Awe and Wonder

February 24, 2008
Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-5
A colleague I met some years back in California shared this story of youth ministry and spirituality. He was leading his high school group on a retreat on the Pacific coast, and had taken the kids out to the beach at sunset. He had them spread out by themselves along the water’s edge and watch as the sun went down over the ocean.
As he watched them watching the sun he noticed that a couple of the girls were crying. Being the good youth leader that he is, he immediately suspected some adolescent drama within the group. A romance broken up, an unkind word from a friend, some other of the myriad stumbles along the tortuous route of growing up.
So he went up to one of the girls to find out what he was going to have to deal with that weekend, what was going to get in the way of his great plans for drawing the kids into a deeper spirituality. He asked her, “what’s the matter?”
And she said, simply, “it’s so beautiful; I just never realized how beautiful it is.”
It was at that moment, he told me, that he had them right where he wanted them: open in awe and wonder to the grandeur of the universe; open, that is, to enter the moment of worship of the author of that grandeur.
As the psalmist wrote, “the sea is God’s for God made it … come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker.”
Let us worship.
Whatever else it is, whatever else we may try to make of it or accomplish through it by way of building up and maintaining a community, of learning the old, old story, of reflecting on the problems and challenges and issues of contemporary life, that initial call to worship begins so often with the simple recognition of the beauty and grandeur of the created order and a deep gratitude for the gift of our lives, our opportunity to appreciate and participate in it.
Whether they come standing before a Pacific sunset or under an eclipsing full moon, on a mountaintop or a field of waving grain, in solitude or in the company of others, out beyond the bounds of development of in the midst of the city where human creativity can reflect the creator’s image, those moments of simple recognition of beauty and wonder in the face of grace and love, open us to the presence of God and lead us to worship.
When our hearts are broken open by beauty, grace and love, worship is a fundamentally human response.
At such moments, I hear the old American hymn running through my mind:
“My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation.
I hear the clear, though far off hymn that hails a new creation.
No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I’m clinging.
Since love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”
Tears flow, even sometimes for those of us who do not cry easily. I recall with great clarity coming home from the hospital after Bud was born, sitting still for a moment, and being overwhelmed by the beauty of the moment of birth, by the immeasurable love I experienced, by my own heart being broken open as if for the first time. Likewise, I remember being on a roof-top garden above mid-town Manhattan with a group of high-school kids, sitting still in the dark listening to the late-night sounds of the city, sharing our thanksgivings after a day of serving the least of the city, and joining our voices in simple songs of praise. Or sitting – being still – in a park in the Rockies, looking down on the spreading lights of Denver, after a day of serving the least of that city, and offering thanksgiving and praise with a different group of kids as we looked out at the wonder of creation.
Such moments of awe and wonder are not the end of Christian worship or spirituality, they are the beginning. Such moments are not the end – the telos or purpose – of faith, but they can give rise to that direction.
For if faith is ultimately more about a relationship of trust than it is about a body of knowledge, then how better to begin to trust than to be still and know that God is God, to be still and open to the beauty and grandeur of the universe and of our small lives within that immense creation.
We all respond to such moments in our own ways, and, at its best, Christian worship brings together those multiple and diverse authentic responses and gives common voice to a communal response to that experience of God.
One of the reasons that there are so many variations on Christian community and worship is surely that our individual responses to such moments and experiences are also varied and diverse. For some, falling into contemplative silence is an authentic response, for others reflection and writing are authentic responses, for some breaking into dance, for others lifting voices in song.
Moving into response begins to give shape to our experience, and situating the experience within the story of a particular tradition begins to give it meaning and power.
That’s how it was that Paul was able to say, “we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
His heart-breaking experience of God’s presence opened him to hearing a new story, to singing a new song, and that story gave shape and meaning to his experience. Together, the experience and its meaningfulness, gave rise to a powerful faith such that Paul found hope in the midst of suffering.
Paul’s letters to the earliest Christian communities do not give much specific detail about their worship. He doesn’t tell us if they sung the classic hymns of the age or developed an entire new genre of praise, nor if they battled in disagreement over the difference. He doesn’t say if they were preaching communities; although one of my favorite Pauline anecdotes is the passage where a young man falls asleep during the preaching and tumbles out a window. I take that as a warning against the dangers of long-winded preaching!
So I’m going to stop right here and open our community to some prayerful conversation about what gives rise to wonder in your own experience, and about your own most deeply felt worshipful responses.

