So What?

Genesis 1:1-2:4 Matthew 28:16-20 I do not recall having ever said, “My father is better than your father”, “My Dad can beat your Dad.” But I do recall being in awe, because he loved us. My father was of the great generation who could build a house, or fix a car, invest in stocks, and play bridge. Dad had been an Electrical Engineer, so could design the most incredible Science Fair Projects! Dad had created for us an elaborate world for HO trains, with mountains and tunnels, lakes and bridges. Mom had her Sewing Room, but Dad had his Shop in the basement where he could fix anything from carpentry to plumbing, to problems at school or in life. Dad was a pastor, so a leader in the community. He spoke and people listened. He fixed marriages, he fixed circumstance when people were in trouble, he was there to baptize babies and to bury grandparents. My father used to say to me, that he was glad he had served as a pastor when he had, in the years following WWII, when communities and churches were growing exponentially; when people knew they were thankful to God for being alive, having survived the Great depression, having survived War, having survived the rapid surge to marry and give birth to children. The world today is different. The Church today is different. Because of which, we ask different questions than ever before. Not that earlier times, circumstance or conclusions were wrong, only that today there are different questions. For the last Century, across Western Europe and North America, culture has been fighting over Science versus Religion, Evolution versus Creation, Answers versus Faith. But the point of this morning is that beneath this are more basic questions. Who, When, Where, How are Objective questions, which seem to give us control over chaos. But ultimately, Who What When Where cannot answer the questions of meaning and purpose, questions of Why and So What Now? The other day, I was with a family who were grieving the loss of a matriarch, a great grandmother. The family were anxiously waiting to hear why she died, how did this happen, was it a stroke, an aneurism, cancer, did somebody do something? Suddenly it hit me, I have never seen a headstone in any cemetery that read: Cancer. Heart Disease. Drunk Driving. How and Why, really do not address the questions we need answered. Grandma had been over 100 years of age, as long as anyone in the family could remember, she had been there, she made them clothes, she knit sweaters, she instinctively knew the recipes for baking cookies when we came. Would our world be overtaken by chaos, without Grandma to tell stories? When hearts were broken, when jobs were lost, when a child had died, she had always been there. How could we live without her? The meaning of our identity, the roles we play for others, the questions of So What and Why, are Subjective, they do not provide absolute Control over life and death, but they do provide meaning, and context and relationship, all of which help to create order and understanding and faith in something beyond what we can control. Not only do we have different questions, we have different means of communication. And the Church Today must embrace the reality that our Teens, Twenties and Thirty year olds do not communicate by writing letters, by going to someone's house to speak with them, they do not pick up the land-line telephone, they do email. The culture Texts and Tweets and I.M.s. For the last twenty years, ushers and preachers and parents, have been reprimanding people to turn off your Communication Devices. What a foolish thing for us to say especially in church! Instead, I want to say that I need your help. I would like it if every worship service, every occasion in life, if you would text me with your questions, and I will try to find the way to respond. Possibly, sermons from week to week will be better connected, ever probing deeper. Perhaps, if I get even better at multi-tasking, we can select the top three questions to respond to during that morning's sermon. The top three questions every time we gather, probably are going to come back to “Why?” “So What?” and “How are we to live our lives with this change?” Faith does not begin with Abstract Objective Questions and Answers, because life itself is subjective and relational, a story, and every story has a beginning. The story of Faith begins with an affirmation: “In the Beginning God.” Before there was anything else, before time, space, power, good and evil, right and wrong, there was God. That is a powerful Theological claim. Life is not an accident or mistake. All of life has to be explained and understood as being in relationship to God. In the Beginning God Created the Heavens and the Earth, rather than being the story of Christianity, or Israel, or America, even the story of Abraham, or Adam, Faith begins that God created all things in heaven and earth to be inter-dependent in relationship. Against the context of heaven and earth being Chaos, a Frightening Black-hole, where nothing is as it seems, everything is hostile and destructive, by the