No WAY!

(Uriel Presbyterian Church ) 

Sermon

“NO WAY!!”

20 March, 2011

Second Sunday in Lent A

In God, Jesus proposes the impossible

In God, we can do the “impossible” too!! 

Text: Genesis 11.26- 12.4

(NRSV) 26 When Terah had lived for seventy years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.

27 Now these are the descendants of Terah. Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran; and Haran was the father of Lot. 28Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his birth, in Ur of the Chaldeans. 29Abram and Nahor took wives; the name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah. She was the daughter of Haran the father of Milcah and Iscah. 30Now Sarai was barren; she had no child.

31 Terah took his son Abram and his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, his son Abram’s wife, and they went out together from Ur of the Chaldeans to go into the land of Canaan; but when they came to Haran, they settled there. 32The days of Terah were two hundred and five years; and Terah died in Haran.

12.1 Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

4 So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.

Text: John 3.1-10

NRSV 1   Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.  2  He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  3  Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  4  Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”  

5  Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.  6  What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit.  7  Do not be astonished that I said to you [all], ‘You must be born from above.’  8  The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  

9  Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”  10  Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? 11 "Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. 12 If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 

16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 "Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

What impossible things have you done so far today? None? Really?  Did you pull out a piping-hot breakfast from a cabinet that was cool to the touch? --A cabinet some people call a microwave? Did you get out of bed and walk into church using a steel joint imbedded in your hip or in your knee?  Did you maybe watch a large box set into a wall spit out some cash into your hand? Did you recieve a crystal-clear phone call from a hundred miles away while sitting here waiting for the service to start--a call recieved on a phone almost small enough to be worn as a wristwatch?  Did you hear the US Secretary of State,  Hilary Rodham Clinton, a former first lady...a WOMAN hold a press conference on TV this morning? All of these things, and a thousand more, would have been rejected as "impossible" when many of us were born. Indeed, when some of us were born, no women could vote, much less hold a national office! When some of our grand-parents were born, there was still lively debate as to whether black people really had souls or not.

Yet today, deep cultural changes as well as electronic gadgetry, medical breakthroughs and global communication have made much of what seemed impossible in the past such a part of common everyday experiences that we take no notice of them.

So why do we think that the impossible sounding things in the bible can’tve happened? In today’s readings we hear of some impossible things being made to happen: Abraham is told by God to leave home at 75 years of age, but since his father Terem finally died at 205, he didn’t need to stick around Babylonia any more.)  plus God promises that “all of the families of the earth will be blessed by you”...now if that’s not an incredible statement to make, what is? 

The frightened pharisee Nicodemus takes advantage of Jesus presence in Jerusalem for Passover to sneak over to see him in the middle of the night. He wants to ask some important questions but instead of answers gets even more impossiblities. Nicodemus exclaims "How can these things be [possible]?" eliciting the most famous verse from the whole bible. Can you complete it? (For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosever believeth in him should not perish but have ever lasting life)

 “For God so loved the world"....that is Christ’s answer! THAT is how the deep things of the soul  are possible! In today's gospel text, Nicodemus is one of those folks  who claim that new possibilities are still impossible. Nicodemus is so flummoxed by the unexpected nature of Jesus' reality and the possibilities of his promises that all he can keep stupidly stammering is "How is this possible?" "How is this possible ...?" 

 --How is it possible for us to go back to being a teeny baby from being a big hulking hairy adult?

--How can water give birth or what does a spirit in labour produce?

--And in a world where everything eventually dies, how is it possible that creatures such as ourselves may have "eternal life"?

But then again, today as live in a world where Egypt can bring down a modern day pharoah, just by standing in a public square, where the United Nations has finally put some life into the words that has had written on paper for more than 80 years and begun holding Quadaffi accountable for  spontanously combusted and took on a life of it’s own,  we ask equally impossible questions:

 --How is it possible for one of the most oppressed groups on earth to be given justice in this country without raising a fist?

 --How is it possible for societies like those in the Soviet Union and South Africa to change radically in less than 10 years? Could the same thing that is happenning in the Middle East, finally happen in Israel and the West Bank?

--How can new life come to someone who seems dead to all but alcohol and drugs, to someone locked away in prison?

--How is it possible for a town whose industries have all fled to come back to life again?

From the moment he opens his mouth Nicodemus tells more than he means to. He says, “Rabbi, we KNOW that you are a teacher who has come from God” (emphasis added); but neither he nor the other pharisees actually take Jesus’ authority seriously. He goes on to say that that “no one can do these signs [i.e., turn water to wine and clear the temple] that you do apart from the presence of God”. But it soon becomes apparent that Nicodemus is presently either unable or unwilling to submit to Jesus’ teaching, to be “born from above”

 Jesus doesn’t waste time on Nicodemus' game of polite compliments. Instead, he IS the God-given teacher  Nicodemus has labeled him and runs with it. Jesus challenges Nicodemus to consider taking radical action in the face of his confession that God is present in Jesus' ministry. Nicodemus knows all the favourite games of scholars; the  “how-many-angels-are-dancing-on-this-pinhead” conversations; the abstruse questions about perfectly obvious words. But Jesus strips all that away and gives him what he came for, but can’t admit to himself that he wants.

