"We become What We Believe" August 28, 2016

Jeremiah 2: 4-13 Luke 14: 1-14 Where did you learn your faith, ethics, beliefs and manners? As a Preacher’s kid, I had an abnormal upbringing, with perfect attendance at Sunday School and Vacation Church School and Choir, but I also grew up in a family with four sons, and Dinners particularly Sunday Dinners were a full-family occasion where everyone had their place, we took turns setting the table, clearing the table, saying Grace, and were expected to be part of the conversation. When we first came to Skaneateles, I made the point that we had two sons who at the time were 3rd and 5th Grade, and that I treasured the time driving them to school and having them stop by on their way home. I recall when I candidated here in 1996, being asked if family time is so important, just how many hours per week I intended to work? I hope you have felt you got your monies worth. But talking together before and after school, and family discussions at the table, were where we learned our faith, ethics, values and manners. How to say “Please” and “Thank you” even to your brother. How to not spill a glass of milk, which side of the plate the fork goes on, how to refrain from belching, and what was appropriate conversation at Table. But even more, at the Table, was where we discussed what was going on in our lives, our questions and concerns and hopes and dreams. While in a classroom or meeting you were expected to listen and recite, on sports teams or in theater plays you acted out your part, at the Dinner table there was an expectation of being candid and honest and real as you struggle with life. One of the things I already miss about the coming Autumn, is that this year there will be no Downton Abbey, and particularly no dinner table discussions at Downton Abbey! In spite of the formality and splendor depicted, there was a repartee at the Table, where family members were especially candid as their stories and personalities intersected. Somehow in dinner table discussion, one idea prompts another, and just as with conversation we reveal connections we did not realize we believed. When Jeremiah begins “Hear the Word of the Lord, O House of Jacob and all Israel…” People would have remembered the most basic teaching of faith in Deuteronomy 6; “Hear the Word of the Lord, O House of Israel, the Lord our God is One, and God only shall you serve with all you heart, mind and strength.” With this introduction, believers were reminded, there is one true God, but Jeremiah accuses them of idolatry, of seeking after everything that is not God. And there is here a subtle and powerful image of faith, that what you seek becomes what you believe. If you seek worthlessness you become worthless. If you seek to hide in darkness, you become lost in the dark. If you seek to control and to dominate, you yourself will be controlled and dominated. If you seek to comfort others, you in turn are comforted. The merciful obtain mercy. I struggle whenever preaching this passage, because decades ago, there was a couple in another Church who were great leaders, she was an Elder and Clerk of Session, he was Moderator of the Deacons, both sang in the choir, and she had begun the Nursery School and taught for 20 years. Suddenly on Monday she described, “My husband and I took your sermon to heart. We realized that we had made an idol of our mortgage! When either of us got a raise, it was always for the house. One year, we gave each other a new Kitchen, another year a new roof. Everything we did was in service to the house, and even more the word “Mortgage” we discover is Latin for Death. So we are retiring early, selling our house and traveling the world! Preachers have to be careful, not only what they say, but who is listening, because believers may take the Word to heart. When a people of God neglect to recite their story, their heritage and foundation, the people become lost and easily believe in other things, like he who dies with the most toys wins, or might makes right, or prejudice is acceptable. Israel’s earliest memory, recited often was that their ancestors were nomads, wandering Arameans who possessed nothing, no land, no name, no offspring, BUT God provided for them. Part of our ancient history is that all the world sinned, enough so that God could rightly destroy the world. And God unleashed Chaos on the Earth, but still God preserved a remnant of Israel. More recently, our ancestors had been slaves, persecuted and beaten even to death. Yet these slaves, without name, without possessions, without heritage or power, cried out to God and Almighty God heard their prayer and entered in. Who and what are the People of Faith, a people who believe in the Power of God to listen and care and enter in. We are a people who are generous, because God has been gracious and generous to us. For Jesus, the focus of his life became the Cross, the means of atoning for the world. In the Creed, there is no mention of Jesus’ teachings, Jesus’ parables, of all the people that he healed, but that he was born of the Spirit and suffered and died and rose again. For the Early Church, their identity was not in the Cross, but in Baptism and fellowship at the Table. At Sunday dinner in our parents’ home there were a few basic rules. There was to be no fighting at the table, no kicking under the table, and when you sat down you stayed seated until the end of the meal. In like manner, in the first Century there were rules about the Sabbath. Because there were six days to work, on the Sabbath you did not… but seeing a man suffering, Jesus had compassion and healed him. Was this a monumental infraction, No, except that the Gospel describes “They were watching him.” And testing their reaction to his compassion, Jesus then challenges his fellow guests and his host. Realize that this was a time of great division. The Greeks did not associate with the Romans, and the Jews did not associate with either Romans or Greeks as Gentiles. But when a celebration occurred, you invited everyone and could not, would not discriminate against the most powerful and the lowest within your culture. However, while all were invited, the more powerful were catered to in different ways, and the least, had it emphasized that they were the least. Jesus Christ is the Son of God! Jesus is the Savior, the perfect atonement for all that separates us from God, for all the Sin of the World. But Jesus would have made a terrible Presbyterian Pastor! Imagine if as we came walking up during the Prelude, the Pastor stopped and told you to move to the back of the Sanctuary, and those in the back to move to the front? There would be chaos and disorder and a violation of your human expectations. Then again, I recall the Sunday, we celebrated our first ten years together. There were several Baptisms and many children in worship, and emphasizing that we have claimed one another and love each other, I took the children and gave them to other people. That when you come to worship, you do not have to be distracted or worried by your children, as there are others present who would love to sit with and teach the faith to a child. And that morning, despite having taken 50 children from their birth parents and placed them in the company of others, there was not a tear, not a scream, but the people of God celebrated our faith together. What you believe, what you affirm, is what you become.

