maxolm

Life with God in the 1p.pl.abs.

2012-01-09T11:31:00.000-05:00

Life with God in the 1p.pl.abs. The Dover Church
January 8, 2012 –Epiphany
Scripture: Isaiah 60:1-5, Ephesians 3:1-12, Matthew 2:1-12

When I went to seminary, I was already a pretty well formed individual. “Set in my ways” would be another way of putting it. I had chosen Faith, Health and Spirituality as my area of concentration, with a vision of myself in perfect peace, happiness and harmony, plugged into God and living shalom every day in every way. I was going to be faithful, healthy, and spiritual. What I didn't know was that the first step was getting de-formed, off track, up-set and un-plugged from my set ways of being, thinking and seeing. To my great surprise, my first two years seemed to be one memorably disturbing and uncomfortable classroom experience after another. My friends, this morning I may just make your skin crawl.
For starters, in my spirituality classes I was the only student with a beard, a pickup truck with a kayak on top, and a dog up front. Normative in Boulder, Colorado, but not at seminary. Beard, truck, boat and dog aside, I was often the only man in my classes. Gender aside, I was often the youngest. Age aside, I was often the only Jesus person amongst fervent Unitarians. Faith aside, everyone else seemed to know each other well enough to kiss and hug and talk about people they all knew... and I didn't. In short, I was an outsider, a stranger, and not necessarily a welcome stranger.
So there I was, a strange stranger feeling really strange, in my class on prayer, a weekly 4 hour seminar/hands on practicum, and the instructor says, “we are going to learn how to practice gratitude. Get into groups and start sharing all the things you have to be thankful for.” “I can do that,” I thought. Being a pretty linear, point A to point B, get the job done kind of guy, I started to make a list in my mind while someone else in the circle went first. And she started in on a long, drawn out, narrative rivaling War and Peace about this person and that person and this thing and that thing. After a while I had to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out, “Wanna know what I'm gonna be thankful for? The moment you stop talking about yourself and give someone else a turn.” But I didn’t blurt, for which I am eternally thankful. You see? The exercise is still working for me.
And then there was “Embodying Your Joy.” “Today we are going to embody our joy by dancing, moving, whatever, in ways that communicate, unleash, express, and unlock our deepest joy.” I knew the waltz, the fox trot, the polka, even the Mexican hat dance, but “embody your joy”? Mrs. DeFalco never taught us that in 5th grade. Guys like me were never taught “embody your joy.” And there I was, the embodiment of a cigar store Indian, standing stone-faced in the midst of a bunch of leaping, spinning, laughing, singing and hugging, joyous classmates.
And the day I wanted to just die, which was appropriately titled “Lament.” “Today we are going to share our personal Lament, our most intense experiences of sadness, despair, tragedy, loss, failure.” And I prayed, “In your great mercy, O Lord, strike me down right now with a heart attack or seizure, that I might be plucked by medevac from this pit.” Talk about just about the last place I wanted to go. The place where I hurt most deeply was so far off my list of desirable destinations that I didn’t even know where it was. It took me about 20 minutes to find it and another 20 to put it into words, which was unpleasant enough, but when my turn came to stand up and read my lament I thought I was going to vomit and fall down, my stomach and legs were trembling so.
Obviously I survived the curriculum. I even came to love it as I saw how I was awakening to a life I had never even imagined before. Just about everything you ever hear me preach is only possible because of the reality check I went through in seminary. Before then, I was pretty much a stranger to myself. Being a stranger to myself, how could I possibly introduce myself to God?
Speaking of strangers brings us to Epiphany, the arrival of the kings in Bethlehem. Unlike our Christmas Pageant portrayal, those kings were foreigners in the eyes of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, in the eyes of every other Jew in Bethlehem that first Christmas. Foreigners were by definition dirty, polluted and contaminating, to be shunned and avoided, the kind of people we get uncomfortable just being near, strangers we don’t want to touch or be touched by. Imagine your worst nightmare of a person. That’s the kings in our story. And God’s love, in the form of a star, shines through all that darkness of disgust, fear, distrust and ignorance to welcome in these outsiders. On Epiphany God’s love went from an invitation- only family reception into a universal celebration. God’s love became first person plural absolute, as in we and us, and with absolutely everyone on the inside, no exceptions. God loves everyone and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Can I get an Amen?
Of course, most people know the tragic history of how we Christians have loved our Kings and failed to live Epiphany. We saw the star and went about kicking everyone else out of the light. First it was our Jewish brothers and sisters, the very people who gave us life, who had to be crushed or converted. Then it was the Gentiles, non-Jews who were not Christians, the Kings and others like them, who had to get in or get lost. Then it was people of color, black, brown, yellow and red, who were not quite as fully beloved children of God as the rest of us. Brown people like Jesus, Joseph and Mary for example. Speaking of Mary, the mother of God, let’s not forget women. From the male church leadership point of view, women were born to stand in the shadows of the men upon whom that star shone. Oh, and we can't possibly leave out our love of damning, persecuting and killing our Christian brothers and sisters who live their faith differently than we do. It’s enough to make anyone cringe. And in this generation, our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren, cousins, neighbors, coworkers and friends, are told that they are dirty, immoral, defective, deviant, untouchable, unclean, outsiders, because of who they are. I have heard church folks tell them “God loves you but hates who you are.” If you can parse the logic of that, how God, who is pure love by all confessional standards, can both love and hate the same person completely at the same time, please let me know. You know what I think: “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.” No exceptions. No limitations. No qualifications. Life with God in the first person plural absolute.
Which is one of the reasons why I love our church. The last thing we do in our covenant is promise “to be kindly affectioned one to another.” In the larger United Church of Christ, of which we are members, the phrasing is a little different: “Open and Affirming.” Open and Affirming has focussed on welcoming gays and lesbians in particular, for the simple reason that they are the last group of people left who know that they are really not welcome in most churches that don’t specify that they are. "All are welcome" on the church sign usually doesn't mean them. After discussion, discernment and change, churches declare themselves open and affirming and hang a rainbow on their sign, so that all people know they are welcome.
You would think that an Open and Affirming, liberal New England seminary would be a place of safety and welcome for everyone. Faith, Health and Spirituality...can't get any more warm and fuzzy, non threatening than that. And we all know that Unitarians are even more vehemently inclusive and welcoming than we UCC folks. Yet I didn't fit in. They knew it and I knew it and all the rhetoric about O & A or kindly affectioned didn't make a bit of difference. For the first time in my faith life, I was a stranger, an outsider, not quite kosher, and the absolute necessity, the inescapable faith imperative for being Open and Affirming of all people, no exceptions, became clear to me. As long as anyone, any group of people, is not enthusiastically welcomed to be full front line participants in our faith and fellowship, none of us are truly safe. Here's the irony, as long as we know that we are keeping them out there because of who they are, we will never be safe in here to love God, our neighbors or ourselves because we will rightly assume that some of who we really are might well be too hot for all the perfect people in the church to handle. You know, all those purple haired tatooed kids off at college, the marital difficulties, learning disabilities, eating disorders, history of family tragedy or disgrace, drinking problems, lay offs, financial problems, business failures, bad sense of taste, strange political opinions, and all the other quirks that make us human which just might go public and cause us to fall from grace in the eyes of other church folks.
Right now you may be having one of my seminary experiences, disturbed and uncomfortable, not sure you like this, worried that you or someone you like will get up and threaten to leave the church or tell me that this sort of thing splits churches. I know. I hope, however, that you can see what astoundingly great Good News Epiphany is for folks like us in a town like ours where we all live under enormous pressure to be, of all people, Mary Poppins, practically perfect in every way. Instead of being yet another private perfection club, which, I should point out, is a heresy, we can, as Brian McLaren puts it, be the church and all come out of our closets. If we became Open and Affirming of all people, no exceptions, if we allowed ourselves to live a life with God in the first person plural, we, us, no they and them on the outside, absolutely, then we could all relax into ourselves, our neighbors and our God and enjoy life for a change. Now that sounds a lot like thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, to me.

A Christmas Eve Sermon

2011-12-30T09:05:00.001-05:00

A Christmas Eve Sermon The Dover Church

"Oh boy. I really wish I had a fallback plan right about now. What am I going to do? Even making the best of a bad situation will still be exactly that, a bad situation." These were the anxious, harried and slightly bitter thoughts going through my mind as I was turned away from yet a third inn because there was no room. I had hiked 19 miles already that day, from 7 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon, with an hour break for lunch. The last seven miles had been a 3000 foot uphill slog to the village where I had hoped one of those three inns would be waiting for me. I had counted on a shower, a meal and a bed. No luck. If my feet and legs hadn't been so discouraged, I would have enjoyed the real humor in the way the three innkeepers pointed out my foolishness to me, "you should have called ahead, Monsieur. All of France is on vacation in August and we have been booked for days." As if I didn't know that I had made a mistake. My legs were doing just fine bringing my attention to that fact.
While walking the labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral seven years ago, I had been seized by the desire to walk the ancient pilgrim trail from France to Santiago de Compostella in Spain, a 50 day hike covering 990 miles. As I came out of the labyrinth that day, the doors to the cathedral stood open with a beckoning vista of the town and surrounding countryside. Next to those open doors was a plaque, which read, "since 985, pilgrims have departed through these doors for the tomb of St. James in Spain." As I stood there, savoring the spiritual high of the labyrinth, all I could think was, "wouldn't that be something? To walk out these doors, down the hill and up that road heading southwest over the fields of France. I could just…go…right now."
But I couldn't just go for several good reasons. My wife was waiting for me at a cafe in town to take the train to Paris where we were visiting a friend. I didn't have my backpack and all the other necessary stuff. I hadn't trained. And my church back home was expecting me in the pulpit in two weeks, not two months. So I settled for a glass of wine and Paris with my wife rather than setting off into the high heather on a quest for the tomb of St. James with God and Jesus.
Five years passed before I was finally able to start my pilgrimage, one week at a time rather than 50 days all at once...with a wife, two young sons and a church, a week was just about all I could cut loose for. On this particular day, I was already five days into my second stage. It had been a glorious hike so far, with beautiful French countryside, charming villages, Romanesque churches, good food, interesting people, and great weather. My feet and legs were holding up nicely. I had been making good time all morning as I walked beside a river, in which I saw the heartbreaking combination of many trout rising and almost no one fishing. Oh for a fly rod and waders instead of this walking staff and backpack! Focus, Max. You’re on a pilgrimage!
It was hot and sunny after lunch when I set off up the seven mile hill to what I expected would be a shower, a dinner and a bed in one of the three inns listed in my guide book. You already know what happened. No room in the inn for the foolish American. The inn keepers were all suitably impressed by how far I had come, but that wasn’t enough to make another bed magically appear.
When all your options involve walking, you might as well get started, which is what I did, weighing the likely outcomes of those options while I did so. They were: one, I might just find another inn that wasn't listed in the guidebook where an open bed awaited me…too good to be true; two, I could walk until twilight and then sleep out somewhere in the woods…true, but not too good; or three, I could just walk all night with my head lamp and arrive a day early at the monastery of St. Fois in Conques. Like I said, option three.
Option one wasn't panning out for me. I did come across unlisted inns, but they were all full. Option two wasn't all that attractive. I didn't have a tarp to put under my sleeping bag and the prospect of being hungry, wet, bug bitten, and perhaps driven off in the early morning hours by a farmer with a shotgun didn't catch my fancy. And then there was option three, the gutsiness and epic will power of 38 miles in 24 hours appealed to me. Now that would be an accomplishment, but could I actually pull it off without seriously injuring myself?
While I walked and weighed my options, I recited the 23rd Psalm and other psalms of trust in God's providence, steadfast love and mercy. At three miles an hour, I wasn’t going anywhere fast, so I was gradually able to reflect on my situation. My legs and feet were holding up, but I was hardly footloose and fancy free. I was living a spiritually conflicted paradox, paradoxically exactly the spiritually conflicted paradox I had set out to put myself in when I decided to go on a pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is about removing yourself from normalcy, from all the usual routines and support systems we depend upon in our normal lives to escape having to trust in, dare I say depend upon, God’s mercy and guidance. I was tired, hungry, worried and feeling very much alone. No cell phone. No friends. No ATMs, let alone anything that could be solved by more money. No car. No bus….no town. I was in the middle of an almost empty French countryside with limited language skills. A little more than I had bargained for perhaps, but I had succeeded in getting myself into exactly the situation I had gone looking for in a pilgrimage.
To bring this right into Christmas, the parallels to which I hope you have seen coming long before now, I had put myself in shoes a lot like Mary’s. She had not gone looking for it and I had, which is why I was doing a spiritual practice and she ended up the Mother of God. You’ll remember from our lessons that Mary was minding her own business, when the angel Gabriel showed up and told her that God was about to quite literally fall into her lap. Her first response was disbelief, which is eminently believable. After all, how many of you have had an angel show up? Although scripture doesn’t say so, I am pretty sure this was a first for Mary. When Gabriel explains exactly what God has in store for her, Mary’s not buying it. This is just not possible. Gabriel goes on to spell out how marvelous this thing that is about to begin will be, summing up with some of my favorite lines from the Bible, “For nothing will be impossible with God.” Mary doesn’t run out of the room screaming. Instead, she speaks some more of my favorite lines, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me just as you say.” In modern American, “OK, God. I’m not sure I believe it but I’ll try living it. I’m in!”
Which is where I was on that road that day. “OK God. Here I am, way outside my comfort zone and there's nothing I can do about it. Let’s see some of that mercy, steadfast lov, leading me into green pastures and lying me down beside still waters.” The beauty of the situation was that I didn’t really have any choice, so I had to pull a Mary. Here in Dover, with family and friends, a job, house, car, cellphone, credit cards, the works, I would have struggled mightily. Out there in the middle of nowhere with nothing…sure, here I am, the servant of the Lord.
So what happened? Well, I’m here so I obviously survived. I did better than survive. I had Christmas in August. At exactly 40 kilometers for the day, 26 miles for you marathoners, I was walking down this steep hill with my quads burning up when I came around a corner and found a gate with a sign on it. “Christian family welcomes pilgrims. Free food and bed. Welcome.” “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I thought. Inside the gate was a bell, which I rang and waited to see what would happen. Perhaps 50 yards away across the garden, a door opened in the house and an older woman came out. As she walked towards me, I was hurriedly trying to get my pitch straight for me staying here. I introduced myself and as pitifully as possible explained my predicament. She pursed her lips and brow and said, “I am sorry, Monsieur, the beds are all full for tonight and we are having dinner right now.” “If I could just have a shower and be allowed to sleep in your garden for the night…” To which, she interrupted with, “Oh no, Monsieur. You can certainly shower and then you will sleep in our chapel. Would you like to join us for dinner?” Fearful of abusing her generous hospitality…my heart was still unprepared for no strings attached mercy and steadfast love… I responded, “Oh, thank you, but I am fine.” I had four apples in my pack. And I was in.
I took a delightful shower, got into clean clothes, put my gear in the chapel, and sat on a bench outside the chapel eating apples, watching the sunset, feeling safe and secure and truly blessed. When I went to bed that night on the stone floor, there was the Holy Family looking down at me from icons on the wall, Mary, Joseph and the Baby Jesus. And I knew as I said my prayers that not only had my prayers on the road been answered but I also knew I had been given my Christmas Eve sermon for tonight.
As I let myself out of the gate early the next morning, I saw a little donation jar on a table, which the lady of the house had put out with coffee, tea and juice for passing pilgrims. I took off my pack, dug out my wallet, and put all the money I had in that little jar. There was sure to be an ATM in Conques and her welcome had been priceless.
I never knew that woman’s name, the same way we never know the name of the innkeeper in Bethlehem. But in their acts of no strings attached hospitality, God’s love became physically real, for Mary and Joseph in the manger and for me on the road in France. How about you? We’re all on the road of life somewhere. Where do you really need to open yourself to hospitality right now, either inviting someone into your life or allowing someone to invite you in? Where is Christmas waiting right now to really happen in your life if you’ll just ring that bell and say, “Here I am, God. Let the good times roll.”

You Look Good

2011-11-23T14:27:00.001-05:00

You Look Good The Dover Church
November 20, 2011 –Thanksgiving Sunday Scripture: Luke 17:11-19

To paraphrase the gifted phrase master, Yogi Berra, “it was like deja vu all over again.” I was at my 25th high school reunion and there was Jimmy O’Neill, whom I hadn’t seen in 20 years, shaking my hand and grasping my shoulder, eyeing me up and down to get a really good look, and saying, “Wow, Max. You look good. I mean it, Max. You really look good.”
“You too, Jimmy,” I told him, smiling and laughing along with him. Jimmy was an old high school pal of mine. We had sat next to each other in homeroom, played basketball and had plenty of fun together. I could still see a lot of the tall, skinny, curly haired leprechaun looking kid I had known all those years ago. I was not lying. He did look good.
The deja vu experience went like this: While both of us could see the two kids we once were inside the middle aged men we had become, I had to admit that we also looked exactly like what we had become. Jimmy, still the smiling, Mass going former altar boy guy, had grown into a big, burly, Irish state trooper with 20 years in. About my size in his dark gray detective's suit, it was not hard for me to imagine Jimmy gaining the respect of both the good guys and bad guys he came across in the line of duty. Jimmy was a “statey.” He fit the classic profile and looked the part.
And there I was, the Congregational minister in my own dark gray suit, shaking hands, chatting with folks, listening to stories and doing just about what I do on any given day. Apparently Jimmy had a harder time imagining me on the job. “Wow, Max. You became a minister? Where did that come from? You were pretty crazy back in the day, but... Jesus, a minister. You can get married right? I mean, you're not a priest, not that there’s anything wrong with that…” I thought I fit the classic profile, but maybe not.
“Yeah, well...it's a long story and yes I can get married and yes I did get married,” showing him my pictures.
Jimmy congratulated me and ended with…“but you look good Max. I really mean it.”
One after another, old classmates told me that I looked good, that they really meant it, that I had hardly changed at all, that they weren't kidding me. I have to admit that my feelings started to slide from initially flattered to less certain to a little put off. Their refrain of “I really mean it” kept clanging on my brain. “Why are they all saying that they really mean it? Do I look bad? Have I aged badly? Are they just trying to be nice? Or did I look bad as a kid and they are surprised how I turned out?”
All of us have things from our past which we prefer remain in the past. I was the Class Clown of 1981. That night I just couldn’t be sure if all the compliments were referring to the apparent arrested maturity of my appearance, or the persistent immaturity of my personality. “Is this some joke that they agreed beforehand to play on their old Class Clown?” “Hey, everyone. When Max shows up, let's all tell him how good he looks. Just keep smiling and telling him how we really mean it. Everyone say exactly the same thing. At the end of the night, we'll all turn and yell... “Hey, Max you look good. We really mean it… NOT!” It'll be a riot.” Reunions give out these little awards for this, that, and the other thing. When it was announced that I was the “least changed,” I was certain the zinger moment was at hand. Going forward for my prize, a foggy pocket mirror as it turned out, I was outwardly smiling and inwardly cringing. But the moment came and went with only applause and warm wishes. I guess they really meant it.
While I don't spend a lot of time mirror gazing, I am not without vanity. You may laugh, but that night my vanity had me leave my glasses in the car. The hotel ballroom was dimly lit, the wall mirrors were far from the bar and tables, and I struggled. rather than just enjoying the warmth and compliments of my old friends, I found myself trying to catch glimpses of myself in those distant, dim mirrors for verification. I could see the people I was talking to, but I could not see myself very clearly in those mirrors. I have noticed that my life gets pretty ironic from time to time. That night I couldn’t see what they were seeing. Why did I doubt?
I share this little story because it points to a very serious spiritual problem all of us struggle with: insecurity about our identity, self-worth, and purpose. Like me, gazing around somewhat myopically for a glimpse of my appearance, all of us look here and there for some reflection of ourselves to give us confidence and purpose, some idea of who we really are and what we ought to do. All of us trip over the present from time to time while we are looking over our shoulder at the past, either wishing we were still back there or wondering why things went the way they did. All of us want to believe that we are special with something special to bring to life, but we also doubt. Sometimes the people or the events of our lives have sown this doubt. Sometimes there is just too much contradictory input from the outside. Am I good? Good enough? Am I worth loving? Compared to what?
If you have been coming to church long enough, I am certain that you have heard at least two things. First, God loves each of us and all of us unconditionally like beloved children, created in God's own image. Not the ideal you. Not the you you used to be. Not the you you think you ought to be or the you your parents told you to be. No, the you who you are and always have been. As the confirmands learned on retreat, God loves you and there is nothing you can do about. It's a gift. Enjoy it. And second, God has given each of us and all of us unique gifts, gifts which only we have and gifts which we can only begin to appreciate and enjoy when we share them with others.
You've all heard that before, right? But how many of us really believe it? I mean really believe it, not as some rose colored glasses fairy tale in our heads, but believe it so much in our hearts and spirits that we are just bubbling over with confidence, hope, and creative love, bubbling over so much that our confidence, hope, and creative love just spills out into the world, which only increases our joy?
Take our lesson for today. I imagine those former lepers getting together later on at their reunion and telling each other how good they look, how they really mean it. And they would all be speaking the truth from the heart. After all, they all had been lepers, outcasts from society because of their very visible infirmity. And now they are healed. Only one, however, knows something more. The one who had seen the hand of God in his salvation lived a life of praise and worship, whereas the others had just moved on. That distinction may not seem all that important to you. What difference does that make? Just being better is good enough, isn’t it?
I don’t think so. In fact, I know it’s not. I think that most of us at one time or another see our lives as either the result of our individual agency, as in we did it all ourselves, pulling it off in spite of this or that, or just luck. As long as that is the case, it's hard not to be haunted by go doubt and apprehension, knowing in our hearts, even the most successful and beautiful of us, what frail creatures we are, how capable we are of making mistakes, and how fickle luck can be. Take the healed lepers in our lesson for this morning again. All are healed but only the one is well, "get up and go on your way. Your faith has made you well." says Jesus.
I know the difference between the nine and the one because I live it myself, Lord have mercy. Many days I run around in apparently good shape, looking to the priests of the world to tell me that I am well, driven by a nagging sense of deficiency and incompleteness. What's next? What's more? What's missing? And then there are the days, or even just moments in days, when I praise God that I already have more than even Warren Buffett with all his billions could ever buy me: a few people to love and be loved by; my physical health, which may not be what it was but which is probably better than it will be; my mental health and acuity, which also may not be what it was but which is probably better than it will be; the knowledge that I can marvel at the extraordinarily abundant and overwhelmingly manifold beauty of the entire universe in the sunlight shining on one golden maple leaf; the knowledge that I can actually feel the beginning of creation in the warmth of the sun on my face; the knowledge that with every breath I breath, every bite of food I chew, every drink of water that passes my lips, I am intimately and vitally connected to every living thing that ever was and ever will be, as well as the author of life itself, God our creator. Can you see the qualitative difference? Without this faith I am a self contained, independent, often sadly miserable unit, the me thinking that the joke may be on me going forward to receive my reunion award. With faith, I am transformed into a vital, excited, Christ's joy complete in me part of the very glory of God. Those of you who know me well enough have seen both. Which me do you prefer? More importantly, you all know yourselves best. Which you do you prefer? I tell you in the name of Jesus Christ, "you look good. I really mean in." Don't just believe it. Be living it and you'll be the you you prefer.

The New Normal

2011-11-15T14:31:00.000-05:00

Acts 2: 37 – 47
The New Normal
A sermon preached at the Dover Church, November 13, 2011
Rev. Wendy Vander Hart, Associate Conference Minister

Grace and peace to you from Jesus Christ, the head of the church. I bring you greetings, blessings and all manner of good wishes from the 72 churches of the Metropolitan Boston Association as well as the 385 churches of the MA Conference. It is good to be together to worship God and lift up our covenant connections as the body of Christ.
I want to thank Max and Emilia and church leaders for the invitation to be here today. I am grateful for Max and Emilia’s ministry with you and pray their partnership with you bears the fruit God has in mind for you.
Whenever I am in one of our churches I name our mission as the MA Conference as the reason for being there. You may or may not be familiar with the mission of the MA Conference but it goes something like this, “nurturing local church vitality and the covenant among our churches to make God’s love and justice real.” It used to be that our mission was to nurture local church vitality and covenant but many of us asked to what end? Over a year ago the phrase to make God’s love and justice real was added. For myself I state it “provoking local church vitality and covenant following Jesus who made God’s love and justice real.” Stating our mission and purpose clearly makes a difference. I thank you for your contributions to that mission through your giving to Our Church’s Wider Mission and fellowship dues and the ways in which you offer time and talent to the cause.
Now 250 years is a long time to be a witness to God’s amazing love in one community and I am sure you will be celebrating the saints and forbears that have led you to this time. You would not be here were it not for that long line of founders and caretakers who have gone before you.
But I would venture to reason that the present is just as important. You are only here as a church now because God tugged on each one of your hearts in the present moment and said, “there is spirit-driven community at The Dover Church, UCC that is worth the investment of your time and generosity!” And thank God, here you are! It is good to thank God and... it is good to thank each other so I invite you to thank someone nearby you for being part of this ministry. Reach out to someone and say “thanks for being part of this ministry!”
The topic for this sermon is “The New Normal.” I think we can all agree that the world of 2011 is significantly different from the world of 1762 – though many in our New England region following the October snowstorm might have felt that they were back in 1762! But would you agree that what folks who resided in what would become Dover in 1762 would describe as “normal” would be very different from what we would describe as “normal” today. Can I hear an Amen to that? Would you give me an Amen if I said that what was “normal” in 1956, when Kraft Hall was built, is different than what is “normal” now?
I have been captured of late by the phrase, “the new normal.” I most recently heard this phrase spoken by Conference Minister Jim Antal. To know Jim is to know he is passionate about our response to climate change. He was remarking on the floods in Vermont as the result of hurricane Irene and noted that events like these can no longer be labeled 100 year events. Like the devastating floods of the spring of 2010, this past spring and the hurricane, the freak snowstorm- storms like these he asserts are the “new normal.”
If you Googled the phrase “the new normal” you would see about 151,000,000 results from that search. It refers to everything from the economy, technology, the use of social media, and the list goes on. I believe the phrase is apropos for the changing landscape of ministry and the challenges our churches face in the shifting sands of culture.
Let me paint a picture of “the new normal” for our churches. In any given community across the United States only 17% are worshiping in a faith community on a Sunday morning. Some statistics say the percentage in New England is closer to only 9%. The average age of members of United Church of Christ congregations is 65. We have enough seminarians to fill one seminary, but not the seven that are associated with the United Church of Christ. And given the smaller size and older age of our congregations it is estimated that between 30-40% of our churches will close in the next 15-20 years. Add the characteristics of the culture at large to these challenges – like an increasingly multi-option society, the impact of social media on people’s way of relating to one another and the decline of institutions in general – and you can see that local church vitality faces an uphill battle. Tell your neighbor, “there’s a new normal out there.”
Now that was the challenging news. Here is some good news. I can tell you some stories of UCC churches in the area that are meeting that uphill battle of church vitality and are thriving. And they all have the same thing in common – they can clearly state who they are, why they are and for whom they are. In a Twitter world where you need to state something in 140 characters or less, these churches can sum up their mission in a Tweet!
UCC Medfield – the discipleship church. Each member lives in covenant together around six marks of discipleship – daily prayer, daily bible reading, weekly worship, generous giving, mission through and beyond the local church, relating with others to foster spiritual growth. $700,000 of their $750,00 budget is met by people’s giving.
Old South Church in Boston – the blessing church. Located at the finish line of the Boston Marathon they bless the feet of the marathoners. They bless backpacks at the start of school, hammers for mission trips, animals – you name it, they will bless it.
First Somerville – the testimony church. Everything they do is understood to be testimony to the faith they live. This even carries over to the front yard of the church that is fully taken over by a vegetable garden. It is a living testimony to who they understand themselves to be just outside of Davis Square. They also practice testimony in worship. Every week in worship the liturgist leads the time of confession and the offering by sharing testimony of their faith lives. There is a one year waiting list to be liturgist!
Let me also share the story of a non-UCC church, Highrock Church in Arlington – the transformation church. I live in Arlington and have been meaning to visit them for awhile. I finally got there on Labor Day Sunday, the 9:15 a.m. service. There was a line to get in the door! The sanctuary was packed (and air conditioned!) with a multi-ethnic, mostly young adult congregation. Throughout the service in any number of ways they were clear that they are about transformation – through connecting to God personally, connecting to God’s people, connecting to God’s purposes. There was a long invitation to join a small group – either a short term connection group or a longer term covenant group. They will help you start a small group around Monday Night Football Group! You could not leave worship there without a sense of who they are, why they are and for whom they are.
Each one of these churches has at least two things in common: 1. They have clarity of the mission God has called them to and 2. That mission is rooted in the reclaiming of ancient practices.
Ironically, the renewal of the church is dependent upon recapturing the past for the present day. The acts of discipleship, blessing, testifying and changing lives of these thriving churches are all rooted in ancient Christian practices. UCC Medfield, Old South and First Somerville have found in the roots of our heritage a source of life and a sense of purpose.
If we look back to the first days of the Christian Church, those days right after the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost we can see the roots of our renewal staring us in the face.
You remember that story that precedes the portion of Acts we heard today – a huddled group of grievers waited in a room in Jerusalem because Jesus promised an Advocate, a spark that would carry them forward without him. On the rush of a wind they were filled with the Spirit to the point where they were ablaze with passion for sharing good news.
But they did more than share good news, they lived good news. They prayed together, ate together, remembered together and gave so generously from what they had so that no one was in need. And those who witnessed their transformation were beating down the door to be baptized and grab some of this good news for themselves. That day of Pentecost saw 3000 baptized. Imagine 3000 people knocking on your church’s front door because they saw in you something they knew would quench that unidentified hunger and thirst for God in their lives.
It would be like someone sending a tweet – “going to The Dover Church because they are living Jesus over there,” and all following that Twitter account showed up! Donald English, a British Methodist leader said, “the world doesn’t need more salespersons for the gospel, just more free samples.”
That is who you are called to be in this new normal, in this day and age. A community who has hundreds of people following your every move because they see and experience in you something of Jesus still alive, still present, still calling people out into the world.
So I wonder with you today Dover Church– in the midst of a new normal, in the throes of a Twitter world - what do you want to be known for in this neighborhood? If I can encourage you in an awesome way to mark your anniversary, now is the time to be able to say the Dover Church is the ____ church. Now is the time to be making Christians. Not for your own survival and vitality, but so that the transforming power of Jesus Christ is known through the people who gather in this meeting place on Springdale Ave. and in the community that it seeks to serve. May it be so.

The Good Fight

2011-11-02T11:37:00.000-04:00

The Good Fight October 30, 2011
All Saints Sunday. The Dover Church

With just six weeks of seminary education under my belt, I was called to be the part-time Associate Minister at the Second Congregation Church of Cohasset. The Cohasset church was much like The Dover Church, a beautiful, clapboard New England church in the center of a beautiful New England town. As a novice minister dropped in the midst of hundreds of people, I sort of skated across the surface of the church for some time, trying to learn names, getting the hang of preaching and public praying, learning the ropes as it were, watching how the much beloved, successful and long serving senior minister did things.
The skating ended eight months later when Gary, the senior, went away for the summer on sabbatical. I suddenly found myself alone for three months with God and all these people. Well, not quite alone. I had DeeDee, our secretary, who was really the second minister in that church, having lived in town forever, knowing everyone and their back stories, where they were in relation to the church, as well as how to make a church run. Whenever I had a question, which was quite a lot in those days, DeeDee had a good answer.
One day, the phone rang and I could hear DeeDee speaking to someone from down the hall. The next thing I knew, the light on my phone blinked and it rang. I picked up and heard a woman's voice saying, "This is Roberta McKinnell. My husband Scotty and I were wondering if you might come by for a visit this Friday at 1." "Yes, I'd be delighted," I said. "See you then." There were some other pleasantries, but that was our conversation in a nutshell.
After putting down the receiver and marking the visit in my pocket planner, I walked down to DeeDee's office to find out what I needed to know. "So who are the McKinnell's, DeeDee? I can't place them. And what do you think this is all about?" As I said, DeeDee knew what was what in the Cohasset church. She took out the latest directory and showed me a picture which prompted my memory. A very elegant, dashing couple in their 70s who drove a sharp sports car and whom, I had heard, did a lot of traveling, which explained my lack of name recognition. I remembered them from around Christmas, he in a blazer and McKinnell tartan vest, her in a stunning coat. As to what this was about, all DeeDee could say was, "I heard a rumor that he was sick."
So, on Friday at 12:50, I got in my car, checked a map of the town and drove over. Arriving at 12:57, I waited down the street. Mrs. McKinnell had said 1, so I waited for the church bell in town to strike the hour before walking up and knocking on the door, which was opened by the very same elegant woman from the directory picture. She welcomed me graciously and invited me in to the screen porch where Scotty was sitting. He got up from his chair to welcome me when I came in, but he had changed. Before me was not the ruddy faced, blue eyed, burly, firm handshaking, smiling Scotsman I remembered from Christmas. He had thinned out substantially and looked jaundiced, quite yellow in fact.
After some small talk and the pouring of some lemonade, Scotty got right down to brass tacks in the best Scottish tradition. "I have pancreatic cancer," he said. Being still wet behind the ears at this sort of thing, I had no idea what that meant. So I asked, "is that bad?" Without missing a beat, Scotty said. "Yes. It is. My doctor tells me that I have between 3 and 6 months to live." "Oh," I said. "That is bad. I am so very sorry."
Years before, when my best boyhood friend was just starting out in ministry, I had asked him out of curiosity how he handled difficult pastoral visits, tragedy, death, deep pain. "What do you say in situations like this?" "I don't say anything. I listen and let them tell me what they want to do." I thank God for my friend’s wisdom, because that's just what I did. I listened as they told me about Scotty's cancer. I kept on listening as they began to tell me about themselves. Suddenly it seemed, a clock chimed somewhere in the house and it was 2 o'clock. They thanked me for coming. I asked if we might pray before I left. They said yes, that they would like that. Then I got bold. I reached out and took their hands and we prayed. There were some tears. As Roberta was seeing me to the door, I asked, "may I come again?" "Yes, that would be nice. Will next Friday at 1 work for you?" she asked. "Yes. See you then."
And just like that, I began to become a minister, visiting with Scotty and Roberta every Friday at 1, sitting in the screen porch when it was warm and in the parlor during the winter. Every Friday, an update on Scotty's cancer, followed by a long listen to the story of their life. They literally wove together the beautiful and wonderful tapestry of their more than 50 years of love as I sat there and listened. We talked about recollections from the past, present concerns, and hopes for the future. Every now and then we shifted gears with a God conversation, questions like why? And what's next? We always ended with a prayer holding hands. Scotty lost a lot of weight, as much as 80 pounds and stayed very jaundiced. He also got cold easily and spent a lot of our visits wrapped in a blanket. Roberta was always beautiful, looking like she could go downtown to dinner and dancing on a moment's notice.
During probably the third visit, I finally asked Scotty, "so how are you with all this Scotty?" He looked me right in the eye and said, "to be perfectly frank with you, Max, I'm damned angry. This cancer makes me feel awful and I don't want anyone to see me looking like this. But that's not what has me angry. It's not even the prospect of dying. It's the immediacy of it. It's that it's now. I don't want to complain. I've had a great life. I married the only girl I ever loved and I love her every bit as much now as I did the first time I saw her at Bates College after the war. I love my kids and grandkids. I had a great career. I have a lovely home and all the toys I ever wanted, a sail boat and the sport car. I don't want you to think I am selfish or whining, but the truth is that I want more time to go on loving my life. I want more time with my Roberta. It's too good not to want more of." "There's nothing selfish or whiney about that, Scotty," I said. "God created us for love and surrounded us with goodness."
Every Friday from 1 to 2, Scotty and Roberta would tell me about the goodness and love they lived. There was the grand adventure and honor of being a naval officer aboard the U.S.S. Nashville in the Second World War. There was the passion of courtship and marriage. There was Bates and MIT, the challenge of starting out in business, working together through adversity and being able to turn his firm over to his son as a partner. There were the joys and struggles of raising three kids and watching them celebrate and struggle as they grew up, fell in and out and in love again, and raised kids of their own who were now going to proms, making mistakes, winning championships, not doing so well, going off to college, and dipping their own toes into the sea of life. There was skiing in Maine, travel, a deep pride in his Scottish ancestry.
It was beautiful. I listened for an hour a week, became friends, and prayed, prayed that all would be well, that we would have hope and courage, that we might draw closer to God in this struggle. And the astounding thing to me was that God seemed to be answering our prayers. I certainly saw God all over this, but more miraculously three months passed, then six, and then nine. And every Friday I would go over and Scotty would look the same and Roberta would be beautiful and we would sit and talk, and pray. Not wanting to call the Almighty's cards, I never shared my astonishment at and growing confidence in the power of prayer with the McKinnell's. They weren't born yesterday. They could count the months as well as me.
Then, one Tuesday in October, Roberta called. "Can you come over this afternoon, Max?" she asked in the same gracious voice. "Yes I can. The usual time?" "No. That's not important. Whenever works for you." I came over at 12:05 and found Scotty comatose, dying in bed. He had never been able to let go of his anger about having his life cut short and I felt like I had failed him and Roberta. There was nothing else for it now, so I took his hand, held Roberta's hand, and prayed. When I got to the Lord's Prayer, Scotty's breathing changed, his face seemed to relax, I felt pressure from his hand, and his lips moved. After the Amen, I bent down and kissed his forehead, wishing him the peace of Christ. I said goodbye and saw myself out. Roberta called me around suppertime to tell me that Scotty had just died.
When we laid D. James McKinnell, my friend Scotty, to rest, I was deeply sad but swelling with blessing of the fullness of life. To be invited to be part of such richness of life, to hear people's sacred stories, to see God active and moving powerfully in love in so many lives, to help people see the meaning and significance in the details of their everyday lives, was beyond description to me. I had known how precious life was in a sort of intellectual way before Scotty and Roberta, but the experience of walking towards death together made it visceral for me. Everything they had told me was so very ordinary, but it wasn't. It was extraordinary because it was the specialness of their particular life. I suddenly knew why God had become a human being in Jesus, to show us just how holy the ordinary truly is if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Whatever blessingI might have been to the McKinnell’s, they had blessed me with this gift.
A few days after the funeral, I stopped by to see how Roberta was doing. Beautiful as always and ever gracious, we had a drink and there were tears. In the midst of our small talk, she took my hand, looked at me searchingly and said, "Your faith is so strong and your hope for your prayers so earnest that I didn't want to tell you, but the last six months we had been giving Scotty shots which we were smuggling from Canada. I didn't want you to think less of us, that we didn't have faith." I guess such a confession must have tickled her, because she started chuckling through her tears and went on, "we finally gave up last week when the shots became too painful and difficult for me to administer, and Scotty died." I found myself laughing with her as I returned the grasp of her hand, saying, "Roberta, such a strong will to live and love... If that's not God, then I don't know what is." Amen.

