First Reading: Philippians 2: 1-11
Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had:
Who, being in very nature God,did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God, [our Creator].
Luke 18: 9-14
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ “But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
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God, giver of the gifts of peace, mercy, justice and truth, speak to us this day. Call us to wonder anew at Your creation. Teach us to walk in right relation through the love of the Holy Spirit. Amen
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Here’s a story you may recognize—don’t worry, the names have been camouflaged to protect the innocent or not so innocent. Seems there was this couple, they’ve been together a really long time—know each other well. Very little surprises them—they could be Josie and Joellen, or John and Jack, or Jack and Joellen, for that matter. Well, they were sitting on their lanai, having their coffee one morning and reading their papers. Joellen says to Josie (you substitute the names that work for you), “Do you know what day it is?” Josie, thinks for a minute and then panics (You may identify with her panic!), “Of course, she says.” Now we all know the truth—Josie has no clue what day it is and so she sets out to make sure that she does everything she can to keep Joellen from finding this out. As soon as she gets to work, she orders a big, beautiful bouquet of white roses—has them delivered “with love” right to Joellen’s desk at work. Then she stops and buys a great big box of chocolate and makes a reservation at the nicest restaurant in town. She texts Joellen—meet me at the Steak Place at 7—let’s have a special meal to celebrate. She walks into the restaurant, kisses Joellen, gives her the chocolate, orders the most expensive bottle of wine in the place and proceeds to order the chateaubriand for two. Midway through dinner, Joellen says (and we can hear the ‘twinkle in her eye’), “wow, this is the best groundhog’s day I’ve ever had!”
And so we come again to this Table spread before us. Some of us come tired from the week we’ve just finished and some come anxious about the week ahead, but God invites and we arrive in all our humanness and need: our joy, our pain, our confusion and certainty. And God, says “Welcome to the Table!” But sometimes, we really don’t know what day it is and although we may rush around and try to do all the right things—we miss the mark. We answer a question with the completely wrong answer when the right answer is so close at hand.
God invites us, as Paul invites the Christians at Philippi—to participate in right relationship as we enter into this feast of fellowship and common celebration. Paul asks a favor from his friends in Philippi—Have they experienced any encouragement or comfort from being in Christ? If the answer is yes (and we know that Paul already knows that it is so), then he wants it to be so for all. He calls them to be in ‘right relationship’ with each other. Not to buy gifts for him or for each other, but to give the gift of Christ as they share in common. And Paul describes exactly what this means: “in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same attitude of mind Christ Jesus had.” Paul continues, “ Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a human being, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!”
Aha! the crux of the matter—humility. Jesus points this out in our Gospel lesson as well. Not impressed with the ‘showing off’ of the Pharisee—the grandiose religiosity for the sake of being seen and heard, Jesus calls us to be like the flawed, but humble tax collector, praying quietly in the corner—seeking God’s forgiveness and mercy. Surely this is not quite what we expect, not quite the day we thought it was. Here we have both Jesus and Paul challenging us to think these things through a different way—to put away the answer we thought God required and all those things we hoped would do, and hear the question again, this time is a new way, a way that challenges us to the very core of who we thought we were—challenges us to make sure that we know what day it is, that we understand the fullness of the feast and the nature of God’s call.
God calls us to right relationship in three separate, yet very much related areas—with the Divine, with others and with self. Let’s look briefly at each as it applies to God’s welcome to the Table. In humbleness, we seek to be in right relationship with God. Perhaps this right relationship in all areas will become more clear if we think about God’s peace offered to us as we come to Table. God’s perfect peace, known as shalom in the Old Testament can be described as complete and whole and only present when right relationship exist between people and God, people and each other, and people and themselves. I believe that there are seven aspects of this right relationship which can help us understand God’s call to us this day.
One: God is, by nature, relational and revelational. The world, including humankind, was created to be in relationship with the very source of creation. When human beings are in right relationship with their Creator, they will rejoice in the rest of creation and care for it. They will celebrate their inter-relationship with all of creation and experience a profound sense of gratitude to the God who invites us to come along. And God, through creation and constant re-creation, reveals the divine desire to remain in positive relationship with us. Once we grasp that the relationship between God, humankind, and the rest of creation is inter-twined, that we cannot have one without the other, God’s shalom—perfect peace—is present.
Two: Our common purpose, shared with all of creation is to bring glory to the God who creates us, redeems us and sustains us. When we recognize that we share this purpose with all creation, we become more keenly aware of our place in creation and our responsibility for maintaining that relationship. We become convinced that we must maintain right relationships with others and with ourselves. We honor those who differ from us, who dislike us, who wish us ill. And when, we treat ourselves with less than God’s fullest love, we are called back into the perfect relationship with the one who created us in the image of the Divine. We take on, as Paul calls us to, the mind of Christ.
Three: We—all of us—break down those perfect shalom-like relationships when we allow ourselves to reject the humility to which we are called. Sin, the belief that we are equal to God, clouds our perceptions and causes us to set ourselves above others—like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable for this day. We come to think that we are better than the rest of creation—the rest of humankind—that we can make it without God’s perfect grace and peace. Our right relationship, our shalom is shattered, by our own turning away from that which keeps us settled in the midst of God’s love.
Four: Jesus, whom we celebrate each and every time we are invited to this meal, restored the broken relationships caused by humankind refusing God’s grace and gift of peace. As we celebrate the ‘cup of the new covenant’ we proclaim that this restoration of broken relationships has taken place. And so we come to this Feast with open hearts, ready to heal and be healed—ready to reach out and to be reached out to. We come longing for the restoration of our relationships, seeking those with whom we have broken the sacred trust of God’s lovingkindness.
Five: Once our relationships are restored, God gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit to help us maintain those right relationships. It is through this divine Spirit that we learn to love as Jesus loved. Our ‘process’ becomes God’s process at work in us—our journeys belong to God, our peace, God’s perfect shalom at every step.
Six: We can maintain those right relationships only by being open to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives and in our interactions with those around us and our individual spiritual formation as led and directed by this same Holy Spirit. We bring the working of the Holy Spirit in all our relationships with us to the Table each and every time we accept God’s invitation.
And, finally, seven: the Church, God’s perfect example of right relationship on this earthly plane, is sustained and transformed constantly through the work of this same Holy Spirit. Falling out of right relationship with God, each other, or ourselves, we are called back—we are offered the chance to enter again into this place of rightness and shalom—we are reconciled through the Feast itself. And so, again this Sunday, like every Sunday, we come, we taste and we see that God is very good indeed. Amen and amen.
Welcome!
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Monday, July 25, 2011
Welcome to the Table: An Invitation to Authenticity 7-24-11
THE READINGS (The Inclusive Bible ©2007))
First Reading: I Corinthians 10: 1-4
I want you to remember this: our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; by the cloud and the sea all of them were baptized into Moses. All ate the same spiritual food. All drank the same spiritual drink—they drank from the spiritual rock that was following them, and the rock was Christ.
Gospel Reading: Matthew 26: 16-18, 26-30
On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came up to Jesus and said, “Where do you want us to prepare the Passover for you?” Jesus told them to go to a certain person in the city and say, “the Teacher says, ‘My appointed time draws near. I am to celebrate the Passover in your house.’”
During the meal, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to the disciples. “Take this and eat it,” Jesus said. “This is my body.” Then he took a coup, gave thanks, and gave it to them. “Drink from it, all of you,” He said. “This is my blood, the blood of the Covenant, which will be poured out on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins. The truth is, I will not drink this fruit of the vine again until the day when I drink it anew with you in my Abba’s kingdom.” Then, after singing the Hallel, they walked out to the Mount of Olives.
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Welcome to the Table: An Invitation to Authenticity 7-24-11
God, our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, You invite us to participate in Your reign of justice and peace. You never fail to say “welcome”. Grant us the grace to always say “yes”. May the words of my mouth and the reflections in all our hearts please you this day. Amen
I want to take you back to 19th Century Denmark, to an impoverished village inhabited by poor, but religious people. Two sisters, daughters of the town’s only pastor, live and serve the poor folk of the town, almost as Protestant nuns, even after his death. A French refugee, named Babette, arrives one day on their doorstep and begs them to take her in. They do not know her or know anything about her, but following their father’s teachings, they allow her to stay. She works with them for a while and then two things happen at very much the same time. The sisters decide that they wish to have some sort of party to commemorate what would have been their father’s 100th birthday. And Babette discovers that she has managed to purchase the winning lottery ticket. Babette begs them again, this time to allow her to prepare the feast for the party. They are skeptical, after all she is a French Catholic; they are staunch protestants with a puritanical bent. But they agree. The day of the feast arrives. And although the townsfolk have already decided that this feast will not be something they will like, they grudgingly arrive for the party. Babette has worked for days and begins to set the feast before them. “Welcome to the table!” she says. Plate after plate of the most delicious food they have ever eaten is placed before them. Soon they have forgotten their pledges not to enjoy this feast and all are talking and partaking in the party atmosphere—loving and laughing, and forgetting , for a time, that they live a subsistence life in a dark and dreary village. One of the villagers has a visitor, a nephew from Paris who is used to the finer things of life. He announces, “Only one time before have I tasted such amazing food and that was at the finest restaurant in Paris!” Finally Babette acknowledges that, before political persecution drove her from Paris, she was the top chef at that very restaurant. In all the time she had been with them no one had ever guessed that she was a famous chef who lived as social royalty in Paris. This, of course, is the story of “Babette’s Feast” an international film that came out in 1987. I suspect that we can learn just a little from Babette’s feast as it relates to our introduction to our series of Sundays where we will speak of the Communion Feast. Welcome to the table, oui?
