Today's Sermon - Preparing for the Holy Spirit - 5/26/19

Today's Sermon, even to me, is a kind of snooze-fest.  Sorry, but it's really not one of my better ones.  I didn't really know where I wanted to go with the text this week.  In any case, here you have it.

Preparing for the Holy Spirit

(based on John 14:23-29)

It is a growing trend that Americans are becoming more and more preoccupied with their homes.  Some people claim that we have gone from simply cocooning in our homes to burrowing into them, and thus shutting out the world far more successfully.  No longer is our home just our castle; it has become our fortress, the walled sanctuary in our communities to shut out the rest of the world.

Here’s some of the evidence.  When we have a choice, we don’t venture out as much as we used to, we stay home.  It’s at home that we now have our feasting and fun, our games and celebrations.  The home entertainment center and all the Internet options now consume much of the time once taken by the city park, the private club, the neighborhood bar and grille.  Our world consists mainly of two distinct halves, like an apple split by a knife: the one side is work or school or whatever it is we must do; the other side is what we’re free to do, and increasingly we choose to do that at home.  Americans take far fewer vacations away from home than they did even ten years ago.

Consider what this means for business, both locally and nationally. Business-wise, it’s better to invest in video options such as Netflix, Hulu, Redbox, etc…, rather than in video stores and movie theaters; in carry-out food franchises – such as Blue Apron, Home Chef, Hello Fresh and Dinnerly, not restaurants; in mail order operations such as Amazon, Walmart, and WayFair, not shopping malls.

The message bombards us from every direction.  Decorate your home!  Equip your home!  Maintain your home!  Enjoy your home!  Worry about your home!  Your home reveals who you are, and who you want to be.  First, make your home in your image, and then let it return the favor: you are made over in the image of your home.  You own it; and it, most definitely, owns you.  A decade or so ago, the term “house-poor” was forged out of the idea that we spend more money on our homes than on anything else in our lives, sometimes to the detriment of not having enough money to cover other important parts of our lives, sometimes even food.

Having a home is the beginning point for all this.  And there is certainly nothing inherently wrong with any of the above.  However, there’s more to life than home ownership.  I’d like to suggest a different angle. What about becoming a home?

Our home is not only the four walls around us.  There is also a home inside each of us.  We may be aware of this inside home and comfortable with it, or we may neglect this home, remain absent from it, keep moving away from it, as though driven from our deepest selves.  What about the home we already are?  The condition of our inside home is at least as important as that of our outside one.  We need to be as concerned about who occupies this interior residence as we are about the occupant or occupants of our outer fortress that we’ve paid so much attention to.

One reason our inside home is so important is that it is here God desires to be our guest.  Remember a promise Jesus makes at the Last Supper that appears in today’s Gospel. “If (anyone) loves me, that person will keep my word.  My Father will love them, and we will come to them, and make our home with them.”

God the Father and God the Son will come, but with them also comes God, the Holy Spirit.  The Trinity God, whom we worship each Sunday wants to dwell inside each of us.  Are we making our interior homes available for them, or do we leave the Trinity no space in our lives? 

Our inside home may be filled from floor to ceiling, cluttered by all manner of stuff that has collected there: preoccupations and attachments and resentments that crowd the space where God would be.  Our inside home may even be loaded from floor to ceiling with ourselves.  We may be full of ourselves, and leave no room for God.  But blessed are those who can empty themselves for the occupation of the Triune God, and the on-going interior work of the Holy Spirit.

The classic practices of the Christian life tend to be more exercises in clearing out than in adding on, in emptying rather than accumulating. Thus they run against the grain of much ordinary existence, especially in a society like ours that is preoccupied with acquisition and consumption. It’s easy for our spirituality to become a matter of collecting religious merit badges, when what the Trinity seeks is not what we do, but who we are. God desires our company, our companionship, our kindness.

It’s a strange thing that God wills to be our guest, as strange as Jesus born in Bethlehem’s barn, yet equally true.  So strange is this divine desire that we may fight it or ignore it, trying to keep the Trinity at a cold distance.  Yet our inside home can be a royal suite that welcomes the King of glory.  God seeks it out as a lodging place in this world.  And to accept this visitor is to become holy.  In the end, holiness is a form of hospitality.