The Sermon of the Amount

2011-10-18T08:50:00.000-04:00

“The Sermon of the Amount" The Dover Church
October 16, 2011 –18th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 96, Matthew 22:15-22

Most people become uncomfortable when the pastor starts talking about money in church. I don't know exactly why, but here are my guesses. First, I think that people expect preachers to be judgmental when it comes to money, as in we have it and many don’t and that makes us guilty, or we have it and spend it but we don’t spend it where we ought to, which makes us guilty, or that we have a lot of it and we don’t share enough of it….you guessed it, guilty again. I don't find guilt very motivational, so don't worry. Second, I think that most people don't equate giving to the church with pleasure compared with taking the family out to a delightful dinner, going on a great vacation, or buying that special something. Just compare the excitement and generosity around our 250th Renovation work. Many of you have been really excited about the tangible results your generosity makes possible and have given abundantly and enthusiastically, whereas stewardship feels more like “oh, it’s that time again.” And third, I'm obviously leading up to an ask, along with every other good cause. Fair enough. I usually am, but I ought to preach money more often because we all have it and Jesus had a lot to say about it.
I am asking this morning, but first I would like to reframe the spirituality of money and giving. I think it is my responsibility as your pastor, the individual charged with the care of your souls, to talk about money because our checkbooks, along with our calendars, are a mirror into our souls. How we use our money is an absolute indicator of what we value. Prayerfully reflecting on our money, where it comes from, how we get it, how much we get, how much we want or feel we need, what we do with it, and what we hope to achieve with it, helps us sort out our lives, adjust our priorities, work out inconsistencies between our stated values and our lived realities, and is a fantastic spiritual discipline for finding harmony and balance in the midst of our chaotic, sometimes confusing, and often stressful lives.
Here’s how I practice this spiritual discipline. As you have probably guessed by now, my relationship with God is at the center of my life. Why? Why is my God relationship so important to me? My God relationship gives me meaning and purpose, a sense of perspective and proportion, a sense of direction, it helps me discern what is important and what is not. And perhaps most importantly in my chaotic life, my faith gives me confidence, hope and assurance. I don’t need to worry. I don’t need to sweat it, knowing that God is God and I am not, that God is on top of things so I don't have to be. Talk about a load off of my shoulders!
Now that's all nice God talk, but how do I translate all of these benefits into a lived reality? Our faith captures the importance of money in our lives in relationship with God with two concepts: tithing and giving from the first fruits. A tithe is 10% of one’s income. First fruits are well, first fruits, the ripe, luscious strawberries on top and not the stray raisins left over in the bottom of the bowl. Eating apples off the tree as opposed to picking up drops. I know it’s sounds obvious, but the parallel with human love is close: if you really love someone you show it and live it. Aiming for a tithe, giving of the first fruits makes the importance of one’s God relationship unambiguous. When you give in that way you notice it. It is intentional. It is significant. It is not an afterthought or just cutting a check.
My tithe, my giving of my first fruits, would be a gift to God through the Dover Church of roughly $6,000. “What are we paying this guy?” you might ask. Or, “Why would he possibly give that much money to the Dover Church?” This institution is not God after all. That’s true, but this church is the place where, and you are the people with whom, I have been called to live out my God in Jesus Christ relationship. I know that if I give that generously and if the many of you who are able to do likewise actually do likewise, together we will have the financial wherewithal, the tools, to meaningfully, concretely, and measurably do God’s will in this very place at this very time. That is something I want to see in my lifetime, a church where that sort of generosity is creating a world of spiritual abundance and overflowing good works. If all of us gave that generously, we would have over $2 million every year. If that’s not unambiguous, I don’t know what is.
But, of course, like you, I have other commitments in life, other things I hope and dream of, other things I have to plan for, other things that draw on the tangible fruits of my labor, my money. Right off the top, I have to save aggressively for three big things: my retirement, a home to live in when I retire, and our sons’ education. I am well compensated by The Dover Church, but I can do the math and I know that I need to save a lot if I want achieve these important goals. That saving does squeeze my ability to give to the church as generously as I would like. Last year I gave $2,600, which was almost half a tithe, not quite half of the first fruits, 4.25% of my income. My giving was progressing towards an accurate reflection of the central importance of my relationship with God. By way of cheerleading, if the 167 pledges to the church last year were at least $2,600, or if those who gave more gave enough more to balance out those who were unable to give that much, then we would be well on our way to being that church I dream of with a giving total of $434,000. If we acted in percentiles and became a half a tithe church, in which everyone aimed for 5% of their income as their annual gift, we would have roughly $1.1 million to do God’s will with every year. Can you say outstanding everything in here and literacy programs, nutritional programs, job training, affordable housing, or schools and medical clinics out there? You name it. You dream it. Every year. Now that would be an exciting church to be part of, wouldn’t you say?
I think I dropped that bomb on you two years ago, so let’s get back to my money for the moment. What am I to do? How am I to get my gift to the church to where I want it to be, to a real first fruits level? A tithe? Where am I going to come up with another $3,500 when I have to live today and save for tomorrow? And what would be really good for my soul, how can I make my giving reflect my primary values, the things that are most important to me?
What are the values I would like my gift to reflect? What do I value the most in life? My relationship with God in Jesus Christ as lived out in this church. My family and our future. The Kingdom of God as preached by Jesus Christ values of peace and justice. The Biblical call to care for the environment and sustainable living. And the “created in the image of God” imperative of physical and emotional well being. Those are the biggies. Many of you probably share them. How can he possibly work that all into his weekly offering envelope? Isn’t this a simple question of affordability?
Well, I have an answer and all of you who drive past 61 Dedham Street have seen it. Last summer I started collecting firewood and last Christmas I bought a wood stove. Just last winter, I saved $1,500 on the oil bill and $600 on the electric bill – the furnace blower takes a lot electricity. That is money that the church can now use for doing God’s will. Those $2,100 of savings plus my $2,600 pledge from last year brings my gift to $4,700, which puts me at 7.8% and closer to my first fruits. As you can judge by the size of my present wood pile, I aim to save at least another $1,000 in energy costs this winter. Add in all the hours I spent cutting, chopping and stacking, or figure the value of 6 cords of wood at $300 a cord, and my gift to the church is over $6,000. I am giving a tithe, real first fruits. And what’s of equal importance to me, I am actually living my primary values. I am putting my God relationship up front while still saving aggressively for my family’s future. I am cutting my dependence on foreign oil and multinational corporations, which I think are the root cause of much of the violence and injustice in our world. I am living locally, these trees came from within 600 yards of my house. I am living within my limits…if I don’t chop it I can’t burn it. I am living sustainably, it only takes about 5 big trees a year. I am caring for the environment by burning less oil and creating less carbon emission. And I am caring for my physical and emotional well being. Those hours I spend out on the woodpile are both my gym membership and my therapist’s couch. And you thought I was just an eccentric who was going round the bend with wood chopping.
My friends, I am asking you to give some of your money. In fact, I am challenging all of us in a big way. But the real challenge is not dollars and cents. I am inviting you to something much deeper and more challenging: to give spiritually so that your annual gift to our church reflects your deepest and most heartfelt values. I am saying that together we can live into our hopes and dreams, God’s hopes and dreams for us, for ourselves and for the world within our effective reach. I am not asking you to go out and start chopping wood or even hijack an oil truck and hide it behind the church. Between today and Agape Sunday, November 20, when our giving ministry wraps up, I invite you to prayerfully consider where you want your God relationship to be in your lives and then imagine what sort of future you would like to be part of here at The Dover Church. And then, let’s give so that we can live it.

Legos and Kingdom Living

2011-09-27T14:52:00.000-04:00

“Legos and Kingdom Living" The Dover Church
September 25, 2010 – 15th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 25, Matthew 21: 23-32

When I was a little boy, I loved Legos. I had a big box of them in my closet, in all different shapes, sizes, and colors. I spent hours building houses and cars and planes and rocket ships and castles. Looking back, my houses and cars and planes and rocket ships and castles weren’t always obviously houses or cars or planes or rocket ships or castles. They were more what you might call reasonable facsimiles. When my mother or father would smile at me and ask, “what do you have there, Max?” they were genuinely curios. “It’s a plane,” I’d hold it up, smiling. “Oh yes! What a lovely plane you’ve made.”
Have any of you played with Legos recently? As a father of two small boys, I have and let me tell you, things have changed. Nowadays you don’t buy a box of 100 Legos. Now you buy “The Death Star,” “the Eiffel Tower,” “The Medieval Castle” or some other truly extravagant kit that is not intended to be a reasonable facsimile but rather an exact replica of the picture on the box. Inside every box is a detailed book of instructions, because this is about exact construction and many of the pieces only go in one place. After Leo’s birthday I look with despair at the boxes that say for age 7+, knowing that I am in for a long engineering afternoon with an impatient birthday boy asking me when we’re going to be finished or why I'm not doing anything as I root around in the piles of pieces which we unwisely dumped out of their individual plastic bags. Legos these days are beautiful and marvelous toys for learning patience, sequential thinking, and spatial association, but I wonder whether they are really meant to be played with by real little boys. Real little boys drop and break things. Once the space ship has gone to pieces, the instructions are not all that helpful. Putting it back together again feels a lot more like complex reconstructive surgery than play to me.
Jesus’ parable of the Two Sons and the Vineyard got me to thinking about Legos this week. According to this parable, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life is like a father who tells his two sons to go into the vineyard to work for him. One son says yes, but doesn’t go. The other says no, but goes. The reluctant one who goes is living the kingdom. Jesus is clearly telling us that being a kingdom person living a kingdom life is, at its most fundamental level, about obedience, about doing the will of God. In Christian lingo we call it following Jesus, living how Jesus lived.
It occurs to me that modern Americans like us have three problems at least with this model of being a kingdom person living a kingdom life. First, we like to think of ourselves as independent, autonomous individuals, which is another way of saying that “obedience” sticks in our throats. The idea of blind obedience is not attractive to us. There's something unAmerican about it. That's not even good for kids these days I'm told.
Which leads to our second problem, emulation, copying Jesus. We like to think of ourselves as freethinking, creative people who find our own ways in life according to our individual intelligence, ingenuity and hard work. To just do as Jesus did seems somehow an abandonment of our adulthood, our maturity, our intelligence, our hard won autonomy and independence.
And last but not least, obedience and emulation imply action, doing something. Most people think that Christianity is something you think about, something that makes you feel a certain way, a from the neck up experience. We are supposed to actually do something? Something, or a number of things, the way Jesus did them? Oh, that is a problem. Some might see me.
And yet, you are all here this morning so I am assuming that you have felt at least some allure to Jesus, something about him attracts you, something has made you want to find out more about being a kingdom person living a kingdom life. A lot of people meet Jesus in the Bible and like what they see, so they decide to give the whole thing a go. The more we learn about Jesus, the we you discover there is to find out about him. Some is quite attractive, love, dinner parties with friends, being nice, hanging out with God, and some is a little off putting because it doesn’t mesh all that well with how we lived our lives before this Jesus guy popped up on our radar screens, forgiveness of enemies, suffering, welcoming strangers, giving away our money to the poor. Which leads me back to the Legos. Some folks, let’s call them the Legos from my youth folks, take a piece here and a piece there, picking and choosing what they find attractive, easy to do, easy to incorporate into their life style and world view, and they build a kingdom life. Believe me, I know, because I have done this. What I ended up with, however, was a reasonable facsimile that was fun to play with, but it was completely idiosyncratic to what I wanted to do, what I would have done anyways on my own, rather than what Jesus is inviting me to do. In my experience, important pieces tended to be left out, the ones that didn’t fit in easily, which were usually exactly the ones I really needed.
Then there are what I will call the Leo’s Lego folks who see the picture on the box, take the entire kit with all its hundreds and thousands of intricate pieces, each of which go in in only place, and set about piecing the whole thing together according to the instructions. I’ve never done this myself, so I can’t say for certain, but I would bet that the analogy with Legos still holds. If these folks actually get the whole thing together, it’s beautiful. It’s remarkable, but they can’t actually play with it. If one piece gets lost, they can’t put the whole thing back together again. It’s something of a museum piece to put on their shelf and look at. And I'm convinced that God meant life to be fun.
So what are we to do? I prefer a third way that is both true to Jesus, that is actually obedient to God’s will for us, and that is practical, as in conceptually simple, with a very few pieces involved. The difficult part is actually wanting to put them into our lives in the first place and being willing to keeping putting them back together as they continually get dropped on the floor of our lives. It's sort of a hybrid of my Legos and Leo's.
Just in case you were thinking I am a light weight so far this morning, far from the world of Legos is Walter Brueggemann, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible whom I admire immensely for the breadth of his wisdom, the scope of his scholarship, and the rambunctiousness of his personality. He is also a member of the United Church of Christ like us, so he speaks our language. In the context of a larger debate about what liberal and conservative Christians ought to be able to agree upon, Brueggemann once said that there are three primary marks of the church, three primary and essential components, three Lego pieces if you will, to being a kingdom person living a kingdom life. Those primary marks are: Practicing Hospitality, Practicing Generosity, and not Practicing Vengeance. He went on to add Sabbath Keeping and No Coveting as two other essential non-negotiables. I am a small fry compared with old Walt, but I would also add Practicing the Awareness of the Holy. Do these six things, build your life on them, let them seep into every pore of your daily life, stick with them, evolve with them as they continually pull you out of where you are into where God would have you, and you will be true to Jesus, doing the will of God. You will be the son who goes.
Jesus’ parable is more accurate than we care to admit. When we look at the pieces, we know that all of them are going to take us places we are pretty sure we don’t want to go. Our first response will be that of the second son who says no. Practice hospitality? Like Jesus did? There are some pretty seedy characters in some of those Bible stories. Practice Generosity? How much? Towards whom? No vengeance? Never? Like Jesus and all that forgiveness stuff? Can I still privately resent others? No coveting? My coveting has made me successful. It keeps me getting up in the morning and going to work every day. Keep the Sabbath? During the hockey season too? Ah, practice an awareness of the holy. Now that sounds nice. Does he mean praying? Slowing down and seeing God in your life? Well, I can do that on summer vacation and when things slow down at work.
“So why bother?” you might ask. “What’s in it for me?” We are living the good life here in Dover after all. Why mess that up? The priests and elders, people living a very Dover sort of top of the pyramid life in Jesus' day, asked the same question in our lesson this morning: by what authority did he do what he did? Eknath Easwaran, a Hindu teacher of meditation once said, "Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one." If we truly believe that Jesus was of God, or even if we only want to try to find out, well that is what Jesus offers us: a way to authentic, whole, healthy, happy, creative, unconfused life. Live a life of hospitality, generosity, non-vengeance, sabbath keeping, no coveting and awareness of the Holy. Jesus himself once said: “I have told you these things so that my joy may in you and your joy may be complete.” Imagine the joy of God in me! You don't have to imagine. You can live it and see for yourself. That’s what keeps me getting out of bed in the morning and giving it another try every day. This is the Good News.

A View of the Kingdom

2011-09-19T09:55:00.001-04:00

“AView of the Kingdom" The Dover Church
September 18, 2010 – Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 145, Matthew 20: 1-16

I grew up something of an anti-snob snob. I’m sure you know what I mean: the self-righteous type who thinks he’s better than all the superficial people who are hung up on status, money, power, possessions. In other words, a complete hypocrite who was truly as hung up on these things as any of the people I was looking down on, if anything, worse, because I was a charlatan who was kidding myself whereas they were at least honest. Let me paint you a picture of just how pathetic I was.
As I said, money, power, possessions, those weren’t my things. I was an academic who lived in his books, and I was a fly fisherman for trout. I accepted my position at the University of Colorado because of the fantastic trout streams nearby. At least that’s what I told myself. Yes, I had a Ph. D. from the University of California, Berkeley; yes, I was at the top of my game and was good at what I did, but the truth was that I was lucky to get the only advertised entry level position in Scandinavian Studies in North America that year. And I was excited about the trout streams because they fit into my life somewhere between the real joy I have in fishing for trout with flies and my self image: beard, messy L.L. Bean’s clothes, battered fishing hat, and a little red Nissan pickup with a camper shell on the back in which all my rods, reels, fly boxes, waders, and camping gear were ready to go at a moment’s notice. And there were a lot of moments in those years: every weekend, school vacations, afternoons, early mornings. I was living the dream.
One day I was in a National Forest up by the Continental Divide, having driven a long way in on a fire road that my little two wheel drive truck could manage. My professed feelings about four wheel drive at the time were that they were designed to encourage fools to drive into places where they shouldn’t have gone in the first place. Talk about self delusion! If someone had given me a souped up Land Cruiser or Range Rover, I would have been psyched. Anyway, there I was, deep in the woods when I came to a clearing and the stream I was planning to fish. I could see that the road led into the water and came out the other side. Park here and fish? Or try to ford and see what was further on? I got out, pulled on my waders, and walked in to see how deep the ford was and how fast the water was moving. After only about five steps I realized that it was a no go, too deep and too fast, which meant that I was rigging up here for the day. Great! This is going to be awesome. The water looked perfect with not another person in sight.
Just as I had locked my truck, up drove my worst nightmare: a hotshot, George Clooney looking, yuppie, weekend warrior fisherman in a very shiny Nissan X-Terra. When he jumped out with a big smile behind really expensive sunglasses and a brand new brand name baseball cap, wearing the swankiest fishing clothes from Orvis or Burberry, I smiled back. We talked a little bit, during which time I learned that he fished high end bamboo rods, had just come back from a fishing trip to Argentina, lived in an expensive suburb of Denver, and did something that must translate into an income at least 10 and probably 20 times mine. This guy was hitting all my self-righteous anti-snob snob hypocrite buttons right where I was vulnerable, fishing.
It didn’t take long for him to get bored with me, which I assure you was a mutual feeling, at which point he said, “I think I’ll drive over to the other side and follow the road up a few miles. There are supposed to be nice beaver ponds up there.” “Well, I already checked the river bed and I think you’ll need a Hummer to make it.” He looked at my little truck, at his jacked up truck, at the river, and finally back at me, and said, “Oh, I think I’ll be alright.” “Good luck then, “ I said. “Maybe I’ll see you later as I’ll be working my way upstream. Don’t catch them all.”
He climbed back in, started up, and drove down the bank and into the river with a smile and a wave. I just stood there and watched as he made it about ten feet before the water surged up the side of his truck. He gunned the engine as his wheels spun and went under and the truck started to slide downstream, i.e., out of the shallow ford and into really deep water. I was thinking smugly to myself, “I wonder if that thing will float.” He finally gave up, well and truly stuck, unable to make it across and wise enough to see that any further attempt would only end up with his truck at the bottom of the pool below. I forgot to tell you, but he had not put on his waders while we were talking, so now he was going to have to climb out his window and wade wet through deep water to come back to shore. I shrugged to him and waved.
He made it. “Do you want a ride back to the ranger station?” I asked, hoping he would say no as the station was at least an hour away and my generosity would cost me a great day of fishing. “I think they have a wrecker there that can pull you out,” still playing the hypocrite. “No thanks,” he smiled. “I have a cellphone.” At which point he patted down his pockets only to discover that he had left it in his truck. “I’ve got my waders on. Want me to go get it for you?” (what a fraud!) “No, that’s alright. I’m wet already. Thanks for offering.” “Want me to hang around until you’re sure they’re coming?” I asked. “No. Go enjoy the fishing. If I’m still here when you come back for your truck, you can give me a lift out then.” I silently breathed a sigh of relief, put out my hand and said, “well good luck. I hope everything works out for you.” And off I went for a great day of fishing, occasionally finding myself belly laughing with self righteous, holier than thou, smarter than him, who’s the real fisherman, self satisfaction at the memory of that guy who had everything I wished I had, even though I would never admit it, not even to myself, stuck in the river I was catching fish in. It must have worked out for him because I didn’t run into him on the water that day and his truck was gone when I came back that afternoon, not drowned at the bottom of the pool because I could see the tire tracks of the wrecker and the mud and water from where his X-Terra had been pulled out.
Funny little story? Sad little story about the human condition. Sad little story about my human condition that Jesus speaks to in our lesson this morning. We hear Jesus’ parable about this vineyard owner who pays everyone who works for him the same wage, regardless of how many hours they put in, and we don’t know what to think of it. Is this guy being super generous with the folks who only put in a couple of hours? Or is he cheating the folks who put in a full day? And most importantly, what is Jesus trying to tell us about God and us? I think that the reason we don’t know what to make of Jesus’ parable is because it hits too close to home, striking at the very core of all the assumptions and values we walk around thinking and living without knowing that we do. I can say this to you in a non-judgmental way, having just confessed my own messiness. We are so deeply influenced by our assumptions about our personal self-worth and identity, and the self-worth and identity of others, being tied into what we make, what we achieve, what we own, the labels we wear, how we look, that we can’t see what a mess we make of ourselves, our neighbors, and our world. Like me on that trout stream.
Just to make sure you do not misunderstand where Jesus is going with this, Jesus is not condemning wealth, hard work, achievement, beauty, or possessions. How could he? These are the things of human life, which God created and pronounced good and which Jesus blessed by living as one of us. As Dallas Willard, a theologian and philosopher at USC, puts it so well, “Human life is not about human life. Nothing will go right until the greatness and goodness of its source and governor (i.e., God) is adequately grasped…Until that is so, the human compass will always be pointing in the wrong direction, and individual lives as well as history as a whole will suffer from constant and fluctuating disorientation. Candidly, that is exactly the condition we find ourselves in.”
It’s as simple as this: the kingdom of the heavens which Jesus describes in his parables is not someplace else at some other time. It is right here and right now. The only thing standing between us and it is…us, our ways of thinking and being, our assumptions, judgments and delusions. When we see ourselves as God created us to be, that is workers in God’s vineyard, doing well what we do for the joy we have in doing it and to glorify God, in the place where we find ourselves and with the people God has blessed us with, and realizing that God is showering us with abundance each and every day we get out of our beds in our right minds with our health intact, truly our wages for the day, then we can let go of all the grasping for more and resentment of others, all the frustration and scheming, all the judgment and categorization, the fear of not having enough ourselves and our reluctance to insist that so many be helped to have barely enough. Jesus is not telling us about being right or wrong, about being morally superior or inferior, or even pointing the finger at us. Jesus is pointing his finger….to life, to the true abundance all around us right now that we cannot see because it doesn’t make sense according to our way of seeing things.
Life in the kingdom is so much better than the world we make for ourselves. How do I know? Let’s go back to that river that day. What would that day have looked like if I had been a kingdom person living a kingdom life? Instead of doing what I did, I would have invited that guy to use one of the five extra rods, seven extra fly boxes and two spare pairs of waders I had in the back of my truck. He came to fish and didn’t have anything else to do with all his stuff stuck in the middle of the river, so he probably would have agreed, and we would have fished together while we waited for the ranger. Once the trout got over their fright, they may well have stacked up right behind his truck, which was doing a great job as a midstream rock. He’d show me a thing or two about how you catch the big ones in Argentina and I’d show him a thing or two from what I knew and I would have made a friend. In the course of the day, I am sure that we would have laughed together for the pure joy of the beauty of the Colorado Rockies and the trout. Can you see the difference? If you can, then the Kingdom of God has truly come near.

Ten Years to Think About It

2011-09-13T12:01:00.001-04:00

“Ten Years to Think About It" The Dover Church
September 11, 2010
Scripture: Matthew 18: 21-35

My memories of the morning of September 11, 2001 are pretty much the same as everyone else’s I have ever spoken with about it, which is to say vivid and rich in detail. I can remember where I was, who I was with, what I was doing, what the weather was like, and how I felt, although those feelings have only sorted themselves out over time. Even now, after ten years to think about it, I still know that I can’t get my heart or mind all the way around it.
I remember being shocked and amazed. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I remember thinking that the whole thing looked more like a Hollywood blockbuster at the movie theater, than a real time news broadcast on my seminary day room television I was watching with other seminarians. If Harrison Ford or Morgan Freeman as the President of the United States, or even Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, had come on screen, rather than Peter Jennings of ABC News, it would have seemed more “normal” to me. This sort of thing happened in Tom Clancy thrillers, not on domestic news reports. I was reasonably well informed, so I was vaguely aware of some group on the other side of the world who had bombed the USS Cole, the East African embassies, and whom we had counter-attacked with missile strikes in Somalia and Afghanistan, but that was so far away. Over there somewhere.
But it was real. As the individual stories of loss began to be told, as the pictures of the firehouses and morgues in New York, the commuter parking lots with unclaimed cars in them in Connecticut, the rubble, fire and smoke in New York, Washington, and the twisted wreckage in a Pennsylvanian field, the grief stricken faces, I was swamped with sadness and emptiness. I can’t remember being fearful or angry, only very sad.
As an associate pastor, I went to church where I was awed by the number of people and the intensity of silent prayer. On the following Sunday, more people came. The prayers, the hymns, the emotion in the sanctuary were some of the holiest church experiences I had known. But every time anyone tried to sum up what had happened, what we were to think about it, and where God was in all of it, well, it felt hollow and insufficient. I knew that all the preachers I listened to in those weeks and months were only trying to offer an answer, a word of comfort, to people who really wanted to hear one. Luckily I was not called upon to preach. I would have claimed to be a Quaker and invited everyone to sit in silence. I didn't know what to say. God is love sounded like a Hallmark card. I knew righteous vengeance and damnation would resonate but wouldn't be true to Christ. So I didn't preach. I prayed and listened for God to answer.
Listening to the politicians was equally frustrating, the sound bite grabs for clarity, the simplifications. When war in Afghanistan started, I resigned myself to the inevitability of it. When bin Laden escaped and suddenly our leaders were rolling us inexorably to war in Iraq, then I despaired and started to feel fear. This thing was a whirlwind with a life of its own that would swallow us all. And as all the horror and tragedy of the last decade has unfolded, I have been unhappy, frustrated, and still waiting for an answer.
Having thought about that day for ten years now, I still do not have a simple, easy answer for you. But I can say this. In the last ten years I have read books like The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Husseini and marveled. The last few weeks I have listened to stories on NPR, stories of loss and mourning, stories of courage and survival. My sadness in listening to those stories and reading those books has been intense at times, but what has really moved me in the stories are the brilliantly bright flashes of surging life amidst the carnage, struggle, violence and death: the stories of widows who do not forget but have found new life nonetheless; stories of selfless heroism that lead to unexpected new life nonetheless; stories of grieving people who found a path forward in the completely unexpected direction of reaching out to Afghanis and Iraqis who also mourned nonetheless; stories of maimed soldiers who were bravely striving towards new life here at home nonetheless; stories of service families who had lost a son, father, brother, daughter, and yet, were somehow at peace with their loss nonetheless. Forever changed, but none the less nonetheless. All stories of dramatic, disruptive change, but change that was not killing but transformative and unexpectedly life-giving. Where it would seem impossible to go on, some have. The light from their lights is blinding compared with the dull darkness of sadness and despair in which they shine.
I did not choose our lesson about forgiveness for this morning. It is always the reading for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost in the first year of the three year lectionary cycle, which just happens to be September 11 this year. As I read Jesus' words and thought about what I might say to you this morning, I knew that I was not going to tell you that Jesus says we have to forgive. I was not going to say that we should have forgiven ten years ago and thereby avoided everything else that has happened since. No. That’s all hypothetical, philosophical, intellectual, and won’t get you anywhere. You can’t think your way into this. I want you to look at real life, at the stories of those people who have forgiven, the grieving widows, widowers and children, the maimed soldiers and mourning service families, the real, true stories of people who seemingly unbelievably have been able to forgive, not forget mind you, but forgive, forgive as in let go of the gripping emotional intensity of whatever day their day has been in this decade of violence, as in cutting loose the ball and chain of anger, fear, pain, regret, desire for revenge, whatever, that could have all too easily kept them imprisoned, chained if you will, to September 11, 2001. Listen to those stories. See those people. Those people have forgiven and they have found new life. Jesus was right. Jesus wasn't telling us that we ought to forgive. I think he was just telling us the truth about life. Life is truly impossible without forgiveness. Just compare the soul of the orphaned children who have started foundations for orphaned Afghani and Iraqi children with the soul of the suicide bomber masquerading as a police officer who goes to Friday prayers and blows himself and many others up and apart. I am not telling you that you are bad people or faulty Christians if you have been unable to forgive or do not want to forgive. I am only telling you that Jesus was telling us the truth about life. Forgiveness is the only way forward. This is not a question of spiritual willpower or heroism. I think real forgiveness, the depths of forgiveness necessary to meet the pain of the events of September 11, can only be gifts from God. Deliverance from this level of agony can only come through the gracious and merciful intervention of the Lord our God. In other words, this depth of forgiveness is something we ought to spend our lives praying to our Lord Jesus Christ to grace us with. This lesson is one worth spending a lifetime pondering and reflecting upon. For this is the sure way of life, truly the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, of life out of death. Hear the Good News of Jesus Christ: “How much should I forgive?” We ask. “As much as the hole in which your pain keeps you buried is deep. As much as you desire new life, as much as your desire to be set free from whatever it is that chains you to a dreadful past. God will give you exactly as much as you ask for.” This is the Good News. Thanks be to God.

Experience is what you get

2011-07-17T10:43:00.001-04:00

“Experience is what you get” The Dover Church
July 17, 2011 –5th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 86, Genesis 28:10-19a, Matthew 13: 24-30

“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” About four years ago, a video was flying around the internet called “The Last Lecture.” It was by a very impressive professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh named Randy Pausch. The first few times someone sent me a link to it, I discarded the e-mails, being jealous of my time. When the number of invitations exceeded six and most of those six were from people who didn’t spam me several times a week with devotional chain letters, I figured, why not? I’ll take a peek.
The video opened with Pausch, age 46, doing push ups in front of a packed auditorium. Then he stood up to applause and laughter, put a slide up on the wall and said, “my father always said, “point out the pink elephant in the room.” This slide is a cat scan of the ten tumors growing in my body.” He proceeded to point to them with his laser pointer. Once he was sure that we had seen them all, he continued, “I have pancreatic cancer and my doctors tell me I have 3 months to live.”
For the next hour, he spoke movingly and enthusiastically not about dying but about living, about achieving your childhood dreams. Two weeks ago I was poking around in the swap shop at our transfer station when I found the book version of Pausch’s lecture. As I read it, one of his bits of wisdom jumped out at me, which my hearing must have skipped over in the emotional experience of watching the video: “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.”
These words pulled me up short. I had to put the book down, and let them sink in. Then I picked the book up again, reread the passage and put the book down. I got out of bed and went to kiss my kids as they lay sleeping, petted the dog on my way back to bed, kissed my wife as she lay sleeping, thinking as I wandered through the dark house about the experiences I had been having which hadn’t been what I had wanted and how I blessed I felt to have lived them. I then reread the passage, thought about my life as your pastor and the experience I have gained in that capacity and the blessedness of all of you, put the book down at last, turned out the light, and prayed “experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want” as I was falling asleep.
I often wonder if one of the biggest obstacles in the way of people becoming Christians is some expectation of perfection, that believing in Jesus, that following Jesus is supposed to get us exactly what we want and yet doesn’t work out that way, either because of some deficiency on our part or Jesus’, that faith is supposed to make everything perfect: inner peace, harmonious relationships, clarity of thought and purpose, kind and generous behavior, to borrow from Jesus’ parable, “a weed-free life.” This goes for people in the pews as much as the people out there somewhere. “What’s wrong? Why isn’t this working for me? Why is my life so messy? Why am I so messy?” we wonder. But that’s misunderstanding the whole thing. Becoming a Christian, being a person of faith is not about living a weed-free life. It’s about not being alone in the weeds, about knowing that God in Jesus Christ is in there with you, guiding you toward spiritual maturity right there in the thick of things, living with that hope and confidence, by that grace and guidance, in that trust and non-anxious openness.
Take Jacob, our ancestor in faith. In our lesson this morning, he seems to be perfect, as seemingly weed free as one could possibly get, right there on the threshold of heaven. But this scene is just a moment in Jacob’s life. Jacob lived a life in the weeds if ever anyone did. For that matter, every major Biblical person, from Adam and Eve, to Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and his wives, sons and daughter, Moses, David and the mess he made of his life, all the prophets, the disciples, the Apostle Paul, weeds, weeds, weeds everywhere. They are in the Bible not because thyey were perfect, but because they show us how to live with God in the weeds.
Jacob and his brother Esau were twins. Jacob’s very name is a word play on the Hebrew word for “heel” jaqev, as Jacob was born grabbing at his brother’s heel, trying to get out first and into the privileged position of first born heir. Jacob’s father loved Esau best as the first born, an outdoorsman, a hairy, burly hunter, while Jacob was something of a smooth cheeked mamma’s boy, staying close to home and the tents. Jacob lived into his word play name, acting the “heel,” when he tricked first his brother, Esau, into signing over his birthright as first born for some soup, and then his elderly and near sighted father into bestowing his blessing on Jacob rather than Esau for a leg of lamb. We can imagine the weediness of it all: knowing your father’s first love is your brother; knowing that your brother’s resentment towards you is well-deserved; knowing that your home is not a place of security and unconditional love.
Being formed in such a home, Jacob goes even deeper into the weeds as an adult. First, tricked by his uncle into marrying Leah when he was in love with her sister Rachel. Then having to work for his uncle another seven years to gain Rachel’s hand. Then having two jealous sisters as wives, the less preferred having children and the beloved Rachel being childless. Then leaving his uncle’s home, nefariously taking most of his uncle’s prized livestock with him on his way. Paybback for those seven years? Maybe. Then having to face his brother who had not forgotten the past and might be looking for payback of his own. Then finally having a son by Rachel, only to love the boy Joseph obviously and preferentially, so much so that his other sons sold Joseph into slavery in their jealousy, telling their father that Joseph had been killed by wild animals. Payback? What a mess. I think of Jacob whenever my family feels uniquely and unfairly mine.
Between his father’s house and his future wives’ house, between one weedy thicket and another as it were, Jacob stumbles upon the threshold of heaven, a barren spot in the middle of nowhere, neither where he was coming from nor where he was going, just a place to stop and rest for the night. We can imagine his thoughts before sleep, a tug of war between youthful excitement about finding a girl and nagging unhappiness about the father and brother he had left behind. And then, suddenly, unsought and unexpected, he has a vision of heaven, of the very place where he has gone to sleep being the connecting point between heaven and earth. The Lord standing beside him, a young man all alone with a painful past behind him and uncertain future before him, speaking words of blessing: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” And what has the Lord promised? all the things that Jacob may well have felt lacking in his father’s house. “Surely the Lord is in this place – and I did not know it.” Rightfully fearful, who wouldn’t be? Jacob exclaims, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God! Beth-el!”
“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” If Jacob had gotten what he wanted, he would not have found his way to this lonely place and into the presence of the living God. I know that this is true in my own life. Every bad thing that has happened to me or that I have brought upon myself, every sidetrack, stonewall, quicksand, dead end, every rejection and defeat, every missed mark and shortcoming, all of them have tripped me up. Every one I have resisted mightily and tried to fight my way through or around. But…and this is the all important but…every one of these mis-fortunes has lead to the good fortune that I now cherish. Looking back over my life, I find myself treasuring the experience that has come to me as highly if not more than the easy home runs, the coasting victories, the bouquets of roses which have fallen into my lap because I too have stumbled into God when I didn't get what I wanted, whereas I must have missed him in the rush of success. I would not have the life I love today, and that most emphatically includes my faith journey, if I had gotten what I wanted.
I still struggle with the misdirection of my spiritual, emotional and physical energy which I expend focusing on the weeds all about me, all the things that aren’t going my way, all the people who are working at cross purposes with me, all the unexpected twists and turns of life. As I have matured, however, I am learning to think of Jacob, to think of Jesus’ parable of the wheat in the midst of weeds, and let go of this mania of trying to find my way out of the life I find myself in. Now I struggle and strive to grow into the image and likeness of Christ exactly where I am. I try to look into the experience I get when I don't get what I want with a wondering and open heart. What does God have in store for me? I relax into my spiritual ecosystem.
"Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” God’s promises of blessing to Jacob are God’s promises of blessing to us in Jesus Christ. “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Right here, and every place you might ever find yourself, right now, and every moment that you live and breath, the Lord is in this place.

Roads, Rocks and Thorns

2011-07-12T10:53:00.001-04:00

“Roads, Rock and Thorns” The Dover Church
July 10, 2011 –4th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 65, Matthew 13: 1-17

1. Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God. In fact, he went around saying "it's right here, right now, within you and all around you...for those with eyes to see and ears to hear."
2. With his parable of the sower and the seeds, he explains how it is that our eyes can see, yet not perceive; how it is that our ears can hear, yet not understand.
3. Jesus explains by means of metaphor: roads, rocks and thorn dull our sight and block our ears.
4. Let’s start with roads – hard packed, dusty things in Jesus’ day
a. Solids, like seeds for instance, which fall on them either bounce off or just lie there for the birds to eat and or dry up
b. Liquids too, like streams of living water to use another Biblical metaphor, also bounce off and run off
i. These metaphorical roads are the first obstacle all of us face in hearing the Word of God. They are the hard places separating us from the Word as God sows it and the interpretation we want to give it
c. All of us are hard packed with all the unquestioned values and assumptions of our parents, peer groups, and teachers we absorbed in early childhood and everything we picked up in our socialization – these powerful influences have programmed our understanding of reality, so powerfully that the Word of God just bounces off of us when it doesn't confirm our reality
d. We all have had this experience at one time or another, when something the prophets or Jesus say in the Bible or something some preacher preaches about that Word is upsetting and we instantly reject it because it stands in complete odds with everything we already know, believe and live for, with our reality
i. I have seen it any number of times in churches, whenever I have waded into what I know is going to be an unwelcome teaching of Jesus – people in the congregation just close up, a wall comes down, eyes get veiled, a look of displeasure crosses the faces of those in the room, and I know we are on the road. I have never had anyone stand up, shaking their fist and yelling at me during a sermon, but I have had plenty of people come to me afterwards and tell me that my sermon was upsetting or disturbing and I should never do that again. While I feel uncomfortable, I know I was probably close to capturing what Jesus or the prophets were getting at.
ii. Jesus’ teaching is an earthquake shaking our unquestioned values and view of reality.
iii. as one of my teachers put it “the Good News of Jesus Christ is a hand grenade which most of us professional preachers who really want people in our congregations to like us spend a lot of our time and energy trying to fall on so it doesn’t go off in the faces of our unsuspecting congregations.
iv. think of all in our town, only a small number of whom ever go to a church, synagogue, or mosque. Think of all the people who have been in our church but aren't anymore, or are, but with only one foot.
v. In some cases it is because of the unpleasant past experiences. In some cases it is because of the incompetence of the present religious leader. But mostly it’s because the Good News is not Good News for most of these people. It is upsetting, disturbing news. It’s much more pleasant to do other things which either just question our values or confirm our reality.
e. Therapeutic technique #1 – instead of rejecting the Word of God outright because it is too upsetting, examine ourselves, our beliefs, our lives to discover which truth, which reality, this particular Word is threatening – if you can do this, you will find yourself on pathway #1 to the good soil
5. Then there are the rocks. In this soil the seeds quickly sprout up and then are just as quickly withered because their roots are shallow.
a. We have all had this experience before in church too, when we hear something which touches our hearts and sets our minds to imagining being a kingdom person living kingdom life. And then, sometimes within the blink of an eye, that desire for the kingdom is squelched by competing and more attractive alternatives which we already now.
vi. Service to others – time I don’t have for myself to either have fun, relax or make money for myself and my family
vii. Observing the Sabbath – kids activities, sleeping in, work, gardening, you name it
viii. Forgiveness – painful encounter, present splendid and comfortable isolation
ix. Inclusive community – personal autonomy
x. Prayer and reading the Bible – the million other things which we could do and which will bring us immediate benefits
xi. And the list goes on
b. Therapeutic technique #2 – pay attention to those wistful desires for being a kingdom person living a kingdom life which may flit through our minds in church when we pray, listen to sermon, sing a hymn, or when we read a spiritual book, and then pay attention to the competing desires which drive them from our hearts and minds – these are the rocks we are going to have to identify, dig out, hoist up into our backpacks and carry until they become so light or our spiritual backs become so strong that they just slip through our fingers like dust - pathway #2 to the good soil
6. And then the thorns – my friends, life is full of thorns, thistles, prickers, weeds and brambles. Of course, we don’t call them thorns, thistles, prickers, weeds and brambles. We call them:
a. The annoying person or people at home
b. The annoying person or people in my neighborhood
c. The annoying person or people at work
d. The annoying person or people at church
e. All the things that have gotten and are getting in my way, keeping me from doing what I want do, being what I want to be, living the way I want to live
f. All the things that get me angry, anxious, afraid
g. All the things I wish I have but don’t or can’t
h. All the things I wish I was but aren’t or can’t be
i. All the shouldas, wouldas, couldas, oughtas, and haftas which nag at us, steal our peace, keep a non-stop monologue going in with us in our minds and turn us into thorn bushes ourselves
j. Therpeutic Technique #3 – pay attention to those thorns, thistles, prickers, weeds and brambles. These are the things you are going to have go through to the Good Soil. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt - We can’t go around them. We can’t go under them. We can’t go over them. We have to go through them, which we can only do once we touch them, find the points of access, and ease our way. This prickly path is pathway #3 to the Good Soil – thorns alert us to the way we have to go if we really want to get there.
7. Here's the big lesson about the road, the rocks and the soil: They are always going to be there. We are always going to be partly on the road, partly in the rocks, and partly in the thorns.
a. It’s how we look at them that matters. It how we engage them that matters. It’s our openness to the possibility of the divine that matters. If we see our lives as having, then we will have more. If we see our lives as lacking, then we will feel constantly as if what little we have is being taken from us.
b. If we see the road, the rocks and the thorns as pathways to blessing, as, in fact, blessings in and of themselves which alert us to the pathway to the Good Soil, then we are, believe it or not, also, already, in the Good Soil.
c. If, however, we see the road as something to try to jump over, the rocks as something go around with a quick kick or poke as we pass, and the thorns as something to exterminate with righteous Round Up, well we are going to be left with very little room to move, and even what little we have will always feel as if it’s being taken from us. We can pull those bamboo shoots up, hit them with round up, build a wall and hope they’ll stay put, but they will pop up in no time at all in the middle of our prized roses, which, I might point out, also tend to have their fair share of thorns.
8. The Good News of the Kingdom of God is an invitation to go exactly where most of us are culturally conditioned to not want to go, to avoid at all costs, to ignore if possible. Yet these are the very places which are thresholds to the Good Soil.
a. As I said, an openness to engage, trusting in God’s grace to see you through, is already a first step that will bear abundant fruit in your life
b. And you will not be alone. God in Jesus Christ will be with you, sowing more kingdom seeds than you'll know what to with
xii. Even then, a mortal guide is indispensable. I myself, someone who is still languishing on the road, stubbing my toes on the rocks, and deeply in the weeds, have had a spiritual director to help me see these places for what they are.
xiii. I can be that spiritual director for you if you want to set out.
9. It all comes down to this: there is a distinct difference between getting your way and finding your way. When you're getting your way, you're on your own. When you're finding your way, you are walking in the kingdom.

What are you doing here?