To Do Justice

February 17, 2008
Gen. 12:1-4; John 3:1-17
When I was about 10 years old I got a basketball for Christmas. I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a hoops junkie, so you can imagine the joy that gift brought. I took that ball with me everywhere I went and played wherever I could find a game. Then one day the ball was stolen; another kid took it from the gym.
I saw him leave with the ball under his arm, and I told my Dad. The boy, a classmate of mine, lived in a downtrodden neighborhood of North Chattanooga. My Dad knew it well, having grown up there, and he took me. When we got out of the car we could hear the thump, thump, thump of a basketball bouncing in the house.
Dad knocked on the door and told the woman who opened it that I thought the boy had picked up my ball by mistake. She went in the house and came out a moment later with the ball. “Is this yours?” she asked. It was, as the name and phone number in indelible ink confirmed.
She apologized for the “misunderstanding,” and I went home with my ball.
Walter Brueggemann has written that the Biblical understanding of justice amounts to sorting out what belongs to whom and returning it.
I learned a little bit about justice that morning, and about tempering it with compassion.
“Justice at its best,” Martin Luther King said, “is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
Whether it’s a pilfered basketball returned without undue embarrassment, or much larger and more difficult transactions, the work of justice is fundamental to any human community. For Christians, it is an essential part of the call to follow the Nazarene.
“What does the Lord require of us? To do justice …”
“Take away from me the noise of your songs … but let justice roll down like waters.”
“Maintain justice, and do what is right, for soon my salvation will come.”
Clearly scripture is concerned with justice. The word appears, in the NRSV translation more than 150 times, and “righteousness,” which in most cases translates a synonym, appears more than 250 times. God cares deeply about justice, and calls people of faith to similar deep concern.
Indeed, it is not too much to say, simply, that the call of God is to do justice.
Micah frames it best in his simple question, “what does the Lord require of you?”
The answer, “to do justice, love kindly, walk humbly with God.”
It does seem so simple and straightforward, but look around. What is the measure of justice in our world? How much does loving kindness mark the measure of our communities? Is there much left of humility in people of faith these days?
Is this what God had in mind in promising to make of Abram a great nation, blessed and a blessing for all the families of the earth? Is this the salvation for which Jesus lived and died?
The call of Abraham is the foundational moment for the creation of our faith; the moment of God’s self-revelation and the initiation of a covenant through which a people will be called, shaped and formed as a specific community marked, first and foremost, by the practice of justice.
The arc of the story of that people rises and falls according to the measure of that practice, and is defined with clarity for all time when God hears the people cry out from the burden of their unjust task masters and brings them out of the tyranny and injustice of Egypt into a land that is to be defined by specific practices of justice: welcoming strangers; caring compassionately for the least powerful; seeking shalom.
Although these practices cannot be fully captured by or identified with any particular political agenda or social policy, every agenda and policy must be measured against them. Which is to say, no political party or leader or candidate will bring about the coming of the kingdom. Nevertheless, justice is the journey of the beloved community toward the kingdom.
As Diana Butler Bass puts it in the book that we are studying in our Lenten series, “justice is not about backing a secular political agenda – whether that be liberal or conservative. Rather, justice is part of the faithful life of being a Christian; justice is spirituality.”
Of course, to have affects in the world, the practice of justice must engage the powers or it amounts to nothing but an empty spiritualism. Empty spiritualism does not get the basketball back to whom it belongs. Empty spiritualism does not and cannot address the spiritual ills of injustice.
More than 40 years ago, Martin Luther King warned the nation of impending spiritual death and he identified the deep social diseases speeding us toward that demise as racism, militarism and poverty. At their root, although each of these ills have real and urgent manifestations in the lives of our neighbors, these great social ills are spiritual. They stand in opposition precisely to those practices that were to mark the great nation of Abraham’s descendants.
Racism, and we may broaden that to the more generalized attitude of bigotry and thus include in the list of its victims women, gays, lesbians, undocumented workers, Muslims and so on, is the behavioral manifestation of the spiritual illness that closes us off to authentic, soulful encounters with sisters and brothers who differ from us, with the stranger in our midst, the alien in our land.
When Jesus says that we must be born again in order to enter the kingdom, he calls us to die to racism. He calls us to let die within us the spiritual disease that closes us off from the relationships that form the foundation of the beloved community, and to be born again to the abundant life that is ours as we gather at an unfenced table and celebrate God’s boundless love for a wondrously diverse humankind.