I wonder if we, like Babette’s guests, are sometimes caught off guard, not expecting this Table, spread before us, to contain the richest blessings God has to offer. Or how often we come determined not to let God speak to us through the breaking of bread and sharing of the fruit of the vine. Or sadder still, how many times are we are so pre-occupied with life, that we come—go through the motions—and leave, allowing the experience to have no impact at all. But in the movie, the blessings get the better of them and they find themselves in great joy and fellowship in spite of themselves. And while here is where our comparison to French food must necessarily cease, the question is a good one: what if we allow God’s blessings to get the better of us at this Table? What if we make a conscious effort to bring our whole selves—the saintly, the not-so-saintly and the just plain, well, ugly—parts of ourselves to this Table, this morning? Think about it.
Some of us come from traditions where communion—this Lord’s supper—is rarely celebrated. And some of you come from traditions where the Eucharist is the center of all worship and faith. When asked why MCC churches celebrate communion each week, there is one common answer. Rev. Troy Perry, when he founded MCC, wanted to make sure that no matter when you arrived on the doorstep of an MCC church, that communion would be available. This is the surface answer, of course, there is much more behind Rev. Perry’s reasoning. When we are denied communion, and many of us were, we are cut off from what is literally the lifeblood of the church. We are separated from what makes us God’s community—not by God, of course, but by those who would seek to exclude us. And so, as we understand more and more about the centrality of the coming to Table in the worship experience and the life of the believer, we come to understand why the invitation to the feast must be offered every time we meet. And, even more importantly, we come to understand the meaning and depth of our participation in this sacrament with all those others who are gathered with us this day and every time we meet to worship.
Now I admit that the history and tradition of communion has not always gone smoothly. Churches have divided over theological debates regarding the nature of communion –some of you feel very strongly about those debates and the theological arguments in them. Some of you have never given it a thought, and the vast majority of us are somewhere in between. For me, this day, there are two fundamental questions that I need to know the answers to when I accept God’s invitation to the Table. Those would appear to be simple questions. Alas, they are not—but for me, I need to know these two things: Who is this God who invites me to feast and who am I as I accept the invitation.
Now I could preach for another 90 minutes on “Who is God at the Table?”. Relax, I have no intention of doing so, but we will return to this question time and time again throughout the next few weeks. The second question would not take me so long to answer, but would take a lifetime to live into. So who is God? God is not only our host, God is our creator, redeemer and sustainer. Hear what Paul tells the Christians at Corinth about the Old Testament Israelites in their journey in God. They ate the same spiritual food, and drank the same spiritual drink from a rock that followed them everywhere they went. And who was that rock? That rock was Jesus Christ who is sustaining the wandering Israelites with food and drink. Not only is it important for Paul to link ‘the Christ’ to the spiritual food and drink given to the Israelites by God, it is important that this spiritual food and drink be the same for all who partook. So, our God is an historical God—a God who has and who will feed us for all time—and all with the same food.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus reveals more about God and the gift of the feast. Body and blood, only human beings have bodies and blood. And there sits Jesus, the incarnation of our God, talking about his body and blood. His body given for us, and his blood “poured out for the forgiveness of sins”. And he calls us to a new covenant—a covenant born out of his sacrifice. Jesus becomes the great Paschal lamb, freely and fully, giving himself in our place. God’s gift to us of grace and freedom is made possible with this sacrifice of Jesus, dying and rising again.
This God, comes to us in the flesh, walks with us and talks with us and shows us how to live and, finally, calls us to celebrate the memory of this earthly Jesus—and to participate in the mystery of God’s redemption in real, physical ways. God calls us to incarnate the divine act of redemption. So this God who invites us to Table, is here with us, present in the fellowship, present in the meal. And we present ourselves as guests, fully open to partake of God and fully open to accept and love all the others also present at Table in the feast. This is where the Christian life becomes its realest of real—its authenticity, if you will, is part and parcel of our experience when we accept the invitation to the Table.
I am coming to the end of my time and I told you there were two questions of importance for me. We will spend much more time in the next three weeks looking at both questions but, especially, the second question: Who am I as I come to the Table and go from the Table? As a child of God I have been welcomed into the Family of God—I am perfectly acceptable in God’s sight. How do I know this? Because God has issued the invitation. And the invitation that I have answered is to participate in something much larger than myself—to be wholly God’s child seeking all that God has to show me regarding this living in God, this be-ing in God, this growing in God. I pray that, today, coming to the Table is the beginning of something new and wonderful in our lives and in the life of this church. Amen and Amen.
First Reading: I Corinthians 10: 1-4
I want you to remember this: our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea; by the cloud and the sea all of them were baptized into Moses. All ate the same spiritual food. All drank the same spiritual drink—they drank from the spiritual rock that was following them, and the rock was Christ.
Gospel Reading: Matthew 26: 16-18, 26-30
On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the disciples came up to Jesus and said, “Where do you want us to prepare the Passover for you?” Jesus told them to go to a certain person in the city and say, “the Teacher says, ‘My appointed time draws near. I am to celebrate the Passover in your house.’”
During the meal, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to the disciples. “Take this and eat it,” Jesus said. “This is my body.” Then he took a coup, gave thanks, and gave it to them. “Drink from it, all of you,” He said. “This is my blood, the blood of the Covenant, which will be poured out on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins. The truth is, I will not drink this fruit of the vine again until the day when I drink it anew with you in my Abba’s kingdom.” Then, after singing the Hallel, they walked out to the Mount of Olives.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Welcome to the Table: An Invitation to Authenticity 7-24-11
God, our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, You invite us to participate in Your reign of justice and peace. You never fail to say “welcome”. Grant us the grace to always say “yes”. May the words of my mouth and the reflections in all our hearts please you this day. Amen
I want to take you back to 19th Century Denmark, to an impoverished village inhabited by poor, but religious people. Two sisters, daughters of the town’s only pastor, live and serve the poor folk of the town, almost as Protestant nuns, even after his death. A French refugee, named Babette, arrives one day on their doorstep and begs them to take her in. They do not know her or know anything about her, but following their father’s teachings, they allow her to stay. She works with them for a while and then two things happen at very much the same time. The sisters decide that they wish to have some sort of party to commemorate what would have been their father’s 100th birthday. And Babette discovers that she has managed to purchase the winning lottery ticket. Babette begs them again, this time to allow her to prepare the feast for the party. They are skeptical, after all she is a French Catholic; they are staunch protestants with a puritanical bent. But they agree. The day of the feast arrives. And although the townsfolk have already decided that this feast will not be something they will like, they grudgingly arrive for the party. Babette has worked for days and begins to set the feast before them. “Welcome to the table!” she says. Plate after plate of the most delicious food they have ever eaten is placed before them. Soon they have forgotten their pledges not to enjoy this feast and all are talking and partaking in the party atmosphere—loving and laughing, and forgetting , for a time, that they live a subsistence life in a dark and dreary village. One of the villagers has a visitor, a nephew from Paris who is used to the finer things of life. He announces, “Only one time before have I tasted such amazing food and that was at the finest restaurant in Paris!” Finally Babette acknowledges that, before political persecution drove her from Paris, she was the top chef at that very restaurant. In all the time she had been with them no one had ever guessed that she was a famous chef who lived as social royalty in Paris. This, of course, is the story of “Babette’s Feast” an international film that came out in 1987. I suspect that we can learn just a little from Babette’s feast as it relates to our introduction to our series of Sundays where we will speak of the Communion Feast. Welcome to the table, oui?
I wonder if we, like Babette’s guests, are sometimes caught off guard, not expecting this Table, spread before us, to contain the richest blessings God has to offer. Or how often we come determined not to let God speak to us through the breaking of bread and sharing of the fruit of the vine. Or sadder still, how many times are we are so pre-occupied with life, that we come—go through the motions—and leave, allowing the experience to have no impact at all. But in the movie, the blessings get the better of them and they find themselves in great joy and fellowship in spite of themselves. And while here is where our comparison to French food must necessarily cease, the question is a good one: what if we allow God’s blessings to get the better of us at this Table? What if we make a conscious effort to bring our whole selves—the saintly, the not-so-saintly and the just plain, well, ugly—parts of ourselves to this Table, this morning? Think about it.
