 + What does it take to trust? + Frank Alton
Isaiah 49:8-16; Psalm 131; Matthew 6:24-34
MP3 File
Last night Judy and I went to see Indiana Jones with our daughter and her family. As I stood at the concession stand I looked around the lobby of the theater. Everywhere I laid my eyes there was an over abundance of visual stimulation. TV screens, giant posters, signs with the menu, special offers and directions; and people everywhere. And that was before the wild ride of the movie even began. I couldn’t help but think about how sharply all that contrasted with the image of the Psalmist who wrote: “I have calmed and quieted my soul.”
Tomorrow the nation celebrates Memorial Day when we are invited to honor those who died in the pursuit of peace and freedom – our own or that of others. There have always been those who have questioned whether all those deaths really contributed to peace and freedom, and whether war is even an appropriate way to seek those ends. It seems that there are even more who question that today. To hold that question does not give us permission to forget or ignore those who have died in war. We owe a great debt of gratitude to soldiers, whether we agree with the wars they fought or not. But our questions make it more complicated.
I believe that the three Scripture passages we just heard speak to that complexity. As I worked through them I realized that accessing peace requires deep trust whether we find ourselves in noisy movie theaters, in places of desperate emotional darkness, in the midst of a terrifying call, or in situations of war – whether we consider that war legitimate or not.
The Psalmist uses the image of a child who has fed at a mother’s breast to speak of the kind of trust associated with peace in our souls. But the text is not clear as to whether the child has been recently weaned from the breast or has just finished a feeding. In that ambiguity lie resources to deal with the complexity.
In the Gospel, Jesus suggests that people’s participation in the abundant life of God is blocked by worry and anxiety. He doesn’t use the image of birds and flowers to argue that release from anxiety in our souls comes from being unaware of the complexity but from participating in the life of God.
Finally the Prophet Isaiah addresses those who are able to access peace in their own souls by offering them a vocation that offers peace and freedom to others who are stuck in dark prisons because they don’t know they can get out. Let’s examine each of these more closely.
There is a bumper sticker that says, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs – you clearly don’t comprehend the situation.” At first reading that does not sound very consistent with the Bible. Doesn’t the Bible call us to find calm in the midst of chaos? Well, yes. But often we have tried to do that by avoiding or denying the chaos rather than honestly finding calm in the midst of it. That part is not biblical.
Psalm 131:2 says, “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” I have it on good authority though not from personal knowledge that a mother experienced in breast feeding knows that a two year old weaned child is not the ideal picture of calm. More likely that child would be pulling on her blouse to look for her breast, perhaps singing a little song to her breast, grabbing a handful of what she’s eating, showing her a doll, and tugging at her earring. Any mother knows that a weaned child is not a model of calm.
What mothers know from experience is confirmed, or at least debated, by language scholars. The Hebrew word does not literally mean “weaned” but instead means “dealt well with, dealt with bounteously.” That sounds more like a child who has just finished nursing. A recently weaned child who is quiet in despair because he or she knows crying won’t do any good is very different from a child whose calm is born of satisfaction, trust, and sufficiency in the availability of mother’s milk.
The prophet Isaiah picks up a similar image: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15). In Hebrew, the words for compassion and womb come from the same three-letter root so that one implies the other. God as nursing mother does not communicate sentimentality, but immediate biological urgency.
Neither a nursing child, nor a recently fed child, nor a weaned child is completely calm. Nor is the mother! Nursing children whimper, cry, scream, and sometimes bite. Breasts that are not suckled on time ache, swell and leak. All children step on their mothers’ bladders as they crawl over them, and tear their bodies as they exit the birth canal. If God is like a mother, she is intimately connected to us, intensely aware of our experience and our needs and incapable of forgetting. The implications for the portrait of God and God’s children are significant.
The picture the Psalmist paints is a combination of regret, lament and grief on the one hand, and peaceful hope and joy on the other. (Psalm 131) Perhaps the psalmist’s lament is, “I am beat down, O Lord, by all the forces of life. I have tried to subdue my emotions, but my heart is sobbing like a child.” (Texts for Preaching Year A, p. 158) That might be combined in the same person with an understanding his or her relation to God and to the larger world that hasn’t led to false pride, such that there has descended on this person’s innermost being a marvelous peace. To trust ones soul to God may require both parts: struggling with regret & grief over the losses & failures we’ve had to face in life and accepting our worth before God and the limits of our humanity and mortality. Soul work is difficult, but it is the way to find peace and quiet in the midst of all the noise of the world.
In the passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us that the roots of trust are found in God, and that creation offers clues about how it works. While the life of the soul is full of complexity, the soil in which that life is planted must be simple. It is literally impossible to be planted in two different soils at the same time. Jesus puts it in terms of God and mammon. Mammon refers to wealth in all its forms – money, power and reputation are the three primary forms Jesus addresses. We can only depend on one – either we depend on God or the wealth we depend on the wealth we can accrue independently of God.
To root our lives in money, power or reputation is to assure a life of anxiety. We all have experience of losing them. One moment we have power, the next moment we are powerless. One week we have a paycheck, the next week we lose our job. One day our reputation is good, the next day people are saying all kinds of bad things about us. Jesus compares it to birds and flowers. Perhaps we think it’s easier for birds and flowers because they don’t use the currencies of money, power and reputation. But maybe Jesus’ point in using the examples of flowers and birds is not that they are carefree because they’re oblivious & unaware, but that they unselfconsciously participate in the life of God, life which is pouring forth through all creation. Too much worry blocks that participation, which is why we humans often feel distant and disconnected from God. Fear closes down our hearts; worry puts up a barricade to grace. The birds and the lilies and all of nature have lessons to teach us about being unobstructed channels for the flow of God’s grace.
That’s why it renews our faith and our perspective on life to get out in nature. We are reminded of what life is really like. Last Sunday I was in Hawaii. I must confess to playing hooky from church to go snorkeling. But as a guy who is in church just about every Sunday I thought it was appropriate to go snorkeling. Whether that is a rationalization or not, being up close and personal with all those beautiful creatures with their intense colors and varied shapes, and floating in the water buoyed up by a force outside myself, brought me closer to remembering what life is about than going to church would have done. I felt energy surging through my whole being.
But we can’t leave the matter of peace and trust at the level of their nature and their roots. The word of God always calls us to bear fruit in our lives, to act on what we receive. According to Isaiah, the fruit of trust is not simply a peaceful life but a vocation of calling others out of their darkness into the light and joy of life in God. (Isaiah 49:8-16) This is important both so that what we do emerges out of deep places in us rather than superficial ones, and so that we don’t get stuck on the inner journey without developing an outer journey.
The passage in Isaiah is addressed to “the servant.” But it is never clear who the servant is. At the very least she or he is part of the people. The servant could be anyone. It is the one who trusts God’s compassion. In order for a person to be a servant who provides that kind of channel for others requires that the person’s life be rooted in the peace that arises from being deeply satisfied in knowing God’s compassion.
This servant addresses a group of exiles who had been living in a foreign land their entire lives, after their ancestors had been forcefully removed from their homeland. They had grown accustomed to their circumstances. Those who remained had mostly forgotten Jerusalem or never knew it. They had stopped telling the stories and singing the songs, so the joy that was Jerusalem had been lost to the new generation. After a while prisoners don’t even know they are captive anymore and exiles don’t know they are alienated from their homeland.
