Enjoin!

Deuteronomy 26:6-11; Luke 4:1-13

February 14, 2016

So, what is this season of Lent all about, anyway? Commonly understood – and by common understanding I pretty much mean ‘this is what Wikipedia says about it’ – Lent “is a solemn religious observance in the liturgical calendar of many Christian denominations that begins on Ash Wednesday and covers a period of approximately six weeks before Easter Sunday. The traditional purpose of Lent is the preparation of the believer through prayer, penance, repentance of sins, almsgiving, atonement and self-denial.”

Wow! That sure sounds fun, doesn’t it?

Seriously, though, it is true that there to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. So, in the life of each individual and every community there are times for repentance and atonement. These are fundamental to a healthy spiritual life. But they are not the only fundamentals, and, more to the point, they do not feel right to me in this particular season.

They don’t feel right to me because these traditional disciplines of Lent – at least insofar as we have learned them over the years – are practices that turn us inward. I believe, in this particular moment, we are called to turn ourselves outward.

In fact, we can see this in the story of the temptation of Jesus. The devil tempts Jesus to turn inward: to feed himself; to take power for himself; to protect himself. Jesus rejects this exclusively inward turn and goes on to invite his disciples to cast their nets broadly, to practice their faith with their faces turned toward the world.

What might be some disciplines of discipleship, practices of the faith that turn us outward?

What are practices of the faith that turn us outward?

It will surprise no one who knows me to hear me say that I find my own answer to that question in Micah 6:8. What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, to love with merciful kindness, to walk with humility – which is to say with regard for others and their feelings and convictions. In other words, God asks us to turn outside ourselves. Indeed, Micah insists, God requires this of the faithful.

Happily, I am utterly convinced – by study and by experience – that this is how we grow. This is how we grow our own faith deeper and stronger, and it is how we grown the community of faith.

We grow by attraction when it can be said of us as it was said of the early church: “see how they love.” As Jesus told his disciples, “this is how they will know you are my followers: that you love one another.”

I’ve invited the community, during these 40 days, to consider what brings you deep joy and to practice that. I’ve noted in several places the difference between mere pleasure and deep joy. Simple pleasures – good chocolate, a nice red wine, mind-candy on TV – are all well and good. But deep joy is different. It’s the difference, for me, between listening to music and creating music, it the difference between reading a fun mystery novel and reading Walter Brueggemann.

For, in reading Brueggemann I am challenged to consider, for example, that

“When we live according to our fears and our hates, our lives become small and defensive, lacking the deep, joyous generosity of God. If you find some part of your life where your daily round has grown thin and controlling and resentful, life with God is much, much larger, shattering our little categories of control, permitting us to say that God’s purposes led us well beyond ourselves to live and to forgive, to create life we would not have imagined” 

When we live into God’s larger purposes we get to participate in something beyond ourselves, and in doing so we live into deep and authentic joy. Even when the way is rough and rocky, others will be drawn to it.

That’s why our Lenten sharing this season is about the ways that some of us have found deep joy in the ministry of membership in the community of faith. Membership in the body of Christ – as spelled out in the Book of Order – invites us  to live fully into the meaning of that ministry by proclaiming the good news in word and deed, taking part in the common life and worship of a congregation, lifting one another up in prayer, mutual concern, and active support, studying Scripture and the issues of Christian faith and life, supporting the ministry of the church through the giving of money, time, and talents, demonstrating a new quality of life within and through the church, responding to God’s activity in the world through service to others, living responsibly in the personal, family, vocational, political, cultural, and social relationships of life, working in the world for peace, justice, freedom, and human fulfillment, participating in the governing responsibilities of the church, and reviewing and evaluating regularly the integrity of one’s membership, and considering ways in which one’s participation in the worship and service of the church may be increased and made more meaningful.

Through such practices, we offer praise to God and we find deep joy in our common life. We enjoy God forever, and we are joined by others who seek after such enjoyment.

Together, then, like the children of Israel, we shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord our God has given to us and to this house. May it be so.

