Read John 5:1-9 and Acts 16:9-15
Just before today’s passage from Acts we read these verses:
6Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. 7When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to.
Interesting isn’t it that though Paul and his friends were trying to do the work of God, taking the Good News about Jesus Christ to those who needed to know how very much God loves them, that they were stopped by the Holy Spirit from going into Asia. How do we know what is God’s will in our lives and how do we do it? How can we discern what it is that God wants us to do at any time in our lives individually or gathered together as the church in this place at this time?
These are questions we all struggle with. In fact, our church is struggling with a question of what to do about our location of worship and the time we will have worship services. We are talking with University Temple United Methodist Church about using their very nice chapel for our worship services. The chapel seats 160 persons in easily moved and very comfortable individual padded chairs. The chapel has both a piano and an organ. There is storage for our supplies. There are very nice fellowship and meeting facilities next to the chapel. There is plenty of free parking on Sundays. The church is on a busy bus route on 15th Ave across from the University of Washington. We could move our worship services from 1:00 PM to as early as 11:30 AM. The cost of leasing their facility would be the same as we currently pay here at Temple de Hirsch Sinai.
University Temple UMC desires to have a relationship with us. They want us to share their space with them and they have actively courted us by coming to us with this proposal. They see this as their way of helping us yet realize that it would also benefit them by providing additional income for their congregation. I have met with members of their facility usage committee and with their pastor, Rev. May Boyd, who is a friend. All of them want us to come and worship in their building. If we ever wanted it and could afford it they even have office space to lease to us. They want us to think about joint worship services during holy days at Advent and Christmas, and Lent and Easter. They have invited us to participate in their children’s Sunday School and in their adult education programs. They see this as a step toward them and us moving into joint worship facilities together if and when the University District Ecumenical Campus is built which would offer us a permanent base of operations and worship space. Even if the UDECC project is never built there is the possibility of this becoming a very long term relationship.
Many of you have expressed great concern about the late hour of our worship service and how you must often make a decision to not come to worship in order to go out to dinner with family and friends, or participate in another activity taking place on Sunday afternoon. Having the freedom to move worship services to an earlier time will help many of you not have to make the decision to choose between church and family and friends. You will be able to do both. Many of us would like to extend the fellowship time by going out to dinner together on a Sunday afternoon after worship. Moving our worship time earlier will allow us to the opportunity to build stronger fellowship ties with each other.
Pastor Michelle will meet with their facility committee this week to discuss any questions they might have as well as to share with them how we now use this building on Sundays. That committee will then take the matter to their board who will make a formal decision about inviting us to share their facility.
Our board will hold its next board meeting at U. Temple on May 23 so the board and anyone else can tour the chapel and fellowship space we would be using. On June 6 we will hold a forum discussion after fellowship time to listen to your opinions on this decision. At its next meeting on June 13 our board will make its decision about moving our worship services to U. Temple or staying at Temple de Hirsch. Please begin talking together about this opportunity and how you feel about it with each other and with our pastors and board members. This is a decision we all must participate in and hopefully we all will feel that God is leading us forward together to new opportunities and possibilities. Personally, I think this situation offers us great potential for increased attendance and participation by those who might not choose to come at 1:00 PM on a Sunday afternoon.
Some want us to stay in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood because it is the traditional Gayborhood. However, few of our current members and friends actually live in the Capitol Hill Neighborhood. The truth is that our people come from all over the metropolitan region with many driving 30 minutes or more to get here. They would still drive to get to worship services no matter where we choose to have worship. Those that use the buses would simply have to change routes. The one or two who walk may need for others of us to help them get to church. Our church isn’t linked to one and only one neighborhood: we must have a vision that includes all of metropolitan Seattle and surrounding communities.
The fact of the matter is that those who come to our church are more interested in relationships than they are in location. Think about it. Why did you come to church here? It’s seldom about the building or the location of the building. Most of you found out where this Queer Church was meeting and you came. You would have gone wherever it had been located because you came seeking relationships, seeking friendship, seeking to share a worship experience with like-minded persons.
Research has proven over and over again that the primary reason someone comes to church is to find friends, to build a caring community with others. We should be able to do that anywhere we decide to have worship services, mostly because what happens in a church isn’t only about what happens in the worship service, but also what happens beyond the worship service as we engage ourselves in each others’ lives and care for each other between worship services.
We must, like Paul and Silas, listen to the Spirit of God speaking in our hearts and chose to follow the guidance of the Spirit. Like us, Paul had other plans in mind but the Spirit of Christ stopped him from pursuing those plans and sent him in a different directions. Paul found the truth of this in the relationships he developed with other people who helped him discern the will of God for his life. We should do the same thing. Open ourselves up to the creative God who puts us into relationship with other people all the time. We must be ready for the unexpected gifts God wants to give to us when we enter into relationship with others.
Paul’s habit was to seek out those who worshipped in the Synagogues. In other words, Paul usually went to the Jews first, those who already worshipped God but might not yet know about the life of Jesus Christ. When they get to Philippi they find there isn’t a synagogue so they go to the river outside the gates of the city, a place of prayer, where they hope to find a group of belivers gathered together worshipping God and studying God’s Word. But what they find is the unexpected. They find a group of women praying together and studying the scriptures of their faith, but these aren’t Jewish women, these are women who are referred to in the scriptures as God-fearers, that is those who believe in the same God as the Jews and who are studying the Jewish scriptures. Very uncharacteristically, and very much against tradition and the idea of doing the right thing in the right way at the right time, Paul and Silas sit down with the women there on the banks of the river outside of the city.
Outside of the gates of the city, outside of the usual boundaries and places of worship they had expected to find, even outside of the usual gender group they had expected to connect to. Paul and Silas open themselves up to the leadership of the Spirit of God. We don’t know who most of these women were, but I might suspect that among them are widows, those who have been excluded and ignored by the rest of society because they no longer have a husband who can provide economically for them. Some might be other women of wealth and influence who know and follow the leadership of Lydia. Don’t miss the truth here that seeking out women would not have been something that Paul would normally have done, because as a devout Pharisee he would have been obligated to follow the law and avoid public conversation with women. For a man to talk to a woman he was not related to by blood or marriage was to assume that you were asking her to prostitute herself for a sexual relationship. Why else would you talk to a woman you weren’t related to? When we see how Paul is changing his behavior as he develops relationships with non-jews, with gentiles, we begin to see just how far Paul has come from his religious roots as he follows Jesus who broke down all the barriers between God and persons and between persons themselves, Jesus who always goes outside the gates of the city to those who live on the edges of society.
Among these women is a very prominent woman, Lydia, apparently a wealthy woman of some means who is also a maker and seller of purple fabric which only the upper class and rich were allowed to wear. She is the owner of her own business, a leader in the community. She is also a believer in God and she opens her heart up to the message Paul preaches and quickly becomes a believer in Jesus Christ. What is significant is that following her conversion to faith in God through Christ, her whole family follows her in professing faith in God through Christ, a very typical pattern of faith at this time. If she were married, then this verse implies that even her husband followed her leadership and became a Christian. It wouldn’t have been so unusual at this time for the father to converted and then the whole family converting. But in this situation we have the very unusual case of a woman setting the example and others from her household joining her in this new faith.
Lydia practices radical hospitality and she opens her home to Paul and his co-workers and they apparently go to stay with her despite the rules and regulations that say that a Jew cannot go into the home of a gentile person. Relationships change people and relationships change the traditional rules we thought we were suppose to follow blindly.
We know that her home becomes a house-church for Philippi and though we do not know if Lydia became a primary leader of the church in that city, though I suspect she was since it met in her home. We do know that later in this same chapter after Paul and his companions are arrested and put in jail, that upon their miraculous release through an earthquake that frees them, they return to Lydia’s home to rest up before resuming their journey. Lydia provides for Paul and his companions through her resources and through her relationships with others in her community. She is in fact the first European convert to the Christian faith, and the founder of a church for that city that worshipped in her home.
Today we celebrate Mother’s Day. We remember Lydia, but especially we remember the great women of faith who have cared for us in our own lives: Women who birthed us, who raised us, who gave us their love and care, who built loving relationships with us. Women who had enormous influence on our lives often because of the deep and abiding relationship they had with God.
I want you to honor all the women in your life today who helped you to become the person you are today, not just the woman who may have given birth to you, but all the women who had significant influence in your life because of their relationship with you, because of what they did to help you. I look around this room today and I see so many of you who do for me those things that my own mother, God rest her soul, can no longer do for me. I see Gloria who worries that I should be taking better care of myself. I see Lee who encourages me and lifts me up in so many different ways. I see Michelle who prays for me and who is honest with me always even when I don’t want her to be so honest. I see the ever-smiling Demi who I know will love me and hug me and affirm me and make me feel good about myself. I see the gentle, loving Deb who is so very willing to help me in so many wonderful ways.
I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I am the person I am today because of the love, care, support, and encouragement of the people gathered in this room to worship today. You are my mothers, and fathers, and brothers, and sisters in the faith. You are the ones I seek out to build relationships with, to help me discern what God’s will is in my life and in the life of our church.
Paul and Silas did not know that there would be a Lydia when they got to Philippi, but thank God they found Lydia and her group of women on the bank of that river outside of the city that day. For through that chance meeting God grew a great church in the city of Philippi one that Paul later writes to by saying, “Rejoice, again I say rejoice,” and “make my joy complete.” Paul celebrated his relationship with these members and friends of the church in Philippi just like I celebrate my relationships with you, the members and friends of the church in Seattle. Very simply, I rejoice in you because you make my joy complete in so many amazing loving and caring actions and words. You are a miracle in my life and I thank God for you daily.
We have been taught over the years through other less than perfect relationships we have had that we might not be acceptable to God or at least to those who identify themselves to us as God’s people. I was raised in a fundamentalist religious home where I was taught that any Queer person who wasn’t heterosexual was an affront to God and considered a sinner worthy of eternal punishment in hell. That scared the dickens out of me because I knew I was gay and I also knew that there wasn’t anything I could do to change that fact about my life.
I internalized the homophobia of others and it literally condemned me to a life of depression and self-loathing. I tried to do the things I was told to do to change myself so that I would be acceptable to these so-called Christians and their crooked understanding of God. And when trying to do the so-called right thing, in the so-called right way, at the so-called right time didn’t result in any change in my life, I was made to feel that was also my fault because I just didn’t have enough faith in God. Listen to me, dear friends, those kinds of religious relationships are toxic, they are poison. Those kinds of religious relationship will literally kill you or cause you to take your own life. If you find yourself in those kinds of relationships, please, get out! Respect yourself. Love yourself. Leave the abuse behind and move into the future God wants to give you that is full of hope and joy.
Now, if you didn’t know this about me before now, please don’t gasp in amazement, but I’m a rather stubborn person. I will let others rule my life only for so long before I have to escape from their clutches and figure things out for myself. I had to come understand who I was and how I was suppose to live my own life in my own way by experiencing a relationship with God through Christ that was based on my own study of the life of Christ and what Christ taught. In other words, I couldn’t rely on anyone else’s relationship with God; I had to build my own relationship with God.
Luckily for me God did put some wonderful people in my life and through those remarkable relationships I discovered that God loved me exactly the way God made me: gay. My sexuality had nothing to do with my relationship with God. God already knew I was gay before God created me and if God knew that and accepted it and made me that way, then I should just accept that fact myself and listen to God who loves me and stop listening to all those other people who didn’t even know me, and kept telling me that they loved me but not the sin in my life (even though, between you and me, being gay isn’t a sin). I had to escape from those people who were misinterpreting the Bible and using their misinterpretations to condemn me because I was outside the gates, outside their personal boundaries of acceptability.
We are often taught that understanding God's will in our lives and doing it is a matter of following the rules, keeping tradition, doing the right thing (as defined for us by others) in the right way and at the right time. This has resulted in the rejection and condemnation of many who should be hearing from the church that God loves and accepts them exactly the way that God created them.
Few so-called fundamentalist Christians will come to the aid of those who they believe are outside of the will of God in their lives as defined by their own faulty interpretation of scriptures. Fundamentalist Christians will tell you that the scriptures have always been interpreted the same way, their way, and that you and I are out of God’s will when we say that there might be a different way of understanding the same scripture passage. This kind of reasoning in ancient times was used to condemn the handicapped and disabled persons because they must be that way because of some sin in their lives. We now know that kind of interpretation of scripture is not what God intended for us to understand. The same kind of misinterpretation of scripture has been used to support slavery, to keep women from assuming equality with men, to separate the races, to keep as many people as possible outside of the gates.
In John 5:1-9 Jesus encounters a man who has been paralyzed for 38 years. The tradition is that when the waters of the pool he is lying beside are troubled that those who are first to lower themselves into the water will receive healing. But the man is paralyzed and no one will help him get into the pool of water. He can't get healing because he can't do things in the right way at the right time.
Jesus comes into his life and Jesus tells him to forget about doing the right thing in the right way at the right time. Jesus offers him both a relationship and healing. Jesus helps the man by caring for the man, by healing him, by doing for him what he can do within his abilities. We should follow the example of Christ. We should care for others in loving, considerate ways that lift persons up out of their predicaments and gives to them the opportunity of a life full of rejoicing and hope. Rejoice again I say rejoice. Make my joy complete.
As I examine this passage from John and from our other lectionary passages this week I am impressed that knowing and following God's will has more to do with our relationships than with rules, regulations, or theologies. God leads us by giving us relationships with people who guide us with their wisdom, their care, their love and their kindness. God calls upon us to be and do the same for others.
We are spiritually healed, not according to the rules we have been taught to follow, but by trusting someone who stands beside us in love, just like Jesus stood beside the paralyzed man, just like Lydia stood beside Paul.
Who do you choose to stand beside today? Into whose life can you bring hope and joy? And while you are helping others, don’t forget to allow others to come into your life and bring to you the hope and joy that God wants you have through your relationship with them. You deserve it! Don’t take anything less.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Are You Wearing Your ID Badge? Easter 5C
Scripture: Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:34-35
Who is a Christian? What are some significant traits of a Christian that would make you observe of another person that he or she is a Christian?
In other words, exactly what makes a Christian different from other people?
When I was growing up it seemed to me that people defined who a Christian was by what he or she didn’t do. My parents taught me that a Christian didn’t gamble, smoke, dance, or drink or go with girls or boys who did. We couldn’t go to movies, unless it was a Disney cartoon. In fact, we couldn’t play real cards, though Rook was okay. I remember my parents clipping the curtains together on our windows when we played Rook just so no one walking by might look inside and see that we were playing cards. Of course that person would have had to be ten feet tall to look into the windows of the home we lived in at that time.