There is nothing in our pop culture (nor was there in that of Nicodemus) that is driven by money, success, beauty, and power that can help him or us understand this kind of possibility that Jesus is talking to Nicodemus about. It is only through the grace of God that we can see what God is doing. It is that same Grace of God that helps us understand the depth and heighth and breadth of God’s possibility. In God, Jesus is doing what seems impossible. In Jesus, we too can do what seems impossible to us. 

Nicodemus comes for a theological bull-session with another theologian, but instead gets a gilt-edged birth announcement:“Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. “

I believe that the birthing Spirit that overflowed in black churches in 50s, that found a way past the impossible walls that were thrown up against change is still available;  the spirit that is finding huge numbers of people in China is the same spirit that can be born in  us today.

Perhaps you will feel the birthpangs working in the Second Harvest distribution, or working in an after-school program, or in helping an elderly neighbor or working with the Dove’s Nest or Christ Central downtown. Perhaps in the very places that you are weakest--those “NO WAY!” places,  you will come to know the strength of God’s possibilities being born of the faith that you thought was still and quiet within you.

 I recently overheard a conversation that reminded me a little of Nicodemus and Jesus. A young man was trying to decide whether to propose. He was just unsure whether he could make that commitment for the rest of his life to one person. The woman he was talking to happened to be his grandmother and she said “I’ve been married to four different men over the past 40 years...all of them your grandfather. The man waiting at home is not the same boy I married back before God made dirt! Every ten years or so we have faced the fact that both of us have changed and each time we have made new sets of committments based on the newness of who we are.”  Periodically in every age we must discover for ourselves the invitation and make the committment. 

Today we heard an invitation to Abraham and Sarah to do the impossible, to take a journey to the edge of the world. We heard an invitation to Nicodemus to do the impossible and be born in a different way, and finally through God’s word and the call of the cloud of witnesses that surround us, Christ is placing an invitation to your hands. To do what? what is your invitation?  What have you heard today? The wind blows where it will, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  Consider Christ’s impossibly possible invitation to new life,  to whom be honor and glory, now and forever. 

Amen.

What the Devil (questionnaire)

What the Devil...?

A personal questionnaire

      Draw me a picture of the devil       Draw me a picture of God

Is one easier to draw than the other? Why?

Name as many names as you know for the devil (satan, etc..)

Name as many names as you can think of for God.

Choose the ONE that best fits how YOU understand the devil

The devil is...

_____a real being whom we first see in the Garden of Eden as a snake

_____a fallen angel, one of the nephilim/sons of God from Genesis 6.1-4

_____a very handsome, very clever, powerful trickster

_____the ruler of fiery hell and in charge of a variety of demons who torture the damned under the earth

_____only a name for the evil in the world

_____is us

Use a scale to evaluate the following statments; 5--abolutely agree   0--absolutely disagree

The devil is...

_____just as strong as God, in fact, God and devil are equally matched opposite combatants

_____in us and struggling with God in our souls to win the victory

_____in possession of some people’s bodies and souls and must be exorcised by a priest

_____the ruler of this world and therefore this world is evil

_____the author of evil in this world

_____has supernatural powers and can be summoned by witches

_____the attorney in God’s court who seeks to convict humanity, as seen in Job.

_____the one who makes us do things against our will (ie Flip Wilson ” the devil made me  do it!”

_____is working to create the anti-christ to bring about the end of the world

What individuals,(historical or living), and which groups of people are/were in league with the devil?

What the Devil?

(Uriel Presbyterian Church )

 Sermon

“What the Devil...?”

13 March, 2011

First Sunday of Lent A

 The devil lives between “my will be done” and “Thy will be done”.

Hebrew Text: Genesis 2.15-17, 3.1-7 and 22-24

2:15   The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.  16  And the LORD God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;  17  but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”.

3:1   Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”  2  The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;  3  but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ”  4  But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;  5  for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  6  So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.  7  Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves. 

3:22   Then the LORD God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—  23  therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.  24  He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.

Gospel Text: Matthew 4.1-11

(NRSV) 1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. 3 The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." 4 But he answered, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" 5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6 saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" 7 Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." 10 Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" 11 Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him.

(Play the video clip of Flip Wilson and the “Devil Made Me Do It”)

There is a whole lot of truth mixed in with a whole lot of funny in that story. Today in our readings from the bible as well as in this film clip we are dealing with temptation...temptation that is personified in something called the devil. 

