sermon archives

As most of you know, in worship, I don’t generally pay a lot of attention to secular or civic holidays because first and foremost worship is about God and our relationship to God, but there seems to be a connection between today’s scriptures and Independence day that I felt called to explore, and I hope you are willing to explore it with me.

When I think back over the history of this country the first thing that comes to my mind is the famous line from the Declaration of Independence that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I learned that early in my education, and I am young enough that I thought that included women. I am old enough that I knew that this wonderful phrase had not been intended to include Black men and women. So, gradually I learned that the Declaration of Independence really meant that the people who were created equal were men – white, land-owning men at that.

As imperfect or incomplete as it was, there was a vision; a vision that drove our ancestors to seek independence. That vision was expanded and challenged by another piece of history embodied, 87 years later, in Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He went on to say, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Liberty here meant that one person should not be owned by another person – that black men, women and children should be free, not pieces of property. Liberty at that point still did not include the right to vote either for those who were black, or for women.

One hundred years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. pushed the dream further when he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and said, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: `We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’” He went on to give many moving visions of what the fulfillment of that dream would look like. He was talking not only about voting, but also about living together in harmony, freedom to live where one chose, equal opportunity for education, employment, justice and a society in which a person was not judged or identified by his or her color or race.

I believed that the American experiment in democracy meant that we were growing toward a dream and that one of the supreme tenets of our great experiment was the freedom – and indeed, the responsibility, to challenge ourselves and our government when it looked like we were missing an important piece of that great dream. Many of the great heroes of this country were people who took that responsibility and freedom seriously.

Christian teachings were part of what formed those men who believed so strongly that their Creator had endowed them with certain rights and responsibilities.

Before that visionary dream statement in Martin Luther King, Jr’s speech, there is another that is of profound importance for us to hear today. Speaking of some white people who were present that day and active in the civil rights movement he said that they “have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.” This has become increasingly true as technology has increased, jobs have been outsourced around the world, and we are increasingly dependent upon other countries for many of our needs.

This is one of the messages in today’s scripture, and in many ways is, I believe, one of the foundational pieces of our faith. In the Corinthians passage, the church at Corinth is being urged to complete an important undertaking to help provide for the needs of the believers in Jerusalem. Paul urges them to give not out of a sense of obligation and requirement, but out of love and out of recognition and gratitude for the generous act of Jesus.

Eugene Peterson’s The Message puts it this way: Once the commitment is clear, you do what you can, not what you can’t. The heart regulates the hands. This isn’t so others can take it easy while you sweat it out. No, you’re shoulder to shoulder with them all the way, your surplus matching their deficit, their surplus matching your deficit. In the end you come out even.

Isn’t this the theory at the bottom of import and export arrangements, or barter agreements? One person, community, or country providing what another needs and in turn, receiving what is needed. Part of that vision is acted out in the Gospel today. This is the story of two healings – both involving women – one the daughter of a powerful temple authority. The other involved a woman who on the opposite end of the religious spectrum – a woman who had been sick for 12 years, who because of her illness was impure, an outcast, and poor.

“Interrupting his journey to see the dying child, Jesus takes time to speak with the woman directly, and confirms that `your faith has saved you.’ Jesus prioritizes the woman’s concerns, acknowledges her existence and her actions, and commends her, symbolically equalizing her status with that of the child. Mark … and Paul, make it clear that it is our faith in God alone that makes us equal and valued, regardless of our social status or religious purity.”[i]

If we truly believe that we are created equal, that all of us have the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than we need to look carefully at how we live this out. If we truly believe that as Jesus said, we should love God with all our heart, soul, and mind and love our neighbor as ourself and that we should “do unto others as we would have them do to us” then we need to look carefully at our own actions as well as the actions of our government. This year as we celebrate the independence of our nation – it might be a good time for us to evaluate how far we have come in living into the dream of our ancestors – and at the same time, be honest about the changes we need to make in order to continue to grow into the bigger vision – that this nation or any nation founded on the principles of freedom, liberty and equality might continue to live and honor that vision.

Jim Wallis from Sojourners spoke recently in Washington saying, “We need a new moral logic that merges personal and social responsibility – a more honest assessment of both the individual decisions and social systems that trap people in poverty. … We covenant together here, before God and our neighbors, to work and pray for a new America:

An America where everyone able to work is working and able to support a family. An America where those who are unable to work are compassionately supported. An America where no child lives in poverty and goes to bed at night hungry. An America where every person has a roof over their head. And an America that opens its heart and its budget to our neighbors around the world. A new America – where all of God’s children have the life and dignity they deserve.” He went on to say that, “While the world fears American domination, it still looks for American leadership. And the very best defense against terrorism would be the example of the world’s strongest nation leading the world in the moral battle against poverty, disease, intolerance, and oppression.”[ii]

With all its imperfections, sins, blemishes, and warts, the Church of Jesus Christ is to be active in the healing of the world’s wounds. As we come to the Lord’s Table, let us come remembering that faith in Jesus Christ makes us equal with each other, and calls us to reach out to all those who are in need – not as those who are better, but as those who are eager to share what we have, so that the needs of all may be met.

The great Sequoia Redwood trees of California provide a good illustration of the way our lives are interconnected. These trees grow as tall as 300 feet above ground, but their roots are shallow spidering out just under the surface of the ground. Storms with heavy winds would almost always bring these giants crashing to the ground, but this rarely happens because the trees grow in clusters with their roots intertwining and supporting each other against the storms. As individuals, as churches, and as a nation, we are dependent upon the root system of others to keep all of us strong.

[i]Michaela Bruzzese was a freelance writer living in Chile when this article appeared in Sojourner’s Magazine. This article comes from Sojourner’s Sermon Helps for July 2, 2006.

[ii] Wallis, Jim. Excerpts from address at the Sojourners/Call to Renewal Pentecost 2006: Building a Covenant for a New America conference.

As a child, I remember hearing the story of David and Goliath. I pictured a little boy standing up to a giant. I didn’t have time to be afraid of the giant because God helped the little boy to get rid of the mean scary giant who scared all the grownups. As I got older, I started to think of the giant as symbolizing all of those big scary things in life and learned that God could help me overcome whatever the giant represented. Later, I decided that I didn’t like the story because it was too violent and I thought it inappropriate for young children.

One of the things that I really like about the Bible is the way something familiar can suddenly grab your attention in a new way. I believe that’s why the Bible is called the Living Word of God. Something jumped out at me this time around. King Saul gave David his armor to wear. The armor was much too heavy for David to wear, so he removed it. David faced Goliath with only his sling and five stones. David used the weapon that he knew how to use – not the one that was right for someone else. This got me thinking about the way we approach the enemies – or the giants – in our lives.

We live in a world in which we have believed that the one who had the most fearsome weapon would prevail against the enemy. We’ve become almost obsessed with which countries have nuclear capacity and how they might use it. We drew some comfort from the fact that nuclear power costs an enormous amount of money and resources to develop and deploy and consequently we could consider some poorer countries as less of a threat than others.

9-11 brought a paradigm shift that we, as a country, still haven’t quite figured out. Now we deal with the treat of terrorists who are able to transform our technology and science to use against us at far less expense. In many respects terrorism has become the modern day Goliath. Combine that with concerns about avian flu and increasingly severe hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes and Goliath is alive and well.

On a personal level we have our own Goliaths. Whether it is fierce storms, the uncontrollable actions of terrorists, mounting financial debt, or the diagnosis of a horrible illness, the feeling of being unable to defend oneself leads to a paralyzing sense of fear. That was what the disciples felt in the boat when a great windstorm arose and the waves beat into the boat. They woke Jesus up, and you can hear their accusing voice, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”

That was the situation for King Saul and his men, none of whom was willing to stand up to Goliath. They would have been less frightened had they been able to go to war against the entire Philistine army using the weapons they knew. Goliath had set a new kind of challenge before them: a one on one battle – winner take all. “When Saul and all Israel heard these words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.”

When David, the young shepherd boy, was the one to come forward and volunteer to fight Goliath, King Saul had David put on the king’s armor – which we can be quite sure was the very best around. David’s response was, “I cannot walk with these; for I am not used to them.” So David removed them. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi, and put them in his shepherd’s bag, in the pouch. David went into this battle trusting in God’s protection and in the skills that he had learned.

The challenge for believers against any threat is to determine what the stones are that we have been given against such a threat. Traditionally the five “stones” that the church has been given are worship, education, fellowship, service, and evangelism.[i] While at first glance these may not seem to be effective weapons against terrorism or hurricanes or most of the other Goliaths of our world, they are the building stones of who we are as Christians and they are not only informative but also formative for our world view and our response to Goliath and to the unexpected storms that threaten to swamp us.

Worship and prayer center us on what is truly most important in the world and in our lives. When David became King he faced many more battles in his life and one of the most important things he carried with him was his faith in God. Worship was of great importance to him. Most of the Psalms in our Bible are songs of David – songs of praise, of prayer; songs that spoke of his fears, his frustration, the times when he felt alone and afraid and the times when he knew with absolute certainty that he was not alone, that God was with him. In our time of worship, we stop and in the words of a familiar hymn, “Come and find the quiet center in the crowded life we lead, find the room for hope to enter, find the frame where we are freed: Clear the chaos and the clutter, clear our eyes that we can see all the things that really matter, be at peace, and simply be.”[ii] In our prayer we should listen to God at least as much as we speak to God. We raise our concerns, our fears, and our questions. We bring all that we are to God and place our lives in God’s tender, strong, loving hands. How much more clearly we can see the issues around us when we are centered and quieted in God.

The second stone that we bring is education or study of the faith. We do that partly through worship but also in group or individual study. In our study we may focus on how Jesus modeled life for us reaching out to and including those whom society excluded. In our study we discover that we are the Gentiles who were originally excluded, but through Jesus have been included. Through our study we discover that Jesus sent his disciples and us out to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth and that he promised that he would still be with us. In the study of our faith, we discover that the Holy Spirit has been given to us as a constant companion, as the voice of God speaking in our lives, comforting us when we need comfort, and strengthening and empowering us to face the difficult times. When we study the faith we learn about those who have gone before us and how they struggled with the difficult questions presented to them.

We discover that when the leaders of the early church were faced with the question of how or whether to include Gentiles they met together in what might be called the first General Conference. You can find that in the 11^th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. Peter recounted a vision and then the experience in the home of Cornelius – not only a Gentile, but an officer in the Roman army. He concluded by saying, “It is clear that God gave those Gentiles the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ; who was I, then, to try to stop God!” When they heard this, they stopped their criticism and praised God. (Acts 11:17-18a) Perhaps the modern church needs to go back to seek that same kind of holy conferencing and guidance in the questions of inclusion that still threaten to tear churches apart today.

Worship and Prayer, and the study of the faith are two powerful stones given to us to help us face the storms and Goliaths of today. The third stone is fellowship or the support of the faithful community. Many times in the midst of the storm, or in the face of Goliath, it is the support of the faithful community that helps carry us through. Sometimes the greatest antidote to our focus on the fears trying to overwhelm us is the memory of how God has helped us in previously threatening situations. Frequently, as we look back we discover that it was the support of our brothers and sisters in Christ that helped us face each new day. During the times when we might have been unable to pray for ourselves, it has been the prayers and the presence of the community that have sustained us. When we recognize the support of the faithful community in our lives then we are more eager to provide that some kind of support for others both in and outside of the community.

The fourth stone that forms us and empowers us is service to those who are in need. In the Old Testament culture, hospitality was a more highly placed virtue than we can even begin to imagine. Those who were in need were to be taken care of – this was an absolutely basic tenet of life. There are so many needs around us that it is increasingly easy to become desensitized to the needs of others. As we study our faith – stone #2 – we also learn that Jesus consistently modeled and taught the need to give to those in need. There are two parts to this need –one is meeting the need of someone with less than we have, but the other equally important part is that it is in giving that we receive, it is in meeting the needs of others that our lives are fulfilled, it is in helping those who most need our help that we will be fulfilled. Just think of the implications this has for public policy.

The fifth stone that we have is evangelism, sharing the good news of God. By this I do not mean the judgmental preaching that has often passed for evangelism. I do not mean the bashing of others to try to get them to accept our viewpoint. I do not mean the frightening tactics used to try to get people to convert or the self-centered superior attitude that says that we are the only ones with the answers. True evangelism has been described as “one beggar telling another beggar where to find a crust of bread.”[iii] Evangelism is truly sharing the good news of what we have found and what we have experienced of the love of God, of the sustaining of the Holy Spirit, of the teaching, healing and life of Jesus. Evangelism is sharing with others that which gives us the strength and the power to face Goliath with the confidence that we are not alone.

All of these five smooth stones from the bedrock of the Christian faith give us a perspective that can help us face the Goliaths of today. Worship and Prayer, study of the faith, support of the faithful community, service to those in need, and sharing the good news of God help form us into the people God calls us to be, the people with a vision of a world where not only is there enough food for everyone, but everyone has the food that they need in order to live. A vision of a world where God’s children do not die for lack of the basic necessities of life including basic health care and sanitation. A vision of a community and a world where people are not hassled, bullied or excluded because they are “different” than those who are in the majority and consequently those who are in power. A vision where the lion and the lamb lie down together or where Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Agnostic and Atheist children play together and adults live together in harmony, respect, and peace.

When Jesus spoke to the wind and the sea, even they obeyed him and a calm came over them. The disciples were filled with awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Who then is this, that we worship, who seeks to guide our lives into a new vision and a new way of being.

God of graciousness, you lay the foundations of the universe, building a shelter for our battered souls, you create wonders which are priceless, yet do not forget the needy. When evening comes and our fears prowl the shadows, you whisper, “Peace! Be Still!” to our hammering hearts so that we may know you are with us in every moment. When our lives are swamped by doubts and fears, you calm us; when we struggle with the clamoring chaos of our world, you calm us, Spirit of Gentleness. Open our hearts to you, so that you might heal us. Open our ears to your voice so that we might hear words of peace. Open our spirits to you, so we might be filled with the trust and hope you offer to us through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Amen.[iv]

[i] McCutchen, Stephen www.sermonsuite.com The Immediate Word, June25, 2006

[ii] Murray, Shirley Erena, “Come and Find the Quiet Center” found in Faith We Sing, #2128

[iii] I think this is D.T. Niles, but I am unable to find the exact source.

[iv] The Immediate Word. June 25, 2006

At the 10:00 service we will be celebrating the Christian Education ministry of this congregation and specifically the Sunday School. In preparation for the service I’ve had many conversations with Lisa Dallas the Sunday School Superintendent about what the various classes will be doing. A part of some of those conversations has led us down memory lane thinking about how these children have grown. The scriptures for today seem quite relevant to that recollection because they both have a focus on how little things become big things.

David was anointed as future king in a secret process that involved only his family and the prophet Samuel. It boils down to a wonderful story in which Samuel and Jesse, David’s father, learn that God doesn’t see as we see. Jesse presents his first son to Samuel and Samuel thinks that surely this must be the one whom God has chosen – the oldest son and one of fine outward appearance. Quickly Samuel gets the message that this is not the one chosen by God who looks not on the outward appearance but on the heart. Six more sons are presented to Samuel and in each case the answer is “not this one.” Finally Samuel asks if there is another son. There is one more but he is the youngest and is out in the field tending the sheep. This is the one whom God has chosen.

David became the King by whom all others were measured in Jewish history. In next week’s scripture is the amazing story of David and Goliath – the young boy taking on the fearsome large warrior. Something that started small – a secret anointing – became in time something big, the glory days of Israel. For centuries after, the Israelites would say their best times were King David’s time.

The parable in Mark’s gospel speaks of the Kingdom of God starting small as a grain of mustard seed and growing into a plant housing the birds of the air. This is illustrative of the way many things begin in our world. There are the obvious, all of us adults, started out as tiny babies. All of our flowers, vegetables, trees began as small seeds or cuttings from other plants. But it is also true that little things become big things in many other parts of our lives and the life of the world.

“If we had been a rider on the city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, we could hardly have predicted her act of courage would start one of the most massive social changes in our country’s history.”[i]

At Annual Conference this year we heard story after story of women who were called by God to preach in a church and an era that didn’t recognize women as preachers. Some of them were given licenses to preach in small rural churches that no man was willing to serve. The 1920’s and 30’s saw a few more women preaching, and being appointed to serve small out of the way churches. In 1956, 50 years ago women were given full rights of ordination and vote in the Methodist Church. It would be 13 years later that the first woman was ordained in any of the New England Conferences. This year that woman, Lynne Josselin preached the sermon at the ordination service. Today, the New England Conference has the highest percentage of ordained women of all the United Methodist Conferences – just over 35%. Little Things become Big Things.

Less than a year ago, Daniel and Dorcas Kamanda came back from the Nar Sarah Clinic, so dear to them, in Sierra Leone. They told us about a young girl who needed heart surgery. A little thing in the scheme of the world – a big thing in the life of that child and family. I included a mention of it in the benediction at the 10:00 service that Sunday. Samantha Dallas, a child in our church heard about it and started asking questions. By the next day Lisa was on the phone trying to find out the possibilities of bringing Saffiatu Bah to this country for surgery. We watched and participated as this took on a life of its own and now Saffiatu is back home in Sierra Leone – a Muslim child, who received life saving surgery in a Jewish hospital in Tel Aviv, through the efforts of Christians in the United States. Those initial small conversations were the seeds that became something very big that brought people in this church and others together in meeting a life saving need for a child halfway around the world. A resulting Eagle Scout project is expected to provide a vehicle and medical supplies and equipment for the clinic. Little things are big things.

When I read, watch, or listen to the news it is easy to become overwhelmed by everything that is happening in the world, and even in our town. As the cost of gasoline has increased and with it the resulting increases in electric and fuel bills, the number of phone calls I’m receiving in the church office looking for assistance is on the increase. The shelves of the food pantry are looking bare. Need has increased and donations have decreased. There is a real concern about not being able to meet the basic need for food for those who depend upon the food pantry. If this is true in North Kingstown imagine how much more true this is in Providence and other places without some of our resources.

Many of us know that feeling of helplessness in the face of the issues of the larger world. We know that we can’t all be out lobbying for affordable housing, livable wages, healthcare, environmental protection and the plethora of other crucial needs. There’s a tendency then to look at the big picture, feel overwhelmed and think that there is nothing that we can do that will make a difference, and the temptation then is to do nothing.

All that we know of Christ’s teachings and today’s Scripture passages in particular challenge us to plant the seeds that God can cultivate in a manner that evokes a kingdom-like response. We need to plant seeds and let God go to work. We need to trust God to nurture the seeds into a full-grown plant, helping wherever we can. Then we need to be ready to move into action when those efforts begin to produce positive results. When we excuse our inaction on the basis of a sense of helplessness, we are demonstrating a lack of faith in God and God’s ability to grow the seeds and produce fruit.

For those of you who may be thinking literally right now, there’s a garden in the back yard of the parsonage with tomato plants, beans, squash, cucumbers and a few other vegetables growing. With the help of people in this congregation taking responsibility to water, feed, and weed when necessary, we hope that this garden will meet a piece of that need. It’s a little thing but it will be a big thing to the people who eat the tomatoes, beans and squash.

That’s a very literal planting of seeds that will help meet an important need. I’ve mentioned other seeds that have borne fruit – Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement, this congregation and Saffiatu Bah, and the women who heard a call to preach and responded even when rebuffed by those in power. There are so many more ways of planting seeds.

We are all planting seeds every day and every where whether we realize it or not. The question is what kind of seeds are we planting? We are called to demonstrate grace and the love of God in all of our relationships. This demonstrates Christ like behavior and introduces the world to the kingdom of God. Are these the kind of seeds we are planting or are we planting seeds of anger, fear, apathy or judgment?

Soon we will be facing choices at the polls. Our challenge will be to look beyond the hoopla of political advertisements and the spin of those who attempt to interpret actions in the way that looks best for their candidate. With Samuel we will find ourselves standing and looking. I pray that we will also be asking to look in the same way that God does, to see the heart, to look for those traits that make a particular leader pleasing to God, those who will do justice, work for peace as not only the absence of war, but as a way of life.

God chose David – the least likely. In the Gospels we repeatedly see Jesus choosing the least likely, and reaching out to the last and the lost, to those who were excluded by society. Can we, in our lives and in our political choices, think about and reach out to those who are not able to advocate for themselves, those who most need our voice.

If you don’t think you’re ready to jump into all these things with both feet – don’t worry. Remember the small seed that grows into something much larger. We never know how God is going to use one small act. Growth always starts with a seed of some sort, and that is true of our lives as Christians. It is true throughout our lives. When we stop growing, we stop living. Start where you are; start small. If you don’t already have a regular devotional practice start with a small daily practice – something that you can manage. Pick up a devotional booklet and read a small section each day – preferably in the morning to start your day, perhaps in the evening to settle you in. If you already have devotional practices that suit you well and encourage your growth then continue with them. If your devotional practices are getting a little stale make a small change.

