Thompson's Blog

Onward!

Matthew 14:22-33

22 Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. 25 And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. 26 But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” 28 Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” 29 He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” 31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” 32 When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33 And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

It’s interesting the way different things stand out to you at different times. What struck me when I read this passage this week was the fact that Peter didn’t lose his nerve when he realized he was walking on water – it was the strong wind that freaked him out. He had been battling that wind all night – as he had on many other nights, but this was the first time he had ever walked on water, and yet it was the wind that scared him.

I don’t guess fear is ever a rational thing. We don’t get to decide what’s going to frighten us, and we are all frightened by different things. And the thing that frightens us on one day may not touch us on another day. And if you are like me, there are some things that are terrifying when you wake up at 2am and start thinking about them, but they are of no consequence at 2 in the afternoon. Of course there are things that are just as frightening in the light of day as they are in the middle of the night. There are terrifying realities that come our way.

Jesus was dealing with one in his life. One of the reasons Jesus had dismissed the crowd and gone up the mountain to pray was because the most righteous man in all of Israel had just been beheaded by Herod. A bad thing had occurred, and Jesus needed to spend some time in prayer. This wasn’t an unusual event – Jesus is reported to have often gone off to be alone with God. I think this is something we are supposed to notice about Jesus, and the message is that this is something we are to incorporate in to our own lives.

Things go differently when we pray. Things may not go exactly the way we want them to, but when we proceed through life with God our fears are diminished and opportunities for new life appear. Spending time alone with God in prayer isn’t a formula for getting what we want, but it does change the dynamics of our circumstances.

Things certainly things got different after Jesus had spent some time in prayer. Now the disciples had done as Jesus had instructed them to do, and they had headed out across the lake, but the weather had deteriorated and they were not doing well. They were probably wondering why they had done what Jesus had told them to do. The wind and the waves were battering against them, they weren’t near the shore, and it was dark. They were in a very threatening situation, and then they saw a ghost. At least they saw what they thought was a ghost, and it’s probably accurate to say that they had moved from fear to terror.

The people of Jesus’ day didn’t really see large bodies of water the same way we do. While most of Jesus’ disciples were fishermen and people who were familiar with working on water, they didn’t consider the water to be a friendly environment. It provided them with livelihood, but it was also very threatening to them. They didn’t see the water as a playground. They saw it as a form of chaos that God often had to contend with.

Of course we all know how dangerous water can be, but we know how to play in the water. Boating and fishing are recreational activities for us. We often go to the lake when want to spend some time alone with God. Honestly we probably go to the lake in order to do more playing than praying, and that’s ok as long as we don’t confuse playing with praying. Of course sometimes those things run together.

I’ll never forget this story that my wife’s cousin told me about an evening he spent on Greer’s Ferry Lake. He lives in Conway, and there was a period of time when he and his friend would do a lot of night fishing on Greer’s Ferry. He said there had been a lot of flooding one spring. The lake was still really high, and they were out late one night. The lake is usually really calm at night, and you can hear things really well under those circumstances. They were totally wrapped up in the serenity of the moment when all of a sudden this huge thing boiled up from the depths of the lake and broke the calm of the lake and of their minds. They were terrified and mystified until they came to see that it was a big bloated cow.

It unfortunately had drowned during the heavy rains and been washed in to the lake. It apparently had been resting on the bottom of that relatively deep lake until the bacteria started working and generated some buoyancy. Sharla’s cousin said it had generated some pretty good momentum by the time it reached the surface, and I’m thinking the level of their terror might have rivaled that of the disciples who saw Jesus approaching them on foot in a storm in the dark on the lake. The breeching cow event probably wasn’t as life-changing for those unsuspecting fishermen on Greer’s Ferry Lake as it was for the disciples, but I’m guessing it was an experience that moved them to a new place in their relationship with Jesus.

This story of Jesus walking on water is a bizarre tale to say the least, but this isn’t a story that’s supposed to leave us stupefied. Just as those guys figured out what had happened on Greers Ferry Lake, we are to understand what was going on between Jesus and the disciples in the storm on that lake. We are to see that Jesus was so intimately bound with God that he wasn’t bound by the normal constraints of this world. You might say that Jesus was so intimately familiar with God and this world that he could play with it in unusual ways.

I’m reminded of what I’ve seen people do on wakeboards on the lake. A wakeboard is sort of like a skateboard that people ride behind a boat, and I’ve seen people do unfathomable jumps and flips and turns on wakeboards. I can get up on a wakeboard and that sensitizes me to the mind-boggling nature of what other people can do on a wakeboard. Now what they do is not on the level of miraculous behavior, but they are able to do what they do because they have intimate knowledge of how to work with the rope, the wake, the board, and their body to do certain things. Their willingness to spend the time and to take the risks to learn those tricks is somewhat miraculous, but what they do doesn’t defy actual physical laws.

And while I don’t think the lesson we are to extract from this story is that we can defy physical laws if we spend enough time in prayer with God, I do think we are to take comfort in knowing that regardless of what may be occurring in life we can experience profound peace if we will be diligent in developing our relationship with God.

What I see in this story of Jesus walking on the water is affirmation that there isn’t anything more powerful than spiritual depth. And there isn’t anything we can’t face when we look to Jesus for help.

