"Standing Alongside in Loss" May 25, 2014

John 14: 15-21 Acts 17:22-31 Who among us has ever experienced loss? With death of a beloved Grandparent, parent, spouse, child, or companion? We want to be assured, we want know, what happens after death? We feel this void, this hole where once we were whole. Paschal described we each have an eternal longing Abyss! This is Memorial Day Weekend, insofar as Skaneateles is a community that work hard and play hard, this is the official beginning of summer. But throughout the last 150 years, Memorial Day has been remembrance of the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression, the War against ourselves, where more Americans died than in any war before or since. Memorial Day has become a tradition, of parades, of cemeteries, of honoring not only our Civil War dead, but all those who gave their lives in Battle, and by extension of admitting the loss of arms and legs, sanity and relationships in every war, and marking the graves not only of soldiers but of all those whom we have loved and lost. In 21st Century America, we are not adept at coping with loss, or talking about loss, consequently we are dysfunctional, tip-toeing around that whether children or adults, we feel ORPHANED by loss. What I hope we will take from worship this day, is not a greater sense of loss, but rather the realization that while loss is a natural part of life, there are losses every day, we have been given the resources and the people who stand alongside us, that we may never have seen before, who more than allowing us to cope, through relationship gift us with the ability to live through and beyond loss. Because that is a part of Christianity that has been lost! Christianity has become a religion focused on an empty tomb over two thousand years ago, in a far distant culture and reality. IF Christianity, were only about Jesus of Nazareth, the teacher, the healer, Miracle Worker, if Jesus alone was God, then that is all there is. BUT Jesus himself described that his life was embodiment of the love of God with us, and that he and God would not leave us orphaned, but with the loss of Jesus, God would send Another Advocate. The point is that we believe in the Trinity, yet most often we Christians have focused on a Duality, as if there were a God in the Old Testament and a different God in the New Testament, or perhaps even that we reject the first as being old, and believe in Jesus Christ alone. Our High Holy days center on the Birth of Jesus, the Death of Jesus and the Empty Tomb. Here 6 weeks later, after the eggs have gone rotten, we are still speaking of Easter, in part because we have little language about the Holy Spirit and we struggle with integrating faith in our reality as being more than inclusion of an Unknown. I would claim to have lived a life of privilege. Most Americans in the 21st Century live in privilege, never having lived “without.” Because of this, we are perpetually searching for what is The new thing. My own privilege was having had the luxury of education, in College and Theological Seminary, where the purpose of life was to read and to learn and to try to understand. Even more, the privilege you provided by enabling a return to Theological Seminary for Doctoral Education, where the purpose was to take everything you have mastered in academic intellectual knowledge and spend time interpreting, reflecting upon personal experience of faith. One awareness I had to relearn, is that the Trinity is not a statement of Time, as if there was a God in the Old Testament, a Jesus in the Gospels, and an Invisible Holy Spirit with us today. But rather that the Creator, who separated light from darkness and place from chaos, who called life into being and breathed life into Adam, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, continues to create in the Here and Now. AND ALSO, that in an historic real life, God became human to bring us into relationship and to atone for our wrongs. A human life, in our reality has a conception, a birth, maturity and responsibility, friends and foes, and a human life dies. HOWEVER the new reality created by God through Jesus is revelation that loss of this life is not all there is, death is not a nothingness, an empty tomb. Rather, we live on, both in full relationship with God AND in the love and relationships of all whose lives we have touched. The critical point in Jesus' words of assurance to his disciples is not to tell them he was going to die, he had said this over and over. But, that his loss was in order that they would be given Another Advocate. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, what we name as the Old Testament, there is affirmation that God created the universe and everything therein, especially you and I, wanting us to choose to be in relationship with God. Over and over and over since Adam and Eve, while God tried, humanity sought to create a reality without God. Even creation of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, and the Temple at Jerusalem were attempts at creating a reality of God with us. The New Testament begins with the incarnation of God in a human person, as Advocate for God's Truth, demonstrating and standing beside us, accompanying us in to relationship with God. So when that life died, which we have historic corroboration occurred, that life returned to be in relationship with God, WHILE GOD sent Another. Part of the excitement of the New Testament, is that the Apostle Paul, like us, never knew the historic Jesus of Nazareth. Like us, Paul struggled to integrate his knowledge of the Hebrew Faith and the stories, teachings, parables, and life of Jesus, with his reality. What the Epicureans and Stoics describe as BABBLINGS and FOREIGN DEITIES is that Paul was comfortable defending the Covenants of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and David, in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, BUT ALSO in his own personal experience. The Epicureans and Stoics were Greek Philosophers, who routinely argued Philosophy at the Areopagus, but their means of debate of truth was either who had the greatest number of corroborations, or whose argument was the more logical and reasoned without emotion. What Paul preached, was filled with citations of corroboration of the presence of God in reality, and the logical reasoning of God's love in Jesus' teachings, but he added his own personal experience. What Paul named for the Greeks at Athens, and by application names for us, is looking around our Village, our Homes, it is immediately apparent that we idolize a great many things. Personally, I enjoy every time I drive Route 20 East from Auburn, coming down over the hill to see the Church at the center of this community. But looking around, it is apparent we idolize leisure. We idolize comfort. We idolize a good meal. We idolize our children and their education. We idolize owning land. We idolize our freedoms. In our community are several different churches, are these idols to an unknown god, a faith we have accepted because we did not want to leave anything out? OR, are there experiences where you can name God's reality in your life? Paul was doing what Jesus preached at the Last Supper, not with a wagging finger, but with an open invitation, “If you love me, love others as I loved you.” Paul is doing what Simon Peter described in our Call to Worship and Illumination this day, “Be prepared to make a defense for the hope that is in you, with gentleness and reverence.” I made reference last week, to something which happened, that now a days occurs extremely rarely, and yet is what faith in the KNOWN GOD is all about, and it is vital each of us be able to do. In Examination for his Ordination, not simply as a Master of Divinity and Reverend, but as a Pastor, our Candidate was asked three questions. NOT questions whose answers come out of a book, but out of taking The Book to Heart and applying through your reality, because in the end all other authorities of reality are meaningless to us. 1) What is your favorite Parable, Story, Teaching about God, and why? 2) Describe a time when you saw The Church acting as the Body of Christ, the Community of Faith? 3) You claim to be Christian, to believe in the Trinity, how do you explain the Trinity of God, in particular the reality of that elusive presence the Holy Spirit in our lives? I recall when my father in law died, and a lifelong friend named to you that we were all right. I recall being gifted the costumes of another church, so that whole congregation could dress in Medieval costume for a Boar's Festival with a burro walking up the center aisle, where the pastor played The Fool, and we celebrated the Christmas pageant differently. I recall when we dedicated the rebuilding of the Church, and while everyone explored the new resources one of the elders on Session asked “Having accomplished what we have talked about for so many years, what do we do now?” I recall Bunt Osborne at the congregational meeting where we discussed replacing the organ, saying “If you want a re-built instrument you already have one.” I recall, a worship service where the Bell Choir was going to play and one of their number had died, so we placed flowers at her position and sat in silence. I recall, when my own father died and not only did our leadership step up to lead, you ministered to me. I recall one Sunday morning where I shared with the church that we had planned to have a wedding that in the end did not occur, and a baptism but the parents had filed for divorce and could not even agree on Baptism of their children. I recall a Baptism on the morning a child of the church dressed in Military uniform was leaving for war. In all these ways and many more, we have named LOSS, and that not even death, or accomplishments, or anything else in all of life can separate us from the Love of God and one another.