Yes, there were some things that Christians did do that also defined them as being one of the followers of Christ. Let me remember, now. Oh, yeah, you went to church everytime the doors were open for any worship service, bible study, prayer group, or committee meeting. And, if you weren’t there, then everyone else prayed for you to get right with God, because you must have some kind of sin in your life that was keeping you away from God and the church. If it was your job then they would pray for God to get you a new job that allowed you to be a better Christian.
Christ gathered his disciples together on that final night with them to hold that last supper with them before he was arrested and crucified. Normally someone would greet you at the door, help you remove your shoes and then wash your dusty and dirty feet. It was a sign of hospitality and comfort when you entered the home of another. This was the duty of a servant, a slave in the household, to care for the grimy feet of the travelers who had come into the home from the dusty street. But not a single one of those disciples would lower himself to wash the feet of the others. That would have said to the world that the one doing the washing was inferior and that the other disciples were superior to them and to put it bluntly, none of them were going to go there. If you recall they had had already had disagreements about who was going to be the most important person in Christ’s new Community when he established it. Christ had told them that it wasn’t going to be that way in his new Community, that the first would be last and the last would be first, that they should be servants to each other and stop wanting the most important positions of authority for themselves. But they didn’t learn the lesson, because their hearts weren’t ready for the truth of what Christ was trying to explain to them and to demonstrate for them by his words and his actions.
So he gives them another lesson by what he does for them that evening. They won’t condescend to wash each other’s feet, so he takes off his outer garments and wraps a towel around his waist and taking a basin of water he goes to each one of them and washes their feet. Their Master Teacher becomes their servant taking care of their needs in a loving, kind action of comfort and care. Then he gets up and dresses himself and turns to them and says: “A New command I give to you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”
How would you have felt had you been one of the disciples in that room that night when Jesus washed your feet and then said these words?
You have to be careful what you pray for. If you ask God to give you patience then don’t be too surprised when God finds ways to test your patience with other people just to see if you are using the resources God wants you to tap into to actually be a more patient person. And if you are a pastor writing a sermon on loving others then get ready to have everything you believe about loving others tested during that week. Perhaps God is saying, “Well, Ray, it’s pretty easy to write out what you should believe, what you should tell others they should believe, but maybe, Ray, just maybe, it’s better if you live out the lessons that you need to preach on, just to be sure that you’ve learned them well enough to teach them to others.” Don’t you just love God for being that way with us?
I’ve had my patience and my love tested this week by some pretty difficult people, no body any of you know, so relax, I’m talking about you. I work a retail job and interact with the public, most of whom are very loving and very kind toward retail clerks and salespeople. Now, most of the time I enjoy my retail sales work and I get to meet a lot of interesting people, however, every once and a while, someone comes in who tests my desire to be patient and kind and loving. God sent several of those to help me with this week’s sermon. I won’t bore you with the stories, but suffice it to say that God impressed upon me that love is more often an action I take, something I do, and not necessarily something I feel. The feeling may come later or never at all, but the loving action creates life and hope where it might not have existed before.
Love changes situations. Love changes people. Love changes the world. What kind of love actions did you take this past week that changed the world for someone else?
We pretty much know when someone else isn’t treating us in a loving manner, or at least we know when we aren’t feeling the love flowing from someone else toward us. But do we usually realize when we aren’t being loving toward another person, or do we excuse our unloving behavior toward others with logical reasoning that allows us to excuse ourselves from following this commandment of Christ to love others exactly in the same way as Christ loves us?
The first Christians had this kind of a problem. They thought they knew what it meant to love others, but they discovered that God’s kind of love, the very kind of love God wants us to share with others, went way beyond anything they had ever imagined for themselves.
They had been with Jesus when he walked on this earth and demonstrated for them just how wide God’s love was as he welcomed those who were outcasts from society into his life and cared for them in amazing ways: the handicapped, the diseased, the widows, the orphans, prostitutes, and even tax collectors who were in league with the Roman Empire to oppress the people, even healing the male servant, some would say lover, of a Roman commander, a non-jew, the very person in charge of making sure that the people stayed under the military rule of Rome. Jesus crossed every boundary line that you could imagine in taking God’s love directly to persons that others thought didn’t deserve any kind of love, much less acceptance by God. People knew who was in and who was out and how things worked in society until Jesus came along and turned their world upside down with his radical thinking, subversive speech, and his revolutionary actions. Jesus was upsetting the status-quo and it’s no wonder they set out to kill him as a danger to society.
600 years before Jesus their nation had been defeated in battle by a foreign power and their most educated and able people carried off to another country to become the servants and workers for their oppressors. They realized that they were going to be absorbed into that society until nothing was left of their own unique identity and so they made some changes in their religious law and practice. They formed the first synagogues bringing together as few as ten men or families to make a worshipping group. They made laws that said you couldn’t eat with anyone other than people like yourself from your own group and made more laws about what food you could eat and couldn’t eat. They made laws about who you could marry and couldn’t marry so that the bloodline of your family would be true and not contaminated. Keeping the laws became a sign of who you were and what you were and everyone knew you by what you did or didn’t do. These changes to the law and the religious life of the Jewish nation meant that they have survived as a separate, identifiable people throughout most of their history and into this day. The idea was there that the only person who could worship God and serve God was a Jew. No one else could do this, unless he or she first converted to being a Jew.
But when Jesus came that all began to change. Jesus opened up the idea of who was acceptable to God and Jesus demonstrated by caring for Jew and Gentile alike that God would no longer allow such arbitrary human rules to prevent God from taking care of God’s human creation, no matter who that might be, or where they might live, or how they might light live their lives. Jesus ended the divisions between people.
So you would think that after living with Jesus for three years, after listening to him teach, seeing him care for everyone without question, that the disciples were a group that opened their arms and hearts and welcomed everyone into their new little church? But you would be wrong. That’s not what happened. They continued to believe that the only persons who could truly worship God and serve God were Jews. And therefore only Jews could become Christians. Nobody else could be a Christian, a follower of Christ, unless he or she were a Jew or converted to being Jewish, abiding by all the rules and regulations of what it meant to be a complete Jew.
But God has a way of shaking up our misconceptions and attitudes. So God blesses Peter with a dream in which God sets food down all kinds of forbidden foods in front of Peter on a picnic blanket and says to Peter, “Take and eat.” But Peter, being the good Jewish boy who has learned all the lessons his parents had taught him says to God, “No, thank you. These are the foods I’ve been taught that we can’t eat. To eat such food would be a sin against you, God. I couldn’t do that. I love you too much God to sin against you by breaking the rules.” And God says, to Peter, “If I have made it acceptable, then you, Peter, have no business calling it unacceptable.” But Peter keeps refusing to take the food that God is giving to him.
Have you ever done that to God? Told God you knew better than God does what you need in your life, what you need God to do for you, what you want from God? We get very arrogant and self-inflated by ourselves to the point that we feel we have a right to tell God just how wrong God is and how it would be so much better for us and everyone else if God would just do things our way for a change. But God has an ingenious plan and a imaginative purpose for all of us. If we just get our selfish selves out of God’s way then God can bring about a miracle for others through us and even for us.
This isn’t so foreign to our experience now or over the last 50 years. I’m a child of the 50’s and 60’s who was taught to sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I was taught that song by people who also thought it was wrong for those same little red, and yellow, black and white children to be in the same classroom or same church Sunday School room for fear that they might grow up and intermarry with each other. In other words, “Only good white children could really serve God.” Not so much different from Peter. And in many ways, it isn’t so much different today as we exclude those who don’t measure up to our standards from our churches and from our loving embrace. We make decisions about loving others every day: I’ll love her, but not him. I’ll accept him, but not her. Jesus didn’t leave the decision about who to love to you and me. Jesus just said, “Love each other like I have loved you.” No exceptions. No exclusions. Obey me. This is my commandment to you. Love each other.
After his vision, there comes a knock on his door and a messenger has been sent from Cornelius, a gentile, a non-jew, who wants to know how to become a Christian. An angel of God has told Cornelius to go and ask specifically for Peter. Peter, having been prepared by God with the vision of God’s definition of acceptability, goes with the men and preaches and teaches to them and low and behold they believe in God and become followers of Christ in the same way that Peter has seen Jewish persons become followers of Christ. There is no difference between them, for a follower of Christ isn’t defined by his or her ancestry or former religious background, but only by his or her relationship to God in Christ.
More specifically, a Christian, a follower of Christ, is defined by his or her ability to love others like Christ loved us. Peter learned to love others like Jesus loved them regardless of who they were, where they came from, or how they currently lived their lives. Peter learned how to cross the same boundaries that God crosses to claim God’s precious creation for God’s self. God will not allow anyone to be outside of God’s gracious love.
Margaret Guenther, director for the Center for Spirituality at General Theological Seminary says that like the rest of us in this age of required identification cards and badges she carries an ID card with her picture on it so she can be identified. Like you and I, without the ID card she can’t rent a video or cash a check. But she goes on to say, “As Christians we identify ourselves, too. We put crosses on our buildings or wear crosses on chains around our necks. Yet according to Jesus, we don’t need these emblems. We have a permanent, universally valid ID card (a badge if you will)—we can be spotted anywhere Christ people if we love one another.”
Do others see Jesus in you today? Are you wearing your ID Badge of love?
Who is a Christian? What are some significant traits of a Christian that would make you observe of another person that he or she is a Christian?
In other words, exactly what makes a Christian different from other people?
When I was growing up it seemed to me that people defined who a Christian was by what he or she didn’t do. My parents taught me that a Christian didn’t gamble, smoke, dance, or drink or go with girls or boys who did. We couldn’t go to movies, unless it was a Disney cartoon. In fact, we couldn’t play real cards, though Rook was okay. I remember my parents clipping the curtains together on our windows when we played Rook just so no one walking by might look inside and see that we were playing cards. Of course that person would have had to be ten feet tall to look into the windows of the home we lived in at that time.
Yes, there were some things that Christians did do that also defined them as being one of the followers of Christ. Let me remember, now. Oh, yeah, you went to church everytime the doors were open for any worship service, bible study, prayer group, or committee meeting. And, if you weren’t there, then everyone else prayed for you to get right with God, because you must have some kind of sin in your life that was keeping you away from God and the church. If it was your job then they would pray for God to get you a new job that allowed you to be a better Christian.
Christ gathered his disciples together on that final night with them to hold that last supper with them before he was arrested and crucified. Normally someone would greet you at the door, help you remove your shoes and then wash your dusty and dirty feet. It was a sign of hospitality and comfort when you entered the home of another. This was the duty of a servant, a slave in the household, to care for the grimy feet of the travelers who had come into the home from the dusty street. But not a single one of those disciples would lower himself to wash the feet of the others. That would have said to the world that the one doing the washing was inferior and that the other disciples were superior to them and to put it bluntly, none of them were going to go there. If you recall they had had already had disagreements about who was going to be the most important person in Christ’s new Community when he established it. Christ had told them that it wasn’t going to be that way in his new Community, that the first would be last and the last would be first, that they should be servants to each other and stop wanting the most important positions of authority for themselves. But they didn’t learn the lesson, because their hearts weren’t ready for the truth of what Christ was trying to explain to them and to demonstrate for them by his words and his actions.
So he gives them another lesson by what he does for them that evening. They won’t condescend to wash each other’s feet, so he takes off his outer garments and wraps a towel around his waist and taking a basin of water he goes to each one of them and washes their feet. Their Master Teacher becomes their servant taking care of their needs in a loving, kind action of comfort and care. Then he gets up and dresses himself and turns to them and says: “A New command I give to you. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.”
How would you have felt had you been one of the disciples in that room that night when Jesus washed your feet and then said these words?
You have to be careful what you pray for. If you ask God to give you patience then don’t be too surprised when God finds ways to test your patience with other people just to see if you are using the resources God wants you to tap into to actually be a more patient person. And if you are a pastor writing a sermon on loving others then get ready to have everything you believe about loving others tested during that week. Perhaps God is saying, “Well, Ray, it’s pretty easy to write out what you should believe, what you should tell others they should believe, but maybe, Ray, just maybe, it’s better if you live out the lessons that you need to preach on, just to be sure that you’ve learned them well enough to teach them to others.” Don’t you just love God for being that way with us?
I’ve had my patience and my love tested this week by some pretty difficult people, no body any of you know, so relax, I’m talking about you. I work a retail job and interact with the public, most of whom are very loving and very kind toward retail clerks and salespeople. Now, most of the time I enjoy my retail sales work and I get to meet a lot of interesting people, however, every once and a while, someone comes in who tests my desire to be patient and kind and loving. God sent several of those to help me with this week’s sermon. I won’t bore you with the stories, but suffice it to say that God impressed upon me that love is more often an action I take, something I do, and not necessarily something I feel. The feeling may come later or never at all, but the loving action creates life and hope where it might not have existed before.
Love changes situations. Love changes people. Love changes the world. What kind of love actions did you take this past week that changed the world for someone else?
We pretty much know when someone else isn’t treating us in a loving manner, or at least we know when we aren’t feeling the love flowing from someone else toward us. But do we usually realize when we aren’t being loving toward another person, or do we excuse our unloving behavior toward others with logical reasoning that allows us to excuse ourselves from following this commandment of Christ to love others exactly in the same way as Christ loves us?
The first Christians had this kind of a problem. They thought they knew what it meant to love others, but they discovered that God’s kind of love, the very kind of love God wants us to share with others, went way beyond anything they had ever imagined for themselves.
They had been with Jesus when he walked on this earth and demonstrated for them just how wide God’s love was as he welcomed those who were outcasts from society into his life and cared for them in amazing ways: the handicapped, the diseased, the widows, the orphans, prostitutes, and even tax collectors who were in league with the Roman Empire to oppress the people, even healing the male servant, some would say lover, of a Roman commander, a non-jew, the very person in charge of making sure that the people stayed under the military rule of Rome. Jesus crossed every boundary line that you could imagine in taking God’s love directly to persons that others thought didn’t deserve any kind of love, much less acceptance by God. People knew who was in and who was out and how things worked in society until Jesus came along and turned their world upside down with his radical thinking, subversive speech, and his revolutionary actions. Jesus was upsetting the status-quo and it’s no wonder they set out to kill him as a danger to society.
600 years before Jesus their nation had been defeated in battle by a foreign power and their most educated and able people carried off to another country to become the servants and workers for their oppressors. They realized that they were going to be absorbed into that society until nothing was left of their own unique identity and so they made some changes in their religious law and practice. They formed the first synagogues bringing together as few as ten men or families to make a worshipping group. They made laws that said you couldn’t eat with anyone other than people like yourself from your own group and made more laws about what food you could eat and couldn’t eat. They made laws about who you could marry and couldn’t marry so that the bloodline of your family would be true and not contaminated. Keeping the laws became a sign of who you were and what you were and everyone knew you by what you did or didn’t do. These changes to the law and the religious life of the Jewish nation meant that they have survived as a separate, identifiable people throughout most of their history and into this day. The idea was there that the only person who could worship God and serve God was a Jew. No one else could do this, unless he or she first converted to being a Jew.