It’s really nice to have this moment in our church when we celebrate the decision these young people have made to look to Jesus for guidance and help. This is a good thing for them to do and for us to witness, but as we all know, they aren’t signing up for an easy life. I think it’s worth noting that it was Jesus who told the disciples to get in that boat and to go to the other side. Jesus might not have known it was going to storm, but he generally knew what was going on. It’s not unreasonable to assume he knew what was going to arise, and he told them to head in that direction.

I don’t think we went over that in any of our confirmation classes. There’s a number of things we didn’t cover – the danger of discipleship, that’s probably a session that I should add to the curriculum, but that’s not what we like to think about. And I don’t believe Jesus arbitrarily sends us in to harm’s way in order to extract new levels of devotion, but I do believe our faith can move us to step in to hard places. Jesus doesn’t just want us to live safe lives. Jesus want us to live rich lives, and such spiritual richness is often cultivated under distressing circumstances. We aren’t to flee from dangerous places and difficult relationships, but we aren’t alone in our work. We are to face whatever comes our way by praying to God and looking to Jesus.

These are mystical things – praying to God and looking to Jesus, and as I mentioned earlier, this isn’t the formula for producing what we need, but scripture and experience leads me to believe that these spiritual exercises enable us to face whatever we encounter with grace and peace. Jesus may not come walking to us on the water, but he may well show up in the presence of a new friend or in a familiar face that we see in a new way. God doesn’t leave us stranded in any situation – God can help us get through anything.

And this is the good news about choosing to follow Jesus. It’s a decision that puts you in good company on earth, and with support from heaven. This world is a difficult place. You never know when a dead, bloated cow might come boiling up from the depths of the lake. The times are always precarious in some new way, and we are all in need of help from ordinary people on earth and our extraordinary savior in heaven. We aren’t going to avoid suffering, but we aren’t going to be overwhelmed by it if we will learn to trust in the source of true life.

It’s easy to think that the most powerful forces on earth are winds and waves, armies and bombs, disease and death – but this passage of scripture tells a different story. This story tells us that there’s nothing more significant for us to do than to give ourselves to God and to trust in Jesus.

This is a nice moment for our church and for those of you who have said you want to follow Jesus. It’s a good reminder for us all to continue to engage life with prayer and hope. We’re in good company on earth and in heaven. Let us proceed with prayer, with trust, and without fear! Onward!

Thanks be to God.

Amen

God’s Eat Place

Matthew 14:13-21

13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. 14 When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. 15 When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” 16 Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” 17 They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” 18 And he said, “Bring them here to me.” 19 Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. 20 And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. 21 And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

In light of this story of a miraculous feast in the wilderness, it’s worth noting that one of the very first things Matthew reported about Jesus was his refusal to turn stones in to bread when he was alone in the wilderness. If you remember, right after his baptism we are told that Jesus was driven in to the wilderness for 40 days by the Holy Spirit. He was hungry. He needed some bread, and while the devil’s suggestion that he turn stones in to bread doesn’t really sound like a terrible abuse of power – Jesus knew that it was not the Holy Spirit talking.  Those 40 days in the wilderness provided Jesus with great clarity regarding the difference between the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the suggestions of an evil spirit. Jesus knew that there are times when we need to deny ourselves feed on the word of God – he also knew that there are times when someone needs to show up with some actual bread.

The back-story for this morning’s scripture lesson was really sad. Jesus had withdrawn to a deserted place because he had gotten the news that, John the Baptist, his friend and fellow servant of God had been killed by Herod. But this wasn’t just a sad occasion for Jesus, it was a blow to all the people who were longing for the redemption of Israel. John the Baptist was one of their heroes. He was a righteous leader, and he had been killed by their terrible governor. Herod had imprisoned John the Baptist after John the Baptist criticized him for breaking up his brother’s marriage in order to marry his former sister in law. Herod was sort of afraid of John the Baptist because of his spiritual power, but his new wife, Herodias, wasn’t so timid.

Caught up in the revelry of an extravagant party, Herod had announced that he would grant anything to his newly acquired wife’s daughter because she had danced so pleasingly for his guests. Prompted by her mother, the young woman asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, and Herod had to comply. John the Baptist’s head was delivered to the party.

The contrast between what went on in Herod’s palace and what was going on with Jesus and the people in the wilderness couldn’t be more extreme. A righteous man was killed for trivial reasons in one place, a crowd was fed by the hand of God in the other place. There was a time in Jesus’ life when he needed to reject the temptation to use his God-given power to feed himself, but on this occasion, he saw that the people needed some food. When Jesus was alone in the wilderness he knew not to use his power to serve his personal needs, but when he was with this hungry and desperate crowd he was moved by compassion to provide them something to eat.

Good food doesn’t eliminate the pain of loss, but providing something good to eat is often our first instinct when we face the pain of death, and that’s not a bad thing to do. Sharing food is about the best way we know to resist the claws of death, and that’s a big part of what was going on when Jesus blessed the fish and the bread and told his disciples to feed the crowd.

