Shelter from the Storm

February 14, 2010 (Snow continues to play havoc with worship in the metro area, and we missed last Sunday.)
PSALM 148; MATTHEW 5:43-47; LUKE 12:54-56
OK. Let’s see now. Voodoo caused the Haiti earthquake. Gays caused Katrina. So who caused the great snowpocalypse?
Whenever the occasionally whiny children in our house ask me, “why is it still snowing?” I always respond, “science.”
Some folks blame the outcast, marginalized “other” for the trials and tribulations that have no readily apparent causality – at least no moral causality; I just blame science. And, since I am not a scientist I am off the hook for further explanation.
But I am a theologian and pastor, so I do feel some small obligation to respond when the question is posed looking for meaning rather than cause, and I feel like I am in fine company when I can simply quote Jesus and say, “the snow falls on the just and the unjust, the rich and the poor, the men and the women, the gay and the straight, Saints fans and Colts fans, the black and the white, the Americans and the Talibanis.”
Really, the storms have no meaning. In and of themselves, the storms, the earthquakes, the floods, the fires have no meaning. They are neither blessing nor curse, promise nor punishment. They simply are a part of life; one among many contingencies of the lives we have been thrust into. And they are inevitable.
The question, then, is not what meaning do the storms brings to our lives, but rather what meaning do our lives bring to the storms.
What does a storm occasion in your life?
Is it a time for fear?
It certainly can be. I recall my mom huddling with my brothers and sister during a particularly nasty thunderstorm when we were kids. Mom was reassuring us that we were perfectly safe and that storms were exciting and fun. And immediately lighting struck a tree in our front yard and brought the top half of it tumbling down into our driveway. So the meaning of the storm for me was, “well, mom’s not always right!”
Now I sometimes lie awake during storms fearful that one of our trees will come crashing through the roof and hurt my children. And when that fear subsides, I begin to dread the possibility of a flooded basement that will mean a whole lot of work; just as the past week’s storms have meant a whole lot of work for anyone who had to move the snow.
Of course, that same snow or flood can be an occasion for compassion. Our basement flooded a couple of years ago and Hans came over with his shop vac and helped me get rid of the water and carry out a lot of nasty wet junk. Lots of folks this week have pitched in to help clean neighbor’s walks or driveways, and Dar, Don, Cheryl and Martin helped keep the church as accessible as it has been.
Surely the outpouring of financial support for Haiti demonstrates that the storms of life can be occasions of incredible generosity, compassion and human connection.
As the church, we are the body of Christ in the world. Ours are the hands of Christ to offer healing in this world, to dig out after the storm, to repair and rebuild. Christ’s is the spirit that empowers us when the wind seems too strong, or the snow piles too deep.
Like most folks in the region, I’ve had some time – shut in this week – to ponder the snow. Watching it pile up, I recalled that Jesus often used the world all around him as a teaching tool. Mustard seeds. Fishing metaphors. Signs of storms. The dust of the road. All of these were objects that he employed to teach his followers about the way of life he called them to.
The mustard seed was like the kingdom of God. Fishing was an opportunity for authentic evangelism. Interpreting the signs of the times was like forecasting the weather. Dust was like opposition to be shaken off as one moved further down the road toward the kingdom of God.
It doesn’t snow a lot in Jerusalem, so Jesus didn’t use snow in his teaching.
One wonders what that might have looked like. Surely there could be lessons about nonviolence to be taught at the scene of a snowball fight. Perhaps the kingdom of God is like a snow flake … no, I really have no idea what that might mean.
I do know, however, that underneath that 25 inches of snow in our front yard last week there are dozens of bulbs resting quietly in the earth. We planted them in the rich soil last fall. In the fullness of time they will begin to shoot forth and blossom into the riot of colors that will transform the monochrome moonscape that we’ve been living in.
From a handful of tiny bulbs … from the smallest seed … something beautiful and wonderful will spring forth.
That is the way of faith. Remarkably enough, the storm that has caused such widespread inconvenience – and worse – has provided shelter for these tiny seeds, and nourishment. That, too, is the way of faith.
