Monday, February 25, 2013

"Not All Who Wander Are Lost"

Image Source: My sister's fabulous photography blog.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
1When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, 2you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.

3You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us." 4When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God, 5you shall make this response before the LORD your God:

"A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. 6When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, 7we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. 8The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me."

You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

Sermon:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor.”  It’s not a very glamorous statement, is it?  Perhaps if a “distant relative of the Kennedys was my ancestor” or “a long lost descendant of William Wallace was my ancestor” it would be worth noting.  But being related to a wanderer?  It’s like saying that the family trade, passed down from generation to generation, is hitchhiking.   There is no glamor about aimlessly rambling in search of some unknown home.  Realtors do not show someone a beautiful three-bedroom, 2 ½ bath home and then say, “But you might really prefer this tent!  It doesn’t have holes or anything.”

These days, the mark of success seems to be exactly the opposite: settling down, earning a good income, and owning a home.  We have no place in our society for wandering.

The reason is pretty simple: when you wander, you can’t take much with you.  When you settle, you can.  Wandering means not knowing where your next meal is going to come from.  Settling means you can predict your meals for the next month, all with the convenience of high-powered gas burners, an overstuffed freezer and an instant microwave.  I imagine the people of Israel would have been delighted with a nice, easy Stouffers lasagna every now and then.

When wandering meant those tyrant Egyptians getting drowned in a sea that they had safely passed through, the Israelites were ready to pitch their tents and enjoy the fresh desert air.  But when wandering meant limited water and food, they wanted no part of it.  They put their stomachs first.  They cried out to Moses, “Are we there yet?  We’re hungry.  Did God really bring us out here to let us starve?  I wish we were back in Egypt…”

How absurd.  To have been liberated from slavery, led by a miraculous God on a journey to a land flowing with milk and honey, only to wish, to long for, captivity because that would be the predictable path.  Oppressed, half-alive, yes, but at least they knew where their next meager meal was coming from.  We have inherited this from these ancestors of ours: The desire for a certain slavery over an uncertain journey. 

Now, you may be thinking that slavery is a part of our history, but not our present.  I beg to differ, y’all.  The slavery we experience is different, though.  It is a slavery of choice: we choose to allow things to shackle us, rather than facing the wilderness of life.  Barbara Brown Taylor describes this well:

Almost everyone uses something--if not anesthesia, then at least a favorite pacifier: murder mysteries, Facebook, reruns of Boston Legal, Pottery Barn catalogs, Bombay Sapphire gin martinis.  I'm not saying those are awful things.  I'm just saying they are distractions--things to reach for when a person is too tired, too sad, or too afraid to enter the wilderness of the present moment--to wonder what it's really about or who else is in it or maybe just to make a little bed in the sand.

The problem for most of us is that we cannot go straight from setting down the cell phone to hearing the still, small voice of God in the wilderness. 
What we have [in Lent] are forty whole days for finding out what life is like without the usual painkillers.  Once you take the headphones off, silence can be really loud.  Once you turn off the television, a night can get really long.  After a while you can start thinking that all of this quiet emptiness or, worst case, all this howling wilderness, is a sign of things gone badly wrong: devil on the loose, huge temptations, no help from the audience, God gone AWOL--not to mention your own spiritual insufficiency to deal with any of these things. 

The wilderness is a terrifying place: just ask Jesus who was not only famished but then tempted by what the people of Israel and he most longed for: food.  But how much better it is to be terrified by our own incompleteness, to be frightened by our own frailty, than to be enslaved by feeling nothing at all. 

Our genealogy from Deuteronomy this morning does not say “a slave was my ancestor.”  Though of course, as those grafted into God’s covenant with the people of Israel, this is true.  But those who came before us are remembered not by their captivity, but by their freedom from it.  By their choice to keep following an old man and his walking stick, trusting that God would provide for them, even and especially in the wilderness.  We remember their grateful worship in offering a portion of their harvest to God and sharing with the foreigners, the wanderers, among them. 

As Earnest Green, one of the nine African American students to be integrated into Little Rock Central High School in 1957, said when speaking at Sandhills last week, “There are ancestors you do not even know whose blood, sweat and tears poured so that you could be here.”  This is our heritage.