2011-06-29T09:12:00.001-04:00

“What are you doing here?" The Dover Church
June 26, 2011 – Second Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 34, Matthew 7:21-29

“What are you doing here?” The words came out gently enough, but I can still remember how stunned I was by the question. I was sitting across the desk from my seminary professor of St. Paul and his letters. He had invited me to stop by his office “to talk.” Having been a professor myself before going to seminary, I had assumed that he wanted to talk about my academic progress and the quality of my work in his seminar, or the lack thereof. That’s what I had invited my students to my office to talk about. This professor, however, was a committed Methodist preacher and pastor before he was a serious professor of New Testament, whereas I had been just some guy studying Vikings, Old Norse mythology and medieval Icelandic sagas. I was speechless, which is pretty drastic for me, when, after shaking my hand and offering me a seat across the desk from him, my professor started our conversation with the question: “What are doing here?”
I felt like the proverbial deer in the headlights. It was as if my brain both froze and started running in circles at the same time. What did he mean by that? Did he mean: What are you doing here? Or what are you doing here? Or what are you doing here? Or what are you doing here? Having just come out of the academic world of graded achievement, I heard his question as a critical challenge, as in, “What is your problem?” or “How is it that you don’t seem to know what you ought to know?” or even, “I thought you already had a Ph.D. How can you possibly be as academically incompetent as you seem to be?” Or did he mean “here” as in “in his office, or “here” as in “What is a professor of Scandinavian Studies doing here in seminary?”
So I puffed myself up, went for the big picture answer, and told him. “I am here to find God. I really want to live in the presence of God, know God firsthand, have God lead me in my life. All the promises of God in the Bible – I want them to be real in my life.” Having gotten up a head of steam, I launched into my big plan of finding God through a combination of intensive theological study and disciplined prayer. I wanted to know everything there was to know academically about God and I wanted to learn how to get myself on God’s wave length through the practice of spiritual disciplines. Satisfied that I had given a suitably coherent, comprehensive and impressive answer, I sat back and caught my breath.
Paul looked at me with a warm and genuine smile and said, “that's great, Mr. Olmstead.” (He always called everyone Mr., Mrs., Ms. or Miss, even the students who insisted that he call them by their first names) “But allow me to reframe your objective for you, if you don’t mind. Would the Kingdom of God, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life, if you will, be enough for you?”
He smiled again, leaned in a little closer, and continued, “We are, after all, supposed to be disciples of Jesus Christ in this seminary. You yourself are preparing to be a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ in this seminary. Let us not forget (which meant me, because he certainly hadn’t forgotten) that the thing Jesus preached was the Kingdom of God, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life.
“How about that, Max?” he asked with another warm smile, using my Christian name. “Would that satisfy you?”
I didn't know where he was going with this, so I reverted to teenage discourse and mumbled, “Sure. I don't really know, but I guess so.”
“Fine,” he said. “Then open your Bible, I know you have one because I've seen it on your desk in class, open it to chapters 5-7 in the Gospel according to St. Matthew and read Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Those two chapters are about how to do just that, what the Kingdom of God is, and how to be a kingdom person living a kingdom life. The Beatitudes, the salt and the light and leaven, the Lord's Prayer, the mustard seed and the hidden treasure, loving enemies, not judging, it's all in there.”
No need to jot that down. I could remember Matthew 5-7, so I just nodded my head. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “Then just do it.”
“Just do it?” I asked incredulously. "This guy has to have a screw loose. There must be more to it than that," I thought to myself.
“Yes, Max. Just do it. Get back to basics. Jesus is the Master and we are disciples. He teaches. We do. He leads. We follow. The Sermon on the Mount is about what we do and how we follow. It's about how to be a kingdom person living a kingdom life. Read those two chapters from Matthew and just do it. Don't get side tracked by a lot of analytical or interpretive thinking. Just do what Jesus says and see what happens. Contrary to what some other professors around here might be teaching, the main points are pretty black and white once you understand the context and know your Isaiah. The time you might spend trying to make it more complex, subtle, nuanced or theoretical than it is is just Satan’s way of keeping you from getting down to kingdom living. (“Ah, there’s the Methodist pastor talking,” I thought) It's just like any other discipline, running, dieting, saving money. You just have to do it to reach your goal. There are no short cuts.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he went on. “It will be hard work and you will have to make some tough choices. It is a lot more radical than anything I hear being preached these days, more radical than what most of the people you will be preaching to, liberals or conservatives, will want to hear. Most people rejected what Jesus had to say, so don’t think this is going to be a picnic. BUT…All the promises of God, the deliverance and salvation, the joy and abundant life, the light, the peace which passes all understanding, the healing and community, the return from exile, they'll become your reality. If that is what you want, Max, being a kingdom person living a kingdom life, just do it."
He paused again, with that amused look he had, and said, “and I'm pretty sure you will experience the presence of God along the way.”
I felt like Beaver Cleaver saying, “Gee, thanks, Professor Sampley.”
Then he added, as a seeming afterthought, “Oh, and don't forget the grace.”
“Don't forget the grace? He says he's a Christian but this is sounding Zen to me," I thought. I managed a pathetic, “how so?”
“The grace, Max. The grace of God that makes anything and everything possible. If you leave this office and actually feel moved to read the Sermon on the Mount, that will be by the grace of God. If, having read something in the Sermon that opens your eyes and heart to a place of change in your life, that will be by the grace of God. If, having read and understood, you feel moved to actually start doing it and then actually do start doing it, that will be by the grace of God. If, having started doing, you find yourself being a kingdom person living a kingdom life, and it grabs you enough to keep you doing it during the tiring, boring, uneventful and unfulfilling times, amidst all the apparent setbacks, enough so that this doing becomes your way of life, that will be by the grace of God. Yes, don't forget the grace, Max. Recognizing the grace is the same thing as living the active presence of God you so much want to experience.”
Having grown up in a church where a lot of people thought that congregationalism meant "anything goes," being a modern American who resisted imitation and obedience, who felt that mature adults had to find their own way, break their own paths, think for themselves, not wanting to just buy into some program, parts of which might not "work" for me, I boldly blurted out, “and if I don’t? Don’t do any of those things? Don’t get started? Don’t follow through? Don’t stick with it?” “Well, Max,” Professor Sampley smiled, “that will be your choice. You will be worshipping and following a God of you own making. There's plenty of room for individual initiative and thinking things through when you follow Jesus, but you'll never know what being a kingdom person living a kingdom life is like until you do it."
And that is our lesson for this morning. Jesus and his way of life, kingdom living, is the rock on which we are invited to build our lives. The winds do blow and the rains do fall and the waters do rise and we have to choose whether we will stagger about on the shifting sands, the shifting sands of either the same old project which hasn’t been working out for us but which we keep insisting on trying to make work, the shifting sands of the latest, greatest solution to life according to some expert we saw on TV, or if we will build our lives on the solid rock of our Lord and Savior. Paul Sampley was right: it has been hard work with difficult choices, plenty of people have not liked what I have to say or do, and there have been plenty of times when I have been oh so tempted to just give up because I wasn’t feeling anything, but it really has been as simple as just doing it and the reward has been a faithful way of leaning into, opening up, to life, knowing God is with me. It was the grace of God that put my professor in my path that day to be my pastor. As your pastor, I’d like to be that instrument of God’s grace for you. What are you doing here? Would being a kingdom person living a kingdom life satisfy you? Then read the Sermon on the Mount and just do what Jesus says....and don't forget the grace. Amen.

A Father's Day Sermon

2011-06-21T08:59:00.000-04:00

A Father’s Day Sermon The Dover Church
June 19, 2011 – Trinity Sunday Scripture: Psalm 8, Genesis 1:1-2:4a

When I was seven years old, my family went on a very special camping trip to Cinnamon Bay National Park in the US Virgin Islands. For one week, my parents, three sisters, and I stayed in a one room cottage, basically a roof with two concrete walls and two screen walls, set in a coconut grove just a hop, skip and a jump from the beach, which is exactly what we did for seven glorious days, hopped, skipped and jumped to the beach and back for lunch, to the beach and back for supper, to the beach and back to bed. It was paradise: swimming in water that I could just jump into…not at all like the beach at my grandmother’s in Plymouth, snorkeling in the bay and out over the reef, seeing the tropical fish and wondrous shells, hibiscus and other amazing flowers everywhere, coconuts quite literally there for the cracking, raucous birds calling out amidst the constant song of other birds, small animals and insects, lizards scuttling through the palm fronds, the blue of the ocean, sudden tropical downpours followed by rainbows, 80 degrees all the time, the sunsets, so vibrant and sudden followed by the amazing stars far from any city. Whenever I think of tropical paradise, of creation largely undisturbed, the Garden of Eden if you will allow me, my memory takes me back to that place and that time.
Twenty five years later, I went to a conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder. On the limo ride from the airport, I gazed out my window for 25 miles in rapt admiration at the most astounding beauty. Rolling grasslands right up to the jagged, copper red and ochre Flatirons, the majestic, snowcapped Rockies rising behind. The buffalo, wolves and grizzly bears were long gone, but otherwise it looked to me like a paradise largely undisturbed since the prehistoric seas had receded millions of years before. Whenever I think of the paradise of the American West, of the vast open spaces of undisturbed creation, my memory takes me back to the primordial beauty of Boulder twenty five years ago.
Everyone I have ever met carries around places of perfection, bounty, beauty, and paradise in their hearts, places they just love, where they feel the holiness if you will allow me, where they feel close to God, if you will indulge me yet again. Take a moment now and bring them to your mind’s eye and write them down on the slip of paper in your bulletin, the places that are just perfect, where God seems very close, to you. Paradise on Earth.
Christians like us do not tend to read the Bible literally, but most of us know in our hearts the Biblical truth of the "very goodness" of Creation. Our places inspire religious experiences in us. There is, for lack of a better word, a tangible "holiness" to creation perfection which moves our hearts. That's what we know in our hearts. In our minds, we know how very fragile, intricate and interconnected these places are, everyplace is. They are not machines with interchangeable parts. They are living organisms, just like us, part of a web of organic life, just like us, which needs all its parts thriving to live and thrive, just like us.
A month ago I was in Haiti, originally very much like the Virgin Islands, but not any more. From the air I could see the clear dividing line down the middle of the island, with Haiti on one side and the Dominican Republic on the other. The Domincan was lush, carpeted with a verdant green, surrounded by bright blue waters and reefs. Haiti was brown, deforested and eroded. Milky rivers gouged their ways down out of the hills, spewing sediment into the ocean, choking the reefs, which were surely there beneath clouds of sediment. Paradise lost.
As luck would have it, I landed a job not many years after that conference in Boulder and I lived in that wonderful mountain bordered grassland for four years. In the seven years between the time I went to that conference and when I finally left Boulder in 2000, the vistas I had marveled at from that limo window, all 25 miles of them, had been replaced with sprawling developments of tract houses sprouting like mushrooms, thousands of them every month. Whenever I would mention to someone that a very good thing was quickly disappearing, the very good thing that had made me want to live in Boulder in the first place, the very good thing that all the locals boasted of in comparison with California and the East Coast which were a mess in their opinion, the locals would always tell me to keep my east coast gone to Berkeley, liberal, big government, regulation loving opinions to myself. People were making real money building those houses. It was jobs and wealth or the environment. There would always be plenty of grasslands left up in Wyoming. More water for the lawns, pools and flushing toilets was sure to be found with another tunnel under the mountains, etc., etc., etc. By the time I left, the only grasslands left were islands of preserved open space, islands surrounded by identical houses with their car noise, sprinklers, Kentucky bluegrass and swimming pools. It sure looked like southern California to me. Paradise lost.
My friends, please don’t dismiss me as the typical tree hugging liberal that I am. I am not some mossbacked Yankee who has his foot in our lovely town and now wants things to remain exactly the same. Nor am I a utopian revisionist who thinks that life has been going downhill since humans left the hunter-gather or basic agrarian stages. This is Biblical and it's about salvation. I am a serious Christian who takes what God is saying to us in the Bible with absolute seriousness. I am a highly educated, modern person who reads scientific journals. I am also, perhaps most motivationally, a parent of two small boys. My point is simple, twofold, and you’ve heard it all before. First, we all know how very beautiful, wonderful, astoundingly bountiful, fragile, and, because this is Church after all, holy, Creation is. The rolling, hymnic praises of Genesis are absolutely true. And God saw it was good. “Yes!” And God saw it was good. “Yes!” And God saw it was very good indeed. “Amen and Amen!” Which is just the Hebrew words for saying Yes and Yes. I know. We know. Can I get an Amen on that?
And second, we know exactly what the problem is: there are too many human beings and our way of life is literally killing the very source of our livelihood. We have gone from being what God intended us to be, caretakers of Creation, to being deadly parasites. It is truly our misfortune to be the generation that has to face the consequences of three solid centuries of disregard for the holiness of Creation. The second thing the Lord our God said out of the fire on Sinai was “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:4-6). While we may balk at this judgmental God who punishes iniquity, saying to ourselves that’s not our God, the proof is in the pudding. You and I, we are the third generation who are faced with the consequences of the iniquitous ignorance and idolatry of past generations. And even more importantly from my perspective, our children are the fourth. Yet even more importantly, if we continue on as we are, our great grandchildren will be yet another fourth generation, still being visited by judgment for our present idolatrous iniquity.
On this Father’s Day, I want to pose a few simple questions to all you parents, not just fathers. If you knew that something you were doing was nearly certain to negatively impact, perhaps catastrophically, the spiritual, emotional, social, economic, political and physical future of your child, what would you do? What would you try to do? If you knew that something that everyone just accepted as the easiest, most profitable and most convenient way of doing something was nearly certain to negatively impact, perhaps catastrophically, the spiritual, emotional, social, economic, political and physical future of your child, what would you do? What would you try to do? Even if you couldn’t see the evidence, because at the moment it was only happening far away to people you didn’t know? Even if the threat seemed so temporally distant as to not bear worrying about right now with bills to pay, jobs to do and games to play, what would you do? What would you try to do? Even if a million things might happen in the meantime? Even if you felt that there wasn’t much you could do yourself, that this was something for the big players, what would you do? What would you try to do?
Every single massive problem we as a global community face, war and conflict, poverty and un- or underemployment, starvation and malnutrition, drought and weather related hardships, systemic injustice, every one of these calamitous quagmires, daunting and seemingly hopeless in and of themselves, are really just noxious symptoms of the underlying environmental cancer which the last three centuries bequeathed to us and we are not treating. If we choose to ignore them because of our own present prosperity and our misguided sense of disconnect, if we lack the political will to do what needs to be done, preferring to play political pattacake with the symptoms, these problems will be the norm for our children and, God help them, our children’s children. Just so you don’t think this is something utopian and theoretical and therefore beyond our agency to do something about, our church creates 20,000 lbs. of global warming contributing carbon dust every year just from the energy it takes to give us electricity. That’s not even including the oil heat we use. 20,000 lbs! If were to sweep that up rather than just let it off into the air as we do, we would have a pile of grey, dirty carbon dust larger than our Meetinghouse, every year, all piled up in one place rather than just floating around out there where we can’t see it and don’t have to think about it. Every year. Just our church. Just the electricity. All of you know exactly what Betty Brady would say if we had a dirty pile even one hundredth that size messing up our house and grounds: "we have to spend the money to get this fixed." Our Saviour died and rose again so that we who live in him might be the New Creation. I think that it is high time that we who have the knowledge and financial means to do what can be done start living our faith in this place at this time, you and me, all of us together, the New Creation, for Christ’s sake and the sake of our children. What would you do? What would you try to do?

Haiti

2011-06-01T14:50:00.001-04:00

Haiti The Dover Church
Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 29, 2011
Scripture: Psalm 66, John 14: 15-21

Last Monday, Jim MacDonald, Dave Melville and I were sitting on the veranda of the Visa Lodge Hotel in Port au Prince, Haiti, having a late lunch. There were a number of other parties at the tables around us, all clearly foreigners like us, most probably here on humanitarian business like us (there not being many other kinds of business to speak of for foreigners in Haiti). The lunch was buffet style and I, for one, approached each hot tray with suspicious curiosity. I am hardly a food snob, but Haiti was a new world for me and I was, as I said, curious in a suspicious rather than expectant sort of way about what I’d find under each warming lid: the usual, rice, beans, leafy greens, and then the meats; first, some sort of barbecued red meat on a skewer...I’d seen a lot of goats walking the streets of the city. Could it be? When in Rome…I’ll try some of that. Next, a white meat swimming in a white sauce….judging by its toughness and rubberiness to the touch of the serving fork, I guessed chicken. Safe bet. I’ll try some of that too.
Back at the table, Dave, Jim and I were chatting about our experiences during the first 24 hours. It was really like two conversations weaving in and out of each other. One conversation was impressionistic, the people we had seen in the various hospitals and clinics we had visited, the enormity of destruction from the earthquake, the vast expanse of blue and gray tents in camps packed into every open space, the insane drivers, the piles of filth and garbage lining every street, the collapsed presidential palace. All of that was fundamentally contradicted by the beauty, joy and hope of so many Haitians, laughing kids playing with a stick or tin can, the posters of the smiling, young new President pasted to the sides of tarpaper shacks. We talked in snippets, offering little snapshots of memory, which I think was the only way we could edge our intellectual and emotional ways into the reality we found ourselves in in Port au Prince. The enormity of the catastrophe could not be swallowed whole. This would have to be processed in small bites.
The other conversation was more businesslike. “So what do you think about that operation? Can you see an opening for us there? How do you think that would work? What do you think the cost effectiveness of our participation would look like? Can we raise that kind of money?” I mostly listened to this part of the conversation, not really having much to offer. I know relationships and possibilities, can judge enthusiasm and sense the Holy Spirit, but dollars, cents and business plans, those were Jim and Dave’s thing.
At some point I noticed that our conversation had taken a decidedly business turn, which gave me an extended opening to address myself to my lunch. Never having had goat before, the barbecue having been so thorough, and my French not doing much with the Creole, I decided after a few bites that I’d never know what was on that skewer. Then to the white meat. As I said, it looked and felt like chicken, but when I put it to my lips it turned out to be fish, a very tough, very chewy, quite lacking in flavor yet smelling like fish, fish. The bouquet and texture were so inspiring on my palette that I gave it over for people watching the other folks on the veranda.
The first group that caught my attention were a dozen or so enormous guys in athletic wear with tattoos on their bulging muscles. I pointed them out to Jim and Dave: "who do you think those guys are?" Football players seemed to be the logical conclusion. And we were right: some players from the NY Giants down to do humanitarian work with the NFL Players Association. We had just come from a hospital paid for by the NHL Players Association and the Canadian government, so it looked like the NFL was also either already involved or just about to be.
At another table sat four older ladies in various kinds of floppy beach hats and baggy over bathing suit beach dresses. "Who do you think they are?" Dave took a quick look and said with a smile, “definitely nuns.” We laughed, “how’d you come up with nuns, Dave?” To which he answered, “older ladies drinking beer and eating pizza in the middle of the day in a place like this…. gotta be nuns.” Looking down at my mystery fish and soda, I thought to myself, “pretty smart nuns.”
I went over later and discovered that Dave was right when I introduced myself to Sister Rosemary Fry who was sitting on a chaise longue by the pool. I told her who we were and why we were there and asked her at least a dozen questions about herself, what she did, and how she thought we ought to go about doing what we hoped to do in Haiti. She was from Toronto and had been in Haiti for 25 years, so she would have a good idea. Her group had come to the capital for an ecumenical meeting, trying to bring some coordination to all the humanitarian relief work going on. We talked for at least a half an hour.
After dinner that evening, there were the nuns again at a nearby table. They came by to introduce themselves and after pleasantries, Jim and Dave started asking them more questions. We learned that two of them served in a hospital for the dying. Another, who looked to be the oldest of them, although all of them had a certain agelessness about them, bright, smiling, youthful eyes shining out of wrinkled faces, her name was Sister Mary Finnick, said to us, “every month 25 children die in our hospital. My goal is to get that number down to 20. I’ve been here 25 years now and seen things go from bad to worse. Sometimes I despair.”
From the moment we had come out of the airport I had felt awash in an escalating and enveloping sense of despair. Even then I knew that any attempt to describe Port au Prince would come out as a superficial cliché, but I am the preacher so let me give it a shot. Imagine for a moment that you are me at 20 years old. My business is to collect rebar, the iron rods that are inside poured concrete to give it strength. After the earthquake, rebar is everywhere, lying on the ground, sticking out of a piles of rubble. I have a wheelbarrow, which I push around in the 100 degree heat and humidity, picking up rods and rolling them in my wheelbarrow to a man who buys it by the pound from collectors like me. Except today I am not working so I am not making any money. Today I am sitting outside a hospital with Leo in my arms as he dies of malnutrition and diarrhea. Except I don’t know that’s why he is dying because I never could afford to go to school so I can’t read and have never been given any health or childcare education. I just know he’s dying and that my heart is breaking. I don’t know that Leo is dying because our water is infected with bacteria and the minimal food I can afford to buy collecting rebar is both insufficient and substandard. Marie-Laure is at home sitting in front of our tent where we have been living for the last year and half since the earthquake with 50,000 of our neighbors. She is taking care of Lucas, who doesn’t weigh 45 pounds as he does in Dover, but 18 pounds. She has a small goods business in front of our tent, selling odds and ends that she barters for, three tubes of toothpaste, five bars of soap, a couple of dishpans, that’s her inventory this week. We make enough to get by, maybe keep our kids alive into their teens, but not enough to educate them, pay rent on an apartment, buy more goods to expand Marie-Laure’s shop, or buy me a truck so that I can carry more rebar or even become the middle man myself. And our family is only one of several million in this city.
“Sometimes I despair,” Sister Mary Finnick is saying to us. “Sometimes?” God help us, only sometimes? But there you have it, so much hope and joy in the face a million reasons to give up in despair. I knew that God was staring me right in the face, so I didn't offer any comment or question. I just held her words in my heart and pondered them, knowing that these nuns are not delusional. Rather they are living Jesus’ commandment to love, God living in them as they live for others, God pouring the Spirit into them as they pour themselves out for others, God in Jesus abiding in them as they abide with others.
Jesus is right. We are not abandoned, orphaned by God. God has sent the Spirit to dwell in us so that we do not despair as we live out God’s love. Because Jesus lives, we can live, even in the most desperate situations. Many first world Christians think of this commandment to love as a duty, an obligation, a responsibility or burden, something to add to our lists, which, to my way of thinking is not all that much of a motivation. It's not something to burden ourselves with, but the opportunity to live with God, to live in God and allow God to live through us. I go to places like Haiti because there I am truly living the Gospel, set free from all the Godless self-absorption and trivia which bogs me down so often in my daily life. From the first page of the Bible to the last, God is clear that those of us who have so much should help those who have so very little. We, who live in towns whose transfer stations have a richer and more varied inventory than most markets in Haiti, have much to share. What I discover when I live it is that these are the places where God is inescapably present and active and the most trivial things, like holding a child’s hand, are full of holiness and meaning.

An Emmaus Sermon

2011-05-17T14:16:00.001-04:00

Emmaus The Dover Church
Third Sunday of Easter, May 8, 2011 Scripture: Luke 24:13-35

I have been fishing for more than forty years, mostly fly fishing. That's what I really get a kick out of. After all these years, I think I know what I'm doing. Nonetheless, I have to say that catching a trout on a fly never fails to surprise me. There will be times when I see the trout, when I have a fly that's worked for me before in similar situations, when my cast will be just about what I intended, when I’ll see the fly on the water, the trout finning below, rising, rising, and just like that….surprise. Wow! Fish on. It's happened to me a few thousand times, but it never ceases to surprise me.
By the time Marie-Laure and I were married, I had performed dozens of weddings. I had done plenty of pre-marital counseling as well as numerous meetings with married couples going through rough patches. I had read a lot of books and thought I knew a thing or two about being married. But then, there I was, a groom myself…surprise! So this is what exchanging vows and rings feels like. And ever since, over and over again, surprise…so this is being married!
Same thing with being a father. I read the books about the birth process. I had even been in the delivery room as a chaplain. And then, it was my turn…surprise! So this is what it feels like to hold your baby. And then again, just as surprising as the first. And most days since, surprise, surprise, surprise.
The list goes on, sunsets on the ocean. The full moon. Spring flowers. The Rocky Mountains. The French Riviera and Provence. Surprise. Surprise. Surprise. Just about everything in my life surprises me. My family and friends. Surprise! All of you. Surprise! Speaking of you, take last weekend. I knew about the auction, had heard the plans and watched the set up. Yet when I walked into the tent…surprise. The fellowship, enthusiasm and warmth. Surprise. The outpouring of generosity….what a surprise. And then on Sunday with Emilia. I was part of the Search Committee, so I knew what she was about and was capable of. And suddenly here she was and, you guessed it…surprise! Wow! Your response, the electricity with the children…surprise, surprise, surprise.
The next morning, I woke up, turned on my computer to read the news and …surprise: Navy Commandos had killed Osama bin Laden. Like everything else I've mentioned, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. They’d been looking for him for more than a decade. I was expecting the weather, more political foolishness, the Sox losing again, but not him. I couldn't remember the last time he had crossed my mind. What does this mean? What will happen now? I listened as the experts discussed just these questions for most of the rest of the week. I watched people celebrating in New York and Washington. That surprised me too, but it shouldn’t have. I guess I was still trying to figure out what bin Laden’s death meant. Was the last decade of war going to come to an end now? Were our soldiers going to come home now? Was the world going to be safer now? Were the threats of terrorism going to end now? I would love to celebrate those things.
I found myself remembering the surprise of that Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, sitting in my room at seminary, studying, when suddenly a plumber burst in, “turn on the TV. Something’s happened in New York.” And there I sat, with the plumber, his assistant, and other seminarians, watching as a second plane flew into the World Trade Center, as another plane flew into the Pentagon, as another plane crashed in Pennsylvania, as news casters tried to figure out what it all meant, what was going on. All morning, we watched and discussed amongst ourselves what this meant. The plumbers left. The other seminarians went to church. I went out for a walk and was struck by how quiet Brookline was without all the air traffic, car traffic, T traffic. It was ominous. My life had changed.
With bin Laden’s death my eyes were suddenly opened to a reality I have been living with for almost a decade, almost the entire time I have been serving churches in pastoral ministry. From that first Sunday, September 16, when the church was packed with people searching for comfort, consolation and meaning, my life as a pastor has been overshadowed by violence and war. Like the disciples on the road from Jesus' death in Jerusalem to Emmaus, I had hoped for so much. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, could America finally be a nation at peace, turning swords into ploughshares, the lion lying down with the lamb, living the words of the prophet Isaiah? There had been the first Gulf War, Mogadishu, Yugoslavia, the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, so September 11 shouldn’t have been such a surprise, but it was.
For almost ten years I have struggled as a pastor and preacher to interpret the Good News of Jesus' life, death and Resurrection, against the backdrop of the spiraling violence and death which a lot of people laid at the feet of this one man, Osama bin Laden. I have been pastor and preacher to people who wanted to see bin Laden as pure evil incarnate and our cause as one of pure righteous justice. I have been pastor and preacher to people whose sons and daughters were serving overseas. I have been pastor and preacher to people who both despised bin Laden and protested the actions of our nation. I have been pastor and preacher to people who didn't want to think about it, who wanted to put it out of their minds on Sunday morning. And all these people have been sitting right next to each other in the pews of four churches now, looking to me every Sunday morning to interpret and make sense, to comfort and assure, or to not bring it up. Actually, it seems to me that everyone except the folks who didn't want to hear it wanted me to confirm the point of view they had as they came through the door. I have stood up and led the prayers at nine Memorial Day Observances as the names of the dead have been read out, the prayers for the peace for which these men and women fought and died. I have lived through the Taliban and Tora Bora, weapons of mass destruction and a second war in Iraq, an insurgency and murderous bloodbath of sectarian violence, first one thousand, then two, then three, then four, then five thousand dead Americans coming home, tens of thousands of physically and emotionally maimed veterans, tens and hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Afghanis and Iraqis, Abu Graib, the capture and hanging of Saddam Hussein, bombs in London, Madrid, Bali, foiled attacks all over the place, first one president and now a second trying to achieve victory, day after day for almost ten long years, and then, seemingly out of the blue, bin Laden was dead. Surprise.
Perhaps the most troubling thing to me about this last decade of violence and war has been how often God has been invoked, with people on both sides claiming that their view is God's, that their purposes are God's, that their actions are in God's name. Bin Laden laid the ground rules and we played right along. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln reflected on the savage war being fought between Americans, in which both sides claimed God's will and blessing for their cause, "In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong." Flying planes into buildings, cutting off people's heads and putting the film on the internet, blowing up mosques full of pilgrims, killing people indiscriminately because their interpretation of the same faith differs from their own, abusing, torturing, raping and oppressing women, strapping bombs onto their bodies and detonating themselves in marketplaces, I think we can all agree that the people who did and do these things must be deluded about God. I think that once anyone brings God into the equation of righteous violence, there are no lengths to which they won't go. I think we disciples of Jesus Christ, who live at a safe distance from the violence done on our behalves, must resist pointing self-assured fingers at the other, no matter which side they are on. The Resurrection is the ultimate refutation of violence and will always stand in critique of any use of violence in God's name. Bin Laden is dead and that is probably a good thing, though only time will tell. We pray that the violence he promoted in God's name may pass from God's creation with him, although we know it won't. There is a long road before us, which only God can see. God has shown us how to walk down that road. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." Hate is easy, impersonal, self-assured, and intoxicating. I watched it blossom between 8 am and suppertime on September 11. By the end of the year, that hate was heady in our country. Love, on the other hand, is always challenging, always personal, and rarely free of doubt. Hate has easy answers. Love has difficult questions. Hate takes on a life of its own, whereas love needs constant nurture. Hate always ends up the same way: Hitler in his bunker, Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole, bin Laden holed up in a house for six years. Love is known in the sharing of bread. Hate offers quick solutions. Love points to a long path. Our word from God this morning is that if we set out by faith on this path, we will find God in Jesus Christ by our side.

An Easter Sermon

2011-04-27T08:20:00.000-04:00

Easter Sermon The Dover Church
Easter, April 24, 2011 Scripture: John 20:1-18

I can’t tell you how many Easter sermons I have heard and read in which the preacher tried to explain what happened on that first Easter. To my way of thinking, that’s looking at the whole thing backwards, essentially ducking the moment of truth. "What happened? is just not the significant question. "What’s going to happen now? What am I going to do about it?” Now those are the questions that'll get you somewhere. I know that it sounds like heresy, but the Resurrection is not something you believe in, as in a fact you just have to make up your mind one way or the other about. No. The Resurrection is something, you be-live, something you live into, after which your mind will sort itself out. Be-living the Resurrection leads to be-lieving what happened.
Many of you may have heard of Viktor Frankl, a famous Viennese psychiatrist of the 20th century, who survived the Nazi concentration camps. After the war, he devoted himself to understanding how some people were able to survive the death camps while others perished. What was it that kept some people going in spite of everything that was designed to destroy them while others succumbed? The answer Frankl came to was quite simple. Survivors felt that they had something to live for, something besides themselves which they wanted to survive for. All of them had a vision in their minds' eye, day in and day out, week in and week out, year in and year out, a vision of a loved one for whom they were determined to live: a spouse, a child, a parent, a sibling, another relative or friend. Without that vision to sustain them through the starvation and disease, the brutality and overwork, the sudden and intentional death all around them, they all said they could never have made it. Those who succumbed had lost that hope, had had that hope taken from them, so that the dehumanizing depravity did them in. While the dead were crushed by the unbelievable, the survivors did the unbelievable and lived.
While many of us here have been through hard times in our lives, I don’t think any of us have gone through anything like that Viktor Frankl and the other survivors of the death camps. Maybe because we have not been in such dire straits, we tend not to live our lives with such a clear, compelling, propelling and inspiring daily motivation of exactly what we are living for. We’re more like Mary, who stumbles accidentally into Easter and the Resurrection. Like Frankl and the survivors, Mary had a vision of a loved one which brought her to the tomb that Sunday morning. By all accounts, her relationship with Jesus was one of deep, mutual love. Jesus had welcomed her into the circle of his friends, cleansed her heart, mind and life of the things which had been getting in her way. Mary had followed Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem. When all the other disciples fled in fear, Mary stayed somewhere close by, close enough that she was a witness along with Jesus’ mother of the Crucifixion, close enough to know where the body had been buried. Those of you who have lost a loved one know her heartache on Friday night and all day Saturday as she thought of her loss and probably replayed in her memory both the scenes of happy times with Jesus and then the physical horror and emotional pain of Good Friday. It was the vision of love for Jesus and Jesus’ love for her that brought her to the tomb that Easter morning. It was that vision of love which made her the first witness to Easter, but she was still stuck in the past with what happened. She was not prepared for what was going to happen next, let alone what she was going to do about it.
This, my friends, is one of the truest stories I know because I live it all the time. I’ll be plugging away at my job, digging through a pile of e-mails, paperwork and administrative details, going to meetings which look like they’re only going to result in more meetings, taking care of this and following up on that, gradually feeling more and more buried under the weight of it all, feeling less and less joyful in my work, thirsting for the Holy Spirit in my work, when something unexpected will happen, someone will show up to talk about where God is their life or the state of their spirit, the light will shine and I will remember that my job is not a job but my ministry to which God called me. And I will remember my joy and begin living it again.
I’ll be trying to take care of the million and one things that go into a marriage and sharing the responsibility for a home, making lists and working my way through them, checking with my wife if we’re on track, running here and there, gradually feeling more and more buried beneath the burden of it all, feeling less and less joyful and more and more stressed out and daunted by the sure and certain knowledge that every time one thing gets knocked off the list two more will be added, when something so absolutely ordinary yet seemingly unexpected in the face of the chores and responsibilities will happen: my wife will give me a kiss when I get home, she’ll tell me that she loves me, we’ll have a particularly pleasant supper, we’ll enjoy talking with one another while the boys play, we’ll go for a walk with the dog and not talk about our work, and just like that the light will shine and I will remember that this isn’t a burden. This is my life which I love. And I will remember my joy and begin living it again.
I’ll be swimming in the sea of parenthood, getting small boys up in the morning, fed, dressed and off to school, or fed, washed, read to and put to bed at night, and in between sorting out squabbles over one thing or another, helping with homework or playing with trucks, reading teacher evaluations and making my own assessments, jumping here or there to keep them from accidentally hurting themselves, trying to teach them by word and example to be kind, loving, moral and intellectually curious little Christian people, and I’ll be getting more and more tired, less and less focused, more and more frustrated, and find myself wondering how it was genetically or environmentally possible that two such nice people as Marie-Laure and I could have possibly given birth to not one but two little Attila the Huns with bad table manners, questionable morals, doubtful intelligence, and less than promising futures unless they go into slapstick comedy, when suddenly something altogether ordinary yet somehow unexpected amidst the hustle and bustle of parenthood happens: one of them will take my hand as we go up to bed and I’ll feel the warmth of life, one of them will climb into my lap before supper and tell me about his day and what he learned or the fun he had with friends, one or both of them will suddenly look up at me with a smile and say, “I love you, Daddy,” and I will remember that this is as good as it gets. This is exactly the life I love, my joy will return and I will begin living it again.
All too often I am an accidental Easter person, just like Mary. As I was writing this sermon I found myself feeling disappointed with myself. “You know better, Max. Why can’t you be intentional about being an Easter person and live the Resurrection all the time? Why do you allow yourself to just stumble along through life, missing out on your joy until you bumble into it unexpectedly over and over again?” Good questions, wouldn’t you say? Do you ever wonder the same thing to yourselves?
Viktor Frankl found that that something worth living for, that joy, was always something more than the self, some one else, something else. Jesus and the prophets put it like this: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength and all your mind and you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. Do this and you shall live.” So how are you going to do that today? How are you going to love God today? How are you going to love your neighbor today? How are you going to love yourself today? Here is what I am going to do this year. I going to do my very best to get up every morning with one thought in mind: what is worth living for today? How am I going to live my joy today? By the grace of our Lord, I’m going to do it. I am a mature enough Christian to know that some days will be better than others. But that’s what I am going to live for. I’m gonna be living the Resurrection because I believe my Lord lives.

Bones and tombs and grave clothes, Oh My!

2011-04-12T13:04:00.001-04:00

Bones and tombs and grave clothes, Oh My! The Dover Church
April 10, 2010 – 5th Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Ezekiel 34:1-17, John 11:1-45

Biblical stories like this morning’s are paradoxical. On the one hand, if you believe that these stories are true, they’re probably not going to be of any use to you. Let’s be honest. How many of us can relate to the purported facts of these stories: fields of dry bones coming to life? Ligaments here, muscles there? Or a person dead and buried for four days brought back to life? On the other hand, if you believe that these stories are false, as in bogus, concocted, fanciful, a sham, they’re also not going to be of any use to you. Until you hear these stories as something that has happened, is happening, and, more importantly, could happen to you, then you’ll never know what God is trying to get at with you, right now, right where you really are. Let me tell you what I mean.
Not all of you are here every Sunday, so some of you might have missed the one or two times I have referred to my parents’ divorce. They split up when I was fifteen. The actual divorce became final when I was seventeen, the spring I graduated from high school. The process was neither pretty, friendly, fair nor painless. I've mellowed and healed to the point where I can’t be bothered with facts or blame anymore, everything having to do with everyone else involved. All I really know is what happened to me and how I felt about it. I felt abandoned by my father. I felt afraid and vulnerable. My stable, respectable, prosperous family lived in a big house in a stable, respectable, prosperous neighborhood and suddenly we were struggling with stability, respectability and prosperity. I was embarrassed because I knew our neighbors were ducking us, afraid of their own embarrassment for us. Surrounded by friends and neighbors whose parents were not divorced, who were not struggling as far as we knew, I was ashamed, ashamed that something was “wrong” with us, resentful that we were now substantially different from everyone else. I felt betrayed, with my rug pulled out from under me. I felt powerless and, what is worse, controlled by my powerlessness. I saw my mother’s struggles and pain. I saw my sisters’ pain. I tried to bury my struggles and pain, hoping that somehow something good would come out of it. All of this boiled down and occasionally boiled up into a deep anger, which I focused on my father as the culprit, even though my anger was much larger than one man could contain. I masked my anger behind a comic facade, but it was always there, bubbling up, seething, and leaping through its bars, ultimately cutting my feet out from under me, although I only saw this in retrospect.
I say “in retrospect” because I was a young person who had no idea why I was feeling the way I was feeling or doing the things I was doing. But my bones were dry as dust. I was well and truly entombed. If you think Lazarus had it bad for four days, what I am about to tell you was 30 years of my life. There was plenty of happiness and achievement, but for this morning I am going to stick with the stuff I shrugged off, tried to ignore, or downplayed for most of those 30 years. For starters, I drank a lot of beer with my buddies and engaged in excessive reckless and risky behavior. Some of you might chalk that up to “boys being boys” and there was certainly an element of youthful fun and experiment, but I wonder how much of what I was up to was really trying to avoid all those bad feelings and energy with parties and adrenaline rushing stupidity?
Because I felt powerless over the course of my life, I longed to become powerful. In academics, I worked like a demon and excelled, not out of joy in my work but out of an intense desire to get myself to a place of security and stability. Ferociously trying to build myself an impregnable castle, I now know that I was motivated by fear. Authority figures who seemed to hold all the cards, who, in my mind, “controlled my destiny,” were threatening. Life was confrontational and menacing, a series of obstacles and opponents which had to be steamrolled over or driven through. Finesse was not my strong suit.
I had trust issues. I did not want to talk about my life, which meant that new people who had to hear the story if they were going to become friends, were not allowed in close. I did not respond well to the normal give and take of human relationships. All in all, not a pretty picture. I am not proud of myself when I tell you that when my father invited me to his wedding 25 years ago, I threw away the invitation without even sending regrets, because I had none. When my sister called me to tell me that my father had had a heart attack 20 years ago, I laughed and said I hoped it hurt like hell. When my father called me 10 years ago, trying to reestablish a relationship, I told him in very brutal terms to get lost. If that’s not dry bones, in a field or in a tomb, I really don’t know what is.
When I met Marie-Laure, she naturally asked about my family and I had to tell her “the story” if we were going to get anywhere as a couple, but I could tell she was not satisfied. Coming from a large family where permanently broken relationships are unthinkable, my story was bizarre, unsettling, frightening. Occasionally she would nudge me to “do something” about my father. “He’s an old man now. If he dies and you haven’t reconciled, you’ll regret it.” “I know, I know.” “You’ll never be truly happy until you work this out.” “I know. I know.” And then, just before Christmas 2009, she lowered the boom, “you can’t stand up there and preach all this love and forgiveness stuff if you are not willing to try it yourself in the most challenging place in your life.” As the French would say, “touché!” “You will not be able to be the father you always wished for until you try to fix this.” “I know. I know. I don’t want to. It hurts. It’s scary.” And then, without telling her, I made the call.
Life after the tomb, what my dry bones felt like after God breathed into them, is a subject for another morning. Suffice it to say, I have lived these stories. I know that they are true in my life. I have been speaking about my messy self in the past tense, like that is who I used to be, which is not quite true. I’m more like Lazarus who is still wound up in his grave clothes. It takes a while to get all that stuff off you. All that negative energy and knee jerk reactionary way of being is annoying and stays with you, like clinging grave clothes that you just want to get out of, but it doesn't dominate me anymore.
As I have been preaching, you might have been feeling a little uneasy, uncomfortable, embarrassed for me, even sorry for me. Please don’t. I stand before you, resurrected, at least from that tomb. I have other tombs, which can also wait for others sermons. If nothing that I have said this morning touches your life, I am sorry to have wasted your time. If however, you know exactly what I have been talking about, if you are living with abandonment, betrayal, loss, threat, fear, sorrow, grief, all that bad stuff we try to just bury away, downplay, shrug off… hear me now….don’t feel sorry for me. Feel sorry for yourself if you are wasting your time like I did for 30 years. Do not waste another day. The God of the prophets is calling you right now, saying “I will put my spirit in you and you will live and you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.” God in Jesus Christ is standing outside your tomb right now, calling you by name, “Come out.” You have nothing to lose, except the life that you wasting right now, if you are buried in grief and loss, betrayal and estrangement, fear and anxiety, powerlessness or megalomania, frustration, addiction, workaholism. What is standing between you and joy in the exact circumstances in which you find yourself? What is standing between you and new and abundant life? If your faith is not enough to get you on that phone or into that car, do what I did. Allow your faith to allow someone who loves you, someone who knows the dried bones and buried in the tomb wrapped in grave clothes person that you really are and pretending to the world not to be, allow that person to give you the backbone you need to do what you need to do. Not what you ought to do, but what you need to do. Yes, need, if you really want to know the new and abundant life, what God is trying to get at with you, right here and right now, no matter where you are and no matter what has happened.