But when Jesus came that all began to change. Jesus opened up the idea of who was acceptable to God and Jesus demonstrated by caring for Jew and Gentile alike that God would no longer allow such arbitrary human rules to prevent God from taking care of God’s human creation, no matter who that might be, or where they might live, or how they might light live their lives. Jesus ended the divisions between people.
So you would think that after living with Jesus for three years, after listening to him teach, seeing him care for everyone without question, that the disciples were a group that opened their arms and hearts and welcomed everyone into their new little church? But you would be wrong. That’s not what happened. They continued to believe that the only persons who could truly worship God and serve God were Jews. And therefore only Jews could become Christians. Nobody else could be a Christian, a follower of Christ, unless he or she were a Jew or converted to being Jewish, abiding by all the rules and regulations of what it meant to be a complete Jew.
But God has a way of shaking up our misconceptions and attitudes. So God blesses Peter with a dream in which God sets food down all kinds of forbidden foods in front of Peter on a picnic blanket and says to Peter, “Take and eat.” But Peter, being the good Jewish boy who has learned all the lessons his parents had taught him says to God, “No, thank you. These are the foods I’ve been taught that we can’t eat. To eat such food would be a sin against you, God. I couldn’t do that. I love you too much God to sin against you by breaking the rules.” And God says, to Peter, “If I have made it acceptable, then you, Peter, have no business calling it unacceptable.” But Peter keeps refusing to take the food that God is giving to him.
Have you ever done that to God? Told God you knew better than God does what you need in your life, what you need God to do for you, what you want from God? We get very arrogant and self-inflated by ourselves to the point that we feel we have a right to tell God just how wrong God is and how it would be so much better for us and everyone else if God would just do things our way for a change. But God has an ingenious plan and a imaginative purpose for all of us. If we just get our selfish selves out of God’s way then God can bring about a miracle for others through us and even for us.
This isn’t so foreign to our experience now or over the last 50 years. I’m a child of the 50’s and 60’s who was taught to sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” I was taught that song by people who also thought it was wrong for those same little red, and yellow, black and white children to be in the same classroom or same church Sunday School room for fear that they might grow up and intermarry with each other. In other words, “Only good white children could really serve God.” Not so much different from Peter. And in many ways, it isn’t so much different today as we exclude those who don’t measure up to our standards from our churches and from our loving embrace. We make decisions about loving others every day: I’ll love her, but not him. I’ll accept him, but not her. Jesus didn’t leave the decision about who to love to you and me. Jesus just said, “Love each other like I have loved you.” No exceptions. No exclusions. Obey me. This is my commandment to you. Love each other.
After his vision, there comes a knock on his door and a messenger has been sent from Cornelius, a gentile, a non-jew, who wants to know how to become a Christian. An angel of God has told Cornelius to go and ask specifically for Peter. Peter, having been prepared by God with the vision of God’s definition of acceptability, goes with the men and preaches and teaches to them and low and behold they believe in God and become followers of Christ in the same way that Peter has seen Jewish persons become followers of Christ. There is no difference between them, for a follower of Christ isn’t defined by his or her ancestry or former religious background, but only by his or her relationship to God in Christ.
More specifically, a Christian, a follower of Christ, is defined by his or her ability to love others like Christ loved us. Peter learned to love others like Jesus loved them regardless of who they were, where they came from, or how they currently lived their lives. Peter learned how to cross the same boundaries that God crosses to claim God’s precious creation for God’s self. God will not allow anyone to be outside of God’s gracious love.
Margaret Guenther, director for the Center for Spirituality at General Theological Seminary says that like the rest of us in this age of required identification cards and badges she carries an ID card with her picture on it so she can be identified. Like you and I, without the ID card she can’t rent a video or cash a check. But she goes on to say, “As Christians we identify ourselves, too. We put crosses on our buildings or wear crosses on chains around our necks. Yet according to Jesus, we don’t need these emblems. We have a permanent, universally valid ID card (a badge if you will)—we can be spotted anywhere Christ people if we love one another.”
Do others see Jesus in you today? Are you wearing your ID Badge of love?
Sunday, April 25, 2010
I See You, I Care for You, I Love You: Easter 4C
Scriptures to read: Psalm 23, John 10: 22-30, Acts 9:36-43
I’ve been thinking and praying about you…and you…and you…well, frankly, about all of you. You are in my constant thoughts and my constant prayers. I see you. I care for you. I love you. You are my chosen family whom I love dearly. When you hurt, I hurt for you. When you cry, I can’t help but cry right along with you. When you are ill I worry about you. When you are out of work I am anxious for you to find employment as soon as possible. When you are depressed I hold out hope for you and try to give you reassurance. When you need to talk, I will make time in my schedule to listen to you.
I’ve taken some of you to the doctor’s office and sat with you while you waited to go in. I’ve gone to the hospital emergency room with some of you and waited while you received treatments and then took you home. I’ve been to the hospital when some of you have been ill and tried to lift your spirits and encourage your quick recovery.
We’ve helped some of you move out of old apartments and into new ones. In short, I’ve tried to be there when you needed someone to communicate to you that God is present with you and that God cares for you.
Many of you in this room have done the same thing for each other. You are truly tending to God’s sheep. You are truly feeding God’s lambs with the kindness and love that Christ calls us to give to others. Thank you.
Whether you’ve noticed it or not, there is a connection between the scripture passages we’ve been reading over the last several weeks. There is a very close connection between last week’s passage from the book of John and this week’s story about Peter from Acts. Does anyone remember what Jesus told Peter to do in last week’s scripture passage? Christ told him to “Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep. Feed my sheep.” Jesus also said to Peter and the others, “Just as God has sent me into the world to care for the world, now I am sending you to do the same thing.”
The fact that Jesus was going to leave the world to return to the Parent did not mean that Jesus was abandoning the world. Jesus breathed God’s spirit into the disciples when he appeared to them after the resurrection and empowered them to become care-givers to others, to tell the world about how very much God cares for every single person, no matter who he or she is, no matter what he or she has done, or hasn’t done. God loves everyone, exactly the way God created them. You and I don’t have to do anything to earn God’s love and acceptance. We don’t have to stop becoming one kind of person and try to become a different kind of person in order to be acceptable to God. That isn’t the message that Jesus taught and it surely shouldn’t be the message that we share with others.
I got several messages through Facebook this week from a young man in North Carolina who took issue with the fact that I am the pastor of a Queer congregation. He started off by telling me that when he saw my picture on Facebook an evil spirit came upon him and he just had to reach out over the internet and condemn me for leading all of you to hell. He believed that because you and I are Queer in our sexuality that we are condemned by God and that we have no hope for God’s grace and love in our lives.
I responded by telling him that I thought he was missing the truth of Jesus’ teachings that all persons are acceptable to God, something Jesus demonstrated during his time on earth by eating with so-called sinners that were unacceptable to the Pharisees, that is the Pharisees thought these people were such sinners that they were certainly condemned to hell and it was therefore obvious that Jesus was a sinner too because he hung out with sinners instead of the righteous stuck-up Pharisees. I told the young man that perhaps he needed to look at things differently, to really read what Jesus had said and try to make room in his life for God to speak to him about being a more loving kind of person, especially to those who are different from him.
He wrote back that I couldn’t change his mind. However, he then used that horrible phrase that so many of our so-called fundamentalist Christian critics use against us. He said, “I love the sinner, but I hate their sin.” Well, that really crawls all over me because that means that this young man gets to define me as a sinner because I don’t live up to his self-determined rules and regulations of what it means to be righteous, that is right with God. He wants to define my love for Mark and our life-time commitment to each other as a sin. The problem is that I don’t define my relationship with Mark that way. I define my relationship with Mark as one that is loving, blessed by God, and given to the two of us as a demonstration of God’s love and care for the two of us.
I sent him my final message asking him to re-read the story of the Prodigal Son and see how the Parent welcomed the son back home even before the boy asked for forgiveness. God loves us with a supreme love and runs to welcome us whenever we turn our thoughts and selves back to God…even before we can ask God to forgive us. However, there was another son in that story, the older brother who refused to come into the party that the parent had given to celebrate the return of the younger much loved, and sorely missed younger son. The older brother thought that the younger son shouldn’t be seen, shouldn’t be welcomed, shouldn’t be loved, shouldn’t receive any care or kindness from the parent, and so the older brother refused to come into the celebration himself. I asked the young man to reflect on the older brother and ask himself if he wasn’t being more like the older brother himself than anyone else in the story.
I could see that the conversation with this young man wasn’t going to go much of anywhere so I cut him off from being able to communicate with me. As I’ve told you before I will not argue with anyone. I will talk with anyone honestly about how I feel, about what I have read in the scriptures, about how I interpret those scriptures just as long as they will have an considerate, polite, and intelligent conversation with me and not try to abuse me or put me down for feeling that I am one of God’s beloved just the way that I am. A one-sided conversation isn’t a conversation at all.
Jesus didn’t tell Peter or the rest of the disciples to go out and care for only those who were acceptable to them, only those who dressed like them, talked like them, observed the same religious laws they did, ate the same kosher foods. Jesus told Peter and the others to go and love everyone and care for everyone just like he had cared for them, just like God cares for everyone. There would be no exceptions, even though the disciples in the book of Acts had to work through their own misunderstandings about who was acceptable to and loved by God. Every time they thought they had figured out who they could exclude, who they could ignore, who they could refuse to care for, God demonstrated for them that they were wrong, that God’s love included even those they thought were unloved and hated by God.
I went to the Northwest Preaching Conference this week here in Seattle at Pilgrim Church downtown where more than 200 pastors, seminary students, and other Christians gathered to hear some rather astounding preachers both preach and lecture on preaching to our society from a Progressive Christian viewpoint. I heard about pastors who were crossing the boundaries that had never been crossed in their church communities in order to care for and love all of God’s children.
One Pastor from Stone Mountain Georgia founded his predominantly black church more than 20 years ago when he was a very young man. The church grew rapidly to over 6,000 members and they built an amazing facility ending up with a huge mortgage that had to be paid off. A few years ago the pastor became convicted that homophobia was wrong and he began to preach and teach his beliefs. He then decided that pushing women to the sidelines was wrong and he opened the door for women in his very Southern Baptist Church to become deacons and pastors. He then decided that being a Southern Baptist Church wasn’t in line with who he and the church were any longer and he went first independent, then he led his church to align itself with the Disciples denomination. He tackled other issues of exclusion and taught his people that God was including everyone in God’s family. It was too much for many of them to take and more than 3,000 members of the church left. Faced with an inability to pay the mortgage and support the ministries of the church the board of directors of his congregation called him in and told him that he needed to cool it. He could have his own private theology and his own private opinions but that he should preach what the people wanted to hear on Sunday, what would keep them coming and giving. He told them that he couldn’t do that and be true to himself and to God. They asked him if he believed what he was saying enough to take a pay cut. He said that he did and they cut his pay, but they didn’t stop him from preaching the truth about God’s love for everyone. His church is thriving again and everyone that comes to that church knows that its pastor believes and practices exactly what he says about God’s love and care for everyone.
One of the amazing things about the Preaching conference was the large number of women in attendance and women as presenters and preachers and lecturers. It was thrilling to see how God is using both women and men to lead their churches and their denominations to question the status quo about the acceptance of same-sex loving persons, transgender persons, those of a different racial or ethnic group, and more. God’s Spirit is alive and moving throughout the church in America in very progressive ways. Yes, there are those churches who do not share our progressive spirit, but it is glorious indeed to find out how many others do share our concerns and our convictions. I heard one amazing sermon on homophobia that will stay with me forever. It was preached by a woman pastor who knew all too well that many of her own church members didn’t share her conviction, but she preached the sermon anyway in a powerful and loving way. To demonstrate how society excludes others who should be included she told about how widowed women have been abused and excluded throughout the centuries. She told the story of a very young child, a girl in India whose parents had married her off to an old man as part of a business deal. After the wedding the girl continued to live with her parents in their home until she would be old enough to consummate the marriage.
However one morning this eight year old girl’s parents woke her up and told her that her husband had died and that they were taking her to the temple where the widows lived and where she would have to stay from then on, rejected by her family and her society because the husband she had never even known had died. At the widows’ temple lived several other women all of whom were supported financially by one of their number, a younger woman who was prostituted out in order to bring in the money they needed to live on. They began to groom the little girl to take her role as their financial provider when she became old enough. Though the laws in India eventually did change, there are places where it isn’t that different even today.
The book of Acts tells us the story of Tabitha a woman of good report and probable wealth who is referred to as a disciple of Christ, the first and only use of the feminine form of the word disciple in the new testament. She must have been a pretty amazing woman. We know the life of widows and orphans was horrible in the early first century. In most of the ancient world women had no right to own property or even conduct business, but Tabitha has an obvious ministry to the widows in her city, offering them clothing that she makes for them herself. She is caring for others in the name of Jesus who others think don’t deserve their time, their attention, or their love. A widow had nothing and nowhere to go if her children turned her out or if she had no children. But here we see a disciple of Christ caring for those on the edge of acceptability to the rest of society, saying to the widows, “I see you. I care for you. I love you.”
When Tabitha becomes ill and dies those to whom she has ministered call for Peter who is nearby to come and comfort them. Peter arrives and the women show him the clothing that Tabitha has made for them and tell him about her amazing ministry to them.
Peter asks to be alone with her body and then says to her, “Tabitha arise.” She is revived and gets up and joins her friends.
Why does Luke tell us this story? In the gospel of Luke Jesus goes to Jarius’ home and says to his little daughter who has died, “Talitha arise” and she revives and Jesus presents her to her unbelievably thrilled parents. Luke is telling us that even though Jesus isn’t physically with us any longer, the power and love of God that Christ brought to us is just as alive and just as present and powerful as it ever was. You and I may not be able to bring someone back from the dead, but we can give them the very presence and power of God through the way we love and care for them. Are you a follower of Christ? Then feed his lambs. Care for his sheep.
Interestingly enough when Peter departs from Tabitha’s home he goes to stay with Simon the Tanner. Because of Simon’s trade as one who handles the dead bodies and skins of animals he would not have been a very acceptable person in society. He would have been considered unclean and outside the boundaries of acceptability, but we see Peter going to his home and staying there with him.
Let me leave you with a passage from the book of Revelation. *
* Revelation 7: 9-17
........I had a vision of an enormous crowd, bigger than anyone could ever count. It was made up of people from every nation; from all the different ethnic groups, cultural groups and language groups. They were all standing together before the throne and before the Lamb of God. They were dressed in white robes and were waving banners and throwing flowers in the air. Their voices rose as one — an enormous roar — saying:
........“The life into which we have been saved
........belongs to our God who is seated on the throne,
........and to the Lamb of our God.”