No doubt there was an abundance of food at Herod’s palace, but it was a godless environment, and the food in that place served as an appetizer to the death-dealing and soul-sickening main course. There wasn’t much food out in the wilderness, but God was present, and five thousand people were given more than they could have asked for. The bread of life is served when God is welcomed and thanked. The bitterness of death is delivered when people ignore God and assume they are in charge of the world. There are a lot of different places and ways to dine in this world. Where and how you choose to dine will determine what you are served and how well you are nourished.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of eating at Doe’s Eat Place, but if you’ve got a good amount of room on your credit card or a few large bills you can get served an enormous steak. They’re also known for their tamales, but I don’t care for tamales, so it’s the steak that has made an impression on me. And it’s such a memorable name for a restaurant. I’ve never been to the Doe’s Eat Place that’s housed in a barn near Augusta, but I’ve been to the Doe’s Eat Place in Little Rock. I don’t know how Mr. George Eldridge from Augusta got connected to the original Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, MS, or how he came to establish his restaurant of that name in Little Rock, but Greenville is where the original Doe’s Eat Place began.

I don’t know the full story of how they came up with that name, but it may be that it had to do with which door you went to when you went to Mr. Doe’s place. The front of the place was a honky-tonk, and there was a kitchen in the back. So if you went to the front door you went to the dance place, and if you went to the back door you went to the eat place. I don’t know the whole truth of the situation, but there’s some truth to this, and it sort of stirs the imagination to think of where we go to get what we want.

In my opinion, you can do some fine dining at a Doe’s Eat Place. But as Jesus pointed out when he was tempted by the devil when he was alone in the wilderness, people don’t live by bread alone. There’s not a steak big enough to nourish that hunger that’s in our souls, but we aren’t just floating souls without the need for bread. Our souls and our bodies are intimately bound together, and sometimes our souls are nourished by good food provided by compassionate friends. When food and compassion and companionship come together you might say you are doing some divine dining at God’s Eat Place.

God’s Eat Place can’t be found at a particular address, but it can pop-up anywhere.  And you never really know what’s going to be on the menu at God’s Eat Place, but when you feast at the table of the Lord you know you are going to leave satisfied. God’s Eat Place serves up a wide variety of sustenance, and while it’s not easy to find your way to the spot where God is serving, you don’t have to worry about the bill. God’s Eat Place is quite a place – it’s not easy to get there, you never know what’s going to be served, you don’t have to pay, and you leave with leftovers – abundant leftovers.

It’s interesting to think about the various ways God nourishes our souls. God always provides, but the menu is always different. On the first occasion when Jesus was in the wilderness and in need of food, God provided him with the wisdom he needed to keep the devil at bay. On this second occasion when Jesus was surrounded by hungry people God provided actual food. On both occasions, Jesus pointed to our need to be thankful and dependent upon God, and God served what was needed.

I’m not saying that our God is fickle, but clearly there isn’t just one policy in heaven for dealing with hungry people in the wilderness. This has got to be maddening to people who want God to be represented by clear and consistent rules. We worship a God who is only consistently insistent upon one thing – that we love God and we love our neighbors. You will always find grace on the menu at God’s Eat Place, but it’s served up in many different ways.

God rarely cooks up the same thing twice. And it sort of drives me nuts when people try to define the nature of our faith with a bunch of rules. According to the Bible, God has been revealed in a wide variety of ways throughout time, and every time we become overly dogmatic about what God requires the Christian faith begins to take on a form of idolatry and that isn’t a good place to go. You don’t want to eat at The Dogmatic Eat Place – you fill yourself up with malnourishing food and you leave with a bad attitude.

The importance of living with reverence for God and compassion for our neighbors never subsides, and this was made so clear by this miraculous meal in the wilderness. This is the only miracle story that is recorded in each of the four gospels. The essential requirements for God’s Eat Place to emerge came together on that day. Some people were desperate and hungry and they looked to Jesus – who looked to God, and who then instructed faithful disciples to share the food that was on hand. Need, compassion, trust in God, and willingness to do what Jesus instructed produced a meal that no one could forget.

The contrast between the slaughter at Herod’s Eat Place and the feast at God’s Eat Place couldn’t be greater. The world was diminished by the banquet of Herod – the world was renewed by Jesus’ feast in the wilderness. Those who ate at Herod’s Eat Place were given a sight that they would be desperate to forget — while those who shared food at God’s Eat Place were fortified for a lifetime.

Faithfulness to God can carry us in many different directions, and God can nourish us in many different ways. Sometimes we find ourselves is circumstances of plenty, and when we do we must do as Jesus instructed his disciples to do and share what we have with others. Sometimes we find ourselves in circumstances of scarcity – of not having all that we need to address the demands of life, and God is there for us then as well – reminding us that sometimes we are to feast on nothing but the word of God.

Jesus was very clear about the need for us to live with sensitivity to one another. People don’t dine alone at God’s Eat Place. If we want to be faithful to the God that was revealed by Jesus Christ we are not just to partake of the bread and juice that represent his living presence – we are to be that same bread for the world.

