July 29, 2012 "The God Particle"

2nd Samuel 11:1-5 John 6: 1-21 On the 4th of July this year, after almost 50 years of research, Particle Physicists discovered what they had known existed but could not find. The Higgs Boson Particle, as I understand it, is a sub-atomic particle by which things have mass, matter and being. 30 years after Peter Higgs published his theory of the reality of this particle, Leon Lederman wrote about it in his book: The God Particle. Ever since there has been debate because at least on the surface, physicists were attributing the creation of matter, mass and being: to God, even that discovery of this God Particle might prove the existence of God. Except, the Particle Physicist Peter Higgs never identified his theory as “The God Particle,” instead, after searching for decade after decade for proof he could not find, Higgs had named the missing particle as That Gosh-Darned Particle, quite literally the God ________ Particle. Rather than proving the existence of God, his euphemism identified that which gave him the greatest vexation and tormented his life, as the thing that was missing. More than attributing that anything we cannot explain must belong to God, the point of our scriptures this day are that when we chose to act as if there is no God, or God is unknown to us, we get into trouble, and yet when we attempt to live our lives in faith miracles are possible, and nothing, not a single particle of matter will ever be lost from God. When we think of King David, some of us recall the Shepherd Boy battling Goliath with a slingshot, some recall the beloved King of Israel author of the Psalms, while others jump to Bathsheba. We hear this story and know that the sin of David was adultery. But that is not what this passage is about. Others of us, pay attention to the introductory words, and note that “In the Spring of the year, when other kings went off to war, David stayed home...” and we interpret that David was having a Mid-life Crisis, or Burned out, and rather than getting a sports car or an earring or tattoo, King David had an affair. But that is not the point of this story. In the Chapter prior, Israel had gone to war, while King David stayed safe at home. Israel was being soundly beaten, when God told David to get up, and he went, and seeing their King leading them, the army of Israel rallied and Israel won. A long winter has taken place and again in the Spring it was the time in which armies and kings went to war, but David stayed home. This is a passage like Jonah to the Ninevities and Elijah in the Cave, a Calling where God instructed David to go, and instead he preoccupied himself with other things. From which came the affair with Bathsheba, the murder of her husband Uriah, and the division of the monarchy with Absalom. All because David chose to not listen to God, to not trust to go where God directed in faith, but practically, reasonably, King David stayed at home. Turning to the Gospel of John, imagine with me if you will, what would happen if suddenly on this morning in late July quite unexpectedly 5000 people came to worship? The Deacons would probably break the copy machine by trying to making additional bulletins. The Music staff would be concerned how we could get hymnals and Bibles for each person to be able to read the words. The Property Committee would be going nuts because at the end of one of the worst droughts in recent history, when the grass is brown and crunchy, thousands of people are trampling and sitting down breaking the blades of grass. The preacher would be grinning from ear to ear looking out upon the masses, concerned whether his words could possibly be worthy. While the Women's Association and the Membership and Outreach Committee wonder how they could provide enough Presbyterian punch for Coffee Hour. The difficulty with appropriating this passage is not identifying with the disciples, but that rationally in the 21st Century we do not believe 5000 people would ever turn out to worship God! I went to Seminary in a skeptical age, where when confronted with a passage like this, we were taught to reason out the most human of interpretations. Like the Children's Story of Stone Soup, it must be, that when the child offered all he had 5 loaves and 2 fish, the adults were shamed into each offering what they had hoarded away, and in the end there was a multiplication