It is as the seeds of God’s love grow within us that we will find ourselves reaching out to others and planting those same seeds of love, compassion, and mercy. It is as the seeds of God’s love grow within us that we will have eyes that see the injustices around us and will begin to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Little things are big things. We never know how God is going to use one small act. Let me remind you of one more little thing that became big. A baby born to a peasant couple grew not only physically but in wisdom and seeking God’s guidance. As a man he gathered around him 12 peasants – mostly uneducated, rough men. From that small beginning, Jesus and 12 disciples, God has grown the church as we know it today.

Where might it end? What seeds are you called to plant and are they the ones that you really are planting? What seeds are we as a congregation planting in our community? What seeds are we being called to plant? Even the smallest acts of mercy and justice can become something big. When we live that way we discover what it means to be people of faith.

[i] Mosser, David N. The Abingdon Preaching Annual 2006, Abingdon, Nashville TN, 2005, p.163

Last week, when I was on Block Island, I got a phone call from the Block Island School office. I had bought several raffle tickets to support the school fair which I could not attend in person since I would be at my granddaughter’s graduation from Brown. The school secretary informed me that I was a winner and could come to the office and pick up my prize. Do you think I went up to the school to find out what I had won? Of course I did. It was only a golf shirt with the logo of a local hotel but I was pleased to find out that I was a winner. I hadn’t paid full price for it but it was mine!

How much more ought we to be excited about the unearned gift God has for us! Listen again to the words of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he GAVE his only Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life!!!”

What a gift! We didn’t earn it! We didn’t pay for it! As a matter of fact in Romans 5:8 we hear “God demonstrates His own love toward us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”. We messed up, we distanced ourselves from God yet God reached out and gave us the sublime gift of his only Son, sacrificed on a cross, to show us how greatly He loves us!

No one of us can really comprehend this kind of love. We tend to measure things based on our own experiences, our own point of view. How then can we look at the passages which were read today and take away some learning which we can apply? How can we respond to this magnificent gift in a way which will make a difference in our lives and in the lives we touch?

Let’s think about this. When someone gives you a gift you have to open it and find out what it is, you have to accept it and say you will keep it, and you have to use it.

Not only do we inherit eternal life according to John but in Romans we hear that we “have received the spirit of sonship” “that we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ!”

Will we accept this gift? Each one of us has to make the choice to claim our inheritance as a child of God. It is there waiting for you and me but if it is left in the “To be picked up” file God’s work will not get done.

What does it mean to CLAIM YOUR INHERITANCE? How do you do it? You need to speak up and put it into words. The first sentence of my personal mission statement is this: “I am Ellen Jacke, Child of God!”

I have repeated that phrase to myself every time I reread my Mission Statement which is taped on my cupboard door. I speak it! I have owned it for myself. I have claimed it for myself.

Simple, wasn’t it? No hanging the head and saying” I’m not good enough”. No enumerating all your wrongdoings. Just stop, speak a few words out loud and then in awe and wonder realize the immensity of this gift! It inspires me to repeat the words of the familiar hymn, ”Oh how he loves you and me!!!”

When you go home today maybe you could write out those words affirming yourself as a child of God and post them somewhere where you can see them regularly to remind yourself of your inheritance.

If you or I inherited a million dollars it would do no good to anyone unless it was put to use. OK ,we have a million dollars. We could tithe to the church. Maybe we would invest a portion of it and receive interest or capital gains. Maybe we would give a portion to worthwhile organizations. What we wouldn’t do is hide it under a mattress.

Having claimed our inheritance as children of God and co-heirs with Christ how will we put it to work? and where?

Let me read from Eugene Peterson’s The Message, Romans 8, including some of the verses which precede this morning’s reading:

‘Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get to exercising it in real life. Those who trust in God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them – living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is dead end; attention to God leads us our into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased with being ignored.

But if God has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells – even though you still experience all the limitations of sin- you experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-‘ and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!

So don’t you see that we don’t owe this old do-it-yourself life one red cent. There’s nothing in it for us, nothing at all. The best thing to do is give it a decent burial and get on with your new life. God’s Spirit beckons. There are things to do and places to go!

This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It’s adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike, ”What’s next, Papa?’ God’s Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is and we know who we are: Father and children. And we know we are going to get what’s coming to us - an unbelievable inheritance! We go through exactly what Christ goes through. If we go through the hard times with him, then we’re certainly going to go through the good times with him!”

We have further instruction in Micah 6:8: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Or as The Message says it, “But he’s already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, and don’t take yourself too seriously – take God seriously!”

So expectantly we ask, “What’s next Papa?” God wants our hearts and our hands and our mouths to go outside the comfortable walls of this church and show the world how children of God act. In every interaction with our fellow workers, our neighbors, the store clerk, the person in the next car in that traffic jam let us act as if there were big name tags on our foreheads which identify us as members of North Kingstown United Methodist Church. Would that make a difference in the tone of your voice? In the words you would say?. “Will they know we are Christians by our love!” Will they know we are followers of Christ by the way we speak to one another, reach out to one another and respect one another?

Just as the clerk in Walmart becomes the impression a customer has of Walmart and just as the customer service representative of Verizon becomes Verizon the corporation to us so when we identify ourselves as a Christian or a Methodist and go out in the world each of us becomes what a Christian or a Methodist is to the people with whom we interact.

On of the concerns raised by The Learning Team was the lack of civility in the every day interactions and on Town Boards and Committees. One of the major complaints on Block Island in the summer is the rudeness and disregard of others’ rights and feelings on the part of the tourists. Talk to any taxi driver, retail salesperson or Post Office employee and you will hear the same story. I often wonder if the person being obnoxious to a clerk is a member of some back home church.

How many times have we been upset by those who purport to “speak for the Christian perspective” in ways which are the antithesis of what Jesus taught? How many times have we seen people ostracized and vilified when they stepped outside the “acceptable” ?

No wonder there is a bumper sticker out there ( seen on my grandson’s car, no less) which quotes Gandhi as saying” I like your Christ! I don’t necessarily like your Christians!”

The challenge for us then is to show Gandhi and others who have been turned off by the actions and behaviors of some church people what a “real” Christian who claims his or her inheritance looks like!

As individuals, if we are to be co-heirs with Jesus Christ, each one of us must take responsibility for our own behavior, our own words, our own actions as we go about our daily lives, at home, at work or at the Stop and Shop.

However, there is more to it if we are to be co-heirs with Jesus Christ! We are also called to minister to the “least, the lost and the lonely”. Who are they in our community? Where are they and what are their needs?

As a church we are in the process of identifying specific hands-on outreach opportunities such as Habitat, Project Outreach, the Food Bank, etc., where we can identify ourselves as members of NKUMC and show North Kingstown what “children of God” do. Maybe it’s to drive a car. Maybe it’s to drive a hammer. Maybe it’s to make a phone call. Maybe it’s to make a casserole.

Gary Shaw challenged us in the March Newsletter. And I quote,”… our relationship with Jesus…informs and nurtures us to be transformational agents to a hurting, lonely, aching family, neighborhood, community, country and world. We can take up special offerings each week (not a bad idea by the way) but until we are ready to offer ourselves, our actions will be like new medication without the relationship”

We need each of you to keep your eyes and ears open for places where our time and talent can make a difference in North Kingstown and share that information with the Mission Committee so we can expand our outreach. Then, as we identify places where help is needed, sign up to do your part.

In Luke 12 we read, ” For everyone to whom much is given, much will be required”

The path of the follower of Christ is not easy but it is rewarding. There is no rainbow without rain! If we are to gain the glory we have to slug through the briars and the thorns, the mud, the dirt and the heat. We have God’s promise of His presence with us on the journey and we have his promise of eternal life if we but claim our inheritance and celebrate working together as the family of God!

“Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you!” Matt. 25:34

A distinguished professor at the University of Chicago would often be visited by his preschool granddaughter. She loved to walk around the campus with her grandfather. “One day, the man was carrying his granddaughter around on his shoulders. They met a friend who had seen the little girl just the week before. The friend looked up at the little girl riding on her grandfather’s shoulders and, with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes, said to her, `My goodness! Look at you! Look at how much you’ve grown since I saw you last week!’

Of course, what she meant was, `I’m not really this tall. I’m not really this big. I’m riding on somebody else’s shoulders.’”[i]

This is a wonderful story, because it reminds us that throughout our lives we are riding on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, who have taught us, and all the great people of faith who have preceded us. We are carried through life on the shoulders of God and the Holy Spirit.

If we could go back in time to the day of Pentecost, we would marvel at what happened to Simon Peter. We would marvel that a man who had so recently denied even to a servant girl that he knew Jesus, would suddenly speak with such passion and conviction to a crowd of thousands. If we were to compliment Peter on his boldness and eloquence, he would, no doubt, respond, “[ii]Not all of this is me. Very little of it is me. It’s the work of God. I was merely the instrument of God’s Holy Spirit. I was riding on the shoulders of God’s Holy Spirit.”

This is the story of Pentecost; of the disciples being empowered and emboldened by the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is frequently called the birthday of the church. Following Peter’s impassioned speech, the Scripture tells us that more than 3,000 people came forward to be followers of Christ.

We are the church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, carried on the shoulders of the Holy Spirit. Whatever it is that we do as the church, or through the church, “not all of this is us.” Only the Holy Spirit can build a church. Only the Holy Spirit can empower the church. Only the Holy Spirit can sustain the church. A church without the Holy Spirit is no church at all.

Mr. Holland’s Opus is a movie about a dedicated music teacher named Glenn Holland. He became a teacher purely as a practical way to earn a living, while he waited to fulfill his dream of becoming a famous composer. Instead, he spends his entire career teaching music in a high school. He works tenderly with a red-haired girl with pigtails, who wants to play the clarinet. No one believes in her, no one helps her or encourages her except Mr. Holland. He works tirelessly with a student who wants to play the drums but can’t find the beat. He helps hundreds of students through the years acquire a love of music.

At the conclusion of the film, Mr. Holland retires. As he cleans out his music room, he tells his wife and son that he feels like a failure. He never accomplished his dream. With slumped shoulders he heads out of the school but hears a noise in the auditorium. When he opens the door he sees the auditorium filled with his former students. They give him a long, thunderous standing ovation. They have come back to express their love and appreciation to this wonderful man who gave so much of his life to them.

Then the little girl with the red pigtails goes to the microphone. She’s all grown up now and is, in fact, the governor of the state. She says, “Mr Holland, we know that you never got to become the famous composer you dreamed of being, but don’t you see? You greatest composition is what you did with us, your students. Mr Holland, look around you. We are your great opus! Mr. Holland, we are the music of your life!”[iv]

“Our calling as a church is to be God’s music to the world, singing the song of the church’s great faith. But we can’t do that alone. The good news of the Christian faith is that we don’t have to do it alone; God is with us. The Holy Spirit is our strength, our guide, our inspiration, our comfort, our teacher. The Holy Spirit empowers us to build the church, liberates us to be the church.

At the 10:00 service, 12 of our young people will be making the decision to be confirmed in the Christian faith and to become members of this particular congregation of the Christian Church. Two other adults will also be joining the church and a child will be baptized.

This is a good day to think about when and how we became a part of the church. It is a good day to reflect upon our faith journey – where we have been and where we have traveled. Perhaps we can learn from our youth.

We ask the youth in the confirmation class to write a letter explaining why they are ready to be confirmed. One of the themes that runs throughout the letters is that they are now old enough to make this decision for themselves. We always begin with the promise that the decision will be theirs – not their parents or mine or anyone else’s. This year one of our youth has chosen not to be confirmed at this point – I want to affirm the recognition that this is an important decision and that one youth decided that this was not the right time for him to make that commitment.

Some of our youth have been involved in this church since they were infants, some came from other churches; for others this was the first church that they attended on a regular basis and one of our youth has been attending church for just about one year. On Pentecost, I can see her as being one of the crowd to whom Peter spoke and hearing a message that touched her heart so that she is ready to make that decision.

She wrote, “I know I’ve only gone to church for a year … sure, I don’t know a lot about God, Jesus, and the Christian faith (I’ll admit that), but … I know that I want to do this. … To grow in my faith as a Christian, I will listen to God and Jesus more often. Never going to church in my life, has taught me that God and Jesus have some pretty good things to say.” The people listening to Peter on that Pentecost Day heard and recognized some of those “pretty good things”. Sometimes, those of us who have been around the church for a long time, get so used to what the Bible says that we need help to stop and hear again with a new perspective some of those “pretty good things”.

Along with several others, she identified the need for us to know what we believe as a church and to know our history. Another youth wrote, “What … I will do to grow in my faith as a Christian is to listen to stories of the past and learn from them to also learn to live a life as a Christian. An example is Jesus said the Wiseman builds his house on a solid rock (Matt. 7:24-25) and like the Wiseman, I will continue to grow in my faith as a Christian even more.”

It’s important for all of us to really know that while the Bible contains many stories from the past, those stories speak to us today. That solid rock on which we build our lives is important and especially so when the storms of life come crashing in around us. Another one of our youth drew on a phrase from the prophet Jeremiah and said, “I’ve got `soul fire’!”

One of our youth voiced a very honest struggle with the Bible. “I also believe in most of the stories of the Bible but I admit that some I’m not quite positive could have happened. Nonetheless, I do believe the Bible generally speaks truth.” I hear a willingness to wrestle with the faith questions and what I would consider a very healthy approach to the Bible. I would suggest that there is a fine distinction between a story being factual – i.e. really happened exactly that way – and being true. I do believe that the Bible speaks truth. Even in the stories that might not have happened exactly that way, there is a truth to be heard that can speak to our lives today. Marcus Borg wrote that “to be Christian means to be in a primary continuing conversation with the Bible as foundational for our identity and vision.”[v] How is your conversation with the Bible going? One youth recognizing the need for that ongoing conversation wrote, “I would like to know more about God and the Bible. I enjoy talking about what happened in Jesus’ time, and I hope to learn more when I am confirmed.”

One person wrote a statement of faith, that reminds me of the kind of statement the red pigtailed girl, now grown up, said, “I believe in God. I believe he’s helped me in my bad times and gave me a hand when I fell. In my good times, I believe he pushed me farther, so I could do my best. God has never doubted me, and that’s why I have never doubted him either.” Have you thought about the faith that God has in you – to live out your life as a Christian?

Our youth are ready to affirm their place within the church. One wrote, “I love this church and its people. I want to be of service to it.” Another wrote, “If I am asked for an opinion, I will give it and answer good for our church community.” Yet another said, “I have many ideas and thoughts about things that might be of some use to the congregation.” The challenge for those of us who are adults will be to listen to the wisdom and ideas of our young people.

An important part of our commitment is to live our lives outside of the walls of the church in a way that witnesses to our faith. One young lady wrote, “The responsibilities of Christians in the world are very important. They give kindness to friendless people; they give food to the starving; and hope to the hopeless. We accept everyone as they are, imperfections and all. I have seen things like this happen, and I know I can do it too.” We all can do it – with the help of the Holy Spirit.

Another wrote, “I will be there for people who need me for comfort and people who just need an extra pair of hands.” Still another wrote, “I have seen what Christians do. … Christians play a very important role in the world. They know that they were chosen by God to spread the word of Jesus and keep the world at a reasonable level of peace. Their job is to always do what is right and what feels like what Jesus would truly do.”

One of our youth is sharing the news, “I have talked seriously about Christianity to some of my friends who don’t regularly attend a church – I’ve told them all about my church experience and asked them to consider maybe thinking about coming to a service once in awhile.” When was the last time you talked seriously about Christianity to someone who doesn’t attend a church? When was the last time you invited someone to come to church with you?

One of the things that I hope and pray that our youth and all of us really get is that faith is a life-long journey. One youth wrote, “My faith will help guide me as I grow up.” Yes, that’s the point. One last word from a youth, “I will show others how great it feels being a Christian.”

[i] Moore, James W. Attitude is Your Paintbrush, Dimensions for Living, Nashville, TN, 1998, pp. 53-54.

[ii] Moore, p.54

[iii] Weems, Ann Reaching for Rainbows, “The Church Year”, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, PA 1980, p.81

[iv] Moore, p.59

[v] Borg, Marcus, The Heart of Christianity, Harper Collins, San Francisco, CA 2003, p.47

As you know, today is “ASCENTION SUNDAY” – While trying to prepare for this week’s service I felt a lot like the people of Galilee the day Christ rose up into the sky…..because I too spent lots of time gazing upwards to God My reason wasn’t in awe or bewilderment but because I was hoping He’d tell me what to write for a sermon. Doing this sermon started out as a challenge…. I didn’t fully grasp the Ascension and its meaning or how it would relate to us today. And so I began my preparation by praying, then reading the scriptures, looking up different articles etc. about the Ascension on line and in books and found that in doing so, I not only gained biblical knowledge, but was given a boost of personal confidence, purpose and growth in my Christian walk.

Hopefully, prayerfully, I can relay to you some of what I have come to understand about the meaning of the words: “and He ascended into heaven and sitteth on the right hand of God the father” These words are familiar from the Nicene Creed found in our hymnals, and repeated in unison by most Christian denomination as an affirmation of our core beliefs. Maybe together as the church, and individually as people we can become bolder in our witnessing as we revisit Jesus’ message to us through his Ascension.

Little fanfare is given to ASCENTION SUNDAY in the Christian church compared to the fun holidays like Christmas, Palm Sunday, Easter, or even Pentecost Sunday is like a birthday party ……there are no catchy Ascension Hymns or colorful pageants with costumes etc.. There are no beautifully wrapped gifts ……even though the message is clearly about receiving gifts…the gift of the Holy Spirit that Jesus gives to all of us. Over the past few weeks I have become excited about the meaning of this celebration …and am humbled to be sharing the message with you.

I’d like to begin by asking all of you who are able or would like to, to stand….. and…now, look toward the heavens. You can raise your arms if you’d like – do whatever you would do when looking upward to find God. Get into it! Maybe think or say out loud: “Jesus – where are you??!!” or “I want just a glimpse of you…”… “Help me please…” or. “I believe in you!..”…whatever you’d like to say aloud or to yourself.

OK – thanks……you may sit down. Isn’t this why we come to church? To find Jesus? We figure He must be here someplace, if we only look hard enough. He can be hard to see on a sleepy Sunday morning….a holiday weekend at that. When many people are away and some of us are waiting for summertime to begin. Perhaps many of you have done something like this alone when you’re looking for Jesus. We look up, and we say “Help”! Sometimes it’s over something small and not very serious and other times, it’s with utter despair - whatever it is - we do look to the heavens with our appeal and in our search of our Lord.. I know I’ve done it. It’s natural and it’s OK, because in our minds Jesus is “up there” in heaven sitting right next to God, and it is to both Jesus and God that we look to and from whom we seek help. Like Bruce/Paula read to us from ACTS, the disciples actually saw Jesus vanish up into the clouds. I began to wonder what they must have been thinking. For the people in the first century AD, this wouldn’t seem odd or supernatural…after all, back then, heaven was believed to literally be above the earth, which to them was the center of the universe. If a person could go high enough, they’d find heaven. So naturally they would look upwards after witnessing such a happening! They were transfixed. You can imagine the bewilderment created by this Ascension! The disciples could not take their eyes off the skies. They strained their eyes for one more glimpse of Him. And then two angels appeared and said to them “People of Galilee, why are you gazing up into the skies? Jesus is gone, but He will return some day.”

Let’s back track a minute: The disciples had spent 3 years with Jesus. He’d turned their world upside down…they probably couldn’t remember the life they had before He came into their lives. When they watched Him die on the cross and then saw the empty tomb they must have thought….”that’s it. It was a great gig while He was with us. He’s gone back to heaven as He said He would” and then WHAM….He returns again in human form and stays with them for 40 more days! Can you imagine having an extra 40 days with someone you loved that you thought had left forever? And now, here He was. ….once again leaving them and once again they were to be left alone. Remember after the crucifixion how they locked themselves in the room, afraid of what would happen to them? That was only a few weeks ago. They were at such a loss they didn’t know what to do. Now, Jesus was leaving them again. What would they do? Lock themselves up in the room again? Try to get their old jobs back? Become depressed? Turns out they did none of those things. Like the writer of Psalm 47 they sang praises to God! They worshipped Him with great joy!! They went to the temple and worshipped Him continuously. They didn’t panic or become fearful…they gave thanks to God, they were filled with joy, they rejoiced, they blessed God’s name.