God called the servant to bring a message of hope and an invitation to trust. The servant serves as a reminder of the agreement and promises God had made with the people. The servant invites the prisoners to come out of the shadows and risk moving toward their true home. The first task of the servant is to awaken the people to the fact that there is a homeland, and then to tap into the forgotten longing for home. If he or she is successful at that, the next challenge is to overcome their resistance. The pathway home is through the desert. What they have heard about the journey makes it sound impossible. The promises given to them sound like fantasy: green pastures along the roadside through the desert and on the tops of mountains that are normally barren; guaranteed food and drink when there are no sources of either along the way; protection and strength against the scorching wind and blazing sun; and the Compassionate One who seems to have been asleep for 70 years promising to guide them by springs of water. Oh, and the mountains will become roadways and valleys will be filled in to become highways.
Likely story! The people cannot believe it. But instead of rebuking the people for their lack of faith, God invites creation itself to respond on their behalf in a manner appropriate to the fact that God has comforted the people and will have compassion on those who suffer. “Sing for joy O skies; exult, O earth; break forth into singing, O mountains!” When the people are unable to restore their trust in a God who seemed to have forgotten and abandoned them in their time of need, they are invited to reflect on their own experience: “Can one of you who are mothers forget your nursing child? Is it possible for a mother to not show compassion to the child she bore? Even if that unlikely scenario were possible, I, your God, will not forget you.”
That is a hand we can hold whether in blaring noise or dark lonely silence. That is a hope we can cling to when we have been disappointed over and over again. That is a peace we can claim even when fear is knocking at the door. Friends, let us stand up and trust in our God.
MP3 File
Last night Judy and I went to see Indiana Jones with our daughter and her family. As I stood at the concession stand I looked around the lobby of the theater. Everywhere I laid my eyes there was an over abundance of visual stimulation. TV screens, giant posters, signs with the menu, special offers and directions; and people everywhere. And that was before the wild ride of the movie even began. I couldn’t help but think about how sharply all that contrasted with the image of the Psalmist who wrote: “I have calmed and quieted my soul.”
Tomorrow the nation celebrates Memorial Day when we are invited to honor those who died in the pursuit of peace and freedom – our own or that of others. There have always been those who have questioned whether all those deaths really contributed to peace and freedom, and whether war is even an appropriate way to seek those ends. It seems that there are even more who question that today. To hold that question does not give us permission to forget or ignore those who have died in war. We owe a great debt of gratitude to soldiers, whether we agree with the wars they fought or not. But our questions make it more complicated.
I believe that the three Scripture passages we just heard speak to that complexity. As I worked through them I realized that accessing peace requires deep trust whether we find ourselves in noisy movie theaters, in places of desperate emotional darkness, in the midst of a terrifying call, or in situations of war – whether we consider that war legitimate or not.
The Psalmist uses the image of a child who has fed at a mother’s breast to speak of the kind of trust associated with peace in our souls. But the text is not clear as to whether the child has been recently weaned from the breast or has just finished a feeding. In that ambiguity lie resources to deal with the complexity.
In the Gospel, Jesus suggests that people’s participation in the abundant life of God is blocked by worry and anxiety. He doesn’t use the image of birds and flowers to argue that release from anxiety in our souls comes from being unaware of the complexity but from participating in the life of God.
Finally the Prophet Isaiah addresses those who are able to access peace in their own souls by offering them a vocation that offers peace and freedom to others who are stuck in dark prisons because they don’t know they can get out. Let’s examine each of these more closely.
There is a bumper sticker that says, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs – you clearly don’t comprehend the situation.” At first reading that does not sound very consistent with the Bible. Doesn’t the Bible call us to find calm in the midst of chaos? Well, yes. But often we have tried to do that by avoiding or denying the chaos rather than honestly finding calm in the midst of it. That part is not biblical.
Psalm 131:2 says, “But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” I have it on good authority though not from personal knowledge that a mother experienced in breast feeding knows that a two year old weaned child is not the ideal picture of calm. More likely that child would be pulling on her blouse to look for her breast, perhaps singing a little song to her breast, grabbing a handful of what she’s eating, showing her a doll, and tugging at her earring. Any mother knows that a weaned child is not a model of calm.
What mothers know from experience is confirmed, or at least debated, by language scholars. The Hebrew word does not literally mean “weaned” but instead means “dealt well with, dealt with bounteously.” That sounds more like a child who has just finished nursing. A recently weaned child who is quiet in despair because he or she knows crying won’t do any good is very different from a child whose calm is born of satisfaction, trust, and sufficiency in the availability of mother’s milk.
The prophet Isaiah picks up a similar image: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15). In Hebrew, the words for compassion and womb come from the same three-letter root so that one implies the other. God as nursing mother does not communicate sentimentality, but immediate biological urgency.
Neither a nursing child, nor a recently fed child, nor a weaned child is completely calm. Nor is the mother! Nursing children whimper, cry, scream, and sometimes bite. Breasts that are not suckled on time ache, swell and leak. All children step on their mothers’ bladders as they crawl over them, and tear their bodies as they exit the birth canal. If God is like a mother, she is intimately connected to us, intensely aware of our experience and our needs and incapable of forgetting. The implications for the portrait of God and God’s children are significant.
The picture the Psalmist paints is a combination of regret, lament and grief on the one hand, and peaceful hope and joy on the other. (Psalm 131) Perhaps the psalmist’s lament is, “I am beat down, O Lord, by all the forces of life. I have tried to subdue my emotions, but my heart is sobbing like a child.” (Texts for Preaching Year A, p. 158) That might be combined in the same person with an understanding his or her relation to God and to the larger world that hasn’t led to false pride, such that there has descended on this person’s innermost being a marvelous peace. To trust ones soul to God may require both parts: struggling with regret & grief over the losses & failures we’ve had to face in life and accepting our worth before God and the limits of our humanity and mortality. Soul work is difficult, but it is the way to find peace and quiet in the midst of all the noise of the world.
In the passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus reminds us that the roots of trust are found in God, and that creation offers clues about how it works. While the life of the soul is full of complexity, the soil in which that life is planted must be simple. It is literally impossible to be planted in two different soils at the same time. Jesus puts it in terms of God and mammon. Mammon refers to wealth in all its forms – money, power and reputation are the three primary forms Jesus addresses. We can only depend on one – either we depend on God or the wealth we depend on the wealth we can accrue independently of God.
To root our lives in money, power or reputation is to assure a life of anxiety. We all have experience of losing them. One moment we have power, the next moment we are powerless. One week we have a paycheck, the next week we lose our job. One day our reputation is good, the next day people are saying all kinds of bad things about us. Jesus compares it to birds and flowers. Perhaps we think it’s easier for birds and flowers because they don’t use the currencies of money, power and reputation. But maybe Jesus’ point in using the examples of flowers and birds is not that they are carefree because they’re oblivious & unaware, but that they unselfconsciously participate in the life of God, life which is pouring forth through all creation. Too much worry blocks that participation, which is why we humans often feel distant and disconnected from God. Fear closes down our hearts; worry puts up a barricade to grace. The birds and the lilies and all of nature have lessons to teach us about being unobstructed channels for the flow of God’s grace.