more, than at the first. But to follow this interpretation makes God some great Social Worker, who manipulates peoples sense of generosity. Jesus becomes one who preys upon peoples' sense of shame and guilt, and that is not the Savior whom we know and love. NO, the power of this story is not in rationally reasoning out human behavior, but instead believing in the power of God that all who are hungry should be fed. John Calvin's explanation was that the five loaves represented the 5 Books of Moses, the Pentateuch or Torah, the Books of Law, which when given to the people and distributed returned in the ministry of the 12 disciples, and what was most important to Calvin that not one particle of matter was lost, for nothing could ever be lost from God. The problem of those of us who received our education from the time of the Great Enlightenment through the 20th Century, was that in what was called The Modern Era, we believed Knowledge was Power, that ultimately everything in the universe could be known, and knowing we could master our world. Ironically, with the discovery of the micro-processing chip, computerization and telecommunication, we shifted from the Modern Era to the Information Age. In this time, we are constantly plugged in and bombarded with knowledge. We channel surf between Reality Shows and Sit-Coms, Game Shows, Talk Shows and News Shows, as if all were equal, all were for our entertainment, and as if this were not enough at the bottom of the screen teletype scrolled by with highlights of other stories to distract our focus. Tragically, we have replaced the era of Knowledge, with a Time of being Passive, Isolated and Alone, where we do not know what to do with all the information available to us. In recent years, we have responded to Tsunamis, Flesh-eating Viruses, Mine Cave-ins, Shark Attacks, North Korean Rocket launches, the killing of Osama bi Laden, European Debt, Chimpanzees ripping the face off of a woman, Job Loss Numbers, and the Olympics. I would admit that within the church, we are no better, as sometimes it seems we go from crisis to crisis, the list of concerns is an overwhelming multitude. At times I feel as though our prayers are like plate spinners on old Variety shows, where we are focused on spinning concern for this woman recovering from unending surgeries for cancer, then for this man with depression, then this child, when suddenly we learn of a neighbor falling from a roof. How do we respond and minister to 5000 concerns and in our shock everything begins to crash around us like shattering plates. To treat any of our stories as miracles enables our faith to become a consumerism of magic incantation, if only I pray harder I can save my sister from Cancer. If only we believed more, our child would not have died. If I had been a better parent... And if not me, then it must be “the Will of God” and what a merciless God to cause such suffering! The POINT of Miracles is not to FIX broken things, Prayer is not purchase of the Missing God Particle that will explain the universe, or even the Gosh-darned particle, but redeeming the Lost. Prayer, Faith, Reading the Scriptures, all require that we stop, we re-orient ourselves, to listening for God, watching what God may do, believing all things are possible with God. We need to sit down on the grass, as Moses did with the people in the wilderness when giving to them the Law, and as Jesus did here with the loaves and fishes. The point is not to make any one of these circumstances of our neighbors a testimony to our faith, our latest miracle story, but instead to know that nothing has ever been lost to God, there is a superabundance of grace that can suffice. In 1946 a young woman named Agnes took her vows to become a nun. In the ministry, there is not always choice of where and how you serve, and she was sent to Calcutta to work with those with Leprosy, the untouchables, whose own families had shunned them. Agnes was a young woman of 18 who along with 16 other nuns were given responsibility of ministering to thousands of people with a disease that at the time was incurable. Overwhelming odds, daunting, but the experience made Agnes into Mother Theresa. How easy it is for our fears of what is missing to take possession of us and to toss us in a sea of chaos, instead of listening to God, welcoming Jesus in, and discovering we are already on the other side.