Let It Shine

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2; Luke 9:28-36

February 7, 2016

Twenty years or so ago we lived in central Kentucky. We had moved to Lexington from Chicago, where we had lived in the city for 11 years. We had become, in those years, comfortable urban dwellers.

One weekend during that first summer we lived in Kentucky, we loaded up the minivan and took our two little boys out to Natural Bridge State Park in the foothills of that side of the Appalachians.

It was a lovely summer day. We got to the park, left the van in a shady spot in the parking lot, plopped Martin in a backpack, and headed off onto one of the short trails through the woods. The park was not crowded, and while we saw a few other families along the way, we had a lot quiet beauty all to ourselves.

We still have a few photographs from that day, including one of the boys perched on the low rail of a fence with a beautiful wooded ravine sloping away behind them.

I hope I have described it well enough that you’ve got an idyllic image in your mind, because it surely was that.

The weird thing was that it did not feel that way to me in the moment. I recall vividly that off-and-on the length of that hike I was troubled by some vague uneasiness.

I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until we got back to the parking lot, and I realized what was bothering me: nature!

Seriously, after a decade of living in Chicago I was perfectly at ease in the midst of a huge city day or night, but walking through the woods on a sunny afternoon was unsettling.

This was about a decade before Richard Louv coined the phrase “wilderness deficit disorder” in his bestselling book Last Child in the Woods, but I can attest to the symptoms of that condition.

In the introduction to that book, Louv wrote:

Our society is teaching young people to avoid direct experience in nature. That lesson is delivered in schools, families, even organizations devoted to the outdoors, and codified into the legal and regulatory structures of many of our communities. Our institutions, urban/suburban design, and cultural attitudes unconsciously associate nature with doom—while disassociating the outdoors from joy and solitude. Wellmeaning public-school systems, media, and parents are effectively scaring children straight out of the woods and fields. [1]

I want to suggest three things:

First, we’re not just scaring kids out of the woods; we’re scaring adults, too.

Second, the impulse is nothing new under the sun. Indeed, the strange little story of the transfiguration of Jesus hints at it. What does Peter do in response to the epiphany on the isolated mountaintop? He goes all urban planner: “hey, Jesus, we could put a subdivision right here. There’s plenty of space for three dwellings. You and Moses and Elijah can each have your own digs. If it takes off, maybe John and James and I will build houses of our own. We’ll call it ‘Mountaintop Villas.’ What do you think?”

I imagine Jesus gave him one of those looks, and at that very moment God speaks: “pay attention to him; he’s special.”

Of course, Moses and Elijah were also special, and, thus, this story that brings them together with Jesus is one to which we should pay particular heed. In one sense, this story underscores the growing conviction in the gospel narrative that Jesus is the fulfillment of the law – personified in Moses – and the prophets – equally personified in Elijah.

In addition to that significant interpretive key, the mountaintop, itself, matters. After all, the mountaintop is another key connection. Moses went to the mountaintop to receive the law, in the form of the two tablets with the foundation of the law in ten commandments. Elijah went to the mountaintop to discern his call to continue his prophet mission even though his life, itself, was under threat. Jesus, too, goes to the mountaintop where he receives confirmation of the spirit’s presence echoing the words spoken at his baptism, “this is my son, the beloved one.”

The mountain, throughout scripture, is always an untamed wilderness space, beyond the control of human beings, untouched by human architecture. It is the place that these three crucial figures in Biblical history go not to retreat, to get away from human society, but rather to draw strength for their respective journeys of transformation.

And this brings me to the third point: we are taught to fear wilderness because systems of organized oppression understand the power of wild places to inspire liberation.

Moses goes up to Sinai to draw strength for his ongoing project of liberation, of bringing the people out from beneath the crushing oppression of pharaoh’s empire. Elijah goes up Mt. Horeb fleeing from Ahab and Jezebel and their imperial aspirations in order to restore his strength for the freedom struggle. Jesus goes up the mountain to gain strength from his ancestors for his journey to Jerusalem for the drama of liberation to be played out there.