Still, there’s danger in having God come as a guest.  God arrives with pentecostal fire, burning away the precious accumulation that clutters up our lives, the junk that makes our existence stagnant.  The Lord makes his own space in our homes, space not only for the divine immensity, but for God’s friends as well, space for all those the Lord loves, whether or not they love God or even know God.   When we welcome God, then the hospitality we offer becomes inclusive: we welcome all creatures, both good and bad, who in God’s grace and divine creation, made them to exist and move and have their being.

When we welcome God as guest to our inside home, then we welcome a hungry horde, those countless camp followers who accompany him.  All creation makes its claim.  Can you stand to be a friend of God when he is so indiscriminate about those he embraces?  Can you stand to host an open house, not for the pristine, glorious God alone, but for everyone he accepts in his reckless, wasteful love?  If not, there’s some preparation work to be done.  We need to make room for God’s renovation in our hearts.  We need to prep the walls and scrub the floors of our interior home to allow the work of the Holy Spirit to make of us something new and transformative.

Your inside home will then become not some place for you to burrow or cocoon, not a way for you to avoid life and stay safe.  Your inside home will then become a microcosm of that holy city sent from heaven, a grand hotel for the universe, a place of peace.

The Holy Spirit is coming, are you prepared?

Tribes - Today's Sermon - 5/19/19

Tribes

(based on Acts 11:1-18)

Do you remember last week’s New Testament passage?  If not, let me remind you;

It came from Revelation 7:9

“After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb.”

These words came from John, who had a vision about heaven and what would be there.  And in his vision, John saw that there was such a large number of people that no one could count them, there was so many.  And surprise, surprise, they weren’t all the same.  There were people in heaven that didn’t look like one another – there were tall people and short people, fat people and thin people, there were people who had pale skin and people with dark skin.  Among them, they spoke many languages, not all of them spoke Greek or Hebrew, but they spoke Spanish and Italian, Japanese and Russian, English and Germany, Swahili and Tlingit.  They came from every nation on earth.  Currently, there are 195 countries in the world.  And there were people from every one of them in heaven.  And if you want to get really specific, every tribe was represented, as well.  So, not just every nation, but every group of people that gathers on earth for a cause or a belief or an interest – every tribe!

Yet, if you recall your Old Testament history, the world was separated by language, tribes and nations, nearly from the beginning.  Do you remember the story, from the Tower of Babel in Genesis?

So how do we go from not understanding one another in Genesis and separating ourselves among only people of like interests, skin colors, languages, nations, or tribes to a vision of heaven where everyone is together?

This passage in Acts is supposed to help show us how.

The early church was a Jewish Church.  Jesus was a Jew, his disciples were Jews, and Jesus’ ministry had been spent among the Jewish people.  And although Jesus’ commission to his disciples in Matthew 28:19 was to “go and make disciples of all nations,” up to this point the followers of Jesus were still mostly just Jewish.

But now the church was beginning to see Gentiles, or non-Jews, coming to faith in Christ, and this posed some significant theological and practical problems.  For example, the Jewish Christians continued to observe the Old Testament food laws and circumcision, and one question that arose was should Gentile Christians observe these same laws or not.  If not, how were Jewish believers to maintain their own obedience to food laws when fellowship in Christ involved eating with unclean Gentiles?  And how would close association with Gentile believers affect the relationship of Jewish believers with other Jews who did not share their faith in Christ? These issues were serious theological issues.  They were not to be dealt with lightly.   The Holy Scriptures from God had told the Jewish people that THIS, what was written in the sacred text, was to be their law.  It was to be how they conducted themselves before their God and in life.  And now, the admittance of Gentiles into the fold of believers was threatening the very core of their beliefs. 

What we see is potential divisions emerging between Jewish and Gentile Christians.

“What God has made sacred, you must not call profane!”  With these words the Apostle Peter set off shock waves within the early church gathered in Jerusalem.  The early church that had been so united in its common experience of the resurrection of Christ and the Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit is now being threatened with a theological controversy that could bring about upheaval and division.  