That’s why it renews our faith and our perspective on life to get out in nature. We are reminded of what life is really like. Last Sunday I was in Hawaii. I must confess to playing hooky from church to go snorkeling. But as a guy who is in church just about every Sunday I thought it was appropriate to go snorkeling. Whether that is a rationalization or not, being up close and personal with all those beautiful creatures with their intense colors and varied shapes, and floating in the water buoyed up by a force outside myself, brought me closer to remembering what life is about than going to church would have done. I felt energy surging through my whole being.
But we can’t leave the matter of peace and trust at the level of their nature and their roots. The word of God always calls us to bear fruit in our lives, to act on what we receive. According to Isaiah, the fruit of trust is not simply a peaceful life but a vocation of calling others out of their darkness into the light and joy of life in God. (Isaiah 49:8-16) This is important both so that what we do emerges out of deep places in us rather than superficial ones, and so that we don’t get stuck on the inner journey without developing an outer journey.
The passage in Isaiah is addressed to “the servant.” But it is never clear who the servant is. At the very least she or he is part of the people. The servant could be anyone. It is the one who trusts God’s compassion. In order for a person to be a servant who provides that kind of channel for others requires that the person’s life be rooted in the peace that arises from being deeply satisfied in knowing God’s compassion.
This servant addresses a group of exiles who had been living in a foreign land their entire lives, after their ancestors had been forcefully removed from their homeland. They had grown accustomed to their circumstances. Those who remained had mostly forgotten Jerusalem or never knew it. They had stopped telling the stories and singing the songs, so the joy that was Jerusalem had been lost to the new generation. After a while prisoners don’t even know they are captive anymore and exiles don’t know they are alienated from their homeland.
God called the servant to bring a message of hope and an invitation to trust. The servant serves as a reminder of the agreement and promises God had made with the people. The servant invites the prisoners to come out of the shadows and risk moving toward their true home. The first task of the servant is to awaken the people to the fact that there is a homeland, and then to tap into the forgotten longing for home. If he or she is successful at that, the next challenge is to overcome their resistance. The pathway home is through the desert. What they have heard about the journey makes it sound impossible. The promises given to them sound like fantasy: green pastures along the roadside through the desert and on the tops of mountains that are normally barren; guaranteed food and drink when there are no sources of either along the way; protection and strength against the scorching wind and blazing sun; and the Compassionate One who seems to have been asleep for 70 years promising to guide them by springs of water. Oh, and the mountains will become roadways and valleys will be filled in to become highways.
Likely story! The people cannot believe it. But instead of rebuking the people for their lack of faith, God invites creation itself to respond on their behalf in a manner appropriate to the fact that God has comforted the people and will have compassion on those who suffer. “Sing for joy O skies; exult, O earth; break forth into singing, O mountains!” When the people are unable to restore their trust in a God who seemed to have forgotten and abandoned them in their time of need, they are invited to reflect on their own experience: “Can one of you who are mothers forget your nursing child? Is it possible for a mother to not show compassion to the child she bore? Even if that unlikely scenario were possible, I, your God, will not forget you.”
That is a hand we can hold whether in blaring noise or dark lonely silence. That is a hope we can cling to when we have been disappointed over and over again. That is a peace we can claim even when fear is knocking at the door. Friends, let us stand up and trust in our God.
May 21, 2008 - Prayer: The soul's sincere desire - Hayward Fong
Matthew 6:1, 5-8; Luke 11:1-4; James 5:13-18
Our Wednesday morning worship service started out as a prayer service when Dr. Wilburn was our pastor. Bit by bit it evolved into the more formal worship service as we know it today. I must admit this has been my doing for the most part. When Dr. Wilburn left and I took over the activity by default, this was all I knew. It has been a learning experience and a most rewarding one for me.
In the intervening years, people have addressed their personal concerns to me about prayer. Among our church members as well as outside the church, people have commented on the fact that there is a lot of talk about prayer and about the power of prayer but were unclear about prayer. They had questions such as what is it, what does it do, why is it important, how should I pray? I learned to pray by hearing others, and I still consider myself a babe as to what prayer really is.
Ten years ago, my daughter gave me a calendar devoted to the subject of prayer. Each day contained a thought on payer. It was of immense help to me in understanding more about prayer. Over the course of the past several years, I have presented homilies on how to pray, but reflecting on the questions that have been raised, I have been led to speak today on prayer, first in the generic and hopefully build on it.
To begin with, “prayer” expresses the most comprehensive and enlarged approach to God that is possible. It is communion with God. It is access to God. It is a movement toward Reality. Prayer is the device through which we become engaged with the essence of our self. It is also the manner through which we move self to an engagement and deeper companionship with God. Through it we discover others in a new and more profound way. In short, it is the essence of the spiritual life and the enjoyment of God.
There are many forms and varieties of prayer. “Supplication,” for example is an intense form of prayer. We make supplication when we have an urgent personal need or concern pressing upon us. It is the way of pleading for some one thing, often with a very specific point of focus. In contrast, “intercession” is a form of prayer which stretches beyond the particular to the horizons of free expression of the soul’s approach to the Almighty. It is not confined or limited, but is an offering in confidence and trust, an influence to be used for others.
Edward McKendree Bounds, who was one of the great spiritual influences of the past century, spent a great deal of his energy studying the Scriptures and praying. From his efforts came forth a series of spiritual classics on prayer. Quoting from one of his writings, he insisted that:
We should be grateful for that unnamed disciple who had the good sense to ask Jesus “Lord, teach us to pray.” That request brought forth from our Lord a model prayer that stands among the greatest treasures which man possesses, “The Lord’s Prayer.”
Jesus said to his followers, “Pray then like this…our Father who art in heaven.” The first suggestion Jesus made was to address God directly and in a very close, intimate way: Abba, “Father.” What a fantastic thing that Jesus should teach us to address God as “our Father.” With this instruction he has given to us a profound definition of God. He is not some vague “ground of all being,” but “our Father.”
Prayer, therefore, should have about it the intimacy of a conversation between a son or daughter and a loving father.
But Abba really means something closer to “Daddy.” When my children were growing up, they never called me “Daddy;” they called me Father. In later years, they started to call me “Dad,” and I realized what I had been missing sub-consciously all those years.
We must know the person to whom we are turning, or we cannot address God properly. If we treat a loving father as a vicious tyrant or a distant monarch, we do not make much contact. It is difficult for the father to relate with warmth when he is mistrusted or held at arm’s length. It should be a dialogue that is characterized by honesty and familiarity. It was the Apostle Paul who pointed out that when we cry, “Abba! Father! It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15).
The familiar story of the prodigal son in Luke’s Gospel (Ch. 15:11-24) gives us an image of what God is like. This man gave his son freedom to leave home and even gave him his share of the inheritance knowing full well, but hoping otherwise, that it would be squandered. Yet each day he would go and stand staring out into the desert, hoping against hope that he would see some trace of his son on the distant horizon. Then one day, he saw a weary, broken figure and recognized him before the son realized his father was rushing out to greet him.
The father ran up to his son and hugged him, while the son pleaded only to be granted a servant’s status. Instead, the father gave him the best robe, sandals for his feet, rings for his fingers. Then he ordered a fatted calf to be prepared for a feast so all might rejoice that his son had returned home.