July 1, 2012 "Touching"

2 Samuel 1 Mark 5: 21-43 Four weeks ago a daughter of the Church was married and insofar as the Groom's family were Chilean, I officiated at the marriage, while our Parish Associate translated the entire ceremony into Spanish. A difficult enough task, but there are certain idioms in any language that do not have an immediate equal. The most difficult became description of the wedding band, because what we tried to emphasize was a pun, in that what is worn as a gift of love also wears upon the receiver. Erosion did not seem right, nor dressing up, and we had quite a search for what is related to the feeling of touch and being touched. Increasingly, we are becoming a sensory stimulated society, lighting and colors are made brighter, music and sound louder, I have a brother in the dairy business who tells me that they are having to make stronger and stronger flavors and smells of cheeses because our taste buds are becoming dull. Yet, as stimulated as we are in sight, smell, taste and sound, we are becoming ever increasingly isolated and sterile. We have sanitary lotions everywhere to wipe away the germs of one another. What happens if we become a society afraid to touch, afraid of being touched. For hundreds of years, anthropologists had speculated what might happen to a person if denied human touch. Would we revert to something primordial and vicious? Would we find ways to touch and soothe and satisfy ourselves? Would we withdraw into our own thoughts and a world of our imagination? Tragically in the 1980s, with the Fall of Romania, we witnessed first-hand the effect of not touching, President Ceausescu had enforced bizarre laws about social interaction. The result were thousands of children warehoused from birth in grossly overcrowded institutions, never having been held, touched, soothed, tickled or pinched, or embraced. As adults, we would have difficulty describing them as human creatures; they fully grown, fully mature beings, but incapable of emotion, incapable of interaction, incapable of speech, unable to relate to anything outside themselves. This is the importance and power of human touch. Is it any wonder that in order to be our Messiah, to be the Savior, God became human, a vulnerable baby to be touched and to experience life? Who then as an adult, as the Rabbi, healed and touched. So many describe the difference between the Old and New Testaments, as the one being filled with love and forgiveness, while the other has such brutal violence.Yet, in all human history, over and above any other religion, Christianity in the four gospels narrates a story of human suffering and death more brutal than any other. If we heard this morning's readings as “How David became King” and “Jesus Healed Two People” we miss each of the stories, for these are stories of faith in human intimacy, human interaction, trust and touch. Last Sunday we shared the epic tale of David and Goliath, which provided numerous changes. David the Shepherd boy became a Mighty Warrior. Little David was brought into the household of King Saul, raised as if a brother to Saul's son Jonathan. But also, recall the vow of Goliath, that as one Warrior competing against another, the winner would take the losers head, and the army of the loser became the personal army of the winner. Unfortunately, in preaching, we skip over whole sections of the Bible, dozens of years in a person's life, decades of human history. When the Tribes of Israel had escaped from slavery to Pharaoh in Egypt, there ere other tribes as well. In addition to the Canaanite tribes of the Hittites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, etc, there were the Amalekites. Different from the Egyptians who were Masters, and the Israelites who had been slaves, the Amalekites preyed upon the weak. Like Wolves or Coyotes, the Amalekites followed after the Israelites through their journeys from Egypt to the Promised Land, enslaving and killing anyone who fell behind, anyone weaker than themselves. Their stories, their reputations, their hostility was fearsome. So it was, in the passages we skipped between the people wanting a king and Samuel being told to anoint Saul, and the following week where Samuel mourning that Saul had not been a good king, so out of all the sons of Jesse God chooses David, what happened was that God had told King Saul to eliminate the Amalekites. It is a hard passage, one which makes little sense to a Post-Modern world. Yet, the point of the story is that King Saul decides he knows better than God, and he chooses to not listen to God, to allow the Amalekites to go free. After last week's passage, David comes to live in the Palace with Saul and Jonathan, until one day in a rage, Saul throws a spear and narrowly misses David. SO David runs away to save his life. When suddenly he remembers the vow of Goliath, and claims the Philistine Army as belonging to him. But now David has a problem, because while David has been anointed by Samuel to be King of Israel, and while David is commander of the Philistine Army which had proven they could beat the army of Israel, still David did not want to destroy Israel! Despite Saul trying to have David killed, David revered the King and loved Jonathan as a brother. Repeatedly, when given