How can Peter betray and abandon the sacred traditions of his people?  Just like John wrote in Revelation years later, Peter, the rock upon which Christ said he would build his church, has had a dream.   And this dream, if it was to be taken seriously would turn upside down everything that this gathering of Jewish Christians held dear; the laws and customs of Judaism.  What is at stake here in our text from Acts is the very future of Christianity.  Would the Jesus movement be for Jews only remaining an obscure Jewish sect never venturing beyond the boundaries of ancient Israel?  Or would the Gospel of Jesus Christ transcend its Jewish roots and become an explosive force spreading in every direction across the known world?  

It is remarkable that Luke, the author of Acts, is willing to show us an episode in which schism threatened the fellowship of the very first Christians.  But I think Luke wants us to see the church at its most vulnerable moment when it was in conflict; why?  Perhaps to show us that we’re no longer talking about a religion that is separate from the conditions of the human heart.  That this faith is about being real and honest, vulnerable and compassionate – because that is who God is. 

So, here the new sect of Jewish Christians have the theological question about whether or not a follower of Christ (A Christian) had to be Jewish.  They were wrestling with the question of how they were called to uphold all the laws and customs that Jesus and the Apostles grew up with and practiced as faithful Jews; about what to eat and what not to eat as laid out in scripture.    

It would be easy for us to dismiss this as irrelevant to us today, except the first church was dealing with a profound issue that continues to grip the church today.  It is the appropriate question of how a community of faith defines who is in and who is out; who belongs and who doesn’t.  But what do you do when some new-fangled idea comes along, something different from the way we were raised, something challenging to what we believe?  

Or, to put it another way: how do we know something is from the Lord or not?  Let’s see what we can learn from this story of conflict.  First thing we might notice is that the conflict itself is acknowledged.  This story from Acts reminds us that sometimes we have to talk about difficult subjects that have the potential to divide us.  

The critics within the Jerusalem church said, “Wait, hold on Peter!  What are you trying to tell us?”  And it’s good that they did because you can’t just go with every new thing that comes along without questioning it.  It must be tested.  So, the Jewish people had their traditions.  Those traditions had been practiced for centuries.  They were written in the Sacred text as law coming directly from God.  Because of those traditions and laws, in the chaotic world of the ancient middle east, the people of Israel were able to say this is who we are.  We are not Edomites or Egyptians or Assyrians or Phoenicians.  We are the people of Israel.  This is what we have done over centuries to define ourselves; it is our way of life.  It is how we celebrate that we are a people set apart by God.  Because we believe ourselves to be a chosen people, we seek to follow God’s ways in being careful about what we eat and who we eat it with.

When you have been raised this way, to believe a certain thing like this - it is not just an opinion, or even a belief or practice.  It becomes part of your very DNA.  For Jews the idea of eating unclean food was simply revolting.  It brought about an emotional, almost chemical sense of revulsion.  This deep-seated feeling doesn’t easily yield to theological arguments.  You can’t really even debate it no matter what you say or how rational you might be.  A change of heart regarding a subject like this for the Jews can only come from an even deeper place.  

And that deeper place according to our story is when one sees with one’s own eyes the Spirit of God doing a new thing; when one sees the Holy Spirit working in people’s lives that you might have considered unclean, outsiders, and even worse.  It is only in this way that one is shocked into a new awareness.  And that is what happened to Peter.  But notice what happened next.  Peter did not respond to his critics with countless theological arguments.  He did not angrily confront those who disagreed with him.  He didn’t engage in an “us vs them” debate.  He simply told them a story - his story.  

He said these people came to me and invited me to go with them.  And to see what their lives were like.  And I went.  And yes, I knew that I could be defiled by associating with the unclean, but I went.  I felt like God wanted me to go.  And I saw that God’s spirit was working in them in powerful ways.  And this changed my heart.  This is my story, but it could just as easily have happened to you.  What would you have done if this had happened to you?