It just so happens that going out of church last sunday, someone asked me “Do Presbyterians not believe in the devil any more? Why is it that we never talk about the devil? Is it just too old fashioned?”  And I thought...what a wonderful wonderful question!! The really short answer to the question is that we Presbyterians have never “believed in” the devil...we believe in Jesus Christ who is living proof of God’s power, we believe in Yahweh, the God of Israel, the one who created light and dark and separated the sea from the land. And we believe in the power and work and the person of the Holy Spirit.  But I wouldn’t say we believe in the devil. I refuse to even capitalize the word. 

But that doesn’t mean that he...or she...or they...aren’t around.  But the main question that was asked of me was: “Why don’t we TALK about the devil any more?” Again the short answer is because we want to talk about Jesus Christ, and the positive things that Jesus is doing and working in us. But again, that’s the short answer. The some what longer explanation is that in our modern day with our scientific understanding that draws away the veil from so many things that we feel that we are beyond thinking about supernatural things--we feel above it all and many many millions of us feel above and beyond that and  because of this we don’t feel that we need a devil...or even a God to inform us what we need to do.

I feel strongly that in the body of Christ called the Church..with a Big C , each group and denomination of Christians have a different gift to offer, the orthodox have much to teach us about the mystery and majesty of God, Roman Catholics through their many beautiful devotions and spiritual practices  show us how to incorporate God into every activity of our lives, the Presbyterians are excellent at providing solid scholarship and innovative thinking about the bible and about current christian life. The Quakers teach us about equality and the beauty of silence before God, and one of the gifts of our Baptist brothers and sisters is to keep our minds always alert for encroaching evil, the kind of thing that the writer of 1st Peter speaks about: “Be sober and watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”

But who is this devil? What is the truth about this entity and how do we recognize it? Well, lets take a look at what you’ve already been thinking about this morning in your bulletins (each congregant received a questionnaire  tucked in their bulletin)

I suspect it was a whole lot easier to draw the devil than God, but is this really what we should be on the look out for?  Have you ever SEEN the thing you drew in that picture? I’m curious to know about the names too. By the way, our islamic brothers and sisters have at least 99 names for God. I invite you to look those up on the internet; they are beautiful and varied, but even THEY acknowledge that God’s names are infinite. How many did you think of for Old Scratch? There’s Old Nick, Beelzebub, Belial, Lucifer,  the lord of the flies, the father of lies...and of course Satan. 

It’s this last one that perhaps the most important and oldest. Ha Satan, (the satan) is a Hebrew word (!jfh;) that means “the adversary” and it’s really important if you want to know about the devil that you realize who hasatan is in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. In each instance in the bible, Satan is the prosecuting attorney, the one who makes the case against whatever it is that God is for. Take for instance in the Garden of Eden. HaSatan opposes what God has said, and so tempts Adam and Eve to rebellion. He doesn’t use a pitchfork or fiery flames to scare them into eating; he simply states the truth, albeit a truth that Adam and Eve probably couldn’t understand. After all , the distinction between good and evil didn’t exist until they ate the fruit, so how could they understand “good” or “evil” or even the word “not”? Not that this excuses our parents, because they surely could sense something terrible in the snake’s words, since even animals today can interpret the expression in a speaker’s voice1.  So appears the great trickster, the one who twists things and deforms them, making evil seem good, and good seem insipid and boring. The adversary has a starring role in the book of Job where he puts the case against humanity as a lawyer lays a case before a judge. And this is primarily the Jewish understanding of the devil even today. In fact, commenting on the Book of Job, in the ancient Jewish commentaries, the Talmud, the rabbis express sympathy that God gave him the job  to "break the barrel but not spill any  wine."

If you look carefully at our gospel reading for today, even there, the devil is acting not as the personification of the mighty forces of evil, he is still the adversary, the one who uses the book of Deuteronomy to prove his case to Jesus.

What  and who are we seeing in the temptation story of Christ? This is one of the most fascinating passages in the gospels--it’s like that question: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” If Jesus is in the desert by himself, who was there? It’s also fascinating because nowhere else in the gospels do we peer into Jesus’ head, with the exception of Jesus time in the garden of Gethsemane before his arrest.  Every where else we the hearers of the story are standing a far off observing what Jesus is doing outwardly. But here we have a glimpse into Christ’s soul.

How do we even know this story? Because the disciples had not even met Jesus yet and certainly the gospel writers weren’t out in the desert with him.  So how did Matthew know what happened?  We don’t know who the source for this story is. Is it Christ as told to the disciples? Is it a part of the oral tradition of the Gospel before it was written down?  Is this a way for the gospel writer to talk about Jesus as entirely human, subject to the same temptations as ourselves? There was no Jewish prophecy or tradition that Jesus needed to be tested by Satan, and while conflict with the devil in the new testament is not limited to this passage alone, in Matthew there are only three or four places where Jesus refers to the devil or demons or the evil one.  And here, satan is still the tempter, not the demonic force that will push back against the gospel message.

