"For Us or Everyone Else?" August 11, 2013

Hebrews 11 Isaiah 1: 10-20 Luke 12: 32-41 One Sunday morning in worship, I looked out upon the congregation, and saw that here upon the floor in the second pew was a child turned around backward engrossed in coloring her bulletin program. The parents smiled that everything was as it should be, and I smiled back reassuringly. But during a pause in the preaching of the sermon this cherubic voice spoke out “Mommy is he talking to us or everybody else?” Rubbing her back, her mother said “Shhh, it's all right dear go back to what you were doing.” Suddenly it hit me that this is what we have done to faith. Instead of Salvation being our hope and goal and longing, rather than teaching the stories of Scripture as the foundations of our faith, we have conditioned and reassured our children that they do not need to pay attention to reality. We distract them with games and devices, teaching them that being polite is saying “Thank you” and “I am sorry” and “I love you” to family, even when you are not. It happened again this weekend, that we had a wedding. A beautiful affair with all the friends and family gathered. The couple described that what was unique, was something they had gotten from Amazon.com. Throughout the wedding, there was an empty vase before the couple. At the climax of the wedding, the parents came forward each with vial of sand in shades of silver, gold and brown, which they poured into the vase to form a foundation. After the parents were reseated the couple took their own vials of colored sand and layered these in a beautiful pattern upon their parents foundation of silver, gold and brown. Then, when the vase was almost overflowing, they took an oil candle and placed it upon the top, which became their unity candle. It was a beautiful thing, and a symbol of the sharing this couple hoped to have based on all their parents had provided. But as we walked down the aisle one of the guests leaned over asking “So what difference did that make for their staying married?” We are easily distracted and caught up in ritual, in the drama of the moment, without realizing there is a great deal more to life than going through the motions of saying please and thank you, and I am sorry... without meaning. That the simple words “I love you” are a promise and re-assurance of faith that together we create meaning, together we can believe in more than everything we have seen and known. The current Matt Damon Sci-fi “Elysium,” like the “Matrix” series, follow the theme of John Bunyan's classic Pilgrim's Progress, in which at the very beginning the hero awakens from the reality of everything they have known to believe there is something far better, another world. In each of the current manifestations the goal becomes shattering the difference between worlds, bringing that reality down once and for all to be in concert with what everyone else knows as real. In the Puritan classic, Pilgrim's Progress, the Character “Christian” reads a book, and suddenly realizes the reality he has known is a City of Destruction focused upon its own consumption, a Sodom and Gomorrah, and he sets out on a journey for The Celestial City of God. Each of these are about more than a quest, a great journey, stories are our search for meaning. A quest for whether what those before us claimed to know and believe has meaning, or where we find salvation. The Word of God as it comes from Isaiah, names God's frustration with a people who only go through the motions of life. At the time of Isaiah, worship in the Temple had gone on for hundreds of years. Over those Centuries, instead of worship being about the celebration of our faith, about wrestling with priorities and ethical values, worship had followed a formula. We are sinners. Sin is a debt owed to God. Sinners must make a sacrifice to atone for their sins. There are two corruptions here: The corruption that the more sacrifices that were offered, the more sinners who said they were sorry, the more successful the Temple Worship. There were more people. There was ore money.This is success, Right? And also, whether we are anything more than sinners? God, who only wanted to love, to have relationship with Creation, is drowning in the blood of all the sacrifices that people had made. There was a constant parade of people, bowing down, saying I am sorry, and after hundreds of years of this, according to Isaiah, God said “ENOUGH!” So what do we think has changed in the thousands of years, we have continued? The point is not in making a sacrifice. Not in saying “I am sorry” or “Forgive me” or “I love you.” The point is whether we are transformed and changed to live in love, to live in forgiveness, or not? Years ago, there was a young man who went searching for faith. He found a great teacher, and asked that the teacher would show him what he needed to believe. The teacher took the man by the neck and forced his head under water and held him there as the novitiate wrestled and struggled to survive. Finally, the drowning man was allowed up. As he coughed and sputtered, and pushed the water from his face, the teacher asked “Why did you struggle, what were you searching for?” The waterlogged man replied, “I was struggling for air, searching only to breathe so as to survive.” The teacher replied, “Come back to me, when your struggle for faith, your need to believe is as desperate as for air.” The other day, I spoke with a man, who described that after 64 years of marriage, knowing his wife was dying day by day for the last many years, had held her in his arms as they slept. When he awoke, she had died. And he described feeling like he had been kicked in the stomach. That is to be desperate to believe. I hope that you know, your pastor is not so sadistic of a teacher as to try to drown you. And I do not believe God intentionally causes