As theologian Ched Myers puts it, “The prophetic wilderness experience of transcendence is not trying to escape the world […]; rather it fuels the struggle for true justice.”[2]

That fuel is visibly manifest in the stories of the mountaintop experiences of Moses and Jesus. Both of them are seen to “glow” after their mystical encounters with the Holy One on the mountaintop.

Mystical mountaintop encounters are, of course, the stuff of both poetry and mythology both before and after the writings of Judeo-Christian scripture. When people go up to the mountaintop they have visions. That’s obviously literally true – after all, when you get up to a high place you can see so much further than when you are in the valley.

But that sense of limitless vision gives rise, as well, to imaginative and mystical inspiration. Moses looked over from the mountaintop and he saw the Promised Land. So did Dr. King.

And perhaps his example clarifies the threat that mountaintop visions pose to keepers of an unjust status quo. And if your mountaintop experience leaves you visibly transfigured, you will bear it as a mark.

Last summer I went to Montreat – in the mountains of North Carolina. Up on that high place I, too, experienced the inspiration that comes, often, in such places. I heard Dr. King’s words – spoken at Montreat 50 years before still echoing: “All too often in the midst of injustice,” King had told a group of Presbyterians in 1965, “too many Christians have remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.”

Too many of us prefer the security of our built environment – even when the building of it not only rests on a foundation of economic, racial, and gender injustice, but also when the physical building of it threatens creation itself.

Thus, I heard in King’s words a two-fold invitation:

First, come to the mountaintop – beyond of the security of the everyday, out from behind our stained-glass shields – to be open to the presence of God. Be still in that presence. Experience that wildness of Holy Spirit. Risk an encounter with the Creator in the untamed grandeur of creation. Be filled, inspired, lit brightly from within by the power of the divine unshackled from the concerns of power and economy.

And then, following the way of Moses and Elijah and Jesus, come back down and let your light shine, let it shine, let it shine. Amen.

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[1] http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/excerpt/

[2] In Preaching God’s Transformative Justice, Ottoni-Wilhelm, Allen, Andrews, eds. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2013) 118.

Off the Bench

1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

January 31, 2016

As I was pondering worship this week, from the snow-bound comfort of the living room, I was scanning the file with this morning’s bulletin and I misread the title of the hymn we sung a few minutes ago. I read it as “O Carpenter, Why Leave the Beach.” Being housebound for days does weird things to your brain.

Why leave the beach, indeed?

The middle of January is an excellent time for pondering that existential question. Heck, tomorrow morning I’m actually heading to the beach for a couple of days of retreat time with some colleagues and our beloveds. I’m guessing that, even in February, walking along the Atlantic coast is going to leave me wanting more when it’s time to leave. That’s in February. Imagine what that would be like in warm weather. Seriously, who among us doesn’t want to be on a warm, sunny beach after the week we’ve just lived through here?

How many times have you headed home at the end of a beach trip and thought to yourself, “Can’t we just stay here? Forever?”

Staying on the beach is not a realistic option for most of us, for reasons that we all know well.

On the other hand, staying on the bench is an option, and it’s one that most of us choose much of the time.

The Old Testament reading this morning is about leaving the bench. The text tells the story of the call of the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah tells it like this: “Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appoint you a prophet to the nations.’ Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.’ But God said to me, ‘Don’t say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you will go to all to whom I send you, and will say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid, for I am with you.’”

In other words, “son, get of the bench and into the game.”

But, you know and I know, that it is so much easier to sit out, to sit back and watch, to hesitate, to make no firm commitments, to avoid making a decision. It’s so much easier to say, “I’m too young for that” or “I’m too old for that” or “I’m not talented enough for that” or “I’m too talented for that” or, this is the one I say and hear most often, “I’m too busy for that.”

And, thus it is that callings pass us by.