 So where does the prince of darkness grim get his fire and brimstone? The seed of the answer lies outside of the New Testament, in the Apocrypha, that part of the bible that we Protestants don’t read. In the apocrypha we find stories and events that didn’t make it into the final version of our bibles. There there is a reference to Satan being a fallen angel, with a host opposing God.  And in Revelation, which just barely made it into the bible, Satan is portrayed as the great dragon who is hurled into a lake of fire.

But it took an  Mediaeval Italian and an 17th century English poet to give the devil his due, so to speak. Dante Alighieri, wrote three volumes of poetry based on a dream he had in which he wandered down through seven layers of hell and up through seven layers of heaven, and described the fiery pit in  such detail that centuries of christians have confused his accounts with gospel truth.  Then there was John Milton, a English puritan who wrote the story  called “Paradise Lost”. I can remember as  a child on Sunday afternoons, leafing through the huge victorian parlour table copy that we had at our house, getting scared by the copperplate engravings of the devil. It was Milton that made the devil beautiful.  Milton went back to two obscure sentences in Genesis 6. in which this nephilim race of beings is described. To explain about these would be the subject of a whole Sunday School class, but he wrote that Satan was the most beautiful of all the angels in heaven and then created a whole mythic history around his anti-hero.  For our great grandparents and grandparents, the demon of the fiery pit and the fallen angel from these old poems are  what they passed on to us.

But here is the hideous problem with giving you this information.  It doesn’t touch at all on the the very real truth of pervasive evil, that miasma that flows through our lives  and our souls and our relations with each other, nor does it give you a clear picture of the source. 

Humans are creatures of duality.  This duality comes from our nature and our nurture; our observations of everything around us, and like Adam and Eve an almost primitive sense of  the deeper meaning of things that we can’t see, or smell, or taste or touch, but which we know to be there. It’s not unreasonable for us to understand this in terms of duality: there's a day, and on the opposite there’s night; we can see the bright side of the moon, but there is a dark side. There is a season when everything will grow, and a season when nothing grows. there is life and there is death. Even our computers are composed of binary bits that are either zeros, or they’re not! These opposites are part of the nature around us so we see things in duality. So it’s very thinkable for us to conceive that if there is a divine being constantly craving  our salvation and promoting our goodness that there would be an opposite force  that works for our perdition and our loss. In  a certain way that makes sense to have that balance, hence we make the devil in an image that fills that void the best. 

In the 21st century we have other concepts of the devil. We still have our duality, but most modern people think that we fulfill the function of the devil quite well ourselves. We are the ones who are striving against God just in our very natures. We are the ones who invent systematic evil like apartheid and the Spanish Inquisition. We are subject to the corporate evil that can take over whole countries and groups of people driving them to devilish madness; like Cambodia under Pol Pot or Jim Jones in Guyana.

 Maybe it’s not nearly so important WHO the devil is, but WHAT the effect of that ultimate darkness is upon us. It is sin and despair, violence and apathy, the things that we give control to and the faults that we delight in cultivating. I would put to you today that it is unsafe for your soul to believe and trust too much in a physical devil because it lets us off the hook way too easily . Take a look at the last question on the questionnaire: “What individuals, (historical or living), and which groups of people are/were in league with the devil?” What did you put down? I’ll lay dollars to doughnuts that if you’re like me, that was very easy to think of. When we can see the devil in others; when we can demonize “them”, then it is far to easy to ignore the devil in ourselves.  But there IS no “them”. On the most basic level, they are US--flesh, blood, love, hate, spirit-filled, mothers and fathers, who put their clothes on before their shoes just like us. Yet I will in no way deny that there is evil present there. 

There is SUCH evil around us and against us and in us. But the bottom line is that God subverts and overthrows the works of evil and of that agglomeration that we call the devil.  Satan is not God, and has no independent existence . From the very beginning, God takes the evil that we have done and recasts it, God’s very next act is to provide for our parents, giving them clothes, and while an angel stands between Eden and the first humans, God continues to have regard for them and provide them what they need. In Jesus Christ, evil is subverted and overthrown, by his example and by his teaching, but more than that through his unnecessary suffering and death--for he was completely innocent--by our understanding of God’s law, sin follows death, and Jesus had no sin. Finally there is Christ’s  resurrection the promise of the overthrow of the kingdom of this world and the inauguration of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Is satan passé? The idea that “the devil made me do it” is a literalism that tricks and distorts the very thing it is trying to prove, but don’t allow yourself to be lulled into a complacency. An excellent practice this lent, if you feel like you want to get rid of the devils that are screwing around in your life, I would suggest that you read a short little book by C. S. Lewis called the Screwtape Letters. The author of the Chronicles of Narnia provides a brilliant series of lessons in the importance of taking a deliberate role in living out Christian faith by telling the story of a new Christian with all his temptations and failings, but he tells it as seen from the devils' viewpoint.  Each chapter is a letter written from Hell giving encouraging advice to demons who want to succeed in their chosen career path.  And it is subversive Christianity at it’s best. 