Some of us come from traditions where communion—this Lord’s supper—is rarely celebrated. And some of you come from traditions where the Eucharist is the center of all worship and faith. When asked why MCC churches celebrate communion each week, there is one common answer. Rev. Troy Perry, when he founded MCC, wanted to make sure that no matter when you arrived on the doorstep of an MCC church, that communion would be available. This is the surface answer, of course, there is much more behind Rev. Perry’s reasoning. When we are denied communion, and many of us were, we are cut off from what is literally the lifeblood of the church. We are separated from what makes us God’s community—not by God, of course, but by those who would seek to exclude us. And so, as we understand more and more about the centrality of the coming to Table in the worship experience and the life of the believer, we come to understand why the invitation to the feast must be offered every time we meet. And, even more importantly, we come to understand the meaning and depth of our participation in this sacrament with all those others who are gathered with us this day and every time we meet to worship.
Now I admit that the history and tradition of communion has not always gone smoothly. Churches have divided over theological debates regarding the nature of communion –some of you feel very strongly about those debates and the theological arguments in them. Some of you have never given it a thought, and the vast majority of us are somewhere in between. For me, this day, there are two fundamental questions that I need to know the answers to when I accept God’s invitation to the Table. Those would appear to be simple questions. Alas, they are not—but for me, I need to know these two things: Who is this God who invites me to feast and who am I as I accept the invitation.
Now I could preach for another 90 minutes on “Who is God at the Table?”. Relax, I have no intention of doing so, but we will return to this question time and time again throughout the next few weeks. The second question would not take me so long to answer, but would take a lifetime to live into. So who is God? God is not only our host, God is our creator, redeemer and sustainer. Hear what Paul tells the Christians at Corinth about the Old Testament Israelites in their journey in God. They ate the same spiritual food, and drank the same spiritual drink from a rock that followed them everywhere they went. And who was that rock? That rock was Jesus Christ who is sustaining the wandering Israelites with food and drink. Not only is it important for Paul to link ‘the Christ’ to the spiritual food and drink given to the Israelites by God, it is important that this spiritual food and drink be the same for all who partook. So, our God is an historical God—a God who has and who will feed us for all time—and all with the same food.
In our Gospel lesson, Jesus reveals more about God and the gift of the feast. Body and blood, only human beings have bodies and blood. And there sits Jesus, the incarnation of our God, talking about his body and blood. His body given for us, and his blood “poured out for the forgiveness of sins”. And he calls us to a new covenant—a covenant born out of his sacrifice. Jesus becomes the great Paschal lamb, freely and fully, giving himself in our place. God’s gift to us of grace and freedom is made possible with this sacrifice of Jesus, dying and rising again.
This God, comes to us in the flesh, walks with us and talks with us and shows us how to live and, finally, calls us to celebrate the memory of this earthly Jesus—and to participate in the mystery of God’s redemption in real, physical ways. God calls us to incarnate the divine act of redemption. So this God who invites us to Table, is here with us, present in the fellowship, present in the meal. And we present ourselves as guests, fully open to partake of God and fully open to accept and love all the others also present at Table in the feast. This is where the Christian life becomes its realest of real—its authenticity, if you will, is part and parcel of our experience when we accept the invitation to the Table.
I am coming to the end of my time and I told you there were two questions of importance for me. We will spend much more time in the next three weeks looking at both questions but, especially, the second question: Who am I as I come to the Table and go from the Table? As a child of God I have been welcomed into the Family of God—I am perfectly acceptable in God’s sight. How do I know this? Because God has issued the invitation. And the invitation that I have answered is to participate in something much larger than myself—to be wholly God’s child seeking all that God has to show me regarding this living in God, this be-ing in God, this growing in God. I pray that, today, coming to the Table is the beginning of something new and wonderful in our lives and in the life of this church. Amen and Amen.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
God's Wide and Wonderful Welcome-Part 4-7-17-11
THE READINGS (Contemporary English Version))
First reading: Genesis 11: 1-9
At first everyone spoke the same language, but after some of them moved from the east and settled in Babylonia, they said: Let's build a city with a tower that reaches to the sky! We'll use hard bricks and tar instead of stone and mortar. We'll become famous, and we won't be scattered all over the world.
Then the LORD came down to look at the city and the tower and said: These people are working together because they all speak the same language. This is just the beginning. Soon they will be able to do anything they want. Come on! Let's go down and confuse them by making them speak different languages--then they won't be able to understand each other.
So the people had to stop building the city, because the LORD confused their language and scattered them all over the earth. That's how the city of Babel got its name.
The Gospel Reading: Matthew 15: 1-16
About this time some Pharisees and teachers of the Law of Moses came from Jerusalem. They asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples obey what our ancestors taught us to do? They don't even wash their hands before they eat." Jesus answered:
Why do you disobey God and follow your own teaching? Didn't God command you to respect your father and mother? Didn't God tell you to put to death all who curse their parents? But you let people get by without helping their parents when they should. You let them say that what they have has been offered to God. Is this any way to show respect to your parents? You ignore God's commands in order to follow your own teaching. And you are nothing but show-offs! Isaiah the prophet was right when he wrote that God had said, "All of you praise me with your words, but you never really think about me. It is useless for you to worship me, when you teach rules made up by humans."
Jesus called the crowd together and said, "Pay attention and try to understand what I mean. The food that you put into your mouth doesn't make you unclean and unfit to worship God. The bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean." Then his disciples came over to him and asked, "Do you know that you insulted the Pharisees by what you said?"
Jesus answered, "Every plant that God in heaven did not plant will be pulled up by the roots. Stay away from those Pharisees! They are like blind people leading other blind people, and all of them will fall into a ditch." Peter replied, "What did you mean when you talked about the things that make people unclean?" Jesus then said: Don't any of you know what I am talking about by now?
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God’s Wide and Wonderful Welcome-Part 4 7-17-11
God, You call us to see You in all of creation. Give us new eyes and new hearts. Give us the wisdom to greet each person as a possibility of Your revelation. Amen
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God’s wide and wonderful welcome just keeps getting better and better. God invites us to places as yet unknown and sends people into our lives to both lead the way and walk beside and behind us. And sometimes, the Truth comes in the strangest packages. I hope that today we can think together about some of those precious packages of grace also known as “somebody”.
Taken out of context, it may seem that the story of the Tower of Babel makes little sense in our tracing of God’s wide and wonderful welcome throughout history and time. But if we look again, it makes very much sense indeed. The story of God’s people told in the Bible takes many twists and turns, some of them confusing indeed. In the beginning of the Old Testament, in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the stories focus on the creation and story of humanity in general. Right after the story that we read today, God calls Abraham and the stories focus on one people—the people of Israel. That nation is the focus of the rest of the Old Testament. With a few exceptions, the Gospel narratives of the New Testament also focus on God’s chosen people, the Jewish people or Israelites. Pentecost, which we celebrated a few weeks ago, brings the story full circle and the rest of the New Testament reaches out into the whole world, or at least the whole world of that time. You might think of it as a story that is thick at both ends but thin in the middle. And this story is all about language and culture and difference. So, if we are to understand fully, God’s wide and wonderful welcome, we must understand all that we can about difference.
Let’s look at what actually happened in this place called Babel or Babylonia. It’s actually a simple story with extremely profound ramifications. It seems that everyone spoke the same language, so they were all able to understand each other. They got this idea to build a tower that would reach the sky. Since they were all the same, no one disagreed with this plan. They set out to make a name for themselves, to become very famous and decided to use the finest, sturdiest building materials they could find. They were quite pleased with themselves and planned to have great power. God, though, looked at what they were doing and became concerned. God knew that no good would come from the people all being the same. No one would challenge what they were thinking and they would soon believe that they no longer needed to believe in God. So, God, the Bible says, ‘confused’ their language and scattered the people all over the world.
And just how does this almost not-so-nice story fit into God’s wide and wonderful welcome, you may well ask. We know for a fact that sometimes God has to speak pretty loudly to be heard above the clamor of our everyday lives, and I suspect that God had to do just that what with all the noise of building and hammering, and all those folks chattering about how famous they were going to be when their tower reached God’s heavens. Suddenly, God acted, and they had to work to communicate—to even come together in the same place—to know what the other wanted or hoped for, dreamed or thought about. And this is where it gets good.