Before Jesus returned to heaven; they had asked Him if He was going to establish the promised earthly Kingdom. He told them He would return but that no one would know when, and for them to concentrate on their mission. He said: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the father has set by His own authority. Here are your instructions. Wait for the Spirit I promised. Then you will be a witness to Jerusalem and everywhere that people gather, to Judea, and every nation will call you home, to Samaria, and to every despised and rejected group of people and to the uttermost ends of the earth, everyone, everywhere, always. This is your job and I will help you do it. I’ll be right beside you always, all the way, whenever you are doing your witness work in the world.” He promised them that He would send a Helper to each believer so they could continue His work when He physically left them. This gift of the Spirit would give them the power to continue doing His work here on earth. The two angels were reminding them of what Jesus had already told them: that their mission was not to gaze upwards, but to go out and do His work and spread His word, The Good News. To paraphrase them: “Why are you standing around looking up to the sky? Don’t you have work to do? Jesus will be back one day, but in the meantime didn’t He give you something to do? You’d better get going!” In effect they are reminding the followers that: Jesus is gone. He is back in His (and our) Heavenly dwelling place with His (and our) heavenly Father. Meanwhile, until He comes again, His work is now our work, His life is now our life. His hour had come. Now it is our hour. We should stop gazing upward to see Jesus and start looking forward to sharing Jesus.

I’d like to interject a personal note here…………….being Memorial Weekend and all and talking about a Heavenly dwelling place………the past few months our church family has lost many beloved members…..one being my Mother and another, one of my closest friends, Sue Sams. It’s been a sad, lonely and sometimes confusing time for me. Many of you also know that feeling. A loved one dies, a friend moves away, relatives become ill, we become ill, the old familiar way gets lost and we start to feel alone and abandoned and we look up to God for help. We all need to gaze upward to heaven every now and then. We all get sad, we all run out of gas. I know the past few months I’ve often needed to lift my tear stained face up to God and realize that He is bigger than all my sorrows or problems….and even though He’s not with me physically, He is with me. I am not alone. Today, Christ is enthroned at The Right Hand of God, the Father, and scriptures tells us He is the Living Christ – alive and with us here on earth also.

Because I know that Jesus ascended into the clouds, (there were too many witnesses to that account to not believe it ) I also know that my Mother and Sue and all those who believed, are also in heaven with Him. This is a great comfort and I Thank God for it. We can also be encouraged if we can remember the times when we did feel God’s closeness and be boosted by that memory. I’m not saying we should let our faith be in the past and become so sentimental and nostalgic that we don’t allow the winds of the spirit to revive us. Our memories should comfort us with hope, not lead us into despair. On this Memorial Day Weekend, what good does it do to remember those that sacrificed themselves for our country if we don’t let their memory lead us to making it a better country? And what better way to do that then by witnessing God’s love and power to others. As witnessed earlier when the children walked out to you all, age is no barrier to sharing the Good News.

Through the power of the Holy Spirit given to all of us, Christ is alive in each of us today here on earth. We need to use that power to share with others…not keep it inside. We need to branch out! Let me read to you a story I found that’s fitting to what I’m talking about.

Once upon a time there was a man who wanted to see Niagara Falls. He lived back when people didn't travel much and most travel was done on horseback or on foot. But he had heard how beautiful and magnificent the Falls were, so he set out on the long journey to see them for himself. When he was getting close, less than a day's journey away, he could hear a very faint roar. He stopped that night at an inn and was speaking with the owner. He discovered that the innkeeper had lived there his whole life. So he asked the innkeeper, "Is that roar I heard the sound of Niagara Falls from a day's journey away?” The innkeeper replied, "That is what I have been told." And to the man's amazement he discovered that the innkeeper, who had lived only a day’s journey form Niagara Falls his whole life, had never gone to see it. Yet the traveler had gone a long way to witness its power.

We Christians are sometimes like the innkeeper. We live in the same neighborhood with the power of God almighty Himself, yet rarely go out of our way, or out of our comfort zone to seek and use that power. We believe it’s there, that we’re close to the roar, but we don’t experience it or go near to it.

We can know the power and the love and the grace of Jesus from within, from each other, without Him physically being here. He is sitting at God’s right hand as supreme ruler over us, yet He is also alive in each and every one of us through His Spirit. Open your hearts to be energized by this Spirit! LOVE, JOY, PEACE, LONG-SUFFERING, (otherwise known as patience J) KINDNESS, GOODNESS, FAITH, MEEKNESS, and SELF-CONTROL are the fruits of the spirit which can be awakened in every one of us. Each time we display them we are witnessing Christ’s love to others. He becomes alive through us for others to know and to also receive Him as their Savior.

When I was in Atlanta a few years ago visiting a friend, we went on Sunday to The Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King once preached. What a wonderful, lively service it was! I loved how the people in the congregation would participate in the service with pure joy. When the preacher would say “Can I get an a-men?” The people would shout “A-men”. When he asked for an “Hallelujah” they’d all wave their hands and shout “Hallelujah”. He’d say “Can I get a Thank You Jesus” and they’d all holler “Thank You Jesus”. The request that amazed me the most was when he asked “Can I get a witness?” and so many responded with their own words…..words like “Amen” or “Yes Sir” or “I believe” or “That’s right”. They all openly and joyously showed their love for Jesus. They were preaching right along with their Pastor and giving witness to the presence of the Risen Christ in their own lives. It was a joy filled, spirit filled service and one I will long remember and yearn for. It was so liberating to be so free in my love for Jesus.

Are we energizing the divine power given us??? It’s there…Christ gave us the power and told us clearly to use it to continue His work on earth. It is only through His spirit that we keep Him alive for others. It is what we have been called to do. The first commandment Jesus gave us was “Follow me,” The greatest commandment He gave us was “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The last commandment He gave us before He was taken from our sight was “Be my witness. Watch what I am doing among you and then tell it! Tell it! Tell it! Let your voice be heard above all the other voices that cry evil, above all the other voices that cry out in despair, above all the other voices that take my name in vain. Testify to the world that Jesus Christ has risen and God is love. And I will be with you.”

So, how do we do this? We can witness to what Jesus has done for ourselves personally. We can tell others to look around them and see all the people that God sees, especially those that society tries to keep invisible. We can give people reason to hope when they feel sad, lonely or in despair. We can show them that there is more to this world than material things and wealth and that evil doesn’t have to be the last word. We can tell them that a loving God is in control and that a risen Christ is still with us today. Even when those we love have to leave us, we are promised a blessing of eternal life…and we can tell people that His final act was one of love and caring…. Luke Chapter 24 verse 51 says:

“While Jesus was blessing His friends, He withdrew from them and was taken up into the clouds…..”

At the end of today’s Gospel reading we are left poised on the edge of a new, exciting chapter in the lives of the disciples. They weren’t sure what was going to happen, but they knew they wouldn’t be alone, that God promised them He would be with them in spirit. This was all the assurance they needed to be able to continue to live in hope even after Jesus returned to heaven.

Isn’t that the story of God’s people through all the generations? He gives to us what we need at the right time. The timing may not always seem right, but looking back, we can see more clearly and realize that God was and will always be faithfully guiding us. There is a wonderful piece of theology in the Methodist tradition called Prevenient Grace…which simply means that God is at work in our lives long before we even realize it.

What ever we call it, it is that God is in control, in a good way. He asked the disciples and us to go out into the world and tell everyone we see about The Good News. He promises that we won’t be alone…He will be with us in the form of the Holy Spirit. What a powerful and reassuring feeling to know that we can do anything with God’s help.

Why should we be excited? ..Because we don’t have to do it alone! He is alive within us! He works through us. Harnessing His power is definitely exciting. Will you be a traveler or an innkeeper?

In the readings from Luke we see the disciples worshipping and being genuinely joyful and blessing God. They’re joyful, despite the path that lays before them….joyful because of Christ’s presence in their lives, joyful because of the promise of the Helper or Spirit that will be coming, joyful because they are eager to do God’s call of witnessing to the world. We too are called to share this joy and to share the task of discipleship.

God keeps His promises. He asks very little of us. He loves us no matter what. He gave us His son as our Savior. His son gave us the Holy Spirit, and in return asked only that we keep Him alive on earth until His return. In the meanwhile He is ruling with God in the Heavens. Today as we celebrate His ASCENTION into Heaven, let us also be reminded that He left us not only with a gift, but with a request to use that gift.

Prayer: Oh God, make us your witnesses. Give us the courage to stand up with you. Give us the power to know the words to say, Give us the vision to not just witness about the events and miracles that happened 2000 years ago but also about our own personal encounters with you. Make us your witnesses by the power of your Spirit for Jesus’ sake. Amen

We’ve heard a lot about love in our scriptures and prayers this morning. We like to talk about love. Right now, love is on the hearts and minds of people in my family as we prepare for my son’s wedding next week. Love is the theme of so many songs, books, and movies. You might remember the song, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. No not just for some but for everyone.” It is almost a prayer or a plea to the Lord to send love.

God did send Love. Perfect love – embodied, incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ. Today we hear that Jesus farewell command to his disciples is, “love one another as I have loved you.” It all sounds so wonderful, so comforting, so soft and pleasant. On this 6^th Sunday in the Easter season, the Gospel and the Epistle reading give us love as one more resource for the formation and the maintenance of the Christian community. “Love one another as I have loved you.” It is both the most simple and the most difficult instruction of the entire Bible.

Love as defined by Christ is so much more than the romantic love that brings a couple together in marriage. True love is so much more difficult than any starry eyed young couple can imagine when they make that commitment to each other. We have only to look at the divorce statistics to get a glimpse of how difficult it is to maintain that love through all of the changes and difficulties of life.

Love is so much more than a feeling. Love is a verb. Love is an action. Love is a decision made everyday of our lives. Loving is a commandment given to us by God. So what is this love? How does it manifest itself?

James Killen in his book What Does the Lord Require? writes, “Love is that force that is committed to pulling things together and building things up and making life truly good for everyone.”[i] By contrast, he says that, “Hate is that force that pulls things apart. It sets people and groups and races and nations against each other in destructive conflict.” He also identifies another path that is all too common for many of us: indifference. “Indifference,” he writes, “is basically a selfish way of life. We go happily along thinking of ourselves, pursuing our own dreams, and evaluating everyone and everything in terms of how it affects our personal interest.”

If we are honest with ourselves, we fall into the trap of indifference all too easily. This week I was reading the reports and recommendations that will be coming up at Annual Conference in a few weeks. As I read the recommendation from the Bishops Financial Task Force, my immediate question was whether this radical proposal would cost this church more money or save us money. It’s a normal reaction, isn’t it?

The good news – and the bad news – is that this is not an option for us as Christians. Jesus told us to abide in his love and that we will do so by keeping his commandments. To make sure we get the point, he says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” There’s an interesting subtle meaning here. We are to love one another, not because Christ loved us, although that is true. But it is the way that we are to love. We are to love “as Christ loved us’, in the same or similar way. We are to see Christ as the example of what love looks like and how it acts. Then again, he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Here’s where it gets sticky. There’s more to this love than just having a warm fuzzy feeling about someone else. Christ’s kind of love calls for sacrifice. It calls for commitment. He reminds us, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. … I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”

Clearly this is a topic that is much too big to be dealt with in just one sermon; that’s why we gather every week, so that overtime we can be formed and grow in the way that God chose for us. 1 John says that God’s commandments are not burdensome, but when you hear this command to love one another sometimes it can feel burdensome. And it is if we take it by itself. However, through repeated attention to worship, to prayer, to our relationship with God, we will gradually discover that this kind of love grows and becomes an integral part of who we are and who we can be. The challenge is to know God’s love for us so profoundly that we can also love one another. The light of a candle is not diminished by sharing its light with another candle, nor is God’s love for us diminished when we share it with another. In fact, what we discover is that the more we share God’s love the more love there is to share. It multiplies, not divides.

For the early church, a very practical question or dilemma for them was to try to figure out who it is that God loves. It’s much easier to love if we can pick and choose who we will love. It’s much easier to think of ourselves as the Body of Christ if we can choose who will be part of that body. What we discover in the Bible is that love has no limitations. Love has no boundaries.

Peter discovered that in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning. Prior to what we heard, Peter experienced a profound vision in which he confronted his ideas of what was not acceptable to God and what was. The vision involved a sheet being lowered from the sky and containing all kinds of animals which were forbidden foods in the dietary codes. Three times Peter was told to get up and eat and three times he refused. Each time he heard the message, “Do not consider anything unclean that God has declared clean.”

While he was trying to understand this vision, visitors showed up at his house. They had come from the home of Cornelius, a captain in the Roman army – an enemy. Peter learned that God was using him to respond to Cornelius’ honest desire to know more about God. At the end of the reading today, the Holy Spirit came upon all those in Cornelius’ home – Gentiles – and Peter understood that God’s plan included even those whom he, Peter, wanted to exclude.

The sheet in Peter’s vision contains a variety of creatures that we will meet in our lives: people we may not like, people with whom we would rather not associate, people with different ideas and different viewpoints, people who irritate us just by being themselves. The sheet in the vision tells us that God loves them and wants them to be part of the church on an equal par with us. God chose them just as God chose us.

Love is deeply honest. Love is willing to discuss difficulties and problems, not sweep them under the carpet. Love is willing to face hurt and pain without running away. Love does not call us to be a doormat – to be abused, and nothing I am saying should in anyway be construed to mean that a person should stay around in a dangerous situation. That is not loving ourselves – and we are called to love our neighbor in the same way that we love ourselves. We are not to allow another to abuse or hurt just as we are not to abuse or hurt another. But when one of our companions on life’s journey is going through a tough time, love calls us to stay around even when the going is rough, to hang in there and be a model of God’s love. This is one of the places where Christ’s command to love gets so difficult. We are only able to do this to the extent that we are ourselves connected with and abiding in Christ. “Jesus came to show us God’s love, to teach us how to love, to love us into loving, and to send us out into the world as agents of love. That is what it is all about.”[ii]

Christianity has never been a “sit back and feel comfortable” faith. Yes, it provides comfort to us in pain, sorrow, illness, death, and tragedies of life, but it also calls us to continue to reach out, spread out, go to the outcasts.

The United Methodist Book of Discipline in describing the present challenges to Theology in the Church reminds us that “in the name of Jesus Christ we are called to work within our diversity while exercising patience and forbearance with one another. Such patience stems neither from indifference toward truth nor from an indulgent tolerance of error but from an awareness that we know only in part and that none of us is able to search the mysteries of God except by the Sprit of God.”[iii]

There is no doubt in my mind that Annual Conference this year will be anything but dull. We will be celebrating the 50^th anniversary of full rights of ordination being granted to women. As we celebrate, we will also be aware that there are Christian churches that do not believe that women should be ordained or serve in positions of leadership. At this same conference we will be presented with several resolutions to be sent to the 2008 meeting of General Conference, the overall governing body of the United Methodist Church.

Those resolutions begin with expressing the belief that a United Methodist pastor in another conference was wrong in refusing membership in the local church he served to a homosexual. From there the resolutions progress to dealing with many of the parts of the Book of Discipline that deal with homosexuality. I am confident from previous experience that the discussion and debate around this topic will produce much frustration and many hurt feelings. I know that within this congregation, as in annual conference, we are not all of one mind on this topic. I pray that both the annual conference and those of us in this location may remember that we know only in part and that none of us can speak the absolute Word of God on this subject.

This is one area where we are constantly being asked to stretch and to recognize that however we understand scripture and God’s will, we are still being commanded by Christ to love one another as he loved us. We have been chosen and appointed to bear fruit that will last not produce noxious weeds. We are to continue to love one another.

Again, our Book of Discipline reminds us that, “Our aim is not to reduce doctrinal differences to some lowest common denominator of religious agreement, but to raise all such relationships to the highest possible level of human fellowship and understanding. We labor together with the help of God toward the salvation, health, and peace of all people. In respectful conversations and in practical cooperation, we confess our Christian faith and strive to display the manner in which Jesus Christ is the life and hope of the world.”[iv]

[i] Killen, Jr. James L. “What Does the Lord Require?” featured in Sermon Suite for 5/7/06 www.sermonsuite.com

[ii] Killen

[iii]Book of Discipline 2004 Edition, para. 104, Theological Task, The Present Challenge to Theology in the Church.

[iv] Para. 104. Ecumenical Commitment.

Friday night I attended the 50^th anniversary celebration and annual meeting of the New England United Methodist Federal Credit Union. During the combined worship and business portion of the evening, we heard the story of Emerson Smith, a pastor who in 1954 and 1955 brought a resolution to the floor of Annual Conference to establish a committee to study the feasibility of a Credit Union for Clergy and Lay Members. The Annual Conference, then as now, likes to debate things, table controversial items and often move in ways that seem frustratingly slow to those with a vision. After Conference in June of 1956, Emerson and 9 others founded the Credit Union with $10 each.

Their vision was of a financial institution where people were worth more than their money. They recognized that people who have money can get loans for more money, but people who do not have money to begin with, often cannot get a loan. They recognized the need to loan money to new pastors just graduating from seminary who needed to purchase an automobile in order to serve the congregations to which they had been appointed. At the end of the first year of business, the number of members had swelled from 10 to 57. Today, 50 years later, that Credit Union, born of a vision that continues to serve the Gospel, has 1175 members and membership in this Federal Christian based Credit Union is open to every Methodist. By the way, if at some point, you’d like more information about the Credit Union speak to Rev. Dick Garland who is the new President of the Board of Directors.

This is not intended to be an advertisement for the Credit Union, but the Credit Union is intended to be an illustration of some important truths that I see in this week’s Scripture lessons. In today’s Gospel, we have another of the great “I Am” sayings of Jesus from the Gospel of John. Last week we heard Jesus saying, “I am the good shepherd” and using that image to help his listeners understand who he is and how their lives as disciples relate to his. Today we hear that Jesus is the Vine and that we are the branches. Most of you know that I don’t know much about gardening, so I’m going to spare you details about the need to prune the branches to make them bear more fruit. I’m going to stick with the obvious here – a branch does need to be attached to the vine, to its source of nourishment in order to produce fruit.

The title of today’s sermon is “branching out” because that’s what healthy branches do. They stay connected to their source, but they also move out in new directions. During Lent I told you about a grapevine in Hampton Court Palace near London that was planted in 1768. Some of its branches are two hundred feet long and the single root is at least two feet thick. Because of skillful cutting and pruning, that one vine produces more than six hundred pounds of black grapes every year. Although some of the smaller branches are two hundred feet from the main stem, they bear plenty of fruit because they are joined to the vine and allow the life of the vine to flow through them.

I think that the Credit Union I mentioned earlier is an example of a branch that has spread out from the vine. At first glance one might not think about starting a credit union as being an act of discipleship, as a way of bearing fruit for Christ. However, if you think about the many things that Chris taught and the way that the early church understood his teaching it makes perfect sense. It is a way of combining small resources of many people to help bring together enough resources to help others; it is a way of providing for the needs of others. This was one way of providing a stepping stone so that those who were assisted by providing necessary loans could then bear fruit in the places to which they were sent. The Credit Union is one of many branches growing from the vine spreading in a direction that did not seem obvious to many when it was first presented. That’s part of the reason why it took two years for the Annual Conference to approve a committee to study the feasibility.

In our local church we have many ways of helping those who are most in need of assistance. One way is the Pastor’s Discretionary Fund which takes your extra offering on Communion Sundays and uses it to help those who may need assistance with buying prescriptions, or helping with rent or electricity in an emergency. I can tell you that as the cost of fuel increases and other resources dry up the calls we receive for assistance are increasing and are likely to multiply in the future. This is one of the branches of the vine. This is a branch that provides charity or mercy, but doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the needs of those who come for assistance. There are so many needs. Maybe we need to be thinking about some other ways of providing assistance. Perhaps we could look at ideas that would help a person set up a budget or learn the financial management skills so vital to everyday living on very limited resources. Perhaps God will give you a vision of a response.

Those who are part of the branches may be surprised to discover where the growth and branching out takes them. Philip is a good example of a faithful man who was led where he probably least expected to go. When an angel of the Lord told him to go south, to take the desert road, he did. On this deserted road he met, of all people an Ethiopian official. He was an important man, a foreigner, from an exotic and far off country. His dark skin, in Philip’s culture would have made him an object of wonder and admiration.

The Spirit spoke to Philip and told him to go to the chariot and stay near it. He heard the man reading aloud from the prophet Isaiah and asked if he understood what he was reading. Philip demonstrated his caring and willingness to share his faith but instead of overwhelming the official, he waited first until he understood the questions being asked.