We have gathered today at God’s Eat Place. And it’s good for us to remember that God is a remarkable chef. God knows what we each need, and God knows how to nourish our hearts, minds, and souls. Present your needs, look to God, have compassion, do what you can, and enjoy the divine dining that God will provide.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Thing That Changes Everything

Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

31 He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; 32 it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” 33 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.” 44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. 45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; 46 on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it. 47 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; 48 when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. 49 So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous 50 and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 51 “Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” 52 And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

It can be argued that the endless little decisions we make on any given day or the small things that happen to us at any given moment can have profound impacts on the courses of our lives. We don’t usually see the large ways in which those small things are going to play out in the future, but by putting off your trip to Walmart for 15 minutes you might have some kind of profound impact on something that will affect someone for a lifetime. I don’t have a good example of this, but it seems plausible. Small things can have large impacts, but we usually aren’t aware of how those small things are going to change everything.

Of course there are also those moments when people know that what they’re doing is going to change everything. How do you think Galileo felt when he figured out that it wasn’t the sun orbiting around the earth but the earth rotating as it orbited around the sun that caused the sun to rise each morning. He might not have been the first person to figure that out, but he generally gets the credit for that earth-shattering idea. His idea wasn’t well welcomed by the authorities of the day. They found his idea to be an inconvenient truth, and I think he was almost executed for corrupting the minds of other people with this unsanctioned idea, but they couldn’t get that genie back in the bottle. This was one of those ideas that changed the course of world history.

Few people do things or reveal things that change the world in short order. But Jesus wanted us to be conscious of the way in which small things can have powerful impacts. Two of the parables we’re looking at this morning are focused on these small things that have huge impacts. He said the Kingdom of God is like a small mustard seed that grows in to a huge plant. And then he compared the Kingdom of God to leavening, and we all know that a single teaspoon of yeast can have a powerful impact on several cups of flour. It’s interesting that he used these two examples because mustard seeds and leavening weren’t considered to be valuable things. In fact, mustard plants were considered to be nuisance weeds in grain fields, and leavening was considered to be more of a contaminant than a useful ingredient.

It wasn’t because of their value or desirability that Jesus compared these things to the kingdom of God – it was because of their amazing capacity to grow and the impact they had on their environment. This reminds me of another small thing that can have a powerful impact. Our Episcopalian neighbors down the street had a terrible experience with fleas. They had a bunch of feral cats living in the crawl space under their sanctuary, and their sanctuary became infested with fleas. And I don’t know of a smaller creature that can be a bigger pest. This scenario is a nightmare to me. I think they had to be out of their sanctuary for about 3 weeks as they bombed the fleas and captured the cats. I haven’t called Father Burton about this. I feel bad for him, but I’m afraid he would sense how grateful I am that it didn’t happen here.

I know that was a terrible experience for them, but it’s a pretty good example of the way in which a small thing can have a powerful impact. I wouldn’t put it past Jesus to remind us that the Kingdom of God is like a flea infestation. These small creatures can fill huge spaces and make people move to new places. Jesus didn’t want us to imitate the bad characteristics of nuisance plants or pests, but he did want us to take note of the remarkable way in which small things can take hold and expand – that’s the characteristic of the kingdom of God that Jesus wants us to notice.

And then Jesus told these parables that compared the Kingdom of God to a treasure hidden in a field and a pearl of great value. What these parables seem to indicate is that we are to be on the lookout for hidden values. He compares this enterprise of serving in the Kingdom of God to being on the watch for material treasures, but he wasn’t telling us to focus our attention on great financial treasures. It’s certainly exciting to come across an undervalued item at a garage sale, and it’s fun to hear stories on the Antiques Roadshow of people buying priceless works of art for virtually nothing at out of the way places. Jesus understood those sentiments that we have, and he wasn’t critical of them, but he wanted us to expand our understanding of what it means to find a treasure. Jesus wanted us to know that there’s nothing more valuable that living in relationship with God – of abiding in God’s Kingdom. And he wanted us to pursue that relationship with the same passion we have for finding buried treasure.

As surely as some people have an eye for great works of art or for financial opportunity, Jesus wants us know that there’s such a thing as having an eye for spiritual treasures, and we need to be on the lookout for opportunities to invest ourselves in those places. I think a good example of this is the way in which Phillip Brown has chosen to get involved with a group of kids in this community that are in need of some attention and opportunity. Phillip has recognized a problem, and he’s responded to it as if it’s an opportunity to do something good. This IMAD program – which stands for: I’m Making A Difference, is rich, and I think this is the kind of treasure Jesus is wanting us to find.

In order to create a little urgency in our hearts to search for spiritual treasure, Jesus told the parable of the fisherman who goes out and hauls in a huge catch of fish and then goes about the business of sorting out the good ones from the bad ones. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I went fishing with my grandfather at this little pond he had built. Whenever I caught what he called a Ricefield Slick he told me to throw it out on the bank not back in the pond. At the time I didn’t fully understand what he had against those colorful little fish, but I came to understand that they weren’t good to eat and they could overpopulate the pond.

I’m not saying that God feels the same way about Ricefield Slicks that my grandfather did, but Jesus knew the practice of sorting good fish from bad ones, and he didn’t want us to live our lives in ways that put us on the level of expendable fish. Jesus wanted us to know that there are ways of living that put us in touch with true life and provide us with true life, but there’s also the possibility of remaining oblivious to the kingdom of God and ignorant of the spiritual treasures around us And when we live like that we’re about as useful to God as a Ricefield Slick was to my grandfather.