Poverty, whatever else it may involve, arises out of the twin spiritual diseases of materialism and consumerism. When Jesus said, “you will have the poor with you always,” he was not suggesting that we do nothing to relieve the crushing weight of extreme poverty. No, he was expressing the conviction that the Christian community would always include those who are poor; that the table would always be open and welcoming, and that the poor would have a central place. Despite what our culture of rampant consumerism would have us believe, there is nothing wrong with being poor. I grew up economically poor but rich beyond measure in the those things that cannot be measured: love, compassion, a deep sense of justice. Much of my adult life has been lived on the lower half of the median American household income – far from poverty, to be sure, farther from wealth as measured in dollars, but much closer to the deeper wealth that God desires for us.
The spiritual disease of materialism and consumerism drags at me from time to time, to be sure. When it does, I find myself focusing on the things I do not have and, in that focus on plasma screens and sports cars, I turn away from sisters and brothers, from life in community measured by faithfulness and spirituality and justice, from my heart’s true home. When we all turn away like that, the results are clear: our sisters and brothers fall under the very real ills and diseases that come with extreme poverty. We shop till we drop; they simply drop.
When Jesus said, “you must be born from above,” he was not telling Nicodemus to turn away from the world and its troubles. He was telling him to be open to the movement of the spirit that blows where it will – despite where the currents of the culture and its values and their deep distortions might be blowing. In other words, when the culture says measure your worth and that of those around you by what they own, by their social standing, by their power in the market, I say to you, open yourself to the presence of the spirit that just might be most strongly felt among the least of these sisters and brothers.
To go and be present compassionately among the least of these will put us at risk, to be sure. Such risk moves us sometimes to great fearfulness. In such fear, it becomes all too easy to succumb to that third great social/spiritual disease: militarism.
It is not a partisan political statement to mention that the United States spends more than half a trillion dollars each year on its military, or that such spending is more than that of the next 160-some countries’ combined military spending, or that such spending is more than half of the discretionary spending of the United States’ federal budget. After all, these figures have been roughly parallel through administrations of both parties dating back for many years.
It is not a partisan political statement to recall King’s words from 40 years ago: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
These are not political statements; they are spiritual ones. They call us to confront a broad, national spiritual disease. They call us to the spiritual practice of doing justice, for justice is the ground on which stands the peace that we all desire.
Because bigotry, materialism and militarism are spiritual diseases they call us to be open, precisely, to the movement of the spirit and to the opportunity at every moment to be born again. That openness liberates us from particular partisan agendas and frees us to approach these diseases on the spiritual level – looking first deep within our own souls in order to confront and confess our own complicity, receive God’s grace and mercy and be transformed – born again, and again, and again – into the calling to do justice.
But because these spiritual diseases are manifest in the world in concrete social ills – homophobic laws, the physical diseases of extreme poverty, a too-easy acceptance of violence and warfare – because these spiritual diseases have social manifestations we must not stop at self-examination but rather we must follow the calling of Christians to engage in the spiritual practice of doing justice in ways that respond to the concrete needs of all those touched by bigotry, poverty and violence. And we must act in the world – in the public square and in the market place – as faithfully as possible to address the root political, social and economic manifestations of these spiritual ills.
None of this is simple, and it will not be easy. There is great risk in it, always. Perhaps no risk is greater than the spiritual risk of beginning to believe that the cure lies with us. This is where it becomes more necessary than ever to recall the final of Micah’s challenges: “walk humbly with God.” At the present hour we do not need to claim that God is on our side; but we do desperately need to be on God’s side. At the same time, it is more necessary than ever to recall the words of John, “God so loved the world …” the kosmos, in the Greek – meaning all of creation. God so loves it, has such compassion for it as to suffer with creation and work in and through the created order not to condemn it but to save it.
Let our humble walk be the journey of justice toward a commonwealth in which the great social ills are addressed at their deepest spiritual levels. And let it be said of us, some day down the road, that there walked a people engaged deeply, fully and joyously in the fundamental Christian practice of doing justice. There walked a people trying to sort out what belonged to whom and return it. There walked a people trying to be on God’s side. And when that day comes, morning will have broken and we will sing and dance for our God who even now works wonders among us. Amen.

Calling Everyone

Matthew 4:1-11
February 3, 2008
It has been called to my attention, in no uncertain terms, that I tend to apologize too much when I ask folks to do something. All I can say is, “I’m sorry.”