So why is it that we inherit their slavery more than their ways of wandering and worship?  Why is it that we live in such a way that many – especially those who are not a part of a faith community – see us church folk as slaves to money, theology or tradition?  Why do we live as if we are slaves, when our true identity is that of wanderers?

Perhaps if we have the courage to keep walking into the wilderness of silence and self-denial, even as our stomach growls and our ears ring in the quiet, we would discover that there is an ancient strength woven into our very being.  We would discover that we no longer need painkillers to keep us numb from life’s desert places.

Perhaps, like our sojourning Savior, we would find the courage to silence the voices of evil calling us to seek instant gratification, power and glory.

And, if we let prayer be our food and the Spirit be our breath, perhaps we will find our true selves somewhere along the way.  Not the selves we put out there for the world to admire and validate, but who we really are. 

Wandering is in our blood.  Wandering is in our faith.  If we shake off the shackles of self-focus long enough, we will find that our feet and hearts are desperate for another way.  And as my favorite theologian, J.R.R. Tolkien reminds us, “Not all those who wander are lost.”
How is God calling you to wander this Lent in search of your true self?  What chains of comfort are too heavy or distracting for that journey?  What resurrection are you longing to experience? 

If you are afraid, hungry, doubting, or uncertain about the road ahead of you, then you are most certainly on the difficult but worthwhile journey of our ancestors.  The journey leads to a promised land.  The journey leads to new life.  Let’s wander there together.  Amen. 

Sunday, February 10, 2013

"The Mountain Bottom Experience"


Luke 9:28-43
28Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. 29And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. 30Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. 31They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. 32Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. 33Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, "Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah" — not knowing what he said. 34While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. 35Then from the cloud came a voice that said, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!" 36When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.

37On the next day, when they had come down from the mountain, a great crowd met Jesus. 38Just then a man from the crowd shouted, "Teacher, I beg you to look at my son; he is my only child. 39Suddenly a spirit seizes him, and all at once he shrieks. It convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him. 40I begged your disciples to cast it out, but they could not." 41Jesus answered, "You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you? Bring your son here." 42While he was coming, the demon dashed him to the ground in convulsions. But Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, healed the boy, and gave him back to his father. 43And all were astounded at the greatness of God.


SERMON: “The Mountain Bottom Experience”

I once went on a pilgrimage of sorts to Italy.  I was living in rainy, freezing Belfast and decided I needed to be under that Tuscan sun myself for a week or so.  I most wanted to find where the author of that great book (Under the Tuscan Sun) lived, in the tiny village of Cortona.  I do realize that this sounds like international stalking, y’all.  But off I went. 

In Cortona, I asked people where Bramasole, her famous house, was, and they vaguely guestured, saying  “Up the hill, near the church.”  Armed with my copy of her book and a little paper bag of fresh, plump grapes from the market, I began my trek up the hill.  Cortona is a walled city, with steps going up the hill that seem to have been designed by giants in some forgotten time long ago.  But all along the way to Saint Margarita church, there were mosaic stations of the cross inserted into those walls, guiding me upwards.

At the top of the hill, I looked around and was overwhelmed.  Vineyards sprawled out in every direction, that Tuscan sun shone on my head and cypress trees dotted the landscape like never-sleeping sentinels.  Though I did eventually find my way to Bramasole thanks to a sweet old man (actually hitching a ride with him, which horrified my parents), that moment at the top of the hill was my mountain top experience.  God was as real as the warm, sweet grapes on my tongue.  As real as the crinkled eyes of a stranger as he smiled at me.  As real as the warmth of the sun painting the landscape, and me with it, gold.

We have all had moments like this: mountain top experiences that, whether we’re on a literal mountain or not, fill our souls to the brim with joy and light.  Moments when the existence and love of God is an undeniable reality. 

I like to think that’s how Peter was feeling when he was invited up on a mountain with Jesus and James and John.  Jesus often liked a little hiking with his praying, so Peter might have imagined this was just an ordinary trek. But then something extraordinary happened: Moses and Elijah came down from who-knows-where and those heroes of the Jewish faith were shining like lightning along with Jesus. 