A Sermon

2011-03-30T08:45:00.001-04:00

As I pulled this together at the last minute, I didn't have a title.

“A Sermon” The Dover Church Church
March 27, 2010 – Third Sunday of Lent
Scripture: John 9: 1-41

After a week of sleeping on a church floor, preparing and serving meals to hundreds of people, sorting food in warehouses, helping out in shelters, sightseeing, and basking in the intensity of teenagers, it was time for this minister to go home. There was, however, one last thing in our YSOP week in Washington, DC. Fourteen youth groupers, myself and the other chaperone, and the YSOP coordinator were sitting around a big table in the Church of the Epiphany's Social Room, waiting for our final speaker. Someone was coming meet with the group and tell us his or her story about being homeless. We had met a lot of diverse people that week, so I did not know what to expect.
Into the midst of the joking and laughter, texting and e-mailing, walked our speaker. As he came into the room, I was struck by his dignity, a short man, clean shaven with a neat haircut, quite formal in simple yet spotless clothes which had been ironed with a lot starch. The creases in the sleeves of his shirt and in his trousers stood out in a room full of sweat-shirted and blue-jeaned teenagers from Connecticut. He smiled at us, sat down at the head of the long table, and introduced himself in a very soft spoken voice, “My name is James Davis and I thank you for inviting me here to tell you my story.”
Without further ado, he began. “I grew up in South Carolina in a large, loving family, nine brothers and sisters and a mother and father who loved us and each other. All of my brothers and sisters graduated from college and are successful, except one sister who did not go to college but is the successful owner of her own hair salon. I was a tracking engineer for NASA at Cape Kennedy, working on the space shuttle. I was married and had three kids. We owned our own home and had two cars.”
He sat there, quite straight with a hand resting on each knee, as I said, very dignified, and continued. “Then suddenly things started to change in 1986. Do you kids remember what happened with NASA's space shuttle program in 1986?” he asked. All of the youth groupers were born after 1990, so I took a shot at it: “The Challenger blew up.” “That's right,” said Mr. Davis, “the Challenger mission blew up and NASA halted the space shuttle program. A lot of us had to transfer to other divisions or find work elsewhere while the disaster was sorted out. I decided to leave NASA and find another good engineering job in the private sector, which I did. ”
“Then,” he continued, “within the space of a month, both of my parents died. It hit me really hard. It hit all of my sisters and brothers really hard, but they seemed to be able to work through it. I couldn't. I got depressed, even though I didn't know I was depressed at the time. That's the thing about depression: when you're really depressed, you're too depressed to be able to realize how depressed you are. I didn't want to leave my bedroom on the weekends. My work started to go downhill. I went to therapy, which was good and worked for a while, but it never pulled me all the way up. I started to drink to self-medicate myself, which was a big mistake.” Here he paused again and looked around the table at each of the young people and said with emphasis, “The very worst thing you can do if you are depressed is self-medicate. It makes thing much worse.” He paused for emphasis, a much stronger message than “Just say No,” because he was about to tell how worse much worse could be.
“My depression made me unable to function, which cost me my job. My self-medication cost me my security clearance, which meant that I couldn't go back to NASA. It got so bad that I felt like I was pulling my wife and kids down with my depression, so I decided I had to leave for their sakes. I called a friend in DC to ask if I could stay with him until I got sorted out and found work. I packed my suitcases, took the train up, only to find a moving truck in his driveway when I arrived. My friend said he was sorry, but the landlord had suddenly decided to sell the house and he had to move.”
“And so there I was, with all my bags, quite literally in the driveway, without a job or anyplace to stay. I had had a good job so I did have savings, so I moved into the cheapest hotel I could find, the Holiday Inn at $150 a night. My plan was to get sorted out and find work, but I went through my savings pretty quickly, more quickly than I was able to focus enough to find work due to my depression. In pretty short order, I was out of the hotel and walking around at night with all my luggage, sleeping in the train station, until the police moved us along. I was not alone. I remember one night when I found myself on a park bench in 20 degree weather, trying to both get some sleep and not freeze. There were a lot of people in the park with me that night.
I was too proud to tell anyone that I was homeless. I was too proud to even admit it to myself. I just thought that this was some temporary trick played on me. I know that God has a plan for everyone's life and I see it now, but at the time it just seemed like a big mistake. So I didn't even tell my brothers and sisters, who would have invited me to stay with them. I lied and said I was working and staying with friends. They found out later and were very angry with me for not letting them know, but as I said, I was proud and confused. And even though I didn't say the word, I was homeless, sleeping in shelters, eating in soup kitchens, still trying to find work, but it was almost impossible when you show up for an interview carrying all this luggage and looking exhausted after having only a few hours of interrupted sleep. Who's going to hire someone who shows up looking like that? I was applying for professional engineering jobs.”
Mr. Davis told us about the three years he spent homeless and how he managed to get himself off of the street, selling newspapers and with the help of various agencies like the ones we had been working at that week. He now works for Ritz camera on their digital electronics, advocates for the homeless, and has his own apartment. It was all so very matter-of fact in that soft spoken voice. No pauses for tears or to catch his breath. When he finished his story, the room was absolutely quiet and every eye was on him. “Do you have any questions?” he asked.
I looked around at the young people and could see that no one wanted to go first. “How about your wife and children? Are you in contact with them?” one kid asked. “Yes, I am. We're on good terms, but I'm up here and they're down there.” Another long moment of silence as everyone took that in. For people like us with families and homes, that was challenging.
“Does giving spare change to homeless people really help?” another kid asked. “Sometimes it does. Being able to buy your own cup of coffee rather than have it given to you can be pretty nice.” For people like us who can buy our own coffee and IPODs and clothes, or have them given to them by their parents, that was another new horizon. The dignity of being able to buy a cup of coffee for yourself. Imagine that.
“Did you have any friends while you were on the street?” “Most of the time I was on the move and suspicious of everyone around me. So no close friends.” For people like us who live in supportive and caring social networks, this was almost unthinkable.
“I never know what to do or say to a homeless person when I run into one. Anything I do or say seems so stupid. I get embarrassed.” Not a question, but a question nonetheless. “The best thing you can do is notice a homeless person. We live anonymous lives out there with people looking away, walking around us, and pretending we're not there. Just smiling and saying hello, wishing someone a good day, can make a homeless person's day, make him or her feel like a real human being.” Wow! That's it? Just noticing someone who you're trying to ignore?
There were other questions, about getting medicine and medical care, about what it's like sleeping in shelters, about having to stand in line for everything, food, social work, a bed to sleep in, but it seemed like all of a sudden the time was up. I think everyone had forgotten about that train we had to catch. We thanked Mr. Davis as he left. Liz, the YSOP coordinator, whose daytime job was the study of diseases for USAID, asked the group if we had any thoughts, any reflections to share.
Once again, a moment of silence. And then one boy said, “I always blame the homeless people for being homeless, that it's their fault somehow, that they were responsible for their situation. They must have made a mistake, or a series of bad choices, or were crazy, and homelessness was the consequence. But this guy sort of had it happen to him.” We all sat with that one in quiet for a while.
Another boy said, “I always thought that homeless people were stupid, crazy, dirty druggies. But this guy worked for NASA and was smart and clean.” Another few moments of silence.
Liz didn't affirm or expand on any of our thoughts. Truths like that just have to sit out there and be looked at. I didn't say anything either, but I could feel Jesus in the room with us. We were having on of those moments when our eyes were suddenly opened and we were seeing things the way God sees them.
Which brings me to the man born blind in our Gospel this morning...well, not really. Haven't we been talking about him all along? Let me rephrase: do you remember him? a miserable, blind beggar just sitting there by the side of the road? Did you notice that he doesn't even have a name? He's just the man who was born blind, even after his eyes were opened. His parents are just the parents of the man born blind. Everyone in the story is interested in blame and fault finding. Why is he blind? Whose fault is it? The Pharisees are intent on blame and fault finding with Jesus for breaking the laws of the sabbath. But the blind man cuts through it all: “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes...If this man were not from God, he could do nothing... One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”
Everyone is looking for someone to blame, except Jesus, who is not interested in blame, on who sinned, but is only and completely intent on God's purpose of transforming the hard places of life into new and abundant life. This is clearly a story about compassion and healing. For folks like us with homes, jobs, money, family, friends, compassion usually means “pity” or “feeling sorry for someone,” someone like Mr. James Davis or the man born blind in our story, because they lack what we have. There is a lot to be said for pity and feeling sorry, but the word compassion is a Latin root, com-passio, that means, “suffering with,” and that is what God in Jesus Christ is all about and that is where healing is possible. How can we truly suffer with, have compassion for, someone like Mr. James Davis or the man born blind? We are just not in their shoes. Maybe not, but when we see those people and see ourselves in those people, how they are us and we are them, then the distance disappears and we realize we are all in this together.
As disciples of Christ our spirituality is one of letting go of fault and blame, of resisting all the finger pointing which keeps us too busy for having real com-passion with real people, and get down to the new and abundant life which God in Jesus Christ is bringing forth every day. Because while stories about Mr. James Davis are both moving and enlightening, the Good News is not just for him, or about him and people like him, but for each of us and for all of us. Where am I blind in my life? Where are you unable to love? Where is she unable to trust? Where does our hope fail us? What can he not forgive? What do I need to repent of but cannot? Like it or not, these are the places where Jesus will find us. It’s all about the grace and grace never blames or finds fault.

Wanting to be Abram

2011-03-22T14:09:00.001-04:00

Wanting to be Abram The Dover Church
March 20, 2010 – 2nd Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Genesis 12: 1-4, John 3:1-17

I can still remember exactly what it felt like the first time I really stepped out and followed the unexpected and unpredictable leading of the Spirit. At the time, I was only 20, so I was thinking in terms of adventure. Looking back with more than 25 years hindsight, however, I now know that it was the first time I dipped my toes in the waters of the Spirit.
It was a sweltering Thursday afternoon, July 12, 1984. After a long, hot drive to Kennedy Airport, I had kissed my tearful mother goodbye and was buckled into my seat as the plane taxied down the runway for take-off. On my way to school in Sweden for a year, looking out the window at the gradually diminishing line of planes in front of us turning and taking off, I started to get a sinking feeling in my stomach. Until now, the whole prospect of a year abroad had seemed sort of unreal. Obviously I had made some sort of decision when I wrote the extensive application. Obviously I knew I was on my way when I received the acceptance letter in the mail. Obviously I knew that the time was upon me as I packed my bag. Obviously it hadn’t been all that obvious to me, because it was not until the moment that the pilot started to ramp up the engines and the plane started to tremble with the pent up power of four jet engines right before take off, that it hit me. “What have I done? I don’t even really know where I am going. I won’t know anyone when I get there and I speak the language like a little kid. The one thing I do know is that I’ll be thousands of miles from home for an entire year. What have I gotten myself into?”
You people know me as the extroverted preacher, the boisterous worship leader and singer on Sunday morning, the guy with all the new ideas and energetic enthusiasm in Tuesday night meetings. I do not put a lot of stock in horoscopes, which is to say I don't consult mine to find out what’s going to happen. Nonetheless, I am a Cancer, the crab who likes life best inside his shell. A homebody who deals with constant change from within that hard, protective shell, fiercely loyal and tenaciously holding onto the things that are important to me, a person who likes daily rhythm and regularity. Moving from species to genus for you biologists, I am pagarus poliicaris, a little hermit crab whose head pops out on Sunday mornings and at meetings and then scoots back inside as soon as possible.
Until that moment sitting in that Icelandair plane on that runway, my life had been on a pretty predictable trajectory. We had lived in the same house since I was three. Father worked in an office. Mother took care of us and ran the home. A dog, three cats, hamsters, a fish tank, a yard, summers on the Cape house. I had met most of my best high school friends when we were in nursery school and kindergarten together. Like all the other kids in my neighborhood, I went off to college, where I aimed for decent enough grades to keep my parents off of my back and my options open for possible future graduate studies. I was on the rowing team and lived in a fraternity with a bunch of my teammates. It all sounds so stereotypical now, I know, but it seemed unique, grown-up and even daring to me at the time. I was Joe College.
Sometime in my junior year I started to get the itch for something else, something new, something way out there on the horizon somewhere, far from everything I knew and knew how to do. Why don’t I try this on for size? Drop rowing in my senior year, forget about the political science I had been studying for three years at a large state university, go to Sweden, and enroll in a small, and I mean small, like 500 students, art school on an island in the Baltic. Once there, I drew, painted, learned how to drink a lot of coffee and play the guitar, and sang in a blues band. My friends thought it was hysterical every time I sent them a postcard or a letter recounting what I was up to. I mostly stressed the word “studying” and “seeing Sweden” in letters to my mother. This was when overseas calls cost about $9 a minute.
And it had all come down to this moment of intense fear, buckled into an Icelandair seat. Right then and there, I could have started screaming and running around the plane, which, I am pretty sure, would have gotten me off of that plane and, after a hopefully brief visit to the police station, back to the life I knew so well. But I didn’t and that sent me on a course which I followed for the next sixteen years, a course which, 26 years, 9 months and 6 days later brought me here to this pulpit this morning. As I have already said, I was not thinking in terms of the Spirit at the time, but now I know how Abram must have felt when God did what he did to him. I know how all the rest of us predictable trajectory folks here this morning must feel when we hear Jesus’ words about “being born from above,” about “being blown by the Spirit,” not knowing where we are headed but trusting in the source from which our direction comes. You may not say it aloud, but I imagine many of you are thinking to yourselves, “are you kidding me? What sort of a life would that be like? What would we be getting ourselves into? A 20 year old kid going off to paint and draw with a bunch a beautiful blond people while his parents pick up the tab, that’s not real life.”
Jesus is so wise. I think he knew we were going to think those things and resist the way of Abram intensely, which is why he assures us as Eugene Peterson puts us in his translation of John 3:16-17 “(I came into the world) so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in (me), anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again.” Isn’t that how we feel when we see the example of Abram and hear the invitation of Jesus? Accused? By implication that there’s something wrong with us and the way we are going about our lives? But that's looking at faith backwards. It’s about allowing ourselves to be lead from where we are right now into that fullness and abundance of life which we can’t even begin to imagine as long as we are playing by our rules with our heads drawn back inside our little shells.
My friends, I know that you already know what I am saying is true. You know that life is really a series of pivotal fearful moments on which your life’s journey hinges. How do I know that you know this to be true? Well, how about that moment when you finally decided what you were going to do with you life? What your life’s work was going to be? Or that moment when you walked down the aisle in front of all those people and made all those unbelievably enormous promises to the person you were planning to spend your life with? Or, that moment when you finally told your spouse that the marriage was over? Or that moment when you decided to have a child? Or, what came later, that moment of truth in the delivery room when you actually were holding the living, breathing result of your decision? Or, even a little bit later, that moment when the nurse wheeled you out to the curb with the baby on your wife’s lap and said, “you can go home now.” What? Home? And you looked at each other and wanted to say “We can’t go home. I read the books but I don’t know what to do. Do you?”” And you started dialing your mothers. Or that moment you walked into your boss’s office and told her that you were resigning to do something else, far from your father’s house, far from your kindred and your country? Or that moment you walked into the banker's office with a business plan for your life’s ambition in your briefcase? Do remember how scary it all felt then? Maybe I have left our your moment, but I think those are the biggies for most of us, the biggies when we could have said no out of fear, started screaming and running around and gotten ourselves safely escorted back to our old lives.
In each of these moments, we thought we knew what we were getting into, but the truth is that we really had no idea. At least that has been my experience. The idea and the reality of career, marriage, parenthood, life both in general and in the particulars, are two very different things. The only thing we really knew was that we were setting out with faith. And here’s another truth: hasn’t all the really good stuff in our lives come to us out of just such pivotal moments when we had the fearlessness to say yes to the attractive but unknown? Sure, there have been years and years of hard work to bring it all to fruition, but it all started with that moment and our openness to being Abram.
So what are we going to do, you and I? We are in a bind, you know. Church, by its very nature, is traditional. We cherish our tradition rightly and reverently but it all tends to get in the way of being Abram. The late Jaroslav Pelikan, esteemed professor of history and theology and Yale, once wrote, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.” It's up to us. We can unbuckle our safety belts, start running around the church screaming and we'll end up safe and sound exactly where we are right now. That's what most churches tend to do. Or we can say "Yes" and allow ourselves to be lead towards the blessings and greatness God promises us through Abram, allow ourselves to live into the new and abundant life God sets before us in Jesus. There is so much more out there on God’s horizon, but we’ll never see it let alone live it, unless we faithfully dare to do what we have done at all the other pivotal, fearful, life giving moments in our lives we have said yes to. I, for one, really want to be Abram and find out.

Lessons from the Wilderness

2011-03-15T10:27:00.000-04:00

Lessons from the Wilderness The Dover Church
March 13, 2010 – The 1st Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Psalm 32, Matthew 4:1-11

This lesson, and believe me, it truly is a lesson, comes up on the first Sunday of Lent every year. I wonder, however, if we can hear what we just heard with beginner ears. It is so far from our normal realm of possibilities and expectations that our minds, conditioned by an unrelenting diet of normalcy, might just tune it out while waiting hopefully for something more palatable in the sermon or next week. With attention spans what they are these days, the very thought of Jesus doing anything for forty days, let alone any of us mindfully devoting ourselves to one thing for forty days, seems beyond belief.
And what is that one thing? Nothing less than being lead by the Spirit into the wilderness to fast for forty days and then be tempted by the devil. This was not something that Jesus stumbled into like Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. The sequence of events in Matthew’s gospel moves from Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan with the heavens opening, the dove descending, and the voice saying, “This is my beloved son, with whom I am well please,” to our lesson for this morning, Jesus being lead by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil, to Jesus beginning his ministry in Galilee. There is a clear progression from initiation to preparation to implementation. Temptation was clearly an essential stage in Jesus’ spiritual development.
Where shall I begin for most obvious points of divergence from our normalcy? Is it being lead by the Spirit into the wilderness for temptation? For most of us, should we ever be tempted to ascribe anything to the Spirit’s leading, it’s probably to the good stuff: happiness and plenty, satisfaction and progress, a greater sense of self-awareness and fulfillment. But trial and temptation? No. That’s not the Spirit. That’s bad luck.
Or perhaps it is the lengthy fasting as a preparation for the coming temptation. If any of us were facing a really serious trial of some sort, we would probably be tempted to follow the example of the condemned man who eats a hearty meal and watches a movie while waiting. But Jesus empties himself of distractions, food and company, in his preparation for the devil.
And let us not forget the Tempter himself. The Hebrew word Satan means “the tempter,” and that is what he does, tempts, deludes, ensnares. Most Christians that I know, and that includes me, do not give the devil all that much thought. I did give this some thought this week, why this should be the case, and this is my excuse: I avoid thinking about evil because my life circumstances do not force me to. After all, we do not live in the kind of a place where the reality and power of anything we might think of as the Devil, let alone any sort of definitive experience which we might call an ultimate time of trial, comes our way. Dover is not the scene of ethnic cleansing, famine, plague, devastation, oppression, inescapable injustice, or violence. This is a place of opportunity and choice, a place of comfort and well compensated hard work, a place of education, which is yet another reason why the devil and his ways don’t really frighten us. We either think that we know better or don’t have to know so we don’t bother finding out if there has been an oversight in our superior educations.
And yet, and yet, I am pulled up short every day when I follow our Lord’s advice and pray the prayer he teaches us, every time I pray “lead us not into temptation, rather deliver us from evil.” I have to point out that the version of the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel of Matthew says “lead us not into the time of trial rather deliver us from the Evil One." My Dover mind wants me to think in terms of the trivial temptations which come my way but which I am able to resist through my own intestinal fortitude and better judgment, rather than any sort of an ultimate time of trial. My Dover mind wants me to think in terms of small case evil, as in any incidental evils which may befall me, rather than Evil with a capital "E," as in the Evil One. In short, while our Gospel lesson for this morning is an illustration of the very things we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer, I tend to do my best to avoid having to think about, let alone face that myself.
Did you notice how reasonable the offers were which the devil put to Jesus? Turning stones into bread? That would seem to be just the thing after forty days of hunger, wouldn’t you think? Rescue from death? Rule over the kingdoms of the earth? What is wrong with any of that? It may not have occurred to you, but these are, in fact, the very things Jesus eventually does according to the Biblical witness. So why not now? Why not from the devil?
The late Peter Gomes, Minister and Professor at Harvard Divinity School and a preacher and I writer I admire immensely, wrote this: “The temptations point out the fact that Satan usually appeals to us at the point where we feel ourselves spiritually strong, for where we think we are strong is not the place where we invest our defensive energies. We think that Satan will attack us where we are weak, as if Satan is as rational as we are, but the proof of Satan’s cleverness is that he appeals to those points where, more often than not, we feel secure.”
The devil is basically offering to set Jesus up as a version of the Roman Emperor, who promised his people Abundance, Efficiency, Security, and Power. Bull’s eye! These are the temptations the devil dangles before Jesus. Are these not the very ideals so many of us strive so mightily to achieve or attain in our lives? Are these not the very ideals that our world holds up for us? How can ideals such as these, the very places where we feel spiritually strong and secure, how can they be potential evils? Gomes writes, “…most of the world’s enormous evils have resulted from the pursuit of some notion of good. Many modestly virtuous people have committed deeds of outrageous evil in pursuit of an inadequate definition of good, with each villain of history probably thinking of himself as up to ultimate good. Both omelets and destiny, however, require a few broken eggs. The landscape of human history is littered with the debris of ideals sacrificed to the idol of the ideal…”
I will always remember my visit to the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen. At the end of a street through a residential neighborhood in a suburb of Berlin, a neighborhood full of normal people who watched as more than 45,000 prisoners were marched through their neighborhood into the camp, and no one ever marched out; a neighborhood full of ordinary citizens upon whom the ashes of the ovens fell like snow, yet not one knew what was going on at the end of the street. The enormity, thoroughness, intentionality, and thoughtfulness of the evil perpetrated in that place defied my comprehension. It was all that I could do to imagine the place run by a bunch of monsters and ogres, subhuman, mindless lunatics. I kept asking myself how anyone in their right mind could have worked there and done that, until I finally asked the guide. He looked at me with a certain disdain for my idealism and ignorance, and said, “the men who worked here were accountants, professors, teachers, policemen and artisans, church going husbands and fathers, who saw themselves as defenders of their country in its life and death struggle with mortal enemies. These guys were taught that the communists, socialists, trade union leaders, political dissidents, homosexuals, POWs, Jews, and Christian pastors who hadn’t gotten with the program were some of those mortal enemies. They were doing their duty.” An extreme example, I admit, there is probably none more extreme, but I think that the motivations of the most atrocious perpetrators of astounding evil in recent human history have all been idealistic.
We are not here this morning to point the finger in horror and shock at wicked old Nazis about whom we cannot do a blessed thing. We are here to be challenged by our Word from God and the example of our Lord in the details of our lives about which we can do something. How many eggs do we break in our pursuit of our ideals? How many eggs do we allow to be broken on our behalves? This is Lent and we are on our way to the Cross, which is why I have given you each a little cut nail to take with you through Lent this year, to hold as you think about how each of us and all of us are deluded, ensnared, and tempted in both the specifics and in the broad strokes of our lives. Jesus said, “happy are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” It is only by following the Spirit into the wilderness and facing our temptation, by leaving behind the props of normalcy, expediency, efficiency, productivity, comfort, convenience, custom and habituation, that we can come to that purity of heart where we will see a God who is much bigger than the ideal of the good and idol of ideals we pursue, either willfully or blindly, and know if what we are about is of God, for God and through God, or not; to seek our answer to the Tempter's question: "if you are really a child of God, if you really want to follow this Son of God, what are you going to do about it?"

Functional Atheism

2011-03-01T11:50:00.002-05:00

Functional Atheism The Dover Church
February 27, 2011 – 8th Sunday after Epiphany
Scripture: Matthew 6:24-34

When Jesus preached this word about anxiety and worry, he was doubtless talking to people living at a subsistence level, borderline people who struggled in one set of clothes for enough food to eat every day. And yet, a world away this morning here in Dover, what Jesus says to us truly is Good News, a word of salvation, for us.
I probably don’t need to tell you that our lives here in Dover are also borderline, borderline unrealistic, borderline insane, certainly stressful and anxiety provoking, not restful or reflective at all. We are into consumption, consumption as in our being consumed by our lives. We think we’re really living the good life when our lives are either chewing us up or swallowing us whole.
Those of us who regularly feel overwhelmed and dissatisfied with what we have made of our lives may hear Jesus’ word, “do not worry, do not be anxious,” as that word of salvation. Anxiety and worry are the very things many of us most desperately would like to be set free from. But how? How can we possibly not worry or be anxious when there is so much to do and get done, so many competing obligations, responsibilities and opportunities? When we have to balance ourselves, our families, their lives, our life, work, fun, the home or homes, our finances, our future? I think that we have been conditioned by the world we have created to frame the question in this way: how do we do the impossible? For that reason, any other alternative, let alone Jesus' alternative, is, by definition, out of the question. Truth be told, even the most anxious and worried among us would find the prospect of simplifying and letting go downright unattractive. Think of what we might be missing out on! We are addicted to our busy-ness. That’s who we are, how we live, and, we think, one of the main reasons for our success which has enabled us to live in a place like Dover. So while we may sigh to ourselves as we get up in the morning and go to bed at night, wishing it weren’t so; while we may whine and complain to our spouses, friends, and pastors, we don’t really see any viable and attractive options. Anything else is out of the question, so we give up and go on feeling oppressed. But we go on.
Then there are those of us who like this level of intensity. We are ambitious and this life is the life of the ambitious. I'm ambitious, so I know of what I speak. Fair enough, but let me ask some questions about your ambition. What drives your ambition? Is it because this is fun? Is it because you feel called by God to do what you do the way you do it? Success, achievement and advancement are fun for you? Your vocation? Or are you driven out of anxiety? Anxiety over failure? Anxiety over being swallowed up, taken for a ride, or left broke and behind by life? Anxiety about not having enough? Anxiety of not being someone? Those are good questions to ask, and not idle ones either in my opinion as I ask them of myself to good effect. Most of us do have high overheads to support and important professional responsibilities to keep us on our toes. But when is it fun or spiritual, and when is it driven by fear, anxiety, and a sense of insufficiency? When is enough enough?
For some of you, what I am saying may sound like a lot of drivel. You are wealthy and powerful enough that you feel untouchable. Or you may have reached the point in life where you have lived through just about anything and everything life can throw at you and you’re still here, chugging along in one piece. You are enjoying the blessing of perspective which comes with a long life or a lot of living. Or you may actually be a saint who just floats serenely above it all. If that's you, come tell me what that’s like after worship.
Believe me, I am not downplaying worry and anxiety. Most of us have plenty of reasons to be anxious. For one thing, our lives are full of other people. Who knows what they’ll do next to blow up our lives? And then there are all the other uncontrollable and unpredictable people out there whom we don't know, the folks pulling the strings of our financial system, our political system, who are making the decisions about wars, the environment, technology, the direction of our society and our world, and all the other seemingly beyond our control madness we hear about. It’s enough to drive any sane person to real anxiety.
And, of course, I haven't mentioned the deepest source of anxiety for most people, our health and our inevitable deaths. When I was a chaplain at the Brigham in Boston, I would visit folks to talk about their conditions and to pray with and for them if they so desired. I would visit patients whose charts said they were going to get better and go home. That's what we'd pray for, expressing our thanksgiving, and sure enough, our prayers would be answered. But then there were the patients who were not going to get better and knew it. As you can probably imagine, many of these people were often overwhelmed with fear and dread, anxiety and regret, anger and bitterness. Feeling quite insufficient, even trivial, I asked my supervisor what I could possibly say to these folks and I have never forgotten her answer. "Max, you are there for these people to help them find hope exactly where both of you know they really are. Help them find God in this with them."
As I took the elevator back up to oncology, I realized that I had been ministering as a functional atheist. The world is full of atheists like Richard Dawkins, who dispute the facts of God, the factuality of our sacred stories, and the logic of holiness and belief. And then there are the functional atheists like me sitting in my supervisor's office that day. True faith is not facts which can be scientifically proven or disproved. At it's most important level, faith is trust, trust that God is in here with me, in here with us, in everything with everyone, bringing life out of death even when some physical life comes to an end. Trust coexists with doubt in the hearts of all faithful people. Doubt is inevitable if you allow your faith to lead you into places where your trust is challenged in new and previously unimaginable ways, like when you are facing death. Jesus himself cried out his doubts from the cross, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" But doubt wasn't the last word from Jesus' lips.
Jesus' last words, spoken in his agony of death, were words of trust: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." Not his body, which was truly finished, but his spirit, which would return to his body on Easter and break the bonds of death.
How, then, are we to move from our functional atheism, where we profess to believe in God but do not trust in God, living lives choked with anxiety and worry, dogged by fears of failure and insufficiency, or sitting gloriously on our thrones of self-sufficiency, all symptoms of functional atheism? How can we live enough being enough? Jesus himself said, "for humans it is impossible but for God all things are possible." If you insist, you can continue to do all that you do, but in a very different way. Instead of striving and doing out of fear and worry, live worship. All life is worship, the great and the seemingly insignificant: our work, our play, our certainties and your doubts, all of it. All life is worship to be offered to God in whom we trust to be in all of it with us. Transform the focus and intent behind all that you do from self striving to acts of worship.
And then, in all things, in all circumstances, in the face of life and in the face of death, commit your spirit to God. Make these words your prayer as you do you work, play your games, make your plans, count your blessings and acknowledge your doubts, savor victory and face defeat. "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." Speak them with your lips and with your heart. Bring yourself back to them repeatedly every day until they are the truth guiding as you walk forward into life.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, "If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free"(8:32). This is the truth which will set you free, "seek first the kingdom and God's righteousness, and all the rest will be added unto you." Thanks be to God. Amen.

Gotta Love Those Enemies

2011-03-01T11:50:00.001-05:00

Gotta Love Those Enemies The Dover Church
February 20, 2011 - 7th Sunday after Epiphany
Scripture: Matthew 5:38-48

"Love the enemies that hate you." Enemies. Hate. Hate you. This is not at all the kind of thing most folks like us come to church to think about. Enemies that hate, enemies that you hate... The words alone can make our skin crawl and stomach knot up. Most of the time, we prefer the Jesus who talks about love and friends, friends who love us, God who loves us, Jesus who loves us, God and Jesus who are our friends, friends whom we love. That's all very pleasant. But Christianity is, in a nutshell, about salvation, nothing more, as if there could be anything more than salvation; certainly nothing less, although every time we try to steer away from the really difficult and seemingly unpleasant topics which Jesus drops on us we do just that, try to make Christianity into something much less than a path of salvation. The name Jesus means "he saves" in Hebrew. Salvation is what Jesus was about. Salvation is what Jesus offers us. No one I know needs saving from love or friends. We need saving from our enemies who hate us and persecute us. We need saving from ourselves when we have enemies we hate.
The very words "enemy" and "hate" are so emotionally charged that I think we need to unpack them a bit so we know what we are talking about. It is always best to be clear about what we mean, whether we're talking about life and death, or about how to decorate the living room, so that we don't waste our time going a long way down a road only to discover that we have very different things in mind. The word "enemy" comes from the Latin word inimicus, which is the word amicus, "friend," with the negative prefix in. Quite logical, really. An enemy is the opposite of a friend. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a friend is one with whom one shares a bond of affection; a person who supports and helps you; an ally; a person who uses their influence on your behalf. Friend comes from an old Germanic root which means "love," but this is only partly about warm feelings. A lot of it is relational action, about mutually compatible and promotional relationality out of which those feelings grow. Right off the bat, we can see that we don't have to go all the way to an Osama bin Laden or an Adolf Hitler to find an enemy. Enemies tend to be much closer to home in most cases, and often a lot less sinister.
And then there's the word "hate." Again from Oxford, hate is another old Germanic word which means "to feel a strong aversion to, an intense or passionate dislike for." This also makes logical sense, in that anyone who is an enemy is, by definition, going to evoke in us strong negative emotions. If someone does not share a bond of affection with us, works against us, uses their influence against us, does not support or sympathize with us or what we are working towards, well, we're not going to feel the love, are we?
So, to sum up, enemies are the folks who in one way or another, make our lives difficult: they don’t like us and the feeling may be mutual, they work against us and they get others to do so as well. And how do we feel about that? If we're self-contained, restrained New Englanders, we might be forced to confess that we don't like it all that much, do we? If, however, we're more passionate Mediterranean or Middle Easterner types, like Jesus and his immediate audience for example, we wouldn't beat around the bush, being polite or proper. We'd come right out with it: we hate them and all the ways they are messing up our lives and our agendas.
That may sound quite harsh, but it's really just the beginning. Let me take this one step farther. The real problem with enemies who hate us and enemies whom we hate is that, quite frankly, they own us. Our enemies control us and dictate who we are and what we can do. Before you think I have gone too far, consider this. The real opposite of love is not hate. The real opposite of love is fear. Yet another Old Germanic word, fear is "an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat; (fear for) a feeling of anxiety concerning the outcome of something or the safety and well-being of someone; the likelihood of something unwelcome happening." Doesn't that capture exactly how we feel around and about our enemies? And not the distant Hitlers and bin Ladens, but the very people we live and work with? We fear them because they threaten us, threaten us immediately and directly all the time, not hypothetically or eventually. And because we fear them, they own us.
How so? Our experience of enemies is visceral: we feel them in our bodies, with tensed muscles and a heightened heart rate. In other words, they make it difficult for us to relax and enjoy ourselves. Unless we are confrontational, we tend to avoid them, which means that they are determining where we will go and where we will not go. Because we know they will oppose us, we spend a lot of time considering how to go around, through, over or under them rather than just doing what we feel called to do, living into our joy and the things which we know will bring us and those we love our joy. They make us modify our hopes and dreams, not to mention our actual goals and objectives. Our enemies are the people who star in the interior monologues which go on inside our heads all the time, when we say the things we wish we had the courage to say on the spot but were too afraid to, our regrets, frustrations, anger, how we are right and they are not.
What I am saying is that a lot of us give our enemies altogether too much power over us. Truth be told, it isn't just a lot of us. It's all of us. There are those of us who know our enemies and tactfully avoid them, thereby ceding the playing field without even trying. There are those of us who try to always please others, hoping to have no enemies, but we're living lives that others give us rather than being ourselves living our one life. Even those of us who have the power and toughness to just bowl over our enemies, crush them, drive them off. All of that domination energy is still power which they are making us use against them rather than for us. In a very fundamental way, even when we win, they called the shots.
Which brings us to loving our enemies. Why should we love them? Because Jesus commands us to? That's a starting point, but I think most of us here are going to need something more motivational than a command to actually give this a try, let alone keep at it when the going get tough. And the going will get tough. I have discovered that my enemies are really worthy of my love because they provide me with a window into my soul. When I am able to not be overcome by negative emotions, I use my interactions with enemies analytically. If I am reacting strongly, why is that? What does that tell me about the importance of something to me? About how we are interacting? About my behavior and motivations? I get more clarity out of a good conflict than I do out of holding my sons on my lap. Those good times are good enough for me and do not need any analysis. They're something to just enjoy while I have them. But a good blow up? Well, why did that happen? Why am I so upset? Why is this so important to me? Why is this so important to them? Wow, this wasn't even really about him or her. It was the way they reminded me subconsciously of my rotten cousin who I haven't seen in twenty years that got me going. My bad! Tried to get a drink out of a mirage again. And gradually, if you stick with it, you come to know what you can let go of, and what you really will go that second mile for, what is incidental and what is essential to who you are, who you want to be, and what you feel called by God to do with your life. Believe me, knowing the difference cam make all the difference.
Jesus ties this lesson about loving our enemies together with an enticing goal: the vision of being perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. The Greek word in the Bible is teleios, which means "complete or whole." The perfection is not in moral rectitude, ethical purity, or even spotless conduct. It's about not being all over the place, feeling fractured, broken up or broken down as the case may be, living fearfully and piecemeal. It's about living out of that whole center, where you are loving God and being loved by God, where you are loving yourself and knowing that God loves you, where you are loving your neighbor, both the good and the evil ones upon both of whom God causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall, because that's the only sane way of going about living. From that place, you are you, living your love. You are calling the shots. You are no longer dancing fearfully around others, not daring to be this or to do that. You are just dancing to the song God has put in your head and heart. If that's not as close to perfect as any of us messy, flawed people can hope to get, then I don't know what is.
Before this drifts into sentimentality, however, let me say that there will come the times, often frequently every day, when someone stops you, diverts you, drives you back, makes you question who you are and what you're doing. With practice you'll learn to discern what is essential and what is incidental. You're going to mistake the two all the time. I certainly have. In time, letting go of the incidental will get easier and easier. And going the second mile will be the way you want to go, the way you have to go if you are going to be true to yourself and your God. You dance right on, fearless, seeking not to deflect or retaliate but to redirect all that negativity into God's positivity embodied in you and your life. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells us “I came that you might have life and have it abundantly”(10:8). That abundance lies right now on the other side of the fear we feel for our enemies. If you want to know salvation, if you want to live salvation, then you gotta love those enemies.