Now I tend to think we are rarely one thing or the other. Certainly there are some people who are a lot closer to perfection than others, and some people have chosen paths that seem to resemble perfect evil, but most of us move with fits and spurts toward the Kingdom of God. On most days I think it would be hard for the divine fisherman to quickly throw most of us on that pile of culled fish, but on any given day we might not be immediately recognized as prized catches. In other words, I think we are often made up of mixed agendas. We have an eye out for spiritual treasures, but we can also spend an inordinate amount of time seeking meaningless treasures.

It might be helpful for us to think of ourselves as the fisherman who has a net full of fish. Maybe we each have a pond and we’ve seined the pond to see what kind of fish we’ve got. And it turns out that some of us have ponds that are full of fine fish – catfish and crappie and bass and bream, but some of us discover that we have a good number of trash fish caught up in our nets, and we’ve got some work to do to improve the population of our pond.

Jesus told these parables about activities from everyday life to help us take note of the way in which we can live extraordinary lives. He didn’t give amazing motivational speeches that ramped up everyone’s energy level with the expectation that they were going to go out and change the world tomorrow. Jesus pointed to the small things in life that generate amazing results over time. Jesus didn’t expect us to do anything other than pay attention to our own lives and to the way in which we invested ourselves. Jesus wanted us to be aware of what we’re wanting and what we’re seeking, and he wanted us to know that it’s these small things that make all the difference.

I’ve never really thought about this last illustration that Jesus shares with the crowd. He talks about the scribe that’s been trained for the Kingdom of God, and how he is like the master of the house who brings out his new and old treasures. This is an unusual instruction, and it’s not easy to know exactly what he’s talking about, but it makes me think he’s talking about the work of a preacher. A scribe who’s been trained for the kingdom of God is a pretty good description of someone who’s been trained to be a minister. And you might say the task of preaching is to bring out the old and new treasures. We read the old treasure of scripture and we try to point out the way God’s kingdom continues to be revealed.

Whether Jesus had that in mind or not, this is what it brings to my mind, but I don’t think such work is limited to those of us who work in professional ministry. Those of you who don’t have the credentials of ordination don’t have to think of yourselves as scribes, which is fortunate, because Jesus didn’t generally have much affection for the people who bore that identification, but I think Jesus wanted all of us who have affection for the Kingdom of God to share our treasures of the kingdom.

If you’ve found a great pearl you should let people know about it. If you’ve done all you can to acquire one of God’s hidden treasures you need to bring it out and share it with others. When you’ve seen the way that God has produced some miraculous growth in your own life or in somebody else’s you don’t need to be quiet about that.

On some level, following Jesus Christ is a very practical thing to do. It’s not that mysterious. It’s about living a plain and simple life while keeping an eye out for the opportunities that God provides for us to extend some grace and love for one another. Small things can grow in to large operations. The small thing you do because you think it’s something Jesus would like for you to do may be the very thing that changes everything for somebody else.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

The Aches and Pains of Abundant Life

Romans 8:12-25

12 So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh — 13 for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15 For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16 it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, 17 and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ–if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. 18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

I’m taking a little deviation from my normal course of preaching – which is to wrestle with passages from the gospels, in order to look at something Paul wrote about the Christian faith. I’m not a Pauline scholar, and as my preaching pattern indicates, I prefer to examine those things that are recorded in the gospels of what Jesus said and did, but Paul had some things to say that are important for us to consider. I don’t think Paul had a flawless understanding of what it means and what it takes to follow Jesus, but I consider him to have had a profound understanding of the faith, and there’s no questioning of his commitment to Jesus. What Paul did to promote the message of Jesus is sort beyond comprehension.

Paul was totally immersed in the work of preaching and teaching about Jesus, and he has some gripping instruction to those of us who seek to give ourselves to Christ, but I often find myself wishing that Paul would have written with sixth graders in mind. In my opinion, he puts forth some amazingly complex theological claims. In this text he provides us with some familiar images, illustrations, and actions, but the way he weaves them together sort of leaves me scratching my head. I think it makes sense, but I have the feeling that what he’s saying is above my reading level. So I’m not going to try to unpack everthing Paul has to say in this passage, but I’ll elaborate on some of the familiar images and ideas that he raises and share what I think he might be saying.

The first image I want to address is this idea of the goodness of our debt – which is interesting because I don’t think any of us are normally inclined to think of debt as a good thing. But Paul seems to be celebrating the fact that we are debtors. I know sound financial planners will point out that there’s a difference between good debt and bad debt, but what they are usually talking about is the difference between the kind of debt that gives you some tax advantage and the kind of debt that simply takes your money away. But that isn’t the good kind of debt that Paul was talking about.

Paul is suggesting that there’s a form of debt that puts us in touch with life. Paul suggests that there’s a form of debt that leads to life – which is in contrast to the kind of debt that leads to death. And this is one of those cases where his logic and language isn’t that easy to follow, but he seems to be saying that if we are indebted to the flesh we’re headed toward fear and death, but if we’ll be indebted to the Spirit we’ll become free and alive.