This text offers this very important clue about conflict in church.  We will more likely be able to resolve our conflicts and discern the will of God when we share our stories.  Not debate.  Not arguments.  Not name-calling.  Just, this is my story.  This is what I have experienced for myself.  That’s what Peter did.

          Now, there are a lot of years yet to go between Genesis, when all of the people on earth were separated into various tribes, and the Revelation as seen by John regarding heaven.  This story from Peter, recorded in our Holy Scriptures, is just one story about how we go from Genesis to Revelation.  And that story, that quest, to be more Heavenly, to usher in the Kingdom of God continues, even today.

          Some day there will be a grand celebration when all the Children of God sing and worship together before the throne of the Holy One.  Until that day comes, we share our tribal stories.

Today's Sermon - My Cup Runneth Over 5/12/19 - Happy Mother's Day

My Cup Runneth Over

(based on Psalm 23)

When we hear Psalm 23 read aloud, many of us immediately have a memory or a determined understanding of what the text means.  “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”  This Psalm evokes something in us.

What is it about this psalm that makes it so beloved?  Perhaps many of us were taught to memorize the psalm when we were younger.  Maybe some of us can remember our mothers and/or our grandmothers whispering it by our bedsides before we went to sleep.  Is it the simplicity, the ease for memorization?  Besides the Lord’s prayer and John 3.16, “For God so loved the world”, this is perhaps the best known of all Christian scripture.

I believe what makes this psalm so compelling is not so much its brevity, but instead its realism.  This is no happy-go-lucky, “everything is awesome,” kind of passage.  Rather, it faithfully faces the dark realities of what life is really like, while at the same time calls us to honestly remember the delights of life.  It has become so popular and beloved that many of us can recite it from memory, but we may have lost touch with what the passage is actually saying.  Every verse contains a wealth of theological treasure waiting to be uncovered and enjoyed.

“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.”  We of course remember immediately that Christ is the good shepherd.  God in Christ is the guardian of the church.  The great I AM shepherded the Israelites through the wilderness, delivering them from slavery and captivity to the promised land.  The Lord was the shepherd to the prophets who proclaimed the Word to the lost Israelites.  God helped shepherd Christ throughout Galilee, even to the cross.  Our Father was the shepherd to the disciples as they spread the gospel throughout the world.  The great shepherd is now with us, guiding and keeping watch over all that we do as we act out our witness to God’s love in the world.

“He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul.”  In our modern lives we seem to have lost the power to relax; we no longer know what it means to observe sabbath time in our lives.  We succumb to the power of stress that overcomes us regularly, and lose the energy to live vibrant and fulfilling lives.  So, God, in this beloved hymn, bids us to relax, to observe some sort of sabbath in our lives, and to find rest.  However, notice that rest is not an end in itself, but rather for a purpose; God restores our souls through rest so that we can continue on our faithful journeys.  Life is filled with movement, because then;

“He leads me in rights paths for his name’s sake.  Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff – they comfort me.”  God leads us, as the shepherd, on the right paths.  So much of the vital moments and decisions in our lives do not come from our choosing; we do not determine the time of our birth, the kind of parents that we will have, the culture in which we find ourselves, the opportunities that “come our way.”  At times life is beyond our control, and to be honest, that is probably a good thing!  To seek complete control of our own lives will eventually end in disappointment.  In order for God to be the shepherd of our lives, we have to also let Him guide us on the right paths.  We need to let God be in control.  It is only when we let go that we can faithfully proclaim, “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”  It is only when we let go that we can know that God is with us.

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil.”  Like any good shepherd, God always brings his flock back home to safety, even if, within our midst are enemies and people that like us.  The feast is set for people to break bread together, to find common ground and be in communion with one another.  That is how you make an enemy into a friend.

So now we come to the climax of this hymn, an incredible collection of words that encompass God’s goodness in our lives: “my cup runneth over…”

How often do we take time to look back and reflect on what God has done for us?  How much time do we spend in prayer thanking God for all that he has blessed us with and done for us?  Can we all faithfully declare “my cup runneth over…”?