Faith does not promise the end of storms, but it does promise this:
• We are not alone in the storm, and
• Out of the storm comes the promise of new life.
Consider the words of the 23rd Psalm: though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death … in the presence of my enemies.
Faith does not guarantee that there will be no valley, that there will be no opposition, that there will be no death. Nevertheless, God promises to be present through the valley, to provide sustenance in the face of draining opposition, to bring forth new life in the face of death.
The one who calms the storm is the one who offers shelter in its midst.
Likewise, the one who loves those we call enemies, is also the one who provides a table at which we gather in the hope and the trust that at table the barriers might fall and enemies be transformed to companions on the way.
Whatever the nature of storm winds blowing in your own life right now, take this moment. Settle into its quiet. Breathe in the peace of Christ. Experience this time and place of sanctuary, of shelter from the storm. Gather at the table of our Lord. Know the peace that passes our understanding. Amen.

All You Need Is Love

Jan. 31, 2010
1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30
How many times do we hear Paul’s words from the Corinthian correspondence read at weddings? His riff on love is probably the most common scripture used in nominally Christian weddings, and it probably gets read at services of other faiths and no faith at all.
That’s understandable: Paul could write a bit and these famous words about love are beautiful and powerful.
But I’m willing to bet that no wedding service has ever paired Paul’s words in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians with the strange little story from Luke’s gospel.
After all, nobody wants to leave a wedding thinking about an angry mob trying to toss someone off a cliff – no matter what the circumstances of the wedding.
So why bring them together now? What word from God can this odd pairing of ancient texts have for us today? On a joyous day when we welcome new members to this community? Does anybody want to leave this service thinking about an angry mob and a cliff? Is that what it means to join the church?
Perhaps, to begin, we ought to own up to two truths: First, we’re not Jesus, and, second, Paul is not talking about us at all.
Paul’s words on love were never meant for weddings because they do not describe erotic love nor, to push the point, human love at all. Paul is talking primarily about God’s capacity to love, and how that love for creation can shine through human interaction and give meaning and weight and purpose to our actions.
“If I speak in tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understanding and knowledge and faith but do not have love I am nothing. If I give everything away and practice great piety but do not have love I gain nothing.”
In other words, I can lead a conventionally moral and ethical life but be nothing save a lot of noise if I do not ground that life in God’s love.
Why?
Because that love – the love of which Paul speaks – is steadfast and unfailing. It is the foundation upon which we build lives that matter, it is the faith that sustains us and the hope that we cling to when those lives are shattered by circumstance.
That foundation, that faith, that hope, guides Jesus journey, and it can guide ours as well.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus preaches a prophetic word and the crowd wants to throw him off a cliff.
Why?
When he speaks of Elijah and Elisha, Jesus tells the stories of a widow and a foreign military officer, and he suggests to the hometown audiences that God’s love is not their private property. Indeed, Jesus tells them that God loves other tribes who are not their kin at all. According to the generally accepted moral codes, it was perfectly acceptable to dismiss the needs of other tribes altogether because their concerns were not of vital nation interest – to employ a phrase that I hope suggests clearly that we are not that different from Jesus’ first audience.
This initial public pronouncement prefigures the entire trajectory of Jesus’ ministry. He will reach out to those on and beyond the margins of polite society, he will touch the untouchable, he will break bread with the undesirable, he will embody the love of God for the ones most hated or feared by the conventionally moral and acceptable citizenry of his home town. Is it any wonder when they try to toss him off a cliff?
Still, I confess that I’ve always found this story difficult to fathom. Why would merely demonstrating that God has always had concern for ones unlike you lead you to violence?
Thomas Jefferson famously said, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Why should it matter to say that the God you worship loves someone else, too?
Of course, the “someone else” that Jesus indicates is, in fact, a despised outsider; and the declaration that God loves this despised other carries with it also the conviction that now we must walk through the broken barriers and reach out to the despised other ourselves.
I did gain a small bit of personal insight into this dynamic about a decade ago when I preached, on the Sunday of the Martin Luther King holiday, a sermon suggesting that Dr. King would include “straight and gay” in his litany of those who would join to sing their liberation along with “black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics,” and that same-sex marriage was a civil right worthy of the concern of the church.