Around the throne stood the four awesome creatures, and around them stood the twenty four elders, and around them stood all the angels. All together they fell to their knees before the throne, with their faces to the ground, and worshipped God, singing:
........“So say all of us!
........May glory and wisdom
........and gratitude and honor
........and authority and strength
........and every good thing
........be given to our God,
........from now to forever!
........So say all of us!
........Then one of the elders came and spoke to me, saying, “What can you tell me about these people in white robes? Who are they, and where have they come from?”
........I replied, “I’m not sure, Sir, but you have the answers.”
........Then he said to me, “These are the people who have come through the ultimate atrocity. They have been cleansed by the Lamb.
........For this reason they now have the privilege
................of gathering before the throne of God,
........and there in the Temple they serve God, day and night,
................and the one who is seated on the throne
........................provides them refuge and safe shelter.
........Never again will they go hungry;
................never again will they go thirsty;
........never again will they be burned by the sun,
................or left exposed to any searing heat.
........The Lamb who is at the centre of the throne
................has guided them through the wilderness
........................and will now care for them forever.
........He will wipe every tear from their eyes
................and guide them to crystal clear springs
........................where the water of life bubbles up freely.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net
God is saying to each one of us today: I see you. I care for you. I love you. God wants to give you a River of Life springing up inside of you so that you can face the challenges that life will bring to you and so you can know that God loves you no matter how unacceptable you may feel , no matter how unacceptable others might tell you that you are. And when you’ve been filled from that non-stop fountain of hope, you can become God’s gift of love to those who need your care and your presence in their lives this week. And you will be able to say to them:
“I see you. I care for you. I love you.”
I’ve been thinking and praying about you…and you…and you…well, frankly, about all of you. You are in my constant thoughts and my constant prayers. I see you. I care for you. I love you. You are my chosen family whom I love dearly. When you hurt, I hurt for you. When you cry, I can’t help but cry right along with you. When you are ill I worry about you. When you are out of work I am anxious for you to find employment as soon as possible. When you are depressed I hold out hope for you and try to give you reassurance. When you need to talk, I will make time in my schedule to listen to you.
I’ve taken some of you to the doctor’s office and sat with you while you waited to go in. I’ve gone to the hospital emergency room with some of you and waited while you received treatments and then took you home. I’ve been to the hospital when some of you have been ill and tried to lift your spirits and encourage your quick recovery.
We’ve helped some of you move out of old apartments and into new ones. In short, I’ve tried to be there when you needed someone to communicate to you that God is present with you and that God cares for you.
Many of you in this room have done the same thing for each other. You are truly tending to God’s sheep. You are truly feeding God’s lambs with the kindness and love that Christ calls us to give to others. Thank you.
Whether you’ve noticed it or not, there is a connection between the scripture passages we’ve been reading over the last several weeks. There is a very close connection between last week’s passage from the book of John and this week’s story about Peter from Acts. Does anyone remember what Jesus told Peter to do in last week’s scripture passage? Christ told him to “Feed my lambs. Take care of my sheep. Feed my sheep.” Jesus also said to Peter and the others, “Just as God has sent me into the world to care for the world, now I am sending you to do the same thing.”
The fact that Jesus was going to leave the world to return to the Parent did not mean that Jesus was abandoning the world. Jesus breathed God’s spirit into the disciples when he appeared to them after the resurrection and empowered them to become care-givers to others, to tell the world about how very much God cares for every single person, no matter who he or she is, no matter what he or she has done, or hasn’t done. God loves everyone, exactly the way God created them. You and I don’t have to do anything to earn God’s love and acceptance. We don’t have to stop becoming one kind of person and try to become a different kind of person in order to be acceptable to God. That isn’t the message that Jesus taught and it surely shouldn’t be the message that we share with others.
I got several messages through Facebook this week from a young man in North Carolina who took issue with the fact that I am the pastor of a Queer congregation. He started off by telling me that when he saw my picture on Facebook an evil spirit came upon him and he just had to reach out over the internet and condemn me for leading all of you to hell. He believed that because you and I are Queer in our sexuality that we are condemned by God and that we have no hope for God’s grace and love in our lives.
I responded by telling him that I thought he was missing the truth of Jesus’ teachings that all persons are acceptable to God, something Jesus demonstrated during his time on earth by eating with so-called sinners that were unacceptable to the Pharisees, that is the Pharisees thought these people were such sinners that they were certainly condemned to hell and it was therefore obvious that Jesus was a sinner too because he hung out with sinners instead of the righteous stuck-up Pharisees. I told the young man that perhaps he needed to look at things differently, to really read what Jesus had said and try to make room in his life for God to speak to him about being a more loving kind of person, especially to those who are different from him.
He wrote back that I couldn’t change his mind. However, he then used that horrible phrase that so many of our so-called fundamentalist Christian critics use against us. He said, “I love the sinner, but I hate their sin.” Well, that really crawls all over me because that means that this young man gets to define me as a sinner because I don’t live up to his self-determined rules and regulations of what it means to be righteous, that is right with God. He wants to define my love for Mark and our life-time commitment to each other as a sin. The problem is that I don’t define my relationship with Mark that way. I define my relationship with Mark as one that is loving, blessed by God, and given to the two of us as a demonstration of God’s love and care for the two of us.
I sent him my final message asking him to re-read the story of the Prodigal Son and see how the Parent welcomed the son back home even before the boy asked for forgiveness. God loves us with a supreme love and runs to welcome us whenever we turn our thoughts and selves back to God…even before we can ask God to forgive us. However, there was another son in that story, the older brother who refused to come into the party that the parent had given to celebrate the return of the younger much loved, and sorely missed younger son. The older brother thought that the younger son shouldn’t be seen, shouldn’t be welcomed, shouldn’t be loved, shouldn’t receive any care or kindness from the parent, and so the older brother refused to come into the celebration himself. I asked the young man to reflect on the older brother and ask himself if he wasn’t being more like the older brother himself than anyone else in the story.
I could see that the conversation with this young man wasn’t going to go much of anywhere so I cut him off from being able to communicate with me. As I’ve told you before I will not argue with anyone. I will talk with anyone honestly about how I feel, about what I have read in the scriptures, about how I interpret those scriptures just as long as they will have an considerate, polite, and intelligent conversation with me and not try to abuse me or put me down for feeling that I am one of God’s beloved just the way that I am. A one-sided conversation isn’t a conversation at all.
Jesus didn’t tell Peter or the rest of the disciples to go out and care for only those who were acceptable to them, only those who dressed like them, talked like them, observed the same religious laws they did, ate the same kosher foods. Jesus told Peter and the others to go and love everyone and care for everyone just like he had cared for them, just like God cares for everyone. There would be no exceptions, even though the disciples in the book of Acts had to work through their own misunderstandings about who was acceptable to and loved by God. Every time they thought they had figured out who they could exclude, who they could ignore, who they could refuse to care for, God demonstrated for them that they were wrong, that God’s love included even those they thought were unloved and hated by God.
I went to the Northwest Preaching Conference this week here in Seattle at Pilgrim Church downtown where more than 200 pastors, seminary students, and other Christians gathered to hear some rather astounding preachers both preach and lecture on preaching to our society from a Progressive Christian viewpoint. I heard about pastors who were crossing the boundaries that had never been crossed in their church communities in order to care for and love all of God’s children.
One Pastor from Stone Mountain Georgia founded his predominantly black church more than 20 years ago when he was a very young man. The church grew rapidly to over 6,000 members and they built an amazing facility ending up with a huge mortgage that had to be paid off. A few years ago the pastor became convicted that homophobia was wrong and he began to preach and teach his beliefs. He then decided that pushing women to the sidelines was wrong and he opened the door for women in his very Southern Baptist Church to become deacons and pastors. He then decided that being a Southern Baptist Church wasn’t in line with who he and the church were any longer and he went first independent, then he led his church to align itself with the Disciples denomination. He tackled other issues of exclusion and taught his people that God was including everyone in God’s family. It was too much for many of them to take and more than 3,000 members of the church left. Faced with an inability to pay the mortgage and support the ministries of the church the board of directors of his congregation called him in and told him that he needed to cool it. He could have his own private theology and his own private opinions but that he should preach what the people wanted to hear on Sunday, what would keep them coming and giving. He told them that he couldn’t do that and be true to himself and to God. They asked him if he believed what he was saying enough to take a pay cut. He said that he did and they cut his pay, but they didn’t stop him from preaching the truth about God’s love for everyone. His church is thriving again and everyone that comes to that church knows that its pastor believes and practices exactly what he says about God’s love and care for everyone.
One of the amazing things about the Preaching conference was the large number of women in attendance and women as presenters and preachers and lecturers. It was thrilling to see how God is using both women and men to lead their churches and their denominations to question the status quo about the acceptance of same-sex loving persons, transgender persons, those of a different racial or ethnic group, and more. God’s Spirit is alive and moving throughout the church in America in very progressive ways. Yes, there are those churches who do not share our progressive spirit, but it is glorious indeed to find out how many others do share our concerns and our convictions. I heard one amazing sermon on homophobia that will stay with me forever. It was preached by a woman pastor who knew all too well that many of her own church members didn’t share her conviction, but she preached the sermon anyway in a powerful and loving way. To demonstrate how society excludes others who should be included she told about how widowed women have been abused and excluded throughout the centuries. She told the story of a very young child, a girl in India whose parents had married her off to an old man as part of a business deal. After the wedding the girl continued to live with her parents in their home until she would be old enough to consummate the marriage.
However one morning this eight year old girl’s parents woke her up and told her that her husband had died and that they were taking her to the temple where the widows lived and where she would have to stay from then on, rejected by her family and her society because the husband she had never even known had died. At the widows’ temple lived several other women all of whom were supported financially by one of their number, a younger woman who was prostituted out in order to bring in the money they needed to live on. They began to groom the little girl to take her role as their financial provider when she became old enough. Though the laws in India eventually did change, there are places where it isn’t that different even today.
The book of Acts tells us the story of Tabitha a woman of good report and probable wealth who is referred to as a disciple of Christ, the first and only use of the feminine form of the word disciple in the new testament. She must have been a pretty amazing woman. We know the life of widows and orphans was horrible in the early first century. In most of the ancient world women had no right to own property or even conduct business, but Tabitha has an obvious ministry to the widows in her city, offering them clothing that she makes for them herself. She is caring for others in the name of Jesus who others think don’t deserve their time, their attention, or their love. A widow had nothing and nowhere to go if her children turned her out or if she had no children. But here we see a disciple of Christ caring for those on the edge of acceptability to the rest of society, saying to the widows, “I see you. I care for you. I love you.”
When Tabitha becomes ill and dies those to whom she has ministered call for Peter who is nearby to come and comfort them. Peter arrives and the women show him the clothing that Tabitha has made for them and tell him about her amazing ministry to them.
Peter asks to be alone with her body and then says to her, “Tabitha arise.” She is revived and gets up and joins her friends.
Why does Luke tell us this story? In the gospel of Luke Jesus goes to Jarius’ home and says to his little daughter who has died, “Talitha arise” and she revives and Jesus presents her to her unbelievably thrilled parents. Luke is telling us that even though Jesus isn’t physically with us any longer, the power and love of God that Christ brought to us is just as alive and just as present and powerful as it ever was. You and I may not be able to bring someone back from the dead, but we can give them the very presence and power of God through the way we love and care for them. Are you a follower of Christ? Then feed his lambs. Care for his sheep.
Interestingly enough when Peter departs from Tabitha’s home he goes to stay with Simon the Tanner. Because of Simon’s trade as one who handles the dead bodies and skins of animals he would not have been a very acceptable person in society. He would have been considered unclean and outside the boundaries of acceptability, but we see Peter going to his home and staying there with him.
Let me leave you with a passage from the book of Revelation. *
* Revelation 7: 9-17
........I had a vision of an enormous crowd, bigger than anyone could ever count. It was made up of people from every nation; from all the different ethnic groups, cultural groups and language groups. They were all standing together before the throne and before the Lamb of God. They were dressed in white robes and were waving banners and throwing flowers in the air. Their voices rose as one — an enormous roar — saying:
........“The life into which we have been saved
........belongs to our God who is seated on the throne,
........and to the Lamb of our God.”
Around the throne stood the four awesome creatures, and around them stood the twenty four elders, and around them stood all the angels. All together they fell to their knees before the throne, with their faces to the ground, and worshipped God, singing:
........“So say all of us!
........May glory and wisdom
........and gratitude and honor
........and authority and strength
........and every good thing
........be given to our God,
........from now to forever!
........So say all of us!
........Then one of the elders came and spoke to me, saying, “What can you tell me about these people in white robes? Who are they, and where have they come from?”
........I replied, “I’m not sure, Sir, but you have the answers.”
........Then he said to me, “These are the people who have come through the ultimate atrocity. They have been cleansed by the Lamb.
........For this reason they now have the privilege
................of gathering before the throne of God,
........and there in the Temple they serve God, day and night,
................and the one who is seated on the throne
........................provides them refuge and safe shelter.
........Never again will they go hungry;
................never again will they go thirsty;
........never again will they be burned by the sun,
................or left exposed to any searing heat.
........The Lamb who is at the centre of the throne
................has guided them through the wilderness
........................and will now care for them forever.
........He will wipe every tear from their eyes
................and guide them to crystal clear springs
........................where the water of life bubbles up freely.”
©2001 Nathan Nettleton LaughingBird.net
God is saying to each one of us today: I see you. I care for you. I love you. God wants to give you a River of Life springing up inside of you so that you can face the challenges that life will bring to you and so you can know that God loves you no matter how unacceptable you may feel , no matter how unacceptable others might tell you that you are. And when you’ve been filled from that non-stop fountain of hope, you can become God’s gift of love to those who need your care and your presence in their lives this week. And you will be able to say to them:
“I see you. I care for you. I love you.”
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Fishing, Following, and Feeding John 21:1-19
Touching Others: Fishing, Feeding, Following
I’ve said it several times over the last couple of weeks: “The Jesus that the disciples saw after the Resurrection was the same Jesus they had known before the Crucifixion.” They knew him by the way he spoke their names, by the way he blessed and broke bread at a meal, and by the way he tenderly cared for them in very personally specific ways…just like he had done for them before he was crucified. There was no question in their minds or their hearts about who the Risen Christ was. He was the same person they had always known and loved.