"God's Word in Our Mouths" August 21, 2016

Jeremiah 1:1-14 Luke 13: 1-17 This morning I would pose to you a series of basic questions about Life, and the nature of Good and Evil: Is life basically good and wonderful, with moments of unhappiness, or is Reality hard with glimpses of joy? Do you believe there are sinners and there are saints, some people better than others predestined as evil & good? Before WWI, President Wilson believed America could be isolationist, because of our location with Oceans we were safe and secure. There have been occasions, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center, where evil was revealed as something unimaginable having occurred and we were attacked. At those moments in time, we reacted with fear, that we were more vulnerable, human and mortal than we wished to believe. Throughout our Nation’s history, generation upon generation have had a better standard of living, greater technology and freedoms than ever before. I am a self-proclaimed optimist, so always assumed Life is Good, but as described by Job to his wife, “If we expect blessings and wonders from God, should we also not expect some days are not?” For the last many weeks, miles and square miles of California are burning out of control, not in the desert, not in wilderness, but neighborhoods, people’s homes and businesses. For the second time in 11 years, New Orleans is flooded to rooftops, parts of the State of Texas as well. The Superpowers of Russia and the United States each have been bombing Syria, under the guise of destroying ISIS, but the United States has been supporting those trying to remove President Asad, while Russia is blowing up neighborhoods of those fighting against those we support. My mother-in-law has survived cancer three times over the last 20 years, and now has an infection in her blood stream and heart and spine. I was a fortunate to not know chronic pain until after I was 55… Chronic pain that you will never escape, pain that you will live with the remainder of your life, occasionally celebrating an Anniversary, or Birthday, but always with that life sentence of being bent over in pain, changes your outlook. C.S. Lewis most of us know from The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe: Narnia series, or as Christian Theologian his Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters, a contemporary and friend of J.R. Tolkien, but Lewis also wrote his own trilogy of Science Fiction. In this series, all the Universe is populated, and every planet with a different world view, but Earth is a Failed State, a desolate place of corruption. When an astronaut from Earth attempts to describe the circumstance of our reality to alien worlds, he struggles because the Judges have no word for SIN, trying to explain the concept of Sin, of Good and Evil, he finally arrives at the word BENT. Life functions, everything works, but everything in life is harder than it needs to be because life is Bent, we do not see face to face, not through a microscope or telescope, but through a dim dark reflection of what life was supposed to be. One Sabbath day Jesus went to Temple, and while he was there he saw a woman who had been Bent for 18 years, he called her over and said “Be Healed” and she was set free from pain, from being stooped, she was able to stand upright. Presbyterian Ministers have different requirements for Ordination than do other denominations. We do not have a Book of Prayers, or manufactured and approved sermons, instead throughout the history of the Church, we have required Ministers to graduate from Seminary, and while there to be educated in Hebrew and in Greek, because these were the original languages of the Old Testament and the New. I grew up in Michigan, in an era where the schools spent on Music and the Arts and Languages, we learned French in Elementary school, we were required to have 3 years of a language other than English to graduate High School, and another 3 years of a language at University level to graduate College. Having traveled extensively, I was able to pick up enough of languages to travel independently in Serbia and Croatia, and the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union. But not until Seminary Greek, did I understand about the words in our mouths, the reason for conjugation of verbs, differing tenses, because Greek had no punctuation so all the words within a sentence agreed in masculine or feminine, and past, present or future tense based on the verb. The first concept we learned was that you need to pay attention to the Verbs, because verbs communicate a complete thought, and verbs communicate action. The first word we learned in Greek was the verb for Set Free, to un-Bind, to Heal, to allow to stand up-right. This was the difference between peoples, between classes, the Free, the Citizens of Greece could stand tall, upright and look one another in the eye, where a slave was never to look a person in the eye, a servant was always bent. The point