We don’t think of the father as being a prodigal, but he is. The dictionary gives as a second definition for this word, “lavish.” This is the kind of father to whom we pray when we say, “Our Father.” Our God is a prodigal Father, lavish in His nature. God is so much better than anything we could have dreamed of or hoped for. God is not “wish-fulfillment,” because no one can imagine in their deepest sense that such an overflowing love is the source and center of the world of which we are a part. It takes real faith to believe that the world can be like that when humans are what they are.
The petition “Give us this day our daily brad,” emphasizes the need for daily prayer as a regular part of our lives. Some people argue that prayer should be spontaneous rather than habitual. They say that daily prayer may lapse into sterile routine, sort of form without any real force behind it. This is always a danger, but sporadic prayer may be under a worse threat: if we pray only when we are “moved” to do so; prayer may become so erratic that it disappears all together. Isn’t it a fact of experience that where there is no regular habit of prayer, the result is very little praying? We need to make prayer a regular part of our every day life, in order to assure that it remains a vital part of our lives.
When we pray for our “daily bread,” we are recognizing that our lives are dependent upon God’s good gifts. We could not live for a moment without his daily provisions. It is the petition of one who understands that we need more than the material “bread” of life, for man “shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). To pray for our daily bread is to call upon God’s power to enrich and nourish our lives both physically and spiritually, to energize us for our living.
At the heart of our prayer should be the sincere desire to discover the will of God for our lives. Jesus prayed at every crucial moment of his life for God’s guidance. At the beginning of his ministry he went into the wilderness and prayed for strength to resist the devil and to be obedient to the Father. Before selecting the twelve disciples he prayed all night for God’s direction. Before facing the agony of the cross, he prayed, in the Garden of Gethsemane,
that God’s will, not his own, be done. The prime purpose of prayer is to discern the will of God…to know the mind of the Father.
Having received God’s “word” for our lives, the Christian’s prayer moves on to an act of submission. Just as the patriot disappears in his attachment to his country, the artist in his art, the singer in his song, so must the Christian disappear in his Christ. “He must increase, I must decrease.” The climax of true prayer is found in the submission to the will of God; “The will be done,” is the highest form of faith. From the willingness to offer such a prayer of submission comes a life radiant with the power of the Holy Spirit. God sent Jesus Christ into the world with a plan so we might have that power and He gave us this prayer so that we might know how to pray to become instruments of this transformation and love.
PRAYER: “Our Father who art in heaven…”- Lord, help us remember today that You not only rule the universe but also know us and love us as a Father with the tenderness of a Mother’s heart.
“Hallowed be Thy name…”- We thank and praise You for the beauty of the world and the blessings of Your grace and love.
“Thy kingdom come…”- Help us spread Your joy and kindness and shine Your light in the lives of our families, friends, and everyone we meet today.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”- Show us the plans You have for us, and help us to follow Your will with a faithful spirit.
“Give us this day our daily bread…”- You give us everything we need for a good and happy life. Let us use these gifts for Your glory, and also generously share them.
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…”- Help us to see others through Your eyes of compassion and forgive them even when it is hardest just as You have forgiven us.
“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil…”- Be the light onto our path wherever we go, and let Your holy angels keep us always.
“For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.”- May we keep in our hearts that our strength, our hopes and our joys are in You – today and forever. Amen.
Our Wednesday morning worship service started out as a prayer service when Dr. Wilburn was our pastor. Bit by bit it evolved into the more formal worship service as we know it today. I must admit this has been my doing for the most part. When Dr. Wilburn left and I took over the activity by default, this was all I knew. It has been a learning experience and a most rewarding one for me.
In the intervening years, people have addressed their personal concerns to me about prayer. Among our church members as well as outside the church, people have commented on the fact that there is a lot of talk about prayer and about the power of prayer but were unclear about prayer. They had questions such as what is it, what does it do, why is it important, how should I pray? I learned to pray by hearing others, and I still consider myself a babe as to what prayer really is.
Ten years ago, my daughter gave me a calendar devoted to the subject of prayer. Each day contained a thought on payer. It was of immense help to me in understanding more about prayer. Over the course of the past several years, I have presented homilies on how to pray, but reflecting on the questions that have been raised, I have been led to speak today on prayer, first in the generic and hopefully build on it.
To begin with, “prayer” expresses the most comprehensive and enlarged approach to God that is possible. It is communion with God. It is access to God. It is a movement toward Reality. Prayer is the device through which we become engaged with the essence of our self. It is also the manner through which we move self to an engagement and deeper companionship with God. Through it we discover others in a new and more profound way. In short, it is the essence of the spiritual life and the enjoyment of God.
There are many forms and varieties of prayer. “Supplication,” for example is an intense form of prayer. We make supplication when we have an urgent personal need or concern pressing upon us. It is the way of pleading for some one thing, often with a very specific point of focus. In contrast, “intercession” is a form of prayer which stretches beyond the particular to the horizons of free expression of the soul’s approach to the Almighty. It is not confined or limited, but is an offering in confidence and trust, an influence to be used for others.
Edward McKendree Bounds, who was one of the great spiritual influences of the past century, spent a great deal of his energy studying the Scriptures and praying. From his efforts came forth a series of spiritual classics on prayer. Quoting from one of his writings, he insisted that:
“The more praying there is in the world, the better the world will be, the mightier the forces against evil everywhere. Prayer is one phase of its operation, is a disinfectant and preventive. It purifies the air; it destroys the contagion of evil. Prayer is no fitful, short-lived thing. It is no voice crying unheard and unheeded in the silence. It is a voice which goes into God’s ear; and it lives as long as God’s ear is open to holy pleas, as long as God’s heart is alive to holy things. God shapes the world by prayer. Prayers are deathless. The lips that uttered them may be closed in death, the heart that felt them may have ceased to beat, but the prayers live before God, and God’s heart is set on them and prayers outlive the lives of those who uttered them; they outlive a generation, outlive an age, outlive a world…. The strongest one in Christ’s kingdom is he/she who is the best knocker. (“Ask, and it shall be given unto you, seek and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened” Matthew 7:7, Luke 11:9). The secret of success in Christ’s kingdom is the ability to pray. The one who can wield the power of prayer is the strong one, the holy one in Christ’s kingdom. The most important lesson we can learn is how to pray.”There is no singular formula on how to pray, but spending a moment listening and speaking with God, no matter how halting the attempt, is the first step to a life of prayer.
We should be grateful for that unnamed disciple who had the good sense to ask Jesus “Lord, teach us to pray.” That request brought forth from our Lord a model prayer that stands among the greatest treasures which man possesses, “The Lord’s Prayer.”
Jesus said to his followers, “Pray then like this…our Father who art in heaven.” The first suggestion Jesus made was to address God directly and in a very close, intimate way: Abba, “Father.” What a fantastic thing that Jesus should teach us to address God as “our Father.” With this instruction he has given to us a profound definition of God. He is not some vague “ground of all being,” but “our Father.”
Prayer, therefore, should have about it the intimacy of a conversation between a son or daughter and a loving father.
But Abba really means something closer to “Daddy.” When my children were growing up, they never called me “Daddy;” they called me Father. In later years, they started to call me “Dad,” and I realized what I had been missing sub-consciously all those years.
We must know the person to whom we are turning, or we cannot address God properly. If we treat a loving father as a vicious tyrant or a distant monarch, we do not make much contact. It is difficult for the father to relate with warmth when he is mistrusted or held at arm’s length. It should be a dialogue that is characterized by honesty and familiarity. It was the Apostle Paul who pointed out that when we cry, “Abba! Father! It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15).