As I prepared this sermon on Saturday, I was also preparing to go to the Bishop’s day of training in evangelism for our district. I knew that part of the day would involve going to the homes of people in Warwick to share gifts from the Asbury United Methodist Church and to specifically invite them to come to a special worship service on Saturday evening at the Pilgrim Senior Center. I knew that this was not something I felt excited about, or even remotely comfortable doing, and I thought of Philip and the need to be willing to share our faith but to also be willing to listen to what people were really saying or asking. Sometimes branching out can be more than a little uncomfortable.

In many respects Philip’s conversation with the Ethiopian and the baptism that followed were the beginning of the fulfillment of Jesus’ later words to his disciples that they would witness to him in Jerusalem, in Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Ethiopia was quite literally the end of the known world. The official was the end of the earth culturally and in terms of power. The man asked, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” and Philip led by the Spirit, obliged him.

This story is foundational in the growth of the early church. It is a crucial piece of a branch growing from the vine, being nourished and spreading out. It is a radical message of inclusion, rather than simply a story of one man’s conversion. It is a story of breaking barriers and reaching out to another in love and kindness. We don’t know exactly what happened to the official afterwards, although Eusebius, an early church historian, believes that the Ethiopian returned home and became an evangelist. We do know that Christianity was well established in Ethiopia, Egypt and North Africa even before the beginning of Islam in the seventh century.

Philip continued to tell the good news in all the towns through which he passed until he came to Caesarea – a coastal town some 50 miles away. The next time we meet Philip is 20 years later in Caesarea. Philip the man who was filled with the Holy Spirit, is identified at that time as the Evangelist. 20 years later and 50 miles away, Philip has been branching out and bearing fruit. Where are the places today where we are called to branch out? What are the needs around us that God might be calling us to fill?

I’ve heard evangelism explained as one beggar telling another beggar where to find a crust of bread. That, for me, is a profound and important concept. It means that we do not have all the answers. We are not better than anyone else. We are, as Jesus said, branches attached to the vine, bearing fruit because of our attachment. We are people who have found a source of nourishment that because of God’s great love for us, we are eager to share with others. But sometimes words are not the best way initially to do that.

Jesus taught his disciples that one of the most important ways of witnessing to others is through our actions. He taught them that providing food for those who are hungry, clothes for those who are naked, visits to those who are sick, or in whatever way is needed meeting the needs of others, is the same as doing this for Christ.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Communists took over Russia. Contrary to popular belief they did not close the churches but they did put limits on what they could do. They were not allowed to feed the hungry, or to find homes for the homeless. They could not make medical help available to those who were sick. They were not allowed to provide education for the children. They did not close the churches, but they might as well have done so. As a result of the restrictions placed upon them, 70 years later many of the churches had closed down and were just empty buildings because they could not do what God called the church to do.

We are called to reach out to others in acts of love and compassion. We are called to bear fruit because we are branches attached to the vine. Like the vine in Hampton Castle, our branches may reach in many different directions. We might ask ourselves who are the Ethiopian Eunuchs in today’s society. Who are the people we are called to reach? Emerson Smith’s vision has been bearing fruit for 50 years now. There are so many ways that we can branch out and bear fruit for Christ. Think about them. Ask God to give you a vision of the way that you can bear fruit as you abide in Christ.

We often hear the familiar words of the 23^rd Psalm at funerals, and yet it is also the Scripture for the 4^th Sunday of the Easter season. I don’t know that I had every really thought about why the 4^th Sunday of Easter is “Good Shepherd” Sunday. Easter 4 – today – begins a new segment of readings in the Easter Gospels. On previous Sundays, we have learned of the empty tomb, of how Jesus convinced Thomas that he has risen, and of Luke’s account of Jesus’ appearance to the assembled Disciples. Today we have the parable of the Good Shepherd.

The people of Jesus’ time were very familiar with sheep and with shepherds. Even the leaders of nations, including kings, priests, and prophets, were frequently called shepherds. It was only natural then, that Jesus should use the same figure to identify himself. As a good shepherd he seeks the lost sheep, and after his resurrection, the newly risen Jesus tells Peter “to feed his sheep” in order to prove his love. In today’s Gospel though, I finally discovered why this is an Easter passage. Jesus identifies himself as the good shepherd. He tells them what they already know that a shepherd, who is the owner of the sheep and not a hired hand, will risk his life for the sheep. Jesus says that he knows his sheep and his sheep know him. “And I lay down my life for the sheep.” We know that Jesus did exactly that. He laid down his life for us on the cross. But hear the rest of what he said, “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.”

That’s an Easter message! The Lenten stories are about Jesus going along with those who wanted to take his life. He could have stopped it. He could have run away. He could have gone into hiding. Think of how well Osama bin Laden has hidden himself. Geographically this is the same type of terrain as the area in which Jesus lived. American military and informational technology has not been able to find Osama bin laden – how much more easily could Jesus have hidden himself if he had so chosen. But he didn’t! He understood what was happening, and he laid down his life, he gave his life for his sheep – for us.

He also took up his life again. Without the resurrection, Jesus would have been a good shepherd for his generation, but not for those following. But Christ is today’s Good Shepherd who lives to eternity, and who is alive to care for his sheep even today. I think that what’s important about this image of a Good Shepherd is that it tells us what kind of a God we have. It tells us that we have a God who knows us, cares for us, protects us, and provides for us. And the really good news is that this shepherd rose from the dead and lives forever to continue to shepherd us.

There is comfort in this knowledge. We know that God loves us; that Jesus came to live among us and loved us enough to die for us, and rose again. We know that Jesus promised his followers that the Holy Spirit would come and be with them and us; the Holy Spirit who is sometimes called the comforter, who guides us in our daily lives. We know that God lives in us because of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

What does this image say to our generation today – to a secular, industrialized, technological society? Does it have any relevance to us? I believe it does. For one thing it speaks to our need for a good leader who is also a good shepherd. The world has suffered from the leadership of men like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin and other more recent leaders who were concerned about themselves rather than the people they were leading. In our country, we elect those who will lead us, hoping and praying that they will be good shepherds who will put the needs of the country ahead of their own needs, hoping and praying that they will protect the most vulnerable of the sheep. Remember the picture of Jesus with a lamb draped over his shoulders and the parable of the shepherd who goes looking for the one sheep who gets lost. We pray that our leaders in political, economic, business and religious circles will be people who will pay attention to the needs of those who are not able to care for themselves rather than seeking their own financial gain and personal notoriety.

If you think about the animal kingdom, most animals have ways of protecting themselves from predators. Dogs bite, cats scratch, porcupines have quills, skunks have odor, but sheep have no real way to protect themselves. They cannot run fast enough to get away from a predator. They are not strong enough to fight. Their coloring doesn’t blend in with their environment so that they can hide. Sheep require someone to protect them.

“Ours is a hurting world. In America alone sixty million people are physically or mentally disabled, over thirteen million are deaf, ten million are blind, and almost three million are institutionalized. Millions of others join these in needing someone to care for them, to love them, help them, and listen to their woes. They all need a good shepherd to bind up their wounds, to comfort them in their worries, and to help them in their afflictions and needs.”[i]

“The comedienne Lily Tomlin shocks her audience when she suddenly collapses on stage in the middle of her routine. She literally just falls over. After a few moments, while still flat on her back, she says to her audience, `I notice none of you got up to see if anything was wrong.’ Then with a cynical twist of a well-known phrase she comments, `Remember, we’re all in this – alone!’ Certainly a good shepherd could restore the truth of the more familiar reading: Remember, we’re all in this together!”[ii]

As comforting as it may be to have a good shepherd taking care of us, we are to do more than be recipients of God’s loving care. The passage from 1^st John shifts the focus from what Christ does for us to what w, Christ’s followers, are called to do for one another and for those sheep who are still lost. We are to “love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” We do know, don’t we, when we are acting in love? We know when we are acting as Christ would have us act, because our hearts really do know the difference between a Christian act and a non-Christian act. If our focus remains on God’s Son Jesus Christ, then we will know the right actions to take, and we will know the commandments that Christ calls us to obey. The more we seek Christ, the more we seek Christ’s will, the more we adopt Christ’s ways and experience Christ’s love, the more like the good shepherd we become in our care and support for our brothers and sisters in need. Our actions then are an ongoing witness to Christ’s presence in our hearts and our minds.

Good Shepherd, your Church so often feels like a comfortable field, with lush grass ready to eat, and well fenced in against danger. But sheep who live in fields like that have no need of a shepherd. Good Shepherd, enable your Church to step out onto the hillside, to stand up for its beliefs and to support the marginalized, for only then can we really experience your shepherding skills.

Good Shepherd, in this beautiful world you have given us there are many wolves, snarling and waiting to viciously attack. Give integrity to all our governments, that they may care for the sheep and repel the wolves. Help us to realize that the wolf of hunger is our responsibility, and can be defeated if we learn to properly share our wealth.

Good Shepherd, it seems that sheep turn into wolves if they don’t receive the proper love and care and attention from the cradle onwards. Help us to so love that we nurture sheep, and to so care that perhaps we can begin to help some wolves change back into sheep.[iii]

Good Shepherd, help us to witness to your presence in our lives by loving our brothers and sisters as you have loved us. Amen.

[i] www.sermonsuite.com Preaching the Parables by John R. Brokhoff 5/6/06

[ii] www.sermonsuite.com Brokhoff 5/6/06

[iii] www.sermonsuite.com The Village Shepherd 5/6/06

When we started the service today and sang, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” did the thought cross your mind that perhaps there was a mistake in the bulletin. We sang that song two weeks ago on Easter, why again? When you heard the Gospel about Jesus appearing to this disciples did you wonder about the resurrection appearances – wasn’t that last week? In the church Easter, like Christmas, is not just one day. It is a season. Christmas and Easter are so important to the life of the church to who we are as Christians that it takes more than one day to talk about it, to experience it. The Easter season continues for six weeks until almost the end of May. During that time we try to understand and experience what Easter is all about. We’ve heard the story and we think we know it, so there’s a temptation to become complacent, or worse yet, apathetic. We know the story, what can it say to us today?

There is great irony today around the stories of the crucifixion and the resurrection. In Jesus’ day, it was unconceivable that the Messiah, or a man of God, or from God could be crucified. Today we know all too well, that many of our societies have quietly or openly hidden or killed some of the finest people you have lived when their message was uncomfortable to those in power. On the other hand the resurrection which was a source of great joy and power for the early church has often become a stumbling block for modern people. How can we believe it?

Frederick Buchner says: But I can tell you this: that what I believe happened and what in faith and with great joy I proclaim to you here is that he somehow got up, with life in him again, and the glory upon him. And I speak very plainly here, very un-fancifully, even though I do not understand well my own language. I was not there to see it any more than I was awake to see the sun rise this morning, but I affirm it as surely as I do that by God's grace the sun did rise this morning because that is why the world is flooded with light.[i]

The early church was filled with power because of the resurrection. They knew with certainty that Jesus had risen from the dead. The early church was conscious of itself as a faithful people surrounded by a hostile environment to which each member was called to witness to God's love in Christ. They were called to be evangelists, in the biblical sense of the word -- those who bear good news. Their task was to carry into a hostile world the good news of healing, love, and salvation.[ii]

It didn’t happen all at once. As we discovered last week in John’s gospel, the disciples were behind locked doors on that day, when Jesus appeared to them. A week later, they were still behind locked doors. It took time for them to learn how to experience the risen Christ in a new way. “Years ago the Standard Oil Company changed its name from ESSO to EXXON. Perhaps you remember the public campaign. For months, the famous “put a tiger in your tank” tiger was pictured on a large sign climbing a stepladder to the top of the local gas station’s ESSO sign. With a big smile on his face, the tiger held in his arms the new EXXON sign. Then one day, Standard Oil stations across America no longer had their old ESSO signs, but new EXXON signs. It was a clever campaign. If the new EXXON signs just showed up one day without any warning everyone would have been confused. “What happened to the ESSO station?,” people would have wondered. It took a time of transition.

“In the early church it took time for Jesus’ followers to realize that the post-Easter Jesus, the Risen Jesus, was the Jesus they knew in Galilee, but also different in important ways. That’s what the resurrection appearances in Matthew, Luke and John are for. They helped those first disciples recognize the post-Easter Jesus. Before Easter they knew him by the sound of his voice, the muscle of his arm, the stride of his gait. After Easter they would learn to recognize Jesus in new ways.”[iii]

They learned however that Jesus was real present with them. At first, they needed the proof that he was not a ghost. We hear that question in today’s gospel and Jesus telling them to look at his hands and feet, to see that he has flesh and bones, and finally he helps to convince them by eating a piece of broiled fish. He opened their hearts and minds to understand the scriptures and finally said to them, “You are witnesses of these things.”

They were witnesses – witnesses to the real presence of Christ. They understood that as witnesses, Jesus did not command the whole world to go to church, but that Jesus commanded the church to go into the whole world. The question for us today is, “how is the church to be the real presence of Christ in the today’s world?” How are we to be the Body of Christ? How are we to show wounded hands and feet and make it clear that the presence of the risen Lord is not just a shadowy vapor but a real, living presence? What is the purpose of the Church – and what is the purpose of this particular congregation? How are we, the people of Christ in this particular congregation to be the real presence of Christ in the world? How is the real presence of this church to be seen and known?

Now, it may come as a relief or as a disappointment to you that I don’t have a set of neat little answers to those questions. They are the questions of vision, mission and ministry with which every congregation should be struggling every day of our lives.

Throughout history, the church has had many ideas about how to witness, how to be present. Many wonderful things have been done by the church in the past – and unfortunately, many terrible things have also been done by those who claimed or believed that they were acting in the name of Christ.

Barbara Kingsolver wrote a rather lengthy but wonderful book called The Poisonwood Bible. It is the story of a pastor who goes into the jungles of Africa as a missionary, to convert the people. Unfortunately, he goes with such clear ideas of how to do things that he cannot see or hear what people who have lived in the area for all of their lives are trying to tell him. He is close to giving up at one point because as hard as he tries he simply cannot get anyone to agree to be baptized in the river that flowed by the village. He failed to understand that although the message might have been appealing, the method of accepting it was most terrifying. The river was filled with crocodiles and even the youngest among the villagers were terrified of the river.

Our church has been engaged for close to a year now in a process led by the learning team to help us discern our particular call as members of this congregation in this particular place. Some of what we have learned has been illuminating. There are many in town who know the presence of this church as the location of the food pantry. There are many others who know the presence of this church as the location where some organization they belong to meets. These are good things, and we might think of them as expressing part of our mission of hospitality. But are they the real presence of this church. Are we simply a good building for meetings and housing a crucial service to people in town?

There are many who know us as a place of worship, a community that cares about each other, a place where our children learn about Jesus. Those are wonderful parts of who we are and who we should be, but do we keep this part of our identity a secret or do we share it with our friends and neighbors? There is a little girl in Sierra Leone who knows the real presence of this church as the people who helped give her new life, who helped transcend religious differences so that a Muslim child, helped by a Christian church could have life saving surgery at a Jewish hospital. An outgrowth of that witness is that a Boy Scout with a peripheral connection to our church is doing an Eagle Project to help bring medical supplies to the clinic in Sierra Leone so that many other children, women, and men will be able to get much needed medical care.

“Many churches seem to be very focused in the twenty-first century on being driven by purpose, to become "biggie-sized" in terms of membership, to have greater and greater influence in politics, economics, social change. The mantra seems to be about achieving "extraordinary" success through marketing and the media.

“Which makes for an interesting contrast with the Jesus we meet in John's Gospel. A bible student comes to him one evening with some questions that have popped into his mind. On a hot day, with a parched throat, he asks a woman for a drink of water. He talks with a man blind from birth. He goes to the home of Mary and Martha, who are grieving over the death of their brother Lazarus.

“And there, in these ordinary moments, in these chance meetings, in these everyday encounters, God is present in Jesus Christ:

· helping the grief-stricken sisters to realize that God is more powerful than death; that God's love calls forth life from the grave.

“Maybe we are missing something as the church seeks to reach out to our world today. Maybe we are so "into" the extraordinary that we miss out on all those ordinary, everyday moments God presents to us to be the church, to be faithful, to be Christ's representatives here on earth.

“So the next time you are in the store and chatting with a friend, look to see if Jesus is over in the next aisle, eavesdropping. When your child asks you for a snack upon returning home from school, be sure to listen carefully to see who is making the request. When a sibling calls at night in the middle of your favorite show, pay attention to their questions, not the commercials.

“Pay attention to the ordinary, and the extraordinary presence of God will be revealed. [iv]

Perhaps that is how we can be the real presence of the church in our community by paying attention to the ordinary, examining our lives as disciples to see where we can be witnessing through our actions, seeking to discover the needs around us and responding to them as Christ did. In this way we can show wounded hands and feet and be witnesses of all that we have seen and all that we know of God’s love. In this way we can be the real presence of the church, the real presence of Christ in the world today.

[i] Dudley C. Rose, Here Are the Witnesses, You Are the Jury, cited in E-sermons, 4/30/06

[ii] Loren Mead, The Once and Future Church (Alban Institute, 1991), p. 10

[iii]Thomas H. Yorty, Recognizing Jesus

[iv] The Immediate Word, April 30, 2006

Some years ago a good friend of mine was involved in an automobile accident on a very cold icy night. As she waited for the tow trucks to arrive, the police officer suggested that she might want to wait inside the police cruiser. For awhile she enjoyed the warmth and feeling of relative safety. Soon, however, she decided she needed to get out of the car. It was then that she discovered that the back door of a police cruiser cannot generally be opened from the back seat. Still reacting to the close call from the accident, she panicked and became desperate to get out of the cruiser. She managed to climb over the back of the front seat, squeezing through the small opening between the grated doors that separated the front and back. Looking back, she thinks that her acrobatics must have looked quite funny, but, at the time, she wasn’t laughing. Fear and desperation ruled her actions.

Fear and desperation ruled the actions of the disciples shortly following Jesus’ death. Peter and John had reported that Jesus’ body was missing from the tomb. Mary Magdalene claimed to have seen and talked with Jesus. But that couldn’t be – could it? Someone would be blamed for the disappearance of his body, and it would probably be them. They gathered together inside a house and locked the doors trying to insure their safety.

Locked doors may help us feel safe, but it depends on who controls the lock. Locked doors can imprison us within a particular space. They separate us from other people – and in some cases, locked doors on our hearts may separate us from God. In John’s gospel, however, we see that Jesus comes to us in the midst of our locked doors regardless of why the door is locked.

Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” This was a fairly conventional greeting for the time, but in this context it said so much more. Jesus’ followers might have expected to be rebuked for deserting Jesus during his hour of need. They might have expected a lecture on not having paid attention to what he had taught them, otherwise perhaps they would have understood him when he told them plainly that he would be killed and would rise on the third day. But these things didn’t happen. Jesus came among them and instead of chastisement or rebuke, he offered them peace. As he had said to them on their last night together, “Peace, I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

This was no ordinary greeting of peace. This was not the ordinary “Hi, how are you?” that we say so glibly as we rush quickly in the opposite direction, not wanting or waiting for an answer. Some years ago, following a worship service, I walked into the office of the pastor with whom I was working at that time. As I entered, I asked, “How are you?” Taking my question for the customary greeting, he replied, “I’m fine, What can I do for you?” I assured him that I didn’t want anything, and had come specifically to ask him how he was doing. He breathed a deep sigh, pushed back his chair and talked for half an hour or more responding to what had been a sincere concern for his well being.

Jesus didn’t offer the customary greeting of peace. He offered a gift that far surpassed anything the disciples could imagine. He offered the key to unlocking the doors that symbolized their imprisonment to fear and uncertainty. He offered the key to a new radical understanding of life and a freedom to live without the locks and closed doors that they had thought so necessary for safety.

“Peace, be with you!” Death may have appeared to win the battle, but God’s love won the ultimate victory! Look at me. I am not a ghost. I am real. He showed them his hands and his side. This is the peace, the comfort upon which we depend when a loved one has died. This is the peace, the comfort, the strength that we hold tightly to when someone is facing serious illness and potential death or when we ourselves are in that situation. This is the rock, the gift, the promise whenever we are afraid. This is the key that unlocks the door that imprisons us deep within ourselves.

The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. In the midst of the great trials of life, when we recognize the risen Christ present with us, we too find a peace that the world cannot give or explain – a peace that can come only from the presence of Christ with us. We do not experience the physical presence of Jesus coming to us and standing before us. But we can experience his very real presence with us in many ways – through the presence of a friend, a phone call, a note, the prayers of others or our own prayers. The risen Christ comes to us despite the doors that we have locked so tightly.

Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” This was another clear message of love and power; of something out of the ordinary. Your sins are forgiven. I have forgiven you for running out on me. I have forgiven you for not understanding what I tried to teach you. I have forgiven you for locking yourself behind these doors and being afraid. But now, you do not need to be afraid any more. I have broken the bonds of everything that has bound you. I have taken away the power of sin to control you. No longer will feelings of inadequacy or lack of self-confidence control you.

In John’s version of a Pentecost experience, Jesus breathed on them and told them to “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is the source of empowerment given to us by the Risen Christ. The Holy Spirit will give you the words you need, the power you need, the confidence and courage you need in order to face what is necessary. I will be with you wherever you go. In the Acts of the Apostles we read about times when the disciples were arrested and forced to defend their faith and themselves. In those cases we read words like, “Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them:”

Instead of firing the disciples and hiring a new group of people to carry on his work, the Risen Christ reaffirmed and sent out the very ones who had proven so unreliable under pressure. He sent out the very ones who had denied him either through words or actions, the same ones who doubted, who questioned, and who were afraid. It doesn’t matter whether we think we are able to handle the ministry that God has for us; it is not our ability, but God’s that matters. In fact, I am sometimes concerned when a person feels extremely confident in his or her abilities. It is good to have an accurate assessment of our own skills and abilities. However, when we are living as disciples of Jesus Christ, when we are seeking to be faithful to his call, when we are responding to the work he has for us to do, it is far better to know that these skills and abilities are gifts and graces given to us by God. It is far better to know that the Holy Spirit will fill us and empower us to do that to which we have been called.

The rest of the Gospel lesson tells us of another appearance of Jesus a week later. The doors are still locked. It appears that it takes more than one experience of the Risen Christ to really change the lives of the disciples. We probably shouldn’t be surprised though. Remember that throughout Jesus’ life, he repeatedly went off by himself to be in prayer, to communicate with God. Jesus, God’s Son, God incarnate, needed to be intentional about maintaining close communication with God. It should come as no surprise to us that a one time commitment to Jesus is not enough to carry us through all of our life. Following Jesus is a way of life, an everyday decision, empowered by the Holy Spirit, but still, one that requires our time, energy, desire and will. It would be awhile yet, before the disciples would be standing out on the street corner preaching and witnessing. There would be more experiences of the presence of the Risen Christ and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit as they learned what it truly meant to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Jesus came to them, once again, despite the locked doors. He came and stood among them and said, yet again, “Peace, be with you!” Present with them this time was a disciple who had been missing at the previous meeting. Thomas has been called the “Doubter.” Thomas refused to believe his friends until he could see the nail marks in Jesus’ hands and the hole the spear had made in his side. Let me say, that I believe that characterizing Thomas as the doubter is unfair, but I’m grateful for his doubts. Thomas is the model for us of honest doubt. Thomas was willing to ask the questions and willing to express what he needed in order to believe the incredible event.

Jesus offered to Thomas the very proof that he required. Interestingly, it is the same proof he gave to the other disciples when he appeared to them a week earlier. He showed them his hands and side, and now offered the same to Thomas. “Peace be with you!” Kristen Bargeron Grant, the pastor of Cedar United Methodist Church in Ham Lake, Minnesota describes this part of the Gospel account in this way: “’Peace be with you, for there is more to this world than meets the eye.’” She points out that Jesus invites “Thomas and all who will come after him, to believe the truth that is too good to be true.” Because of this, “we can break free of our demands to touch and to see and trust the witness of the apostles.”[1]

Indeed, speaking of and for us, Jesus says, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Once convinced, Thomas uttered probably the greatest affirmation of faith found in the Bible. With Thomas, we can proclaim, “My Lord and my God!”

Jesus never asks us to pretend to believe. Jesus never tells us we shouldn’t ask the tough questions. One of my favorite biblical characters is the man who came to Jesus asking him to heal his son. Jesus said to the father, “’Everything is possible for him who believes.” Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed, `I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!’” (Mark 9:23-24) The risen Christ comes to us in spite of the locked doors of our doubt and opens the doors leading us from doubt to faith.

“Peace be with you!” Jesus has overcome death. He has released us from bondage to our sins. He has promised us that there is more to life than what we can see and imagine. Jesus came to the disciples and comes to us through the locked doors of our lives. He comes to us despite the prisons we set up for ourselves. He promises to walk with us through the doorways from doubt to faith, from sorrow to joy, from despair to peace, and from death to life.

[1] Bargeron Grant, Kristen “Living by the Word” in The Christian Century, April 19, 2003 p.18

Easter has always been my favorite day in the church calendar. I love the Easter lilies, and the Alleluia’s. Since I was a child, I have loved Sunrise Services no matter what the weather. I love the crowds at Easter and the festive atmosphere. Singing “Christ the Lord has risen today” brings tears to my eyes. I love the Scripture readings. However, I confess that until a few years ago, I was not particularly fond of Mark’s account of the resurrection. Like much of Mark’s gospel it is concise and lacks much of the poetry and majesty of some of the other accounts.

There is a lot of confusion about how Mark’s gospel ends. If you look in your Bibles you’ll likely see a note indicating that some of the more ancient manuscripts end with verse 8: “So they went out and ran from the tomb, distressed and terrified. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” Not exactly the ending we are familiar with. Then there are two other possible endings found in different manuscripts that tell of some other post resurrection appearances and the stories of the women telling about what they saw.

One of the things that I love about the Bible is that no matter how many times you read it, there is always the possibility that something new will jump out and catch your attention – something that speaks to you in a new way. This is what happened to me with Mark’s resurrection account. Let me read a small portion of that to you again and see if you catch it. “He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell the disciples and Peter.” There are two little words there. “And Peter.” I had never really noticed them until I read something by Max Lucado and he pointed them out. “And Peter.”

Peter was always in the center of things when he was with Jesus. He was in the center of things the night Jesus was betrayed, arrested, and tried as a criminal – but this time, Peter was in the center in a shame filled way. On that night, Peter, the man whom Jesus had called the Rock, denied three times that he even knew who Jesus was. Now, in Mark’s gospel, the angel is telling the women who have come to the tomb, to tell the disciples that Jesus is risen. And to make sure that there is no question about it, they are told specifically to tell Peter. Even though Peter had denied Jesus – and perhaps especially because he had denied Jesus – Peter, especially, is to be told that Jesus has risen.

There is a real treasure in those two words. There is a message of hope and grace that is beyond anything we might expect. There is an incredible second chance – for Peter, and for us. There aren’t many second chances in life. If you doubt that, think for a minute about Bill Buckner. He had an impressive 20 year career as a major league baseball player. He was an outstanding fielder at First Base. In his career he was charged with only 128 errors in almost 14,000 fielding opportunities. That’s a very impressive record. And yet, ask the Red Sox faithful who Bill Buckner is, and you will hear about the ground ball that went between his legs in the 10^th inning of game 6 of the 1986 World Series when the Red Sox were one out away from winning their first World Series in 68 years. Contrary to popular memory, Buckner’s fielding error did not give the Series Win to the Mets; it merely made Game 7 necessary. And yet, that is the legacy that has haunted Bill Buckner’s impressive career. There was no second chance – no “do over”.

It’s a different story in the Bible, however. The Gospel and indeed most of the Bible is a story of second chances. God continually reaches out to us to offer us a second chance – and generally a third, fourth, fifth and even more if we need it. Go, tell the disciples and Peter.

We worship a God of relationships; a God of mercy, of reconciliation, of second chances. Many of us at one time or another in our lives have been like Peter, denying Jesus. Oh, we may not have come out and said, “I don’t know him.” But our actions may have said otherwise. Many of us have at some time become busy with many other important and good things in life and let our relationship with Christ take a back seat to everything else. That is denying him as surely as Peter’s frightened verbal denial. Yet, the message comes to us. Jesus is risen, make sure to tell Susan, John, Ellen, Michael, fill in your name. God reaches out to us with the olive branch of peace and reconciliation. God offers us a second chance, a “do over.”

God loves us so much that the choice to accept or reject God belongs to us. God is not a puppeteer forcing us to do one thing rather than another. God does not manipulate us into accepting God’s love – if that were so, then it wouldn’t be love would it? The choice comes to each of us daily. If yesterday and the day before you said, “no”, today is a new opportunity to say, “yes”.

You see, God is about inclusion. Please don’t let anyone tell you that God wants to exclude anyone from the Kingdom of God. Throughout the Old Testament, we hear God’s word about welcoming the stranger, about treating the stranger with justice and mercy. In the Gospels we see Jesus eating with tax collectors, and other sinners. We see Jesus healing the child of a gentile woman. We hear Jesus tell a story about neighbors where the one who acted as a neighbor to an injured man was a despised Samaritan who showed mercy and compassion. We find Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman who was an outsider even in her own village. On the cross, between two thieves, we hear Jesus say, “This day you will be with me in paradise.” Jesus went out of his way to include those who were excluded from mainstream society.

In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles this morning, we have the last piece in a wonderful story about inclusion. I would encourage you to read the rest of the 10^th and 11^th chapters in the book of Acts if you aren’t familiar with this story. In it you’ll find Peter – yes, the same Peter who had denied Jesus three times – this same Peter experiences a profound vision. Through this vision he comes to understand in a very dramatic way that as he proclaims in today’s reading, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality” or “God treats everyone on the same basis.” This takes place in the home of Cornelius, a Captain in the Roman Army. To go to Cornelius’ home and to eat with him was a direct violation of everything Peter had been taught since he was a child.

Peter had been transformed by Jesus’ death and resurrection. He had been transformed by the angel’s instructions to tell the disciples, including Peter. He had experienced forgiveness from the risen Jesus. He had been asked three times by the risen Christ, “Do you love me?” Three times he had been told, “Feed my sheep, take care of my lambs.” Jesus hadn’t meant four footed wooly creatures, but two footed unruly stubborn humans who find it hard to do what we are supposed to do, who need a second and third chance. Peter had experienced that second, third, and even fourth chance and now he was ready to be open to new ways. He was ready to boldly go where no observant Jew had gone before. He was ready to be used by God to bring the message of inclusion, of love, mercy, grace, and justice wherever God sent him.

Following this event, he was challenged by other believers who were scandalized at what he had done by visiting with and including Gentiles. He stood before what we might call the first all Church Conference and testified to what had happened and how his attitude and understanding had been changed by God’s actions. At the end of his testimony, we hear that “they stopped their criticism and praised God.”

Go, tell the disciples, and Peter. Go, tell the Gentiles. Go, tell the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the shepherds, the merchants. Go, tell the world, that Jesus has risen, that he is going ahead of us. Hear the good news for yourself, be reconciled if that is what needs to happen in your life. Become reconnected if that is your need. Receive the good news. Be transformed as Peter was transformed. Live a life that reflects the grace and love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and go and share the good news.

God of love, on this day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. On this day, we hear the words, “Go, tell the disciples and Peter.” If today we are Peter, we give you thanks for second chances. Help us to hear the good news in new ways that transform our lives. If today, we are more like the women who came to the tomb, send us forth to share the good news with all the Peters you place in our lives. Help us to live reconciled with you, renewed and reconnected, transformed and filled with your grace and love that we may share your love with others. Amen.

We know that the wilderness of our lives is difficult and often frightening, so what sustains us in the wilderness? How do we cope? From where does our strength come? Sometimes we think we need to be like Pollyanna with a cheerful and infectious optimism. There is no question that optimism is powerful, but it isn’t enough. We need more than optimism and it is that “something more” that we focus on in this last sermon on wilderness time.

In Mark’s gospel we hear that when Jesus was in the wilderness the wild beasts were with him. We know about the wild beasts. They have many names: discouragement, grief, loneliness, doubt, and fear, to mention but a few. But then Mark says something else, “And the angels waited on him.”

When you think of an angel, I imagine that the immediate image that comes to mind for many is a being with a halo around its head, wings sprouting from the back, and a long flowing robe. There are numerous works of art depicting angels and many of us have pins or little statues of guardian angels or other angels. At Christmas especially we are likely to have angels decorating our Christmas tree. However, the Bible doesn’t really seem to be concerned with what angels look like. The Bible is more concerned with what the angels do. The Hebrew and the Greek word for angel mean “messenger.” Angels of messengers of hope when God’s message of hope is most needed. Angels are the way we talk about God being present and bringing hope.

Think about some of the angels in the Bible. There was the angel who visited Abraham and Sarah and gave them the message of hope that they would have a son. An angel met the grieving women at Jesus’ tomb and proclaimed the great message of hope: “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said.” Angels always seem to show up at terribly low times in individuals’ lives. Angels seem to show up when God seems far away and when the next moment seems uncertain. It is the time of great need and weakness when the messengers of God deliver their word of hope.

This is the good news that Paul discovered and told about in the Epistle reading. Paul was tormented by something he described as a “thorn in the flesh”. When he prayed repeatedly for this burden to be removed, he received this answer from the Lord, “My grace is sufficient for you for power is made perfect in weakness.” It is in our time of need and weakness that God’s message of hope and comfort is spoken – most often in a language too deep for words and too profound to voice. In the times of greatest need, God’s message of hope comes through when the soul is open to receive it, and sometimes even when we are not open. That is the good news of comfort in the wilderness. We are not alone. God’s sustenance and strength is available to us and we can leave the wilderness stronger than when we entered because of God working in our lives.

We are comforted not by a positive attitude, not by optimism, but by hope – the hope that comes from knowing that we are not alone; the hope that comes from knowing that the wilderness is not all there is; and the hope that comes from knowing that when our strength has gone, God’s strength is sufficient. Hope stays with us singing its song in the bleakest wilderness.

If you are uncomfortable with the idea of angels as heavenly beings coming to us, think about something else. If angels are messengers of hope, can it be that most of the angels we meet are fellow humans? Many years ago, I was very sick with one of those nasty flu type things. One of the women from church brought a very large container of soup – large enough to feed me for at least a week if not longer – and it did! I think that soup was the only food I ate for about a week. I would crawl out of bed just long enough to heat up some soup and then crawl back to bed. When I recovered my health and returned to church, the first sermon I heard was about “angel food”. I don’t remember anything else about the sermon, but I knew that the soup that had arrived on my doorstep was definitely angel food delivered by an angel named Gloria.

Think of some of your darkest wilderness experiences. Were there people who were God’s messengers of hope for you? That is one of the most beautiful ministries that God gives any of us – to become a ministering angel to help a brother or sister in the wilderness experience the comforting presence of God. Even in the worst wilderness imaginable, God calls us to be persons through whom the light and life and love of God flow into a wilderness world. John Henry Jowett said, “God does not comfort us to make us comfortable, but to make us comforters.”[i]

We’ve been talking about wilderness for several weeks now, and you may be wondering when we are going to get out of it. That’s a feeling that we often have in the wilderness and it is helpful to remember that wilderness times are temporary. One of the phrases repeated more than 450 times in the King James Version of the Bible is “It came to pass”. That can be very good news, if you are in the wilderness. Wilderness times come but they are not permanent. Wilderness time, the time in which we learn about priorities, face challenges, learn to depend on God, may experience doubt and find comfort are always followed by a new beginning.

Wilderness times often mark the end of one phase and the beginning of a new phase of our lives. Jesus’ time in the wilderness was followed by the beginning of his public ministry. It prepared him and strengthened him in a way that perhaps nothing else could.

New beginnings are at the heart of the gospel message. No matter who we are or what we have done, whether the wilderness is of our own making or not, God is present in the wilderness with us and can lead us through it and out of it. Remember the words of the 23^rd Psalm, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

The apostle Paul was an expert in new beginnings. He spent a great deal of time in the wilderness but he also knew the power of being made new and set free from the wilderness of a broken relationship with God and with others. The Message translates part of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians this way, “What we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from God.”

Jesus told the story of a man who had two sons. One day the younger of the two and in so many words said, “I wish you were dead.” He asked for his inheritance and ran away to a distant country. It didn’t take him long to blow his inheritance and he found himself homeless and hungry. Eventually he decided to go home and see if his father would consider forgiving him. As he approached the house his father saw him coming and ran out to greet him and welcome him back home. Jesus taught that God is like that loving father. If you’re in the wilderness, feeling separated from God – God is like the loving father ready to run and meet you and welcome you home – even if you ran off into the wilderness yourself.

But what about the greatest wilderness? What about death? The good news of our faith is that even the wilderness of death comes to pass. The apostle Paul observed that, “In Christ, death has been swallowed up in victory.” (I Cor. 15:54) The good news is that even out of the wilderness of suffering and death, and even out of the wilderness of the death of someone we love, there is a new beginning. Death is swallowed up in victory through Jesus Christ. Death never has the final word.

When Jesus was on the cross, he was in the darkest wilderness of his life. Jesus was nailed to that cross to die as a criminal by that cruel Roman means of execution. As he hung there, the life draining from him, he experienced the the rejection, the anguish, and the loneliness of the darkest wilderness. Jesus cried out, quoting Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” But, we know that he also prayed, “Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit.”

We know that the cross was not the end. We, who walk the wilderness way with Christ, know that at the end is resurrection. Death will never have the final word. No matter what the wilderness, no matter how many wild beasts are present, there are angels who come to help us, and the wilderness will “come to pass” into a new beginning.

Gracious and loving God, there are those who are dwelling in a dry, desolate, and lonely wilderness. As they struggle in the wilderness, help them know that they do not struggle alone. Help them know your presence nd find comfort and strength to endure. Help us to remember, O God, that you call us to be present in another’s wilderness as those called to minister in Jesus’ name.

God of new beginnings, help us hear the good news that in Christ the old has passed away and the new has come. Help us know that even the darkest wilderness gives way to light and life and new beginnings in you. Amen.

[i] With few exceptions, the majority of this sermon comes directly from Tim Bruster’s sermons “Wilderness Time: A time for comfort” and “Wilderness Time: A time of New Beginnings” in Abingdon Preaching Annual 2006. My apologies and gratitude to Tim Bruster for coming to my rescue in a difficult week.

In the earlier weeks of Lent, we’ve talked about the Wilderness as being a metaphor for our Christian journey and an appropriate symbol for Lent especially. We meditated on the wilderness as a time of learning, of challenge and of dependence on God. Today we focus on the doubt and questioning that takes place in the wilderness. This is a subject that really resonates with me, because for most of my life I have struggled with questions and doubts. I like things to be logical. One of my favorite pastimes is to work on Logic Puzzles and I’m attracted to the new craze of Su Doku puzzles because they are logical. I want things to make sense. Unfortunately for me, life doesn’t always make sense.

I have always loved the father in the gospel story we heard earlier. He brought his son to Jesus for healing and when Jesus talked about faith, he cried out, “I believe, help my unbelief!” or “I have faith, but not enough. Help me have more!” The cry of the father seeking healing for his son was not the first such cry, nor would it be the last. People of faith down through the ages – including the greatest Christian leaders – have experienced doubt in the wilderness time.

Unfortunately all too often we, in the church, have dismissed or discounted doubt as the product of an immature faith. The reality is that this causes many people to try to keep their doubt hidden because they are ashamed of it, they don’t want anyone to know. On any given Sunday morning in any congregation, there are many people sitting in the pews who hold unresolved issues of faith. When we go through a difficult time, it is extremely rare not to struggle with the tough questions and to have doubts of some kind. It is critically important that the church be a safe place where these doubts can be raised without the questioner being made to feel like a second-class Christian! Each year I hope that one of the things the youth in confirmation class will really understand is that it is okay to have questions.

The important truth is that doubt is a part of our faith journey. Most Christians experience it at one time or another – especially in the wilderness times. Many of us experience it a number of times throughout our lives. “Doubt is part of the Christian’s journey, but doubt is not a good destination – any more than the wilderness is a good destination. It is not intended to be a stopping place. Doubt calls us to action. It moves us on and move us forward. There is a big difference between doubting and giving up. There is an immense difference between wrestling with faith and throwing it to the side. There is a big difference between moving through doubt and getting stuck there and becoming a cynic. The healthy way of understanding doubt is to understand it as part of the faith journey. The key to doubt being a journey and not a destination is caring about God and wanting to move to faith: `I believe. Help my unbelief.”[i]

Frederick Buechner wrote wonderfully hopeful and helpful words about doubt. “If you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep you awake and moving.”[ii] How much more comforting it is for me to think of doubt as part of the faith journey! Too often we tend to think of doubt as the opposite of faith, but in reality apathy or staunch disbelief is the opposite of faith. Paul Tillich, the great theologian, defined faith as “the state of being ultimately concerned.” In other words what we are most concerned about is what we really have faith in. If you have doubts, it is because you are concerned about God. We are called to ultimately concerned about God – to have faith and trust in God. The opposite of being ultimately concerned is not caring at all. I have learned through the years, and I hope that you have too, that if we are ultimately concerned abut God and about our life in God, then our doubts will not destroy our faith, but will deepen our concern and urge us on to resolve the questions and the doubts.