These folks in Babylonia had completely missed the point—they thought that they could be God, could reach as high as God, could be so famous that they were independent of God, that, in fact, they simply would not need God at all. But God called them to return to a real relationship of worship and trust in God, not in themselves. And, at the very same time, God gave to us the gift of difference. Letty Russell calls it “riotous difference”. And so this wide and wonderful welcome invites us into a community of difference—of different perspectives, languages, cultures, histories and dreams—a difference that encourages us to seek out the gifts and joys hidden behind the everyday realities of all of our lives and the lives of those who look absolutely nothing like us at all.
Think about it for a minute. If all birds looked like bluebirds, would we ever appreciate the exquisite blue of the bluebird itself? If all the trees were weeping willows, would we truly admire the sweeping sway of the willow in the wind? If everyone talked like everyone else, would we not be bored in an instant? And, worse yet, if everyone thought and believed like everyone else, how in the world would we ever grow, ever be called to live into more than we currently experience? But God knew better—knew that we needed each other to challenge and prod and even argue at times. Whether you experience this story as truth or myth, think of the grace that God allows us to experience when we take seriously our need to learn to communicate and appreciate each other.
And yet, we are oh so afraid of difference. No matter how hard we try to open wide the wonderful welcome afforded to us by God, we stumble as we run head long into ‘somebodies’ that don’t always see eye to eye with us.
There’s something from our Gospel lesson that we can take into our growing place this day. It seems that there were some very strict teachers of the Law of Moses called Pharisees. They were part of God’s chosen people we spoke of earlier and they were very serious about obeying every teensy-tiny letter of the Law. They confronted Jesus. “Your disciples eat with dirty hands. You know that is against what our religion teaches. Why don’t you make them obey the law?” Jesus turns it back on them and accuses them of perverting their own laws when it benefitted them. He denounced them and, in general, ticked them off pretty badly. Jesus had a knack for pushing the envelope of his time. He taught the crowd and said, “Don’t you get it? It isn’t what you put in your mouth that puts you out of relationship with God, it’s the words that come out of your mouth that breaks that relationship down.” His disciples, always trying to make nice with the powers that be, say to him, “You’ve gone and made the Pharisees mad again, Jesus.” Jesus, frustrated again, says, “Stay away from the Pharisees—they don’t know the way, and they will just lead you down the wrong path.”
Jesus calls us to a higher understanding of difference. He wants us to know that difference—those people who do things differently from us are not inherently wrong or bad. What really matters is what they say, what kind of relationship with God they exhibit. But we, much like the Pharisees, seem to get caught in the Law of What We’ve Always Done, or the Law of What Keeps Us Comfortable. Jesus calls us to open our eyes and ears to what people are saying and doing rather than whether or not they conform to what we’ve always known and look like what we think they should look like. And that’s a wide and wonderful welcome indeed.
Nevertheless, we must push ourselves to understand why we struggle so much with those who are different—those who are “stranger” to us. We are so quick to label folks as ‘strange’ rather than looking for the gifts their ‘strangeness’ brings to us. Each person who walks into our sacred circle—a circle we say is open to all—brings new ways of worshipping God, new ways of expressing who God is in their lives, and new ways of being the hands and feet and voice of God to each of us. We must push through the decades, even centuries of self-serving comfort that tells us that it is ok to reject those who don’t look or sound like us. We must talk with each other about how to make this place a place of welcome for those who are different from us. And we must have a plan for never letting ourselves off the hook, when someone’s challenge takes us by surprise or dares us to look at God in a new way.
Think back to God’s original plan—God intended for humankind to multiply and fill the earth—the glories of difference a direct reflection of the glorious multitude of the ways God sends love to the earth. As far back as the tower-builders in Babel, people thought they had a better idea. Nevertheless, God challenges them again—gives them and us another chance to rejoice in the ‘riotous difference’ in creation, in perspective, in gifts and in understanding. God gives them and us another chance to celebrate the expanse of creation—to push beyond our comfortable viewpoints and embrace all that God has for us to experience. Let us go forth to enter into the fullness of God’s wide and wonderful welcome this day and all the days to come. Amen and Amen.
First reading: Genesis 11: 1-9
At first everyone spoke the same language, but after some of them moved from the east and settled in Babylonia, they said: Let's build a city with a tower that reaches to the sky! We'll use hard bricks and tar instead of stone and mortar. We'll become famous, and we won't be scattered all over the world.
Then the LORD came down to look at the city and the tower and said: These people are working together because they all speak the same language. This is just the beginning. Soon they will be able to do anything they want. Come on! Let's go down and confuse them by making them speak different languages--then they won't be able to understand each other.
So the people had to stop building the city, because the LORD confused their language and scattered them all over the earth. That's how the city of Babel got its name.
The Gospel Reading: Matthew 15: 1-16
About this time some Pharisees and teachers of the Law of Moses came from Jerusalem. They asked Jesus, "Why don't your disciples obey what our ancestors taught us to do? They don't even wash their hands before they eat." Jesus answered:
Why do you disobey God and follow your own teaching? Didn't God command you to respect your father and mother? Didn't God tell you to put to death all who curse their parents? But you let people get by without helping their parents when they should. You let them say that what they have has been offered to God. Is this any way to show respect to your parents? You ignore God's commands in order to follow your own teaching. And you are nothing but show-offs! Isaiah the prophet was right when he wrote that God had said, "All of you praise me with your words, but you never really think about me. It is useless for you to worship me, when you teach rules made up by humans."
Jesus called the crowd together and said, "Pay attention and try to understand what I mean. The food that you put into your mouth doesn't make you unclean and unfit to worship God. The bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean." Then his disciples came over to him and asked, "Do you know that you insulted the Pharisees by what you said?"
Jesus answered, "Every plant that God in heaven did not plant will be pulled up by the roots. Stay away from those Pharisees! They are like blind people leading other blind people, and all of them will fall into a ditch." Peter replied, "What did you mean when you talked about the things that make people unclean?" Jesus then said: Don't any of you know what I am talking about by now?
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God’s Wide and Wonderful Welcome-Part 4 7-17-11
God, You call us to see You in all of creation. Give us new eyes and new hearts. Give us the wisdom to greet each person as a possibility of Your revelation. Amen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
God’s wide and wonderful welcome just keeps getting better and better. God invites us to places as yet unknown and sends people into our lives to both lead the way and walk beside and behind us. And sometimes, the Truth comes in the strangest packages. I hope that today we can think together about some of those precious packages of grace also known as “somebody”.
Taken out of context, it may seem that the story of the Tower of Babel makes little sense in our tracing of God’s wide and wonderful welcome throughout history and time. But if we look again, it makes very much sense indeed. The story of God’s people told in the Bible takes many twists and turns, some of them confusing indeed. In the beginning of the Old Testament, in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, the stories focus on the creation and story of humanity in general. Right after the story that we read today, God calls Abraham and the stories focus on one people—the people of Israel. That nation is the focus of the rest of the Old Testament. With a few exceptions, the Gospel narratives of the New Testament also focus on God’s chosen people, the Jewish people or Israelites. Pentecost, which we celebrated a few weeks ago, brings the story full circle and the rest of the New Testament reaches out into the whole world, or at least the whole world of that time. You might think of it as a story that is thick at both ends but thin in the middle. And this story is all about language and culture and difference. So, if we are to understand fully, God’s wide and wonderful welcome, we must understand all that we can about difference.
Let’s look at what actually happened in this place called Babel or Babylonia. It’s actually a simple story with extremely profound ramifications. It seems that everyone spoke the same language, so they were all able to understand each other. They got this idea to build a tower that would reach the sky. Since they were all the same, no one disagreed with this plan. They set out to make a name for themselves, to become very famous and decided to use the finest, sturdiest building materials they could find. They were quite pleased with themselves and planned to have great power. God, though, looked at what they were doing and became concerned. God knew that no good would come from the people all being the same. No one would challenge what they were thinking and they would soon believe that they no longer needed to believe in God. So, God, the Bible says, ‘confused’ their language and scattered the people all over the world.
And just how does this almost not-so-nice story fit into God’s wide and wonderful welcome, you may well ask. We know for a fact that sometimes God has to speak pretty loudly to be heard above the clamor of our everyday lives, and I suspect that God had to do just that what with all the noise of building and hammering, and all those folks chattering about how famous they were going to be when their tower reached God’s heavens. Suddenly, God acted, and they had to work to communicate—to even come together in the same place—to know what the other wanted or hoped for, dreamed or thought about. And this is where it gets good.
These folks in Babylonia had completely missed the point—they thought that they could be God, could reach as high as God, could be so famous that they were independent of God, that, in fact, they simply would not need God at all. But God called them to return to a real relationship of worship and trust in God, not in themselves. And, at the very same time, God gave to us the gift of difference. Letty Russell calls it “riotous difference”. And so this wide and wonderful welcome invites us into a community of difference—of different perspectives, languages, cultures, histories and dreams—a difference that encourages us to seek out the gifts and joys hidden behind the everyday realities of all of our lives and the lives of those who look absolutely nothing like us at all.