The familiar story of the prodigal son in Luke’s Gospel (Ch. 15:11-24) gives us an image of what God is like. This man gave his son freedom to leave home and even gave him his share of the inheritance knowing full well, but hoping otherwise, that it would be squandered. Yet each day he would go and stand staring out into the desert, hoping against hope that he would see some trace of his son on the distant horizon. Then one day, he saw a weary, broken figure and recognized him before the son realized his father was rushing out to greet him.
The father ran up to his son and hugged him, while the son pleaded only to be granted a servant’s status. Instead, the father gave him the best robe, sandals for his feet, rings for his fingers. Then he ordered a fatted calf to be prepared for a feast so all might rejoice that his son had returned home.
We don’t think of the father as being a prodigal, but he is. The dictionary gives as a second definition for this word, “lavish.” This is the kind of father to whom we pray when we say, “Our Father.” Our God is a prodigal Father, lavish in His nature. God is so much better than anything we could have dreamed of or hoped for. God is not “wish-fulfillment,” because no one can imagine in their deepest sense that such an overflowing love is the source and center of the world of which we are a part. It takes real faith to believe that the world can be like that when humans are what they are.
The petition “Give us this day our daily brad,” emphasizes the need for daily prayer as a regular part of our lives. Some people argue that prayer should be spontaneous rather than habitual. They say that daily prayer may lapse into sterile routine, sort of form without any real force behind it. This is always a danger, but sporadic prayer may be under a worse threat: if we pray only when we are “moved” to do so; prayer may become so erratic that it disappears all together. Isn’t it a fact of experience that where there is no regular habit of prayer, the result is very little praying? We need to make prayer a regular part of our every day life, in order to assure that it remains a vital part of our lives.
When we pray for our “daily bread,” we are recognizing that our lives are dependent upon God’s good gifts. We could not live for a moment without his daily provisions. It is the petition of one who understands that we need more than the material “bread” of life, for man “shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4). To pray for our daily bread is to call upon God’s power to enrich and nourish our lives both physically and spiritually, to energize us for our living.
At the heart of our prayer should be the sincere desire to discover the will of God for our lives. Jesus prayed at every crucial moment of his life for God’s guidance. At the beginning of his ministry he went into the wilderness and prayed for strength to resist the devil and to be obedient to the Father. Before selecting the twelve disciples he prayed all night for God’s direction. Before facing the agony of the cross, he prayed, in the Garden of Gethsemane,
that God’s will, not his own, be done. The prime purpose of prayer is to discern the will of God…to know the mind of the Father.
Having received God’s “word” for our lives, the Christian’s prayer moves on to an act of submission. Just as the patriot disappears in his attachment to his country, the artist in his art, the singer in his song, so must the Christian disappear in his Christ. “He must increase, I must decrease.” The climax of true prayer is found in the submission to the will of God; “The will be done,” is the highest form of faith. From the willingness to offer such a prayer of submission comes a life radiant with the power of the Holy Spirit. God sent Jesus Christ into the world with a plan so we might have that power and He gave us this prayer so that we might know how to pray to become instruments of this transformation and love.
PRAYER: “Our Father who art in heaven…”- Lord, help us remember today that You not only rule the universe but also know us and love us as a Father with the tenderness of a Mother’s heart.
“Hallowed be Thy name…”- We thank and praise You for the beauty of the world and the blessings of Your grace and love.
“Thy kingdom come…”- Help us spread Your joy and kindness and shine Your light in the lives of our families, friends, and everyone we meet today.
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”- Show us the plans You have for us, and help us to follow Your will with a faithful spirit.
“Give us this day our daily bread…”- You give us everything we need for a good and happy life. Let us use these gifts for Your glory, and also generously share them.
“Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…”- Help us to see others through Your eyes of compassion and forgive them even when it is hardest just as You have forgiven us.
“Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil…”- Be the light onto our path wherever we go, and let Your holy angels keep us always.
“For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever.”- May we keep in our hearts that our strength, our hopes and our joys are in You – today and forever. Amen.
June 9, 2008
May 14, 2008 - Honor your mother daily - Hayward Fong
Genesis 3:20; Deuteronomy 5:16
One of the old familiar hymns of the church is “Faith of our Fathers, Living Still,” but the faith and strength of our mothers did not become recognized until 1920, when Arthur B. Patten wrote the words to “Faith of Our Mothers, Living Yet,” sung to the same tune as the more familiar hymn.
The theme of the four verses emphasizes four qualities of motherhood’s faith that are truly characteristic ---living, lavish, guiding, and Christian, for such is the faith of all true Christian mothers. Let us thank God every day for mothers, the one who gave us birth, and others whose motherly love have nurtured us through the years, and find our own special way of expressing this heartfelt thanks not only on Mother’s Day but each day.
About thirty-five years ago, Erma Bombeck wrote a Mother’s Day article which I would like to share with you.
Amen.
Last Sunday was Mother’s Day. I seem to be constantly behind instead of ahead of these memorable occasions and celebrations. I suppose, better late than never. The idea of celebrating mothers was born in a small Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia. It was 1876 and the nation was still mourning the Civil War dead. While teaching a Memorial Day lesson, Mrs. Anna Reeves Jarvis thought of the mothers who had lost sons in the war. She prayed that one day there could be a “Memorial Day” for mothers. The prayer made a deep impression on Anna, one of her eleven children. Young Anna had seen her mother’s efforts to hold the war-split community and church together. As she grew into adulthood, young Anna kept her mother’s dream in her heart. When her mother died in 1907, she requested that a church service be held to honor her. She placed large jars of white carnations in the church because they were her mother’s favorite flower. In the following year, local observances were held in Philadelphia. By 1909, observances were held in 45 states, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Canada and Mexico. On May 8, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution of Congress designating the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day, “for displaying the American flag and for the public expression of love and reverence for the mothers of the country.” I am personally grateful for the spirituality that led Mrs. and Miss Jarvis to give us this day of national recognition for our mothers.“The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.” -Genesis 3:20
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.” -Exodus 20:12
“Hearken to your father that begot you, and do not despise your mother when she is old.” -Proverbs 23:22
“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb?” -Isaiah 49:15
“As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you.” -Isaiah 66:13
“And his mother kept all these things in her heart.” -Luke 2:51
“And Hannah made a vow and said, ’O Lord of hosts, if Thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of Thy maidservant and remember me, and not forget Thy maidservant, but wilt give Thy maidservant a son, the I will give him to the Lord all the days of his life, and a razor shall never come on his head.” -Samuel 1:11
Mother's Love
Her love is like an island
In life’s ocean, vast and wide,
A peaceful quiet shelter
From the wind, the rain, the tide.
‘Tis bound on the North by Hope
By Patience on the West,
By tender Counsel on the South
And on the East by Rest.
Above it like a beacon light
Shine Faith, and Truth, and Prayer;
And through the changing scenes of life
I find a haven there.
-Anon
One of the old familiar hymns of the church is “Faith of our Fathers, Living Still,” but the faith and strength of our mothers did not become recognized until 1920, when Arthur B. Patten wrote the words to “Faith of Our Mothers, Living Yet,” sung to the same tune as the more familiar hymn.