Today, of course, is Mother’s Day.  I am blessed and privileged to have a mother who has cared for, and loved me, every day of my life.  A mother who participated in my life and activities throughout my life, but gave me the freedom to grow and experience life independently.  A mother who sacrificed her own needs again and again to do whatever was necessary for my sister and I, simply because she loved us.  Because of her, my cup runneth over.

Some of you might not have had a mother like mine, some of you may have lost your mother through the years, and some of you might have grown up without a mother, but look around you.  The call of being a Christian is to be motherly to all that are gathered here.  Though your mother might not have been like mine, or is no longer with you, I know that each of you have mothers in Christ that are here with us today.  Because of that, our cups runneth over.

In the movie, Hope Floats, Gena Rowlands played the role of Ramona, set somewhere in the south.  She had two daughters.  One was off in California “finding herself”, leaving her only child Travis, with the grandmother to raise.  The other daughter, Birdie, played by Sandra Bullock, finds herself in the midst of an ugly divorce and has come home to live with mom, bringing her daughter Bernice.  During the movie we learn that Ramona’s husband has Alzheimer’s and is in a nursing home.  Her life hasn’t been easy.  But, tucking her granddaughter into bed one night, she remarks about her love for her family and her life, “O honey,” she says, “My cup runneth over.”

Whether we look around the room here in this sanctuary or in the relationships of our own families, we are surrounded by an all-encompassing love.  Our cups runneth over.

The 23rd psalm is filled with such vivid and realistic imagery, applicable for our daily living.  The great shepherd tends to his sheep, keeping them close and protecting them from harm.  Our God compels us to find rest so that we can continue on our journeys of faith.  But today, the Lord asks us to look on our lives and remember our blessings.

God has blessed our lives over and over again and those blessings spill out everywhere.  Because of those blessings we have the choice to reflect on God’s goodness, or to remain in our suffering.  Today we remember what God has done, we remember the blessing of mothers, and the call of the church to be motherly toward everyone, we give thanks to the Lord our God for shaping us through those we call friends.

It’s only when we look at our lives and faithfully say, “my cup runneth over” that we can begin to proclaim the final verse of psalm 23: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”  Amen.

Today's Sermon - Breakfast on the Beach 5/5/19

Breakfast on the Beach

(John 21:1-19)

          About a month ago, I attended the Executive Committee of Pittsburgh Presbytery’s retreat held up at Camp Crestfield.  I have served on the committee for about 5 years, but there were some new faces.  As part of the beginning “get to know you” phase of the retreat, Executive Presbyter, Sheldon Sorge asked us to go around the room and tell everyone just a bit about ourselves.  One of the items that we needed to include was how old we were when we held our first leadership position in the church.

          Now, the make-up of the Executive Committee is relatively diverse, as it should be.  But, nonetheless, the average age skews toward the upper end of the age scale, just like that of your average congregation.  Those in the room who were my age and older got their feet wet in leadership roles early on in their lives – some as young as 10 or 11, but nearly all of them through some kind of youth ministry at their church.  The fewer younger members of the committee, those in their thirties or forties, began with having leadership roles in the church later in life and nearly all of them even came to church life, later; not having had that youth experience that many of the older members had.

          After the “get to know you” phase ended, we took a short break and many of us “older folk” sat around talking about the experiences we’d had in church and growing up in the church, while the much fewer “younger folk” had not had that experience.

          These discussions got me to thinking about my own growing up years in the church and the experiences I’d had.  I thought about how those experiences had shaped me, how they may have shaped those members in the room who had dedicated their lives to the work of the church – many now in their sixties and seventies, and even eighties.  Those stories and those experiences were so different from those who were younger, having come to church life as adults.  They came to Christ from a very different point in their lives.  How did that shape their accept of Christ, to believe in the teachings of the church, to come to an awareness of God and how important that ended up becoming to them in a very different way?

          I’m still wondering if the lack of younger people and younger leaders in the church is because of this very reason.  That they didn’t have those youth experiences that many of us did which may have molded and shaped us so differently.