Think about it for a minute. If all birds looked like bluebirds, would we ever appreciate the exquisite blue of the bluebird itself? If all the trees were weeping willows, would we truly admire the sweeping sway of the willow in the wind? If everyone talked like everyone else, would we not be bored in an instant? And, worse yet, if everyone thought and believed like everyone else, how in the world would we ever grow, ever be called to live into more than we currently experience? But God knew better—knew that we needed each other to challenge and prod and even argue at times. Whether you experience this story as truth or myth, think of the grace that God allows us to experience when we take seriously our need to learn to communicate and appreciate each other.
And yet, we are oh so afraid of difference. No matter how hard we try to open wide the wonderful welcome afforded to us by God, we stumble as we run head long into ‘somebodies’ that don’t always see eye to eye with us.
There’s something from our Gospel lesson that we can take into our growing place this day. It seems that there were some very strict teachers of the Law of Moses called Pharisees. They were part of God’s chosen people we spoke of earlier and they were very serious about obeying every teensy-tiny letter of the Law. They confronted Jesus. “Your disciples eat with dirty hands. You know that is against what our religion teaches. Why don’t you make them obey the law?” Jesus turns it back on them and accuses them of perverting their own laws when it benefitted them. He denounced them and, in general, ticked them off pretty badly. Jesus had a knack for pushing the envelope of his time. He taught the crowd and said, “Don’t you get it? It isn’t what you put in your mouth that puts you out of relationship with God, it’s the words that come out of your mouth that breaks that relationship down.” His disciples, always trying to make nice with the powers that be, say to him, “You’ve gone and made the Pharisees mad again, Jesus.” Jesus, frustrated again, says, “Stay away from the Pharisees—they don’t know the way, and they will just lead you down the wrong path.”
Jesus calls us to a higher understanding of difference. He wants us to know that difference—those people who do things differently from us are not inherently wrong or bad. What really matters is what they say, what kind of relationship with God they exhibit. But we, much like the Pharisees, seem to get caught in the Law of What We’ve Always Done, or the Law of What Keeps Us Comfortable. Jesus calls us to open our eyes and ears to what people are saying and doing rather than whether or not they conform to what we’ve always known and look like what we think they should look like. And that’s a wide and wonderful welcome indeed.
Nevertheless, we must push ourselves to understand why we struggle so much with those who are different—those who are “stranger” to us. We are so quick to label folks as ‘strange’ rather than looking for the gifts their ‘strangeness’ brings to us. Each person who walks into our sacred circle—a circle we say is open to all—brings new ways of worshipping God, new ways of expressing who God is in their lives, and new ways of being the hands and feet and voice of God to each of us. We must push through the decades, even centuries of self-serving comfort that tells us that it is ok to reject those who don’t look or sound like us. We must talk with each other about how to make this place a place of welcome for those who are different from us. And we must have a plan for never letting ourselves off the hook, when someone’s challenge takes us by surprise or dares us to look at God in a new way.
Think back to God’s original plan—God intended for humankind to multiply and fill the earth—the glories of difference a direct reflection of the glorious multitude of the ways God sends love to the earth. As far back as the tower-builders in Babel, people thought they had a better idea. Nevertheless, God challenges them again—gives them and us another chance to rejoice in the ‘riotous difference’ in creation, in perspective, in gifts and in understanding. God gives them and us another chance to celebrate the expanse of creation—to push beyond our comfortable viewpoints and embrace all that God has for us to experience. Let us go forth to enter into the fullness of God’s wide and wonderful welcome this day and all the days to come. Amen and Amen.
Monday, July 11, 2011
God's Wide and Wonderful Welcome-Part 3-7-10-11
THE READINGS (THE MESSAGE)
First Reading: 2 Corinthians 8: 9-11
You are familiar with the generosity of our Master, Jesus Christ. Rich as he was, he gave it all away for us—in one stroke he became poor and we became rich. So here's what I think: The best thing you can do right now is to finish what you started last year and not let those good intentions grow stale. Your heart's been in the right place all along. You've got what it takes to finish it up, so go to it. 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.
Gospel Reading: Luke 19: 11-26 (portions)
Reader Two: While he had their attention, and because they were getting close to Jerusalem by this time and expectation was building that God's kingdom would appear any minute, he told this story: There was once a man descended from a royal house who needed to make a long trip back to headquarters to get authorization for his rule and then return. But first he called ten servants together, gave them each a sum of money, and instructed them, 'Operate with this until I return.' "When he came back bringing the authorization of his rule, he called those ten servants to whom he had given the money to find out how they had done.
"The first said, 'Master, I doubled your money.' “He said, 'Good servant! Great work! Because you've been trustworthy in this small job, I'm making you governor of ten towns.'
"The second said, 'Master, I made a fifty percent profit on your money.' "He said, 'I'm putting you in charge of five towns.' "The next servant said, 'Master, here's your money safe and sound. I kept it hidden in the cellar. To tell you the truth, I was a little afraid. I know you have high standards and hate sloppiness, and don't suffer fools gladly.' "He said, 'You're right that I don't suffer fools gladly—and you've acted the fool! Why didn't you at least invest the money in securities so I would have gotten a little interest on it?' "Then he said to those standing there, 'Take the money from him and give it to the servant who doubled my stake.' "They said, 'But Master, he already has double . . .' "He said, 'That's what I mean: Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and end up holding the bag.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
God, You welcome us into Your kingdom. Show us, step by step, exactly what that means. Open our eyes and our hearts to hearing You. Teach us to love each other, all the each others, now and to come. Amen
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Some of you may be wondering how our scriptures fit into our theme of God’s wide and wonderful welcome. Some of you may have heard the Gospel lesson and said, “Here it comes, she’s going to talk about money and giving”, and you would be right, except that I believe that by combining our ongoing theme of God’s wide and wonderful welcome with a new understanding of what it means to participate fully in the reign of justice to which we are being welcomed, that we will come away with a new, much more useful way to look at all these things.
Let me assure you of one thing—there are few, if any, pastors who strive to live authentic, transparent, God-driven lives who like to preach about that dreaded word “money”. And while some of that is because we know that many folks in the congregation will shut down and turn off the minute they figure out what the pastor is up to, it is mostly a reflection of our own conflicted relationship with money in our lives. Philip Yancey, a contemporary Christian author expresses our dilemma rather well. He says, “I feel pulled in opposite directions over the money issue. Sometimes I want to sell all that I own, join a Christian commune, and live out my days in intentional poverty. At other times, I want to rid myself of guilt and enjoy the fruits of our nation’s prosperity. Mostly I wish I did not have to think about money at all.” And, on that point, I agree.
The problem with that approach is that Jesus said more about our relationship to money and material things than he did any other single issue. So, if I fail to speak to you of such things, I fail to follow the example of the one who made the way into God’s wide and wonderful welcome so very plain and clear. So, I am going to trust you, my friends to not turn off and tune out, while I speak some of what I have learned about money and “things” along the way.
First, I have learned that it might be easier to talk about money when you don’t have any. When I have no money, I am much more able to speak about what others should do with their money than what I should do with my little mite. And many of you, are getting along on not very much money—let me be clear and upfront about that. However, If you walk away from this sermon, feeling guilty or ashamed or ‘less than’, I will have failed to correctly communicate what I believe God’s word says to all of us—from poverty stricken to wealthy to “I’m doing all right for now”. I pray that we will allow God’s Holy Spirit to show us the deeper truths and send us from here rejoicing in what God has given us for this day.
Scripture is clear about money—it, along with everything else we enjoy—comes from God. We are entrusted to use if for the right purposes, and there will come a time when we must account for how we have used all the generosity of God in our life.
That’s what the word “stewardship” means. When we are a steward, we acknowledge that we are caring for whatever we have been given for the true owner of it all. And I am talking about all of creation—which, of course, is another sermon itself—as well as that which we have been given as individuals and specific communities. Today I want us to look at ourselves—at what scripture says to us as individuals living in community.
We start with our Gospel lesson. It is important to note that in the Gospel of Luke, this is the last parable that Jesus tells—the last teaching story that he uses before entering Jerusalem for the last time to begin the week of his passion, death and resurrection. Even at the end, Jesus wants us to understand this notion of stewardship. Let me summarize the lengthy story that we heard read so well by Linda and Laura. A ruler gets called away. Before he leaves he hands out some money to some trusted employees to invest for him while he is gone. When he returns, he calls them to account for their investments. We hear about the first three he interviews. The first one has invested well and doubled the ruler’s money. The second one did half that well, and the third one let his or her fear of failing keep her from doing anything at all. She wanted to believe that it was enough to simply keep the investment safe. Alas, she was wrong and the ruler was very displeased. The one who had earned the most interest was given the additional money from the one who did nothing. When the onlookers told Jesus that this was unfair, he responded that it was very fair—that we are called to take risks if we expect to reap the benefits. The version we read today is almost humorous in its conclusion: “Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and end up holding the bag.”