I met a man one time who was a relatively recent convert to Christianity. He saw a very clear distinction between the way he lived before he found Jesus and the new way he was trying to live. But he remembered his old ways and he said he was dealing with a man on a deal of some kind who was being unreasonable and sort of aggressive, and he said, You know, I was about to get in the flesh with him — but I didn’t. And that’s about one of the best working definitions of the flesh that I’ve ever heard. I don’t know exactly what he was tempted to do, but it was going to be aggressive and ugly, and while it might not have lead to death it would have been on that path.

When paul speaks of being indebted to the flesh I think he’s talking about our propensity to being overly concerned with our immediate selves as opposed to our eternal selves. This is a deathly form of indebtedness because there’s nothing we can do to eliminate this debt – in a sense there will always be an immediate demand of some kind to maintain our surface wellbeing. This is the worse kind of debt because it only grows and it never goes away. This indebtedness to the flesh is worse than student loan debt – which doesn’t go away until you pay it off or die, but at least it goes away at that point. If you’re indebted to the flesh it will probably follow you in to the afterlife.

But Paul says it’s a good thing to be indebted to the Spirit, because when we live with a sense of debt to the Spirit we’re motivated to give ourselves to eternal matters. To be indebted to the Spirit is to take a longer view of life and not to be battered by immediate demands. Neither the pleasant windfalls or the horrendous pitfalls that we encounter in this world are as life altering to those who are indebted to the Spirit. Death isn’t as threatening to those who are indebted to the Spirit because death doesn’t disrupt the work of the Spirit. It’s this sense of indebtedness to the Spirit that enables us to experience adoption from God.

To feel adopted by God is to trust that your primary relationship is with God. And when your primary relationship is with God you lose fear of what may happen to your flesh. This is a truth that had become abundantly clear to Paul. His allegiance to Christ had been very costly to him in a physical way. His love and allegiance to Jesus had caused him to be rejected by his Jewish friends and family members and it had put him at odds with Roman rulers. He had been beaten and imprisoned for what he did and believed. And in spite of that he felt blessed and glorified.

I believe that what Paul is saying is true, and I like to think that I’m more indebted to the Spirit than I am to the powers of this world, but frankly speaking I don’t think my allegiance has been very tested. I like to think I’m indebted to the Spirit, but this hasn’t been very costly to me. My faith doesn’t seem to be at odds with my relative good fortune, and I’m grateful for this, but I’m a little unnerved by it as well. It may be that I’m just not paying attention to the way my indedbtedness to the Spirit is at odds with my debt to the flesh. Paul seemed to see very clearly the difference between serving God and protecting his hide, and he was grateful for the abundant life he experienced because of who it was he had chosen to serve.

He considered the sufferings of his time to be a minor nuisance in comparison to the glory that was about to be revealed to him.

Now none of us are immune from the various forms of pain and tragedy that we encounter in this world. Comfort and security are fleeting for all of us, and we’re all familiar with the sound of deep groans.

I find his image of the world groaning in labor pains prior to the arrival of Christ to be really powerful. It’s an image that points to the way in which something new arrived in this world in the life of Jesus Christ, and through Christ we have this opportunity to become the adopted children of God, but he also speaks to the way in which this process of becoming incorporated in to the family of God is not yet complete.

The sound of a groan isn’t a welcome sound, but it’s such an important sound. It’s important to hear the groans of our neighbors, and it’s an important sound to utter when we we come in contact with the pain and tragedy of this world. We aren’t to turn away from the sound of groaning or from awareness of situations that produce the need to groan. We aren’t to live in fear of knowing how bad things can be in this world, and we can face painful truths because we have this assurance that the love of God is going to prevail in this world.

We aren’t to be insensitive to the sound of groaning, but we aren’t to live in fear of it. Paul proposed that we think of the groaning that we experience in life as the groaning that accompanies the pain of birth. Paul didn’t want to belittle the pain that we experience in this life, but he didn’t want us to live in fear of it.

Aches and pains aren’t all bad. I know football practice began last week, and I’m guessing that has been the source of some deep groaning, but that’s some pain that will pay off when the season begins. Paul makes an appeal for us to wait with patience for the new day that will come, but I don’t think he is telling us to sit still and wait. I think it’s a lot easier to have patience when you keep yourself well occupied, and there’s a lot of good work we can be doing. It’s not within our power to fully establish the Kingdom of God on earth, but we can engage in some work to make this world a more hospitable place for others, and we need to extend ourselves in ways that generate those good aches and pains and maybe even some groans.

This world can be a terribly painful place to be, but there’s really only one thing that can keep us from the love of God as it was revealed by Jesus Christ and that is to be more concerned with our mortal flesh than we are with our eternal souls. We are the spiritual children of our loving God and we are called to live in ways that will nourish our spiritual lives. It’s not as easy to feed our souls as it is to nourish the flesh, but I believe we can train our bodies to serve the needs of our souls. This happens when we know the source of true life and we no longer fear for the fate of our flesh.