Bye-bye, Lone Ranger

2011-02-01T13:00:00.000-05:00

Bye-bye Lone Ranger The Dover Church
January 30, 2010 –Fourth Sunday of Epiphany
Scripture: Micah 6: 1-8, Matthew 5: 1-12

Here at the Dover Church, we are part of the venerable New England church tradition called congregationalism which our Puritan ancestors brought with them from England. When they left Europe behind, one of their main motivations was to leave ecclesial authority behind as well. In theological terms, the idea at the heart of congregationalism was a renewal movement in which each locally gathered group of saints would live according to the movement of the Holy Spirit, discerning afresh in each generation the way God was calling them to be the church in their place and time. In non-theological terms, no bishops down in Boston were going to tell us what to do out here in Dover.
We have come a long way from our Puritan roots in the last 380 years or so, but we have held onto this ideal of local church autonomy. Of course, we are kidding ourselves, because we do not really stand alone. We are firmly within a tradition and don't make everything up from scratch. The United Church of Christ, which we joined in the early 1960s, offers us area ministers who assist us in calling new ministers and resolving issues which we need help with. Our hymnals, worship resources, stewardship strategies, educational curricula, our ministers, everything come from someplace: the denomination. Go to any New England congregation church in the United Church of Christ and you will be struck by the remarkable degree of similarity, even, dare I say, uniformity.
Be that as it may, for most of us, it is our local church which matters and we live in blissful ignorance of our sisters churches in neighboring towns, not to mention our association, conference, or national denomination. Whenever we have to think about them, we use that very pronoun, them or they, usually disparagingly or grudgingly, as in “that thing they want us to do,” or “the money we send them.” We are a bunch of Lone Rangers, doing our own thing and wanting others to stay out of our business.
Now that's all well and good, although I think we miss out on a lot which other more connected churches enjoy. But this is what we know and the way we've always done it, so God help anyone who might suggest changing things now after nearly four centuries. There is, however, another side to the story, which you may not be aware of, Lone Rangers that you are. That is the pastor as Lone Ranger. Once ordained by a local church and called by a local church to a ministry, the traditional congregational minister tended to go his or her own way. We could play ball as inclined. If we wanted to go to councils and meetings, we did. If we wanted to work with our area ministers, we did. Most did not, because we were busy in our own fiefdoms, being the Pope of Dover, or any town New England.
About a decade ago, right when I was starting ministry, our Massachusetts Conference began to address some serious consequences of this Lone Ranger mentality among local church ministers. The parallels between being a pastor and being fictional gun fighter are not exact, but they're near enough for a sermon. Ministry is a serious, stressful, dangerous occupation, which requires a cool head and excellent skills. I exaggerate about the danger, you think? Well, unlike the Lone Ranger, we ministers are mere mortals who make mistakes and our mistakes have serious consequences. This is about God, after all, so the mistakes we make can gut local churches, destroy peoples' faith, and cause others to leave the church in disgust, frustration, boredom or rage. In other words, the exact opposite of what we came here to do. It's the spiritual equivalent of working with dynamite, where the difference between success and failure is just about equally dramatic and irreversible.
What's more, being a pastor is often as lonely as being the Lone Ranger, because we don't have a Tanto to unburden ourselves to, to watch our backs, and to offer us sage advise when we're just about or have already made a big mistake. Who are we going to talk with? Most of the folks we spend most of our time with are the very people who are keeping us awake at night. Dumping it all on our spouses, most of whom are members of the churches we serve and friends with the folks whose confidential information we carry around, unduly stresses their faith and the joy of their fellowship.
And finally, just like the Lone Ranger, we pastors have to be on the top of our game at all times. Why? Because local church pastoral ministry is inherently contradictory. As ministers (a word that means “servant”), we serve the local church by caring, comforting and consoling for all of you. As pastors (a word that means “shepherd”), we lead the church into the future, which boils down to trying to get the very people you are caring for and comforting to want to let go of what is getting in the way of the future and moving forward, leaving behind the way things have always been, what people find comforting, and choosing something we do not yet know. Change creates tension, which can end in conflict. Too much comfort leads to stagnation and decline. Too much tension leads to conflict and either decline or dismissal. It’s a fine line.
The Massachusetts Conference discovered that there were a lot pastors out there who were burned out, failing, not renewing themselves, making mistakes, in conflict, putting their congregations to sleep, unhappy in their work, getting divorced, getting fired or quitting in anger, and generally not living the vocation to which they had been called. The figures were and are sobering and the effects on local churches were and are saddening: stagnation, decline, and conflict.
All of this may be shocking news to you. I love ministry and there is nothing else I would rather do, but everything I have said is true and has been my experience, and I am not alone. Every one of my colleagues has had the same experience. Until quite recently, we never talked with each other about it, but that is changing here in the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ.
8 years ago the Conference was awarded a $1.6 million grant from the Lilly Foundation to start a new transformative initiative called Sustaining Pastoral Excellence. You've seen bulletin inserts about this program the past few weeks. This money was used to set up supervisory groups for new ministers, where we would share all of our rookie mistakes and get advice and encouragement how not to do that bone headed thing again and how to do better in the future. I was in such a group back in the day and it saved my bacon, and my vocation, more than once. This money was used to set up Communities of Practice for experienced ministers. The one I am in now is made up of seasoned and skilled pastors of larger churches. Under the guidance of an experienced facilitator, the six of us get together once a month to process what we’re up to with other pairs of eyes, share best practices, help each other see our blind spots, talk, encourage, pray, and hold one another accountable. Most clergy groups are bragging or griping sessions, both of which I find exhausting. My Community of Practice is live giving. My colleagues are so wise and experienced, so supportive and insightful, so lovingly yet painfully honest and encouraging, that I come to and leave these gatherings deeply grateful that I am not alone anymore. And finally, this money has been used to offer workshops twice a year on subjects local church pastors and lay leaders have identified as needing help with: worship, church growth, hospitality and fellowship, stewardship, youth, you name it. A lot of what I share with you and pass off as my own genius comes from these workshops. You folks are the recipients and beneficiaries of the ideas and practices of the best and brightest minds in the church today.
As your new pastor, I have heard your stories about Walter and Dean, about Tom and John, about Bill and Amanda, and the blessings they were in your lives. You have told me about your pastors in other churches and the blessings they brought into your lives. There's no doubt about it: having a good pastor can make all the difference in a person or family’s life. You have also told me about their mistakes and the consequences in your lives and the life of this church. I know that when I'm gone you will tell stories about the blessings and stupidity of Max. I am a true, life long Congregationalist, which means for me that this is not about me, but about you. In our Reformed Protestant tradition, I am here to preach, teach, administer the sacraments, and, perhaps of most importance, "to equip the saints (that's you) for ministry." It may be about you, but we all know that local church vitality depends upon excellent pastoral leadership and that is what the MACUCC's Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Program is all about, about helping local church pastors maintain their excellence so that the churches we serve thrive as we thrive in our mutual ministries in Christ.
I never talked with you before about any of this because it felt sort of private, my own little personal blessing, a gift to me from the conference, courtesy of the Lilly Foundation. After one additional grant of $1.6 million dollars, money very well spent, the Conference is now starting an endowment to continue this most vital ministry initiative for the indefinite future. But this is not about them. It is all about you, as the recipients of this blessing, you having the pastoral excellence you long for so that each of you as individuals and all of you as this congregation can thrive in faith and fellowship. It's not about them or the money we send them. It's about us and our church of the future. Being called to ministry changed my life. Seminary both blew me away and helped me focus. The MACUCC Sustaining Pastoral Excellence Program keeps me at the top of my spiritual and professional game, being whatever blessing I am to you and helping me avoid the mistakes you fear I might just make at your expense. The Conference is going ask all of us Lone Ranger churches to fund this endowment so that the churches we love and have bless us will continue to thrive with excellent leaders in the generations to come. “What do you say, Kimsosabe? Hi-ho, Silver and away!”

It'll mess up your life

2011-01-28T11:40:00.001-05:00

It’ll mess up your life The Dover Church
January 23, 2010 – Third Sunday of Epiphany
Scripture: Isaiah 9:1-4, Matthew 4:12-23

Let’s not beat around the bush. Following Jesus will mess up your life. Jesus walking up to two sets of fisherman-brothers and saying, “follow me,” and off they go, sounds kind of nice, doesn’t it? A bunch of brothers going fishing with Jesus is a heart warming story, sort of like Andy and Opey from the Andy Griffith Show, walking down the dirt roads of Mayberry with fishing poles over their shoulders; or Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins, walking down a country road and breaking into “It’s a jolly holiday with Mary…”
But the truth of the matter is this story is one of sudden and massive disruption in the lives of Peter, Andrew, James and John. Following Jesus is going to mess up their lives. I’m sure old man Zebedee, John and James’ father has already noticed as has Peter’s wife when he didn’t come home from work that day. Yes indeed. Following will mess up your life. Let me tell you how.
First, there’s God. One of the obvious attractions of following Jesus is getting to know God and share your life with God. That was certainly the attraction for me. In following Jesus, we actually get to know God. We will not get to know what God looks like, but in reading the Gospels and living the life Jesus invites us to live, we will most definitely come face to face with the unseen God. We will know what God is up to, how God works in the world, what God likes and dislikes, and what God intended for both each of us and for all of creation. That really is quite a lot to know about someone when you think about it. It’s as much if not more than most of us know about each other. It’s just about everything we really know about anyone, except for the sensual knowledge of sight, smell, hearing, touch and so on, but now we’re getting into mysticism.
Let’s get back to messing up out lives. Right off the bat I can say from personal experience that some of your friends and neighbors are going to think your crazy when you tell them that you are into knowing God and experiencing God. You are strange, different, probably harmless but definitely out there. But once you start knowing and experiencing God in worship and prayer, in nature or in other people, you won’t mind all that much what other people think of you. You might not talk about it, but you probably don’t talk about a lot of personal stuff with folks anyways, so who cares? No, the real mess comes when the knowledge and experience of God forces you to see how far off the mark the world is from the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus, the mess we humans have made of every aspect of God’s intention. Once you’re there, it’ll get harder and harder to just accept things the way they are. Things will start jarring you, sometimes just a little, but often right to the core of your very being. You’ll find yourself viewing everything with a critical eye. You can’t be satisfied or complacent anymore, no matter how good your life really is. You see the mess I am talking about? It’s a lot easier being complacent and satisfied, isn’t it?
Then there’s mess #2: you yourself. Once you start following Jesus, you going to have to accept the fact that God loves you just the way you are. Sounds really good doesn’t it? But after a lifetime of pretending to be perfect, or at least pretty close, it’s hard to stop. It certainly took me a long time and I still backslide regularly. But once you really just fall into the grace, you will be able to stop pretending to yourself, to others, and to God of all people (as if God couldn’t see right through that?) that you are not who you really are, with all the flaws, mistakes, pain, fear, anger, bad thoughts and intentions, and all the rest of the warts that all of us have and pretend we don’t. Let me tell you from personal experience, letting go off all those masks and pretense will be a huge load off of your back.
Sounds great doesn’t it? But it’s really another mess. Once again, your friends and neighbors will think you’re crazy if you actually tell them you’re good with being a mess, sinner is the proper term, because God is on it. But like knowing and experiencing God, you’ll probably not mind all the much. The real mess starts when you are no longer pretending and you cannot help but see the difference between who you really and how you’re living and how much more God hopes for me. When I was pretending, I was already there. When I accepted who I really am, I could see the difference. My choices, opinions, actions were all so messy compared with Jesus. Sure, God loves us, but God also wants so much more for us. We love the grace, but there is hard and painful work to do, conforming ourselves to Christ, making hard and often unpopular choices, altering behavior, rooting out destructive habitual ways of being and thinking. God wants us to be free. The irony is that it is only when we accept who we really are will we be able to see how well and truly enslaved we are. Talk about messing your my life. Ignorance is bliss when it comes to personal transformation and holiness.
Then there’s community. You would think that Jesus’ new community of beloved disciples is another obvious attraction of following Jesus: a bunch of people gathered around God in Jesus Christ, everyone welcome, no exceptions, all practicing love and forgiveness, sharing their lives. But there is, unfortunately, the reality of it. You mean I have to love him? I don’t know if I can like him. You mean she is my sister? She looks sort of like an enemy to me. You mean we have to welcome them? They sort of threaten me and they’ll definitely mess up the good thing we have going here. And, of course, all of us, even the best intentioned of us, bring our own non-Jesus agendas with us, not to mention all the messiness I mentioned a moment ago, which means being church is heavy going, rarely idyllic, and often disillusioning. Your friends and neighbors will wonder, how can such a smart, successful, with-it person as you want to be part of such a mess as that? And yet, it can be as good as it gets when we manage to pull it off by the grace of God.
Now if that isn’t mess enough for you, there’s one more biggy: Jesus’ insistence that you serve your neighbor, especially your poor, hungry, imprisoned, filthy, leprous neighbor, as in the very people you don’t want to think of as neighbors. This is absolutely non-negotiable. Follow me and this is what you’re going to be doing. Ouch. As with everything else I’ve pointed out this morning, your friends and neighbors are going to think you are crazy, altruistic and nice, but definitely crazy, if you tell them that you can’t make the party because you’re going to be following Jesus down at the homeless drug rehab center, or in a prison for sex offenders, or in the abused and homeless women’s shelter, or in Haiti, or all unpleasant places you can think of. And let’s not try to make a purse out of a pig’s ear, this serving your neighbor is going to cut into your life in a big way, into your time for other things, into your wallet, into your emotional and spiritual strength and well being. What’s more, serving these folks is going to hit every one of your fears and anxieties, your prejudices and preconceived notions, and make you feel sort of bad about yourself at first if you allow it to. See what I mean? It’ll mess up your life.
But, and here’s the big BUT, serving my neighbor
God, me, community…and loving my neighbor. This is one aspect of following Jesus which most people would expect would mess up their lives. That we will find God and ourselves to the degree we pour ourselves out in love to our neighbors.

Come and See

2011-01-28T11:37:00.000-05:00

Come and See The Dover Church
January 16, 2010 – Second Sunday of Epiphany
Scripture: Psalm 40, Isaiah 49:1-7, John 1:29-42

Yet when I read our lessons for this morning, two phrases just would not let me go. From Isaiah, I heard God speaking to the people of Israel and us, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation shall reach to the ends of the earth.”(49:6) And from John, we hear Jesus speaking to Nathanael and Andrew and us, “What are looking for?” They said, “Rabbi, where are you staying? Jesus said to them, “Come and see… and they remained with him for a day” (1:39). I went back in forth between these two words from God and our news this week, until our snow day made up my mind for me.
Ever since I came to Dover to be your pastor, I have been asking myself, “what is the biggest spiritual challenge these folks face? Where does the Good News of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ really intersect their lives in such a way that they might really latch onto it and rejoice?” I have listened to you tell talk about your lives for a year and a half. I have followed how our community acts and thinks, but it was when I finally realized that I was living your lives now that I had my answer. What do I mean by living your lives? I mean two parents with demanding professional careers, housework and leisure, friends, church, bills, and kids with conflicting and demanding schedules of school, extra-curricular activities, homework and play dates: the whole catastrophe. I think of it as trying to live a 30 hour day.
The greatest spiritual challenge the vast majority of us face, the place where the Good News of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ really does intersect our lives in a way that we cannot but rejoice if we live it, is one that challenges the very ethos of our community. Get ready. Hold onto your seats. We, you and I, need to practice Sabbath. We need to take regularly scheduled time out of our lives every week and just be with God in Jesus Christ, to come and see and just abide. In this town of Dover at this time, if we were to become a Sabbath keeping people we truly would be a light of salvation for our neighbors.
It’s a little shocking at first I bet. Sabbath keeping probably didn't occur to you, it's that far off our radar screens, it's that counter cultural. After all, you don't have to be a Christian to want to help the poor or work for peace. You may think that I am just another religious fanatic who wants to take the fun out of life and impose some rigid system of enforced God time on you and our community. You may think I am just another reactionary who wants to roll the clock back to the good old days. I can assure, Sabbath keeping is really the greatest gift God has to give us of all people: a regularly scheduled day off from all our striving and working and producing, a day to just enjoy God and life without having to accomplish anything. Sabbath keeping, while seemingly old fashioned, is actually revolutionary when you haven’t practiced it ever or for a while. It is just about the most counter cultural thing you and I can do in this place at this time. And, perhaps most to the point, Sabbath keeping is exactly what folks like us who live such hectic and frenetic lives need to savor if we really want to think and act faithfully on the Tucsons, Haitis, Middle Easts, and societal challenges all around us.
In my opinion, folks like us are caught in a big Catch 22. On the one hand, many of us tend to be high achievers who thrive in this environment of high achievement, high competition, and high consumption. Many of us strove mightily and excelled in our work, earning enough money to live in Dover, and found here exactly what we sought: a nice, quiet, aesthetically pleasing community that had good schools for our children and public safety for our families.
But then comes the catch, the tail wagging the dog as it were, or the tendency for our lives to live us rather than the other way around. I’m not sure if it has occurred to you but it has to me. We cannot lighten up if we want to keep the whole thing going. Even if we could relax, which most of us cannot because we have worked so hard for so long to arrive at where we are, but even if we could it would feel very hard to cut back, kick back, take time out and just enjoy life when our tax bills, mortgage bills, utility bills, company payrolls, our kid’s tuition bill, our credit card bill, insurance bill, and every other obligation we have out there is coming due. It’s the one thing our parents forget to mention when they taught to work hard and excel: success and achievement come with a high price. We actually have to get up in the morning and get in to work to make a little or a lot more money to cover our ever increasing overhead as well as plan for our own and our family’s future. Or at least that's what our hearts and minds keep telling us.
When I was a professor, I worked like a fiend. I loved my work and devoted myself wholly to my work. Any of you who have done start-ups will know exactly what I was like: always working, always planning, always thinking, sort of like the eye of a hurricane. But, and here's the big BUT, at least one day every weeekend and at least one weekend a month, I would leave it all behind and go flyfishing for trout in the Front Range, the High Rockies, the National Parks, Wyoming, New Mexico; you name it and I was gone in a little red Nissan pickup. I would just take off and fish, getting back to Boulder for church on Sunday morning and to prepare for work the next day. That may not sound like traditional Sabbath to you, but I assure you it had most of the traditional components, except for family and feasting.
How so? Once I had finished packing the truck, my mind had completely stopped thinking about everything I had to do for work and all the crises I had lived through and which faced me in the week ahead. The bills were in the mail and I never brought academic books or my laptop to work on my next project. I just ceased working and trusted that everything was done. Of course, if I had stayed at home I would have worked and worried and planned and strategized. But once I was out of town and blowing through the mountains at 70 mph with the windows down, all I could think about was the beauty of the scenery, the river I was headed for, and the trout which I was going to try to catch. I didn’t even worry about what I would eat or where I would stay. If worse came to worst, I could just pull off the road and sleep in the back of the truck. I had some cash and a credit card, my driving and fishing licenses, and nowhere to be and nothing to do for two whole days.
And what was that like? First, it allowed me to close the book on the week past. I can’t do anything about it out here anyway, so why think about it? And fly fishing is one of those things which pretty much consumes your mind when you’re doing it. If you’ve never done it, try it. You will be amazed at how a couple of hours of fly fishing for trout completely blocks out all the things which have been consuming your thoughts. I didn’t think theologically at the time, but I basically turned everything over to God and took a time out, trusting that God would provide, which was always the case.
And second, closing the book on the past week and enjoying a day or two reenergized me for the work I had to do and loved to do when I got back to it. I was able to greet each new week as just that, a new week with a new me. There is nothing worse than having a work, stress and activity filled weekend, only to have get up on Monday morning feeling drained and dry and have to begin again when you never really stopped in the first place.
These are gifts of Sabbath keeping. I don’t get to go fishing all that much these days with a family and small children, but I have found skiing to be the same thing. Sure, it is an enormous hassle to get everyone ready and packed, but once I am on the lift, I have ceased working. Now that I am a little older and am less sure of my muscles and bones, less sure that I will always negotiate my way down the slopes in one piece, I find the concentration and, let’s be honest, low grade to intense fear, to be cleansing. One of the first things I notice after a day of skiing is that I didn’t think once about work or responsibility. I just enjoyed: the beauty of the mountains, the physical feeling of intensely being alive, the chair lift riding talk with Marie-Laure about the fun, the heightened taste of meals and pleasure of relaxed companionship with friends. This, my friends, is just about all of Sabbath except the worshipping in a sacred gathering.
“Imagine a day-long spiritual fiction suspending ordinary time. There would be neither past nor future. Our worldwork would be finished. By closing the books on the past week and refusing the to think about the next one, we have nothing left to do. For this reason, on the seventh day there is only the present, simply being alive.
On this day everything we do, and the reasons for everything we do, can be only here and now. If our worldwork is done, we cannot do anything about making it better later. Indeed, there is no later.
We quit planning, preparing, investing, conniving, evaluating, fixing, manipulating, arranging, making, and all the other things we do every day. All these things began in the past and will end in the future. We do them, not for their own sake, in the present moment, but with an ulterior motive, for the sake of some time later.
We are obsessed with work. Six days each week we rest so we can go back to work. We play so that we can go back to work. We love so that we can go back to work. One ulterior motive after another. Worrying over the past, living in the future. We are either tied to the past through our uncompleted tasks or compulsively drawn to them through our need for completion in the future. But one day each week there is a day devoted to being present, the seventh day. On that day, we do not have to go anywhere or do anything. Everything is done and we are already here.” (pp. 23-24)

Keep Awake

2010-12-02T12:27:00.001-05:00

“Keep Awake” The Dover Church
November 28, 2010 – 1st Sunday of Advent
Scripture: Isaiah 2:1-5, Matthew 24-36-44

I have never been a night owl. Even in college, when everyone else would be out until all hours of night, I wanted to be back in bed and asleep by 11. I did have practice the next morning at 5, but plenty of my team mates seemed to manage with short naps. Not me. And as for pulling all night study sessions? None of that for me either. I would just put the books down and rationalize to myself that I either knew what I needed to know by then or not. And now? Well, now I am pathetic. By the time 9 rolls around, all I want is to read a few pages of a good book and turn out the lights.
There have been two things in my life, however, which have overcome the gravitational pull my bed has on me: striped bass and sick babies. In the case of striped bass, the really big ones tend to be most catchable from shore in the middle of the night. And sick babies…well, my father could sleep through that, but I never could.
It seemed to be such a simple question at the time: “do you want to have a child?” When I said “yes” without hesitation or reservation, the whole prospect of extended periods of sleep deprivation did not enter into my thinking. Ear infections were Leo’s thing. Anyone who has ever had a baby with an ear infection will know what the crying and squirming is like. Leo’s always seemed to come on sometime between 9 and 10 PM on Saturday nights. You might think that Saturday night is just about the best possible night if you have to have an ear infection, but for a guy who had to drag himself into the pulpit the next morning…well, it got so bad that I actually blanked on the words to the Lord’s Prayer one Sunday and had to be cued by my organist. I was always torn with feelings of helplessness and ignorance, coupled with indecision. Do I wait it out or call the on-call doctor? The experience was intense…not at all sleep inducing.
Once the crisis had passed, I wondered whether the Tylenol and Motrin cocktail was just masking the pain or whether actual healing was going on. I watched for signs of improvement: had the little hand stopped reaching for the aggravated and painful ear? Was the temperature abating? Were the muscles relaxing and the breath deepening? To use the Biblical word, was shalom breaking out? Peace, health, wholeness, harmony? Or was this merely a lull in the storm?
And then, once I gave up trying to diagnose one way or the other, I would find myself actually enjoying a new experience of wakefulness at 3 in the morning, contemplating my sleeping son, feeling the warmth, watching the facial expressions, seeing every detail on the face, the chest rising and falling, the hand opening and closing. This was a time of gradual awakening to something good. Better than good, something great. Dear God, I love this child and I love that I have the chance to be here holding this child….even though I know I am going to be a zombie at church in a couple of hours.
Suddenly, Marie-Laure would be there, nudging me awake. “How’s Leo?” “He had a tough time until about 3, when things got better and he dropped off.” At which point, mother would take the sleeping baby into the bed and pronounce that magic word, “better.” I had seen little hints that “better” was coming. I had felt them, seen them, heard them, just known that “better” was coming although I would have been hard pressed to offer a scientific explanation of how I just knew, but there it was. Better, something that seven hours earlier seemed unlikely if not impossible. My keeping awake had helped shepherd in that possibility, several hours of rocking and cuddling in the chair, a few walking circuits around the house, sometimes more Tylenol. Not much perhaps, and certainly not instantaneous compared with what a doctor might have done, but my part to play in our little shalom drama.
Before there were babies or even Marie-Laure, I loved striped bass. I love to fly fish for stripers, but if you are shore bound as I was and you want to catch a keeper as I did, then it means live eels and the middle of the night. Night fishing is not going out after supper for a couple of hours or getting up a couple of hours before work. It means going out when the Late Show watching folks are tucking in, when I would already have been asleep for four hours. The certain knowledge that big fish were out there made it clear to me that there was one thing missing in the picture of me holding such a bass in my arms on the beach in the middle of the night: me. You better believe that was enough for me to get myself out there.
And what is night fishing for stripers like. Well, it’s actually not like much of anything at all. I would be pretty excited as I got out of the car and rigged up. I would still be pretty excited as I walked down to the beach, sniffed the breeze for the scent of bait, listened to the darkness for sounds of slurps and splashes which would be those bass feeding within casting distance, looked at the tide and flow to decide where to cast. Most nights nothing obvious would be going on, so then it was the mighty heave ho of a big, squirming eel which I stitched onto the hook and a sinker serious enough to get the whole rig down in the current. I’d wait until I felt that the sinker had settled, gave a couple of finger tugs on the line to check if the eel was swimming freely, let the drag off the reel, sat down, and waited. And more nights than not, I’d wait, and wait, and wait. You can’t catch a fish if your bait is not in the water, so reeling in and casting over and over again is not the way to go. You cast and wait. I would listen. I would watch the tide and move a bit up or down depending on the flow. I would see the stars. I would wish I had brought insect repellent when the sand flees started getting at me. And then, it would begin to dawn on me. I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew… the crabs had taken my bait. The eel’s gone. I’m fishing a bare hook, which means my chances of catching anything have sunk to almost zero. I’d reel in and sure enough, nothing there. So I’d take out another sewn eel, rig up, and cast again.
Not all that often, but often enough to keep me coming back for more, the moment of truth arrived. Sitting and waiting, listening and watching, thinking about something or the other, and then… a click on the reel. And then another. You’d be amazed how a little click can snap you wide awake…and you wait. The obvious urge is to jump up, grab the rod, tighten the drag, and give a big set and reel that baby in. That is exactly the wrong thing to do right now. The bass is down there mouthing the eel, chewing on it. Doing anything now would just pull the whole thing out of the fish’s mouth. So you wait. Another click. Wait. And then line starts to run off the spool. The fish has it. Which way is the fish moving? Away is best, because a set will bring the hook right into the corner of the mouth where it will hold. Sometimes the fish stops to nibble some more and you wonder, is she off? Has she felt the hook and spit the bait? Sometimes the fish is really gone. Who knows why? But other times, she takes off again and you set the hook and the hysteria begins. If your tackle holds up and you don’t make any mistakes, you finally see the fish and then you have to curb your impatience yet again. Don’t go into the water to get the fish because the fish will see you and make another run for it. No, just firmly hoist her onto the beach where you can finally pounce, turn you headlamp on, take a look, and, if you’re like me, take a picture, lift her up for a weight and length, and then carry her back into the water for another day. Big bass are the ones who spawn, so this is really an act of self interest. A great, big bass: yet another little shalom drama and all because I kept awake. The bass would have been there in any case, but I would never have touched it and felt the thrill of connection without keeping awake.
Our Word from Jesus this morning is to keep awake. Keep awake? Aren’t we wide awake already? Sure, but most of the time we are awake to the press of our daily lives which we can’t help but see but often can’t see through or beyond. And when that isn’t consuming us, we’re wide awake to the brokenness of the world all around us which we can’t help but see but often can’t see through or beyond. But Jesus calls us to keep awake for the vision God gave to Isaiah, a world of peace and harmony, God’s shalom.
This is a paradoxical wakefulness. Normally we see ourselves as the primary actors in our life dramas, but in Isaiah it is God who is doing everything. We are invited to participate, to be part of this reality which we aren’t aware of because we’re so busy with other things. Jesus, tells us that the kingdom of God is already at hand; yet another paradox of somehow both now and not yet. And what’s missing in the kingdom picture? Our participation, in a welcoming, open, encouraging, gently helping along sort of way, just like rocking a baby in your lap or waiting for that big bass shows up.
I know that I have fallen asleep when I suddenly realize that I am very self-absorbed, everything in my world is all about me. Every thought I have comes back to me. I know that I have fallen asleep when I suddenly realize that I am too busy too even give a thought to God’s vision, let alone do anything. I know that I have fallen asleep when I suddenly realize that I am overly self-satisfied, doing alright, pretty darned well in fact, and don’t want to spoil it by worrying about everything that’s not alright. I know that I have fallen asleep when I suddenly realize that I have become cynical: this is the way the world has always been and Jesus and the prophets were just a bunch of dreamers. I know that I have fallen asleep when I suddenly realize that I am resigned, this thing is way too big for me so why bother. I know that I have fallen asleep when I suddenly realize that I’m just angry, but that’s as far as it goes.
It’s hard to stay awake waiting for Isaiah’s vision of God’s future. It’s hard to stay awake for God’s kingdom as proclaimed and lived by Jesus. It is as improbable in our present world, improbable as the vision of a happy, healthy baby in the light of dawn when you hold a crying baby at 2 in the morning, improbable as a keeper striper when the ocean seems devoid of life after four hours of crabs taking your bait. Eugene Peterson, my favorite spiritual theologian, puts it this way, “Kingdom is what is going on all the time, whether we are aware of it or not. Kingdom requires a total renovation of our imagination so that we are able to see what our eyes do not see, so that are capable of participating in what will not be reported in tomorrow morning’s newspaper.” “Internationally and historically, killing is the predominant method of choice to make the world a better place” …”when it comes to what is wrong in the world, Jesus is best known for his fondness for the minute, the invisible, the quiet, the slow – yeast, salt, seeds, light.” That’s hard to keep awake for, seeds growing, yeast rising, salt brining, but that is our spiritual discipline.

The Sermon of the Amount

2010-11-16T12:57:00.001-05:00

The Sermon of the Amount The Dover Church
November 14, 2010 – 25th Sunday after Pentecost, Stewardship Sunday
Scripture: 2Corinthians 9, Luke 8: 4-8, 16-18, Luke 6: 38, Luke 12: 48b

Our Lord put it this way: “Give and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you receive.” (Luke 6:38)
The Apostle Paul later said: “The point is this: the one who sows sparingly will also reap sparingly. The one who sows bountifully will reap bountifully.” (2 Cor 9:6).
Much later, my old crew coach used to yell from his launch: “There’s nothing worse than crossing the finish line with something left in the tank. Leave everything on the race course.”
I have poured all of myself into a few things in my life: my family of origin, friendships, rowing, fly fishing, and academics. While I did not always reap exactly what I had hoped for or expected, in every case the harvest was bountiful beyond my expectations. In one way or another, these things are all still bearing fruit long after I backed off my intensity level.
A number of new things came to me in my mid to late thirties, the things which I now give my all to: being a pastor, being a husband, and being a father. These are my three primary spiritual disciplines, the three parts of my life which I give all of myself to and the three places where I seek and find God most fully.
Marriage. I came to it relatively late in life, because, quite frankly, I had had no place in my life for a wife any earlier. I was too busy pouring my life out into academics, fishing, and my family of origin. My call to seminary had moved all the old things to a lower level of priority which made room for Marie-Laure when she showed up. I chose her and she chose me. And I decided. This is the person to whom I am finally going to give all of myself, not just my worldly goods and my sexual fidelity, but the whole catastrophe: the hopes and dreams, the weaknesses and limitations, understanding, compassion, time and effort. This is the person I am going to entrust with my forgiveness and trust that she will reciprocate. In a word: Love. No holding back. All the way. 24/7, day in day out, as long as we both shall live.
All of you married people out there will know exactly what I mean when I say that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. We all say “I do,” but we really ought to say “I don’t really have to foggiest idea what I am promising right now, but count me in.” I have found that you can’t be a little married. You’re either in or you’re on your way out. The measure you give is the measure you receive. No one is perfect, so there is plenty of work involved. The theologians who describe marriage as a sacrificial offering of oneself to another and both to God are really on to something. You have to give it all away if you want to experience the experience of life which only marriage has to offer.
Fatherhood. Once again, all of you parents out there will know exactly what I mean when I say that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. And that’s a good thing. All the sleepless nights and endless tasks, all the challenges of raising children, the fears and anxieties a parent feels for their child’s well being, happiness, education, and maturation…well, it would be enough for anyone to just take a vow of celibacy and go into the monastery. And yet, and yet, my God…the blessings of it all. Not to wax too prosaic, but being a parent is really getting a second chance to discover life, to see it all again as if for the first time through your child’s eyes. There really is nothing like that hug and kiss those words, “I love you, Daddy.” Hanging in there when the going is tough, hanging in long enough to see the change and feel the world turn and know it is all going to work out. I know we have so much more to look forward to. I also know we have so much more to dread, but I can honestly say that I could die now and say with absolute conviction that I have come face to face with God in the lives of these two little boys. Like it or not, those two little guys demand total sacrifice.
And last but not least, being a pastor in a church. I was called by God to go to seminary for two reasons. The first one is about me: I really, really, really wanted to get to know God and seminary seemed to be the only place where the depth of my longing could be met. Call me an extremist, but anything less didn’t seem to be enough. I didn’t want to just know about God. I wanted to actually experience God, come face to face with God, to feel God walking with me. Tall order, I know, but the second reason is even more preposterous.
Second, and this is where all of you come in, having grown up in the church, having been in several churches, some that were pretty good and others that were not, watching most of my contemporaries walk away from the church through boredom, spiritual starvation, trivial preaching, bad group dynamics, bad theology, uninspired leadership, ineffectiveness, a fundamental disconnect from real life, all talk and no action, and other reasons, watching so many people see church for all the reasons I just mentioned as a very low priority compared with all the other things in their life, hearing folks like me say that God and Jesus were for wimps or fools, I felt called by God to ordination, to offer my life to one church, any church, as it turns out this church, to reverse that trend.
The folks on my search committee might remember reading my mission statement in my profile, but here is a paraphrase for the rest of you: I am going to pour my entire life into a church so that worship is authentic, meaningful, and joyful, like we really are standing in the awesome presence of the living God and not just pretending or going through the motions; where God’s Word is not some dead and boring thing to think about, not some museum artifact we look upon dispassionately, but a living hand that reaches inside our very beings and grabs our hearts; where people really can’t stop themselves from being God’s hands and hearts in the world; where we are not limited by our church-experience-starved imaginations but are blown away by God’s vision of what might yet be; where relationships are nurturing and enriching and not superficial and noncommittal; an authentic, genuine community in the midst of world full of communities which are communities in name only; where we clear away all the processes and rules and traditions, and accretions which have crept in over the years and are now the way we’ve always done, no one knows why, how it got started, or why we keep at it except for the seemingly compelling reason that we always have, and the committees which have bogged down every well meaning bunch of Christians I have ever met, all the inertia nurturing stuff that we find in every church which gets in the way of our living a vibrant and meaningful faith…well you get the picture. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I’m here for. That’s what I am up to every Sunday when I get up here to sing, preach and pray. That’s what I am up to every time I come into a meeting with yet more ideas about how we might clear all the stuff out of our ways. That’s what I am prepared for every time I get together with small groups or pray with someone, every time someone is bold enough to tell me who they really are. I want the church I am in to be the all the people who left the church had hoped for but didn’t find, the church most of us probably do not believe is possible because we’ve never seen one like that before. I want pay back for all the loyalty so many people have given the church over the years when it really wasn’t working for them but they kept coming because they felt that had to do something, payback for all the parents who brought their children to church and made do with what the grown-ups had to offer, for back for all the young people who get all the way to confirmation without being touched by God and then drift away assuming rightly that this adult religion doesn’t work for them. I want to invite every disaffected former Christian, every turned off former church person, every agnostic and atheist I know, particularly my friends who think that I have lost my mind, I want all of those folks here every Sunday morning and have them say, “OK, Max. I see what you’re so fired up about. I get it. I may not be on board, but at least I get it now.” This is God’s altar on which I am offering my life.
Now that I’ve got that off my chest, what about you? We’re all at different places in our spiritual journeys. Most of us are unclear with ourselves what we really expect out of our participation in the faith and fellowship of the Dover Church. But I can tell you this: if you only put a little of yourself into your faith, then that is exactly what you are going to get back. If good enough is good enough for you, then that is exactly what you’ll get, exactly the good enough that so many of our friends and neighbors don’t think is good enough to bother being part of. If you are sitting on the fence with your faith and your participation in our faith and fellowship here, chances are a lot of others all around you are sitting right there with you, like those kids in the old Life cereal advertisement trying to get the little brother Mikey to go first: “Try it. You’ll like it.” The measure you give will be the measure you receive. You will reap what you sow, abundance or scarcity. As Paul put it, “each of you has to give as you have made up your mind, not under or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” (9:7). A church full of people sitting on the fence gets just that, a church sitting on a fence.
It’s another one of those God paradoxes. On the one hand, everything we are and do here is about God. On the other hand, it’s really our choice. God is showering us right now with potential abundance, more than most of can even begin to imagine, dangling the church of our dreams right in front of our noses if you will, and we have to make up our minds if we want to be the good soil which will bear extravagant abundance, or if we want to stay in the weeds, get ground down in the rocks, or just get baked on the road. The truth is, if you jump into this whole God, Jesus and the church adventure, you really have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. But if you don’t get in, then you’ll really never find out.

What about the bad stuff?

2010-11-09T12:24:00.001-05:00

What About the Bad Stuff? The Dover Church
November 7, 2010 –24th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 145, Job 19:23-27a

When I hiked the pilgrim Camino de Santiago de Compostello this summer, I was told: take regular breaks, drink lots of water and eat lots of fruit and nuts, don’t push it too hard on any one day because you’ll have to get up the next day and do it again, and take good care of your feet by changing your socks several times every day and treating blisters before they form. I followed this advice scrupulously, until the third day…when I met Kevin.
I didn’t know Kevin’s name at the time. I only knew him as the smallish, older man with trecking poles in both hands and a big floppy hat on his head, who always seemed to be making extraordinary time. In other words, I noticed him as he went zooming by me. I don’t know how he kept ending up behind me so that he could go zooming by, but there he would be, several times every day, walking briskly by me.
We finally ended up together just as we came to a steep, thousand meter climb out of a river valley. I greeted him in French, to which he responded, “Terribly sorry, mate, but I don’t speak French.” To which I answer, “neither do I, buddy. I’m an American.” With a pleasant smile, he looked me up and down, I was a good foot taller and maybe 60 pounds heavier than him, and said, “That you are, mate. With those great, big, long legs of yours you must just breeze up these hills, eh? What’s say we go on up to the top?” And so we did, in the matter of about half an hour, which is a pretty brisk pace to climb 3000 feet or so with a full pack.
About half way up, I could feel both my feet burning from the incline: blisters. Very bad. I hadn’t stopped to change my socks before starting the climb. Every time I thought about calling a halt, there would be Kevin’s cheerful face, chatting away. I couldn’t let this little Englishman, who had to be at least 65 if was a day, walk me into the ground.
And so, I allowed my ego to get the better of me and I destroyed my feet. I didn’t say a word of my pain to Kevin, but when he saw a goat tangled in a barbed wire fence across a field and said that he was going to go untangle it, I told him that I wanted to have a drink of water, look at the map, and would surely see him down the road. Off he went through the tall grass, while I sat down on a boulder, took off my boots, and found the worst: both feet shredded with blood and blisters, white and gooey like they had been sitting in water overnight. Three toe nails were bruised and would eventually fall off. What was I going to do? I had three more days to walk! I had 15 more miles to go that day! So I aired my feet, drank some water, wrapped the mess in duct tape, put on fresh socks, laced my boots up extra tight, shouldered my pack, and hit the trail. I never did run into Kevin again. I sort of hoped that the goat had got him, but he sent me a delighted e-mail a month ago in which he described the rest of his glorious hike.
That afternoon and the next day were tough: 40 miles on ruined feet. At times, every step sent a jolt of pain up my legs and spine right into the back of my skull. After an hour or so my feet went numb and I made good time, but whenever I stopped and unlaced my boots, it felt like someone was hitting my feet with a hammer. For two days I staggered through some absolutely glorious country called the Aubrac, high plains like Wyoming, New Mexico and Colorado, without the mountains in the back ground, but the view was dulled by my desire to reach my goal, my fear of failure, and the pain.
On the fifth day, I woke up, laced up my boots, and started out. The first few miles were another climb, which really aggravated my destroyed heels. When I got to the top, I was almost in tears. What am I doing? This is supposed to be an adventure, not a nightmare. In the midst of my misery, I missed a turn in the trail and got lost. I ended up tottering along on sheep paths for a couple of hours, knowing I was lost and feeling a little desperate because the countryside was quite deserted, when I came to a village named Puy. The cathedral city I had set out from four and half days earlier was named Le Puy-en-Velay. “Ah! This must be a sign,’ I thought. “THE END! STOP! GO NO FURTHER!” I’m going home. Easier said than done. The nearest main road was an hour’s hike away, and when I arrived there that too seemed deserted. I staggered along until I heard the first car coming my way. Sticking out my thumb, the driver stopped. I put my pack in the back, climbed in, and asked, “CAN YOU TAKE ME TO THE NEAREST BUS STATION?” Actually I didn’t do that. I said it in passable French and man took me.
Watching the entire countryside it had taken me 12 hours to stagger through flash by the window in what seemed like maybe a half an hour, made me feel like a stupid failure and a wimp to boot. Imagine my chagrin at the station when I discovered that walking with only Teva sandals was relatively painless. “Hey! I could just hitch hike back to where I left off and finish the hike.” I decided against it, but ride home on the bus and trains was filled with a mixture of excitement to see my family and knawing frustration, a sense of stupidity, failure and weakness.
My friends, this is a true story. I have not even come close to exaggeration. If anything, I have understated and glossed over the physical and emotional pain I felt. While it is true, it is also a parable about the bad stuff in life, about the bad stuff that happens in our lives. Where is God in all of that? How are we to be thankful when things seem quite bad? How can we have the faith of Job who looks for our Redeemer in the midst of disaster?
Everyone I know has had bad times in their lives: serious setbacks, losses, disappointments, illness, abandonment, death, betrayal. Everyone I know has felt the real sadness, despair, anxiety, and fear which the bad stuff brings with it. Maybe it hasn’t gotten this far for any of you, but I have had times when, if even for the briefest moment, I have thought to myself, “Well, that's it. It's done, finished. Nothing is possible there anymore. I’ve hit a dead end.” Like me in the Aubrac, but with a career, relationships, family, health, the serious stuff.
Have any of you ever tried to connect the dots of how you came back from the bad stuff? Of how you got from that bad place to the good, or least better, place you are in right now? Maybe you are in a bad place right now. Having been in that bad place with all those negative thoughts and feelings, and being now in this better physical and emotional place, how did everything change for you? What was it that enabled you to get out of the hole and get going? Obviously something happened for you in your life if once you were there and now you are here, right?
Here comes to Good News. Having known bad stuff in my that makes a pair of beaten up feet look like kid’s stuff, I now live the
Resurrection. All the bad stuff was not the end of the story. Everything that had seemed bad at the time was indeed bad at the time, but it also turned out to be the beginning of the new and abundant life I love now. If those things had not happened, I would not be the person I am today and I would not have the life I love today. All of the negative thoughts and feelings were appropriate at the time. The losses were real. The old life as I had known and loved it was over. My problem was that I allowed all the bad stuff to define me. I did not let go of it when it's time was past, which kept me from seeing the real opportunities which I am now living. Imagine me going through life thinking I was the stupid, failure of a wimp just because of my ruined feet in France. Yet isn’t it true that we allow other, more significant things, to do just that to us.
God in Jesus Christ sets before each of us and all of us new and abundant life, no matter how bleak and grim the situation might seem. God in Jesus Christ brings life out of death. A faithful life is one that opens to life, all of life, the good and, perhaps most especially, the bad. Why “perhaps most especially, the bad”? Because it is the bad that closes us off from life. It is the bad that makes us give up on life. It is the bad that keeps us regretting the past, tentative with the present, and fearful of the future. It is the bad that puts us in the pot of our negative thoughts and feelings and slow cooks us in our own juices.
No matter where you are, no matter how bad things might seem, no matter how conclusive and overwhelming the bad might seem in any situation, God is in there, offering each of us opportunities to walk forward into new life. You will have your hearts broken in life. If they are broken open to new life rather than just broken to pieces, it will make all the difference. Imagine being Job, able to praise and thank God in the midst of disaster? Our world needs people like that right now. Our community, workplaces and families need people like that right now. Whenever I am reeling from something, I get down on my knees and ask God, “Where is the new life in all of this? Help me stay in this place until you come along and show me the way.”
So what about the bad stuff? It's bad and it hurts. In faith and in time, give thanks for the new life that is sure to spring forth. I can assure you it has made all the difference in my life. Where was the new life in my ruined feet this summer, you might ask? Well, I have so much more to tell you, but I will just say that I am going back to the Aubrac with gentler boots and less ego and pick up where God left off with me. For all of you? Maybe this sermon has been a little bit of new life if it sets something free in you. May it be so. Amen.