Are we any different than those in the story? God has given us everything in this life—rich or poor, talented or waiting to discover our talents, living into our gifts or seeking to discover what those blessings of God. Jesus does not let us off the hook because of the amount or kind of assets that we have—we, all of us, will be given the opportunity to show God what we have done with all that we have been given.
And, here is where it gets tricky. Some of you have asked me to explain the Biblical concept of tithing. Tithing brings with it two important concepts: the amount one gives and the faithfulness with which one gives it—equally important, I believe. God, in the Old Testament, commanded that tithing was a simple matter of giving 10% of all that one has. God also commanded, in that Old Testament, agrarian society, that the giving be from the “first fruits”—not the leftovers, but what comes into our lives first. And God commanded that this giving be ongoing and faithful.
Some of you come from families and traditions where 10% tithing was a thing that was modeled for you from a very early age. For the vast majority of you, this concept may seem demanding, even harsh. Please know that God does not intend it to be so. Giving to God, in whatever amount, with whatever talents or gifts, is our response to being welcomed into God’s wide and wonderful welcome. God’s love, God’s grace, God’s love and God’s welcome is freely given and freely experienced by all of us who answer the invitation. Over time, we will explore this concept of tithing further, if you like, but for now, let’s look at it as faithfully giving a certain gift that you dedicate to God every week, without fail—whatever that percent or amount is now or may come to be in the future.
By giving back a portion of what God has freely given to us, we participate in something bigger than ourselves. Paul’s words in our reading today explain all this to the young church in Corinth: Remember how generous Jesus was to all of us—he gave it all away—in one moment, He became poor and we became rich. Here’s a way for you or for us to respond: keep doing what you started, don’t forget what it is all about—you have been doing the right thing for over a year. You know you can finish what you started. All it takes is making a commitment—then you will do all that you can because the hands are controlled by the heart. No one works any harder than anyone else. And what you can’t do, someone else can, and vice versa. It all works out to be even in the end.” Ok, so maybe I changed the words a wee bit along the way, but this is what I think Paul would say to this young church here in Central Florida.
And so we give—as a way of sharing in God’s will for this world and as a way to make a difference. We give of heart and soul, of wealth and talent, of time and energy—not because God requires it of us. We give in response to all that we have been given, as an act of worship, as a way to be a part of what God is up to in this world, as a way to say “there’s more to life than just material things”, as a way of telling the world that God has made a difference in our lives, and, finally, we give because by giving in all these things we grow richer in God’s grace. As we come to understand that by giving our time, our talent, and our treasure in response to God’s wide and wonderful welcome into all that God is about, we enjoy a deeper experience of God as we go about our lives as faithful stewards of all that we have been given. And God just keeps on welcoming, widely and wonderfully, inviting us into a deeper life—deeper than anything we ever imagined, a life that will enable us to participate in God’s very reign, to make a difference in the lives of others and to spread the Gospel here, in this place, and to the world beyond. Amen and Amen
First Reading: 2 Corinthians 8: 9-11
You are familiar with the generosity of our Master, Jesus Christ. Rich as he was, he gave it all away for us—in one stroke he became poor and we became rich. So here's what I think: The best thing you can do right now is to finish what you started last year and not let those good intentions grow stale. Your heart's been in the right place all along. You've got what it takes to finish it up, so go to it. 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.
Gospel Reading: Luke 19: 11-26 (portions)
Reader Two: While he had their attention, and because they were getting close to Jerusalem by this time and expectation was building that God's kingdom would appear any minute, he told this story: There was once a man descended from a royal house who needed to make a long trip back to headquarters to get authorization for his rule and then return. But first he called ten servants together, gave them each a sum of money, and instructed them, 'Operate with this until I return.' "When he came back bringing the authorization of his rule, he called those ten servants to whom he had given the money to find out how they had done.
"The first said, 'Master, I doubled your money.' “He said, 'Good servant! Great work! Because you've been trustworthy in this small job, I'm making you governor of ten towns.'
"The second said, 'Master, I made a fifty percent profit on your money.' "He said, 'I'm putting you in charge of five towns.' "The next servant said, 'Master, here's your money safe and sound. I kept it hidden in the cellar. To tell you the truth, I was a little afraid. I know you have high standards and hate sloppiness, and don't suffer fools gladly.' "He said, 'You're right that I don't suffer fools gladly—and you've acted the fool! Why didn't you at least invest the money in securities so I would have gotten a little interest on it?' "Then he said to those standing there, 'Take the money from him and give it to the servant who doubled my stake.' "They said, 'But Master, he already has double . . .' "He said, 'That's what I mean: Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and end up holding the bag.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
God, You welcome us into Your kingdom. Show us, step by step, exactly what that means. Open our eyes and our hearts to hearing You. Teach us to love each other, all the each others, now and to come. Amen
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Some of you may be wondering how our scriptures fit into our theme of God’s wide and wonderful welcome. Some of you may have heard the Gospel lesson and said, “Here it comes, she’s going to talk about money and giving”, and you would be right, except that I believe that by combining our ongoing theme of God’s wide and wonderful welcome with a new understanding of what it means to participate fully in the reign of justice to which we are being welcomed, that we will come away with a new, much more useful way to look at all these things.
Let me assure you of one thing—there are few, if any, pastors who strive to live authentic, transparent, God-driven lives who like to preach about that dreaded word “money”. And while some of that is because we know that many folks in the congregation will shut down and turn off the minute they figure out what the pastor is up to, it is mostly a reflection of our own conflicted relationship with money in our lives. Philip Yancey, a contemporary Christian author expresses our dilemma rather well. He says, “I feel pulled in opposite directions over the money issue. Sometimes I want to sell all that I own, join a Christian commune, and live out my days in intentional poverty. At other times, I want to rid myself of guilt and enjoy the fruits of our nation’s prosperity. Mostly I wish I did not have to think about money at all.” And, on that point, I agree.
The problem with that approach is that Jesus said more about our relationship to money and material things than he did any other single issue. So, if I fail to speak to you of such things, I fail to follow the example of the one who made the way into God’s wide and wonderful welcome so very plain and clear. So, I am going to trust you, my friends to not turn off and tune out, while I speak some of what I have learned about money and “things” along the way.
First, I have learned that it might be easier to talk about money when you don’t have any. When I have no money, I am much more able to speak about what others should do with their money than what I should do with my little mite. And many of you, are getting along on not very much money—let me be clear and upfront about that. However, If you walk away from this sermon, feeling guilty or ashamed or ‘less than’, I will have failed to correctly communicate what I believe God’s word says to all of us—from poverty stricken to wealthy to “I’m doing all right for now”. I pray that we will allow God’s Holy Spirit to show us the deeper truths and send us from here rejoicing in what God has given us for this day.
Scripture is clear about money—it, along with everything else we enjoy—comes from God. We are entrusted to use if for the right purposes, and there will come a time when we must account for how we have used all the generosity of God in our life.
That’s what the word “stewardship” means. When we are a steward, we acknowledge that we are caring for whatever we have been given for the true owner of it all. And I am talking about all of creation—which, of course, is another sermon itself—as well as that which we have been given as individuals and specific communities. Today I want us to look at ourselves—at what scripture says to us as individuals living in community.
We start with our Gospel lesson. It is important to note that in the Gospel of Luke, this is the last parable that Jesus tells—the last teaching story that he uses before entering Jerusalem for the last time to begin the week of his passion, death and resurrection. Even at the end, Jesus wants us to understand this notion of stewardship. Let me summarize the lengthy story that we heard read so well by Linda and Laura. A ruler gets called away. Before he leaves he hands out some money to some trusted employees to invest for him while he is gone. When he returns, he calls them to account for their investments. We hear about the first three he interviews. The first one has invested well and doubled the ruler’s money. The second one did half that well, and the third one let his or her fear of failing keep her from doing anything at all. She wanted to believe that it was enough to simply keep the investment safe. Alas, she was wrong and the ruler was very displeased. The one who had earned the most interest was given the additional money from the one who did nothing. When the onlookers told Jesus that this was unfair, he responded that it was very fair—that we are called to take risks if we expect to reap the benefits. The version we read today is almost humorous in its conclusion: “Risk your life and get more than you ever dreamed of. Play it safe and end up holding the bag.”
Are we any different than those in the story? God has given us everything in this life—rich or poor, talented or waiting to discover our talents, living into our gifts or seeking to discover what those blessings of God. Jesus does not let us off the hook because of the amount or kind of assets that we have—we, all of us, will be given the opportunity to show God what we have done with all that we have been given.