You need only remember a few words of the Old Testament or the scene from Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark to remember what happens when people see God’s glory face to face.  It usually involves death. 

But here Pete was, seeing that glory without any veil and he was still breathing.  He became so excited that he started to sound like a Boy Scout trying to earn his mountain top camping badge: “Let’s pitch some tents, y’all, and just stay here!”  The language he used can also mean building a shrine.  Perhaps he wanted to stay there basking in that light, worshipping its brilliance for the rest of his days.

But Jesus never meant for his light to stay on that mountain top.  They came down the mountain and like a light switch being turned off, suddenly darkness was all around them.  The darkness of an overwhelming crowd of people.  An urgent voice rose above the rest, shouting, “Teacher!  Help my son!  Please.”  The child was seized with an evil spirit that caused convulsions.  This was, in that time, one way to describe epilepsy. 

The man had first asked the disciples to heal his son, but said, “They cannot.”

Jesus was not a happy camper.  He had just shown his disciples the unveiled glory of God, but it seems they left it there on that mountain top, not thinking it had any place in this needy crowd. 

But with Jesus came a new way of doing things.  The glory of God was no longer toted around in a golden-gilded box that no one could touch or see.  Jesus’ glory was at its brightest, its most illuminating, its most transfiguring, when it was in a place of darkness.  He healed that boy, just as he knew his disciples could do, and all were astounded at the greatness of God. 

As much as my mountain top experience in Italy means to me, it was not the most formative moment of my faith.  We like to think those moments of transfiguring light have the greatest impact on our souls, but in reality, it is the moments of darkness that most shape our faith. 

Moments of sitting with a loved one in a hospital room, where answers abandon us for uneasy silence and the only thing to do is wait, and pray.

Moments of questioning everything you’ve ever heard or believed about God because a great injustice occurs that could not be compatible with such a God. 
Moments of words spoken hastily in anger, instantly causing damage that takes years to repair.

These mountain bottom experiences, where the light of God seems most hard to find, are precisely where we can most be transfigured – transformed – by God’s glory. 

But only if we let them.  Only if we recognize that Jesus came down that mountain for a reason, and that he still chooses to enter into whatever darkness this life brings. 

And only if we recognize that Jesus calls us, like his first disciples, not to keep our faith safely contained in some moment of isolated perfection, but to bring it into those moments of anxiety and doubt, believing that the good news is every bit as real there as it is anywhere else.
If we never take the light of God’s glory into darkness, it ceases to be light at all, for us or anyone else.                                                                          

Helen Keller, a woman well accustomed to darkness, wrote a poem called “A Chant of Darkness”, speaking of the power of it to teach us the meaning of light.

I dare not ask why we are ‘reft of light, 

Banished to our solitary isles amid the unmeasured seas, 

Or how our sight was nurtured to glorious vision, 

To fade and vanish and leave us in the dark alone. 

The secret of God is upon our tabernacle; 

Into His mystery I dare not pry.
Only this I know: 
With Him is strength,
With Him is wisdom, 

And God’s wisdom hath set darkness in our paths. 

Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came,

And in a little time we shall return again

Into the vast, unanswering dark.

The timid soul, fear-driven, shuns the dark; 

But upon the cheeks of him who must abide in shadow 

Breathes the wind of rushing angel-wings, 

And round him falls a light from unseen fires. 

Magical beams glow athwart the darkness; 

Paths of beauty wind through his black world 

To another world of light, 

Where no veil of sense shuts him out from Paradise.

Out of the uncharted, unthinkable dark we came, 

And in a little time we shall return again.

Do not fear the darkness at the bottom of the mountain…it may just be the place where you are able to most clearly see God’s light, and not only to see it, but to reflect the hope of that light to others.  Amen.

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

"Echoes of Love"


Sunday, February 3, 2013

1 Corinthians 13
If I speak in the tongues of mortals or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only in a mirror dimly; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.


Sermon: “Echoes of Love”

We’re going to begin with a little quiz this morning: name that artist!  Shout out the musician when you know it...first song, are y’all ready? (I shall not be singing these):
L is for the way you look at me                            
O is for the only one I see
V is very, very extraordinary and
E is even more than anyone that you adore… (Nat King Cole)

Next up:
Oh, you can’t hurry love
You just have to wait
You know love don’t come easy
It’s a game of give and take…(Diana Ross & the Supremes)

Wise men say only fools rush in
But I can’t help falling in love with you…(Elvis)

(Something for everyone here, y’all!)