The theme of the four verses emphasizes four qualities of motherhood’s faith that are truly characteristic ---living, lavish, guiding, and Christian, for such is the faith of all true Christian mothers. Let us thank God every day for mothers, the one who gave us birth, and others whose motherly love have nurtured us through the years, and find our own special way of expressing this heartfelt thanks not only on Mother’s Day but each day.
About thirty-five years ago, Erma Bombeck wrote a Mother’s Day article which I would like to share with you.
Last Sunday, there was printed on the back of the worship bulletin a Mother’s Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe in 1870. It was offered on the heels of the Civil War between the States of our Union. We are now engaged in the sixth year of a war in the Middle East. The pain and sorrow of l870 are no less today in 2008. I want to close with these words from the heart of Julia Ward Howe as a charge to each of us as Christians.When the good Lord was creating mothers, He was into His sixth day of overtime when the angel appeared and said, “You’re doing a lot of fiddling around on this one.”
The Lord said, “Have you read the specs on this order?”
“She has to be completely washable, but not plastic;
“Have 180 movable parts…all replaceable;
“Run on black coffee and leftovers;
“Have a lap that disappears when she stands up;
“A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair;
“And six pairs of hands.”
The angel shook her head slowly and said, “Six pairs of hands? No way.”
“It’s not the hands that are causing me problems,” said the Lord. “It’s the three pairs of eyes that mothers have to have.”
“That’s on the standard model?” asked the angel.
The Lord nodded. “One pair that sees through closed doors when she asks, ‘What are you kids doing in there?’ when she already knows. Another here in the back of her head that sees what she shouldn’t but what she has to know, and of course the ones up here in front that can look at a child when he goofs up and say, ‘I understand
and I love you,’ without so much as uttering a word.”
“Lord,” said the angel, touching His sleeve gently, “come to bed. Tomorrow…”
“I can’t,” said the Lord. “I’m so close to creating something close to myself. Already I have one who heals herself when she is sick…can feed a family of six on one pound of hamburger…and get a nine-year old to stand under a shower.”
The angel circled the model of a mother very slowly and sighed, “It’s too soft.”
“But tough!” said the Lord excitedly. “You cannot imagine what this mother can do or endure.”
“Can it think?”
“Not only think, but it can reason and compromise,” said the Creator.
Finally the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek. “There’s a leak,” she pronounced. “I told you that you were trying to put too much into this model.”
“It’s not a leak,” said the Lord, “It’s a tear.”
“What’s it for?”
“It’s for joy, sadness, disappointment, pain, loneliness and pride.”
“You’re a genius,” said the angel.
The Lord looked somber. “I didn’t put it there.”
Amen.
May 11, 2008 - The Frightening Freedom of the Spirit - Frank Alton
John 3:5-8, John 7:37-39, Acts 2:1-13
MP3 File
I remember that I used to take Jonathan and his friends to Knott’s Berry Farm for his birthday. One year there was a fast new ride that he really wanted me to go on with him. I don’t remember what it was called, but he told me that the thrill was that the little car you sat in went from 0-60 mph in about three seconds. Now I am one who loves roller coasters, so this sounded fun. But as I sat in the seat before it took off, not knowing exactly when it would, I started to feel anxious. What would my body experience accelerating so much in such a short amount of time? Suddenly, without warning, the cars lunged forward at a speed that felt like it left my body back at the gate. After a short horizontal path it shot straight up, and then proceeded to loop around at frightening speeds until it finally came to rest.
I think Pentecost was a little like that for the disciples. As Jesus was ascending before their very eyes a few days earlier, an angel had scolded them for looking up at heaven, as if they could have done anything else as their friend was lifted up in a cloud as they watched. As soon as they regained enough composure to travel, they returned to Jerusalem and waited. They didn’t know what they were waiting for, but they didn’t have anything else to do. Jesus tells us that the Spirit is like that – you never know where she is going to come from or where she is going. Then when she hits, you get swept off your feet and don’t know what is happening. You are out of control in a way that is much more frightening than a roller coaster ride.
Some would call what Jesus’ followers experienced at Pentecost a profound initiation. In her book Reinventing Eve, Kim Chernin describes initiation in language that evokes images of a very long roller coaster ride. “Initiation is not a predictable process. It moves forward fitfully, through moments of clear seeing, dramatic episodes of feeling, subtle intuitions, vague contemplative states. Dreams arrive, bringing guidance we frequently cannot accept. Years pass, during which we know that we are involved in something that cannot easily be named. We wake to a sense of confusion, know that we are in dangerous conflict, cannot define the nature of what troubles us. All change is like this. It circles around, leads us on a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the first place. Then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door, discovers a threshold, shoves us across.”
That describes experiences I’ve had more times than I like to remember. It feels all too familiar even now. The disciples on the roller coaster ride of Pentecost knew we can’t always plan our moments of initiation, but that didn’t mean they liked it. We cannot control how God is going to beckon us or, perhaps, fling us across some new threshold. What we can do is work to make ourselves available when it happens; but we don’t usually get to choose our initiations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that each person is a “bard (or poet) of the Holy Ghost.” In order to write the poetry that is our life, it helps to, in the words of Frederick Buechner, “listen to our lives,” and, in response, we are challenged, in the words of Parker Palmer, to “let our lives speak.” And it helps to do that in community where we can each affirm that “God is inspiring me and I am gifted,” and then say the same thing to everyone we meet, “God is inspiring you and you are gifted.” But none of that ought to give us a false sense of being in control. It is simply the part where we strap ourselves into the seat of the roller coaster and pray we survive the ride.
A life lived in the Spirit is more dramatic than a worship service. But this morning a lot of pieces come together to open us to experience the drama. Today, as only rarely in the cycle of years, Pentecost and Mother’s Day occur on the same day. At Immanuel we also celebrate the Sacrament of Baptism on this day. The Scriptures offer us images for these events. Jesus said we must be born anew – us an image of the Spirit as a mother giving birth. The child has no control over what happens as it goes through the birth canal. Pentecost itself offers the disconcerting image of the Spirit as wind and fire whose impact is open to different interpretations – drunken excess or fulfillment of promise. Finally, we hear Jesus saying that out of our hearts shall flow rivers of living water: an image connecting baptism as an initiation into community to the promise of Spirit.
These three images offer us handles we can hang onto during the frightening roller coaster ride of freedom that is life in the Spirit. In the image of the Spirit as a mother giving birth, Jesus emphasizes that the moment of birth reveals the basic truth about life: that we don’t control it. We’re socialized into thinking that from the moment of birth we are growing into mature adults who do control life. But at the end of his Gospel, John reminds us that both the beginning and the end of life reveal a different truth. Remember Jesus’ words to Peter after asking him three times if he loved him? He said, “When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt & go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (21:18-19)
Jesus is using either the image of a prisoner on death row being taken to the gallows, or of a blind person being led down unseen paths. In either case, it is a frightening thing not to know where you are being led. It is also the very essence of freedom. For 23 years Judy and I have taken Fridays as our Sabbath. For many years I wanted to have a plan for the day to make sure we got the most out of it. Judy always said that for her the best thing about a day off was having the freedom to make it up as it went along. I confess that made me anxious for quite a few years, but I’ve come to experience it more as freedom than as anxiety. I sometimes resent it when I allow some prior commitment to impinge on my freedom that day. But I am coming to see that even those can be part of the freedom.