Amen

You Only See What You Know

(Uriel Presbyterian Church )

 Sermon

“You Only See What You Know”

6 March, 2011

Transfiguration Sunday A

 There’s a lot of truth in that African proverb...

Text: Matthew 17.1-13

Matt. 17:1   Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves.  2  And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.  3  Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.  4  Then Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  5  While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!”  6  When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.  7  But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.”  8  And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. 

Matt. 17:9   As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”  10  And the disciples asked him, “Why, then, do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?”  11  He replied, “Elijah is indeed coming and will restore all things;  12  but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him, but they did to him whatever they pleased. So also the Son of Man is about to suffer at their hands.”  13  Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist. 

  An old African saying goes “You only see what you know”, meaning that the world is shaped by the kind of knowlege and perception you have.  And perception is everything. Seeing the bread and juice laid on this table a buddhist would simply see food, but to a Catholic Christian, for example, these represent something so sacred that only a consecrated, deeply holy person  is allowed to touch them and to lose a single fragment would be to desecrate God’s very self. 

You only see what you know.

 In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel “The Poisonwood Bible” a conservative american missionary family comes to live in the jungles of the Congo, where they see much, but understand almost nothing, with disasterous consqueneces. One of the daughters tries to bridge the gap by striking up a friendship with a boy her own age, and as they are talking, he is puzzled that white people make distinctions between live people, dead people, people yet to be born and  gods who live beyond all life....to him they are all the same..they are “muntu”-- personhood. Muntu persists through all these--forelife, life, afterlife, paranormal life,-- unchanged. Muntu resides in all these conditions, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for what ever happens next. “That is muntu”, the boy says... “but trees are also muntu”.

 “Trees?”, his new American friend asks... “how are trees muntu? “Well, look at them: they have both have roots and a head...” 1 the little missionary suddenly realizes the enormity of the life of the African world surrounding her that she doesn’t even understand the slightest bit.

 In the same way the apostles only see what they know in the miracle of the tranfiguration. They are taken by Jesus to the top of a mountain where something very odd happens, marvelous and maybe terrifying, but deeply odd. On top of this mountain Jesus is suddenly met by two mysterious figures that Peter addresses as Moses and Elijah. Then just as suddenly they disappear and Jesus is left alone.  The men know there were two other figures there. They know that they had to be something really really important and they know that the three were talking with each other and then they  know that the other two disappeared and all three disciples heard a voice speaking about Jesus. So what did they SEE? For Peter it is the two greatest figures in God’s history come to the mountain, and for two thousand years, no one has questioned that. 

We see what we know. 

In the past few years as I reread this story in all three gospels I continue to wonder and my wondering pushes me out onto the thin ice of understanding. What if these two dazzling figures weren’t Elijah and Moses after all? Were the disciples were privileged to briefly witness the mystery of the Trinity made manifest? What would make Peter call them Moses and Elijah, and what were the three talking about?

I believe that  Peter and James and John saw the perichoresis. Perichoresis is a fancy and beautiful word that means to dance in and out of a circle. And in modern language it tries to describe the relationship between the creator-god, the redeemer-god (Jesus) and the Holy spirit, the sustaining-God. Think of a circle of three dancers arms joined, weaving in and out of the light, completely connected together yet fluid, distict yet one. They have “Muntu”, to borrow that African word, and this muntu moves and shifts and changes, peering from the eyeholes of mystery with a brightness that dazzles and confuses.

I think that what the disciples saw was  the God of the ages, the “Eternal Law” that Moses tried to put into babbling tricky words, I think they saw the Christ, the incarnate one, the one who lived and moved and had being with us, and finally I think they saw the fiery Spirit of God that moves in the essence of wind like Elijah’s chariot of fire.  I think Peter and James and John saw what they knew and not knowing the concept of the trinity, put the pegs of their understanding into holes that they could see. 

 Like the disciples who first witnessed the Transfiguration, the church isn’t really sure what it’s seeing and what it all means, what its purpose is, and what it calls Christians to do today. In short, the church all these centuries later, is still not sure if the Transfiguration is at heart a celebration of who Jesus is, or should be recognized as the somber Lenten beginning of Jesus' journey to Jerusalem and crucifixion.

Because this is where the story leads. As the disciples come down the mountain, the conversation isn’t at all about what they’ve just lived through. It’s about John the Baptist and what “muntu” is peering out from behind his life and preaching.

And likewise, as we gather at this table today, we are looking for a transformation in our lives,  in closing our eyes and being with God and each other, we want to know beyond our seeing, to slide off the edge of our experience into the pool of God’s unknowableness. In this bread and this cup we want to taste grace and feel the healing touch of God throughout this week, to stir things within us that will grow and change. As we approach this table-mountain of transformation and throughout this Lenten season, may you meet Jesus and go away with more than you thought possible. Taste and know the goodness of God, 

to whom be the glory now and forever, 

Amen

Don't Worry....Be Hippy (?)!!