          Like most of you, I’ve always been involved with my church.  I was baptized at a young age, went to the nursery school program while my parent’s attended church, was raised in the Sunday School program, sang in the children’s choir, attended the church’s WOW program – which was short for Worship on Wednesday when all the families came to church for dinner together, we sang some praise songs or hymns with an extremely short message, then the kid’s went to an hour program while the adults attended Bible Study.  We began at 6:30 and were out the door just after 8.  The menu was pretty much the same each month.  One Wednesday it was Hot Dogs and Hamburgers, the next Wednesday was Spaghetti, the third Wednesday was Soup and Sandwiches and the fourth Wednesday was Pizza, if there was a fifth Wednesday in the month, it was a Pot Luck dinner.  And they did it for about 200 people – every week, during the months that they had it – which was about half the year. 

My family didn’t go every Wednesday, often due to other commitments.  We did, however, go to Sunday School and worship every Sunday.  Attending church was a must in our family.  What is interesting is that I remember those Wednesday Night experiences with all the kids and adults sitting around the tables, having fun, learning something important that was explained quickly and pointedly, much more clearly than I remember any Sunday morning service. 

From those early experiences at church, I got more and more involved in church related programs and ministries.   As a teenager, I became part of our youth ministry.  We attended a conference at a beach in New Jersey, I think.  On our last morning, we got up early.  It was still dark, but the youth leader wanted us down at the beach when the sun came up.  We built a fire (not even sure if that’s possible anymore), sang some songs, prayed and watched the sun come up.

As the light around us brightened and the sun’s deep orange and red colors painted the ocean, the youth leader gave the following instructions.  We were to each come to the center of the circle and sit with our heads down and eyes closed.  Then one by one, if you were interested, those around the circle would come up behind you and whisper something they loved about you, something positive and rewarding.

I’d never experienced something like that before.  I watched as my fellow youth group members went into the center, I took my turn going to them and saying honest and caring things about each person that I knew well.  As others had done, I didn’t go into the circle with those I hardly knew because I didn’t know what I’d say to them.

Then it was my turn to go into the circle.  And suddenly, I was nervous.  As I sat down, closed my eyes, I wondered; what if no one comes into the circle with me?  I’m not a worthy person.  I’m not really someone people should like.  What if I sit there until the sun is beating down from the sky directly above and no one has anything nice to say to me? 

Of course, my fears were un-founded and people came, wrapped their arms around me and whispered nice things.  It was one of the most profound experiences in my life.  It happened nearly 40 years ago, and I remember as clearly and vividly as if it was only yesterday. 

That memory always makes me think of Peter and this dialogue he has with Jesus on the beach which we read from the Gospel according to John.  Peter was not worthy.  In Christ’s most demanding hour, when he needed his friends’ support, Peter had run away.  Peter had denied even knowing Christ out of fear.  And then the horrible events of Good Friday arrived.  Peter couldn’t undo his lack of faith or take back his actions when the grip of fear took over.  Then suddenly the surprising news of the resurrection and Jesus alive, like he said he would be.  Peter was not worthy.

Now, just a short time later, there he was, on the beach and Peter had to face his Lord – the Christ, the son of the living God – the friend about whom he fled in fear of being associated with.  I imagine their dialogue was a bit longer than what is recorded in scripture.  I imagine the same scenario we had on the beach with one another, but this time it is Christ wrapping his arms around Peter, as Peter sits head bowed, eyes closed.  And Jesus whispering in his ear, telling Peter that he is forgiven, telling Peter that despite his fear he will be a rock upon which the church will be built, telling Peter that he is worthy of being called a child of God. 

But, out of that love that Jesus has for Peter and that Peter has for Christ, comes responsibility; tend, feed, and care for the sheep and lambs.

I imagine another scenario, as well.  You are all on that beach, summoned by Christ for breakfast.  Do any of us feel worthy?  Have we done things we are ashamed of?  Like Peter, has fear or evil gripped us in the moment and shaped our actions? 

But, as he welcomes you, Jesus, the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, God incarnate - leans in and whispers the words you’ve yearned to hear in your heart.  You are loved, you are forgiven and you are most indeed worthy to be called a child of God.  Then Jesus asks, “Do you love me?”  What will be your response?