Paul doesn’t write in a simple form, but I think his point is pretty clear. We are the children of God and we’re invited to live like God’s beloved children. This doesn’t mean that we won’t encounter terrible hardship and suffering, but we are to understand the pain that we experience in this life as the kind of pain that accompanies childbirth. What will be isn’t always obvious, but we can trust that God’s kingdom will prevail. It may not be this simple, but it probably is.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Our Master Gardener

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

1 That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. 2 Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3 And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5 Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6 But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7 Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8 Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9 Let anyone with ears listen!” 18 “Hear then the parable of the sower. 19 When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart; this is what was sown on the path. 20 As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy; 21 yet such a person has no root, but endures only for a while, and when trouble or persecution arises on account of the word, that person immediately falls away. 22 As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing. 23 But as for what was sown on good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”

I’m going to add an additional verse to this parable. I’m adding this additional warning: But some of those seeds that produced enormous yields were attacked and plundered by squirrels before the grain could be harvested. Jesus would have included that verse if he had been trying to raise tomatoes in Newport. I’m not exactly sure what the interpretation would have been. Maybe this would have been some kind of warning to not let our defenses down when we think we’ve finally gotten our lives in order.

Jesus utilized stories about everyday matters in order to get us thinking about our spiritual lives. I’ve poured a good amount of time and energy in to the challenge of keeping squirrels away from our tomato plants. I’ve built a little frame that’s draped with some thin netting and so far it’s worked, but I have some fear that a squirrel is going to figure out how to get in and then get panicked when he tries to get out. That isn’t going to be a pretty sight. I think the point of that story will be that I should have paid more attention to the state of my soul than the condition of my tomatoes.

And if that happens I’ll try to accept that lesson. Jesus told parables in order to disrupt our familiar thinking about reality, and this parable provides us with some shocking truths. One thing it portrays is the seemingly unlimited amount of seeds that are available to God. Jesus portrays God as being a planter who has no regard for what most planters would consider to be a precious and limited resource.

I know this has been a tough spring and summer for a number of farmers around here, and I’ve heard stories of farmers having to replant their crops more than once because of the abundance of rain. And having to replant is a costly undertaking for a farmer. God certainly knows the feeling of crop failure, but God isn’t concerned about the high costs of production. In Jesus’ parable, God’s concern isn’t about the cost – God’s concern is focused on the low level of production that comes from the abundant amount of seed scattering that God does in the world.

Now it can be argued that God doesn’t utilize the most productive means of planting. I don’t think there’s a bank that would provide a loan to a farmer who treats their seeds like God does in this parable, but parables aren’t intended to reveal the truth about everything. This is not a lesson on proper planting techniques – this is a parable about the possibilities and the pitfalls of fruitfulness.

We’re told that Jesus spoke this parable from a boat because the shoreline was crowded with people. I’m thinking this image of a sower casting seeds everywhere could have been prompted by Jesus’ view of all the people on the shore. It’s as if Jesus saw all of these people as seeds that had been sown by God. And in this sense the parable points to the way in which all people are valuable and full of potential, but sometimes people land in places with really poor growing conditions, and sometimes it’s due to no fault of their own. Sometimes we contribute to the poor growing conditions that we find ourselves in, but sometimes people just land in bad places.

The truth is that we don’t all get perfectly placed in spiritually fertile conditions. Some people are simply born in to spiritually toxic environments. I suspect that a good portion of the people who are housed in our prisons are people who were conditioned as children to behave badly. I don’t know this, and I don’t really know what to do about it, but I believe there are a lot of children who are born in to this world with a very slim chance of becoming spiritually, mentally, and emotionally healthy adults.

Now this is not to say that some people are simply doomed. I believe there’s always this possibility of abundant life for us all – in fact in many cases people find the avenue to spiritual development after they’ve landed in prison or experienced some other form of profound failure. I’m inclined to believe there’s almost always some form of miracle involved in the process of becoming a spiritually productive person, and some of the least likely people have become God’s most productive individuals. It’s hard to predict such things, and you never know what will come together in a person’s life to generate that fertile environment for the love of God to flourish, but sometimes it happens, and when it does it’s an astonishing thing.

Kind-hearted, gentle and gracious people will sometimes emerge from horrible environments, and the opposite can be true as well.

Of course there isn’t a good way to measure what any of us produce, and we always need to be cautious about how we judge one another. We also need to be careful about how we measure the quality of the soil in which we find ourselves planted. I dare say some of the most spiritually arid places are in what we would call nice neighborhoods, and some of the most spiritually fertile land is in some of the sketchiest places. It’s just not easy to determine what will make for a rich spiritual life, but it never happens apart from the grace of God. We don’t produce our own salvation experiences nor is God unavailable in any situation.

There are a number of ways for us to go with this parable. Jesus may have just wanted us to think of ourselves as the seeds that God tosses into the world to take hold where we can, but it’s not unreasonable for us to think of ourselves as the soil onto which God has chosen to drop these good seeds. And if we choose to think of ourselves as the dirt into which God has chosen to plant it’s good for us to ponder the way in which we have nurtured God’s divine seeds. Are we being as spiritually fertile as possible? And what can we do to guard ourselves from becoming hard packed, rocky, or weed infested?