As I live past the middle of my sixth decade I’m learning something about the advantages of growing older. When I was a young adult I regularly put off significant decisions; I’d linger at a crossroads fearing that I would come to regret the loss of the path not taken. I know now that time will take care of that on its own. If you stand at the crossroads long enough somebody will come along and build a parking lot over one of the paths before you. Not to choose is a choice. Not to decide is a decision.

Carpenter, get off the bench. Traveller, pick a road.

For when we refuse to decide, refuse to make a choice, we are deciding. We’re deciding, in fact, that we prefer the known comfort of the status quo to the unknown outcome of the choice we face. Heck, sometime we choose the known discomfort – better the devil you know.

But for followers of Jesus this is simply not a faithful response to what calls us. For we know two essential things, and these two things make all that we do not know irrelevant.

First, we know the promise of the truth captured in the beautiful words of the Apostle Paul to the church at Corinth: “love never ends.”

Second, we know that the status quo is unjust – unfair to literally billions of our sisters and brothers around the world, and to many tens of thousands who live in our midst in the metro area.

Those two truths are enough to get us off the bench even though we know a third truth: responding to the call of God to participate actively in that never ending love comes always with a cost.

The little story from Luke about Jesus’ first public proclamation in his hometown underscores this third truth. For no sooner does Jesus take down the scroll of Isaiah and read about the spirit of the Lord upon him anointing him to bring good news to the poor than his neighbors give him the bum’s rush and threaten to throw him off a nearby cliff.

There’s a lot of insider/outsider historic dynamic at play in this little story, and if we had more time this morning we could examine it in detail. Suffice it to say that any proclamation of good news to those who suffer under the status quo may well be heard as threat to those who prosper under the same status quo.

Nevertheless, those who would follow the way of Jesus are called out, ordained to this vocation: preach good news to the poor, freedom to the captives, new sight to the blind, forgiveness of debt to those suffering under its crushing weight. We’re called to do justice. We’re called to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to comfort those who mourn, to bind up the brokenhearted, to love without limit.

There will be scars.

We may stumble and we may fall when we follow this difficult calling.

But there will be other hands to lift us up along the way.

Because the arc of the moral universe is surely long, but it does bend toward justice.

When we do the work of love, we bend it just a little bit closer.

Carpenters, get off the bench.

Amen.

Of Heroes and Gifts

1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11

January 17, 2016

You received “a gift” when you came in this morning. No big deal. Then you found somebody else who has the same gift. Still, nothing too big about that deal either. It was a set up. A game. Contrived. Unreal.

I’ll grant you all that.

And – at the same time, I will insist on this: every one of these gifts is real, and you have been given each of them to some degree or another: kindness, generosity, peace, faithfulness, gentleness, goodness, patience, joy, love. These are the gifts of the spirit, and we all have them.

You might ask, “so what?” Well, this is what: we have been given what we need sufficient to the day. That is to say, we have the gifts we need to face the challenges of our time.

Like many of you, I listened to more than one David Bowie song last week, and his “Heroes,” from my teenage years, has been running through my mind all week. “We could be heroes, just for one day.”

After all, we have been given gifts sufficient to the day.

That song was apparently inspired when Bowie saw a young couple kissing at the base of the Berlin Wall during the dark days of the 1970s – their simple, human gesture of love in the face of the ugliness of totalitarian authority struck Bowie as heroic, but also as a gesture any one of us could make. We have been given the gift of love. We could be heroes.

We could be, but I’m afraid that as soon as we engage the narrative of hero we wind up letting ourselves off the hook for facing the challenges of our day. Rather than engage, we are content to wait for a hero, a savior, to lift us up in triumph over whatever threatens or oppresses.

We tend to believe that heroes are bigger than life. They are, somehow, fundamentally different than we are. They have gifts we cannot possibly have. We can’t be heroes, is, in fact, what the hero narrative tells us.

Today is, of course, the Sunday of the King Day holiday. Talk about American heroes in pretty much any context, and it won’t be terribly long before King’s name is lifted up. By pretty much any measure, Martin Luther King, Jr. was an authentic American hero.