And, here is where it gets tricky. Some of you have asked me to explain the Biblical concept of tithing. Tithing brings with it two important concepts: the amount one gives and the faithfulness with which one gives it—equally important, I believe. God, in the Old Testament, commanded that tithing was a simple matter of giving 10% of all that one has. God also commanded, in that Old Testament, agrarian society, that the giving be from the “first fruits”—not the leftovers, but what comes into our lives first. And God commanded that this giving be ongoing and faithful.
Some of you come from families and traditions where 10% tithing was a thing that was modeled for you from a very early age. For the vast majority of you, this concept may seem demanding, even harsh. Please know that God does not intend it to be so. Giving to God, in whatever amount, with whatever talents or gifts, is our response to being welcomed into God’s wide and wonderful welcome. God’s love, God’s grace, God’s love and God’s welcome is freely given and freely experienced by all of us who answer the invitation. Over time, we will explore this concept of tithing further, if you like, but for now, let’s look at it as faithfully giving a certain gift that you dedicate to God every week, without fail—whatever that percent or amount is now or may come to be in the future.
By giving back a portion of what God has freely given to us, we participate in something bigger than ourselves. Paul’s words in our reading today explain all this to the young church in Corinth: Remember how generous Jesus was to all of us—he gave it all away—in one moment, He became poor and we became rich. Here’s a way for you or for us to respond: keep doing what you started, don’t forget what it is all about—you have been doing the right thing for over a year. You know you can finish what you started. All it takes is making a commitment—then you will do all that you can because the hands are controlled by the heart. No one works any harder than anyone else. And what you can’t do, someone else can, and vice versa. It all works out to be even in the end.” Ok, so maybe I changed the words a wee bit along the way, but this is what I think Paul would say to this young church here in Central Florida.
And so we give—as a way of sharing in God’s will for this world and as a way to make a difference. We give of heart and soul, of wealth and talent, of time and energy—not because God requires it of us. We give in response to all that we have been given, as an act of worship, as a way to be a part of what God is up to in this world, as a way to say “there’s more to life than just material things”, as a way of telling the world that God has made a difference in our lives, and, finally, we give because by giving in all these things we grow richer in God’s grace. As we come to understand that by giving our time, our talent, and our treasure in response to God’s wide and wonderful welcome into all that God is about, we enjoy a deeper experience of God as we go about our lives as faithful stewards of all that we have been given. And God just keeps on welcoming, widely and wonderfully, inviting us into a deeper life—deeper than anything we ever imagined, a life that will enable us to participate in God’s very reign, to make a difference in the lives of others and to spread the Gospel here, in this place, and to the world beyond. Amen and Amen
Sunday, July 3, 2011
God's Wide and Wonderful Welcome-Part 2-7-3-11
FIRST READING—Hebrews 13: 1-3, 13, 16
Stay on good terms with each other, held together by love. Be ready with a meal or a bed when it's needed. Why, some have extended hospitality to angels without ever knowing it! Regard prisoners as if you were in prison with them. Look on victims of abuse as if what happened to them had happened to you.
So let's go outside, where Jesus is, where the action is—not trying to be privileged insiders, but taking our share in the abuse of Jesus. This "insider world" is not our home. Make sure you don't take things for granted and go slack in working for the common good; share what you have with others. God takes particular pleasure in acts of worship—a different kind of "sacrifice"—that take place in kitchen and workplace and on the streets.
SECOND READING—Luke 4: 14-21
Jesus returned to Galilee powerful in the Spirit. News that he was back spread through the countryside. He taught in their meeting places to everyone's acclaim and pleasure.
He came to Nazareth where he had been reared. As he always did on the Sabbath, he went to the meeting place. When he stood up to read, he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written,
God's Spirit is on me;
[God chose] me to preach the Message of good news to
the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, "This is God's year to act!"
He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the place was on him, intent. Then he started in, "You've just heard Scripture make history. It came true just now in this place."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
God, give us the grace to see You when You welcome us into Your grace, or into a new place of spiritual depth. Give us the grace to welcome others to everything we have in You. Be our vision, our mission, and our light. Amen
Today is often called Freedom Sunday, that Sunday that falls closest to Independence Day. And on this Freedom Sunday we celebrate the freedom that allows us to meet here in this place without fear of bodily or material harm. We celebrate all the freedoms we enjoy and say thank you to all who have fought in so many ways and at so many times for our freedom. May we never forget that it is the courage of those who came before us who enable us to talk of all sorts of freedom today. Nevertheless, may we continue to remember that we are not wholly free until all of humanity is free and that we must continue to work for freedom in our own world and lives. Today, we are graced to meet together, to worship together, and to be grateful together. Let us move boldly into God’s wide and wonderful welcome as we honor those who have done so in other times.
Before the first person every stepped across one of the numerous doorways we have called Open Circle, I was driven by the belief that all of us, young and old, need a place to be at home—just as we are, comfortable in our own skin, finally free from the demands to change who we are or at least to pretend to be something we are not—and I do not necessarily only mean as it relates to sexuality. But as I entered into what is certainly the last half of my life, if not last third or last quarter, and began to watch my friends and colleagues do the same, it became clear to me that, time is indeed short and waiting to find God’s wild and wonderful welcome was not a good plan at all. I sat with those thoughts for probably 5 years before I came to be your pastor. As I authored a training curriculum for nursing home staff and worked with those staff to try to get them to understand the damage of requiring our elders when they entered those unfriendly places known as nursing homes, to either “go back into the closet” or “batten down the hatches on an existing closet even further”, I came to have a passion for finding or creating, if need be, a place where faith is free and open and one is welcome because of who you are—gay, straight, trans, bi, rich, poor, healthy, sick, young, or old or in-between and not in spite of who you are. And God continued to work on my heart and make ready a plan for what became Open Circle.
I am convinced that Open Circle is here because people, all people, need a place where it all makes sense. Perhaps those of us who have passed the mid-mark of our lives, need it a little more as we have come to a time in our lives when we may feel a stronger need for life to ‘make sense’ as we face numerous transitions in our lives. But that takes a very special place, a place full of peace and grace. It takes a place where all are welcome, and where the world in all its difference and splendid creation are represented. I believe that we are intended to have a full array of ministries someday—ministries that will bring all of God’s wild and wonderful welcome into this community and communities beyond. I believe that we are called to minister especially to those who grieve and those who are facing great loss as they age. My vision for this place is to be a place so free from guilt and blame that all prior pain is absorbed by grace. As we spoke last week, it is in community, this community where God’s word becomes incarnate and God’s welcome is felt by all who enter these doors. And it is this community who will, as our scripture says today, go out into the streets to offer God’s wild and wonderful welcome to young and old, parents and children, grandparents, those without homes, those without friends, those without God.
In our first reading, the writer of Hebrews is clear: “Stay on good terms with each other, held together by love. Be ready with a meal or a bed when it's needed.” And referring to our story of Abraham and the heavenly visitors from last week, the writer continues: “ Why, some have extended hospitality to angels without ever knowing it!” This writer calls us to treat prisoners as if we were in prison with them, abuse victims as if the abuse had happened to us. It doesn’t take much to extend those words to include those who are ill, or in pain, or in emotional turmoil. To treat all of those folks as if their infirmity or issue is happening to us, because it is happening to another child of God, calls us to open even wider God’s wide and wonderful welcome. Look at what comes next—it is not enough to stay inside these walls. The writer reminds us, “ So let's go outside, where Jesus is, where the action is—not trying to be privileged insiders, but taking our share in the abuse of Jesus.” For it is outside as well as inside where Jesus is. And finally, the writer commands us: “Make sure you don't take things for granted and go slack in working for the common good; share what you have with others. God takes particular pleasure in acts of worship—a different kind of "sacrifice"—that take place in kitchen and workplace and on the streets.” Particular acts of worship, worship that requires us to use our resources, our hands, and not just our speech. As we plan together, think together, enlarge our thoughts together to explore and celebrate what God has in mind for Open Circle, we will do well to remember these words of challenge. God’s wide and wonderful welcome, indeed!
Letty M. Russell, feminist theologian and minister, writes of God’s welcome in her final book, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference. She talks about the concept of hospitality as it relates to creating a safe space—a space perhaps as I described earlier in my own vision for Open Circle. She relates the concept of safe space to the Hebrew tradition of “Sanctuary” which is rooted in a tradition of ‘cities of refuge’. God commanded the people of Israel to create places of sanctuary—places where no blood could be shed—where, regardless of their past lives and actions, people were safe. Over time, this concept was expanded to include all people, not just Israelites, and the notion of sanctuary and “the sanctuary”, or “church” as we call it began to flow together. According to Russell, “The word “sanctuary” comes from the Latin sanctus, which means “holy”. The Latin sanctus comes from the Hebrerw kaddish, meaning “holy”. The right of protection for all persons is derived from God’s holiness and provides the basic theological understanding of hospitality in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures: Human being are created by God and are to be holy, and to be treated as holy or sacred.”
Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, author of some of the world’s finest books on suffering and God’s grace, also notes that the concept of sanctuary relates to human beings. He states: “Every human being is a dwelling of God—man or woman or child, Christian or Jewish or Buddhist. Any person, by virtue of being a son or a daughter of humanity is a living sanctuary whom nobody has the right to invade.” Now we know that there are many places in the New Testament where our bodies, our very selves are referred to as sanctuaries, temples, holy places. And so, we are sacred, each of us, our hearts, our souls, are all sacred before a living and loving God.
God calls us then to extend this wild and wonderful welcome in ways that protect each other and all of creation. Who are we to welcome then? Or, in other words, who is it that needs this safe space, this wild and wonderful welcome of God? For this we turn to Jesus’ reading in the temple in Nazareth. He stood up, and he read from Isaiah: God's Spirit is on me; [God chose] me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the burdened and battered free, to announce, "This is God's year to act!"
Jesus handed the scroll back to the assistant and sat down. And then he said, “today, this has come true in your hearing.” I believe as we move forward into a full expression of God’s wide and wonderful welcome in this place and in this time that God will honor our actions—this remains God’s year to act! Amen and amen!
Stay on good terms with each other, held together by love. Be ready with a meal or a bed when it's needed. Why, some have extended hospitality to angels without ever knowing it! Regard prisoners as if you were in prison with them. Look on victims of abuse as if what happened to them had happened to you.
So let's go outside, where Jesus is, where the action is—not trying to be privileged insiders, but taking our share in the abuse of Jesus. This "insider world" is not our home. Make sure you don't take things for granted and go slack in working for the common good; share what you have with others. God takes particular pleasure in acts of worship—a different kind of "sacrifice"—that take place in kitchen and workplace and on the streets.
SECOND READING—Luke 4: 14-21
Jesus returned to Galilee powerful in the Spirit. News that he was back spread through the countryside. He taught in their meeting places to everyone's acclaim and pleasure.
He came to Nazareth where he had been reared. As he always did on the Sabbath, he went to the meeting place. When he stood up to read, he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written,
God's Spirit is on me;
[God chose] me to preach the Message of good news to
the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
to announce, "This is God's year to act!"
He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the place was on him, intent. Then he started in, "You've just heard Scripture make history. It came true just now in this place."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
God, give us the grace to see You when You welcome us into Your grace, or into a new place of spiritual depth. Give us the grace to welcome others to everything we have in You. Be our vision, our mission, and our light. Amen
Today is often called Freedom Sunday, that Sunday that falls closest to Independence Day. And on this Freedom Sunday we celebrate the freedom that allows us to meet here in this place without fear of bodily or material harm. We celebrate all the freedoms we enjoy and say thank you to all who have fought in so many ways and at so many times for our freedom. May we never forget that it is the courage of those who came before us who enable us to talk of all sorts of freedom today. Nevertheless, may we continue to remember that we are not wholly free until all of humanity is free and that we must continue to work for freedom in our own world and lives. Today, we are graced to meet together, to worship together, and to be grateful together. Let us move boldly into God’s wide and wonderful welcome as we honor those who have done so in other times.
Before the first person every stepped across one of the numerous doorways we have called Open Circle, I was driven by the belief that all of us, young and old, need a place to be at home—just as we are, comfortable in our own skin, finally free from the demands to change who we are or at least to pretend to be something we are not—and I do not necessarily only mean as it relates to sexuality. But as I entered into what is certainly the last half of my life, if not last third or last quarter, and began to watch my friends and colleagues do the same, it became clear to me that, time is indeed short and waiting to find God’s wild and wonderful welcome was not a good plan at all. I sat with those thoughts for probably 5 years before I came to be your pastor. As I authored a training curriculum for nursing home staff and worked with those staff to try to get them to understand the damage of requiring our elders when they entered those unfriendly places known as nursing homes, to either “go back into the closet” or “batten down the hatches on an existing closet even further”, I came to have a passion for finding or creating, if need be, a place where faith is free and open and one is welcome because of who you are—gay, straight, trans, bi, rich, poor, healthy, sick, young, or old or in-between and not in spite of who you are. And God continued to work on my heart and make ready a plan for what became Open Circle.
I am convinced that Open Circle is here because people, all people, need a place where it all makes sense. Perhaps those of us who have passed the mid-mark of our lives, need it a little more as we have come to a time in our lives when we may feel a stronger need for life to ‘make sense’ as we face numerous transitions in our lives. But that takes a very special place, a place full of peace and grace. It takes a place where all are welcome, and where the world in all its difference and splendid creation are represented. I believe that we are intended to have a full array of ministries someday—ministries that will bring all of God’s wild and wonderful welcome into this community and communities beyond. I believe that we are called to minister especially to those who grieve and those who are facing great loss as they age. My vision for this place is to be a place so free from guilt and blame that all prior pain is absorbed by grace. As we spoke last week, it is in community, this community where God’s word becomes incarnate and God’s welcome is felt by all who enter these doors. And it is this community who will, as our scripture says today, go out into the streets to offer God’s wild and wonderful welcome to young and old, parents and children, grandparents, those without homes, those without friends, those without God.
In our first reading, the writer of Hebrews is clear: “Stay on good terms with each other, held together by love. Be ready with a meal or a bed when it's needed.” And referring to our story of Abraham and the heavenly visitors from last week, the writer continues: “ Why, some have extended hospitality to angels without ever knowing it!” This writer calls us to treat prisoners as if we were in prison with them, abuse victims as if the abuse had happened to us. It doesn’t take much to extend those words to include those who are ill, or in pain, or in emotional turmoil. To treat all of those folks as if their infirmity or issue is happening to us, because it is happening to another child of God, calls us to open even wider God’s wide and wonderful welcome. Look at what comes next—it is not enough to stay inside these walls. The writer reminds us, “ So let's go outside, where Jesus is, where the action is—not trying to be privileged insiders, but taking our share in the abuse of Jesus.” For it is outside as well as inside where Jesus is. And finally, the writer commands us: “Make sure you don't take things for granted and go slack in working for the common good; share what you have with others. God takes particular pleasure in acts of worship—a different kind of "sacrifice"—that take place in kitchen and workplace and on the streets.” Particular acts of worship, worship that requires us to use our resources, our hands, and not just our speech. As we plan together, think together, enlarge our thoughts together to explore and celebrate what God has in mind for Open Circle, we will do well to remember these words of challenge. God’s wide and wonderful welcome, indeed!
Letty M. Russell, feminist theologian and minister, writes of God’s welcome in her final book, Just Hospitality: God’s Welcome in a World of Difference. She talks about the concept of hospitality as it relates to creating a safe space—a space perhaps as I described earlier in my own vision for Open Circle. She relates the concept of safe space to the Hebrew tradition of “Sanctuary” which is rooted in a tradition of ‘cities of refuge’. God commanded the people of Israel to create places of sanctuary—places where no blood could be shed—where, regardless of their past lives and actions, people were safe. Over time, this concept was expanded to include all people, not just Israelites, and the notion of sanctuary and “the sanctuary”, or “church” as we call it began to flow together. According to Russell, “The word “sanctuary” comes from the Latin sanctus, which means “holy”. The Latin sanctus comes from the Hebrerw kaddish, meaning “holy”. The right of protection for all persons is derived from God’s holiness and provides the basic theological understanding of hospitality in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures: Human being are created by God and are to be holy, and to be treated as holy or sacred.”
Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, author of some of the world’s finest books on suffering and God’s grace, also notes that the concept of sanctuary relates to human beings. He states: “Every human being is a dwelling of God—man or woman or child, Christian or Jewish or Buddhist. Any person, by virtue of being a son or a daughter of humanity is a living sanctuary whom nobody has the right to invade.” Now we know that there are many places in the New Testament where our bodies, our very selves are referred to as sanctuaries, temples, holy places. And so, we are sacred, each of us, our hearts, our souls, are all sacred before a living and loving God.
God calls us then to extend this wild and wonderful welcome in ways that protect each other and all of creation. Who are we to welcome then? Or, in other words, who is it that needs this safe space, this wild and wonderful welcome of God? For this we turn to Jesus’ reading in the temple in Nazareth. He stood up, and he read from Isaiah: God's Spirit is on me; [God chose] me to preach the Message of good news to the poor, sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to set the burdened and battered free, to announce, "This is God's year to act!"
Jesus handed the scroll back to the assistant and sat down. And then he said, “today, this has come true in your hearing.” I believe as we move forward into a full expression of God’s wide and wonderful welcome in this place and in this time that God will honor our actions—this remains God’s year to act! Amen and amen!
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