If we look at the lives of those who we consider the most faith-filled down through the ages, it would be difficult to conclude that doubt is destructive of faith and something to be avoided. Many people were shocked to learn after her death that Mother Theresa, whom people considered to be a walking saint, was a person who also struggled deeply with many issues of faith and had many questions and doubts. These did not turn her away from God, but rather her love of God caused her to want to know more, understand more, and helped to raise the questions with which she struggled. Perhaps the struggle is essential to a strong faith in the same way that the struggle of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon is essential to the strength of the new creature.

So, if doubt is a part of our wilderness experience, what do we do with our doubts? First of all, we should not suppress them or deny them. Authentic faith begins with intellectual honesty, and doubt is the foundation stone of honesty. Ask the questions and continue to search. Don’t let your doubts stop up the channels to God. Let the doubts open the way for more insights and more understanding.

I remember well, a conversation that a professor of mine in seminary had with a member of a religious group that he considered a cult. He asked the young man, what he believed about Matthew 25 where Jesus talks about what you do for the least of these you do for me. The young man looked him straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know, they haven’t told me what to believe about that yet.” To me that is frightening. We can discuss the interpretation of various passages in the Bible, we can study the best scholars, I can share with you and offer some understandings, but neither I nor anyone else, can or should presume to tell you what you have to believe about any particular passage of scripture or any question of life. God gave us the ability to reason, to question and to struggle with the really difficult questions of life.

There are times when we will come to the point of saying, “I simply do not know. I have struggled with the question. It is still a question. There are some answers that are not acceptable to me, but I really don’t know what the answer is.” At those times, we may need to remember that we are human and God is God and it is not given for us to know everything. So the first thing to do with doubt is to acknowledge it, not suppress it. Learn to live with it.

The second thing is to stay involved with other Christians. We can learn a lesson here from the disciple Thomas, who voiced his serious doubts about Jesus’ resurrection, yet he continued to remain in the company of the other disciples as he worked through his doubts. By the way, although Thomas is often called the Doubter, he was a man of great faith and commitment. Earlier in John’s Gospel, when Jesus was going to go to Bethany when he received word that his friend Lazarus had died, the other disciples tried to talk him out of going because the Jerusalem area was a dangerous place for Jesus to be at that time. Thomas is the one who said, “Let us go and die with him.” Thomas is also the one who asked the hard questions at other times. During the Last Supper when Jesus tried to explain what was going to happen, he said, “You know the way to the place where I am going.” Thomas was the one who raised the question that was on everyone’s mind. “Lord, we do not know where you are going; so how can we know the way?” Thomas stayed connected with the other disciples throughout all of his questions and doubts. Group support and sharing is a powerful way we can share our burdens and find support for moving through the periods of doubt.

The third thing we should do is to continue to seek Christ and faith in Christ. The issue is never one of avoiding out doubts as if that will cure us of them. Rather it is continuing in honest relationship to God. The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God said, “When you search for me, you will find me.” (Jeremiah 29:13) Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given you, search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.” (Matthew 7:7) When we do these things, our periods of doubts and questions can lead us to faith.

In the early days of John Wesley’s ministry, when he was experiencing a particularly difficult time of doubts and uncertainties, he went to his Moravian friend, Peter Boehler, and shared his concerns. Boehler told Wesley: “Preach faith until you have it, and then because you have it you will preach faith.” In other words, act as though you have already moved past doubt to faith; then, as you act in faith, faith will come.

[i] Mosser, David N. editor The Abingdon Preachng Annual 2006, “Wilderness Time: A Time of Doubt” by Tim K. Bruster. Much of the outline and some content comes from this sermon – the fourth in a series of Lenten sermons. Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2005, pp.83-85

[ii] Buechner, Frederick Wishful Thinking, New York: Haper & Row, 1987, p.20 cited in Bruster’s sermon.

There are many many things that I love about being a pastor. One of the things that I could do without is discovering that the sermon for the week focuses on a topic or a lesson that I need to learn or relearn. Such was this week. The wilderness as a time of dependence. There were many things happening this week that demanded an extra measure of energy – both physical and emotional. Quickly I remembered that the energy that was really needed was spiritual energy. This was, like everyday of life, a time when I truly needed to depend upon God.

Wilderness times are times of complete dependence upon God. This is such an important part of the wilderness experience, but it is one that we sometimes overlook. In the midst of wilderness times, in the midst of so many demands or needs, there is a tendency to dig in , draw on our inner reserves and push ahead thinking that we can do it; we are strong enough, we can handle it under our own power. Sometimes we may include special friends or others and draw upon their strength and their offers to help; but ultimately we discover that a wilderness time is a time of complete dependence upon God.

We heard, this morning, the reading of the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus. When the Hebrew people had escaped from Egyptian slavery with the help of God, they wandered in the wilderness needing to learn how to live together as a community. God gave them the Ten Commandments as the basic rule of life. These commandments are not requirements or burdens laid upon them by a demanding God, but rather, they are the directions on how to life a life that will ultimately be filled with the freedom that God wants for each of us and the community that God desires for us. The very first law is “You shall have no other gods before me.” Rather than hearing this as a selfish ego-centric God making a demand, try hearing this as a loving God stating a reality of life. When we put anything else ahead of God we are headed for confusion, conflict and more problems than we can handle. When we make anything else the god of our lives then we run the risk of being disappointed or betrayed by the person or thing we have made most important. Family, health, career, love, and all of the other things we value in life are fleeting and can disappear in a moment. Only God is enduring.

As the Hebrew people wandered in the wilderness, God gave taught them how to live in habitual dependence upon God. God provided manna (food) and everything else that they needed in the wilderness. Each day God provided what they needed for that day. The manna – a grain like substance – could not be saved or hoarded for the future because it went bad if saved. It needed to be eaten and the next day there was a new fresh supply. This lesson taught them not just dependence upon God but habitual dependence upon God. Each new day brought them a new reminder of their utter dependence upon God.

Each Sunday when we gather, we pray the Lord’s Prayer. As we do so, we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” In teaching the disciples to pray in this way, Jesus was teaching them and us that every day we should acknowledge who the source of everything is. Jesus was telling us to acknowledge our daily dependence on God.

Can you think of a time when God provided for you what you needed for that very moment? Often God meets us where we are and provides for our immediate need, but does not always show us the big picture. Sometimes, particularly following the death of a loved one, or when facing a major illness or change in life, we wonder how we will ever deal with what’s happening for all the days, weeks, months, and perhaps years to come. At those times, God gives us what we need for that very day, sometimes for that very moment. Much later when we look back we may be grateful that we didn’t see all that would occur, the big picture would have been so overwhelming, but day by day, step by step with God’s help we are able to make it.

When our strength, our emotional resources, and the other sources of what we need are at an end, then we learn to be dependent on God. The prophet Isaiah reminds us that even the young grow weak and fall exhausted, but that those who trust in the Lord, will find their strength renewed, so “we shall run and not be weary, we shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31)

The Bible is full of images that call to mind our dependence upon God. Whether we are in the wilderness or not, it is good to meditate upon those images.

Time and time again, God is characterized as a shepherd, and Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd. Sheep are totally dependent upon their shepherd for protection from predators and even from themselves. Sheep are totally dependent upon the shepherd for their source of food. Most of us have been taught that dependence is bad and independence is good. But that’s not completely true. In order to be independent we have to be dependent upon many things. In the wilderness, however, we have needs that we can’t meet with our own resources. What is called for in the wilderness is dependence – dependence upon God, who is able to meet our needs.

Another image that Jesus used is that of the vine. He said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” (John 15:5) That means that our strength and sustenance comes from outside of ourselves. It comes from our connection to the Source – to the Vine.

In Hampton Court Palace near London, there is a grapevine that was planted in 1768. Some of its branches are two hundred feet long and the single root is at least two feet thick. Because of skillful cutting and pruning, that one vine produces more than six hundred pounds of black grapes every year. Although some of the smaller branches are two hundred feet from the main stem, they bear plenty of fruit because they are joined to the vine and allow the life of the vine to flow through them. We, like the branches, are dependent on Jesus Christ for life in all its fullness. We draw our life from him.

In his letter to the Philippians, the apostle Paul wrote of the strength he gained from Christ when he said, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)

In the passage we just heard from Hebrews, the writer teaches that Jesus Christ is our great High Priest. Unlike the Jewish people of Jesus time who understood the practices of temple worship and the role of the High Priest, that image may be unfamiliar to us. What is important is that Jesus is identified as the High Priest who could sympathize with our weaknesses, who has been tested in the same ways that we have been and yet did not sin. He goes on to say, “Let us be brave, thn, and approach God’s throne, where there is grace. There we will receive mercy and find grace to help us just when we need it.”

Did you hear that, “Just when we need it.” Christ understands our loneliness and despair. Christ understands the wilderness. Whatever wilderness we find ourselves in, Christ understands, because he has been there, and is there with us.

You may remember a couple of years ago that the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island, Geralyn Wolf spent some time posing as a homeless person and spent time on the streets and in the shelters. Some people were angry that in doing so, she had taken a spot that was needed by another homeless person. But many recognized that through doing this she came to understand and could then communicate the plight of the homeless, the services available to them, and the many needs that existed.

So it is with Jesus who walked where the outcasts walked. This is part of the message of the Lenten season, part of the message of the cross. Jesus walked where we walk. When we walk the way of suffering, Jesus walks with us. In the wilderness times, in times of our greatest need, we will receive strength from beyond ourselves. That strength comes from God.

The story is told of a boy and his father who were walking along a road when they came to a large stone. The boy said to his father, “Do you think if I use all my strength, I can move this rock!”

His father answered, “If you use all your strength, I am sure you can do it.”

The boy began to push the rock. Exerting himself as much as he could, he pushed and pushed. The rock did not move. Discouraged, he said to his father, “You were wrong, I can’t do it.”

The father placed his arm around the boy’s shoulder and said, “No, son, you didn’t use all your strength – you didn’t ask me to help.”[i]

Wilderness time is time when we must use all our strength – and God is our strength!

[i] David J. Wolpe, Teaching your Children About God. New York, Henry Holt, 1993, p.214 This illustration and much of the content of this sermon comes from Tim K Bruster’s sermon series, “Wilderness Time” found in Abingdon Preaching Annual 2006.

Into the wilderness we are called and we must go. Our spiritual ancestors certainly had their time in the wilderness. Our Hebrew scripture today tells us of God speaking to Abram and saying

Think of it, Abram was 99 and Sarai was 90 and God calls them to obey and he will give them more descendants than can be counted. A very daunting task was set before this couple. Can you imagine God calling you to start a family of nations at 90 and 99 years of age?!? How perplexing and how beyond our earthly understanding. Certainly not a challenge you or I would seek out at the ages of 99 and 90. But, God called and Abram became Abraham and Sarai became Sarah. By answering God’s incomprehensible challenge, a challenge beyond their understanding, God blesses them with new names, Abraham and Sarah, new life, life that was to change the world in God’s way.

Another spiritual ancestor who had time in the wilderness is David. In Psalm 22, David expresses the challenges before him in agonizing emotions and crying out for God. David is desperate and under attack from every direction. He cries out in his despair at the beginning of this Psalm

Isn’t this often our first response to times of trouble? Times when we feel under attack from life’s circumstances, overwhelmed by the suffering when in the wilderness. This is our human response to the painful challenges in the wilderness.

Don’t stay far away Lord! My strength comes from you, so hurry and help. Rescue me from enemy swords and save me from those dogs. Don’t let lions eat me.

David works through the emotions of despair as he turns the suffering around to ask God for help and then to praise God. By the end of the Psalm, we have these words from David:

This is a dramatic change from the despair expressed by David at the beginning of the Psalm when he is reacting to the circumstances surrounding him. David shows us how to travel through the wilderness of despair, by turning to God and asking for God’s help and then by praising God for bringing us hope. May we find our way when in the wilderness to ask for God to help us and then to Praise God and to thank Him.

I teach a class called Optimal Human Functioning and one theme throughout the course is how we can achieve sustained happiness and what we can do when we are knocked down by life’s circumstances. Life will knock us down but how soon we get back on our feet, find our way out of the wilderness, can depend on how we think about our circumstances. Seligman, a cognitive psychologist has compiled decades of research to help people live the optimal life. One part of our lives we can change for sustained happiness is how we think of the past and the present. He talks about the importance of forgiveness. It is sometimes hard to forgive our enemies, those who have wronged us. David certainly did not want to be thrown to the lions by his enemies. But to escape the wilderness experience of suffering and to keep from bringing that suffering into our daily existence, Seligman states that forgiving the past wrongs defuses the bitterness that makes satisfaction impossible. We are to leave the bitterness behind. Another key according to Seligman is to increase a sense of gratitude and daily thankfulness. He had a class assignment in his graduate seminar where students would write a letter to someone they had not adequately thanked, someone who they had life time gratitude for the positive influence this person had on the student’s life. The students wrote these letters of testimonial, giving thanks to this person and then invited the person to come to class and they read the letters out loud. Sharing in this way increased the students’ positive feelings of being grateful for the influences in their life, grateful not bitter about the past. Another exercise to increase gratitude, I tried with my class this semester. You take 5- 10 minutes at the end of each day for about two weeks and list 5 things you were thankful for that happened during that day. We called it our Thankful Journals. Students shared some of the following: they were thankful for friends and family, for parents who cared, for shelter, for food, for heat, for health, for a day without a migraine. They were thankful for their life circumstances. One student wrote I am thankful that I had good schooling and family and didn’t end up in jail at age 17, another that her brother’s heart surgery went well, another I am thankful for a loving family who helped get out of a terrible depression. They found they were thankful for the simplest of things, pizza, clean laundry, warm, sunny days in February, a warm cup of tea. Perhaps the students were not experiencing the crisis that David was when writing Psalm 22, but they found things to be thankful for and they said, this was like their evening prayers and they will continue to include thanking and praising God for all they have been given by Him. Thanking God and singing His praises like David helps us in good times and bad.

Like David, Paul encourages us during our time of being tested by suffering brought on by life’s challenges, in 2 Corinthians 4:8-11, Paul writes:

When we are in the midst of a wilderness experience the emotions of suffering are very powerful, too powerful at times creating a desire in us to shut down, shut ourselves off from others, to feel alone. The last thing we may think of is to look to ourselves to find God close by, but He is.

The surprising thing to me about this passage, is that God’s Spirit calls Jesus to the wilderness to be tempted and surrounded by challenges and potential attack from wild beasts. But, the angels took care of him. What did Jesus know about accepting the wilderness challenge? Jesus had faith in God and had obedience in answering and acting on all that God called him to do. Jesus also knew that he would not be alone during his time in the wilderness as he was never alone. Jesus knew that God dwelt within him and so he accepted this time away from others to listen to God and to trust God, he knew God would bring him through the wilderness. When Jesus came out of the wilderness of challenges he was strong with the Spirit to do God’s work. Know that our communion time with God in the wilderness makes us stronger to do His work.

This is one lesson we can use to help us in our times of the wilderness challenge, to know that when life’s circumstances places us in the wilderness that God is close by, we are thankful for His presence and we will emerge stronger with His Spirit to do His work.

Perhaps there is a second, less obvious wilderness challenge. Perhaps God calls us to times of solitude, times to be alone with Him, to seek His spirit everyday, not just to seek Him out in times of trouble, but to deal with the daily jungle of modern life. Being alone in our own company can be a frightening challenge for some of us, perhaps sometimes it is preferable to go along our busy ways without making time to commune with God.

I did a google search on the wilderness experience and among the links that came up on the computer was a site that is entitled Christians for Mountains: Christianity and Wilderness. The scripture at the top of this site was from Luke 5:16, Jesus withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.

The site goes on to explain that wilderness has great spiritual value. That most people who spend time in wilderness settings will say that their being in wilderness is spiritually strengthening. Indeed, some go into the wilderness for the purpose of spiritual cleansing and awakening. …

This website talks about how Paul Brooks in his text The Pursuit of Wilderness talks about wilderness. He states that the biblical meaning of wilderness was desert. It was a hostile environment, a last refuge for outcasts, a place into which you drove the scapegoat laden with the sins of mankind… wilderness was unholy ground inhabited largely by devils.

And then in John Muir’s letter to his mother about his first explorations in Yosemite Valley we are given a very different picture of the wilderness. John Muir writes, Oh, these vast, calm measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest. Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, to be weary, whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever. I wish you could come here and rest a year in the simple unmingled love – fountains of God. You would return with fresh truth gathered and absorbed from pines and waterfalls and deep-singing winds, and you would find that they all sang of fountain love just as did Jesus Christ and all of pure God…

The authors of this website go on to comment about how these two descriptions of the wilderness may seemingly be contradictory but at a deeper level they coexist. Wilderness is challenge, test, struggle, yet also a place for spiritual purification and reflection.

Thomas Merton (1915- 1968) talks about the deliberate solitude that is the conviction that will help you to love not only God but also other people. Merton encourages us to go into the desert not to escape people but in order to find them in God. He encourages us to find a solitary place, a space we can be in and to visit this same room or corner where we will not be disturbed so that we may enter this chamber of solitary time to pray.

City churches are sometimes quiet and peaceful solitudes, caves of silence where a person can seek refuge from the intolerable arrogance of the business world. One can be more alone, sometimes in church than in a room in one’s own house. At home, one can always be routed out and disturbed (and one should not resent this, for love sometimes demands it). But in these quiet churches one remains nameless, undisturbed in the shadows. The very tastelessness and shabbiness of some churches makes them greater solitudes, though churches should not be vulgar. Even if they are, as long as they are dark it makes little difference. Let there always be quiet, dark churches in which people can take refuge. Places where they can kneel in silence. Houses of God, filled with His silent presence. There, even when they do not know how to pray, at least they can be still and breathe easily. Let there be a place somewhere in which you can breathe naturally, quietly, and not have to take your breath in continuous short gasps. A place where your mind can be idle, and forget its concerns, descend into silence and worship the Father in secret.

I had a quiet, sanctuary experience like Merton describes on the last youth church service blitz and sleep over. During these events I turn my parental eyes and ears way up to detect any possible problems any of the youth might have. Most have slept away from home, but I listen for whimpering of homesickness or the whimpering of a stomach ache from eating leftover pizza at midnight, there were just happy sounds that night, giggling, friendly teasing, shushes, and finally after midnight the happy noises gave way to silence. There is nothing so beautiful than the sound of sleeping teenagers at one of these events. I drift off for awhile and when I woke up I checked my small, digital alarm clock at read 5:58 AM, good, I thought time to get up and get ready before I wake the girls at 6:30. So I got up, washed, tried to make myself presentable, rolled up my sleeping bag, folded my blankets and all was still quiet. Good, I thought, I could have some quiet time in the sanctuary, so I wandered in, not turning on any lights. Our sanctuary is never completely dark, maybe it’s the design of the stained glass windows, but there is always some light. It was very much the way Merton describes, a quiet place. I came to the alter, kneeled and prayed. I prayed about some wilderness experiences I was having at work, I asked God for help and yes, I thanked Him for the special people in my life. I prayed with my eyes closed but I had the feeling of being filled up by God’s light. It was a very pleasant solitary time, but I did not feel alone, I felt at peace, centered and happy to do God’s work. I rose and walked out of the sanctuary and thought it odd that no one’s alarm clock had gone off, no one else was stirring, so I focused my eyes on the narthex clock, it read 4:30. I had not gotten up at 5:58, but at 3:58! I had the bonus of some extra quiet, solitary time that morning. I would encourage you to find some quiet sanctuary time. If you are on your way to a meeting or the church is being used at night, the doors are open and aside from when the choir is rehearsing, the sanctuary is usually a quiet place to come and be with God.

In the quiet, dark places there are fewer distractions and it is easier to feel God’s light.

Perhaps the wilderness experience has more than one meaning, one being to seek out this time of quiet, solitary time to be close to God, a time of sanctuary. Make a sanctuary experience for yourself.

God calls us to the wilderness and we must go. During hard times of life’s circumstances we are to know that God is with us during the challenge of suffering and turning to God, asking for help and thanking God will lead us out of the lost wilderness. For our day- to-day experience God calls us to quiet communion with Him, whether it be in the quiet darkness of the woods, a quiet corner of our house, or a quiet dark corner of a church, God’s light is with us. We need the challenge of the wilderness to stay close to God, to reflect, to strengthen our spirit, and to bring His light into the lives of others.