Or, at least, we have made him into one. We’ve carved him into stone, literally, in some cases, and there his dreaming ended.

But the dream of a distant day when “this nation shall rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed” that all of us are created equal – well, what of that?

I want to suggest several things this morning about heroes and gifts and the rest of us.

First, the dream only has life insofar as all of us live into the gifts we have been given. Indeed, King was only able to use his remarkable gift of prophetic preaching to give voice to the dream because so many others were already using their gifts.

Most of us know the names of a few of them: Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, John Lewis. Some of us know the names of a few more: Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo – martyrs from the Selma march. No one recalls the names of countless thousands of others who showed up at the meetings, sang the songs, did logistics for the marches, arranged bail for imprisoned, made the phone calls, fetched the lunches, and all the other small but significant aspects of a movement to realize a dream.

One of my favorite small stories of the Civil Rights Movement happened before anyone outside of his church and family had ever heard of Martin Luther King, and before anyone beyond the African-American community in Montgomery had ever heard of Rosa Parks.

Parks had just been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Her act was deliberate and long-anticipated by the small circle of Montgomery black activists Parks worked within. The night of her arrest, Montgomery’s Women’s Political Counsel called for a one-day boycott of the local bus system. Jo Ann Robinson, a member of Dr. King’s congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and a leader of the Women’s Political Counsel, made up a flyer to circulate across the city. That night, four of her students from Alabama State College, who had the college students’ gift for pulling all-nighters, made 52,000 copies of the flyer and delivered them to bus stops, hair dressers, barber shops, and other institutions in the black community.

The rest, as they say, is history. But were it not for the willingness and late-night work of four college students, whose names are lost to history, there would have been no boycott the next day so successful that it became the Montgomery Bus Boycott (in capital letters), no Montgomery Improvement Association to coordinate on ongoing boycott for more than a year, and, thus, no need for a 25-year-old preacher to lead that association – and himself – into national prominence. Absent those four kids, we might never have heard about the dream.

We can be heroes. If just for one day … or night. Though, of course, there is nothing heroic about making copies, or about going to meetings to make plans, or just showing up for the work you are called to. Or, perhaps, there is nothing more heroic than that.

Too often, we miss the point of the stories that shape us, and, in missing the point, we miss the invitation and the opportunity to live into the gifts we have been given to meet the challenges of our day – for such an invitation lies at the heart of the stories that shape us.

Take the story from John’s gospel about Jesus at a wedding in Cana. If we read this as merely a miracle story we at once elevate Jesus to the great pedestal of hero and messiah – a perch far beyond our reach before which we can only bow in passive worship. But, if we attend to the details and reach a bit deeper, we can discern a call to use the gifts we’ve been given.

It is always important to acknowledge that the gospel of John is thoroughly symbolic, and richly so. The images in this story point first to Jesus, himself, as the new wine given by God. At the same time, the story invites us into the practice of ridiculously generous hospitality – after all, who saves the best wine for last?

Finally, the setting for this story is crucial. Jesus is in Cana – a Gentile community.

In other words, at the very beginning of John’s gospel Jesus is carrying good news beyond his tribe, breaking down the barriers that defined his culture, reminding his people that they had been given all they needed – gifts sufficient to the challenges of their day.

In reminding us of these gifts, Jesus invites us to share a dream – a dream of a time when good news – radical generosity, boundless grace, the miraculous love of God that sets us free from all that binds – will be for all people. We are part of that dream, and we have been given the gifts we need to live into it.

We don’t need to wait for our heroes to come down off their pedestals. We can share good news here and now, where we are, with what we’ve got. Good news – that ancient but still revolutionary news that the love of God is for all people – good news sets us free from hatred, from fear, from violence, and from so much else that binds us in our own brokenness.

And, as we share this good news, we do speed up that day when all God’s children – “black folks and white folks, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of that old spiritual, ‘free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.’”

Amen.