When my children were still young they would often crawl on the couch beside me to watch TV ask me to rub their back just like I had rubbed their back when they were an infant who I was trying to get to go to sleep. It was a ‘touch’ of love that they remembered and they wanted to experience it again because it said to them that I cared about them and reminded them that I loved them. I remember how my mother brushed the hair out of my eyes, or patted me on the back, or held my hand when she was alive. She did it in such a special way that even if I didn’t see who was touching me, I knew that it was my mother. I always enjoyed those moments with her because she did those things in exactly the same manner each time telling me that she hadn’t changed the way she felt about me and that she never would.
The interesting thing about such events in our lives, that is, when we remember or realize that another person truly does love us, truly does want to encourage us, is that these events usually occur in the ordinary occasions of life. Your Mom serving you breakfast and then brushing the hair out of your sleepy eyes. Your Dad sitting on the couch watching TV when you sit down beside him. Simply walking past a person you know during the preparation of a family meal and having them reach out to pat your back or take a moment to caress your cheek, and smile at you tenderly. These are the ordinary moments of our lives when we know beyond any doubt that we are truly loved.
Jesus came to the disciples in the ordinary moments of their lives: Sharing a meal, a fishing trip, a walk along the highway home, a moment in the garden. Jesus brought to them miracles of love and hope by what he did that was so extraordinary: a touch, a word, a prayer, cooking a meal for them on the beach. They could not mistake the ‘touch’ of the Master’s hand upon them.
Last week we reflected on Jesus’ first appearance to his followers recorded here in the book of John. They were huddled behind a locked door for fear of their very lives when Jesus appears to them, tells them to stop being afraid because he is with them, and breathes the Holy Spirit of God into them with his own breath recalling the Creation story from Genesis when God intimately breathed God’s Living Spirit into Adam and Eve. Jesus tells them that he is sending them into the world to care for others in exactly the same way that God had sent him to them. You would have thought that they would have been so excited about Jesus’ being alive again that they’d run and tell everyone they knew. But that’s not what happened.
As the story unfolded in the gospel of John, a week later we found them still hiding out behind that same locked door when Jesus appeared to them a second time. Jesus again tells them to stop being afraid that he is with them. Did they get it this time? Did they begin to follow his instruction to take the good news about how much God loves the world to everyone? Nope.
In today’s lectionary we find that Peter and at least six other of the disciples have decided to go fishing. Is this just a little retreat from the stress or is this a return to their former occupations as fishermen? This story reminds us that it was in just such a situation that Jesus first encountered Peter, and John, and James who were professional fishermen when he called them to follow him and become fishers of men and women. Is this just an accidental occurrence, or is this the author of John trying to tell us something special about what it means to be a true follower of Jesus, a true fisher of men and women?
Many of us have gone to church hoping to find something different, something new, something hopeful and helpful. Over the years we may have frequently even volunteered our time and efforts, gotten involved in what seemed to be exciting opportunities of hope and love and community. But when problems came up, when other people didn’t act so Christian toward us or others, when difficulties became too stressful, we pulled out of the situation and we may have told God, “Well, God, that was certainly exciting while it lasted, but I didn’t get involved to be misunderstood and abused. Thanks for the good times, but I think I’m not the one you want for this job. So if you don’t mind, God, I’m going to go back to life as it used to be for me.”
Perhaps that was the feeling of these disciples: “That was sure an exciting ride, Jesus. Wow, did you ever surprise us with that resurrection thing! But it also scared us and we’re not so sure we want that kind of stress in our lives any longer. You can’t blame us. I mean look at what they did to you. Maybe they’ll do the same thing to us. Our lives aren’t safe anymore, not especially if we keep hanging on to what you told us and what you asked us to do. Sooner or later they’ll be coming after us and it wouldn’t do any good for us to get ourselves killed would it? So, if you don’t mind, we’re just going to go back to our fishing jobs, at least we know what to expect when we’re fishing.”
And so these fishermen, these former followers of Jesus, go back to what they knew before they met Jesus, they go back to fishing. Only there is a slight problem. These professional fishermen, these guys who know all about how to fish and all about the fish, work all night long throwing their nets out into the waters where the fish ought to be, but they find that their nets remained empty. Not even one small fish accidentally got caught in their nets. The author of the story is trying to tell us something: Something very important for us to understand. Without God in your life you can’t do much of anything, even those things you thought you were so good at doing. If God is absent from your life, then your life is empty and without purpose and without real affect.
It’s early morning when these former disciples decide to head back to shore, depressed at their failure to find fish, wondering what went wrong, what they did wrong, when a man on the shore calls out to them. “Throw your nets on the other side of the boat.” Who is this guy and what does he think he is doing? We’re professional fishermen. We know how to fish these waters. If we can’t catch any fish it’s because the fish went somewhere else. They’ll be back tomorrow night. But the man persists, “Throw out your nets on the other side of the boat.”
Finally, the disciples follow this man’s directives. We don’t know why. They’ve been at this task all night long. What would one more throw of the nets cost them? Not much. So they toss the nets out one more time and this time the nets are suddenly filled to overflowing, more than all of them together could pull into the boat.
Uh, Oh. Suddenly it dawns on them. The guy on the shore, the one who told them to try the other side of the boat, he’s not just anybody, he is somebody. He is Jesus. Peter realizes this and streamlines his clothing for swimming by tucking his shirt into his britches and he dives into the lake and swims for shore. The other disciples bring in the boat trailing the nets full of fish.
They find Jesus cooking them breakfast on the beach. He’s done quite a bit of preparation. He’s even baking them bread. He’s got some fish, too, baking on the coals of the fire. A charcoal fire, just like the one that Peter warmed himself beside on the night Jesus was arrested, the same night when Peter betrayed that he even knew Jesus three times.
Peter is suddenly full of strength and pulls the huge catch of fish in the nets onto the shore all by himself. Quite a feat when before all of the disciples together with Peter couldn’t pull the net into their boat. The net if full of whoppers, 153 fish in all, a number that is the same as all the known nations and governments of the world at that time. John is making a statement about God’s love for all the diversity of the world, not just for one small tribe, one small nation. God’s love is for all people everywhere. God’s intention is to bring all people to God through the efforts of those who are true followers of Christ.
They know this guy must be Jesus, but they are too afraid to ask him. And they don’t need to ask. He is doing for them what Jesus has always done for them. He is caring for their human needs by cooking and serving them breakfast, just like he had washed their feet, and served them a meal at the last supper before he was arrested. He breaks the bread the same way that he had done then. He asks God to bless the meal the same way he asked God to bless all the meals they had eaten together over the last three years. This is Jesus. Jesus is feeding them the same way Jesus has fed them many times before.
Jesus knows our hearts. And Jesus knows that Peter is hurting. Big time hurt. Peter can probably think of nothing right now except how he betrayed Jesus on the night he was arrested. How he denied he knew Jesus beside a charcoal fire just like this one with which Jesus has prepared their breakfast.
Jesus speaks to Peter: Simon, son of John, do you love me above anyone else?” And Peter answers, “Yes, Great One. You know that I love you.” And Jesus responds, “Then feed my lambs just like I’ve fed you.”
Then Jesus asks again, “Are you sure, Simon, son of John, do you really love me?” How it must have hurt to have Jesus ask him a second time if he loved him. I can imagine the tears welling in Peter’s eyes and the dryness that must have come to his throat, “Yes, Great One, you know that I love you.” And Jesus responds, “Well then, take care of my sheep just like I have taken care of you.”
Then Jesus asks him a third time, “Simon, son of John, do you truly love?”
The author of John’s gospel then tells us that Peter is hurt that Jesus keeps asking him the same question. Have you ever been in such a situation? Someone repeatedly keeps asking you the same question to really find out if you meant what you said. It’s easy to respond and tell someone what you think they want to hear, it’s something else when you really tell them what you think and feel yourself. Jesus wants to know what Peter is really thinking and feeling. Jesus wants an honest answer from Peter, not just the answer that Peter thinks he should give, but the answer that speaks from Peter’s heart and soul of Peter’s true feelings for Jesus and all that Jesus is asking Peter to do. That’s the kind of answer God wants from us when God puts a question mark in our hearts.
If I had been Peter, I would be weeping profusely by now, weeping tears of shame and grief at what I had done. But Jesus does not want Peter to be shamed nor grieved. Jesus wants Peter to experience resurrection within himself. Jesus wants Peter to begin living as a real Easter person on the right side of the Resurrection. Jesus wants Peter to come out of the grave just like Lazarus did and truly begin to live his life in the power and presence of God.
Peter answers for the third time, “Great One, you know all things and you know just how very much that I love you.”
Then Jesus tells him once more, “Feed my sheep just like I have fed you.”
That would be a great ending to this story. But Jesus goes on to tell Peter than Peter will face death. Peter has been afraid of what the future might hold for him if he follows Jesus, if he does what Jesus is asking him to do, “Feed my Sheep. Care for my followers just like I’ve cared for you.”
Jesus then says to Peter, the same thing he said to Peter three years earlier when they met on the beach beside the shores of Lake Galilee, “Follow me.”
One cannot follow Jesus until one understands that following Jesus might cost you your very life. Oh, we may not have to face martyrdom like Peter eventually did, we may not have to literally die for Christ, but then, there are many kinds of death: emotional and spiritual to name just two. Difficulties and stress go with being a follower of Christ. It’s not always going to be easy to do the right thing, sometimes it will take tears and loving confrontation before we do the right thing for God.
It is only when we have made a full and complete commitment of our own lives, our own hearts and souls to God through Jesus Christ, that we will be able to truly care for others in the name of Jesus. It is only when we have tuned our lives so completely to the power and presence of Jesus living within us that we will be able to feed his sheep, to touch others in the same way that Jesus touched them.
A blind man came to church a former church of mine one day and was greeted by the ushers and pastors who introduced themselves and shook his hands. He had been invited by a friend who was a member of our congregation. I introduced myself to him and shook his hand. Just then his friend came up to him and without saying a word to him took the blind man’s hand and gripped it firmly and then put his other hand on top of their two hands and patted gently. The blind man immediately smiled and said, “Hi, Marshall.” Later I asked the blind man how he had known that Marshall was the one shaking his hand when Marshall had said nothing to him. The man smiled at me and said, “It was the way he touched me. No one else touches me like Marshall does.”
Touch others in the name of Jesus because no one else can touch them exactly the way that you do
I’ve said it several times over the last couple of weeks: “The Jesus that the disciples saw after the Resurrection was the same Jesus they had known before the Crucifixion.” They knew him by the way he spoke their names, by the way he blessed and broke bread at a meal, and by the way he tenderly cared for them in very personally specific ways…just like he had done for them before he was crucified. There was no question in their minds or their hearts about who the Risen Christ was. He was the same person they had always known and loved.
When my children were still young they would often crawl on the couch beside me to watch TV ask me to rub their back just like I had rubbed their back when they were an infant who I was trying to get to go to sleep. It was a ‘touch’ of love that they remembered and they wanted to experience it again because it said to them that I cared about them and reminded them that I loved them. I remember how my mother brushed the hair out of my eyes, or patted me on the back, or held my hand when she was alive. She did it in such a special way that even if I didn’t see who was touching me, I knew that it was my mother. I always enjoyed those moments with her because she did those things in exactly the same manner each time telling me that she hadn’t changed the way she felt about me and that she never would.
The interesting thing about such events in our lives, that is, when we remember or realize that another person truly does love us, truly does want to encourage us, is that these events usually occur in the ordinary occasions of life. Your Mom serving you breakfast and then brushing the hair out of your sleepy eyes. Your Dad sitting on the couch watching TV when you sit down beside him. Simply walking past a person you know during the preparation of a family meal and having them reach out to pat your back or take a moment to caress your cheek, and smile at you tenderly. These are the ordinary moments of our lives when we know beyond any doubt that we are truly loved.
Jesus came to the disciples in the ordinary moments of their lives: Sharing a meal, a fishing trip, a walk along the highway home, a moment in the garden. Jesus brought to them miracles of love and hope by what he did that was so extraordinary: a touch, a word, a prayer, cooking a meal for them on the beach. They could not mistake the ‘touch’ of the Master’s hand upon them.
Last week we reflected on Jesus’ first appearance to his followers recorded here in the book of John. They were huddled behind a locked door for fear of their very lives when Jesus appears to them, tells them to stop being afraid because he is with them, and breathes the Holy Spirit of God into them with his own breath recalling the Creation story from Genesis when God intimately breathed God’s Living Spirit into Adam and Eve. Jesus tells them that he is sending them into the world to care for others in exactly the same way that God had sent him to them. You would have thought that they would have been so excited about Jesus’ being alive again that they’d run and tell everyone they knew. But that’s not what happened.
As the story unfolded in the gospel of John, a week later we found them still hiding out behind that same locked door when Jesus appeared to them a second time. Jesus again tells them to stop being afraid that he is with them. Did they get it this time? Did they begin to follow his instruction to take the good news about how much God loves the world to everyone? Nope.
In today’s lectionary we find that Peter and at least six other of the disciples have decided to go fishing. Is this just a little retreat from the stress or is this a return to their former occupations as fishermen? This story reminds us that it was in just such a situation that Jesus first encountered Peter, and John, and James who were professional fishermen when he called them to follow him and become fishers of men and women. Is this just an accidental occurrence, or is this the author of John trying to tell us something special about what it means to be a true follower of Jesus, a true fisher of men and women?
Many of us have gone to church hoping to find something different, something new, something hopeful and helpful. Over the years we may have frequently even volunteered our time and efforts, gotten involved in what seemed to be exciting opportunities of hope and love and community. But when problems came up, when other people didn’t act so Christian toward us or others, when difficulties became too stressful, we pulled out of the situation and we may have told God, “Well, God, that was certainly exciting while it lasted, but I didn’t get involved to be misunderstood and abused. Thanks for the good times, but I think I’m not the one you want for this job. So if you don’t mind, God, I’m going to go back to life as it used to be for me.”
Perhaps that was the feeling of these disciples: “That was sure an exciting ride, Jesus. Wow, did you ever surprise us with that resurrection thing! But it also scared us and we’re not so sure we want that kind of stress in our lives any longer. You can’t blame us. I mean look at what they did to you. Maybe they’ll do the same thing to us. Our lives aren’t safe anymore, not especially if we keep hanging on to what you told us and what you asked us to do. Sooner or later they’ll be coming after us and it wouldn’t do any good for us to get ourselves killed would it? So, if you don’t mind, we’re just going to go back to our fishing jobs, at least we know what to expect when we’re fishing.”
And so these fishermen, these former followers of Jesus, go back to what they knew before they met Jesus, they go back to fishing. Only there is a slight problem. These professional fishermen, these guys who know all about how to fish and all about the fish, work all night long throwing their nets out into the waters where the fish ought to be, but they find that their nets remained empty. Not even one small fish accidentally got caught in their nets. The author of the story is trying to tell us something: Something very important for us to understand. Without God in your life you can’t do much of anything, even those things you thought you were so good at doing. If God is absent from your life, then your life is empty and without purpose and without real affect.