But seriously … it’s the first Sunday of Lent and I want to share with you my Lenten discipline for this 40 days. As I’ve mentioned in previous years, I tend not to “give up” things for Lent, but instead try to take on some practice during the season that deepens my faith, strengthens my spiritual life, or makes my Christian witness more effective.
This year my Lenten discipline is to stop apologizing.
Oh, to be sure, this does not include all those things that I will no doubt do during the next 40 days that will call for apologies. I’m sure that I’ll drop things in the next six weeks: I’ll drop something on the kitchen floor; I’ll drop the ball on something; I’ll try my best to drop no bombshells, but I am sure that I will make mistakes during Lent that I will apologize for.
But I’m not going to apologize for my faith. I’m not going to apologize for my convictions. I’m not going to apologize for my calling. And I’m not going to apologize for asking you to live into your own faith and conviction and callings.
For all kinds of reasons that we will not psychoanalyze together this is perhaps this most daunting challenge that I could possibly take on, and I will need your help to do it well.
But if we are to live fully into the faith that we claim we must ask of one another daunting challenges. After all, if all we ask for is the edges of our lives then that is all we will get.
Jesus did not ask for the edges of people’s lives; he asked for the whole of them.
My mom told me once of being at a Presbyterian Women’s national gathering at Louisville a few years back and hearing a woman call the offering saying, “Jesus don’t want your fives and tens, Jesus wants your twenties and fifties.”
Well, Jesus doesn’t want the edge of your life, he wants the whole of it.
That’s what call is all about. Authentic calling to Christian discipleship is not about the edges of your life. It’s not about what’s left over at the end of the day; it’s the whole of the day.
The essence of the temptations that Jesus faces in our passage from this morning is to cheat his calling; to offer up only the edges of his own life not its fullness as a gift from God.
When the adversary places before Jesus a series of temptations none of them involves doing anything that we would consider evil, sinful or even remotely bad. After all, eating is fundamentally necessary to human life, so bread cannot be bad. Being protected from harm is fundamentally necessary to human life, so being borne up when you fall cannot be bad. Leadership if fundamentally necessary to human life, as well, so having power cannot be bad either – especially if you’re a basically decent, all-around good guy as one can safely assume that Jesus was.
No, the temptation in each of these offers lies not in its content, but rather in its path. The tempter puts shortcuts to authentic human experience before Jesus – shortcuts to his calling. And Jesus says, simply, get thee behind me, Satan.
He says, “no,” to shortcuts and “yes” to the call for the center, the whole of his life.
It really is as simple as that; as simple as knowing the difference between “yes” and “no.”
Of course, therein lies the rub. It is all that simple, but it is also all that hard.
Take, for instance, my own Lenten declaration, and the temptations that lie in its way, in my way.
I am tempted to make everyone happy. On the face of it, what can be wrong with that?
After all, happiness is a good thing, right? And certainly part of my role as pastor involves your happiness, at some level and, of course, depending upon how one defines “happiness.”
On the other hand, however, I am utterly convinced that, at the deepest level, your happiness – human happiness in general – is essentially connected with call. That is to say, I do not believe that any one of us is genuinely happy – in the sense of the beatitudes – unless and until we are on an intentional journey of response to our several callings.
Thus, at a deeper level, my role as pastor involves helping you on that journey; and that involves, often, holding you accountable to all that is involved in that journey beginning with the simple conviction that God calls us to give our lives – the whole of our lives – to God’s purposes in the world.
And that’s not always an easy call to answer. It is certainly difficult for me – especially the part of my own calling that demands of me holding others accountable. I hate that part, because you might not like it – it might make you unhappy for a while. So I am tempted to apologize in advance, or to undersell what is asked, and that’s when I most need to recall Jesus’ own response to temptation.
Each of us has such temptations, and for each of us they are uniquely our own. What causes me trouble may not bother you a bit; what tempts you may not be a blip on my radar screen.
That’s why the community of faith is critical. We do bear one another’s burdens. We do bind one another up. We do love one another.
At their core, the temptations of Jesus were aimed at that essential human truth. The tempter says, “bear your own burdens, bind yourself up.” The tempter says, “turn your back on human community.”
And Jesus says, “no.” Jesus says, “to be fully human means to be in deep and interdependent relationships with every other human – to be responsible to one another.”
So, on this Lenten journey together, let us commit to being present to each other, to being responsible to each other, to hearing together God’s call and claim on our lives, and to sharing together the burdens and joys of responding to that call. No apologies necessary. Amen.