us pain. The point of faith is not to shock, or to entertain, or to console. For years now, we have celebrated in worship, in many and different ways. Barking like a dog. Praying in Confession. Laughing and Singing. Making Offerings. Sharing Communion. Serving one another. We could replace the Bibles in the pews with Kindles to read the Scriptures. We could replace the Hymnals with projections of words. We could replace the preacher with pyrotechnics, or actors, or a live band. The point of faith, is not whether we said the right words. Not whether we got the right people, or how many people. The point is whether we believe, and believing whether we pray and act, as we believe. We began worship this day, with the 11th chapter from the Letter to the Hebrews, which has a succinct recap of the journey of Abraham and Sarah. One day when he was 70 years young, Abram was called by God to leave home and family, and everything they had ever known to follow God. He took his wife and followed. Day after day, for years and decades they journeyed in hope of an inheritance. The nuance there, is that an inheritance is not fulfilled in your own lifetime. You are struggling, you are on this journey, so that there will be future generations after us, who might receive, who might believe. We said last week, that part of the nature of an inheritance is whether our parents, our loved ones, loved us as much as we thought, as much as they loved others; in this case whether God loves us; but even more whether we treasure their love. The particulars of Genesis, include that Sarah was very beautiful. Year after year as they journeyed, they encountered powerful, kings and pharaohs. Being afraid, Abraham had told his wife Sarah to tell the Kings and Pharaohs that she was only his sister instead of his wife. She bore this indignity. She bore their flirtations and gifts. Every time, their secrets would be found out, because secrets can never be hid. Finally, when they had wandered the earth on a journey approaching 40 years, when Sarah was 90 and Abraham over a 100 years of age, Abraham told his wife they were going to have a child. She laughed. After everything she had been through, journeying beside this partner. Now, when he was as good as dead, when it was long past the time of conception for her, they were going to have a child? But though she laughed, still she believed. Searching for our Celestial City... searching for what will be home for us... searching for fulfillment, can we believe? Jesus said: “Fear Not, little flock, for it is God's pleasure to give you the Kingdom.” We know God's desire. The question is whether we believe this is for us, or everybody else?

"The Illusion of Individualism", August 4, 2013

Hosea 11: 1-11 Luke 12: 13-31 There is an irony to Preaching. Ministers do not simply read or perform a prescribed speech. The craft of writing a sermon is in taking archaic texts, from different languages for different cultures, and developing a thesis elaborating upon their themes as application for our time and our concerns, developing meaningful ideas, pearls of wisdom, that will be worth the time of diverse people, different every week. Yet, week after week, at social engagements, on the street and at home, the Preacher is asked in One Word, or in Sound Bytes: What is the Sermon about? Last evening when I was asked, I quoted the title: “The Illusion of Individualism”. No one is an island! But part of the power of this morning's Scriptures is that each goes somewhere, there is a change a “Therefore!” In Amos and Hosea, we have read how frustrated God was with Israel, with humanity, God wants to destroy creation, God sees just how out of plumb we are and resolves Never Again to Pass-By, to Forgive, to Passover Israel. But Hosea having put away Gomer, God having resolved “Enough! No More” to forgive, ultimately recognizes that God cannot be alone. The Luke passage is about Money, Inheritance, Consumerism: Barns that are filled with surplus so the owner resolves to build bigger barns, The American Dream, yet this is the only Parable in all the Gospels where God speaks, and what God says is “YOU FOOL!” This is a sermon about The Beatles' Song “Can't Buy Me Love.” The problem is not that money is evil, not that the American Dream of Success is Corruption, but underlying both the Old Testament and the Gospel is the sin of Covetousness, of Greed, of Want not because of Need, but only because I Want. David Noel Freedman was a genius of Biblical Scholarship. Quite literally, he graduated from High School at age 13, College at 17, and had earned his first PhD before age 20. Freedman was the Editor of the Anchor Bible and an Old Testament Scholar at the University of Michigan, later at Princeton Seminary. After decades of research, Freedman came to the conclusion that the first 10 Books of the Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel and Kings, all were demonstration of Israel's violation of the first NINE of the Ten Commandments. Honoring God, Idolatry, Reverence, The Sabbath, Honoring Parents, Adultery, Murder, Stealing. Evidence of the first Nine, because for Murder there has to be a Body. For Adultery there has to be a liaison. For Theft, some thing has to be stolen. But according to Freedman, to Covet is internal, and therefore has no outward manifestation. Underneath everything else, the hardest sin of all is Desire, Covetousness, Greed. Adam and Eve was not about knowledge, not about Apples, but that when they could have anything and everything, this couple coveted what they could not taste. David and Bathsheba, was not about only about adultery, and about murder, but what prompted both was coveting the spouse of another. Not because we need, but because we want. Oddly enough, Greed is not born out of Drought and Economic Collapse. Greed is created out of success and