I believe that in his ministry, Jesus tried to use the institution of the Sabbath to move the structures of society toward this very freedom. The religious authorities had grasped the reins of control so tightly that they couldn’t even answer a simple question like, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath?” In that world, Jesus couldn’t just heal on the Sabbath when there was no other alternative. He had to actively choose to heal on the Sabbath in order to wrest their hands from the reins of control – both for their own sake and for the sake of the people. Where are you hanging onto the reins of your life so tightly that you have lost your own freedom, and may be restricting the freedom of others? Open yourself to the frightening experience of being born of the Spirit from above on this Pentecost.
The second image is that of Pentecost itself. After the wind and fire had calmed down and people who spoke different languages understood each other, those who had watched from the sidelines had different reactions to what had happened. Some expressed confusion: “What does this mean?” Others sneered, “They are filled with new wine.” The apostle Peter, one of those on whom the Spirit had fallen offered a different view: “this is what was promised through the prophet Joel.” Years later the Apostle Paul put this in perspective. He wrote that the risen Christ is now known as Spirit; that apart from the Spirit there is a veil that covers the mind to keep it from realizing that the old ways of knowing are no longer operative; that there is a new kind of knowing available through the Spirit. The veil is removed by the Spirit, who sets us on a path of transformation into the image of Christ (2 Cor 3:15-16).
The power to unveil was let loose with the tearing of the Temple curtain at the moment of Jesus’ death. The Spirit has continued the work of unveiling ever since. 2000 years later, many people inside and outside the church now clearly see and experience that the old ways no longer work. A key aspect of that old way is the violent aspect of religion itself. The origins of religion are rooted in the need to not have community collapse under the chaos of escalating violence. Religion was born to save human communities from disintegrating through the spirals of violence. But religion accomplished that by substituting lower doses of sacred violence to minimize the threat of all-consuming profane violence. So religions engaged in Holy Wars and created theologies of sacrifice and substitutionary atonement. The cross of Jesus continues to be interpreted that way by many Christians.
Yet the Spirit now seems to have unveiled for many the insight that religious violence is still violence. In former ages religion has been reasonably successful in veiling sacred rituals of sacrificial as simply that, i.e., sacred rituals of sacrificial violence. Today people will not tolerate that rationalization. And that is for the better. So why the change? Why has the sacredness of this violence been unveiled such that we simply see it now as violence? Could it be that the Spirit has been doing her work all these years? The work of the Spirit Pentecost has been to reveal that the real story of the Tower of Babel was not that God had scattered the people of Babel, but had broken up the false foundation on which they had been basing their lives, namely an order based on envy rather than community. They had even projected envy onto God as they put words into God’s mouth: “See, Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now might reach out a hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” The real message of Pentecost is that Christ is that tree of life and that there is no banishment. All the foundations of human society are futile exercises in the production of a fragile order. The only real foundation is the one given in Christ's gathering.
The final image emerges from the last: out of our hearts shall flow rivers of living water. Baptism as an initiation into community connects the promise of the Spirit to the new community established at Pentecost. John 7 tells how Jesus issued the most astounding invitation imaginable on the 7th and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles when Israel commemorated the time that Moses was out in the wilderness, struck a rock and water came gushing out of it. For seven days, the priest would go out into the center of Jerusalem to a large spring called the pool of Siloam. The water was bubbling up out of this rock and the priest would dip a pitcher of water from the spring, and carry it to the temple where he would pour it. On that particular seventh day the priests were pouring water from golden pitchers and the choir was singing the words of Isaiah 12:3, "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." Suddenly Jesus cries out to all those gathered, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me!"
In the midst of the alleged abundance of water offered in the official celebration of the Feast, Jesus offers an alternative source. When the Holy Spirit comes and lives in you, you will know it because out of your heart shall flow rivers of living water. There has been no human being who embraced his soul and his full humanity more fully than Jesus. There is nothing magical or passive about this invitation. It requires a response. The text does not say, “If anyone is thirsty, I will give them water.” It says, “If anyone is thirsty, come to me and drink.” Then, as a natural consequence, rivers of living water will flow out of that trusting person’s heart.
But the world is never fully ready for a person who allows her or his soul to express itself. The soul is always ahead of history. The consequence is opposition, and that’s what Jesus’ invitation led to: “Some of them wanted to arrest him.” But the promise of God is life for whoever allows their souls to express themselves. Souls don’t obey the laws of today. They respond to the Spirit moment by moment. That drives those who control today’s laws crazy. It takes great courage to allow our souls to express themselves in this unwelcoming world. The most significant and visibly lasting impact of Pentecost was precisely that: an increased boldness in the disciples of Jesus. They found the courage to be themselves and to proclaim their message that had eluded them before. But they only overcame their fear by embracing or being embraced by something frightening itself: the freedom of the Spirit. The message of Pentecost is that in order to discover the freedom of the Spirit we must overcome our fear of that very freedom. And in order to overcome our fear we must face fear.
How is God calling out your soul to obey the Spirit in ways that might evoke opposition from the world around you?
MP3 File
I remember that I used to take Jonathan and his friends to Knott’s Berry Farm for his birthday. One year there was a fast new ride that he really wanted me to go on with him. I don’t remember what it was called, but he told me that the thrill was that the little car you sat in went from 0-60 mph in about three seconds. Now I am one who loves roller coasters, so this sounded fun. But as I sat in the seat before it took off, not knowing exactly when it would, I started to feel anxious. What would my body experience accelerating so much in such a short amount of time? Suddenly, without warning, the cars lunged forward at a speed that felt like it left my body back at the gate. After a short horizontal path it shot straight up, and then proceeded to loop around at frightening speeds until it finally came to rest.
I think Pentecost was a little like that for the disciples. As Jesus was ascending before their very eyes a few days earlier, an angel had scolded them for looking up at heaven, as if they could have done anything else as their friend was lifted up in a cloud as they watched. As soon as they regained enough composure to travel, they returned to Jerusalem and waited. They didn’t know what they were waiting for, but they didn’t have anything else to do. Jesus tells us that the Spirit is like that – you never know where she is going to come from or where she is going. Then when she hits, you get swept off your feet and don’t know what is happening. You are out of control in a way that is much more frightening than a roller coaster ride.
Some would call what Jesus’ followers experienced at Pentecost a profound initiation. In her book Reinventing Eve, Kim Chernin describes initiation in language that evokes images of a very long roller coaster ride. “Initiation is not a predictable process. It moves forward fitfully, through moments of clear seeing, dramatic episodes of feeling, subtle intuitions, vague contemplative states. Dreams arrive, bringing guidance we frequently cannot accept. Years pass, during which we know that we are involved in something that cannot easily be named. We wake to a sense of confusion, know that we are in dangerous conflict, cannot define the nature of what troubles us. All change is like this. It circles around, leads us on a merry chase, starts us out it seems all over again from where we were in the first place. Then suddenly, when we least expect it, something opens a door, discovers a threshold, shoves us across.”
That describes experiences I’ve had more times than I like to remember. It feels all too familiar even now. The disciples on the roller coaster ride of Pentecost knew we can’t always plan our moments of initiation, but that didn’t mean they liked it. We cannot control how God is going to beckon us or, perhaps, fling us across some new threshold. What we can do is work to make ourselves available when it happens; but we don’t usually get to choose our initiations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that each person is a “bard (or poet) of the Holy Ghost.” In order to write the poetry that is our life, it helps to, in the words of Frederick Buechner, “listen to our lives,” and, in response, we are challenged, in the words of Parker Palmer, to “let our lives speak.” And it helps to do that in community where we can each affirm that “God is inspiring me and I am gifted,” and then say the same thing to everyone we meet, “God is inspiring you and you are gifted.” But none of that ought to give us a false sense of being in control. It is simply the part where we strap ourselves into the seat of the roller coaster and pray we survive the ride.