Audrey Haynes, has no brains...

2010-11-09T12:22:00.000-05:00

Audrey Haynes, has no brains The Dover Church
October 31, 2010 – All Saints
Scripture: Exodus 3:1-6, 13-15, Revelation 7: 9-17, John 11: 17-27

Grandparents can be unique windows into eternity for children. If you sit and listen to your grandparents stories as I did, you gain an awareness that all of us live in a story which is much larger than ourselves. We are all part of someone else’s stories, as they are part of ours. We are who we are due in large measure to those who have gone before us, all the way back to Adam and Eve in the garden. That realization has made me more reverent of the past, more conscientious towards the future, and more aware of the holiness of everyday life.
One of my earliest memories of my grandmother, Audrey Elizabeth Haynes, is her singing to me: “Audrey Haynes has no brains. Don’t know enough to come in when it rains.” It’s more than 45 years now since I first heard it, but I can still see her face, hear her voice, and smell the cedar closet smell she always had about her. When I was 5 or so and kids at school started teasing me about my name as kids will, Gram’s way of comforting me was to first sing me that little ditty again for the hundredth time and then tell me how the neighborhood kids in South Boston had teased her with that more than 100 years ago now. As she sang that little rhyme for me yet again, she burst into chuckles and then full laughter. All those years later she was still laughing at herself. Being able and willing to laugh at oneself is a healthy and potentially transformative tonic to the challenges of living a life.
The truth is that my grandmother really didn’t know enough to come in when it rained. Gram was not a very good driver. In fact she was a very bad driver. She had always driven Buicks, which were automatics. When VW Beetle appeared, she liked the look of it and bought herself a red one, figuring she’d get the hang of the stick shift. Well, before she got that far crashed her beautiful, brand new VW into a hedge, flipping it over and leaving herself upside down and apparently unconscious inside when the firemen arrived. This was before seat belts were the norm. The story goes that the first fireman poked his head through the shattered window, took a look, and then told his colleagues over his shoulder, “I think the old lady's dead.” At which point, my grandmother opened her eyes and said with great indignity, “I am neither dead nor an old lady, young man. Stop fooling around and get me out of here.” They got her out and to the hospital. When my mother arrived, there was my grandmother, still in a wheelchair in the middle of the emergency room, sitting bruised and bleeding with extensive facial swelling. Gram was appalled. Not planning to get into an accident, Gram had gone out in, of all things, her housecoat, with a kerchief covering her hair, which were in curler. Her housecoat, kerchief and curlers in public! Her first words to my mother were, “Get me out of here, behind a curtain or into one of those examination rooms. Someone will see me.” In the months and years to come we would pass by that hedge, which never fully recovered from my Gram and was eventually torn up and replaced with a stone wall (probably in case my grandmother was still out there somewhere driving). Every time we passed by, one of us would yell out from the back seat, “Tell us the story of your red Volkswagen and the hedge, the fireman and Mum at the hospital.” She would always oblige and we would all laugh together, Gram perhaps loudest of all. That story never lost its appeal on any of us.
No, Gram walked in a lot of rainstorms during her life. After a challenging childhood in which she had a brother in an iron lung in the parlor who died in childhood, among many other things, Gram went on to marry a sea captain, my grandfather, who was away for months at a time. They had four children together, the raising of whom she did alone as he was at sea. When the only work my grandfather could find during the Depression was lighthouse duty, which meant even longer absences, Gram said that they were happy to have it as she and the children had a roof over their heads, food on the table, new clothes to wear, and heat in the furnace during the winter. My grandfather was gone again for four years during the Second World War. In the forty odd years of their married life, they only lived together the last ten or so as far as I can tell. My grandfather came down with melanoma shortly after retirement and they had to leave the beach and move to Jamaica Plain for his treatment. It wasn’t all that long before he was in the hospital for good where he died at 63, leaving her alone yet again.
You would think that so much loneliness and hardship would have broken Gram’s spirit, and maybe it did a bit where I couldn’t see, but I only knew her as a woman who loved life and was determined to enjoy it by getting the most out of every day. Gram took very long walks every day. She loved to sing. That was probably her original attraction to my grandfather who was a gifted musician and had played the piano at the silent movie as his first job before running away to sea. Gram loved to dance, teaching me the jitterbug, rhumba, waltz and fox trot as a young boy. In Plymouth, where the water is really cold even in August, Gram was always the first one swimming, usually before Memorial Day. Her grandfather was an L Street Brownie, so maybe it was genetic. She was always the last one out in the fall, usually on Columbus Day, but sometimes later. Gram swam a very elegant side stroke, always keeping her head, adorned in a succession of bathing caps with plastic scallops or flowers attached, above the water. She loved the ocean and told us we could really feel close to God just sitting there, watching and listening. She taught me that spiritual practice as a little boy and it has remained a touchstone throughout my life.
The word saint brings to mind images of a particularly holy person, certainly not someone who drank, smoked, or laughed at profanity. On those counts, my grandmother was no saint. She loved a dirty joke, smoked when smoking was the fashion and stopped when it wasn't, and liked to have a Manhattan before supper. Yet, for all that, my grandmother taught me a lot about living a spiritual life and about being in relationship with God.
“We're all lower than angels, Max,” she would tell me when I would come home in righteous indignation at something someone had done. Jesus would have said, “judge not, lest ye be judged,” or “remove the beam out of your own eye before you take the sliver out of mine.” Christianity 101, according to Gram.
“What is sin, Gram?” I asked her one day after having some Catholic friends tell me what they had learned in catechism. To be honest, I was more than a little nervous, as the 1st Congregational Church of Shrewsbury was more an “unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ church” than an “unconditional sinfulness of humanity as found in the life of 12 year old Max Olmstead church.” Maybe my altar boy friends knew something I didn't but should. “Well Max,” she said, offering me a box of Russel Stover chocolates which she always had on hand, “now that you're getting older, you’re going to do things which you won’t want to tell your mother or me that you did. Those are probably sins. But more importantly, if you ever feel like you don’t like what see when you take a good, honest look at yourself in the mirror, then you’re probably sinning.” Maybe Augustine or Aquinas said it better, and there are certainly holes in her logic (she left out the enormous capacity we humans have for self deception when looking in the mirror), but that explanation has helped me be pretty honest with myself before God.
My friends and I played basketball every day after school in my backyard. Just the summer before she died, I remember my Gram coming out and asking us if she could join in. Having heard the story of the red VW and the fireman enough, I knew better than to tell her that she was too old to play and my friends were too polite to do so, so I suggested we play a shooting game rather than continuing with 2 on 2, a game like HORSE where the point is to shoot a certain number of baskets in a certain way from a certain place which the others miss, every miss being a letter in the word HORSE.
“Age before beauty?” she asked. “Either way I go first.” Up she stepped and tossed an underhand swish from the foul line. Mine clanked off the front of the rim. “That would be an “H” for you, right Max?” John Taylor's rolled in and out. Same for Richard Houlihan. Chris Rapp's wasn't even close. Then she moved to the corner and dropped another underhand swish. We missed. “That's an “O” now, right?” And so it went, R and then S, until our final miss, E, HORSE, at which point we frankly just stood there with open mouths, wondering what we had just seen. She took the ball from my hands, went back to the foul line and dropped one last underhand swish, smiled and said over her shoulder as she walked back to the house, “South Boston High girls basketball, class of 1920.” I had never known, had had no idea.
I remember the last time I saw my grandmother. She was in the hospital. I was sitting on her bed, holding her hand. My Mum had stepped out of the room as we were talking when I suddenly realized that Gram thought I was her husband. Those of you who know our family will know that some of us look a lot alike. And there she was, Gram, a young woman inside a dying body, talking to her husband as if it were 1920 or 1930. I don’t know why I thought what I thought at the time, but it occurred to me that Gram was crossing over from this life into eternity, going to be with the husband she had missed so much. I didn’t contradict her or interrupt her. I even called her Audrey for the only time in my life, just so that she could enjoy being with my grandfather and I could enjoy being with both of them, if that makes any sense.
She died a couple of days later. It was a Saturday night and I had a basketball game. I wanted to go with my Mum to the hospital, but my mother was her mother’s daughter and said, “you go have a great game, Max. Gram would want that.” So I went. I can’t remember if we won or lost, if I played well or badly, but when I got home my mother was there to tell me that Gram had died in her sleep.
There is much more I could tell you about my grandmother. Even as a little boy I knew that she wasn't perfect, but as a grown man and as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ, I know that she possessed all the qualities we pray for every child at every baptism, the qualities we prayed for Allie Hefter last Sunday: she was filled with joy, never ashamed to confess her faith in God, strong in her life's journey, courageous in her times of suffering, faithful, loving, and hopeful. She also had a great laugh and sense of humor, a sense of humility and proportion before God and neighbor, a firm understanding of the realities of life and how to relate to God in real life, love and commitment to her family and friends, warmth, understanding, compassion, good chocolates, and a great underhand basketball shot. “Audrey Haynes, had no brains, didn't know enough to come in when it rains,” a gift from God. My Gram comes to me both in moments of great joy and possibility and in moments of doubt and fear, and that makes her a saint in my book. Thanks be to God.

What do you expect?

2010-10-26T13:27:00.001-04:00

“What do your expect?” The Dover Church
October 24, 2010 –Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Joel 2:23-32, Luke 18: 9-14

When Dave Melville first called me about a year and a half ago and we started talking about me being your minister and you being my church, it wasn’t long before a sense of excitement and possibility started to wiggle its way up my spine. I thought to myself, “This could be great. Judging from the demographics, that church has to be just brimming with really gifted people who are doing really extraordinary things in their lives. Judging by the cost of real estate in Dover, a lot of the members must be pretty affluent, which means that they can afford to do some great things as a church.” That’s what I thought a year and a half ago.
Now that I have been here a little more than year, many of my preconceived assumptions about you people have been born out. I’m still just getting to know you, but I am pretty impressed by what many of you have achieved in your lives. In business and finance, in engineering and applied technology, in law and politics, in science and medicine, in education and the arts, in academia and research, in athletics and community service, you people are high achievers. Every now and then I will brag to my clergy colleagues that we have two gentlemen in this church who have been knighted by the Queen of England, which is something I imagine very few churches this side of the Atlantic can lay claim to.
I haven’t had time yet to visit all of you in your homes, but the homes I have visited are, without exception, delightful. You folks live well. As your minister I live well in a very pleasant home. You drive nice cars, belong to great fishing, hunting, riding, golf and yacht clubs, have beautiful beach and ski houses, boats and other cool stuff. I always enjoy sharing stories of vacation adventures with you. You seem to have as much, if not more, fun than we do on vacation. You raise impressive children who are being educated to go to impressive colleges and will probably go on to impressive lives. The fruit does not fall far from the tree. One of the reasons Marie-Laure and I came here to Dover was for the educational opportunities for our children.
Some of you may be wondering what’s behind all my flattery. What is he building up to? The pessimists among you might be thinking that I am going to lay the conventional Christian guilt trip on you, about how wealth, success and privilege are somehow bad and you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Having heard the lessons for this morning, you may think that I am about to compare you to the self satisfied Pharisee who has his act together and looks down with contempt on the guilt ridden tax collector beside him at prayer.
And you would be wrong. As I just finished telling you, I came here because of the potential for exciting ministries and missions which churches like ours have. You folks have the talent and the money to make exceptional things happen. I celebrate the lives you have built for yourselves and the pleasure you take from fruits of your labors. Let’s face it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.
I do not see this church as the self satisfied Pharisee in this morning’s lesson. No, believe it or not, in some very fundamental ways I think that, when it comes to being church, our church more closely resembles the tax collector who stands far off with downcast eyes, asking only for God’s mercy.
I know part of this is historical. You folks have had some tough times over the last few years, with declining membership and the resulting erosion of confidence in yourselves as a church. As your pastor, I truly feel for the ways these difficulties have tried your faith and fellowship. I wish I could have been here sooner. But for this morning I am interested in where we are right now and that is a place of low expectations when it comes to ministry and mission possibilities, specifically the money to pay for them. Many times when I am around money conversations in this church, I am struck by the sense of scarcity. Granted, I am exaggerating for dramatic effect, but there is often a palpable sense of futility and hand wringing around money in this church: “Oh God, have mercy on us. Our big givers of the glory days are gone and have not been replaced. Woe is us. What are we to do?” Believe me when I say I have heard this before in other churches, but here? A culture of scarcity in the midst of a culture of abundance? How is it that when I expected to be jumping into the mix with a bunch of hard charging, big dreaming, high achievers who would want to be members of a robust church, I found us struggling to flex our church muscles?
My friends, we have not expected much in the way of financial support in recent years and that is what we have received when compared with the bountiful abundance with which we all live. Not all of you. Some have been consistently very generous, but as a group we are far from our potential. I have done the math and the actual yearly giving potential of this congregation with the members we have right now is, hold onto your seats, two million dollars and change! I’m not asking you for two million dollars, but I want you to begin dreaming about what we might become as a church. It is time to get out of the past and start looking to the future. I want our church to be the church we have not yet dreamt of being. I want our church to be the church I always dreamed of. But most importantly, I want each of us and all of us to actually experience being the church that God dreams of us being. And that all starts with your generous support. Without that, we can’t even get out of the starting blocks.
So here are some dreams that I have. Imagine a church where worship is an awesome experience of the presence of God, inspiring, comforting, challenging….every Sunday. Imagine not just one good choir of 15 but one great choir of 30, a multigenerational choir, or several choirs of different age groups with various instrumental ensembles to help make our worship experience remarkable. No more ho-hum, wishing you hadn’t bothered to come after all Sundays. Imagine having a couple of different services every Sunday so all the folks who can’t be here at 9:30 could dive in at another time.
Imagine our facilities being state of the art. Not flashy of wasteful, but sending a clear message that “this is the temple of the living God”…albeit in subdued New England austerity. Imagine Kraft Hall and our Sunday School rooms looking every bit as delightful and inviting as the Chickering School, or my sons daycare for that matter.
And speaking of Sunday School, imagine having a program children flocked to, actually dragging their parents on Sunday morning. Why? Because it was both fun and spirit nurturing. Ingrid and our Sunday School teachers have worked hard to turn things around, but now it is time to start taxiing down the runway for take-off. Imagine weekday after school opportunities for children which they would want to invite their friends to. Imagine 100 teen agers in our youth programs, learning about God, experiencing God, getting guidance on how to live a good and faithful life, and then living it together in an open and nurturing circle of friends.
Imagine networks of adult friendships in which everyone who comes to be with us has at least a few folks with whom they really feel they are sharing their lives. I have started forming groups to get this going and now Ingrid is charging to, so in a few years this will be a reality. Imagine regular social gatherings, fun events which bring us all together like Rally Day, so fun that we actually prioritize them over all the other things we have to choose from.
Imagine a broad offering of adult faith formation opportunities at which all of us could learn about our faith, explore our experience of faith, and grow in faith. Imagine yoga, workshops on holistic living. Imagine regular retreats, pilgrimages to the Holy Land, a labyrinth on our property.
Imagine offering a number of opportunities for us to live our faith through mission service. I don’t have to supply the dreams here, because a number of you have already shared your dreams with me on this one. We have one couple who want to build a school in Kashmir. We have a bunch of guys who want to go to Haiti to begin building a mission opportunity for all of us. We have a lot of folks who are deeply moved by the plight of the homeless and want so much to do something tangible. IHN is really just the threshold to what we might do. Some of us helped build a Habitat home in Medway and would like to do more of that. We have folks who have personally funded an afterschool literacy programs for underprivileged children. Imagine learning how to connect our faith with the environment or peace and then doing it. I’m sure I am barely scratching the surface, but even with just a scratch you can see what a beehive of enthusiastic mission service we might be if we could just get going.
God’s word for us this morning is about honesty, about daring to be who we really are before God and our neighbor. So let’s be honest. We are not the church we can be. We are not the church God dreams we will be. We are not even daring to try. Since this is about honesty, I can honestly say that I am just the guy to tell you this: “Let’s go. You all know our church can be so much more. I think our giving to the church has been flat because the church hasn’t been all that much to get excited about. Pitching in to keep the old church open, which in itself is not inexpensive these days, is not nearly as energizing as pumping life blood into exciting and transformative ministries. You folks have told me that you enjoy sharing your wealth with organizations that excite you and are making a tangible difference in the world. Well, let’s be that church, exciting and transformational.”
Jesus taught a brilliant lesson about life when he said, “The measure you give will be the measure you receive.” What you put into life will largely determine what you get out of life. As in life, so it is with the church. What do expect out of our church? Give accordingly and you shall receive.

Why bother with Lazarus?

2010-09-30T11:23:00.000-04:00

Why bother with Lazarus? The Dover Church
September 26, 2010 – Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 146, Luke 16: 19-31

I grew up in a nice, quiet New England town where everyone was a lot like my family, which is to say, white, church going, law abiding, and at least reasonably prosperous. While some of us were rich, some of us were middle class, and some of us were working class, the differences were not that noticeable because houses, food, gasoline and seemingly all the necessities of life, even college, were inexpensive.
Because my parents were intensely interested in politics and world events, I realized early on that we lived on an island in the midst of a very turbulent world. This was the late sixties and early seventies, which means that there was Vietnam, civil rights and racial conflict, the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Cold War with the real threat of worldwide nuclear annihilation, repeated wars between the Arabs and Israel, the IRA blowing up bombs in London and the PLO hijacking planes in the Middle East, Patty Hearst of all people robbing banks with some liberation army, the first oil crisis, and Watergate. Because we lived on our island of tranquility and prosperity, these things did not have to touch us very much unless we wanted them to. Most of the people I knew did not want to be touched.
In church, I learned about Jesus. The Jesus I learned about was a lot like us, a nice man who even looked like us in the pictures. He did have long hair and a beard, which none of our fathers had, so he looked sort of like a hippie, but clearly a nice hippie. It seemed to me that our Jesus wanted me to be a good boy, nice, kind, polite, and respectful, sharing with others, not doing anything to others that I wouldn't want them to do to me, and so on. Church, the boy scouts, the YMCA, Little League baseball, public school, they all wanted the same thing for me: to be a good citizen.
Our church sponsored a missionary in India, so we heard about the work we were helping to pay for: building a school and clinic, donating clothing, digging wells, sending over a tractor. I learned about the poor children in Africa and elsewhere, how they were children of God just like us, and how we ought to share with them. Whenever I did not want to eat my spinach or something else my parents thought was both delicious and good for me, but looked gross and tasted worse from where I was sitting, my parents would always say, “there are starving children in Africa who don't have enough to eat. You finish your supper.” To which I wanted to answer, “Why don't we wrap this stuff up while it's still hot and ship it off to them. I am happy to share.” We got our UNICEF boxes and filled them with coins while we filled our Halloween bags with candy. I always thought those African kids would have preferred my Milky Ways to the dyptheria shots my UNICEF money was going to buy. They never did get my spinach or my candy and I think about that. I heard the stories about Jesus caring for the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the sick, the outcasts, the sinners, and so on, sort of like the way my parents cared for my sisters and me, but even nicer than my parents because the people Jesus cared for were strangers who would have been viewed with suspicion in our neighborhood. I clearly understood that I ought to do the same when I got bigger. Caring for these others seemed to be just another rule for me to follow: don't swear, don't hit, don't lie, don't steal, and care for the others.
By the grace of God, I began to want to know God at some point in my mid to late 20s. I say by the grace of God, because any and every inclination anyone ever has to get closer to God is really only God who is putting that inclination there in the first place. God in you desiring God. God in you seeking God. God in you loving God. So I began to feel this inclination and it seemed like a great idea so I acted on it. I started to rearrange my life so that I had time for all the desiring, seeking and loving I felt called to be part of. I started going to church every Sunday. I started reading my Bible every day. I joined an adult Bible study at church. I started learning how to pray in ways other than “Now I lay me down to sleep.” I started going on retreats with folks from church where we prayed and talked with each other about what that was like. And I felt like I was really getting to know God, feeling God in life. Not the distant God in heaven of my childhood. Not the nice, blond haired, blue eyed Jesus of my childhood. No, someone altogether different from those guys.
So there I was, getting into the whole personal holiness thing, but more Sundays than not the scripture lesson would be one of the prophets telling us that God loved the poor and sick; that God wanted peace; that God watched out for the powerless and outcasts; that God would cast the rich and powerful down from their thrones. And there would be Jesus, Sunday after Sunday, a homeless guy himself, healing the sick, feeding the multitudes, hanging out with the prostitutes, tax collectors, foreigners, and other down-and-outers. I don't know why it took so long for it to dawn on me, but I began to notice that all the praying, reading his Bible, or going on retreats Jesus did only got him ready and centered for all this other stuff he did. Clearly this whole caring for the poor, hungry, homeless, hopeless, sick and despised thing was a really big piece of the life with God thing, maybe half of the life with God thing, definitely something I was going to have to try out myself if I really wanted to know God.
So I tried and this is what I came to know about God and Jesus.
First, whenever I am sharing my life with the people Jesus shared his life with, almost the first thing I notice is how trivial my own concerns seem. Here are these people with nothing to eat, nowhere to live, no future to look forward to, and practically no one who cares, and I spend altogether too much of my life worrying about the push and pull of my job, about money for this or money for that, about time for this or time for that, and all the rest, the very things most of us spend most of our time thinking about. Sharing my life with the people Jesus shared his life with takes my mind off of ME. I stop obsessing about MY life and how I am the center of MY world, which, my friends, is exactly where a relationship with God begins: letting go of our own egos and their concerns and opening ourselves to God and what God is doing in and through us and everyone else. When I am in that place, I am open to God. Sharing my life with the people Jesus shared his life with is a great antidote for triviality and self absorption. Wow! Jesus was right!
Second, as my concerns and worries and frustrations and self absorption begin to fall away, the possibility that I can reorder my priorities begins to dawn on me. How many clothes do I need? How much stuff do I need? How much money should I spend on myself for things I don’t really need rather than giving it away to where it is really needed? How do I spend my time? What is important and what is diverting me from my call to be a disciple of Jesus? Once that door is opened even a crack, everything Jesus ever said about money and wealth as stumbling blocks to a life with God takes on a new meaning. He's talking about me and my life! The possibility of a different life begins to feel a lot like a necessity. Wow! Jesus was right again.
Third, whenever I am sharing my life with the people Jesus shared his life with, questions of blame, fault, personal responsibility, and all other kinds of finger pointing seem totally beside the point.
When I am sitting with a man who is shaking uncontrollably because he needs his heroin or alcohol, I could care less how he became addicted or why he can't recover. Right then and right there, the only thing I care about is what I might share of myself, which is often nothing more than a hand to hold.
When I am eating supper with a woman who literally stinks, not because she does not want to bathe but because she has neither a place to bathe nor the clean clothes to put on if she could bathe, I could care less why she is in the situation she is in or why she cannot get herself out of it. Right then and right there, I care about what I might share of myself, which is often nothing more than a little dignity and friendliness.
When I am having a cup of coffee with a man who has disgusting sores on his nose, cheeks and fingers from the cold and I know he will be going back out into that cold again as soon as the coffee is done, I could care less why he forgets to take his medication or seek psychiatric care. Right then and right there, I care about what I might share of myself, which is often nothing more than my interest in our conversation.
What I am trying to say is that sharing my life with the folks Jesus shared his life with blows up my “normal” point of view and priorities. Everything that Jesus ever said is suddenly not only completely true but also completely real. I am living it. The kingdom of God really is right here and right now. The kingdom of God really is in the smallest of things: a cup of coffee, some warm food, a quiet minute to chat, a place to sit down out of the cold, genuine interest. God really is most present in that space separating me from you, us from them. Jesus really is alive somehow in the place where my life meets the lives of these folks. All normal distinctions and divisions melt away as I realize that God really does love all of us more than we can even begin to appreciate. Jesus' images of the heavenly banquet and the shalom of breaking bread with others are real. Paul's talk about the body of Christ not only makes perfect sense, but it seems more desirable than all of the other alternatives most of us live most of the time. And all of it fills me with great joy, which is something else Jesus talks a lot about but which seems to be missing from a lot of religious folks. It's not that I feel good about myself because I am doing good. It's just joy, the movement of the Holy Spirit.
Fourth, I said a minute or so ago that I could care less about why these things happened to these people, but that is only while I am busy holding hands, sharing supper, having a cup of coffee, and chatting. Once I am back home, I cannot help but reflect on the hows and whys. In America we love to argue whether people have to take responsibility for themselves or if the government ought to take more responsibility for the least fortunate in our society. My friends, you won’t often hear me talk about the devil from the pulpit, but this ceaseless and fruitless arguing about government vs. individual responsibility is the devil at work. The devil loves to deflect God’s people from God’s purposes. Endless and inconclusive argument is just a way of avoiding doing what we know God wants done.
What I know, not think now, but know from the experience of sharing my life with the folks Jesus shared his life with, is this: First, like it or not, the main reason there is such misery in the world is because that is the way the world is set up to be. The world is set up by people like me to favor people like me: white, heterosexual, married, men whose parents could afford to give us the best healthcare, education, and opportunities. You may want to debate this, but I prefer to count the heads of the most miserable people in our country and in the world. Who are they? Mostly women and children, non-white, without access to healthcare, education, decent housing, gainful employment, justice or opportunity. This fact is no coincidence. Their parents were not like my parents, so they did not get the life I got and everything else unfolded from there. Like it or not, the deck of life is stacked heavily by folks like us in our favor. Wow! Everything the prophets and Jesus ever said about how God sees things, almost completely the opposite of how the world sees things, how God favors the poor, the hungry, the homeless, the hopeless, the outcasts, is true.
Which leads me to the second thing I know: this truth is a life worth devoting one's life to. Like it not, faith is ultimately political and activist, because you cannot find God in the lives of those whom Jesus shared his life with and not want to try to change the world that creates such misery.
And so, why bother with Lazarus? Quite simply, because that's where God is surely to be found, known and experienced. Prayer, retreats, worship and fellowship are all important, but they are the preparatory work of getting centered in God in Jesus Christ so that we are both willing and able to take the next step. If we really want to experience the love of God, we have to leap over from the gutter outside our gates, the chasm that separates us from Lazarus, who is lying there right now, with stinking sores that the dogs are licking. We know what to do. We just have to believe that Jesus meant what he said and did and go and do likewise. God is waiting for us to show up.

Jesus and George Steinbrenner

2010-07-20T11:26:00.000-04:00

“Jesus and George Steinbrenner” The Dover Church
July 18, 2010 – 8th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Colossians 1:15-28, Luke 10:38-42

My friends, something really big happened this week in the world of sports, specifically in the mythological Gotterdammerung of Red Sox nation. George Steinbrenner, long-time owner of the New York Yankees, the emperor of the Evil Empire, the single most readily identifiable nemesis of Red Sox Nation over the last 40 years…has died.
I myself am not all that much of a Red Sox fanatic, not the way I once was, so I can only claim to be mildly engaged with the story of Mr. Steinbrenner’s passing. I did not shoot off fireworks or light a candle in a shrine someplace this week. I have thought about George and his Yankees and the large shadow he and they have cast over much of my life. I never personally disliked the man, for the simple reason that I never met him. I’m sure he was quite charming at a party. I didn’t even hold his brash behavior and speech, his bullying, his temper tantrums, his seeming egomania, his fist fights with managers and players, against him. With my ingrained New England sense of superiority which looks down on things New York, I just sort of chalked all of that up to being a New Yorker. What else can you expect?
The thing about George Steinbrenner which quite literally ate at my soul for many years was his ability and willingness to spend the money to put together teams that would consistently and thoroughly beat the Red Sox, year after year after year. Anytime a new pitching or hitting phenom emerged somewhere in the major leagues, you just knew it was only a matter of time before Steinbrenner brought them to the Bronx, outbidding the hapless Sox every time. I know it sounds silly, but the ingrained New England sense of superiority which I mentioned a moment ago actually conditioned me to look down in contempt on Mr. Steinbrenner’s payrolls. You can’t hear it, but in my head I am already speaking with the clipped accents of English Public Schools. Bostonians just don’t spend that kind of money on athletes. This is supposed to be a game, a contest, sporting, played in park, not a Stadium, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
So it goes without saying that being down 3 games to none to the Yankees, which felt all too familiar, and then to win the next 4 in the Fall of 2004, which was mindbogglingly unfamiliar, was arguably one of the highpoints of my life. I loved it. I loved that it happened at Yankee Stadium. I loved that the Red Sox with their bad haircuts, messy uniforms, tar spattered helmets, and odd behavior, looked like underdogs compared to the spick and span Bronx Bombers and had still pulled it off. Quite frankly, the 4 game sweep of the Cardinals in the World Series was something of an anticlimax for me. Being all too human, I was glad to turn a blind eye to the fact that the new Red Sox ownership and their deep pockets put that team together. Now we also know that steroids were used on both sides, but we Christians are supposed to be forgiving people. For me it was all the genius of that kid Theo Epstein from Brookline. We finally won!!!
This week I have tuned into some of the commentary about Steinbrenner and his life with the Yankees, the good, the very good, the critical and the comical. I have also been studying theology, in particular reading a book by one of my favorite Biblical theologians, N.T. Wright, called After You Believe. Why Christian Character Matters. Wright is the bishop of Durham in the Church of England. As you can gather from the title, this book is about Christian character and how we go about forming it and being formed by it. A great book, as his many books usually are in my opinion. There I was with Steinbrenner on my mind, the Yankees 5 games ahead in the East at the All Star break, and Wright in my hand, when I came across an intriguing passage, in which Wright discusses the role models of virtue we turn to in our society. He writes, “we have (a)…passion for the heroes and heroines of sport, popular music, and other similar attractions. We expect them to fulfill the role of “celebrity” in being both superhuman in some respects and more or less subhuman in others (in their undisciplined use of drugs, alcohol, fast cars, and sex). They reflect, in fact, an image which is well known to students of the classical world: the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome, who were powerful, dazzling, capricious, licentious, and unusually helpful to people they liked and dangerous to people they didn’t.”
Please believe when I say that I am not a sore loser who is using a pulpit in the heart of Red Sox nation to kick dirt on Mr. Steinbrenner’s grave. Nor am I an uptight, sour grapes Christian preacher, pushing a fundamentalist faith which despises and rejects secular culture. This is baseball after all, which is a game and is supposed to be fun. George Steinbrenner is topical this week and everything about the man is undeniably iconic. Much of the public face of the man, our fascination with and admiration of him, our loathing and fear of him, fits nicely into Wright’s diagnosis. He was larger than life, a living and breathing little Zeus, both superhuman and subhuman. When I said that I looked down on Steinbrenner and his Yankees, that was Bostonian hyposcrisy. The truth is that I envied him and them and resented their negative impact on my life. Even if we pretend otherwise, many of us have a passion for celebrities like Steinbrenner. We want to be like them. We aspire to the glory they live.
And then there’s Jesus. I love the way the lectionary puts these two texts together on this Sunday every third year. The first, an awe inspiring, glorious, mystical, cosmic vision of the Christ. The second, a rather mundane vignette of the man Jesus visiting with two women, one who is busy doing chores and the other who just sits and listens. Why do I love them together like this? Because together they open a window for us into how Jesus the man can open a window into Christ who is God for us. The man who is our pathway into the divine, something we are actually invited to make our daily lived experience. In, through and with Christ, we can transcend both super-humanity and sub-humanity and live into full humanity. That is exciting.
Most people want to be good people and live good lives. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear how we do that or can be certain that we’re on the right track. But what if being good and living a good life are not ends in themselves, but portals to something more? What if being good and living a good life are not ends in themselves, but portals to something more? What if this man Jesus, the travelling rabbi, the earthy teacher of wisdom, the nice man in a real human body living a real human life, the healer, is the doorway into the glorious, exhalted, heavenly, cosmic Christ? This person who wants to take us right into the heart of God? How do we get from the dusty streets of the Galilees of our lives to know the invisible God? How do get from feeling quite far from God to being reconciled with God? How do we get from thinking about God to experiencing the fullness of God? How do we get from a place of ignorance of or doubt about God and life to a place of participatory fellowship with the eternal mystery of God? How do we get from our quite messy lives to lives that are holy and blameless before God? How do we get from a place of feeling broken, drawn in a million directions, worn down, burned out and anxious, to becoming mature, complete, whole in Christ? How do we reach the goal Paul paints for us? How do we get from Martha and Mary’s living room to a direct encounter with the living God?
My friends, it all begins, is sustained by and continues throughout our lives, by following Mary’s example from this morning, listening to Jesus. Just sitting and listening. I know that sounds too simple to be any good, but it is true. It flies right in the face of everything our culture’s many gods and goddesses tempt us with. Listening to Jesus is countercultural. It requires all the Christian virtues of patience, humility, chastity and love to just sit and listen. The people we admire are the ones who do the talking, like George Steinbrenner. And it won’t “work” overnight, or even all that quickly, which is perhaps the most countercultural thing about it. We can’t buy expensive spiritual free agents to win us the championship. We are surrounded by so much noise in our lives, so many competing images to follow, so many different goals to aim for. But if Paul is right, and I believe he is, then communion with Christ is THE GOAL God created us to live into. And the way to begin, the way to stay on track, is to listen. It takes training and practice. You would think it would come naturally, but I had to learn. I have to keep at it. I have to relearn and begin again regularly.
To get from here to there, to live into all the promises, to experience the fullness of God, to become fully human as God intended us to, all ways of expanding on the Christian code words “eternal life,” it all begins and is sustained by listening to Jesus.

The Kingdom of God has come near

2010-07-06T14:54:00.000-04:00

The Kingdom of God has come near The Dover Church
July 4, 2010 – 6th Sunday after Pentecost Scripture: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

The last few weeks have been very un-spiritual for me. I have not noticed the holiness of life and wonder of Creation all that much. I haven’t paused to see where God is in all of it, my life, my work, my family, my community. My days have felt like a long list of tasks to work my way through with far too little time to give anything the respect and attention it deserves. From my rising in the morning to my lying down at night, it has been a blur. Life has seemed very circumstantial, rather than full of meaning, so much so that I lost perspective. In short, I have not seen God or felt God’s presence all that much and that has drained my spirit.
The funny thing about this is that as I was actually writing these words on Friday at 11, in yet another serious rush to get something important done that I had had to put off for all the more most immediates earlier in the week, my wife sent me a text message: “would you like to go for a walk with me?”
“Right now?” I immediately started spirally into more intense anxiety about the still unfinished sermon and the sound of the copy machine running bulletins in the office which would need to be folded and the knowledge that Leo’s camp would get out at 2, which only left me three hours to finish everything.
But then it dawned on me, “Don’t sit here in your office writing a sermon about it, Max. Live it. Right now. Peace be with you. The Kingdom of God has come near.”
Our lives tend to be crazy from sun up to sundown with a million things to do, rushing here and rushing there, balancing competing agendas, trying to love our families, work, take care of our homes, respect ourselves, and maybe fit God in here or there. That’s just how life is these days for most people. So what’s the big deal?
The big deal is that living this way erodes the human spirit and ultimately makes life in communion with God improbable if not impossible. Any of us might be able to pull it off for a while, maybe even for years, but in the end our lives go by and we miss so much, miss the most important thing, which is God’s presence in us, with us, and for us.
In our lesson this morning, Jesus sends out the disciples and tells them to go into the word proclaiming, “Peace be with you. The Kingdom of God has come near.” Perhaps you never thought about being a Christian in this way, but this is what it is really all about. As disciples of Jesus, we are called to go into the world and proclaim “peace be with you. The Kingdom of God has come near.” I do not mean just mindlessly walking about yelling out the words. Sure, you might say the words themselves from time to time, but talk is cheap. Anyone and everyone will see right through the words if the substance of peace and nearness of the holy is not tangibly evident in your demeanor, your interaction with others, the details of your life, and the choices you make. I mean first living it ourselves. Once we are living it so fully that it is just bubbling over, others around us can’t miss it. As ne member of our church put when describing being in the presence of a holy person, “what drug is she on? I want some of that!”
Jesus himself would have used the Hebrew words “Shalom Aleychem,” which is still the Jewish Sabbath greeting. “Peace be with you.” In the Koran, the holy book of Islam, we find the following commandment: “...when you enter a house, greet one another with a greeting from Allâh (i.e. say: As-Salâmu 'Alaikum - peace be on you).” But this peace which Jesus and our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters greet each other with is much more than what we think of when we think of “peace.” Correct me if I am wrong, but when we say the word “peace” we probably are thinking of either the absence of conflict or things just being nice. The Hebrew word shalom means so much more, “may you be “complete, whole, no longer split in pieces, may you be who you could be, the ideal which God hopes for you.” You see what I meant when I described my life over last few weeks? I was none of those things. I was all over the place. I was living out on the periphery. I was not living out of my center which is God in Jesus Christ. I lacked shalom.
Just to let you know what I did about my wife’s invitation to go for a walk in the middle of a busy Friday, I went. Thomas Merton, one of the great teachers of the spiritual life in the 20th century once wrote that “efficiency is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life in our time.” I’m not trying to make excuses for ducking out of work for an hour, but all I can say to Merton is “Amen!”
Which leads me to what I learned from this moment of realization and what I hope you will bring away from this sermon. Once I knew what was wrong with my life, I knew how to go about putting it right. Everyone of us are unique individuals with our own spirituality, practices and ways of being that work for our personality type. One kind of prayer does not fit all. Far too many people these days throw around this word “spirituality” and what they are really talking about is some sort of psychological self-help strategy. It’s hard to see the difference between a handbook on aerobics and one on meditation sometimes, except one gets you sweaty and the other doesn’t.
One of the people I turn to for guidance on the spiritual life is a woman named Joan Chittister. I have never actually met Joan, but she has written a number of very good books which I have read. In one, she writes, “Spirituality is about coming to consciousness of the sacred. It is in that consciousness that perspective comes, that peace comes. It is in that consciousness that a person comes to wholeness.” Ah! There’s that wholeness, that shalom Jesus wishes for us. Consciousness of the sacred is what Jesus was on and that’s what I want a lot of!
For me, the path of coming to that consciousness of the sacred is the practice of silence and contemplation. By silence, I do not mean coming home from work and going out to lie in the hammock with a cold beer and the paper while my wife keeps the kids inside. No. I mean the disciplined practice of silence, of intentionally sitting in silence until all the noise inside my head goes away, until all the voices of ego which tell me what I ought to do, who I ought to be, and what I ought to have, just stop catching my attention and I am alone…with God. In case you are thinking this sounds like a piece of cake, I can tell you that I have been in a monastery in total silence for two whole days and nights before all the noise quieted down, and those two days felt like a serious wrestling match.
As I said, silence may not be your path. You should never try to force things of the spirit. Force is a thing of the ego. But for millennia people who seek consciousness of the sacred have known that silence is the surest way to find God. Last week, when I talked about sharing with you paths towards spiritual maturity, or growing up as I called it, well…this is one of the biggies. You would think that being silent would come naturally, that it wouldn’t be something one would have to be taught or learn, let alone practice. But it is. I am still learning and being taught and practicing, practicing, practicing. Now I would like to start sharing with you.
Why? Because this is who we are supposed to be as the church: people not just conscious of the sacred, but living it. This is who Jesus has sent us out to be in the world. We are here to demonstrate peace and the nearness of the kingdom of God in our individual lives and in our communal life as the church. We, the people of the Dover Church, are really a mission outpost in our community, an outpost of peace, an outpost where the nearness of the Kingdom of God is tangible to our community full of people whose lives are normally like mine was these past weeks, stressed out, fragmented, rushed and a little rough. Do the hundreds of people who pass by our church everyday see it? Feel it? Is here somehow different from out there? How do we proclaim and live peace? Are we consistent and believable agents of peace and the kingdom? In our homes and neighborhoods? At work? Wherever we are in our lives? Can others see it, feel it, sense it in our presence? Do they receive peace? Do they recognize the presence of the kingdom of God?
“The harvest is indeed plentiful, but the laborers are few. Let us pray to the Lord of the harvest that he might send laborers out into the harvest, that we might be those laborers.” I am talking about a whole different way of being church, in-soul, in-between, in-house, and in-the-world. Margaret Meade once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” That's us, or who Christ calls us to become. This is not just rhetoric or homiletics.
Just to finish my story about taking a break to walk with Marie-Laure, she came by to get me and we took off. Well…not quite. As I locked the door, I remembered that I had to leave Kraft Hall open for a group of students. So I went back to unlock that door. Then I thought I ought to bring my phone, just in case the students couldn’t figure out which door was open while we were walking. So I went back to my office to get my cell phone, which started to frustrate Marie-Laure. Finally we were power walking down Springdale towards Main Street, planning to walk around the block, Springdale to Main to Haven to Dedham and back to the church. And then, my phone rang. “Hello?” “Hi, Mr. Olmstead?” “Yes.” “This is the Dover Rec Department calling. We have Leo here. Camp ended at 12 because of the holiday weekend.” “Oh my God! I’ll be right there to get him. Sorry.” And so we went back to the church to get the car and went to pick-up our son. Was I angry or frustrated? No! I was laughing. God was telling me to not take myself too seriously, not to get on my high horse with this sermon. Laughing at oneself is also good spirituality! And for the first time in a few weeks, I was returning to a consciousness of the sacred and I was able to write this sermon. Oh, by the way, it turned out that I had the date wrong for the students. They aren’t coming until tomorrow. I didn’t need the phone for their call. It was my son’s call I needed it for. “Peace be with you. The Kingdom of God had come near.”