When I was a child, I was told, “Methodists don’t do Lent.” Directly or indirectly I got the impression that Lent was a Catholic thing and, at that time and place, whatever Catholics did, we didn’t. It was a convoluted and twisted way to decide on religious practices. I’m glad that so much of that attitude has changed. It is a great loss for any Christian not to prepare for Good Friday and Easter. Baseball players have reported for spring training; people are starting to think about things like planting gardens and even spring cleaning. We should prepare for the most important event in the ministry of Jesus, Golgotha’s cross and the empty tomb. Lent is a kind of spring training, spring cleaning, and planting for Easter.

Generally I am a lectionary preacher. That means that I follow a set of scriptures that are on a three year cycle. There are many good reasons for following the lectionary when preaching, but there are occasionally good reasons to depart from the lectionary and that is what I am going to do for the season of Lent. As part of our spring training or spring cleaning, I think it’s important for us to prepare for the sorrow of Good Friday and the glory and majesty of Easter by spending some time thinking about where we spend most of our lives – somewhere in between.

The wilderness is often used as a metaphor for our Lenten Journeys as we allow God to lead us through the preparation and testing to become the people that God is calling us to be. The wilderness, quite literally and also metaphorically, is a place of transition, of promise, preparation, and testing and it is a place that is outside of the center of power. The wilderness is a part of our lives. We cannot live and love and engage life in meaningful ways without sometimes ending up in the wilderness.

Jesus began his ministry in the wilderness. In today’s gospel – which, by the way, is from the lectionary – Jesus went out into the wilderness and was baptized by John in the Jordan. As he was coming out of the water, he experienced the powerful affirmation of God’s words, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Mark 1:11) Matthew, Mark and Luke all follow this spectacular event by telling us that this same Spirit that descended upon Jesus at his baptism, then drove him out into the bleak, lonely, dry Judean wilderness for forty days of fasting, testing, and learning. Matthew and Luke give us a much longer account of what took place in the wilderness. Mark confines the experience to one verse, “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” (Mark 1:13)

Wilderness times are those times when we feel that we are tested to our limits, and we often describe those times in wilderness terms: dry, desolate, lonely, trying, difficult, agonizing. We speak of hunger, thirst, and longing in the wilderness. Over the next several weeks of Lent, we are going to be looking at this difficult spiritual territory.

Today, we begin by recognizing that the wilderness time is a time for learning. Perhaps you have seen one of the many e-mails that telling about things that children have learned about life. They include such things as: “You can’t trust dogs to watch your food for you.”

All of these speak of learning by experience, or what we often call, “learning the hard way.” In the hard territory of the wilderness of life we can learn many things, but one thing stands out. We often learn about priorities – what really matters in our lives.

We have so many options in our lives that unless we have a clear sense of what is most important to us we can spend all of our time and energy blowing in the wind and at the end of the day – or the end of our lives – discover that we have not taken care of what matters the most. The wilderness times of our lives are great teachers about what is really important.

In Matthew and Luke, the longer accounts of Jesus time in the wilderness tell us that during this time Jesus was tempted by wealth, fame and power. It was important for him to face these temptations head on early in his ministry because they would present themselves time and time again in the next three years. By facing these temptations early Jesus could have been diverted from the most important parts of his ministry. One of those temptations was part of one of our Gospel readings just a month ago. It is a later part of this same chapter from Mark. Jesus had healed many people in Capernaum. In the morning his disciples came to find him because the town was all ready filling up with people who had come to be healed. When they found Jesus by himself praying and urged him to come back because everyone was waiting, Jesus responded that they had to leave that town and go someplace else so that he could proclaim the message in the other towns – because “that is what I came out to do.” Jesus knew his priorities and after the wilderness experience he stayed connected with God in prayer so that he didn’t forget those priorities.

A young man who was in the wilderness while dealing with an aggressive form of cancer said, “I have learned that what I thought was very important before doesn’t seem very important now, and what I took for granted and thought I could put off for another day has risen to the top of my list of priorities.”[ii]

“As painful as wilderness experiences are, they can yield more spiritual growth than the good times. They can be times of learning about ourselves, about God, about what is most important, and about where life is headed. Without that time of stocktaking and learning – whether in the wilderness or not – life can go along without much thought.”[iii]

During this season of Lent, let me suggest some good wilderness questions to reflect upon. What important relationships and friendships have I been putting off to some future time? What is God calling me to do with my life and with all the resources God has given me? What in my life right now to I take for granted?

Several years ago the people of this congregation decided that a family in our midst needed some assistance for a life saving liver transplant for their daughter. Many fundraisers later and a successful surgery behind her, the remainder of the money raised was no longer needed for her care. Not long ago several people from this church decided that one of the things we take for granted is our access to health care. Many of you decided that one thing to do with some of the resources God has given you is to help a 12 year old child half way around the world without access to modern heath care have life saving surgery. The funds raised for the child in this church provided the seed money that helped us say, yes, we can do this. We can raise the money needed. Saffaitu Bah had her surgery recently and although she faces a long recovery the likelihood of her survival is now very positive.

There are many programs in our town that try to meet the needs of our brothers and sisters. There is a wonderful program that meets here for young parents. Some who need that program cannot get here because they have no transportation. Other people in town have trouble getting to doctor’s appointments because of a lack of transportation. The program FISH helps with that. Drivers are always needed for these kinds of programs.

Each of us has the same 24 hours in every day. The world is quick to tell us how to fill those 24 hours, just as the world was quick to tell Jesus what was important from their perspective. One of the lessons we can learn in the wilderness is not to let others tell us who we are and what is important.

Whether we are in the wilderness or not, let us be intentional during this Lenten season about learning what is of most importance to us. Let us use this time to discover or rediscover our priorities in life. If you have not done so, let me encourage you to pick up one of the Lenten devotional booklets on the small table in the narthex. There is a richness to these meditations written by people from this church.

In the first four days of Lent, in reading the meditations there, I found a good clue to what our priorities ought to be. Give our hearts to God, reach out to help others, ask God to restore to us the joy of our salvation, and accept the transforming love of God that empowers us to live in restored and reconciled relationships with others as we claim the image of God within us. In this way we may be reconciled to God, reconciled to each other and be at peace with ourselves. Sounds like a good beginning to understanding the true priorities of our lives.

Our gracious God during this Lenten season, we are grateful that you meet us where we are and that you are with us wherever we are, even in, and especially in the wilderness. Help us to use this time to seek a closer walk with you and a new awareness of the true priorities of life. Amen.

[i] The basis of this series of sermons is a series by these titles found in the Abingdon Preaching Annual 2006 David N. Mosser editor, Tim K Bruster author of series. Abingdon Press, Nashville, 2005, pp.65-67

[ii] Bruster, p.66

[iii] Bruster, p.66

J.R.R. Tolkien’s, “Lord of the Rings” series has stirred the imagination of young and old alike. The first book in the series, “The Hobbit” has a wonderful scene in it that comes to mind when I think of today’s Scripture readings. Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, and his 12 companions are traveling through a dangerous forest infested with gigantic spiders and all manner of creepy-crawly things. It was a frightening experience and they all wanted to get out of the forest, none more so than Mr. Bilbo Baggins, who like most hobbits much preferred his safe cozy home far more than traveling in strange places.

Hoping against hope that the edge of the forest would soon appear, they continued their travels but as time went on their hopes were greatly diminished. Finally it was decided that Bilbo Baggins, being the smallest of them all, should climb the tallest tree to look around and see where the dark forest ended.

Very reluctantly, Bilbo climbed the tree with limbs, branches, and leaves scratching at him. Several times he nearly fell. Finally, he pushed his way through the forest canopy and was nearly blinded by the sudden and intense sunlight. It took some time for his eyes to adjust to the light, but once they had, Bilbo found that it was very wonderful and beautiful up there. What a magnificent place to be! It was with great reluctance that he finally made his way back down the tree into the dark oppressive forest where a journey of some length still awaited them.

That story is fiction, but this brief section is symbolic of some truths about our lives – and especially about our lives as Christians. We just heard Mark’s account of the Transfiguration of Jesus. It has all the makings of a great scene for a movie. The words are awesome and majestic. The accounts are full of wonder and mystery. It is tempting for us to try to explain them, to normalize them, to put them in nice little containers which make sense to us - but when we try to do that with “God-experiences” we are trying to take the place of God by explaining God. So today, we live with some of the mystery and majesty.

Jesus took Peter, James and John with him. They left behind the dark valleys of the world where Jesus had been trying to teach his disciples that he would be rejected, put to death and then three days later rise again to life. It had been a disturbing time for the disciples who didn’t understand what Jesus was trying to tell them. A week later, they left this behind, at least temporarily, as they climbed the mountain with Jesus.

Mountaintops can be great places to be. We use the term “mountain-top” experience to describe something that somehow transcends our daily lives, something exciting, exhilarating. Often we are describing something that is breath taking or beyond words. That is what it can be like to stand at the top of a mountain. But those who really know mountains know that the experiences on a mountain can also be dangerous and sometimes frightening. Much preparation and a lot of hard work come before you can stand at the summit.

Sometimes it is not even possible to stand at the summit of a mountain. George Adam Smith, a Scottish preacher, professor and scholar, told about climbing the “Weisshorn (mountain) above the Zermott Valley in Switzerland with two guides on a stormy day. They had made the ascent on the sheltered side. Reaching the top, and exhilarated by the thought of the view before him, Smith sprang to the top of a peak - and was almost blown away by the gale. The guide caught hold of him and pulled him down saying, `On your knees, sir! You are safe here only on your knees.’”[i]

Sometimes the only appropriate response to God’s presence is to be on our knees, or in some other waiting, open, listening posture. Peter and the disciples had become comfortable with Jesus, so comfortable that in the chapter before this event, Mark tells us that Peter took Jesus aside and rebuked him for talking about suffering and dying. This earned him a stern reminder from Jesus to get back into his appropriate place of following the divine not focusing on the human perspective.

Often we become comfortable with what we expect from God. We become comfortable with our ritual, our routine, our worship and study. We may not really recognize or even expect God to be truly present. In the Celtic tradition "Thin Places" are places where the spiritual and the natural world intersect. It is a place where it is possible to touch and be touched by God. "Thin Spaces" are the moments when we experience a deep sense of God’s presence in our everyday world. For Peter, James and John the mountaintop experience with Jesus was one of those thin spaces. If we are honest with ourselves sometimes we may not even want those thin spaces where a word from God might challenge our lives and our worldview.

Often we try to tame or manage our experiences of the sacred as Peter did when he immediately offered to erect tents for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. It was a wonderful act of hospitality that Peter offered. It reminds me of the story of Jesus visiting his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Martha was busy preparing a meal, busy being the perfect hostess, busy being in charge. Mary, on the other hand, was sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him. Here Peter, like Martha, was responding to the presence of God with busyness. Like Martha, he needed to learn that as important as hospitality is, as important and as necessary as activity can be, as good as being responsible is, sometimes the only correct response is to stop, wait, listen, and be open to what God is doing. Peter’s offer to help was met by a voice that appeared to come from a cloud saying, “This is my own dear Son – listen to him!”

This is an important moment in Jesus’ ministry, in which God breaks in to uphold Jesus’ teaching and example, to demonstrate that those who follow and obey this Jesus will also be pleasing to God. Listening to Jesus takes practice. It takes commitment. It takes being open and being still long enough and often enough to be able to hear God speaking to us in many different ways. “Listen to him,” this was the message that they would take with them when they left the mountain.

For leave the mountain they must. Bilbo Baggins could not stay up in the tree, in the light, forever. At some point, he needed to climb back down and rejoin his fellow travelers who waited for him below, and who waited for the directions that they hoped he would bring. Peter, James and John came back down the mountain with Jesus. Jesus continued to teach and to heal. Peter, James and John came back with a new reminder that this Jesus whom they followed, was indeed the Son of God and their job was to “Listen to him.” They came back to the world that was waiting at the bottom of the mountain. If we read a little further we would read, “When they joined the rest of the disciples, they saw a large crowd gathered around then, and some teachers of the Law arguing with them.” They found a man with a son whom the disciples had been unable to heal. It’s a great healing story with the father proclaiming, “I have faith, but not enough. Help me to have more!”

They were thrust immediately back into all the things that had been going on before their brief trip up the mountain. When we have mountaintop experiences we discover that the world hasn’t changed while we’ve been on the mountaintop. Hopefully, we have changed. However, the majority of our living does not take place on the mountaintop; mostly we live in the valleys and sometimes we live in the desert or the wilderness. When we come to worship on Sunday mornings, we come apart from the world for a short time, but then we leave and the needs of the world are still there waiting for us to listen to Jesus and do what we are told to do.

You may have heard the story of the man who came to church late one Sunday morning. He rushed to the door of the sanctuary where he saw the head usher and asked him, “Is the service over?” The usher wisely answered, “Well, the worship is over, but the service has just begun!”

There are some people who would like religion or faith to be all about heartwarming experiences. They want to prolong the times of feeling close to God and prefer to spend all their time praying, studying the Bible, or being in worship. In the account of the transfiguration they might be symbolized by Peter who wanted to stay up on the mountaintop and build tents for Jesus, Moses and Elijah to live in. There are others who want to emphasize social action. They might be symbolized by the other disciples who were not on the mountain, but were down in the valley trying to heal. When Jesus came down from the mountain and encountered the father seeking healing for his son, he was told that the disciples had been unable to heal him. Perhaps that was because they had no power, they had not been up on the mountain.

True Christianity follows the approach that we saw in Jesus. He combined the two. He put worship and service together. He put devotion and social action together. He went up on the mountain to worship and then he came down into the valley to heal.

The message is clear. Don’t try to separate the devotional life from social action. They go together.

The mountaintop teaches us to stop, be still, and listen to the one whom we follow, and then empowered we go out to be God’s servants, to be the instruments of God’s healing power.

[i] Hewett, James S. editor, Illustrations Unlimited Tyndale, Wheaton Ill. 1988, p.419, #14

Do you like new things? I guess it depends on what the new thing is, doesn’t it? I wasn’t sure that I would like the “new thing” the trustees were going to do to the parsonage this summer when the house was to be painted yellow. I was comfortable with the gray; the house often went unnoticed and that probably wouldn’t be the case if it were yellow. I discovered however, that I loved the yellow. More importantly, I discovered that when I walked up the driveway I felt different. The yellow made me smile. I began to realize that the gray and the mold on the back of the house had been a downer for me emotionally. The bright clean yellow house picked me up.

That’s the way it is with some new things. A wedding, the birth of a child, a promotion are generally events that we get excited about. Sometimes the something new is not something we want: a serious illness, the death of someone we love, the loss of a job. Sometimes things happen that change our life for ever – and sometimes we don’t recognize how momentous the change will be at the time.

New things happen on a vast scale as well. Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, the Station Nightclub fire three years ago tomorrow, and events so momentous we have only to mention the date – September 11^th. Such events become watershed events for communities, nations and even for history.

The passage from the prophet Isaiah today focuses on such a watershed event in the history of Israel. God said, “I am about to do a new thing.” People had to sit up and take notice. These words came to a people who were in exile. They had been forced to leave their homes decades before and taken into captivity in a foreign land. Their temple had been destroyed and it was hard to convince them that God had not been destroyed along with the temple. They were extremely discouraged and felt that all hope was gone.

Then suddenly in the midst of their discouragement comes a word from God. God is about to do a new thing. Prior to our text for today, God had referred to what was the central event of Hebrew history – the exodus from Egypt, the rescue from slavery and oppression. In essence, God now says, “forget about the past, I’m about to do something so spectacular it will make your heads spin; something so wonderful that you’re going to stop looking back and talking about the good old days.”

A new thing – rivers springing up in the desert, wild animals praising God – yes, that new, that amazing. God would bring God’s people back to their land; even though they had forgotten or abandoned God, God would not abandon them.

In our gospel reading, some people wanted to bring their sick friend to Jesus to be healed. Unfortunately for them there were so many people gathered in and around the house where Jesus was that they couldn’t get near the door. Desperation can make people do strange things, or perhaps they remembered that God had made a way through the desert to bring their ancestors back to Israel. They removed the roof above Jesus and lowered the mat with the sick man down through the hole. When Jesus saw their faith, he announced first forgiveness and then healing. The paralyzed man picked up his mat and went on his way. The crowd was amazed and glorified God saying, “We have never seen anything like this.” A new thing!

Today, if we are willing to hear, God continues to tell us, “I am about to do a new thing” and God asks us to cooperate in this new thing. I found myself Friday night in a place I never expected to be. Along with several other women from the church and some of their friends, I was at the Odeum Theater in East Greenwich for the production of the “Vagina Monologues.” This is a series of monologues produced throughout the world – generally close to Valentine’s Day. They are produced as part of a movement called “V-Day” a day to raise awareness of violence against women and children – the theme is “V-Day until the violence stops.”

We were there because I was to receive an award that night, an award for helping to make the world a safer place for women and girls to live. It was quite an honor – but it almost didn’t happen because I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go to a production of a play called “The Vagina Monologues”; I wasn’t sure I wanted to receive an award called “The Vagina Warrior”. You see, in some respects, I’m like the gray house. I like blending into the background. This was a little too out there for my liking.

Parts of the play were hilarious; parts were extremely powerful and disturbing. One of the women said, “it’s too bad you can’t get anything from this for your sermon.” As I thought about it, I realized that she was wrong. Somewhere in the middle of this whole thing, God was doing something new – new for me, and perhaps new for some other people. I didn’t recognize the new thing at first. I didn’t see the signs as some people from here encouraged me to accept the award. I didn’t see the signs as I tried to prepare what I would say as I accepted the award.

I finally realized that maybe the “new thing” was that God was giving me an opportunity to testify to God’s love in a venue where many people might not have really heard that message. Perhaps there was someone there Friday night who needed to hear me say that, “There is nothing in Christian, Jewish, or Muslim teaching that can rightly be used to justify abuse of another person.” Perhaps someone needed to hear that when scripture or other religious teachings are used in this way, it is not only bad theology but dangerous theology. Maybe someone needed to hear that the model for healthy human relationships comes from the God who knows each of us intimately and loves us with a perfect love and that God’s heart breaks every time one of God’s children is abused, battered or injured.

God continues to do “new things” and to call us to be part of those new things. God continues to call us to find a way like the friends of the paralytic did when the door is blocked. There are many obstacles today which keep people from coming to Jesus. Some of these obstacles are things that we do in our churches. There are some obvious and many less obvious barriers, and often it takes creativity to identify them and find a way to remove them.

The Learning Team has been working for several months now to facilitate discussion and help us see who we are and who we think we are – and whether those two fit together. One of the phrases that we have used is that we are trying to prepare for the next 50 people who God wants to bring through our doors. One of the important questions for any church is whether or not they really want 50 more people to walk through the doors. Churches almost unanimously would say that yes, they want new people to come, but many churches consciously or unconsciously set up barriers to keep them out or at least discourage them from returning.

Sometimes churches don’t want new people to come because it changes things. We might not know everyone like we did back in the good old days. We may not be able to do things our way – the way we did back when we were the only ones in charge. If you ask many churches why they want new people, you might hear that they need new people in order to help meet ends financially, or because they need Sunday School teachers or new people in the choir. In other words they want new people to meet their needs.

That’s not what it’s about. That’s not the new thing God is doing. God is not bringing people into the church to meet our needs, but rather so that we can meet theirs. God is bringing new people into the church because they are God’s children and they need to be in a place where they can meet God and be in a relationship with God, and nurture that relationship and help in grow. God is bringing new people into the church or bringing church people out into the world because there are people who are hungry, or cold, or being hurt by those they love and we are being called to feed them, or keep them warm, or stop them from being hurt.

One of the new things God has been doing in this place has been giving us the opportunity to help a Muslim child half-way around the world. One of the new things God does every day is to give us the opportunity to witness to God’s love as we go about our daily work. That witness may involve words, but it might also be simply a smile to someone who needs it, a gentle word to someone who is feeling beat up, or a word of encouragement to someone who is discouraged. Your witness might be the way you act around other people – and the way you act when you think no one is watching.

Being a friend of Jesus’ means being a friend of those for whom Jesus cares and doing so with that being our only motivation – not with thoughts of acknowledgment or appreciation or anything else. It is a ministry of being present in whatever way is called for at the time, and helping to carry another into the presence of Christ, even if we do not mention his name at the time. When we raise the names of people in prayer during our worship service and in your private prayer time, you are participating in carrying others into the presence of Christ.

In all these, God is busy doing a new thing. We may not see the big picture; we may not even recognize the new thing as it is happening, but with God there’s always the possibility of that new thing happening. When we live as faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, when we reach out to others in Christ’s name, when we cooperate with God’s plan, we might be surprised to hear someone whisper, “We have never seen anything like this.” We might be surprised to look around some day and see the bigger picture and hear ourselves exclaim, “We have never seen anything like this.” God is doing a new thing and we are privilege to be part of it. Praise be to God!