opportunity David spares Saul's life, for Saul is the Anointed Installed King of Israel and no one not even David has the right or power to lay hands upon and kill God's Anointed. All of which sets up this morning's reading, as news comes to David from the front lines. If you were David, how would you respond: Did this man provide mercy to Saul, killing him to spare suffering? As an Amalekite, whom God had ordered Saul to kill and he had not, this one who preyed upon the weak, dared to lay hands upon and kill God's Anointed, and take the Crown and Armlet, was this treason? The distinction that is present in the Bible, is that the Old Testament is about The Law, The Amalekite had preyed upon the dying king, he was of a tribe that was to be exterminated, and he dared kill the anointed one of God. Whereas the New Testament emphasizes the fulfillment of the Law, is not always black and white, sometimes humanity, forgiveness, faith, intimacy, touch make all the difference. To understand these stories from Mark, we need to recall this as a Caste Society, where those who have power are esteemed and revered, and those who are unclean according to the Law, cannot socialize, cannot speak or touch those who are clean. Jesus had been preaching and teaching and healing, had gotten into the boat of fishermen to cross the Galilean Sea and awakened from sleep Jesus calmed the wind and sea. Their boat arrived on the otherside, where they were greeted by what was left of a man possessed by a legion of Demons, casting the demons out of this man into a herd of pigs, the swine ran off a cliff, for which Jesus was chased back into their boat and out of the region. Arriving back on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, before their boat is even on shore, the most esteemed and respected leader of the Synagogue named Jairus comes running to Jesus. Middle-eastern Men, leaders of the Synagogue do not ordinarily run. He bows down and humbles himself before Jesus begging for Jesus to come immediately to save his 12 year old daughter. Throughout the Gospel of Mark , the most common word, used over and over to emphasize that this is a Crisis Moment a Chiros moment, is the word “IMMEDIATELY.” Yet, Jesus has to go through the marketplace to get from the shore to Jairus' home, and a woman who had had bleeding for 12 years, a woman who was ritually unclean, reached out and touched the robe of the Anointed one of God. Here the leaders of the Synagogue had just bowed down and humbled himself before Jesus, and this un-named, unclean ostracized woman dared to try to touch Jesus! Is that the way we think faith works? Touch the magic hem of the robe and be healed? In a crowded busy marketplace, Jesus who had touched 10 people with Leprosy, Jesus who had been accused of eating with hands defiled, Jesus who himself would strip and kneel before the disciples to wash their feet, Jesus who held babies and children, do you imagine would be upset by this woman touching him? Yet, instead of rushing to Jairus' 12 year old daughter, Jesus stops to acknowledge that this unclean, unacceptable woman has been made well by her wanting to touch him. When they arrive at Jairus' home, the father and the anointed one are told that the 12 year old is dead. Oddly, what is described is that paid mourners, are in chaos what to do, and when Jesus responds we must pray to bring the dead to life, the paid mourners laugh. If I were Jairus I would want my money refunded. These are people paid to grieve and display mourning, and instead they are talking and gossiping and laughing! Jesus instead goes into the house, into the child's room and treats her, not as unclean, not as a dead corpse, but as child, he takes her hand and lifts her up, to sit up and stand and eat. The point of these passages about touching and being touched, are that we question, whether we allow ourselves to feel and experience faith? Whether like Saul we become so caught up in our being right, that we defy God? Or like the Amalekite we risk killing God's anointed one for us in order that we might gain? Or whether we are desperate enough to cross boundaries and risk to touch, whether we really want to be made well? Whether we treat a child as a child, and death as prelude to everlasting life, or whether we are in chaos uncertain if we are to laugh or weep, or gossip, and are only motivated by who is paying us? David's response to the Death of King Saul and Jonathan is one of the classics of literature. As experienced at the Memorial of President Kennedy. As experienced at the Assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. As experienced on September 11th. We as a Nation, as a people of God, stop in Sabbath to recognize that life will never again be the same. Over and over again, with the Foreign policy, with the Economy, there have been assumptions that we would get back to normal... to life as we are comfortable with it... The point of the raising of Jairus' daughter, the healing of the unclean woman, and mourning the deaths of Saul and Jonathan are that we allow ourselves permission to feel, to touch and be touched , and experience life wearing upon us. The Scottish Philosopher John MacMurray has described “I need you, in order to be myself.” We each need one another to wear upon.