A life lived in the Spirit is more dramatic than a worship service. But this morning a lot of pieces come together to open us to experience the drama. Today, as only rarely in the cycle of years, Pentecost and Mother’s Day occur on the same day. At Immanuel we also celebrate the Sacrament of Baptism on this day. The Scriptures offer us images for these events. Jesus said we must be born anew – us an image of the Spirit as a mother giving birth. The child has no control over what happens as it goes through the birth canal. Pentecost itself offers the disconcerting image of the Spirit as wind and fire whose impact is open to different interpretations – drunken excess or fulfillment of promise. Finally, we hear Jesus saying that out of our hearts shall flow rivers of living water: an image connecting baptism as an initiation into community to the promise of Spirit.
These three images offer us handles we can hang onto during the frightening roller coaster ride of freedom that is life in the Spirit. In the image of the Spirit as a mother giving birth, Jesus emphasizes that the moment of birth reveals the basic truth about life: that we don’t control it. We’re socialized into thinking that from the moment of birth we are growing into mature adults who do control life. But at the end of his Gospel, John reminds us that both the beginning and the end of life reveal a different truth. Remember Jesus’ words to Peter after asking him three times if he loved him? He said, “When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt & go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.” (21:18-19)
Jesus is using either the image of a prisoner on death row being taken to the gallows, or of a blind person being led down unseen paths. In either case, it is a frightening thing not to know where you are being led. It is also the very essence of freedom. For 23 years Judy and I have taken Fridays as our Sabbath. For many years I wanted to have a plan for the day to make sure we got the most out of it. Judy always said that for her the best thing about a day off was having the freedom to make it up as it went along. I confess that made me anxious for quite a few years, but I’ve come to experience it more as freedom than as anxiety. I sometimes resent it when I allow some prior commitment to impinge on my freedom that day. But I am coming to see that even those can be part of the freedom.
I believe that in his ministry, Jesus tried to use the institution of the Sabbath to move the structures of society toward this very freedom. The religious authorities had grasped the reins of control so tightly that they couldn’t even answer a simple question like, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath?” In that world, Jesus couldn’t just heal on the Sabbath when there was no other alternative. He had to actively choose to heal on the Sabbath in order to wrest their hands from the reins of control – both for their own sake and for the sake of the people. Where are you hanging onto the reins of your life so tightly that you have lost your own freedom, and may be restricting the freedom of others? Open yourself to the frightening experience of being born of the Spirit from above on this Pentecost.
The second image is that of Pentecost itself. After the wind and fire had calmed down and people who spoke different languages understood each other, those who had watched from the sidelines had different reactions to what had happened. Some expressed confusion: “What does this mean?” Others sneered, “They are filled with new wine.” The apostle Peter, one of those on whom the Spirit had fallen offered a different view: “this is what was promised through the prophet Joel.” Years later the Apostle Paul put this in perspective. He wrote that the risen Christ is now known as Spirit; that apart from the Spirit there is a veil that covers the mind to keep it from realizing that the old ways of knowing are no longer operative; that there is a new kind of knowing available through the Spirit. The veil is removed by the Spirit, who sets us on a path of transformation into the image of Christ (2 Cor 3:15-16).
The power to unveil was let loose with the tearing of the Temple curtain at the moment of Jesus’ death. The Spirit has continued the work of unveiling ever since. 2000 years later, many people inside and outside the church now clearly see and experience that the old ways no longer work. A key aspect of that old way is the violent aspect of religion itself. The origins of religion are rooted in the need to not have community collapse under the chaos of escalating violence. Religion was born to save human communities from disintegrating through the spirals of violence. But religion accomplished that by substituting lower doses of sacred violence to minimize the threat of all-consuming profane violence. So religions engaged in Holy Wars and created theologies of sacrifice and substitutionary atonement. The cross of Jesus continues to be interpreted that way by many Christians.
Yet the Spirit now seems to have unveiled for many the insight that religious violence is still violence. In former ages religion has been reasonably successful in veiling sacred rituals of sacrificial as simply that, i.e., sacred rituals of sacrificial violence. Today people will not tolerate that rationalization. And that is for the better. So why the change? Why has the sacredness of this violence been unveiled such that we simply see it now as violence? Could it be that the Spirit has been doing her work all these years? The work of the Spirit Pentecost has been to reveal that the real story of the Tower of Babel was not that God had scattered the people of Babel, but had broken up the false foundation on which they had been basing their lives, namely an order based on envy rather than community. They had even projected envy onto God as they put words into God’s mouth: “See, Adam has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now might reach out a hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” The real message of Pentecost is that Christ is that tree of life and that there is no banishment. All the foundations of human society are futile exercises in the production of a fragile order. The only real foundation is the one given in Christ's gathering.
The final image emerges from the last: out of our hearts shall flow rivers of living water. Baptism as an initiation into community connects the promise of the Spirit to the new community established at Pentecost. John 7 tells how Jesus issued the most astounding invitation imaginable on the 7th and last day of the Feast of Tabernacles when Israel commemorated the time that Moses was out in the wilderness, struck a rock and water came gushing out of it. For seven days, the priest would go out into the center of Jerusalem to a large spring called the pool of Siloam. The water was bubbling up out of this rock and the priest would dip a pitcher of water from the spring, and carry it to the temple where he would pour it. On that particular seventh day the priests were pouring water from golden pitchers and the choir was singing the words of Isaiah 12:3, "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation." Suddenly Jesus cries out to all those gathered, "Let anyone who is thirsty come to me!"
In the midst of the alleged abundance of water offered in the official celebration of the Feast, Jesus offers an alternative source. When the Holy Spirit comes and lives in you, you will know it because out of your heart shall flow rivers of living water. There has been no human being who embraced his soul and his full humanity more fully than Jesus. There is nothing magical or passive about this invitation. It requires a response. The text does not say, “If anyone is thirsty, I will give them water.” It says, “If anyone is thirsty, come to me and drink.” Then, as a natural consequence, rivers of living water will flow out of that trusting person’s heart.
But the world is never fully ready for a person who allows her or his soul to express itself. The soul is always ahead of history. The consequence is opposition, and that’s what Jesus’ invitation led to: “Some of them wanted to arrest him.” But the promise of God is life for whoever allows their souls to express themselves. Souls don’t obey the laws of today. They respond to the Spirit moment by moment. That drives those who control today’s laws crazy. It takes great courage to allow our souls to express themselves in this unwelcoming world. The most significant and visibly lasting impact of Pentecost was precisely that: an increased boldness in the disciples of Jesus. They found the courage to be themselves and to proclaim their message that had eluded them before. But they only overcame their fear by embracing or being embraced by something frightening itself: the freedom of the Spirit. The message of Pentecost is that in order to discover the freedom of the Spirit we must overcome our fear of that very freedom. And in order to overcome our fear we must face fear.
How is God calling out your soul to obey the Spirit in ways that might evoke opposition from the world around you?
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