What are you doing, pilgrim?

2010-07-01T14:55:00.000-04:00

What are you doing, Pilgrim? The Dover Church
June 27, 2010– 5th Sunday after Pentecost Scripture: Luke 9: 51-62
Today is my 47th birthday and I have an announcement to make. I find that I have become my father. Raising two energetic young boys, I hear myself bursting out more often than I care to count with that time worn fatherly question: “what are you doing?” Silly question, I know. We both know, the boys and I, what they are doing. The real question is not what? But why? I know that before too much longer I will become even more like my father and begin bursting out with “what do you think you're doing?” or just “what were you thinking?”…if I catch them after the fact, because, of course, neither the deed itself nor the perpetrator, is really in question. It is the motivation and thought process that is troubling. And yes, I know, by asking that question I will be giving them altogether too much credit for having thought through whatever it is they have been doing. Although it has been more than 30 years now, I can remember how I myself thought I had turned the tables on my own father as he fumed “what were you thinking?” with my wise acre teenage response: “Isn't it obvious, Dad. I wasn't thinking.” So I have all of that to look forward to.
But we’re not here to talk about raising kids this morning. No, we’re here to give some thought to what we are doing with our lives, what we think we are doing with our lives. At least that’s what our Gospel would ask us to think about. It is a story about intentionality and decision, about setting out, or not.
We ministers tend to talk about life as a spiritual pilgrimage, with ourselves as pilgrims seeking God and following Jesus. It is a pretty apt way of looking at being a Christian. For one thing, Jesus is walking down the road in our lesson this morning. You might have noticed that Jesus always seems to be going from one place to another most of the time in the Gospels. So following Jesus is sort of hitting the spiritual highway, except for the interesting paradox that following Jesus is both the path and the destination, which can be a little confusing for folks like us who tend to think linearly about a beginning, middle and end.
“Wait a minute,” you might say. “Nothing happened in the stories. The village rejected Jesus and those guys by the road made excuses and didn't follow. How is that a pilgrimage? Don't you have to go from one place to another to be a pilgrim?”
Well, let's not be so hasty to pass judgment. Just imagine for a moment that Jesus came to Dover, proclaiming the kingdom of God, calling us to repentance from our failed ways and inviting us into God's promise of new life, forgiving us all our halfhearted and failed attempts and offering a new beginning in relations with God and neighbors. What would happen? Well, not to be too facetious, but I bet that most of us would be busy doing something and miss him. We’d find out about it though the next Thursday in the local paper’s Police Report: “Friday, June 25, 5:30 PM. Unwanted solicitor reported on Centre Street. Police responded and drove the man to Needham.”
We’re here in church, though, so that’s not really us. Our neighbors maybe, but not us. No. Most of us may be more like the next three men Jesus meets. Take the first man whom Jesus invites to follow him. He is very enthusiastic initially, “I'll follow you wherever you go,” but when Jesus spells out the challenges of being a disciple, we don't hear another word out of this man. Well, of course. He has a settled life where he is, all of which he likes. Just like us. Becoming a vagrant doesn't sound all that appealing, to him or to us, even if we would get to hang out with Jesus. Then we’d be the ones sitting in the back of the cruiser being driven to Needham.
Or how about the second man? This man seems willing, but first he has to go bury his father. Well, of course. That's an important responsibility, a demonstration of love and respect. Any of us would have begged off if we were in that man's shoes. Can you imagine how much psychiatric care we’d need down the road if we just left our fathers in the funeral home and took off with Jesus?
Or how about the third man? He too seems willing, but wants to go home first and say goodbye to everyone there. Well, of course. To leave without saying goodbye would be hurtful, without wrapping up any unfinished business like putting unpaid bills in the mail would be irresponsible. This man is a sensible person, just like us.
Martin Luther described the truth of the scriptures as de te loqitur, “It's talking to you.” Did these encounters actually happen? I say “yes,” or at least encounters a lot like these. But their real truth lies in how they speak to us. We know ourselves in these stories. We know ourselves and God in these stories. What would we do if we were these men? Just think for a moment of all the things that would keep you from following Jesus, were you to be out in your front yard, working in the garden say, and up walked Jesus. If Jesus really looked like he does in any of the movies, you’d probably try to get the kids in the house and let out the dog if you happen to have a big angry one. Jokes aside, if you're like me, a very long list of all the reasons why not would begin forming in your mind, growing longer every minute you didn't just go and follow.
Once again, facetiousness aside, there actually is one thing more than any other which I think stands in our way. It’s our way of being church. I don’t know why, but at some point the New England Congregational Church stopped teaching people how to grow up in faith. If you want to become a dancer, you take dance classes. If you want to fly planes, you take classes. If you want to accumulate assets, your investment advisor tells you how to go about it. But with the spiritual life in churches like ours we have gone out of our way to put people off the path. It has always been sort of “come to church, join, raise your kids, serve a committee, pledge, have weddings, baptisms, funerals, end of story.” How is that following Jesus? How is that going to get you moving down the spiritual highway of your life? It’s not really. It’s going to church!
Eugene Peterson, a retired pastor and scholar, and brilliant writer whom I greatly admired, puts it this way: “The whole point of life is to grow up.” Our kids really are on to something when they go on and on about what they’re going to do when they grow up. That is the whole point, growing up. We know that’s true. When we think about our own growing up we think about going off to college, getting a job, finding a partner, having kids, buying a home, building a career, saving money, accumulating assets, and doing some of the things we always wanted to with our lives. We know people who are really grown up in this way, guys who have their own real estate empires in NY, a TV show in which they get to fire people, their own beauty pageant, and yet it’s obvious they still haven’t grown up. We all know people who have grown up so much that they have become the best linebacker in the history of the game, made millions of dollars, are idolized by sports fans young and old, but who end up broke, divorced and in prison because they never grew up. Not to go overboard, but we know the same things about ourselves. In some ways we are really grown up, but in others, the really important aspect of spiritual growth perhaps more than any other, we are still little boys and girls. How could it be otherwise? No one ever taught us how to grow up.
I noticed this at some point in my life of going to church. I began to wonder why nothing was happening, why I didn’t seem to be getting any closer to the ultimate goal of our faith and life, what the Apostle Paul called “the resurrection,” or “the new creation,” or “God himself.” God was not becoming “all in all” for me, in me, or through me (1 Cor. 15:28). I did not feel as if I was reflecting the divine image all that much, let alone fully and completely, not from God into the world and not from the world back to God. I didn’t even know that’s what following Jesus was all about when I started wondering. I still thought it was about “going to church,” which is an important part but only a part. Noticing the lack and desiring the goal, I set about finding teachers who might show me how I might start heading down that road and keep on keeping on. As your pastor, I am the one who is supposed to be teaching you. I myself have a long way to go. In many ways, I am still an infant. But I do at least ask myself the question: “what are you doing?” or “what do you think you are doing?” Where are you on your pilgrimage? Do you want to step forward? What is it that’s holding you back? If you’d like to some help…well, that’s what I’m here for. In every other part of our lives we are taught the steps towards maturity and have clear metrics to measure our progress. The same thing exists for the spiritual life. It’s just that no one ever told us. It’s not linear, but then neither is the stock market. This fall I am going to start teaching those of you feel called how to go about following Jesus. Call them courses in spiritual growth. Or just growing up. We can help each other grow up in faith. That’s what being the church is supposed to be all about!

The Church and Politics

2010-06-22T08:26:00.001-04:00

“The Church and Politics” or
“How the Preacher oughta stay out of politics and stick to the Gospel”
June 20, 2010 –4th Sunday after Pentecost
Scripture: Psalm 42, 1 Kings 19:1-15

Three weeks ago we had our Memorial Day Observances here in town. As one of the local ministers, I had been asked to say a prayer. Before things got underway, I was sitting up front in the bright sunlight with Lucas on my lap, dressed in my minister’s suit and feeling a little out of place with my three colleagues in black with collars, when I saw Peter DeSanto, the pastor of Grace Church, helping an elderly man into a seat where the other veterans and fire fighters were going to be seated.
The old man was wearing a Marine Corp garrison cap, a sort of tent-like fore and aft cap, and a dungaree blouse with USMC printed on the front pocket, both cap and blouse faded with age. Peter introduced me to the man as a survivor of the Battle of Iwo Jima. I had just finished reading William Manchester’s biography of being a Marine in the South Pacific, so I was moved to meet someone who had lived through something that horrific. I stuck out my hand and introduced myself, “I’m Max Olmstead, pastor at the Dover Church.”
That got his attention. His bright blue eyes flashed behind his glasses as he exclaimed, “The Dover Church! I went to the Dover Church all my life until 1966. The minister started in on Vietnam and I went out the door and have never been back.” Exclamation point!
So there I was, shaking this old Marine’s hand, smiling, and living the paradox many ministers find themselves in on a regular basis, the paradox of being a preacher of the ideal toward which our faith points us and being a pastor. In my head I was thinking, “1966? That must have been Dean Clarke. Wow, Dean started early on Vietnam! Most ministers didn’t touch that hot poker until 1968 or 1969, if they touched it at all.” I privately admired Dean Clarke for the courage of his convictions. At the same time, I was shaking this old Marine’s hand and saying with absolute sincerity, “thank you for your service.” I would have sincerely said the same thing to any veteran, even though I am opposed to war as an article of my faith. That’s the paradox!
Having sacrificed so much, watching his comrades be maimed in terrible ways and die in huge numbers, having to kill, having to offer his life to repel the real threat of worldwide fascism, I knew that arguing the qualitative and historical differences of Imperial Japan and North Vietnam would feel like I was kicking this old Marine’s most intense lived experience. Once you have offered everything, that sort of argument seems somehow beside the point compared to the valor and sacrifice of the men and women who served and died in Vietnam, or anywhere else for that matter. We’ve been there. We know. The pastor doesn’t.
The same can be said for any theological discussion which challenges the parts of our life in which we are heavily invested. We do not want to have our way of life, our standard of living, our political convictions, our religious beliefs and practices, anything we hold dear, held up as faulty in light of God’s intention for us. And yet, what are we to do with prophets like Elijah? What are we to do with Jesus? Are we just going to skip over the real challenges, the hard places where the chasm separating God’s hopes for us and how things really are right now is glaringly inescapable? To do so would be to avoid salvation, the way into new life that God offers us. I sincerely believe, and you can correct me if I am wrong after worship, that people want to hear preaching that speaks to the really important issues in their lives, the places that are challenging and anxiety provoking, the places where there are no easy answers. I know that people come to church for comfort and affirmation and that’s fine. If that’s all we were to do, however, avoiding issues of ultimate concern, we would ultimately be left without any comfort when the hard places become unavoidable. I believe that people sincerely want a faith that helps them make decisions, choose life paths, discern between right and wrong, good and evil. This really is a matter of life and death. Of course it’s going to be upsetting and uncomfortable. Of course we’re going to feel judged, all of us, myself included. How else can we feel, when we hold up the stark contrast between God’s intention and our individual and communal reality under the bright light of scrutiny? There’s that paradox again. On the one hand, we want to know the truth. On the other hand, we know it’s going to be upsetting. Like it or not, standing before the living God is like being in the shoes of the lifelong smoker with a chronically sore throat sitting in the doctor’s office.
In case you were wondering, I am not going to actually jump into any political question this morning. Rather I would like to invite you into dialogue with me. I’d like to begin finding out if we want our church to be a place where the difficult questions of our real individual and communal lives are examined in light of the Gospel? It’s going to require honesty on both sides.
So let me begin by being honest with you about what I think Jesus and the prophets and being the church is all about. This past week I read the most amazing book by a French Christian scholar and activist of the last century named Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom. I always love books that spell out something I know is true but which I have struggled with either through ignorance of spiritual cowardice, books that challenge me in ways I know I need to be challenged. Ellul did that for me this week, reminding me that our faith is our way of looking at the world that is totally non-partisan, not liberal or conservative, but Christian, which is another way of saying totally critical of just about everything and everyone, especially ourselves as believers. Not critical for criticism’s sake, but critical like that doctor of the smoker I mentioned a minute ago, critical of that which causes disease and leads to death, so that we might, by the grace of God, be moved to move ourselves and our world towards new and more healthy life.
Ellul basically restates Jesus, Paul, the whole Bible for that matter, in modern terms, when he writes, “The first great fact that emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end; we do not know whither we are going.” I know that would have resonated with Elijah in the 9th century BCE and it certainly resonates with my own experience of modern life. Ellul argues that our civilization has substituted “means” for “ends.” Things like productivity, prosperity, efficiency, usefulness, technology, information, the state, government are no longer means towards an end, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but ends in themselves. We produce more and more for the sake of producing more and more. We create prosperity to create more prosperity. We use technology to create more technology. We become more efficient to be able to become more efficient. Information creates more information. The government creates more government. And so on. The whole things runs itself for itself without any clear end in sight. If anyone is actually calling the shots, we don’t know who that might be. Even the President of the United States seems helpless at times. Ellul argues, and I agree, that we have enslaved ourselves to our means and the whole mess is leading us to destruction. We are caught in webs of madness which we have been lead to believe are rational progress.
Enter Elijah to show us the way. Along with Muslims and Jews, we Christians know that the end towards toward which all things are working is only God. All the means we create are only good insofar as they lead us to God. As Christians, we would expand on that a bit and say, “the Kingdom of God as proclaimed and lived by Jesus Christ.” We know, in Scripture, what Jesus said and did, how he lived, why he died, and that he rose again. We are called to both live that and proclaim it to our world which had lost its way. You’ve heard it before, I know. You are the salt of the world, the light of the world, the leaven. We are here to first be reminded ourselves and then to proclaim to the world the Kingdom of God.
The question we have to be clear on is simple: do we want to be cured and be the cure? My hope is that we could become the church where all of us old Marines, myself included, could feel safe enough to face the things we do not want to think about, knowing that they are the very real things standing between each of us and all of us and the living God. My hope is that someone might ask any of us one day, “where do you go to church?” “The Dover Church.” “The Dover Church? The edgy church? You’re the church that deals with really divisive issues! What’s that like? Don’t people get mad and leave?” “Sure, we all get a little upset from time to time, but we decided that we really wanted to listen honestly to God and learn the truth so that we can live the truth in our world.”

Practicing Resurrection

2010-04-30T10:27:00.000-04:00

“Practicing Resurrection” The Dover Church
April 25, 2010 –4th Sunday after Easter Scripture: Psalm 23, Acts 9:36-43
When I read the Bible, I seek truth, truth that I can touch and know, truth that I can live my life by. I seek a truth, a vision which draws me into life. I seek truth, which empowers and inspires me to strive on.
With that in mind, what are we to make of this morning’s lesson, the story of Peter restoring Tabitha to life, bringing her from death into life? Where is the truth in this story? Where is the truth we can touch and know? Where is the truth we can live our lives by? Where is the vision of something more to which we can inspire? Which will empower us to not just dream, but to do?
Maybe if I were a Biblical literalist, someone who believed that every word in the Bible was exactly and factually true, believing that Peter actually did what the story said he did wouldn’t be a big leap for me. But I am not a Biblical literalist. I do believe that some things in the Bible are factually true. I also find a lot of things confusing at first glance, but that doesn’t bother me. Why? Because I know that most of the confusion is just the efforts of ordinary people just like you and me to put the indescribable experience of the living God into words. As someone who tries to do just this every week in a sermon, I know just how confusing and difficult that can be. And finally, I know that many things in the Bible were meant metaphorically. They are invitations to engage with a larger truth, so see what we think of as reality with new eyes. Jesus himself taught in parables, stories which weren’t factually true but which brought the listener to a realization of some deeper truth.
When I come face to face with something confusing or perhaps metaphorical in the Bible, something I doubt the factual truth of, I do not abandon hope and write it off or try to ignore it. No. I take a step back and return to what I know about God, who God is and what God does. Then I return to the story and reread it in that light.
So what do we know about who God is and what God does? From the first pages of Genesis, through the Exodus, into Israel, and in the mouths of the prophets, our God is a God who brings something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death. This is who God is. This is what God does. In Jesus, we see the exact same thing. In story after story in the Gospels, this is who God in Jesus Christ is. This is what God in Jesus Christ does. And in the Newer Testament stories of Paul’s churches and in The Acts of the Apostles, this is who God the Holy Spirit is. This is what God the Holy Spirit does. This is who we are to be as the church, believers in God, disciples of Jesus, filled and lead by the Holy Spirit. This is what we are to do: bring something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death. Not us alone, but God in and through us.
With that in mind, I know this story of Peter and Tabitha is true, something I can know and touch, a vision to live into, something to empower and inspire me. Why? Because I had seen something brought out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death over and over again in the mission work of the churches I have been part of: shelter for homeless people, casseroles for women in Boston, dinners for elderly people in town, children taught to read, children taught about Jesus and how to pray, money given for Haiti, tsunami, earthquake and hurricane relief, scholarships established, animals bought for Heifer, Habitat for Humanity homes built, letters written to legislators, hospital or homebound people visited, prisoners visited, orphaned or impoverished children from Uganda to Arizona sponsored, all the stories we see every week in the mission inserts from UCC churches around the country.
The last two weeks have been powerful for me. I understand that Greg Mortenson has been to Dover to talk about his school building efforts in Pakistan and Afghanistan, but I finally got around to reading his books Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools. When I read his stories, I saw someone bringing something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death. A lost and seriously ill mountain climber who made a promise to a village in Pakistan who cared for him, a promise to build a school for their kids. A promise that lead him to build over 130 schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan. A guy with no life ambition, no money, no training, no natural ability, limited organizational or time management skills, who just walked into places with hope and helped build just that, hope. A promise that brought together Christians and Muslims, Americans and former mujahedeen and Taliban, Muslims who saw each other as heretics, Sunnis, Shiites, Ismailis, liberal Americans with conservative Pakistani mullahs, school children in Dover and school less children in the Hindu Kush. A promise that survived heartbreaking loss, earthquake, war and violence and flourished. A promise that raised lots of money, sometimes in big chunks from wealthy donors and often in the form of pennies from children. A promise that brought building materials over insurmountable obstacles and put them in the hands of people who wanted a future for their children and their community. As I read page after page, my very soul was on fire with delight. Something like this is worth living a life around. Something like this is worth being the church about. This is exactly what God calls us to be and do, in Christian terms, practicing Resurrection: bringing something out of nothing, possibility out of impossibility, life out of death.
In the final pages of Stones into Schools, Mortenson describes the lesson of the school built in the most remote part of Afghanistan which took him 11 years to see from promise to completion, a promise he himself made to a bunch of Kirghiz horsemen who rode over the mountains to find him and ask for his help, but a completion he was unable to be part of due to repeated personal setbacks and illness: “Thanks to what the Kirghiz managed to pull off, no citizen of Afghanistan can now look toward the High Pamir without pondering the legend of the ragged company of horsemen who rode over a chain of mountains in search of someone who could build them a school – and who winded up fulfilling the promise that they had been given by finishing that school with their own hands.
Today that legend is inscribed on the stones that were used to build the walls of the school, and as the water falls out of the sky and over those stones, the words of the legend are carried down from the mountains and into the fields and gardens and orchards of Afghanistan. And as the water and the words rush past, who can fail to turn to his neighbor and whisper, with humility and awe – if this is what the weakest, the least valued, the most neglected among us are capable of achieving, truly is there anything we cannot do?
Despite everything that has befallen us, do we not continue to hold the destiny of this shattered and magnificent nation, together with the future of all our children – girls and boys alike – in the palm of our hands?
And knowing all of this, is it not time to reclaim the things that have been taken from us?
The answer to those questions reveals the power that a legend can wield – and no one is haunted by this truth more profoundly or with greater anguish, perhaps, than those to whom the privileges of education and literacy have been denied.
If I could somehow have found a way to share the story of the tiny four-room schoolhouse that was nailed together upon the Roof of the World with my old mentor and friend, Haji Ali - a man who never learned to read or write, and who now lies in his grave under the apricot trees next to the barley fields of Korphe – I believe he would have nodded with approval.
He was a man who understood the virtue of small things” (pp. 378-79).

"So, friends, every day do something that won't compute...Give your approval to all you cannot understand...Ask the questions that have no answers. Put your faith in two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years...Laugh. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts....Practice resurrection." — Wendell Berry (The Country of Marriage)

A Way Forward

2010-04-30T10:26:00.000-04:00

A Way Forward The Dover Church
April 18, 2010– 3rd Sunday after Easter Scripture: Acts 9:1-20

In my opinion, the only person more misunderstood by Christians than Jesus is the Apostle Paul. In these days of 12-15 minute sermons, it is difficult for a preacher to convey just how important Paul is for understanding Christian discipleship and living a vibrant and meaningful relationship with God. Paul requires a lot of cultural explanation and is rarely easy to categorize. In the good old days of 1-2 hour sermons we could dive right in, but luckily those days are past.
Of all the things there are to know about Paul, there seem to be two things that most Christians and even non-Christians think they know, both of which are usually misunderstood. First, there’s the story of Paul’s conversion which we heard this morning. Lots of people use the phrase “A Road to Damascus experience” to describe a sudden eye-opening and completely life changing moment. The problem is that that is not what happened to Paul on the Damascus road. He had an eye closing life changing experience that took him years to get a grip on.
The second thing everyone knows is what they have heard at weddings, Paul’s words about love in his first letter to the church in the Greek city of Corinth. So people think that Christianity is all about feeling the way we felt on our wedding days, all warm and fuzzy. Except Paul wasn’t writing to couples in love. Paul was writing to a church in conflict, people in serious disagreement. This is how you work out your irreconcilable differences over the long haul.
The really important question is this: “how in God’s name did the angry, even murderous, Paul on the Damascus road get to his love song to the Corinthians?” That, my friends, is THE QUESTION, because in learning the answer we can learn the Christian way forward and how to actually walk it. Paul came an enormous spiritual distance in his long walk with Jesus. Every journey, as they say, starts with that first step, so let’s start with Paul’s first step, the divinely applied kick in the seat of the pants which Paul needed to get him started. That’s a perfect image for me, because that’s exactly what most of us need to get started: God’s boot in our backside.
So how did Paul come to be on the Damascus Road in the first place? Paul first appears under his pre-baptismal name of Saul in the Acts of the Apostles, helping out at the stoning death of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, in Jerusalem. It’s a short reference: “Then they dragged Stephen out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died. And Saul approved of their killing him” (Acts 7:58-8:1). For those of you who have read Khalid Husseini’s books about contemporary Afghanistan, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the future St. Paul sounds a lot like a Taliban fanatic.
Paul never knew Jesus before the Crucifixion, but he hated the disciples after the Resurrection. Why? For the simple reason that they were, in Paul’s opinion, getting Judaism all wrong and leading people away from the right path, which is to say, Paul’s path. Being very devout, Paul took it upon himself to crush this non-conformist Jewish sect. He was the scourge of the disciples in Jerusalem and, as we have just heard, had now turned his attention further afield to Damascus. Going down that road with arrest warrants in his purse, filled with certitude and rectitude, Paul had no idea how seriously stuck he was. Paul thought he had found a way forward towards God. His plan made sense to him and many others like him. It fit into everything he knew about God and being a faithful person. But he was stuck, so stuck that he didn’t even realize how stuck he was. If we were to have asked him, “Paul, are you stuck? Going the wrong way? Perhaps mistaken?” I am pretty sure that Paul would have thought we were either stupid or insane.
Now isn’t that how life is? How our lives can be? How our lives have been? How our lives maybe are right now? We think we are on a way forward, maybe even the way forward into or towards God, when really we are just stuck, going around in circles, going the wrong way, banging our heads against a wall, just plain lost.
The problem for most us most of the time is simple. We allow our lives to live us, doing what we think we ought to do and have to do, trying to work hard and be smart enough to take care of ourselves and our families. That’s what we know and are familiar with. That’s how everyone else’s life seems to be, so that’s what we do too. Maybe God and something more isn’t even on our radar screens all that much. Yet in all the conversations I have had with people about faith over the years, it always seems to come down to one thing: a feeling that somehow something is missing, that there has to be something more, that time is going by too fast, that some deeper and richer and more beautiful meaning, some transcendent purpose is out there and they are missing out on it.
Which is where the divine kick in the seat of the pants comes in. This is what it often takes to get us moving. This is what it took to shake Paul up enough to get him out of the familiar, the voice out of the sky: “Paul, what are you doing?”
Paul had two very important things going for him. First, he really loved God. Second, he really wanted to get his relationship with God right. Those are two enormously helpful starting points. Jesus took Paul’s burning love of God and used it to take Paul in the exact opposite direction he had been heading. If Paul hadn’t loved God so much, he would have never gone to the places he didn’t want to go and to the people he didn’t want to know. Without that desire for God, Paul would have never allowed himself to be taken so completely out of his comfort zone. But he did, and out there he learned how to live the love he wrote of to the Corinthians in ways he never even imagined. Out there, Paul found the God he loved so much and lived the relationship he desired so deeply.
What does that have to do with us? Like Paul, God in Jesus Christ offers us a way forward into love of God, neighbor, and ourselves. What I have learned, just like Paul, is that way forward is never the easy path, the path we want to take. In fact, it is usually the exact opposite. What’s more, it is never quick or easy. After this episode in his life, Paul spent three years in the Arabian dessert getting the hang of it. Then he spent the rest of his life working out the implications of it all. In other words, there is no quick fix to really knowing and loving God.
So why bother? Why want to get unstuck? Well, for one thing, there’s God to get to know. I have come to know that I can only really know myself and others and love myself and others and be happy in my life to the extent that I know and love God. That is enormously motivational for me.
And there’s something else. As I have grown in this way I have come to look at the world around me in a very different way. It used to be that all the stuck places in our world used to really burn me up. All the stuff with Israel and Palestine, racial conflicts, gender conflicts, fundamentalists and progressives, liberals and conservatives, consumers and environmentalists, you name it, used to just get me angry, scared, frustrated, and confused. They repelled me. Now I know they are invitations for me to walk into, bringing my little energy of love. Jesus came to save us so that we might save the world. Jesus offered us a way forward so that we might shape a way forward for all creation.
Let me give you an analogy. How many of you have practiced yoga? How many of you do some sort of exercise for your cardio-vascular health? The whole point is to go right up to your yoga edge, the place that is tight and hurts, and hold it. That’s where the openness and lightness is to be found. The whole point is to get right to the point where your muscles burn and your breath is heavy and stay there. That’s where the health is.
And the same is true for the spiritual life. There is truly a way forward. Look at your lives. Where are the places, spiritual and emotional, where you really do not want to go in your lives? Who are the people you do not want to love? What are things you cannot imagine yourself wanting to do? These, my friends, are the guideposts to your first steps into God. If you feel yourself getting angry or uncomfortable or wanting to tell me what an idiot I am, then you know you are right at the threshold. I’ve been there. I know. It’s going to feel like the Crucifixion at first but the Resurrection really is on the other side. Like I said, usually it takes a kick in the seat of the pants to get going. Hopefully this sermon was a little nudge, first for each of us as individuals, then for all of us as a church, and finally for all of us as the church for the world.

Me? I really am just the gardener

2010-04-06T13:20:00.000-04:00

Easter Sermon The Dover Church
April 4, 2010– Easter Sunday Scripture: John 20:1-18

How about a Resurrection story this morning?
How many of you were here in 1957 when Kraft Hall was built? For that matter, how many of you were in other churches in 1957? You remember how it was back then in the good old days: full churches with two services every Sunday and more added for Christmas and Easter, two and even three choirs, one for adults, one for high school youth, and one for children, ever expanding budgets for building Sunday School facilities which were full to the brim of children. I paint the picture because most people 40 and younger never knew what church was like back then.
In 1957, the United Church of Christ was formed as a national denomination and the Dover Church joined by the early 1960s. The UCC had 3 million members nationwide in 1957. Now there are 1.2 million. The median age of our members gradually got older and older. Budgets plummeted. Staff was cut. Churches left the denomination. Many local churches closed. Many more struggle to just stay afloat.
Even during the decade of 1967 to 1977 when I was in Sunday School, church was still rolling right along as I described it in 1957. The Blue Laws had not yet been repealed here in Massachusetts, so there was nothing else to do on Sunday mornings except go to church. We had a captive audience, if you will. I grew up in a neighborhood where the pillars of Worcester society lived, all the leaders of finance, industry, commerce, law, medicine and politics. Every Friday night we would see our Jewish neighbors get in their cars and drive off to Temple. Every Saturday night we would see many of our Catholic neighbors get in their cars and drive off to Mass. And every Sunday morning, our Jewish and Saturday night Catholic neighbors would wave from their front lawns to the rest of us Catholics and Protestants as we got in our cars and drove off to church. I cannot remember one family on my street who did not go someplace to worship most weekends of the year back then, summers excepted. If you were a pillar of society back then, part of the establishment, that’s just what you did in neighborhoods like mine. Church was where you established relationships with other pillars, connected, plugged in, the way it still is south of the Mason-Dixon line even now.
But the bottom fell out for most of our churches and nearly every mainline denomination between 1957 and today. The turmoil and crises of the 1960s and 1970s shook society deeply and many people lost trust in institutions. Churches like ours were seen as part of that establishment, so we fell into disfavor as well. Options opened up for people when it came to Sunday morning. There were sports, recreation, shopping, and work. With both parents working or only one parent at home, Sunday became the only time for family time. The stigma of not going someplace to worship was suddenly gone and people felt free for the first time to claim that they were spiritual, but not religious, which sounded somehow more authentic than just “going to church” to a lot of younger people who had never known what being spiritual had to do with church.
Denominations like ours had taken our position as the established church in the center of town for granted for so long, that they were slow in responding. When panic began to set in, they started rolling out new ideas for local churches to try out: contemporary or praise worship, new hymnals, new Sunday School curricula, new ways to do fellowship, new justice and witness initiatives, new and more effective stewardship programs. Any of you who have been in any mainline church over the last 10-20 years will have seen these ideas come and go, usually with little lasting impact after the initial enthusiasm leveled out. Many times I have opened the latest informational packet from the “Main Office” in Cleveland or Framingham and wondered, “what have they come up with this time?”
I have been in ministry throughout the last ten years of this decline and I have watched our denomination and my colleagues search eagerly for the silver bullet to turn things around. What has always struck me as strange is how the problem had been misdiagnosed. In all the latest strategies for renewal and growth the main thing was missing. Can you guess it was? I know. It’s so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing. What was missing was…well, not a thing, but a person. You know…Jesus.
In our glory years of large membership, robust budgets and societal expectations of participation, we tended to downplay Jesus. We were more of a distant Almighty yet loving God church. Jesus was an idea about which we thought and whose ideas we taught as philosophical concepts, but not someone we related to. We tended to be pretty low key about our faith, private folks who got uncomfortable about overly enthusiastic religion. We liked middle of the road preachers. The church was more of a civic organization than a revival meeting. Those of us who were raised in the church of the 1960s until now had pretty low expectations of what church could be and only vague ideas of who Jesus was and what he could mean for our lives, let alone someone we would actually want to emulate in the physical living of our lives.
And through it all, as churches and denominations like ours looked here and there for answers, our Easter story of the Resurrection was just sitting there, waiting. All we really ever had to do was just follow Mary Magdalene’s example as she searched for answers. All we ever had to was just turn around and see Jesus. My friends, this is not rocket science. If it were, I wouldn’t be standing where I am.
I know what you are thinking. I know that I am making many of you uncomfortable right now, because you think I am talking about the ultra-conservative “family values” Jesus whom the TV evangelists yell into the cameras. You think I am talking about the oppressive Jesus in whose name people damn this or that group of people. You think I am talking about the not just un-intellectual but downright anti-intellectual Jesus, the Jesus who says “either faith or science, creation or evolution, it can’t be both.” You think I am talking about the Jesus who sounds limiting, parochial, and closed off from possibilities, the one my colleagues in academia thought I was nuts to be interested in. You think I am talking about the Jesus that wants us to wave our arms in the air and burst into tears to show our sincerity in worship.
But I’m not. That’s not my Jesus. My Jesus, the Jesus I find in the Gospels, the Jesus I myself have turned around and seen is this incredible God person of unconditional love, forgiveness, mercy, a community builder, a welcomer, a teacher who invites us into an adventure of the mind, spirit, and body, a friend, a burster of limitations and boundaries, an invitation into the unknown, neither conservative or liberal, a window into the soul God.
You folks tell me about the amazing things you do and have done, the climbs to the top of Kilimangaro, the lifetime of learning about how to grow orchids, the businesses and fortunes you have built, the sails across the Atlantic, the marathons you have trained for and run in, the jumping out of helicopters to ski some glacier in British Columbia, the joy you have in your families and friends, the way practicing yoga has changed your life, the time and talent you give to make the world a better place, the ice boat racing in the Soviet Union, the serenity and joy you feel playing your piano, and so on. That’s what I’m talking about, about bringing that same enthusiasm to knowing Jesus. It’s supposed to be a fun adventure, a relationship which will bring you into the heart of God, a relationship which will stretch your mind and expand your horizons every bit as much as studying quantum physics or traveling to exotics places will.
I know that if we are as enthusiastic about getting to know Jesus and form our lives in his image as we are about the other things in our lives, if we just turn around and see Jesus, God is going to do amazing things in and among and through us. I know because I have seen it in any number of churches, churches I’ve visited and churches I’ve served, churches that just came alive, churches that came back from the dead, as they really got to know Jesus and fell in love with him all over again for the first time. I see it here in this church on a daily basis, growing and percolating. This incredible person is somehow alive and his presence and power does amazing things in the lives of those who want to do and be amazing people and churches.
I know that many of you are doubtful about this whole Jesus thing. I know that you think it’s all about me. As the new senior minister, you think that if I am gifted enough, charismatic enough, skilled enough, likeable enough, the church is going to take off. My friends, do not make the opposite mistake of Mary Magdalene, who saw Jesus and thought he was the gardener. Me? I really am just the gardener.

And on the other side of town

2010-04-01T09:28:00.000-04:00

And on the Other Side of Town The Dover Church
March 28 – Palm Sunday Scripture: Luke 19:22-44

As most of you know, I grew up in a New England Congregational church just like this one. Even as a youngster I was interested in the experience of God, not just my own experience, but how people from other traditions experienced the divine. Although this is what I know and love best, I have discovered is that we New England Congregationalists miss out on a lot. We shy away from really meaty and moving celebrations, the enormous reservoirs of spiritually transformative experiences which energize other traditions: the Passion Plays and Stations of the Cross of the Roman Catholics, the vigils and Easter dawn processions of the Orthodox Christians, the Passover of the Jews, the Haj to Mecca of the Muslims, the bathing in the Ganges of the Hindus, the sweat lodges and vision dances of the Native Americans.
Where the Baptists go down to the riverside or immerse themselves in large tanks, we have a nice, portable baptismal font which we take out and put away, out of which we sprinkle a few drops on babies’ heads. We like to sit in our nice box pews and listen to sermons, standing up every now and then to sing in a very organized and orderly way. Even the Lord’s Supper we like served to us in the pews. Think about the resistance churches like ours have had to exchanging signs of peace, another reenactment, where we actually have to get up and go to other people and shake their hands. No, we have not wanted to go there.
When we do these sorts of things, we make our children do them for us, the Christmas Pageant and the Palm Procession. I think that at some point people began to feel uncomfortable with the emotional energy these sorts of things triggered in the participants, so they decided to become spectators of the children, which made the whole thing sweet and harmless. We removed the immediate experience of God to arms length, but the Palm Procession is not kid’s stuff.
We all know that the setting is Jerusalem right before the festival of Passover. As the holy city of Judaism, the home of the temple, the place where God had chosen to dwell on earth, the focus of Jewish devotion and the destination of pilgrimage, Jerusalem was and is more than just any old city. In this small, sacred place the political and religious hopes and dreams of the Jewish people were inextricably interwoven.
It was also a remarkably cosmopolitan place in Jesus’ day. Home to probably 80,000 people, it dwarfed the villages most people lived in. Herod the Great had built on a massive and extravagant scale during his long lifetime and rule, encircling the city with massive walls. On the east side of the city, the side through which Jesus would have come this morning, the wall stood 150 feet high. 150 feet. Much higher than the top of our steeple, a height even more impressive as it rose directly out of the Kidron Valley’s deep ravine, which separated the Mount of Olives from the city. This high wall was just the foundation however, forming one side of the truly enormous platform on which the equally massive temple stood.
So that’s Jerusalem in a nutshell. But then there is Jerusalem at Passover. Passover is more than a Jewish Thanksgiving. It is the remembrance and celebration of Israel’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. In Jesus’ day, as many as 150 to 200,000 pilgrims would have come to the city for this most important of Jewish festivals, camping out on the hills all around the city. As they made their way towards the city, the pilgrims would have seen enormous stones being pulled by teams of oxen, stones as much as 50 feet tall and weighing hundreds of tons, stones for the completion of the Temple. For people who lived in wattle and daub or adobe style homes, the scale of the project was almost beyond belief. Thousands of animals would have been bleating and bellowing in the streets as they were sold in stalls for the coming sacrifice. And, of course, at the center of all this excitement was Adonai Elohenu, the Lord our God, in the Temple.
Into this heady mix of religious and political aspirations add the presence of occupying Roman legions in their holy city and you begin to get a sense of just how much emotional electricity would have been in the air. Had the time come for God to act decisively again for the people of Israel and deliver them from slavery? I imagine that being in Jerusalem would have been a lot like the experience some folks get at the Vietnam War Memorial in DC, or at Ground Zero in NY, or standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, or watching the sunrise over the Grand Canyon, or visiting the house you grew up in after many years, or returning to your ancestral home, or being DC for Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, JFK’s or Barack Obama’s inauguration, or walking into church on your wedding day, or lighting candles on Christmas Eve or All Saints. But all rolled into one.
Into this bubbling pot of excitement and anticipation, aspiration and resentment, came Jesus. He had been walking down the Jordan River valley from Galilee for a few weeks, telling his disciples that he was going to Jerusalem where he would to be handed over by the religious authorities to the Romans and be killed. They did not want to hear it, tried to argue Jesus out of it, but he explained that this was inevitable. The authorities would not tolerate him. They could not tolerate him and he was going to force their hand and show what God could do.
Jesus stayed in the village of Bethphage, on the side of the Mount of Olives facing away from the city. Luke’s Gospel is quite clear that Jesus planned a demonstration for the Sunday before Passover. The events we remember as Palm Sunday were intentional and provocative. Jesus told the disciples where to go to get the donkey. He was very clearly trying to evoke the message of the prophet Zechariah who had proclaimed: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, you king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the war-horse from Jerusalem; and the battle bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ens of the earth” (Zech. 9:9-10). A message of peace for Jews dreaming of a warrior king to drive the Romans out, dreaming of a new Messiah like King David of old. I'm sure there were heads scratching in the crowd that day.
A planned demonstration, probably a pretty pathetic demonstration at that, at most a few hundred folks or so, maybe more, probably less, but hardly a major disturbance in the midst of the thousands of people swarming in and around Jerusalem. A country rabbi, riding on a donkey with a bunch of peasants singing Hosannas, waving branches, as Jesus passed through this massive 150 foot high wall, through the Beautiful gate and into the city, where he went into the Temple, warned the listeners about the path of violence and the coming destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem by the Romans, turned over tables by some accounts, and went back to the Mount of Olives.
“Hossana!” A word used in worship at the Temple meaning “please save” or “save now.” Where was the salvation in Jesus' message of salvation through peace from Zechariah? It's almost ludicrous, isn't it, this little bunch of pilgrims with their “King” on a donkey, riding into a city which probably didn't even notice. But then again, Jesus was just doing what Jewish prophets did. This kind of seemingly absurd street theater was standard operating procedure for Jewish prophets warning their people and their leaders. God's prophetic Word often seems ludicrous in the face of the political, social and economic realities of the world.
So there's Jesus making his point, and on the other side of town a very different demonstration was underway. On the other side of town, there was another procession, “an imperial one. On or about the same day, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, rode into the city from the opposite side, the west, at the head of …imperial cavalry and foot soldiers arriving to reinforce the garrison on the Temple Mount.” “ (The Roman governor and reinforcements) came each year at Passover …to Jerusalem from Caesarea Maritima, the city on the Mediterranean coast from which the Roman governor administered Judea and Samaria.” Their garrison, the Antonia (named after Marc Antony of Cleopatra fame), had 2 - 3,000 soldiers. It was placed directly next to the Temple with guard towers overlooking the Temple courtyards where the pilgrims would gather to pray. In the words of David Van Biema of Time magazine, “the Roman garrison...loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a prison.” They came to keep a lid on the Passover aspirations of those Jewish pilgrims. They wanted to keep the whole liberation a spiritual one, to keep the flock from becoming a mobv.
Coming through the east gate, a bunch of peasants, their “King” on a donkey, waving palm branches and crying “Save us! Hosanna!” Coming through the west gate, weapons, helmets, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold. The pounding of horse hooves, the clinking of bridles, the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the beating of drums, the swirling of dust.” And silence from the onlookers, some awed, some resentful. No Hossanas here!
Jesus staged the whole thing to embody the central conflict of his last week in the juxtaposition of these two contrasting processions: the kingdom of God and the kingdom of imperial domination. The choice was there for the people of Jerusalem to see. A choice of two kingdoms. A choice between two visions of life on earth. One side looking silly and weak. The other’s power speaking for itself. A choice between peace and shalom or domination and oppression. Choices involve decisions and anything but a “Yes” that translates into action for God’s kingdom amounts to a “No,” because those imperials processions and the kingdoms they maintain just keep right on rolling, unopposed. I think that’s why we want our kids to do the marching for us. But this is not kid’s stuff, is it?