(Uriel Presbyterian Church )

Sermon

“Don’t Worry...Be Hippy (?)”

27 February, 2011

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, A

Hebrew Text: 1 Corinthians 4:1-5 

(NRSV) 1 Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God's mysteries. 2 Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. 3 But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. 4 I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. 5 Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God.

Gospel Text: Matthew 6:24-34  

(NRSV) "No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth. 25 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? 27 And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? 28 And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, 29 yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you--you of little faith? 31 Therefore do not worry, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear?' 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today."

Just as Spring is following close on the heels of  Winter, so the annual events in the US have a definite progression. The Superbowl winners have hardly gotten back from Disney world and the nation is already rolling out for the next Clash of the Titans, though this one won’t be on a green field; it’ll be on a red carpet...that way the blood won’t show. The weapons of choice won’t be a football and a pair of enormous pitchforks at either end of the field, it’ll be stiletto heels and an infinite cunning and a savoir-faire that would make sharks squirm with envy. 

Tonight is Oscar night and long before the guest take their seats for the 4 hour long ceremony, a kind of frenzy is taking place outside the theatre that somehow communicates even 2000 miles to our little part of the world.  Not so much to about critiquing film, but to find out WHAT will these people be wearing tonight? 

As you know, I’m not the most elegant dresser, in fact clothes are perhaps the smallest line item in my entire yearly budget, but I do confess to tuning in to the red carpet portion of the Oscars....just to judge for myself what these people are going to be wearing. For every swan that glides across the red carpet in white silk and French rhinestones, there are going to be those ducklings who lost touch with their minds when they handed over their wallets to the people who dressed them. Is it going to be some horrible frumpy blue satin potato sack that makes beautiful Helena Bonham Carter look like she has her gown on upside down and back to front...and falling off her shoulders to boot? Or  snort my coke out my nose laughing at Robert Downy Jr’s nice formal tuxedo with a dorky turquoise bowtie and matching turquoise tinted sunglasses and his feet thrust into black  tennis-shoes with white platform soles. 

It’s people like me that drive these hollywood actors crazy. I’m the reason that they spend a $2000 (or more) a day on a stylist to help them choose a look/hair/makeup that will cost between $8000 and $30,000 on clothes for one night of their life.  Can you imagine the anxiety and stress in Los Angeles the week before this event? There are the stylists who are going bezerk with clothes that haven't arrived yet from Italy, and the attendees who fear being shot down in flames not only on live tv instantly broadcast around the world but even worse, being the butt of jokes on millions of twitter feeds and facebook pages; 

These young handsome people fear looking slovenly almost more than they  fear of not winning that little golden statue. And let’s not forget the thousands of behind the scenes people who are involved in every aspect of this circus who have their entire careers wrapped up in making this night of glamour happen.

It’s the opinions of people like me who drive these hollywood people nuts, but it’s people like them that drive Jesus crazy. They definitely didn’t have academy awards in Israel in Jesus day, but they did have people who’s minds were filled with nothing but looking chic and fashionable. In fact the Greeks and Romans invented fashion consciousness. Before the Roman Empire, clothes changed very little from long century to long century. Did you have greek furniture in your home or was it all Syrian crap that your aunt had given you when you got married? Did your slaves know how to braid your wife's hair in the latest swags popular on the Emperor’s island retreat on Capri? Suddenly, it mattered what colour you were wearing this season. Suddenly the length of your palla determined whether you were in the right social and business crowd or whether you were an outsider. And Jesus hated all that nonsense. HAAAA-TED IT.

In this section of the sermon on the Mount he holds up the mirror to the shallow concerns of his listeners who were desperately worried about their appearance and their status, their wealth and their future prospects, but only vaguely aware of who they were inside.  He begins this part warning us that we can’t serve two masters, God and mammon. Mammon is an Aramaic word that means possessions. It’s neither a scorning term or a elevating term though. But it is strange for Jesus to put it on the same level with God. It’s surprising that Jesus places the things we have on par with God in a discussion of the  object of human service. For those first listeners sitting there listening to the master, it must of been an strange twist to think that they served their possessions instead of their possessions being of service to them; that they were the servants, not the masters; that they pampered and cosseted and gratified their stuff, instead of the other way around.  

It is an affront to our understanding of what life means, both then and now.  It’s revolutionary on Jesus’ part to declare that human life is not an end in itself; that our journey from the cradle to the grave is not the game itself, but the vehicle for a greater action. Jesus makes us notice that we find the meaning of our lives outside ourselves; that human life inescapably serves something that gives it meaning. Moses, Ghandi, Marie Curie. Al Capone, Atilla the Hun, Ma Barker...all of their lives had a meaning beyond just living. Moreover, the choice we make with the life  we lead is not whether we SHALL serve something else with our existence, but WHAT or whom we shall serve.  This is the underlying message in what Jesus goes on to say about worrying about our lives.