It’s early morning when these former disciples decide to head back to shore, depressed at their failure to find fish, wondering what went wrong, what they did wrong, when a man on the shore calls out to them. “Throw your nets on the other side of the boat.” Who is this guy and what does he think he is doing? We’re professional fishermen. We know how to fish these waters. If we can’t catch any fish it’s because the fish went somewhere else. They’ll be back tomorrow night. But the man persists, “Throw out your nets on the other side of the boat.”
Finally, the disciples follow this man’s directives. We don’t know why. They’ve been at this task all night long. What would one more throw of the nets cost them? Not much. So they toss the nets out one more time and this time the nets are suddenly filled to overflowing, more than all of them together could pull into the boat.
Uh, Oh. Suddenly it dawns on them. The guy on the shore, the one who told them to try the other side of the boat, he’s not just anybody, he is somebody. He is Jesus. Peter realizes this and streamlines his clothing for swimming by tucking his shirt into his britches and he dives into the lake and swims for shore. The other disciples bring in the boat trailing the nets full of fish.
They find Jesus cooking them breakfast on the beach. He’s done quite a bit of preparation. He’s even baking them bread. He’s got some fish, too, baking on the coals of the fire. A charcoal fire, just like the one that Peter warmed himself beside on the night Jesus was arrested, the same night when Peter betrayed that he even knew Jesus three times.
Peter is suddenly full of strength and pulls the huge catch of fish in the nets onto the shore all by himself. Quite a feat when before all of the disciples together with Peter couldn’t pull the net into their boat. The net if full of whoppers, 153 fish in all, a number that is the same as all the known nations and governments of the world at that time. John is making a statement about God’s love for all the diversity of the world, not just for one small tribe, one small nation. God’s love is for all people everywhere. God’s intention is to bring all people to God through the efforts of those who are true followers of Christ.
They know this guy must be Jesus, but they are too afraid to ask him. And they don’t need to ask. He is doing for them what Jesus has always done for them. He is caring for their human needs by cooking and serving them breakfast, just like he had washed their feet, and served them a meal at the last supper before he was arrested. He breaks the bread the same way that he had done then. He asks God to bless the meal the same way he asked God to bless all the meals they had eaten together over the last three years. This is Jesus. Jesus is feeding them the same way Jesus has fed them many times before.
Jesus knows our hearts. And Jesus knows that Peter is hurting. Big time hurt. Peter can probably think of nothing right now except how he betrayed Jesus on the night he was arrested. How he denied he knew Jesus beside a charcoal fire just like this one with which Jesus has prepared their breakfast.
Jesus speaks to Peter: Simon, son of John, do you love me above anyone else?” And Peter answers, “Yes, Great One. You know that I love you.” And Jesus responds, “Then feed my lambs just like I’ve fed you.”
Then Jesus asks again, “Are you sure, Simon, son of John, do you really love me?” How it must have hurt to have Jesus ask him a second time if he loved him. I can imagine the tears welling in Peter’s eyes and the dryness that must have come to his throat, “Yes, Great One, you know that I love you.” And Jesus responds, “Well then, take care of my sheep just like I have taken care of you.”
Then Jesus asks him a third time, “Simon, son of John, do you truly love?”
The author of John’s gospel then tells us that Peter is hurt that Jesus keeps asking him the same question. Have you ever been in such a situation? Someone repeatedly keeps asking you the same question to really find out if you meant what you said. It’s easy to respond and tell someone what you think they want to hear, it’s something else when you really tell them what you think and feel yourself. Jesus wants to know what Peter is really thinking and feeling. Jesus wants an honest answer from Peter, not just the answer that Peter thinks he should give, but the answer that speaks from Peter’s heart and soul of Peter’s true feelings for Jesus and all that Jesus is asking Peter to do. That’s the kind of answer God wants from us when God puts a question mark in our hearts.
If I had been Peter, I would be weeping profusely by now, weeping tears of shame and grief at what I had done. But Jesus does not want Peter to be shamed nor grieved. Jesus wants Peter to experience resurrection within himself. Jesus wants Peter to begin living as a real Easter person on the right side of the Resurrection. Jesus wants Peter to come out of the grave just like Lazarus did and truly begin to live his life in the power and presence of God.
Peter answers for the third time, “Great One, you know all things and you know just how very much that I love you.”
Then Jesus tells him once more, “Feed my sheep just like I have fed you.”
That would be a great ending to this story. But Jesus goes on to tell Peter than Peter will face death. Peter has been afraid of what the future might hold for him if he follows Jesus, if he does what Jesus is asking him to do, “Feed my Sheep. Care for my followers just like I’ve cared for you.”
Jesus then says to Peter, the same thing he said to Peter three years earlier when they met on the beach beside the shores of Lake Galilee, “Follow me.”
One cannot follow Jesus until one understands that following Jesus might cost you your very life. Oh, we may not have to face martyrdom like Peter eventually did, we may not have to literally die for Christ, but then, there are many kinds of death: emotional and spiritual to name just two. Difficulties and stress go with being a follower of Christ. It’s not always going to be easy to do the right thing, sometimes it will take tears and loving confrontation before we do the right thing for God.
It is only when we have made a full and complete commitment of our own lives, our own hearts and souls to God through Jesus Christ, that we will be able to truly care for others in the name of Jesus. It is only when we have tuned our lives so completely to the power and presence of Jesus living within us that we will be able to feed his sheep, to touch others in the same way that Jesus touched them.
A blind man came to church a former church of mine one day and was greeted by the ushers and pastors who introduced themselves and shook his hands. He had been invited by a friend who was a member of our congregation. I introduced myself to him and shook his hand. Just then his friend came up to him and without saying a word to him took the blind man’s hand and gripped it firmly and then put his other hand on top of their two hands and patted gently. The blind man immediately smiled and said, “Hi, Marshall.” Later I asked the blind man how he had known that Marshall was the one shaking his hand when Marshall had said nothing to him. The man smiled at me and said, “It was the way he touched me. No one else touches me like Marshall does.”
Touch others in the name of Jesus because no one else can touch them exactly the way that you do
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Full Text Sermon: Stop Being Afraid
It’s very difficult to live life on the upbeat all the time. Some days we are exhausted and even trying to be upbeat is close to impossible. Some days we are so overwhelmed with grief or beaten down by illness or physical pain that we despair thinking that there will never come a day when we could even smile again. Many are dealing with the loss of jobs, the failure to find a job after months of looking, or the impossibility of trying to make meager financial sources stretch to cover current expenses, maybe even facing homelessness due to failure of adequate income. Some days we just want to go into our own room, lock the doors behind us so that no one can disturb us and suffer in silence.
That’s sort of the place the disciples found themselves after the death of Christ. They went to the house of one of their community in the area of Jerusalem and locked the doors behind them, afraid for their lives, despairing over the lost vision of the fantastic future they had imagined because their leader was now dead. Even when Mary came to bring the news that she had seen Christ alive they didn’t change their behavior much. They didn’t throw the door open wide and steam out into the city to declare him alive. Nope, they stayed right where they were, and probably tried to convince Mary she was just being hysterical.
Suddenly, despite the locked door, Jesus appears in the room with them and for the first time tells them, “Peace be still.” Then the author of the Gospel of John tells us that Christ breathes his holy spirit into them, telling them to go out into the world and love and care for others just like God had sent Christ. This is John’s Pentecost when the disciples receive the Holy Spirit of God, breathed into them, just like God had breathed into Adam and Eve at their Creation. Christ was giving them Christ’s presence and power to go out and take God’s love to a suffering world.
He also speaks about forgiveness, probably the hardest thing to talk about in any church, even harder than sex and money.
Thomas comes back to the room. He’s been out. Apparently he’s not afraid leave that locked room, but he is disappointed that Christ appeared to the rest of the followers of Jesus but not to him. Basically he says to them, ‘I won’t believe what you are telling me until I, too, can see him and touch him, and feel the wounds in his body.’
When we grieve we can get pretty particular about what we want in order to give up our grief. I’ve sat in hospital waiting rooms holding up faith and hope for others while a beloved person undergoes surgery following an accident or due to and illness. I’ve heard people say, “I won’t believe she is okay until I see her walk out of this hospital on her own. I won’t believe God can heal him until I can hug him and see that he is okay for myself.” When we grieve we can make some mighty big demands upon God and upon ourselves.
Do you notice something rather interesting about this story. What did those followers of Jesus do after Christ appears to them and breathes the Holy Spirit into them? Not much. Even Jesus appearing to them alive didn’t get them to budge out of that room. A week later we find them still hiding behind closed and locked doors, but this time Thomas is present. Jesus comes again. Jesus tells them once more “Peace be with you.” In other words, “Stop being afraid!”
Why do you think they are still afraid? I remember growing up and my mother saying to me when I had been rather disobedient, “Just wait until your father gets home, young man.” My father was a rather violent disciplinarian when I was little. He changed over the years and you would not know the gentle person he is today is even the same person who disciplined so violently as a child. Now, Pastor Ray, just what does that memory of yours got to do with the disciples in the upper room. Plenty.
They were afraid of being arrested and killed by the Sanhedrin and the Romans for being followers of the condemned man Jesus. Rightly so. I would have been, too. Why stop the killing with just Jesus? Why not go after the whole bunch of them and get rid of the insurrection with a mass arrest and a mass killing. It wouldn’t have been the first time the Romans acted in such a manner. I’m sure they had heard the news reports and the rumors.
Then Jesus appears to them alive again. As my grandmother would have said that must have scared the be-jesus right out of them. First of all, if the Romans didn’t get it right the first time they killed Jesus, perhaps they will come after Jesus again, and who among them is safe if it becomes known that Jesus has returned and has been in your home with you? But…that isn’t the most scary thing about this whole situation.
What’s really scary is thinking about what Jesus will do to you. Sure it’s a childish thought, be we all have them. If Jesus can command life into being even after dying, what kind of power does Christ have over you, over the very followers that professed to be loyal to him, but who deserted Jesus at the moment of his crisis?
Will Jesus punish Peter for betraying him, not once mind you, but three times? Will Jesus discipline the disciples for running away and hiding? Just what will this Risen Christ do to them? Remember they lived in a society where people believed that the gods of the world could and did come into your life and punish you for your misbehavior; in much the same fashion that a violent father will beat his children for disobedience.
We know now that is not how God works in our lives. We also know that when we read the stories in the Old Testament about a vengeful, wrathful God that those stories reflect more the immature reasoning of primitive people. From other more reasoned scriptures we know that God works with us in love and truth to give us opportunities for New Life, to give us a chance to start over again, without the failures of the past haunting us. Like a loving parent of a toddler learning how to walk, when we fall down God picks us up, puts us back on our feet, gently brushes the dust off our clothes and tells us to try again.
However, many of us still live our lives in fear of God like frightened children who have just been told, “You just wait until your Father comes home.” We believe that God will somehow be forced into punishing us for our misbehavior or our wrong decisions. People ask me all the time, “Why is God doing this to me? What have I done that is so bad that God would punish me this way?”
Listen to me, carefully, God doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t intentionally punish you for disobeying God. It may seem like that to you, but that is a childish immature reaction, and it is not based on the truth about how our God works with us. Instead the scriptures tell us that God loves us and wants to demonstrate that love for us by giving us God’s power and presence and another chance to start all over again even when we or others screw up our lives.
It’s hard to change our behavior, our thinking, and our mis-perceptions of life even when we are looking square into the face of a miracle. We linger in the past, hesitant to move on into the future, even when the future seems so bright and so full of hope.
I once asked a depressed friend why she kept herself hidden away in her home and refused to engage with those who loved her and wanted her to heal and return to a productive life again. She said, “I’m comfortable here. No one bothers me. No one is asking me to do anything or go anywhere. I like being left alone.” I also suspect she was afraid to face the unknown of life beyond her home where you never know what is going to happen to you. It’s safe living behind closed and locked doors, even if you have few opportunities for real living.
But just like the disciples, Jesus won’t leave us alone in our despair. Jesus keeps coming back into our lives again and again bringing hope and a vision for a future full of possibilities and life. Jesus wants to give us a New Life in God’s New Community with our New Chosen Family of Faithful Friends. Sometimes we feel Christ’s presence as no more than a nagging feeling to get up and unlock the door to our heart, unlock the door to our life and welcome Christ and friends back in to be with us. Sustained by their love and care we again are able to think about moving beyond the closed doors and back out into life.
The disciples took the challenge Christ gave them. They moved beyond the closed and locked doors and out into their city and eventually across the whole Roman Empire. Centuries later we are the living legacies to their faithful witness of Christ’s Love for all people everywhere.
Whatever overwhelms you this morning, know that God can and will come into the midst of your fear and say to you, “My Peace be with you. Don’t be afraid.”
Whatever doubts churn in your mind, whatever sins trouble your conscience, God can and will come into your life and say to you, “My Peace be with you. Don’t be afraid.”
Whatever pain and worries bind you up, whatever walls you have put up or doors you have locked securely, God comes into your life anyway, and says to you, “My Peace be with you. Don’t be afraid.”
Whatever hunger or need you feel deep in your soul, God wants to call us to this table today, to feed us well, and to send us out into a world to be God’s justice, God’s peace, God’s salt and light, God’s love and hope for the world.
We can do it! You know we can do it! But only if we keep our eye, and minds, and hearts open and willing to love others just as we have been overwhelmed by the love of God.
As God sent Jesus into the world, so God sends us this day. My Peace is with you. Don’t be afraid.
Why don’t you take the challenge this week: Unlock and open the doors to your life. Take the Peace that Christ offers. Stop being afraid! Begin to enjoy life again. Begin to move out into the world sharing the Love of Christ with all you meet.
That’s sort of the place the disciples found themselves after the death of Christ. They went to the house of one of their community in the area of Jerusalem and locked the doors behind them, afraid for their lives, despairing over the lost vision of the fantastic future they had imagined because their leader was now dead. Even when Mary came to bring the news that she had seen Christ alive they didn’t change their behavior much. They didn’t throw the door open wide and steam out into the city to declare him alive. Nope, they stayed right where they were, and probably tried to convince Mary she was just being hysterical.
Suddenly, despite the locked door, Jesus appears in the room with them and for the first time tells them, “Peace be still.” Then the author of the Gospel of John tells us that Christ breathes his holy spirit into them, telling them to go out into the world and love and care for others just like God had sent Christ. This is John’s Pentecost when the disciples receive the Holy Spirit of God, breathed into them, just like God had breathed into Adam and Eve at their Creation. Christ was giving them Christ’s presence and power to go out and take God’s love to a suffering world.
He also speaks about forgiveness, probably the hardest thing to talk about in any church, even harder than sex and money.