prosperity. Having our needs met, we want to consume more. It is a human condition, our wants translate into desire for satisfaction. But when our our wants are filled, we still want, not because we are hungry, not because we need, but because we are not satisfied. Prosperity creates a sense of fear of scarcity. If my needs are currently met, but still I want more, will more stuff be there when I want? Coveting is not about Money, not about the possessions themselves, but Coveting is the insatiable desire to satisfy what can never be satisfied, to accumulate in a culture that can never have enough, to possess a monopoly in a world of scarcity. I have a couple of scandalous suggestions for you this morning. Scandalous because we live in a Village that sells a lot of stuff, stuff that we may not actually need... Can you go a month without buying stuff? Not that we halt the economy by not making any purchases, but all the excess stuff that we buy just for the sake of buying, that at the moment we had to have, to consume, to possess, we might go without. I heard about a grandmother, who decided that this year, her son had enough ties, her daughter had enough scarves, and sending a check to the grandchildren did not seem at all satisfying. So for her own birthday, she sent each family $1,000 with direction that they should use this to make a difference in the life of someone other than themselves. The sum was large enough, they could not forget to send a thank you, they could not ignore what the gift had been used for. The $1,000 was unexpected and had not been needed, so how would each choose to use it? The difficulty of the Bible is that the parables have become so familiar to us, life is so familiar, as to have lost the shock value of having been heard the first time. We think we own the passage, we know the meaning before we listen. The parable of the Rich Man and his Barns must be told within the context of the question posed. One in the crowd cried out to Jesus “Make my brother divide the inheritance fairly.” Growing up, I had three brothers and there was always a question of fairness. Our mother created a game, that whoever was in charge of division, of sharing, of cutting the desert or pouring the juice, could not be the one who was able to chose first. Knowing that yours was the leftover, the last chosen, ensured that every portion was exactly the same. But I have come to realize something, from all the years of memorials and funerals, what is important is not that we sung their favorite hymn, not the flowers, not that the worship service was beautiful, not that they were eulogized with all their accomplishments, not even that Aunt Jeanne did not make a scene. Funerals, Memorials, Death is about Closure, and as human beings as much as we covet reconciliation and resolution, we do not like the finality of closure. Throughout life there are all these unresolved threads, which dangle after death. Our desire for closure is to resolve what had been unresolved, to weave in and end what had been spurious living things. Related to this, inheritance is not about that lamp, or the Trust fund or portfolio, or the house on Skaneateles. The division of inheritance is about our parents' love. Whether Mom and Dad rewarded me the same or more than everybody else, whether I got more of their love and attention than anyone else? Painfully, we have each already made our lot in life, we have found careers and employment that have allowed us to meet our actual needs. Inheritance is about possession and control of the stuff beyond what we need. The reality is, that life is not about us in isolation. Our identity is composed of all the relationships we have, the accumulated worth of being our parents' children, our siblings' sibling, our neighbor's neighbor. Like God in the Book of the Prophet Hosea, there do come times when we want to cry out “Enough, No More!” But also like God, we look through our memories like a photo album. Instead of the baby coming home, we see the home we made for them. Instead of seeing the child taking their first steps, we see our finger holding them up. Instead of seeing their first birthday, we see the fuss we made over them, the cake, the party, our desire to love. I have come to realize that the prophecy of Hosea is not about taking a Prostitute as a spouse. None of us is so filled with self-hatred as to do so, or to name our children: Valley of Death, or Not my Child, or Unloved. While there may come times, when we want to send our children or our spouse away forever. I have come to believe that Hosea is the story of having to take responsibility for your Mom or Dad over their wishes, taking charge of your Husband or Wife, of your own Child. At Weddings we emotionally commit to “For Better and Worse and Richer and Poorer and Sickness and Health” which with the little we have experienced at 23 or 43 years is a monumental vow. But the heartache of Hosea, is if and when because of Worse and Poorer and Sickness, you take responsibility and take control for the other, how can you ever approach one another again as partners, as equals, with trust and the freedom to love? According to Hosea what God came to realize, is that God is not a human being. Faith is not ordinary or rational. God is God and as Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of Life, God must find a way to love anew. We so often imagine Jesus as having been betrayed by Judas, abandoned by the Disciples, Arrested by the Sanhedrin, put to death by Pontius Pilate and the Roman Empire. But also, presiding at the Table, giving the disciples bread and wine as his giving his body and blood, his life, was Jesus' gift that instead of closure offered the possibility of redemption and life different, never again alone or isolated by living our lives as part of the body of Christ, sharing the riches of God.