IT has always been very puzzling to me the whole speech about the lilies of the field, neither spinning nor toiling, and the grass of the field which is green today and shoved in an oven tomorrow, and the birds of the air bit. This whole thing just reminds me of 1960s hippie philosophy. Don’t worry, be happy. But clothing won’t make it self: the cotton won’t pick itself or spin itself or weave, dye, sew itself.  So what gives? In trying to makes heads or tails of hippie philosophy this week, I was really surprised to find that the foremost hippie thinkers of the 1960s had been the best little sunday school students of the 1950s; They had really read the bible! Sitting in church classrooms with wide eyes and receptive hearts  they somehow heard in stereo technicolour the sermon on the mount that that was presented to them by  sunday school teachers for whom Jesus words were monochromatic utterances.  What these bright kids heard was :  God doesn't operate from scarcity; God operates out of abundance, where there is enough for all, all must share. 

FIfteen years later with this particular passage of scripture in mind, they sought to free themselves from a path committed to mammon, choose their own way, and most interestingly , find new meaning in life.  And while we’re on the subject of clothes, one expression of their conversion was their clothes. Through their appearance, hippies declared their willingness to question authority,  to deviate from the path of  mammon and  express their commitment to radical change, one that was not based on possessions and status.

Things went pretty haywire with drugs and ethical decisions, but the fact remains that these earnest young people were the largest group in history to dare to experiment and experience the radical ideas that Jesus represented. 

But as these hippies discovered as they lived out their commitment well into their 40s and 50s, the challenge to trust in God’s providence doesn’t exclude working and having property.  Jesus isn't prohibiting or even discouraging sowing and reaping, working and storing in barns. He is calling us not to base our lives on these things or serve them. Through our activities we have got to be developping integrity and honesty, compassion and charity and putting these things first, making these the qualities of the Kingdom of God. 

I love the writings of Alyce McKenzie (1) , in thinking about this part of the Sermon on the Mount she reflects:  “In this short passage, I am being pushed to give up one of my most cherished occupations, worry, in favor of trusting God for the basics of daily life. I am being pushed to consider that my other loyalties are in conflict with my loyalty to God (6:24). Jesus' teachings are digging tools that undercut the foundation of my house. My priority, my life's project has been to build a comfortable present and a secure future for me and my family. Jesus wants to undermine it and eventually, to replace it with radical, risky trust in God and the mission of seeking God first, confident that other matters will fall in place. If I give up a preoccupation with anxiety and security, it would seem like I would have time and energy for seeing to the needs of others around me. These teachings take something away to free me for something more. In that sense they are just the beginning.”  Amen

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(1)     a wonderful homiletics professor and expert on the book of Proverbs who blogs at www.patheos.com

Invisible Believers

(Uriel Presbyterian Church )

Sermon

“Invisible Believers”

20 February, 2011

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, A

Faith is the invisible energy that produces visible results.

Hebrew Text: LEVITICUS 19:1-2, 9-18

(NRSV)1The LORD spoke to Moses, saying: 2Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.

9When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. 10You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the LORD your God.

11You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. 12And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the LORD.

13You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. 14You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the LORD.

15You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. 16You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the LORD.

17You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. 18You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.

Gospel Text: MATTHEW 6:1-6, 16-21

(NRSV) 1“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.

2“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 3But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

5“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

The major religious events of ancient Israel are great theater on the grand scale. Noah’s small ark standing on the vast plains of Ur waiting for the billowing clouds of heaven to be rent asunder by the deluge. 

Moses going up on Mount Sinai where  the mists close behind him like curtains. He brings down the commandments, and the children of Israel are unimpressed, and in grand dudgeon he smashes them along with the golden idol they have made while he was gone. 

Building on the dazzling victories and the meteoric rise of his father King David, Solomon builds a huge temple. Inside, behind a great blue, purple and crimson curtain, is the Holy of Holies, where the high priest, like Moses before him, communes with God. He returns from this holy communion with the most precious gift, the forgiveness of sins, the healing of the broken covenant. To this day the pulling aside of the curtain of the ark in the synagogue is done with great ceremony as a reminder of this and with everyone standing and facing the ark as it is opened.

Given all this, it is very interesting that Jesus flies in the face of historical drama and tells his listeners NOT to be seen practicing their devotion openly. In fact he describes those who do so as “hipokritai” (u`pokritaiv,) which i s exactly the same word as ‘hypocrite”   . But even more interesting is that hipokritai doesn’t entirely mean what we think it means in Greek. In Greek it’s not an insult at all, it’s  the word for ‘stage actor’--someone standing on a stage, making a speech. But here it’s being used to describe people who perform religious acts with an eye on the grandstand. People who crave not only people’s attention but God’s as well.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Ironically, I need to set our stage a little bit myself. Just to remind you, we’re in Galilee with Jesus, on a nice afternoon, sitting in the high hills with the wind from the sea of Galilee far below us gently blowing across our sun-drenched backs We’re gathered to hear Jesus teach us his most important lessons, lessons that history calls the Sermon on the Mount. After Jesus teaches us the surprising virtues of meekness, peace and poverty, which he calls the beatitudes, and compares his listeners to salt and light , Abruptly  Jesus begins to  tell us how we shouldn’t act; all those things that make our lives miserable and trapped. But now Jesus changes direction again. He leads us out of the land of "you shall not,"--the land of commandments, to bring us into the land of holy living;--the land of "you shall," That is where we find ourselves this morning. 