Open our eyes and ears, O Lord, to the new things you have in store for us. Help us not hold the past in our hands so tightly or cling to our comfort zone so tightly that we cannot receive from you the blessings you have for us now and in the future. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

Healing stories like the ones in today’s scripture passages often create problems for us. We ask why some people are healed and others are not? When we read Mark’s Gospel, we have to get used to asking those kinds of questions, because one third of the Gospel of Mark is stories of healing. It has been my experience that when we get too hung up on the questions of who gets healed and who doesn’t, or why, we miss some very real truths contained in these stories.

Both the story from Mark and the story from I Kings are stories about men being healed of something described as leprosy. Leprosy as described in the Bible included much more than the disease that we today know as Leprosy or Hansen’s Disease. There were many skin diseases called leprosy then, some more physically serious than others, but the one thing that they had in common was the way they separated people from society.

I don’t know how the society reacted to leprosy in Aram, where Naaman lived, but in Israel, “Leprosy was the worst thing that could happen to a person. It was a living death. A leper was physically isolated to prevent the disease’s spread. The victim was separated from family and community. The diseased one was required by the law of Moses to live outside the camp and to keep a six foot distance from every other person. The victim was required to wear torn clothes, to let their hair grow and hang loose and to cry a warning, `Unclean’”[1]

For a person to be considered clean or cured of leprosy, he would have to go and present himself to the temple authorities who would examine him for any sign of the disease. Only after being pronounced cured by the authorities was a person allowed to resume a normal life. To be healed of such a disease was far more than the healing of the skin, it meant restoration of a life within the community. It was a healing that was more than skin deep.

As I read these two passages the healing of the leprosy certainly stands out, but there is much more. In Mark’s gospel the man violated several laws in approaching Jesus. He failed to keep the distance required; instead he came right up to Jesus and kneeling before him said, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Mark uses this story, at least in part, to cue us in to the power of God in Jesus. Those first hearing Mark’s gospel would understand something that we might easily miss. They believed that only God could heal at will, so when the man begs Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean,” he is identifying Jesus with God’s power.

Jesus responds in a similar way, “I do choose. Be made clean.” The words themselves would have been enough, but Jesus went beyond words. He reached out and touched the man. He reached out to an outcast and touched him. Jesus, himself, crossed the line of acceptable behavior. We consider it quite acceptable to bring in cans for the Food Pantry - but how often do we get involved in working in the Food Pantry? We consider it a good thing to make a donation to help those who are homeless, but most of us would be afraid to walk in some of the places where they curl up at night trying to stay warm.

Think what this touch must have meant to the man in Mark’s Gospel. He had not been touched by another human - not even his wife or children - since he had been declared a leper. Jesus’ touch was a great and significant act that brought healing to the doomed man. More than simply healing his physical disease, it expressed Jesus’ great compassion and his acceptance of the leper as he was. Jesus takes us as we are - even if diseased and destined for death. Jesus’ touch brought with it a healing that changed him from a leper - an outcast - to a man accepted and cared for even before his physical disease was healed.

The story of Naaman is one of my favorites. There are so many remarkable things that happen in this story - so many different kinds of healing taking place. Naaman’s story involved a long journey which included several miracles before the actual healing of his disease.

A young slave girl in his house had enough compassion, and courage to approach Naaman’s wife with her belief that a prophet in Samaria could cure Naaman. She was a young girl who had every right to be bitter and to hate Naaman. She had been taken from her home and family during one of the many raids against Israel. She reminds me of how important it is to pray and have compassion even for those whom we consider to be our enemies - when we do, we may soon discover that they are no longer our enemies, but rather people who need hope, love, and compassion as much as we do.

Naaman’s wife could have easily dismissed the words of her young slave girl. Why should she have trusted the words of this child? What kind of reliable authority was she? She reminds me that sometimes we are too quick to dismiss the insights that our children offer, the wisdom that comes not with age, but with innocence and openness to God. In our own congregation recently we’ve seen the results of taking children seriously. It was an 11 year old who called me the day I first learned about Saffiatu and asked what she could do to help. If she had not been taken seriously by her parents, the Kamandas and the church we might not have become so involved in trying to bring healing to Saffiatu. Yesterday an 8 year old, accompanied by some family and friends, rode 16 miles with a goal of raising $1,000 to help Saffiatu. I understand that a local toy store took this seriously enough to donate 10% of yesterday’s sales to help Saffiatu. Children have been selling bracelets and valentine cards in stores. The miracle of listening to children and taking them seriously has helped bring another child closer to health.

Think about how Naaman must have reacted to this preposterous information presented by his wife, as coming from her slave girl. Go to the place where he had previously conducted raids - go to people who would likely consider him to be an enemy and ask for help. And first, he must go to his king and ask permission to make the trip. It’s almost like imagining a Christian Church raising money to send a Muslim child from an African Country to a Jewish Doctor in Tel Aviv to have life saving surgery.

The King of Aram had a very high regard for Naaman who is identified as a valiant soldier. He is quite willing to send Naaman to the King of Israel. He sends him with gifts of gold, silver, and fine clothes and a letter asking the King of Israel to cure Naaman of his leprosy. As we might imagine, the King of Israel reacted with great suspicion and anxiety. He sees this as a trick to give the King of Aram an excuse to attack him yet again.

Fortunately for the King of Israel, word reached the prophet Elisha and he sent a message that Naaman should come to him. Naaman ventured further into unfriendly territory and went to Samaria, to Elisha’s house. If the story wasn’t sticky enough already, it gets stickier at this point. Naaman expects the prophet to come out to greet him and give him all the honor and respect due a man of his position. He expected the prophet to wave his hand over the spot on his skin, call on the name of his god and cure Naaman of his leprosy. And Naaman had brought enough gold and silver with him to handsomely compensate him for his efforts. It was a simple business transaction.

What Naaman expected was not what Naaman got. The prophet didn’t come out. Instead he sent a messenger who told Naaman to go wash in the Jordan river seven times. Naaman may have had leprosy - but he had a bigger case of pride. His pride was so great that he simply couldn’t deal with this lack of respect. He became furious and was ready to go home. After all, how could he be told by an as yet unseen prophet to go wash in a muddy river like the Jordan when there were wonderful rivers in his own country - obviously much better rivers. Didn’t this prophet know who he was? Didn’t he understand how important Naaman was? He should have been honored that Naaman had traveled so far to come to him? Where was his sense of propriety?

Once again a miracle happened. Another servant risked his wrath, and dared to approach him suggesting that if the prophet had told him to do something difficult Naaman would have done it, so how much more should he be willing to try this very simple thing. To Naaman’s credit, he listened, and responded. Twice now, Naaman has acted upon the advice of a servant, someone inferior to him. He washed in the Jordan seven times and his skin became clean and restored. The story goes on beyond what we read, to tell us that Naaman went to the prophet, and became a worshipper of the God of Israel.

But this was a miracle - a healing - that almost didn’t happen - wouldn’t have happened at all, if it had not been for two servants who had the courage to approach the person who held life and death power over them. Naaman received much more than a healing of his physical illness that day. Through listening to servants, following the directions of a prophet who had refused to come out and honor him, and washing in a muddy river that he thought was beneath his dignity, Naaman learned a lot about how things really work, not just how he expected them to work.

Naaman learned that God could and did use the unexpected, the least likely persons to bring about great things. He learned that he couldn’t classify all of the Israelites as inferior to him. He learned that he had to be open to great possibilities from unlikely and unexpected places.

I think that in both of these miracles of physical cures there is a healing that is more than skin deep, there is the greater miracle of blowing away preconceived ideas and prejudices. Naaman discovered that something good could come from the inferior land of Israel, and his servants. Jesus demonstrated clearly to those who were with him and to the unidentified man that leprosy or other conditions are not what define us in the eyes of God.

This God of Israel, this God of Jesus, this God we worship is a God who offers healing that is much deeper than the superficial healing of a skin disease. It is all too easy for us to miss the way God brings healing in the most unlikely of ways. That is a theme that runs all through the Bible and yet, we still don’t get it. We allow ourselves to be locked into little boxes of preconceived ideas about how someone is going to think or act based on some notion we have in our minds - sometimes consciously, but often subconsciously.

We see, hear, and understand things based on many things other than objective reality. Indeed, sometimes I wonder whether or not there really is any objective reality or whether everything we see and hear is filtered through what we believe about ourselves or about other people. Think of what would have happened, or rather not happened, if each of the persons involved in Naaman’s story had not been open to something that went beyond the normal expected behavior of people in certain roles. Think of what would have happened, or not happened, if the people involved had not been open at least in some degree to the working of God in a different way. Think of how each of them became an instrument - a vessel - for healing. Think of how their lives were transformed by the actions in which they participated.

Naaman reacted to preconceived ideas and almost lost not only the cure to his leprosy, but also the healing of his attitudes.

The man who came to Jesus hoped for a cure, but never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined that Jesus would not only cure his illness but heal his self-image as he was transformed from a leper to a man for whom Jesus cared even though he had the disease of leprosy. He received far more than he expected. Often we tend to limit what we expect God can and will do.

When we do this we limit our response to God. We may decide that we couldn’t possibly do anything for God because we just don’t know enough, or aren’t religious enough, or don’t have enough abilities or training. Friends, if a little girl far from her home, could set in motion the events that led to Naaman’s healing, then God can use each one of us in many ways. If children deciding that its not fair for another child halfway around the world not to have the medical care she needs can motivate a church and a community, then God can use each of us in unexpected ways.

If you are in school you can refuse to stand by and watch when someone is being ridiculed or picked on. You can refuse to participate in gossip and name it for the destructive evil that it is. If you are in business you can refuse to participate in sleazy underhanded practices which make you as unclean as the leper but in less obvious ways. In your homes you can treat each other with respect - learn to listen rather than accuse, realize that your example is one which your children will carry with them all their lives as they establish other relationships and form their own expectations of how to treat people.

These may not seem like big things in the light of the world, but they are bigger than we will ever realize. God uses the most unexpected ways and persons to make a difference in the world. Each of us needs to learn to expect God to work in unexpected ways, through unexpected people - including us - to bring about God’s kingdom on earth - where God’s will is done and we live in peace, love and harmony with all of God’s children, not just with some.

Jesus’ touch brought wholeness to the unidentified man. Jesus’ touch can bring that same wholeness to our souls.

[1]Brokhoff, John. Preaching the Miracles, Cycle B 1990 CSS Publishing, Lima, Ohio, p.47

Every morning when the sun comes up, a gazelle wakes. He knows that he must outrun the fastest lion or he will be eaten. When the sun comes up, the lion wakes. He knows that he must outrun the slowest gazelle, or he will starve.
In the end it doesn't matter whether you are a lion or gazelle; when the sun
comes up, you better be running.[1] Doesn’t that sound a lot like our lives? When I talk with people in this congregation - parents, adults - single or married, youth, even children - and when I talk with people in other places, I often get the sense that many of us feel like either the lion or the gazelle - from the moment our eyes open in the morning, and often even before, we’d better be running. Our days are scheduled so that every minute is filled with demands - and most of them for things that are worthwhile or important in one way or another. The daily pressure of this kind of schedule takes a subtle toll on us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It saps energy needed for relationships. Do you ever feel as if you want to shout, “Stop the world, I want to get off?”

I’ve been feeling like that a lot lately. I can give you many reasons – good reasons why I’ve felt distracted, or fragmented, pulled in many directions at one time. I’ve been emotional and stressed – and I know why – or I thought I knew why. Several weeks ago, I received information about a clergy spiritual formation event that I make a point of attending every year. I looked at the dates and thought that I just couldn’t afford the time to go. There was too much going on and I couldn’t take the time to be away. I looked at the topic and the piece that jumped out at me was something about devotional practices in a fragmented world. I knew that I couldn’t afford not to go. It spoke to my heart and to one of the real reasons why I was feeling so distracted, fragmented, and pulled. It reminded me that this is something that happens to me whenever I get sloppy about my personal time with God.

When that happens I feel guilty because as a pastor, I think that I should have a strong daily devotional time, an intimate relationship with God. I think that I should be aware of God’s presence all the time or else I’m failing as a pastor – not to mention failing as a Christian. So I went off to the retreat. I want to share a small portion of that retreat with you because I hope that it may speak to some of the feelings and thoughts that some of you have.

The very first thing I found out was that I wasn’t the only one feeling that way. There were many other clergy there who were feeling some of what I was feeling. I was reminded that even people like Henri Nouwen and Mother Teresa went through times when they found it difficult to pray; times when they didn’t even want to pray. That was both comforting and disturbing. We were immediately dispelled of the idea of trying to get in right. When we try to get it right, pray the right way, use the right words, follow the right pattern, we are focusing more on ourselves than on God.

Prayer doesn’t begin with us. Prayer begins with God. That’s one of the most important messages of Christianity – and of the Judeo-Christian heritage. God has always been the one initiating a relationship with us. That hasn’t changed. Prayer is our response to God. This is also true of worship and Bible Study. We were given the image of rowing out to get into the flow of God’s current. Choosing the boats, oars, or paddles for rowing out is like deciding which spiritual disciplines, which practices or ways of praying or worshiping are helpful for us.

One of the things we were asked to do was to think about how we learned to pray. Who taught us to pray? Were we taught specific prayers, or postures? Some of us were taught specific prayers just as we teach our children the Lord’s Prayer and perhaps other bedtime or meal prayers. Then we were asked which of these no longer worked for us. That’s an important question for each of us to ask and to answer. Some of the oars or paddles that were helpful to us at one time in our life might not be as helpful at another time.

At some point, we start to discover that our prayer life has to expand to include more than the prayers we’ve learned by rote. When I worked at the United Methodist Retirement Center one delightful woman used to tell me that she loved to sit in her chair and just talk to Jesus the way she would talk to her best friend. She said she didn’t need any special words, she didn’t need to fold her hands or bow her head. She did that sometimes, but at other times, she’d make a cup of tea and sit down with the tea and have a chat with her best friend Jesus.

Many of us feeling like the gazelle or the lion on the run find it difficult to make time to spend time with God everyday. I was always impressed by Martin Luther who spent an hour in prayer every morning, but then at some point realized that an hour wasn’t enough and expanded the time to two hours, then three, and finally four hours in very hectic times. The gospel lesson for today speaks clearly to this. Jesus was quickly becoming very popular as a healer. He had spent a very busy day healing many people. Mark tells us “the whole city was gathered around the door.” Certainly it would have been understandable if we had decided to sleep in the next morning and get some extra rest. But that’s not what he did.

He awoke early while it was still dark and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. Later Simon and his companions came looking for Jesus and in a mildly chastising way said, “Everyone is searching for you.” That translates to “there are lots of people coming to be healed, hurry up, get to work, we can’t keep them waiting.”

I can’t help but think that Jesus’ response must have been frustrating for his disciples. Jesus seemed to ignore the implied message and responded, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” To me this is one of the most telling and startling statements. It is a witness of how focused and how centered he was. In the midst of the expectations of other people, he spent time in prayer and received his instructions from God, not from the people around him. In the midst of people clamoring for his attention, in the face of what seemed to be urgent needs of others, he was clear about what it was that God had sent him to do.

I think that this incident could have been a turning point for Jesus’ ministry. If Jesus had not gone out early in the morning to pray, he might have become a wonderful healer in Capernaum. People would have traveled from great distances to see him and he could have been busy 24/7 with an impressive healing ministry. But he might not have proclaimed the message that God sent him to proclaim. He might not have challenged the status quo and the complacency of the authorities. Jesus knew who he was and who had sent him. Throughout the scriptures we find time and time again, that Jesus has arisen early in the morning to go off by himself and pray, or gone off in the evening to a solitary place to pray.

So, how can we be as open to God as Jesus was? How can we be focused and centered, aware of what it is God wants us to do? A lot of it has to do with remembering that God is with us in whatever we are facing; it is God who initiated the relationship with us. It is God who is calling us.

We don’t need to worry about getting it right – having the right words, or the right position. There are many different ways of praying, and opening ourselves to God. What is helpful for me may not be helpful for you or for someone else.

However, let me share with you a couple of thoughts. One really important piece for me is that while a dedicated time of prayer is important, we can pray at any time and any place – often a simple thought or breath. Realizing this can open us to many wonderful ways of being aware of God’s presence.

The Quakers practice what they call the “four doors of worship”. The first door is “Before”. Before we come to worship, it is most helpful if we recognize that God is with us as we prepare to come, as we arrive. I remember well the days of rushing with children and arriving at church exhausted and frustrated and definitely not feeling like worshiping. It might be helpful to give yourself some visual cues. When you drive into the parking lot, breath and say, “This is the day that the Lord has made.” As you walk into the building, breath and say, “This is the house of the Lord.”

The second door is the door inward. In one church, I had a fairly strict practice of not discussing business of any kind with anyone prior to worship. So often we arrive and someone quickly grabs us to tell us something important or to arrange a meeting or ask us to do something, or we see someone and know that we can take care of a piece of business rather quickly before people rush off after worship.. I am as guilty of this as anyone else and I keep promising myself I’ll try not to do that to people. May I suggest, coming in, certainly greeting each other, but then finding your way to your seat early enough so that you can look over the bulletin, perhaps read the prayers, or look at the hymns, or sit and look at the cross or flowers and shift your consciousness from running, to being still and being open to God.

The third door is the door down – this is that holy place where you meet God on a deep level. It might not happen every time you worship, but if you prepare yourself for worship, it will happen more often. It is a special time where you are really present with God and with the whole community; a time when God speaks to you on a deep level. It might happen during a prayer, or during the sermon, or while receiving communion. For me, it often happens in the middle of the choir’s anthem or in the words of a hymn, or in looking out at seeing the light of God shining in the face of someone here.

The fourth door is the door beyond. It is an important door, because it is taking the experience of worship back out into the community, back into your family, your place of employment, your school, back into your life.

Since, you spend more hours away from the church worship experience than you do in the middle of worship, let me share just a couple of quick ideas that might speak to you, ways to pray throughout the day.

When you wake up, respond gently to the new day. Take a minute to stretch and greet your body with love. Take a few deep but gentle breaths and picture God’s renewing light flowing into your body. Say “good morning” to God. As you go about your morning routine, let the water with which you wash remind you of your baptism, the ancient symbol of water as God’s cleansing love. As you dress think of God’s love enfolding you with each garment you put on.

Let each bite of food and drink become God’s gift of life to you through the fruits, grains, and meat of the earth. Let your meals become a sacrament. Let this sacrament become a time of thanksgiving and also a time of increasing your compassionate awareness of your sisters and brothers who are hungry and needy. On the way to work reflect on the tasks and the experiences ahead of you. Claim Jesus’ promise that he wil go ahead of you, preparing the way for you.

Occasionally throughout the day, give a loving encouraging thought to your body parts which are being used: your eyes, hands, feet, arms, legs, brain. They are your good friends who work with you. In the midst of a meeting or a difficult time, breathe deeply and remember that God is closer than your hands and feet.

As you encounter other people, think of God’s love surrounding them. Take a moment to look at a sunbeam, a cloud, a tree, a bird. Greet them as loving mysteries through which God touches you.

At the end of the day, as you prepare for bed, gently stretch, listen to what your body tells you about the day. Give the day’s moments of hurt, distress into God’s hands. Remember that God is awake 24/7; you don’t need to stay awake fretting or worrying. Reflect on the moments of joy with thankfulness. Let each gentle breath become the breath of God flowing through you.

Probably you won’t pray all of these everyday, but perhaps two or three of them will be helpful to you. Be prepared for new ways that prayer may unfold for you.

God is always waiting for us, and no matter how unfaithful we have been, no matter how long we have failed to keep our appointment with God, when we finally show up, we discover that God is there waiting for us, greeting us with open arms, saying, “I’ve missed you. Welcome back.” God sets a table before us that feeds our need to be loved, our need to be accepted, our need to be guided, comforted, and even chastised lovingly and reminded of what we have forgotten, namely, that our strength comes only from God. As the prophet Isaiah reminded the Israelites, “The Lord gives strength to those who are weary. Even young people get tired, then stumble and fall. But those who trust the Lord will find new strength. They will be strong like eagles soaring upward on wings; they will walk and run without getting tired.”

Let us come to the Lord’s Table, to be fed by the God who loves us, who gives us what we need to soar like eagles, to walk and run without getting tired.

[1]GOD'S DOWNWARD MOBILITY, John A. Stroman, CSS Publishing Company, 1996,
0-7880-0790-4 received from e-sermons