Thomas comes back to the room. He’s been out. Apparently he’s not afraid leave that locked room, but he is disappointed that Christ appeared to the rest of the followers of Jesus but not to him. Basically he says to them, ‘I won’t believe what you are telling me until I, too, can see him and touch him, and feel the wounds in his body.’
When we grieve we can get pretty particular about what we want in order to give up our grief. I’ve sat in hospital waiting rooms holding up faith and hope for others while a beloved person undergoes surgery following an accident or due to and illness. I’ve heard people say, “I won’t believe she is okay until I see her walk out of this hospital on her own. I won’t believe God can heal him until I can hug him and see that he is okay for myself.” When we grieve we can make some mighty big demands upon God and upon ourselves.
Do you notice something rather interesting about this story. What did those followers of Jesus do after Christ appears to them and breathes the Holy Spirit into them? Not much. Even Jesus appearing to them alive didn’t get them to budge out of that room. A week later we find them still hiding behind closed and locked doors, but this time Thomas is present. Jesus comes again. Jesus tells them once more “Peace be with you.” In other words, “Stop being afraid!”
Why do you think they are still afraid? I remember growing up and my mother saying to me when I had been rather disobedient, “Just wait until your father gets home, young man.” My father was a rather violent disciplinarian when I was little. He changed over the years and you would not know the gentle person he is today is even the same person who disciplined so violently as a child. Now, Pastor Ray, just what does that memory of yours got to do with the disciples in the upper room. Plenty.
They were afraid of being arrested and killed by the Sanhedrin and the Romans for being followers of the condemned man Jesus. Rightly so. I would have been, too. Why stop the killing with just Jesus? Why not go after the whole bunch of them and get rid of the insurrection with a mass arrest and a mass killing. It wouldn’t have been the first time the Romans acted in such a manner. I’m sure they had heard the news reports and the rumors.
Then Jesus appears to them alive again. As my grandmother would have said that must have scared the be-jesus right out of them. First of all, if the Romans didn’t get it right the first time they killed Jesus, perhaps they will come after Jesus again, and who among them is safe if it becomes known that Jesus has returned and has been in your home with you? But…that isn’t the most scary thing about this whole situation.
What’s really scary is thinking about what Jesus will do to you. Sure it’s a childish thought, be we all have them. If Jesus can command life into being even after dying, what kind of power does Christ have over you, over the very followers that professed to be loyal to him, but who deserted Jesus at the moment of his crisis?
Will Jesus punish Peter for betraying him, not once mind you, but three times? Will Jesus discipline the disciples for running away and hiding? Just what will this Risen Christ do to them? Remember they lived in a society where people believed that the gods of the world could and did come into your life and punish you for your misbehavior; in much the same fashion that a violent father will beat his children for disobedience.
We know now that is not how God works in our lives. We also know that when we read the stories in the Old Testament about a vengeful, wrathful God that those stories reflect more the immature reasoning of primitive people. From other more reasoned scriptures we know that God works with us in love and truth to give us opportunities for New Life, to give us a chance to start over again, without the failures of the past haunting us. Like a loving parent of a toddler learning how to walk, when we fall down God picks us up, puts us back on our feet, gently brushes the dust off our clothes and tells us to try again.
However, many of us still live our lives in fear of God like frightened children who have just been told, “You just wait until your Father comes home.” We believe that God will somehow be forced into punishing us for our misbehavior or our wrong decisions. People ask me all the time, “Why is God doing this to me? What have I done that is so bad that God would punish me this way?”
Listen to me, carefully, God doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t intentionally punish you for disobeying God. It may seem like that to you, but that is a childish immature reaction, and it is not based on the truth about how our God works with us. Instead the scriptures tell us that God loves us and wants to demonstrate that love for us by giving us God’s power and presence and another chance to start all over again even when we or others screw up our lives.
It’s hard to change our behavior, our thinking, and our mis-perceptions of life even when we are looking square into the face of a miracle. We linger in the past, hesitant to move on into the future, even when the future seems so bright and so full of hope.
I once asked a depressed friend why she kept herself hidden away in her home and refused to engage with those who loved her and wanted her to heal and return to a productive life again. She said, “I’m comfortable here. No one bothers me. No one is asking me to do anything or go anywhere. I like being left alone.” I also suspect she was afraid to face the unknown of life beyond her home where you never know what is going to happen to you. It’s safe living behind closed and locked doors, even if you have few opportunities for real living.
But just like the disciples, Jesus won’t leave us alone in our despair. Jesus keeps coming back into our lives again and again bringing hope and a vision for a future full of possibilities and life. Jesus wants to give us a New Life in God’s New Community with our New Chosen Family of Faithful Friends. Sometimes we feel Christ’s presence as no more than a nagging feeling to get up and unlock the door to our heart, unlock the door to our life and welcome Christ and friends back in to be with us. Sustained by their love and care we again are able to think about moving beyond the closed doors and back out into life.
The disciples took the challenge Christ gave them. They moved beyond the closed and locked doors and out into their city and eventually across the whole Roman Empire. Centuries later we are the living legacies to their faithful witness of Christ’s Love for all people everywhere.
Whatever overwhelms you this morning, know that God can and will come into the midst of your fear and say to you, “My Peace be with you. Don’t be afraid.”
Whatever doubts churn in your mind, whatever sins trouble your conscience, God can and will come into your life and say to you, “My Peace be with you. Don’t be afraid.”
Whatever pain and worries bind you up, whatever walls you have put up or doors you have locked securely, God comes into your life anyway, and says to you, “My Peace be with you. Don’t be afraid.”
Whatever hunger or need you feel deep in your soul, God wants to call us to this table today, to feed us well, and to send us out into a world to be God’s justice, God’s peace, God’s salt and light, God’s love and hope for the world.
We can do it! You know we can do it! But only if we keep our eye, and minds, and hearts open and willing to love others just as we have been overwhelmed by the love of God.
As God sent Jesus into the world, so God sends us this day. My Peace is with you. Don’t be afraid.
Why don’t you take the challenge this week: Unlock and open the doors to your life. Take the Peace that Christ offers. Stop being afraid! Begin to enjoy life again. Begin to move out into the world sharing the Love of Christ with all you meet.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Stop Being Afraid
It’s very difficult to live life on the upbeat all the time. Some days we are exhausted and even trying to be upbeat is close to impossible. Some days we are so burdened with grief or beaten down by illness or physical pain that we despair their will ever come a day when we could even smile again. Many are dealing with the loss of jobs, the failure to find a job after months of looking, or the impossibility of trying to make meager financial sources stretch to cover expenses, maybe even facing homelessness due to failure of adequate income. Some days we just want to go into our own room, close and lock the doors and suffer in silence.
That’s sort of the place the disciples found themselves after the death of Christ (See John 20:19-31). They went to a house and closed and locked the doors afraid for their lives, despairing over the lost vision of a happy future with their now dead leader. Even when Mary came to bring the news that she had seen Christ alive they didn’t change their behavior much. Later in the day Jesus appears to them, even breathes his holy spirit into them, but what do they do after that experience? A week later we find them still hiding behind closed and locked doors when Jesus comes again. Jesus told them “Peace be with you.” In other words, “Stop being afraid!”
It’s hard to change our behavior and our perceptions of life even when we are looking square into the face of a miracle. We linger in the past, hesitant to move on into the future, even when the future seems so bright and full of hope. I once asked a depressed friend why she kept herself hidden away in her home and refused to engage with those who loved her and wanted her to heal and return to a productive life again. She said, “I’m comfortable here. No one bothers me. No one is asking me to do anything or go anywhere. I like being left alone.” I also suspect she was afraid to face the unknown of life beyond her home where you never know what is going to happen to you. It’s safe living behind closed and locked doors, even if you have few opportunities for real living.
But just like the disciples, Jesus won’t leave us alone in our despair. Jesus keeps coming back into our lives again and again bringing hope and a vision for a future full of possibilities and life. Jesus wants to give us a New Life in God’s New Community with our New Chosen Family of faithful friends. Sometimes we feel Christ’s presence as no more than a nagging feeling to get up and open the door to our heart, to our life and let others come back in to be with us. Sustained by their love and care we again are able to think about moving beyond the closed doors and back out into life.
The disciples took the challenge Christ gave them. They moved beyond the closed and locked doors and out into their city and eventually across the Roman Empire and ultimately we are the living witness to their faithful witness of Christ’s Love for all people everywhere.
Why don’t you take the challenge this week: Unlock and open the doors to your life. Stop being afraid. Take the Peace that Christ offers. Stop being afraid! Begin to enjoy life again. Begin to move out into the world sharing the Love of Christ with all you meet. It’s at least something to think about.
That’s sort of the place the disciples found themselves after the death of Christ (See John 20:19-31). They went to a house and closed and locked the doors afraid for their lives, despairing over the lost vision of a happy future with their now dead leader. Even when Mary came to bring the news that she had seen Christ alive they didn’t change their behavior much. Later in the day Jesus appears to them, even breathes his holy spirit into them, but what do they do after that experience? A week later we find them still hiding behind closed and locked doors when Jesus comes again. Jesus told them “Peace be with you.” In other words, “Stop being afraid!”
It’s hard to change our behavior and our perceptions of life even when we are looking square into the face of a miracle. We linger in the past, hesitant to move on into the future, even when the future seems so bright and full of hope. I once asked a depressed friend why she kept herself hidden away in her home and refused to engage with those who loved her and wanted her to heal and return to a productive life again. She said, “I’m comfortable here. No one bothers me. No one is asking me to do anything or go anywhere. I like being left alone.” I also suspect she was afraid to face the unknown of life beyond her home where you never know what is going to happen to you. It’s safe living behind closed and locked doors, even if you have few opportunities for real living.
But just like the disciples, Jesus won’t leave us alone in our despair. Jesus keeps coming back into our lives again and again bringing hope and a vision for a future full of possibilities and life. Jesus wants to give us a New Life in God’s New Community with our New Chosen Family of faithful friends. Sometimes we feel Christ’s presence as no more than a nagging feeling to get up and open the door to our heart, to our life and let others come back in to be with us. Sustained by their love and care we again are able to think about moving beyond the closed doors and back out into life.
The disciples took the challenge Christ gave them. They moved beyond the closed and locked doors and out into their city and eventually across the Roman Empire and ultimately we are the living witness to their faithful witness of Christ’s Love for all people everywhere.
Why don’t you take the challenge this week: Unlock and open the doors to your life. Stop being afraid. Take the Peace that Christ offers. Stop being afraid! Begin to enjoy life again. Begin to move out into the world sharing the Love of Christ with all you meet. It’s at least something to think about.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Easter Sunday Sermon 2010: "I Don't Think So!"
Though I’m very glad to hear that our country’s armed forces will begin to deal with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in a new way, I can’t wait for the day when Queer People will be able to serve openly without fear of discovery in our military. Great changes are happening in our society for which I am thankful to God. However, this past week as I’ve read and listened to the news about the sexual abuse of children by priests, and the threat of death for Queer persons living in Uganda, I’ve been perplexed and vexed by many of the comments made by political leaders, elected officials, ordained ministers, Bishops of the Vatican, scape-goating the issues they are really facing by condemning members of the Queer Community or implying that the victims of crimes are the ones to blame for the embarrassment of the Catholic Church. The comments tell me that these leaders seem to feel that if persons like you and I didn’t exist then their lives wouldn’t be so difficult and the issues they have to deal with would be less complicated. The fact is, our absence wouldn’t make any difference in the issues or difficulties they face, they just can’t bring themselves to admit that and so instead of looking critically at their own selves, they choose to attack us instead. Jesus understood this kind of behavior and Jesus understood the way you and I feel when we are blamed and condemned simply for being who we are exactly the way God created us.
This is Holy Week when we focus on the Passion of Jesus and remember his Crucifixion and, more importantly, his Resurrection by God to new life. The religious and political leaders of his day thought that Jesus was the problem and that if they could just get rid of Jesus then they would not have to face the difficulties he confronted them with, nor the issues that he was pointing out to them through teaching and his hands-on-ministry to the people who lived on the edges of society, those people whom the religious authorities felt justified to ignore and exclude.
Jesus, however was a boundary crosser who made it dramatically clear that God loves everyone and excludes no one by eating with so-called sinners and outcasts, by healing the sick and radically pronouncing their sins forgiven. Jesus wouldn’t let the criticisms and threats of those in power stop him from proclaiming God’s Good News and the truth about God’s New Community. Jesus wasn’t preaching about a Heavenly Banquet that everyone would go to someday in some far distant future. They could have coped with that. The far distant future wasn’t a threat to them in the here and now. But Jesus had the audacity to preach about the establishment of a New Community of Hope and Joy in the here and now. That would mean that they would have to change and change wasn’t something they wanted to deal with. So they decided to get rid of Jesus.
One of the commentators I read this week said this: “I keep remembering a little poem called "Anyway": a man named Kent Keith wrote it, but they say that Mother Teresa had it framed on her wall, and she certainly was someone who knew something about suffering and faithfulness (and doubt, we have later come to understand) and, I suspect, resurrection and new life, too. Like Mother Teresa (probably the only way I resemble her!), I too have this poem framed on my office wall, and I really should get up out of my chair and read it more often. It says, for example, "People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway! The good you do will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway! Honesty makes you vulnerable. Be honest anyway! What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway! People really need help but may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway! If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway!" Kathryn Matthews Huey
Steward for Public Life Congregational Vitality and Discipleship Ministry Team Local Church Ministries UMC
Dear brothers and sisters, with Jesus as our example, we should never stop trying to bring about the New Community of God in our own time and place. Bold actions on our part are called for, just as bold action was Christ’s way of dealing with his critics.
The disciples had a choice when Jesus died. They could return to their lives as they were before they had met Jesus, before they learned that there was a different way to think about and relate to God than they had previously experienced. And when the news about Jesus’ resurrection began to be told, they still had a choice to ignore the truth as mere rumor and the imagination of grief stricken women or to act on the joy and hope of Christ’s resurrection and begin to bring about the New Community of God.
Yes, they could have remembered what Jesus said and how Jesus acted and they could have stopped right there…just a good old memory that could be taken out whenever you felt lonely or depressed like a modern day photo album. Or they could claim that the resurrected Jesus was the same Jesus speaking the same words of hope and love, the same Jesus touching lives with power and promise, as the Jesus who had walked along with them before the Crucifixion.
We sometimes concentrate on the differences that happened to Jesus with the resurrection, but this Easter I would like you to remember that the same Jesus that walked and talked and cared for disciples and strangers was exactly the same Jesus that rose from the grave and was seen and heard by his followers.