You say:
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law (U2)

And finally…(if you don’t get this one, I might just make you preach next week!)
All you need is love
All you need is love
Love is all you need. (The Beatles)

What do all of our songs have in common?  Love.  Paul’s letter to the Corinthians might have fit in well with all these lyrics.  Except of course, that he wasn’t talking about romantic love.  Though “Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud…” might be catchy enough for a Valentine’s card, he was speaking to a church, not a couple.  And not a happy, lovey-dovey church, either.  He was speaking to a church deeply divided.

The church in Corinth was in conflict because they interpreted the Bible in different ways, and so Paul wrote: “If I understand all mysteries and have all knowledge but have not love, I am nothing.” 

They were divided because some thought they were more “spiritual” than others or had greater gifts than others, and so Paul wrote: “If I speak in the tongues of people and angels but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
They argued over who was most pious and giving, and so Paul wrote, “If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

When we read this letter in our Bibles, it talks an awful lot about “having” love: if we don’t “have love”, whatever else we might possess doesn’t mean much. 
But in the language Paul originally wrote these powerful words in, he did not say “have.”  The Greek word is literally “echo.” 

If I speak in heaven’s vernacular but don’t echo love, I am the irritating blare of a morning alarm clock that no one will turn off. 

If I am smarter than Einstein and have a stronger faith than Billy Graham but don’t echo love, I may as well not exist. 

If I serve like Mother Teresa and constantly give my old clothes to Goodwill, but don’t echo love, it is all pointless.
Our lives always echo something.  Anxiety, fear, envy, pride, selfishness, anger.  Or…they echo love. 

As North Carolinian folk musician David Lamotte says, “It’s not naive to think you can change the world.  It’s naive to think you can possibly be in the world and not change it.  Everything you do changes the world whether you like it or not.”

We can only echo what we have first heard ourselves.  So much of the time, all we hear around us are stories of revenge and hatred, of despair and greed.  And, without even necessarily meaning to, we echo that destruction because it seems that it is just the way things will always be. 

One of my favorite movies, The Mission, is a powerful witness to the ways we echo that which surrounds us.  It is set in 18th century South America, when Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries were enslaving local tribes, often with the collusion of the Church. 

A main character is Rodrigo Mendoza, played by Robert de Niro.  He is a horrible human being: he attacks the local tribes and steals their children for the slave trade.  He discovers that he and his brother love the same woman, and so he kills him.  This act destroys Mendoza.  He gives up on life, and finally a priest is sent to visit him.  The priest is named Father Gabriel (played by Jeremy Irons). 
Gabriel tells Mendoza that he is a coward, and urges him to have the courage to choose his penance, and with it, begin living again.  Finally, the man agrees, and embarks on a journey to visit the Guarani people, those he once enslaved.  He carries all of his old weapons tied on his back and climbs the perilous waterfall to this remote village. 

At the top, he is utterly spent, and the Guarani see him and are terrified.  A child runs up to him with a knife, and you are certain that vengeance will be done.  But that child chose not to echo hatred back to Mendoza.  Instead he chooses to echo love: he cuts the robe tied to all of Mendoza’s weapons, and throws them down the waterfall, and with them, Mendoza’s grief and guilt.  The man weeps with joy, and begins to serve the very people he had never even seen as human.

Let’s watch together the transformation that took place in his life because of the love he received.



Love is not some warm fuzzy feeling that resides on the inside of a 99-cent greeting card.  Love is not something that can be won on a reality t.v. show.  Love – according to The Mission and these words of Paul – is a movement, a state of being.  Love is the greatest force for transformation in the world.  When we love, and only then, we echo the One who came to repair all brokenness, to restore all life wasted, to return all unity discarded.  When we love, we echo the One who endures forever. 

Love of this sort demands much of us.  But it only demands so much because we have already received so much from God.  We do not need to invent love or create it, God has already done that.  We need only be an echo, in Jesus’ name.  Have we the courage to do that?  Amen.