Some of the things that Jesus tells us to do are to give alms and to pray and later on his sermon he says we are to fast as well.  These are the things that we are supposed to do because we love God. He tells us this very matter of factly. He doesn’t say IF you pray, but WHENEVER you pray. He doesn’t say IF you give charitably, Jesus says WHENEVER you give charitably. He says straight out, you’ve got to pray and you’ve got to give to others.  

Sometimes it appears that we’ve completely forgotten this. 90 percent of us are embarrassed to pray in public, not just out loud but even silently as well. Maybe some of this reluctance stems from misunderstanding this part of scripture. All too often when I ask who wants  to pray within a group, there is complete and utter silence, I have to ask multiple people because  one after the other each one shyly says, “Oh I can’t pray, I don’t know how.”.  Perhaps we’re secretly thinking: “I don’t want anyone to think that I’m trying to pretend I’m spiritual...or intellectual...or better than everyone else. See how that idea of hypocrite lifts it’s tricky head again?  

To this reasoning I say “nonsense”, and I apologize if I seem so blunt. But the truth is that. you learned quickly enough as a child how to ask your mother for a cookie, and your dad for five dollars; --and both of them definitely made sure that you knew how to say thank you to Aunt Thelma for the sweater she knit you. We can praise the beauty of a neighbor’s flowers, a neighbor’s car, and talk about how fantastic Martha’s cakes are. You learned how to say I’m sorry to your big brother when you got mad and crushed his model airplane... I’ll guarantee no one ever taught you to say sorry to the cat when you stepped on her tail--but you did it any way! 

Most of us would never willingly step on stage in front of an audience in a million years... that is why Jesus is saying it’s all right to be invisible believers. It’s all right to board up that famous “fourth wall” that the acting community talks about and pray and give and fast without eyes watching us... Imagine if your whole life was a public performance sort of like Jim Carrey in the “Truman Show”. The anxiety involved would be unbearable.

But you’re not alone in this anxiety. The disciples obviously felt the same thing and Jesus taught them to pray using the Lord’s Prayer. In it, Jesus showed us that prayer is no more than opening your heart to God, praising, thanking, confessing to and begging your parent in heaven and saying plainly what is on your heart and mind. Some how we get this idea that we have to know how to take three steps forward,  curtsey just right to the ruler of universe, before breaking forth into an operatic solo. But it ain’t that. No fancy speeches, no thou’s or thees or thines involved. In fact when we sound like a King James Bible we sound more than a little ridiculous. 

And this is where Jesus arrives at his main point.  Prayer and giving gifts for God is not meant to be Shakespearean drama played out on the public stage, it’s not even meant to be a sitcom. In fact when we are learning about God, it is God who is the actor and we are watching and learning to follow God’s every move, yet, when we practice what we have learned from God’s pageant in our life as Christians, things are reversed. Instead of the wide open stage of the universe, our place of action is bedroom or our closet or even a garden shed. We disciples are the actors and God is watching us to see what we will do, and how we will be faithful. Will we pray when no one is there to see? Will we give 10% of our means if no one is checking our name off of a list?  Seminary professor, Dr David Wells puts it really well: “The place of encounter between God and his people is not the temple, the great theater, the Holy of Holies. It is the locked room (where the disciple meets God one on one), [it is] the anonymous gift [and the regular enveloppe put in the offering plate], [it is the private vow and] the undisclosed hunger.”1 

There are times when we are called to pray in public, here in public worship for instance. By the way, Jesus was joking about the trumpets, No one, even in ancient Israel, would be such a prat as to carry a trumpet with them to announce themselves at worship time.

But here it should be a joy and a relief to cry to God in prayer and song, and Jesus made no prohibition against that! Let your words and thoughts flow from your tongue the way the Spirit moves them! In fact while I carefully write this sermon every week, spending hours and hours choosing every word, my prayer for worship I never write down. I want them to come forth from the dialogue that we have here with God, to be part of the living that we do together. Some times it is scary because I don’t know where God will take the prayer, sometimes it’s sort of boring maybe, but that’s me and not God. 

 I encourage you to pray out loud at meal times and in hospital rooms, at times of crisis when you ask God to be near, at times of rejoicing when you can hardly shut your mouth because you want to thank God so much. 

I encourage you to not only support this congregation financially, but with your presence and your service here and in the community. And to mutually encourage each other to be more giving as well. 

Amen

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1    The Christian Century, January 23, 2000, p. 205