Knowing Christ and the Power of His Resurrection

2010-03-24T11:32:00.000-04:00

Knowing Christ and the Power of His Resurrection The Dover Church
March 21, 2010 –Fifth Sunday of Lent
Scripture: Isaiah 43:16-21, Philippians 3:4b-14

For most of my life, I had absolutely no idea what Paul was talking about in this morning’s lesson. Why would he list all the things he had going for him and then say that now they were loss and rubbish compared to knowing Christ and the power of his Resurrection? That made absolutely no sense to me, because I was thinking of it as an idea to be understood. When it became something happening in my life whose power I could feel, then everything changed. In order to tell the story, I have to go back to 1978 when I was fifteen.
My boyhood was very charmed and privileged until 1978, which was when life gave me my first real shaking. First, my father left. Then, my grandmother died. And finally, I had to put my dog to sleep.
One day, my family was completely normal, healthy and wealthy and wise, doing the things that other families in our affluent, well educated, high achieving neighborhood did. And then, the next day there was a moving truck in front of the house. No warning. No explanation. My parents were quite proper, so there had been no obvious fighting. My father wasn't very good with words or emotions. We had had no experience talking about unpleasantness or feelings, so all of us were completely unprepared for this.
When someone leaves a family, they create a vacuum which sucks stuff in to fill the void. My father's void was filled with fear and insecurity about the future, anger, hurt, a sense of abandonment and huge trust issues. The love we had for one another was gradually swallowed up by all the stuff which was vacuumed in. We couldn't seem to move forward together, so we went our separate ways. We grew up, kept in touch, and moved on, but as a family we never really made it out of 1978.
Then there was my beloved grandmother. In the summer of 1977, she was beating me at basketball, shooting underhand as they did on the 1918 South Boston HS girl's basketball team. Healthy as a horse. And then over the winter she went to pieces and died in February. We buried her, my mother and aunt and uncle, two cousins, my three sisters and I. It was cold on that hillside in Plymouth. We sang “Morning Has Broken,” played our instruments, read some poems, said a prayer, and went home. No one said much or even cried that much as far as I can remember. I think no one wanted to be the first one to fall apart, for fear of what that would do to the rest of us.
And finally, my dog. She came down with a disease that would cost $1,200 to treat, with no guarantee of success. That was big money in 1978. Money I didn't have. Money my family didn't have anymore either with my father gone. So I had to walk her to the local ASPCA and sign the papers to have her put to sleep. Those 2 miles to the ASPCA were the two longest miles we ever walked together. Going home alone was terrible. I don't remember much except that I cried and tried to hide the tears so people driving by wouldn't see me.
I didn't know it at the time because I was not raised to talk about these sorts of things or even give them much thought, but from that time on I had an enormous void in my soul which I tried to fill up with achievement and success. I was basically a broken person, a spiritual cripple if you will, except I didn’t know it because I had never known what living shalom as an adult was like.
How was I broken? Well you heard what did it, but what did being broken look like? On the outside, not much different. In fact, you probably couldn’t see it at all. I couldn’t, and it was my life. A child of high functioning parents who raised me to always do my best, I became a high functioning broken person. Or, put another way, I became a human doing rather than I human being. I was what I did: the funny guy, the honor's student, the rower, the college graduate, the foreign exchange student, the PhD from Berkeley, the Fulbright scholar, the academic. For all the world to see, I was hardly what anyone would call broken. I couldn't see it myself for that matter, but the reality that something was wrong kept trying to get my attention.
And what was wrong? As I have already said, I didn't know it myself at the time because I didn’t know any better, but I had a small, well guarded, closed-off heart. My relationships were largely superficial, except for a few blessed friends. I never really believed it when someone told me that they loved me. There had to be an angle, some reason. It wasn’t me they loved, it was something about me or something I did to earn their praise which they loved. Also, I was embarrassed and didn't want to have to explain what had happened to my family. Nor did I want anyone to feel sorry for me. I had my pride.
Luckily I was a rower, so my friends were not the kinds of guys who wanted to talk about that sort of thing. We talked about rowing and girls. Later, my friends in academia were much the same. We talked about books, ideas, and ourselves. I realize now that I had gravitated toward the perfect world for high achieving broken people. I knew what I did and I knew a lot about a lot of things, but I didn't have the foggiest notion who I really was.
As you might imagine, I also had a fair amount of anger. Justice was big for me. I always wanted people to do the right thing and I got really mad really quickly when they didn’t, which was a lot of the time because people don't do the right thing a lot of the time. I was judging people by my own standards, which were very high, and I was judging them as I was judging myself, as human doings rather than human beings.
And finally, I unconsciously superimposed my family history on every situation in my life. Male authority threatened me and got me angry. Women who were fearful or anxious hooked me into their emotions. I went around living each new situation as if it was my family of origin, trying to squeeze the world into my ideas of how it was and how it ought to be. But every new situation, every new person that I met was just that, new, not a replay. I was so stuck in my family story that it was like I was acting in a play in which I was the only one with a different script. Have you ever had that experience? It can get pretty frustrating.
All of this might sound gloomy and sad, but I have come to realize that a lot of people live variations of my life. At the time, I thought I had a pretty good life from 1978 to 1999: I achieved a lot, had a lot of adventures, and had some friends. I was pretty normal in my high achieving little world. In truth, I had no idea what was going on or why my life was unfolding the way it was. If I could have actually seen my brokenness, I wouldn't have had the first idea of how to go about putting myself together again. And I have to say that the churches I attended never went near this sort of thing, so I never even had a hint of the problem, let alone a solution. I guess everyone else in those churches was OK.
I went to seminary to get close to God, but my frame of reference was still largely in terms of career change. I was going to take all the skills and strategies that had helped me succeed in academia and use them to succeed in ministry. There was one big problem with this however…namely God. In my desire to know and love God in Jesus Christ, God gave me a lot more than I bargained for. God opened up that box of pain and asked me if I wanted God to transform the mess inside into new life, if I wanted to let go of it and be free. I had to come face to face with my suffering, which was just about the last thing I wanted to do. By the grace of God, however, I found the courage to dive in and it hurt. But then something great started to happen. The pain and suffering began to be transformed into new life, closed doors became open windows, impossibilities became possible, a lot of stuff which used to get me all worked up became unimportant, and old death became seeds of new life. I began to actually know Christ and the power of his Resurrection. You see, you have to die to be resurrected and I was just realizing how dead I had been. The scars and nail holes were still there, but I was no longer stuck in the tomb of 1978, or 1978 to 2000. I was like Lazarus emerging from the tomb, smelly with grave clothes on, but free. The enormous stone I had been dragging around, the stone which had sealed me off from life, was rolled away. And that changed my life.
I have been living that new life ever since. Every day I get up and by the grace of God start trying to live the Good News of Jesus Christ again. Every day I get up and try to take each new day as it comes, for what it is, a new day. Nothing is bad. It’s all either good, something that’s about to become good which I cannot see yet, something that I might be just the one to turn into the good, or something I need to bring to your attention so you can help turn it into the good. I still enjoy the human doing thing, but I am really loving the human being thing, just kicking back with Jesus and feeling the love, which is what drives the whole human doing thing now for me. It's not always easy. I'm still broken, but at least I know it now. And knowing, I thank God for the cracks, because it's through those cracks that Jesus comes to me. I don’t have to pretend or deny it anymore.
And what’s more, I now have the experience and courage to help those of you who long for new life to face your suffering, knowing that the power of Christ’s Resurrection will explode into your life if you let it, just like it did with mine. And where before I just saw stupidity, senseless misery and hopeless suffering all around me in the world, now I know that all the brokenness I see are just openings through which God will pour the power of the Resurrection into our world and I am here in this world to testify to this power and help give birth to this new life. That’s all I want now, to know Christ and the power of his Resurrection, to become like Jesus in his suffering so that I too might be brought from death into life. I’m not there yet, not by a long shot, but I press on to make it my own, longing to take hold of Jesus as he has grabbed hold of me, putting aside that which lies behind me and straining forward to what lies ahead.

Charlotte's Staircase

2010-03-09T12:48:00.001-05:00

“Charlotte’s Staircase” The Dover Church
March 7, 2010 – Third Sunday in Lent
Scripture: Psalm 27, Philippians 3:14-4:1, Luke 13:31-35

Ah yes! Charlotte’s staircase. Charlotte is one of the wonderful people I have had the pleasure of getting to know well as a minister. Charlotte and I hit it off right from the start. Charlotte was more than old enough to be my mother, but we were birds of a feather: large people who spoke in loud voices, Swedish Americans who enjoyed off colored jokes and good belly laughs. Charlotte loved parties and thought church parties in particular were dull without cocktails. She was always on the move, buzzing here and there, chatting, helping out someone or getting something organized.
When Marie-Laure and I moved to Higganum as new parents, Charlotte took us under her wing. She was in a good place when we knew her, but she had known her share of hardship. Having grown up during the Depression and the Second World War, Charlotte had never moved farther than next door to the house she was born in. Like most folks of her generation in Higganum, she had married local, to a guy named Bob who was a carpenter. It was Bob who built their house next door to Charlotte’s parents. Whenever Charlotte spoke about “the good old days,” she would laugh and remember the fun they had had together, evenly mixed it seemed with their fair share of struggles. And then, at one of Charlotte’s famous Christmas Eve parties, Bob died of a massive heart attack with a glass of whiskey in his hand, leaving her with four young children, no savings, and no insurance. Charlotte had lived a lot of life, the very good and the very bad, both of which seemed to make Charlotte all the more appreciative of the goodness of the life she now lived with Bill, her second husband of 25 years, with whom she was travelling the world.
Anyway, one Sunday morning, two year old Leo picked up my screw gun which I had left lying around, and was walking down the hall, turning it on and off, when the weight of the heavy tool literally pulled him over onto a pile of pointy scrap wood, which I also had left lying around. He cut his eyebrow open, just missing his eye, and blood was everywhere. I quickly drove Leo and Marie-Laure to the hospital, where Leo waited for stitches, while I rushed back to Higganum to preach. When I told the church what had happened, someone volunteered to go pick them up and Charlotte told me this story at coffee hour.
Bob had just about finished building their house, putting the final touches to a beautiful front staircase, which he was particularly proud of. Their oldest son, Rick, now in his late 50s, but 3 or 4 at the time, had been watching his father work and helping out as young boys will. When Bob had put away his tools and gone to take a shower, young Rick went and got a saw and proceeded to saw every stair, not cut clean through, but just enough to be irreparable.
“What did you do?” I sputtered incredulously. “What could I do?” answered Charlotte with one of her big laughs. Of course, there was nothing to do but fix the stairs, which Bob did, and love the boy, which, in this case, meant trying to teach Rick not to do things like that in the future and keeping the him away from tools, just in case. Charlotte laughed again, admitting that she had not had too much success with either.
I had been laughing right along with Charlotte, but inside I was feeling embarrassed by my question in light of her response. Of course, she was completely right. What had I been hoping to hear? That she had cursed and beaten her child? That she had sent Rick to bed without his supper? That she didn’t talk to him for a week? That she had broadcast her wrath and blamed her husband, refusing to speak to him? The truth, which Charlotte so wisely recognized, was that none of those “solutions” would solve her problems. Charlotte’s relationship with her son was not about a set a stairs, but about growing in love with one another.
All of us forget this fact from time to time, whenever something like this happens in our lives. And things like this happen all the time. That's life, but that's not what life is all about. Life is about being in relationship with one another and with God and about growing in love for one another.
The reason I felt embarrassed was because I was ashamed of myself. I felt guilty, guilty because I suddenly realized how much I buy into the standard rules of life. The standard rules of life? You know what I mean. Rule number one, for instance: life is about “power over” others, about dominating others into getting with our program.
If that doesn’t work, go to rule number 2: use your power to punish. Go ahead. Sacrifice the future on the burning flames of retribution for a past which cannot be changed.
If you cannot punish physically, then go to rule number 3: blame someone for your problems. Go ahead, get your finger out and point it. It’s THEM! THEY are responsible for the problems with my world. If only someone would punish them, make them change, then things would better.
If you are too timid to use your finger, then go to rule number 4: play the victim. I am not talking about the folks who really are victims, but about those of us who wear the mantle whenever we do not get our own way. No one listens to us. We never get things the way we want and no one cares. We’re just bullied and brow beaten by the bullies of life and that’s why everything is a mess. We are not responsible.
And finally, there’s the end game rule: DISENGAGE! Turn your back and walk away. Things are not going my way. Talk is pointless because the other person is either an idiot, a bully, or a control freak...probably all three. So I’ll just take my toys and go home. This does feel good, because now I am without an opponent, so I am sure to get my own way. The only problem is obvious, isn’t it? You cannot love without someone else.
You may be wondering how I happen to know these rules so well. It’s because I fall into them all the time, except for the domination one. I am actually the mellow one in my family or origin, believe it or not. I was the second child and my older sister played the “power over” card enough to condition me not to go there. But the rest of them, sure. At one time or another, I try them all. Of course, they all end up being covert domination techniques, so I’m really right back at Rule #1.
You see. I forget. I forget who I am. I forget that before anything else I am a disciple of Jesus and that, as a disciple, I am not playing by those rules anymore. Jesus threw out the rule book, changed the game completely. Jesus came to preach and live love, to confront the power and domination systems of the world. He walked right into Jerusalem, the city that kills God's prophets of love, knowing that the powers would destroy him. He knew that his suffering was going to open a way into the future for all Creation.
Most people are repelled by the thought of suffering. We don’t want to factor the Cross into our spiritual journeys. Why? Because we know what happened to Jesus and we know that if we stop playing by the rules the people in our lives are going to be angry and make us suffer. These great rules of life have worked so well for us and gotten us this far, so why change? Except for the fact that they haven’t worked, have they? Not if we really are looking for love, to love and be loved. These rules bring us the suffering we now live with into our lives, our power struggles, our blaming others, our broken relationships, our sense of being the victim, our isolation.
I think about Charlotte’s Staircase whenever I forget and I invite you to too. But think bigger than just personal improvement, about being good and doing better. Jesus’ new game is so much bigger than that. The mess we see all around us in the world is just a magnification of the power and domination that each of us harbor in our hearts and live out in our lives multiplied 6 billion times. The energy of each of our lives of power struggles builds and compounds itself until we have the swirling whirlwind of madness we see in the world today. The futility of it all is inescapable for those with eyes to see.
The Cross of Christ is our way to help make the world whole by love. We commit ourselves to taking up the Cross, each of us and all of us, one at a time, so that we might be transformed by love and then, begin transforming the world around us in love, one by one, one relationship at a time, one church at a time. In Jesus and his Cross, God has given us both the power and the means to re-create the world according to God’s intention. This is big stuff we are part of here. Thanks be to God.

If not now, when?

2010-03-01T12:53:00.000-05:00

“If not now, when?” The Dover Church
February 28, 2010– Second Sunday in Lent
Scripture: Psalm 63:1-8, Isaiah 55: 1-9, Luke 13: 1-9

I remember how excited I would be every day as the school bus brought me home from kindergarten, seeing my mother waiting there, knowing she would kiss me and ask me how my day was, probably have baked something for us that morning, seeing my dog and cats and the fun we'd have before supper.
I remember how excited I would be to go see my grandmother, to have her hug me and smell those grandmother smells, the box of chocolates she would always have, the funny things she would do, the days at the beach and her funny bathing cap, the stories she would tell. I'd be on the edge of my car seat as we drove into Plymouth and turned into her street.
I remember how excited I used to get on the drive down to our summer house on the Cape. I'd be making my plans for the summer all the way down, what I'd do on the beach, how I'd go sailing and swimming and fishing, the fireworks on the 4th of July, the steamers and chowder, sand between my toes, the sunburn on my nose.
I remember how much I enjoyed hanging out with my best friend, building forts in the woods, going fishing, playing whiffle ball or basketball, laughing and joking and eating and beating each other up, how I couldn't wait to go to his house or have him come over to my house, and how I would fall asleep thinking of what we'd do tomorrow.
I remember what it felt like the first time I had a crush on a girl, how I would ride my bike just to sprint by her house, and then circle around the block over and over again, hoping to catch a glimpse of her and terrified that she might see me.
I remember how I loved studying and teaching Old Norse, of reading through piles of books and going to lectures and seminars, of following my dream around the world from Amherst to Seattle to Sweden to Berkeley to Reykjavik and then to Boulder.
I remember how I loved trout fishing in Colorado, how I would get up on my day off and think nothing of driving 5 hours to the other side of the state, to Wyoming or New Mexico, to try out some river, camping out overnight in the back of my pickup under the stars, fishing all the next day and then driving all night back to Boulder for work.
I remember how excited I was when I started seminary. “I’m going to actually get to know God. I’m going to meet God face to face. I’m going to read books by people who have also known God and meet some of them who are still alive.” What a thrill!
I remember the first time I met my wife, of how I saw her across the room and thought, “Wow!” I remember how I felt the same way when I met our sons, “Wow!”
These little stories are not pure nostalgia, wistful memories of how I used to be. Any of you who know me know that I am a man of enthusiasms. I am excited about fishing season, about the books I am reading, about going biking and canoeing with our sons, about parties with our friends, about going for walk with my dog. I like being excited about my life.
And of course, there is church. I am excited about preaching and worship every Sunday, because I know that something more than what I have planned is going to happen. Maybe not for everyone all the time, but God does show up. I am also really excited about what is about to happen in our church, as we have these luncheon discussions about the future.
Why am I telling you these stories? Because I want to challenge you the way our scripture lessons this morning challenge us. All of them capture the dynamic tension every human being lives, that tension between what is and what might yet be. There is something incomplete about us humans. Our creator didn't quite finish us. All of us, at one time or another, feel a sense of lack, that somehow we are just not quite what we might be, that we're missing something essential to make our possibility a reality.
We are driven by that sense of incompleteness. It drives our enthusiasms, our thirst for life, our striving to fill out the picture and fill up the incompleteness, to live life a little more fully. As people of faith, we believe that God is both the beginning and end of this human tension, that God created each of us and all of us to be restless and enthusiastic, incomplete so that we would seek God, because that restlessness and enthusiasm can only be fulfilled in God, through God, and with God.
St. Augustine begins his famous autobiography, The Confessions, speaking this truth to God: "You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee." Some people think that this is a cop out, that we people of faith use God as a crutch, as some sort of fantasy solution to all our emotional and psychological failures and insufficiencies, that each of us and all of us is just a little mess stuck in the mess of our own making, crying for a fantasy parent to come take us away, to kiss us and make us better. That, to me, is such a futile, pointless, and slow death dealing way of viewing the human condition.
No, my friends, behind all of our sense of lack and incompleteness, behind every one of our urges to reach out into life with enthusiasm, is God calling us. It is God who yearns to be in relationship with us, to give us an opportunity to love him and show us his love for us. Every one of our interests and enthusiasms is actually an invitation from God. Every one of our feelings of insufficiency and lack is actually a call from God to completion. Our seeking God is really God seeking us.
For many of us, it is when we are children, most incomplete, that we have the greatest enthusiasm for life, that we are most open to God calling us, even if we cannot put it in those words. We just know we want to play. As we get older, however, as we actually become more complete and focus our enthusiasms and have the words to describe God calling us, many of us get tired by the amount of life. Some of us get overwhelmed and frightened by the intensity of life. Some of us let both our fear and our tiredness draw us into boredom and apathy. We become lukewarm. Boredom and apathy are the great danger of modern western society. We allow what was our passion for life, the sorts of feelings I tried to capture in my stories a few minutes ago, we allow that passion for our spouses and families and the things we do and the places we live, to gradually become a burden of responsibility. Our passion for life gradually becomes a job we have to do to pay for what once delighted us, but now burdens us. Occasionally we wake up and notice what has happened and vow to live differently, but then the same old same old creeps up on us again and our lives slip away.
All of us cope in one way or another. Some of us go through fazes, trying first this and then trying that. Some of us climb inside addictions and let them run our lives for us. Some of us run away from our present lives hoping that the grass will somehow be greener, and leave behind a life rich with possibility. All of us mistake the vehicle of our enthusiasm, our families and friends, our work, our hobbies, whatever we pour our energy and time into, we mistake that for the voice behind them calling us, the voice of the living God.
Which brings me to the point of this sermon. First, the personal one which I am sure you have heard many times before so I won’t belabor it. Are you lukewarm? Tired? Apathetic? Without focus? Do you thirst for living water? Satisfaction? Fulfillment? It is God calling you. This is the only life you have. Start living it today. Now is the time. If not now, when?
And finally, the church. I know that so many of you live lives of great enthusiasm out there. You literally move mountains, create new life, do great things, live full lives which are exciting and fruitful. Here, at church, however, what do we do when a new, enthusiastic person comes? We put them on a committee where they are gradually ground down with by-laws and parliamentary procedures, with the one step forward and two steps back approach which leads to so little. We are so set on being proper and orderly that any hope for something as exciting as the other things in our lives which we are enthusiastic about becomes unrealistic and almost impossible.
Me, I believe in the story of the loaves and fishes, of little becoming much for the good of many. Me, I believe in the Sower and the Seeds in the good soil which yield 30, 60 and 100 fold, of the gift of the Gospel bearing fruit beyond our calculations or even imaginations. I believe. I believe in the sense that that is what I want to be part of. I want to invite people to let their enthusiasm for God in Jesus Christ, for the kingdom of God, for love in all its forms, whether teaching or fellowship, worship or education, stewardship or service to our neighbors, I want this to be the place where that blossoms and bears fruit. I want to let the genie out of the bottle. You see, I have only one life to be part of a church and I want God’s promises in Jesus Christ to be fulfilled in this place, at this time, with all of you. If not now, when?

What kind of Messiah?

2010-02-23T09:21:00.000-05:00

What kind of Messiah? The Dover Church
February 21, 2010 – 1st Lent Scripture: Luke 4:1-13

Lent is a serious season, during which our scripture lessons pose questions of the utmost gravity. Beginning to today, with the devil showing up and asking Jesus, “What kind of Messiah are you?”, right through Good Friday, with Pilate washing his hands and saying, “what is truth?”, we are faced with questions that go right to the heart of the God we believe in, who we are as God’s people, how we live that out as a community of the faith, the witness we offer to this life we have been called to.
For many of us, the devil is an enigma, a relic from a supersititious and pre-scientific past. We never talked about the devil in any of the First Congregational Churches I worshipped in around the country in my lifetime. We left that to the hellfire and damnation churches. If anything, folks like us made the devil a laughing matter. I remember doubling over in laughter every time the 1960s TV comedian Flip Wilson would dress up as Geraldine and claim “the devil made me do it.” And in Swedish, most curses involve the devil, but that was also a laughing matter for a boy.
But in church, well…I don’t think anyone took anything called the devil all the seriously. As I remember it, this story was often interpreted in a personal, private, spiritual way, talking about the individual challenges all of us faced in our lives and the choices we made, but never of good versus evil in any sort of world-historical perspective.
While I still don’t come down one way or the other about the existence or agency of the devil, I think just discounting him robs this lesson of the dire seriousness it demands of us. For, in many ways, this confrontation, this temptation, is the hinge of Jesus’ ministry. In all of the faith traditions with which I am familiar, the leader goes through just such a period of intense spiritual introspection and confrontation with or temptation by spiritual alternatives. Moses, the Buddha, Mohammed, Odin, to the name the ones I know best, all had their times of challenge in the spiritual desert, emerging with their vocation clarified and energized. Stay put, turn back, choose another way, go forward? What do to? How to be? Who to be? What kind of Messiah are you? Obviously, Jesus was alone out there in the desert, so what actually happened was either passed on by Jesus himself or invented by the writers. But the implication remains.
“What kind of Messiah are you?” The question might seem frivolous to us. As Christians, we often assume that there is only one Messiah, Jesus, and the way Jesus went about it is the only way to be a Messiah. But in Jesus’ day there were all kinds of Messiahs out there to choose from. We know from historical records and from the rejection Jesus meets in the Gospels that his vocation was the not the popular one.
Where the people of Israel were looking for a Messiah who would deliver them by the sword, Jesus came preaching and living non-violent resistance, power through weakness and love. Where the people of Israel were looking for a Messiah who would reorient their faith by circling the wagons and rooting out the weeds which had crept in, Jesus came preaching a faith of radical inclusivity, where not just one nation was chosen but all people were invited, of direct relationship with God unmediated by priests or institutions, unbounded by any law but that of radical, unconditional and unlimited love. And where the people of Israel were looking for a Messiah who would bring prosperity to God’s people, Jesus came preaching and living a prosperity for all, especially the least, growing out of sharing, giving, community, and compassion.
The choices Jesus made make all the difference in the world. They were intended by Jesus to make all the difference in the world. That is why the sinister character of the devil is necessary, in Hebrew, El Satan, which translates as “the tempter” or “the tester.” Which path are you going to take? Jesus choice was momentous and it ought to be momentous to us as it is quite literally about life or death. Not some sort of spiritual life or death, but actual life and death played out right here and right now in our world.
My friends, we have to give the devil his due and ask ourselves, “what kind of Messiah do we want?” Use the Greek translation, Christ, or the Latin translation, Savior, if that is more helpful. But do we really want to follow the kind of Savior Jesus was? Do we really want to choose that path? Do what he commanded? Live as he lived?
Once again, these questions may seem frivolous. We’re here, after all, aren’t we? So we’ve made our choice, right? I’d like you to notice that I have been consistently using the pronoun “we” throughout this sermon. I hope you understand that I include myself. These are the questions I ask myself too. And it is serious, more serious than most of us want to imagine. Because there are very powerful alternative salvation options out there, options more enthusiastically endorsed by more people than the real Jesus option. We ourselves are probably sucked in without even noticing. Let me give you the three that the devil puts to Jesus and are powerful in our world right now. I call them salvation myths.
Salvation myth one: peace comes through violence. We can be secure if we achieve overwhelming military supremacy and are willing to wield that force “for the good.” Sound familiar? We picked this one up from the British, whose Pax Britannica was borrowed from the Pax Romana, a peace which brought such peace, joy, prosperity and happiness to Jesus’ life.
Salvation myth two: prosperity is to be found in ever increasing production and consumption. Growth, growth, growth. It’s OK that we get and use up more and more for less and less, even if it means sweating the folks who make it on the other side of the world, even though we know the earth is a limited system and will both run out of resources and collapse environmentally before too much longer unless we change our approach.
Salvation myth three: the quick fix. Don’t worry! There is an easy solution and we are not going to have to suffer or strive to make it happen. God, or some God-like being, the President, a scientific or technological genius, or a CEO of a multinational corporation, is going to give it to us.
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer together every Sunday, we all say those last two petitions together: “lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.” For years they went right over my head, What temptation? What evil? Because I thought like a child, I assumed it meant little things. But now I know that what Jesus was referring to are the very things he was tempted with in this morning’s lesson. Buy into the salvation myths of power, prosperity, and the painless quick fix, or follow Jesus? Tempting, tempting, oh so tempting. How so?
Well, for starters, by the standards of the world I live like a Rajah and I am not as wealthy as many of you. Wealth well earned is good, but I have to ask myself: have I bought into the salvation myth of ever increasing prosperity through ever increasing production and consumption? Quantity for me over quality for all? How tight do I have to wear the blinders to avoid seeing the human and environmental degradation my lifestyle demands? And talk is cheap. In the balance of life, do I spend more time, effort and money consuming stuff, or building the kingdom of God for which I pray every time I pray, “thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, right here, right now, as it is in heaven”? Yesterday I went shopping at BJ’s and spent $257, $19 of which bought wash cloths for the folks in Haiti. My razor blades alone cost $37.
Second, my family and I are safe and comfortable here in Dover. That’s a good thing. That’s one of the reasons why we’re here. But I have to ask myself: have I bought into the salvation myth of peace through violence? That I can truly be safe while others are not? That you can’t make an omelet without cracking a few eggs? That we can force others to play by our rules? In the balance sheet of life, do I spend more effort paying taxes for and turning a blind eye to the violence done for my safety and security, or to actively making peace in our world? Building relationships across divides?
And third, the quick fix….oh I long for the quick fix to all the world’s problems. I don’t want to be responsible for all the problems which are out there somewhere else. I’m busy with a wife, kids, a church, you name it. Actually commit my life to being an agent of the change I desire, as Gandhi put it? Sure, I dream about it, but after a hard day at work I just want to bury my head in the sand of this nice little island in the woods.
You see, these are deep, spiritual questions which demand an answer. Unfortunately, anything other than a “Yes” amounts to a “No.” These are not political questions. They transcend parties and nations. Before the actual kingdom of God building must come the spiritual struggle, which is why I chose our first hymn with Martin Luther’s perspective on the magnitude of what we’re up against. Luther was a serious man. Maybe I’m a kindred spirit to Luther, another tormented northern European preacher, but I ask myself that question: “what kind of Messiah do I want?” As your pastor and spiritual friend, I ask you as individual people of faith, “what kind of Messiah do you want?”And as your spiritual leader, I ask all of us as the church in this place: “what kind of Messiah do we want?” I pray that we may choose Jesus and act accordingly. I sincerely believe that his is the only way, the real truth, and the path to life. Amen.

Mountaintop Experiences

2010-02-17T14:37:00.000-05:00

Mountaintop Experiences The Dover Church
February 14, 2010 – Last Sunday after Epiphany, the Transfiguration
Scripture: Luke 9: 28-43a

Before I begin with the actual sermon this morning, I would like to offer a word of explanation for my style of preaching. Those of you who have heard me preach before will know that I often tell stories about myself. While you may already understand why I do this, I feel the need to tell you that I do not tell these personal stories just because I like to talk about myself. On the contrary, my prayer each week as I prepare my sermons is that I will say something true and meaningful. When I started preaching, I used to give very theoretical sermons with lots of references to scholars, poets, novelists and so on. But then it dawned on me that those sermons were all second hand stories. The only story that I really knew to be true and meaningful was my own. Hence, my preaching style which usually comes back to how I know God in Jesus Christ. Just because these are my stories, that doesn’t make them the only true ones. They are however the stories I can tell. More important than my stories is my hope, the hope that whatever I say will help you to recognize God in Jesus Christ in your own stories. This is especially the case when talking about things like the Transfiguration, which no amount of theoretical explanation or cross referencing to the experiences of others will ever help bring to life for you. At least, that’s why I do what I do. So here goes.
I have always loved the water, oceans, rivers, lakes, even splashing in puddles or my bath as a child. When I was serving the church in Cohasset, I bought myself a sea kayak to both get out on the ocean and to reach the hot fishing spots which were not accessible on foot. I lived at the time in a little beach cottage in Humarock with Ella and three cats. I drove around in a little red pickup with my kayak always on the roof, ready to stop and put it whenever a likely spot would present itself. One of these likely spots was the North River on the way home from work. I loved to put in and paddle down to where the river emptied into the sea in Scituate.
One particular day, the weather was perfect, not too hot, not too cold, not too windy, sunny but bearable with sunblock, I had nothing to do and no reason to be anywhere, and the tide would speed me downriver and then help bring me back. I paddled down with my fly rod strapped to the front deck and my lunch and water in a watertight bag under the back deck. It was a weekday, so no one else was around, no power boats, no jet skies, no beach parties with kegs of beer, distracting bikinis, loud music and raucous yelling. Just me in my quiet kayak.
When I arrived at the mouth of the river, I pulled up on a sandbar which had been formed by the current of the river and the tides. I climbed out, sat down, leaned back against my kayak, and starting eating my lunch while I just watched the ocean and the river come together.
And then it happened, what a lot of spirituality gurus call a mountaintop experience like the one we just heard in the Gospel lesson, even though my backside was planted literally right at sea level. And just like that everything began to unfold as somehow different, different as in gloriously perfect. I fell into an intense absorption in the moment: in the blueness of the sky, not thinking about it in an analytical way, but just enjoying the brush strokes of blue and wisps of clouds here and there. I began to notice the bird calls and the gentle sound of the lapping waves, nearby where the water spilled gently onto the sandbar and further off where the ocean waves met the river current more vigorously. I say noticed, but it was something more of a comfortable and pleasant awareness than any sort of rational thought. In fact, I later learned that any sort of thinking would have pulled me right out of the moment altogether and ended the experience just like that.
I felt the light and warmth of the sun on my face and saw how it sparkled on the water. And suddenly I realized, once again in a completely non-rational way but at some level of primary awareness like that of breathing or smelling, that time seemed to stand still. There was no past and no future. I had no thoughts about what had gone before and was not planning for what was yet to come. I just was…completely absorbed in the enjoyment of the moment. And in the enjoyment of the moment I also became swamped by an awareness of the reality of God, not as in a vision of some giant humanoid-like being with a white beard, but as in a felt experience of everything the Bible tells us God is like, if that makes any sense. I felt completely loved. I knew that life was not just good, but great, and that it was all around me in abundance beyond belief to be enjoyed and treasured as a gift from God. I knew somehow that I was good in some sort of non-evaluating, non measurable way. Just good in …well, a good way, if that makes any sense. Even though I was alone, I was not alone, and the presence felt caring and compassionate. My soul could sense the glory of God reaching out in time to the beginning and through everything in an interconnected web of …well, steadfast love and faithfulness. I was, as far as I could tell, sitting in the immediate presence of the living God, fully aware of the fact and loving every minute of it, without counting the minutes. In truth, I have no idea how long I sat there and that was fine with me.
Now what actually happened is beyond words, but I had to try to put it into words for this sermon. In fact, it was the beginning of rational thought and putting the experience into words which brought the whole encounter to an end. The moment I tried to describe for myself and understand what was happening, time started to kick in and my immediate appreciation vanished.
Except in one important way. As I climbed back into my kayak and started paddling back upstream, I suddenly began to remember so many other times in my life when I had been with God like this and had not noticed, either because I was too self absorbed or busy or worried or preoccupied or working or something, or I had just brushed it off or discounted it. I remembered the times when I had actually been on mountaintops, the times in trout streams, the times in church, the times with family and friends when it had been just like it had been that day. And I suddenly knew that God had really been so very close to me always and I had not been paying attention. It dawned on me that it was up to me to open up that temporal, emotional, physical, spiritual spaciousness for me to become aware.
And on the paddle home the idea for my future ministry began to take shape in my mind. I would learn how to practice the ancient spiritual practices of the church and of other faith traditions so that I could open myself to God at all times. More importantly for you, I wanted to learn how to teach others how to practice, so that they, you really, might learn how to become aware, how to remember, and how to relish the prospect of seeking the presence. And ever since then I have done just that. Just so you don’t think this is some sort of delusional fantasy, I can tell you that while the presence defies words, the experience is more real than any theological argument I have ever thought about. Nor is this a narcissistic, amusement park sort of approach to spirituality, it is actually hard work. Sure, there are plenty of times like my kayak story where God just shows up (as I’m sure you know from your own experiences), but there’s all the other times when you have to work at creating that spaciousness.
And so, I hope that you can see that if I had tried to explain the Transfiguration rationally and theoretically to you this morning, it probably would not have made any more sense than what I have just said. You might have noticed how the disciples tried to understand and make sense of what they had been part of, and how that didn’t work out for them.
But enough of me. How about you? What are your stories? Where were you when you noticed God? What were you doing and what was it like? Love? Birth? Death? Church? Mountaintops? Sunsets? I am convinced that everyone has either had these sorts of experiences or longs to. There is not a faith tradition in the world that does not recognize these experiences of the presence. Sadly, our own culture tends to either trivialize or commercialize them, to psycho-analyze or theorize them away, or just plain preclude them with busy-ness. Which is why this story from the Gospel comes right now before Lent. Lent is a season when we try to make room in our lives for the experience of the presence.

Beach Rocks

2010-02-02T13:08:00.001-05:00

Beach Rocks The Dover Church
January 31, 2010 –4th Epiphany
Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-10, 1 Corinthians 13:1-14:1a

1. When I was a little boy, my grandparents had a place on the beach in Manomet – very cold water and rocky beaches - Ever since I have loved beach rocks –the flat ones – skipped them
2. As I have gotten older, I find that I still enjoy skipping the flat ones but I am drawn to the smooth and rounded rocks. They fascinate me.
3. There are two things I particularly like about beach rocks
a. First, holding them in my hand, rubbing them between my thumb and my palm – as a meditative device – just feel the smoothness, the weight and heft, soft yet hard – very soothing
i. I don’t know why, but they focus attention and clear mind of all the stuff – they center me
ii. There is something…perfect about them
iii. Glimpse of eternity – think of the time it took for this perfect little rock to become what it is – mirror image, if you will, of the Grand Canyon effect
iv. Some have a uniform color – but others have swirls of color which hint at the original from which it has come
v. Some are perfectly oval or round, but others are unfinished, with a jagged edge here or protrusion there – hint at what they once were
vi. Some bear witness to the forces which shaped them, with signs of erosion, little scoops and valleys
b. Second, I love the sound they make in the surf – Whitehorse Beach in Manomet, Singing Beach in Manchester, Cranes Beach in Ipswich, Sandy Beach in Cohasset
i. It’s like a little symphony played to the beat of the surf rolling in, drawing back, and rolling in again – all the individual tunes of each of the little stones as they roll over and over on each other as each new waves picks them up, throws them down, draws them back, deposits them and lets them lie for the next wave
ii. a crescending and descending song of rolling rocks as each wave pushes in and then falls back rolling all those rocks
iii. It’s hypnotic –another glimmer of eternity – dozens of times every hour, day in day out, week in week out, down through the years
4. I remember one particular late afternoon, taking a break from pastoral visitation and fishing for stripers in Cohasset
a. Thinking about fish
b. Also thinking about the church and what God wanted us to be and do
5. beautiful day, quiet, alone, – not much happening with the fishing - two things dawned on me as I was standing there in between casts
a. I suddenly saw the whole genesis of beach rocks
b. Could see the immense granite cliffs and outcroppings the rocks had been broken from
c. Could see the smaller boulders with jagged edges which had fallen, climbed over some, others out in the surf
i. Each gradually being eroded into the beautifully smooth beach rocks I was bending down and picking up in my hand and admiring – I could even see which beach rocks came from which cliff or glacial pile
ii. I suddenly saw the entire long span which brought the one rock from here to there, from that form to this, and all the forces which had been involved – the storms, the winter ice and summer heat, the rain and wind, the glaciers that brought them here in the first place and the tides which have been wearing them away ever since
d. Which drew my attention to the sound of the waves on the rocks – a musical sound, like a wind chime almost of thousands of these rocks being jumbled around and around on each other as each new wave rolled in, scooped them up, spread them out, sucked them back into the water, and then deposited them for the next wave to work on – over and over again, dozens of times an hour, thousands of times a day, week in, week out, year in year out, as these harsh outcroppings of granite are gradually transformed into these wonderful, smooth rocks
e. And all the sharp edges, unevennesses they all began with – they become the sand and silt in which all the smooth beach rocks rest when the tide goes out and leave them high and dry
6. And suddenly it dawned on me, these beach rocks and the waves, the whole process – was a great metaphor for the church
7. it suddenly occurred to me that the church is nothing less than a tool or machine – actually the tool or machine which God thought up for teaching people how to love as God loves – if you don’t like the idea of a tool, try the area between high and low tide on the beach, that area of activity, where we learn about the idea of love and then practice it on others who have the same aspirations and ambitions as we do
8. You can’t do it by yourself on your own – absolutely need other spiky, prickly, jagged broken pieces of humanity to whom you have no initial sense of familial or marital responsibility to practice with
9. Kind of gives you an idea of God’s sense of humor – this was the way God wanted us to learn how to love? By bashing us around against each other? couldn’t God have just given us a magic potion or even a recipe
10. Well, there is a recipe – we just heard the quick bake recipe of St. Paul – the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus are the fuller version
11. When you read Paul on love closely – realize that all of the things he spells out are for us to do to others – and not for us to feel good about ourselves - assume that we will need patience, endurance, trust, accommodation and even a bit of intentional naivete. In other words, God knows exactly what we are really like and this is the way to handle us if we are ever going to get along
12. We hear this lesson often at weddings, but Paul was writing to a church, a church full of rugged individualists in conflict
a. Doctrinal conflicts over communion practice, accommodation with surrounding pagan culture, how to keep human sexuality from unleashing chaos in peoples’ lives
b. conflicts over unity – wealthy and powerful throwing their weight around
c. Personality conflicts over spiritual gifts – whose were the best and most important
d. Conflicts over bad behavior – people showing up drunk for church suppers and at least one illicit affair going on which everyone was apparently aware of
13. And so, the church is where we learn how to love in the way Paul describes – and perhaps more importantly, learn how to be loved – allow ourselves to be loved
a. Hard for us – counter cultural in every way
i. requires that we jump in and don’t bail out – consumer mentality
ii. Honest – who we really are – no pretense
1. In fact, the church won’t work on you if you do pretend – need to have the sharp edges and imperfections exposed so they can be rubbed away
iii. A little pain – taking off all the masks and body armor we have for survival in our lives out there
iv. Relax – this is going to take time
v. Trust – that they won’t just dismiss us or ridicule us
14. Think about beach rocks, whenever you think about the church, this church or just the church in general, whenever you’re thinking about diving in deeper, whenever you’re thinking about running out the door in frustration, whenever someone asks you why a smart person like you would possibly go to church, whenever you wonder what’s in it for you or where God might be