of the Gospel, the simplicity of Jesus’ healing in this story, is that the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Good News from God sets people free to stand un-bent. I am struck by the reality, that when a child is born/when a believer comes to faith, we hold them up before God. When a couple are married, we stand them up before the congregation (that we stand with them in their vows and commitment,) and we re-affirm our love for our partner in witnessing theirs. Whenever an individual is in need, bowed down by grief, by sin, by pain or illness, even death, we raise them up, lifting their name to God. Tragically, throughout history, people have had their convictions and agenda when reading Scripture and have attempted to prove their point by making the Word of God fit what they believe. This passage from Jeremiah is a difficult word, for we want God to be about Love and Mercy and Peace and Righteousness, and what this passage means is that just as is referenced in the Lord’s Prayer, God could lead us into Temptation. The role of Jeremiah’s life is to challenge institutions, to break down and uproot, and destroy all that people have built, because everything was built on sand, everything was bent and out of plumb. The tragedy of Jeremiah, is that in order for God to set free the people, to build and to plant, FIRST the Nation needed to understand it was Bent. Jeremiah’s Call was to help the world to see what they had been blinded to see. As 21st Century Americans, everything in our world is instantaneous. For the right price, we can have whatever we want when we want, or we can wait a few years, and because a newer version will come out, prices on what we want will be cheaper. But what if, you were to be prophet of God for generations of leadership, 70 years, and your role for all the nations, was to pronounce judgment and destruction for our sins? To realize no one is innocent, all are sinners? Jesus was asked, if those who were persecuted by Pontius Pilate, those who in the midst of their confession and prayer were killed and their blood mixed with the blood of their own sacrifices, if these were being punished for their sins? Jesus said “No!” “No more than the people who were crushed by the accidental collapse of a water tower, no more than those who have lost their homes and businesses in Louisiana or Texas or California. Throughout the last year and a half, the chant “Black Lives Matter” has been lifted up. And in response has come, “Blue Lives Matter” referencing the risk and value of life of our Police Officers. And both, do matter! But the difficulty is that we live in a bent world where life is not equal and not fair. As a Straight, White, Educated, Male, American, I do not even have to think about the circumstance others live with every night of their lives. I do not have to fear bullets being shot in our streets, or possibly through the windows of my house. I do not have to reconcile that when I get on an elevator, no one grips their purse more tightly, no one turns away. I believe that when I go into the bank or a store, I will be treated with respect and honor at least as someone who belongs. The reality is that a person born in Skaneateles, or on the Southside of Detroit or Chicago, or in Louisiana, or South Sudan, or Central America, or Korea, or Russia, or Ukraine, or Syria, or China, is equally precious to God. What has struck me in the last two weeks, have been stories from these Olympic games, not of who won what medal, not of how athletes and nations cheated to win, not of how prized medalists could get drunk and cause vandalism then lie about it to the Police and to the Fans. No, what has struck me, have been the stories of those who embraced the real spirit of the Games. The two women runners who bumped each other falling down, and helped each other get back up to finish with a torn hamstring and ripped knee meniscus, or the hurdler who crashed into the very first hurdle and picked himself and finished the race. Or Manny Rivera, the Yankees Pitcher, recognized as One of the Greatest Pitchers of all time, who declared “It was not me! But God working through me to Call others to believe.” Not simply about being the best in the world at what you do, because to make it to the Olympics, to pitch for the Yankees, is like being accepted to Harvard, or being the Pastor at the Skaneateles Presbyterian Church, being there you are among the best in the world, but also to recognize we are not here alone, others’ lives matter, and when they have had greater hardship we need to recognize this. Is there evil in the world? I believe there is, our reality is bent. There are times in our lives, when we search for any moments of joy in the midst of a world of un-ending pain; there are also times of sadness that come to those who have lived lives of good fortune. But how different our lives would be, if we recognized that the thoughts of our minds, the words in our mouths, our actions were all be prompted by God.