Jesus’ resurrection like his life was very intimate, very personal. Jesus had very special ways of talking and touching, of acting and caring that no one would mistake him for anyone else. Have you ever noticed how you can identify that a friend or co-worker is approaching by the unique click of their shoes on the tile of the floor? Or the way they breathe or cough or laugh? You know those who are close to you by the way they live, the way they act, the way they speak, they way they touch you physically and emotionally. So, too, did Jesus’ followers both men and women.
Mary is distraught with grief. She finds an empty tomb. She is so overwhelmed with sorrow that I don’t think she realized the guys in the tomb that spoke to her were angels. At least she doesn’t act that way and her questions to the man she thinks to be the gardener shows she is still on a quest to find Jesus’ body. If Jesus was really dead then it was very important to her to find the body. It had to lie in the tomb for at least a year until nothing was left but the bones. Then the bones were buried together so that they might take on new flesh at the resurrection at the end of time. If the body was moved or the bones disturbed then might be scattered and that just wasn’t something that was done.
Mary is intent on giving Jesus a nice burial and making sure that his bones aren’t disturbed. I get it. When my daughter died I kept getting phone calls from family and friends asking me when we were going to put the headstone in place on her grave. They didn’t like it that we didn’t erect the monument to her memory as fast as they thought that we should. Their memory of her was important to them and they wanted a place to go where they could pull out the mental photo albums and replay her life in their minds and in their hearts. That’s what Mary wanted to do, too. It’s part of how we deal with grief as human beings.
But Mary doesn’t need that kind of a place to go to remember Jesus. Mary hasn’t yet comprehended the fact that Jesus’ missing body is telling her a very different story than the one she has imagined as being the truth. Mary doesn’t even see that the man speaking to her is Jesus. Perhaps her eyes are so blurred with tears of grief that she can’t focus them and really see Jesus.
I understand that kind of grief. I’ve buried a parent a daughter and a daughter in law. I’ve grieved with four of my grandchildren at the deaths of their mothers. Grief makes you oblivious to anything and anyone else. But when Jesus speaks here name, the same way she has heard him call her name many times before, the truth sinks into her deeply and she responds by calling him, “Great One.” Mary identifies the Living Christ as the same Jesus she knew before the Crucifixion. Can you imagine her joy? Peter and that other disciple may have ignored poor Mary in her grief, leaving her in the garden to cry alone. But Jesus didn’t ignore her. However, I bet those same disciples couldn’t ignore her when she burst into the room that second time that morning shouting, “Hallelujah, I have seen the Great One. Jesus lives!”
Jesus used this intimate way of identifying himself to those who knew him intimately more than just one time. That same day on the road to Emmaus two of the disciples, fleeing Jerusalem and the terror they had experienced, filled with grief, meet a stranger on the road who walks with them for several miles without recognizing. He teaches them about the Christ from the scriptures. When they arrive at their home they invite him into their home. Then when he breaks bread and prays with them before their meal…exactly the same way Jesus had broken bread and prayed with them many times before their hearts and their eyes were opened and they realized that the Jesus they had known before the Crucifixion was the very same Jesus that was breaking bread and praying with them that night. They, too, like Mary were filled with Joy and Hope and they got up and ran all the way back to Jerusalem in the middle of the night to tell the other disciples that Jesus was alive! Can’t you hear them shouting as they pounded on the door in the middle of the night, “Hallelujah, Jesus is alive!” What a joy filled place that house must have been!
Part B: The political and religious powers of ancient Israel and Rome thought they had given the final word about Jesus by condemning him to death. Now they were sure that everything he had represented and taught would die, too. They dusted off their hands and thought that was the end of the matter. Kill the man, kill what he taught and represented. But God had something very different in mind. And when they killed Jesus and buried him, thinking him no longer a problem, no longer a nuisance, God boldly said, “NO! I don’t think so! That is not the end of this story!”
God resurrected Jesus to continue his ministry and his life, to encourage his followers to keep on working to see that New Community of God would come into existence through God’s power and God’s presence living in and through them every single day of their lives.
We may not like what some politicians and religious leaders say about us. We may not like how easy it is for them to reject and condemn whole segments of our population on the basis of sexuality, gender, race, ethnic background, political persuasion, economic power, age, or mental or physical abilities. But those self-righteous politicians and religious leaders don’t get to have the final word on the matter. God does! And God says to all of us, “I am not done with you yet.”
And how will God have that final word? Through you and me when we speak up and act up on behalf of those who aren’t given a voice in the world, who are ignored and excluded, unemployed and homeless, handicapped and unable to work, or arrested and condemned simply because they are different from those who are in power. Stand up and be counted! Speak up for God and God’s people. Act up for God and God’s people!
How do we celebrate Easter? By praising God for God’s actions, of course. Yes! By thanking God for rising Jesus up from the grave to new life everlasting. Of course! But also by taking bold actions ourselves on behalf of God, for the purpose of building the New Community of God in the here and now.
How did the disciples react to Christ’s resurrection? Read the rest of their story in the Book of Acts. Read how they began a movement that includes you and me today, two thousand years later. They didn’t just go back home unchanged. They set out to change their world so drastically that others said they had ‘turned the world upside down.’ I’d like to think they finally turned it right side up by Bringing God’s kind of Love, Hope, and Joy to all people.
Today, dear friends, today is the day of Resurrection! Today, brothers and sisters of Christ, today is the day of Gods kind of Love, Hope, Peace and Joy! Will we act like it tomorrow? Or will we just go back to our own lives as if it never happened, as if nothing is different? Will Easter become merely a good old memory that we take out every once in awhile like an old photo album to relive the moment again? It’s not enough to remember the good ol’ days, we should be in the business of creating more good ol’ days for those that come after us.
How do you know that Jesus is alive? By the way Jesus touches people through your hands, your voice, and your life. There is an old hymn that begins, “Let others see Jesus in you.” Today, decide to let Jesus live through you. Let Jesus minister to those who need Christ’s touch in their lives through you. And, while you are at it, don’t forget to let us be Christ to you, too!
This is Holy Week when we focus on the Passion of Jesus and remember his Crucifixion and, more importantly, his Resurrection by God to new life. The religious and political leaders of his day thought that Jesus was the problem and that if they could just get rid of Jesus then they would not have to face the difficulties he confronted them with, nor the issues that he was pointing out to them through teaching and his hands-on-ministry to the people who lived on the edges of society, those people whom the religious authorities felt justified to ignore and exclude.
Jesus, however was a boundary crosser who made it dramatically clear that God loves everyone and excludes no one by eating with so-called sinners and outcasts, by healing the sick and radically pronouncing their sins forgiven. Jesus wouldn’t let the criticisms and threats of those in power stop him from proclaiming God’s Good News and the truth about God’s New Community. Jesus wasn’t preaching about a Heavenly Banquet that everyone would go to someday in some far distant future. They could have coped with that. The far distant future wasn’t a threat to them in the here and now. But Jesus had the audacity to preach about the establishment of a New Community of Hope and Joy in the here and now. That would mean that they would have to change and change wasn’t something they wanted to deal with. So they decided to get rid of Jesus.
One of the commentators I read this week said this: “I keep remembering a little poem called "Anyway": a man named Kent Keith wrote it, but they say that Mother Teresa had it framed on her wall, and she certainly was someone who knew something about suffering and faithfulness (and doubt, we have later come to understand) and, I suspect, resurrection and new life, too. Like Mother Teresa (probably the only way I resemble her!), I too have this poem framed on my office wall, and I really should get up out of my chair and read it more often. It says, for example, "People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered. Love them anyway! The good you do will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway! Honesty makes you vulnerable. Be honest anyway! What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway! People really need help but may attack you if you help them. Help them anyway! If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Do good anyway!" Kathryn Matthews Huey
Steward for Public Life Congregational Vitality and Discipleship Ministry Team Local Church Ministries UMC
Dear brothers and sisters, with Jesus as our example, we should never stop trying to bring about the New Community of God in our own time and place. Bold actions on our part are called for, just as bold action was Christ’s way of dealing with his critics.
The disciples had a choice when Jesus died. They could return to their lives as they were before they had met Jesus, before they learned that there was a different way to think about and relate to God than they had previously experienced. And when the news about Jesus’ resurrection began to be told, they still had a choice to ignore the truth as mere rumor and the imagination of grief stricken women or to act on the joy and hope of Christ’s resurrection and begin to bring about the New Community of God.
Yes, they could have remembered what Jesus said and how Jesus acted and they could have stopped right there…just a good old memory that could be taken out whenever you felt lonely or depressed like a modern day photo album. Or they could claim that the resurrected Jesus was the same Jesus speaking the same words of hope and love, the same Jesus touching lives with power and promise, as the Jesus who had walked along with them before the Crucifixion.
We sometimes concentrate on the differences that happened to Jesus with the resurrection, but this Easter I would like you to remember that the same Jesus that walked and talked and cared for disciples and strangers was exactly the same Jesus that rose from the grave and was seen and heard by his followers.
Jesus’ resurrection like his life was very intimate, very personal. Jesus had very special ways of talking and touching, of acting and caring that no one would mistake him for anyone else. Have you ever noticed how you can identify that a friend or co-worker is approaching by the unique click of their shoes on the tile of the floor? Or the way they breathe or cough or laugh? You know those who are close to you by the way they live, the way they act, the way they speak, they way they touch you physically and emotionally. So, too, did Jesus’ followers both men and women.
Mary is distraught with grief. She finds an empty tomb. She is so overwhelmed with sorrow that I don’t think she realized the guys in the tomb that spoke to her were angels. At least she doesn’t act that way and her questions to the man she thinks to be the gardener shows she is still on a quest to find Jesus’ body. If Jesus was really dead then it was very important to her to find the body. It had to lie in the tomb for at least a year until nothing was left but the bones. Then the bones were buried together so that they might take on new flesh at the resurrection at the end of time. If the body was moved or the bones disturbed then might be scattered and that just wasn’t something that was done.
Mary is intent on giving Jesus a nice burial and making sure that his bones aren’t disturbed. I get it. When my daughter died I kept getting phone calls from family and friends asking me when we were going to put the headstone in place on her grave. They didn’t like it that we didn’t erect the monument to her memory as fast as they thought that we should. Their memory of her was important to them and they wanted a place to go where they could pull out the mental photo albums and replay her life in their minds and in their hearts. That’s what Mary wanted to do, too. It’s part of how we deal with grief as human beings.
But Mary doesn’t need that kind of a place to go to remember Jesus. Mary hasn’t yet comprehended the fact that Jesus’ missing body is telling her a very different story than the one she has imagined as being the truth. Mary doesn’t even see that the man speaking to her is Jesus. Perhaps her eyes are so blurred with tears of grief that she can’t focus them and really see Jesus.
I understand that kind of grief. I’ve buried a parent a daughter and a daughter in law. I’ve grieved with four of my grandchildren at the deaths of their mothers. Grief makes you oblivious to anything and anyone else. But when Jesus speaks here name, the same way she has heard him call her name many times before, the truth sinks into her deeply and she responds by calling him, “Great One.” Mary identifies the Living Christ as the same Jesus she knew before the Crucifixion. Can you imagine her joy? Peter and that other disciple may have ignored poor Mary in her grief, leaving her in the garden to cry alone. But Jesus didn’t ignore her. However, I bet those same disciples couldn’t ignore her when she burst into the room that second time that morning shouting, “Hallelujah, I have seen the Great One. Jesus lives!”
Jesus used this intimate way of identifying himself to those who knew him intimately more than just one time. That same day on the road to Emmaus two of the disciples, fleeing Jerusalem and the terror they had experienced, filled with grief, meet a stranger on the road who walks with them for several miles without recognizing. He teaches them about the Christ from the scriptures. When they arrive at their home they invite him into their home. Then when he breaks bread and prays with them before their meal…exactly the same way Jesus had broken bread and prayed with them many times before their hearts and their eyes were opened and they realized that the Jesus they had known before the Crucifixion was the very same Jesus that was breaking bread and praying with them that night. They, too, like Mary were filled with Joy and Hope and they got up and ran all the way back to Jerusalem in the middle of the night to tell the other disciples that Jesus was alive! Can’t you hear them shouting as they pounded on the door in the middle of the night, “Hallelujah, Jesus is alive!” What a joy filled place that house must have been!
Part B: The political and religious powers of ancient Israel and Rome thought they had given the final word about Jesus by condemning him to death. Now they were sure that everything he had represented and taught would die, too. They dusted off their hands and thought that was the end of the matter. Kill the man, kill what he taught and represented. But God had something very different in mind. And when they killed Jesus and buried him, thinking him no longer a problem, no longer a nuisance, God boldly said, “NO! I don’t think so! That is not the end of this story!”
God resurrected Jesus to continue his ministry and his life, to encourage his followers to keep on working to see that New Community of God would come into existence through God’s power and God’s presence living in and through them every single day of their lives.
We may not like what some politicians and religious leaders say about us. We may not like how easy it is for them to reject and condemn whole segments of our population on the basis of sexuality, gender, race, ethnic background, political persuasion, economic power, age, or mental or physical abilities. But those self-righteous politicians and religious leaders don’t get to have the final word on the matter. God does! And God says to all of us, “I am not done with you yet.”
And how will God have that final word? Through you and me when we speak up and act up on behalf of those who aren’t given a voice in the world, who are ignored and excluded, unemployed and homeless, handicapped and unable to work, or arrested and condemned simply because they are different from those who are in power. Stand up and be counted! Speak up for God and God’s people. Act up for God and God’s people!
How do we celebrate Easter? By praising God for God’s actions, of course. Yes! By thanking God for rising Jesus up from the grave to new life everlasting. Of course! But also by taking bold actions ourselves on behalf of God, for the purpose of building the New Community of God in the here and now.
How did the disciples react to Christ’s resurrection? Read the rest of their story in the Book of Acts. Read how they began a movement that includes you and me today, two thousand years later. They didn’t just go back home unchanged. They set out to change their world so drastically that others said they had ‘turned the world upside down.’ I’d like to think they finally turned it right side up by Bringing God’s kind of Love, Hope, and Joy to all people.
Today, dear friends, today is the day of Resurrection! Today, brothers and sisters of Christ, today is the day of Gods kind of Love, Hope, Peace and Joy! Will we act like it tomorrow? Or will we just go back to our own lives as if it never happened, as if nothing is different? Will Easter become merely a good old memory that we take out every once in awhile like an old photo album to relive the moment again? It’s not enough to remember the good ol’ days, we should be in the business of creating more good ol’ days for those that come after us.
How do you know that Jesus is alive? By the way Jesus touches people through your hands, your voice, and your life. There is an old hymn that begins, “Let others see Jesus in you.” Today, decide to let Jesus live through you. Let Jesus minister to those who need Christ’s touch in their lives through you. And, while you are at it, don’t forget to let us be Christ to you, too!
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