May 11, 2014, "You are Known and Loved"

Acts 5:1-10 John 10:1-10 You are known, you are loved! You are and will be remembered! So give yourself to others! That is the simple and profound message of this day, of the Bible, of Baptism, of Mothers Day. Often, we try to make life too complicated. You are known and you are loved! Before this little one is able to speak, before she has been taught anything, not because of what she has or has not done, simply by virtue of being, she is of Child of God, she is loved. Someday, she may be President of the United States, someday she may be a University Professor, some day she may be someone's wife, some day she may be somebody's Mother. In all those ways and many more experiences she will be known, she will be claimed, she will be loved, and remembered, and she will give herself to others, over and over. But today, we affirm that being known to God, she is loved. I have always been quite transparent with you, even that in my birth my mother died. About a year later, my Father married the Church Organist, giving us a new role model for mother. In between, though I was too young to remember, a woman in the congregation raised me with her children. Over the years, because she was not a blood relative, we only saw her on very rare occasions, but when I was Confirmed, she sent a plaster-of-paris hand-print spray painted gold, with my name across it. When Judy and I married, another Hand-print arrived. When I was Ordained there was another gold hand-print. I began wondering if as an infant she had been fingerprinting me in plaster of paris every day? Just how many of these hand-prints did she have? And yet, there was something very re-assuring that before she had been there before I knew anything else, and at all the markers of life, she remembered and loved. You are known and you are loved. Earlier this year, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks Basketball team contacted a Sports Radio announcer and offered him $50,000 to legally change his name for a year to be “Dallas Mavericks.” It would have proven instant publicity for Cuban's team. Every time, the announcer introduced himself, or signed off he would be naming the team. Fans wrote emails and called into the show telling him he should do it. When the announcer did not act, the owner of the team offered to increase his offer to $100,000 and another $100,000 would be donated to his favorite charity, if he would change his name for a year. But finally the announcer said, “I cannot. If I did, I would be selling out my integrity, I would be selling out who I am. Perhaps I would be offering promotion to the local team, but to me every time I introduced myself I would be stating I will do anything for money, for a job, for acceptance.” You are known and You are loved. We seek familiarity, we seek to be known, yet not really. More than ever before we are connected, through Facebook, Skype, Vimeo, Twitter, Email, Smart-phones, Blogs, we are more immediately connected to more people than ever before, and yet there is less intimacy, less caring, less sharing of who we really are with one another. In seeking connection we continue a pattern begun in our infancy, regardless of culture, regardless of family, as infants we all mimic, Our eyes are pre-set to focus upon the face of our Mother and Father. They smile and we smile back. They raise an eyebrow and we do. We seek validation of those like us, seeking to be known, to be loved, to be remembered, and as infants we have no boundaries. But as we mature, our mimicing shifts to a desire for validation, for acceptance; and one of the last things to develop which some of us never do, is discernment among those validating. Is the acceptance of our Mother as important as that of our peers? Is having a really good and trusted friend the same as being able to be seen by 2,500 friends? In the case of Dallas Maverick, is a money worth more than a name? You are known, you are loved, you will be remembered, so give your whole self without restraint. During Lent we began this story of a man born blind whom Jesus healed. But where we tend to be distracted by the miracle, a major point of remembering the story is that suddenly he was different from how everyone knew him. The disciples questioned whether he or his parents had sinned to cause his blindness...the Pharisees judged and rejected him as not being accepted...his own parents said: He's old enough, let him take responsibility for his own life. After having healed him of what had made him different, Jesus sought out the man, offering love and acceptance. Jesus had looked into his eyes and knew him and offered for the man to know his Savior. The Gospel of John is wonderful for having these puns or riddles, we might even call them double en tend-re. The man who had been blind was given sight by the Savior, and knowing the man blind and knowing the same man able to see, made everyone else question their own blindness. Years ago we had a Beagle, and a fenced in back-yard. But regardless of the fence, that dog would try to get out, she would dig under, jump up, pull at the wires to get out to where everything else in life was. Gates in a rural society were important. When animals are penned in, they will find any way possible to get out. But outside is not secure, is not safe. There are predators and robbers seeking to destroy. In the wild, when grazing sheep over night, a shepherd would gather stones and sticks to create a perimeter, an enclosure to hold the sheep which was called a sheepfold. I recall years ago, when we first developed relationship sponsoring refugees from Sudan. One day, I drove to lakefront home of John and Mary Ayer, and I was asked about our relationship. I recall John describing, I want to bring my children and their children to this church and name to them, this was the gate through which we came to be part of America. One of the churches I grew up in had a great deal of artwork. One print was a copy of a woodcut from the 1500s, roughly when Martin Luther was a teenager. In the print, Jesus stood at the gate of the sheepfold, and the sheepfold was the church. While Jesus was at the gate, there were Church officials checking people's papers, to determine who should get in and who should be kept out. Meanwhile, there were Church leaders running away from the Church carrying away members and ideas. The print was what today we might consider a Political Cartoon about the need for the Reformation, and in recent years I have thought a great deal about that print being descriptive of today, as Church leaders fight over who belongs and who does not, while important ideas and people are being carried away and lost. The passage about Ananias and Saphira, names what was required was not that they donate everything they had. Before they sold the land, nothing whatsoever was required of them. No, the difficulty was that they conspired to withhold part, to claim that they had given their all and lied to God, lied to the community, when they were choosing to hide. Being known and being loved, requires that we act honestly with one another, that we recognize and claim each other with our love in response. When there are gates, you had to be careful to use the gate every-time. If you crawl over a gate, over time the hinge would spring lowering the gate to where animals would try to climb over. If you crawled beneath, your pushing away brush and loose dirt would invite animals to believe they could too. My favorite image is of the Shepherd who would lay their own body down as the gate, to keep animals from going in or coming out. Literally, the Shepherd's own self became the Gate. And more important than trying to narrow the gate to keep unwanted out, the shepherd used their own body to extend the width of the gate to try to bring more inside. The secret to understanding faith is a question of where we begin. Are we Human beings searching all our lives to become more spiritual? OR are we spiritual beings, known by God, loved by God, searching to be accepted by humans?