power of a word God creates balance and order, in the first three days God creates an environment for creation and in the next three days God creates creation to fill and care for that environment, and because this is our story of humanity in relationship to God, we affirm that God's greatest creation is us. Two of the wonderful parts implicit in this story are First, that thousands of years and hundreds of Cultures and Empires before Darwin, the ancient Hebrew people got the order of Creation the same as in Evolution. But where rational thought goes backward of what had to be in order for life to exist, and when there was nothing extrapolates a Big Bang, Faith claims that as the Word of God. The Word of God not in war with Chaos, not breeding or destroying, but by a word calling for peace and order and balance and inclusion of both what was and what will be. Second, that the story of Creation is not told in the past tense, but rather in the Future Perfect, as much as to emphasize that the Creative Act of God, is still being Created now and in the future. Oddly enough, the Theological Doctrine of the Trinity, our most basic identity of God, was not created by theologians in an ivory tower in a place apart. Instead, by the fourth Century of the Common Era, there was a raging debate of whether God was and is Singular throughout all time, therefore invulnerable, unchangeable, eternal; OR whether from the Beginning there were three Gods, Creator, Savior and Spirit, Father/Son/ and Holy Ghost, which allowed for and even assumed that the Almighty could change and be changed, which might mean that truth and right and wrong might change as well? The resolution to this, came from the churches meeting together, talking together, and resolving that God is one, but God is also known in differing ways. What is eternal and universal to God is that God is Love. God created the world out of love, with the desire that Creation would love God. We all, like God, desire and need to be affirmed, to be loved. When people were Oppressed and enslaved God loved them so much as to enter into God's own creation to set the people free. God loved the world so much, God gave us God's only begotten child, who himself loved us so much as to die for us in order to bring us into full relationship with God. The last three weeks, I have experienced something different. In three weeks we have had five deaths and had officiate at four funerals. What I came to realize during these is that deaths, like births and confirmations and graduations and marriages, all are times of re-evaluation of our story of our identity. Does that fight ten years ago really matter? What did it mean that Grandma left home at 16 to go to NYC? Who are we, now that that loved one is a memory, an eternal part of who we are. But also, that is Churches across the country officiating at at least one funeral per week is their norm. Half the churches in America across all denominations did not receive a single new member last year. Over the next two weeks we will celebrate four marriages, 16 over the next three months, and between last Sunday and the next three we will celebrate the Baptism of 8 new Believers. Consequently, we recite the marriage vows quite often, and we these words of Jesus. Hearing these so often, is affirming to who we are and what we will be. There are incredible ironies in these words. First that Jesus did not say this before Pilate of the Roman Empire or in Jerusalem or when on a hillside with 5000 followers, but in Galilee of the Gentiles, when they had lost and were disillusioned. Hear, that ALL Authority, power dominion are given to Him, and the Call is not to people just like us, not to a closed group, but to strangers, to those different, by nations not Kingdoms but diverse peoples. Within the last year, the Clinic in S.Sudan has gone from unending accomplishment and success to being temporarily evacuated and abandoned due to war; Presbyterian Manor has been in the process of turning over all of their residents; these are difficult times because we live with insecurity and must minister in a world with an unknown future, but that is reality! Also, according to Matthew, the disciples had already been charged to do all of this, to pray, to preach, to heal, to cast out demons and work miracles, to baptize, all of this except to teach others, that is new. The difficulty is that for so long all we believed we could do was to baptize and teach what we knew, when as the church in this time and place we are called to pray for one another, as we heard the last two weeks that our children and youth can teach us about preaching the word of God, that there are miracles in our midst and demons that need to be named for what they are. The questions we need to be asking are not Accusatory: Who did what to whom, How and When? But rather Questions of meaning and Transformation instead of exegeting with certainty what was said, to listen and respond to the questions of the Gentile world around us. Why did this occur? What could Context tell us? So What are we going to do?