No one threatened to throw me off a cliff, but they did ask me to resign about two weeks later.
And when we announced our same-sex marriage policy at Clarendon about five years ago the stack of hate mail was impressive, as were the calls promising that I was going to hell and it could be sooner than I anticipated.
Why does suggesting that others be regarded as equal to ourselves – no matter how we define otherness – bring out the tribal instinct to mark territory and punish any who would transgress the boundaries?
Moreover, why does this instinct seem all too prevalent among communities of faith, and especially among those who call themselves followers of Jesus?
It’s easy to point out the most egregious examples: the Pat Robertsons declaring that Haitians are being punished for following the wrong God, or the U.S. General who claimed that America would win in Iraq because our God is bigger. It’s more painful to point out the examples that look back at us from the mirror: the times we demonize someone who has the temerity to disagree, or the cynicism that invades our conversation, erodes our faithfulness and blinds us to the gifts of others in our midst.
Jesus’ entire ministry was about boundary breaking love, and if we confess our faith in Jesus and commit to follow in his way we, too, are called, in spite of ourselves, to be ministers of boundary-breaking love. That’s what it means to be a follower of Jesus. That’s what it means to join his church.
Consider Paul’s audience. He writes his stirring words on love to a congregation clearly divided. He opens the letter with an urgent request:
Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you should be in agreement and that there should be no divisions among you, but that you should be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul’, or ‘I belong to Apollos’, or ‘I belong to Cephas’, or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
Even among the faithful there are divisions of insiders and outsiders, of Cephas’ people vs. Apollos’ people. In our own time the divisions are just as readily apparent, and it is all too easy to dismiss those who disagree with us, too easy to mistrust and then to abuse them.
Where is love in this?
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels when urging the church to change its ordination standards or its views on marriage, but do not have love for those with whom I disagree, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal or self-righteous gasbag. Quite quickly, the temptation to view myself as Jesus in this story gives way to the truth that I am but another in the crowd wanting to toss my opponents off any convenient cliff.
Play the scenario out in your own situation, your workplace or neighborhood, your family even. When the situation calls for speaking or hearing a difficult truth how do you speak it? How do you receive it? Are you able to speak the truth in love? Do you want to toss the one who speaks the truth out the nearest window?
Obviously Jesus does not back away – ever – in his ministry from speaking a word of faithful, loving agitation. After all, he does call his opponents within the religious establishment a “brood of vipers.” At the same time he weeps for Jerusalem, the seat of religious power, and the city that kills the prophets, and he prays for those who spitefully use and abuse him, even those who hang him on a cross to die.
Clearly, speaking truth to power and speaking the truth in love is a profoundly difficult balancing act, but it is what we are called to do.
One of the reasons that I am passionately committed to the work of Christian Peace Witness is the ethos of love that guides the work of this ecumenical coalition, and why I still believe that CPW’s work is worth my time and yours even in the midst of seemingly endless war. There are clearly policies with which we utterly disagree and policymakers with whom we have profound differences, but we are clear in spirit, in worship and in action that we are rooted and grounded in love. And, we are equally clear that we are not up to that task left to our own devices, our own limited vision and our own constrained capacity for love.
That is equally true for the broader ministry and mission at Clarendon, to which we welcome new members this morning. We can do so with joy because this difficult ministry is not up to us alone.
The good news in all of this lies precisely where we began this morning: in the recognition that the love in which we root and ground our speech and action is not our love but is, rather, the love of God.
The plain and simple truth is this: we are not capable, on our own, of love that is patient, kind, never envious, boastful or arrogant or rude; that does not insist on its own way or become irritable or resentful; that does not rejoice in wrongdoing but in the truth; that bears all things, believes all thing, hopes all things, endures all thing, and that never ends.
We don’t love like that, even in our best moments. God does, even in our worst moments.
When we stand rooted and grounded in the love that comes from our creator God, then we can begin ministries that break down barriers, that right ancient wrongs, that create bonds of community where once there were walls of mistrust and fear, that speak gospel truth to the powers that be, and speak that truth in love. Amen.