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, held fast to the wonderful theological concept of growing in grace. Wesley considered salvation to be a life-long process, and while he considered it to be a process that was fueled by the grace of God, he believed we have a strong role to play. He thought our task was to learn to cooperate with God, and he had a beautiful way of describing this process. He said we are to learn: how not to resist the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

As the parable indicates, there were more situations that were hostile to the seed than there were fertile situations. It takes a good many things to come together to provide the right environment for God’s seeds to flourish in our lives. John Wesley didn’t want us to think of ourselves as being one kind of soil or the other – as either fertile land or hopelessly rocky ground. Wesley wanted us to think of ourselves as soil that can always use improvement. Some of us need a little compost, some of us need some sand, some of us need some lime, others might need a little Roundup.

John Wesley believed that spiritual development is an ongoing process for all of us. Instead of thinking we are either good soil or rocky ground it’s more helpful for us to think of the ways in which we are being faithful and the ways in which we are neglecting those promptings of the Holy Spirit to serve God and our neighbors. We’re never perfectly aligned with the will of God or too far removed to be touched by God. We all have times of fertility and times of barrenness, and there are ways in which we contribute to both of those conditions.

Wesley described the process of growing in grace as: moving on to perfection, and he believed there was a method to becoming more perfect. He believed we become more fertile by attending worship, by receiving holy communion, by studying scripture and other spiritually oriented materials, and by engaging in the work of helping others. He had an actual list of things to do and not do if you wanted to turn yourself in to more spiritually fertile soil. And he required the early Methodists to participate in weekly meetings where you would be asked how well you are attending to these spiritual practices. It’s a whole lot easier to be a Methodist now than it was in Wesley’s day, but I don’t think it’s gotten easier to be fertile.

I think it’s important for us all to ponder the question of what it is we practice in order to become more perfect. I don’t think God expects perfection from us. In fact God probably expects resistance from us, but God uses us anyway, and I think this is the good news.

God continues to cast seed in a ridiculously abundant manner. Whether we see ourselves as the seeds of God who are provided endless opportunities for magnificent productivity or the ground onto which God casts the seeds of life we are clearly the beneficiaries of a God who wills for us to experience spiritual abundance. And we need to keep in mind that we contribute to our success or failure in this regard. It’s possible for us to live in such ways that we remain lifeless and weed-ridden or fertile and fruitful. And this can change – we can get better or worse.

There are many ways to look at this parable and a number of images to ponder, but regardless of how you look at it you can’t ignore the bountiful opportunity for growth that the sower provides. This God of ours throws seed with reckless abandon. We have a God who knows us well and who has seen all the ways in which we fail to respond to God’s gracious initiatives and powerful promptings, but who continues to grab new handfuls of seed to bestow upon us.

Our God is gracious, but this growth process is hard. God can’t seem to produce in our hearts the will to live in response to these gracious opportunities. There’s something required on our end in order for this relationship to flourish and for God’s garden to grow. We all have abundant opportunities to turn away from arid existence and to experience abundant life, but it isn’t an easy process. We have to be willing to see ourselves clearly and to do the hard work of becoming less self-serving and more life-loving. This isn’t the easy path to take, but it is the most rewarding journey.

None of us serve God perfectly, but we can get better at it. We can practice our faith in ways that make us more fertile soil for God’s good seeds. It doesn’t happen easily or predictably, but we can be those rare seeds that fall on fertile soil and who produce abundant yields. But we can never let up because there are these pesky squirrels out there who are ready to spoil the most perfect tomatoes. Living a spiritually fertile life requires endless vigilance and produces eternal joy.

This parable invites us to see ourselves as being God’s cherished garden. It’s a beautiful image and a powerful invitation.

Thanks be to God.

Amen

The Gift of Clarity

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

16 “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 17 ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ 18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; 19 the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” 25 At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. 27 All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. 28 “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

In my way of looking at things, one of the hardest things to deal with in life is the nagging problem of trying to determine what I need to be doing. Now I know this is what you might call a first world problem. This is the kind of problem you have when you have the luxury to decide how you should be spending your time.

I know there are many people in the world who would love to have the opportunity to make some decisions about how they spend their time, and I don’t want to trade in the problems that come with economic and political freedom for the problems that are associated with tyranny and poverty. But distress comes in a lot of different forms, and one of the things that is challenging for many of us is the problem of determining what we need to be doing and how we can best do whatever that is. We live in a very complex world, and it’s hard to know how to focus in on the most essential matters.

It’s a gift to have a clear calling. This isn’t something I am always in touch with, but I’m not unfamiliar with the sweetness of clarity. I’m mindful of an experience I had a few years ago when I was the director of the Wesley Foundation at UALR. The Wesley Foundation is the United Methodist Campus Ministry program at UALR, and I had gotten our Board of Directors to embrace the idea of building a yurt – which is a round dome-type structure that is made from what you might call minimalist materials. It’s a really interesting design that would provide us with a round room that would be 30’ in diameter.

I had navigated the process of obtaining a city building permit — which was no small task. It didn’t really fit any standard type of construction project, but the round platform that would be the floor of the yurt was much like a deck, and the city building inspector pointed out that when you build a deck the city code calls for all vertical posts to sit on concrete footings that are 2’ x 2’ wide and 18” deep. And that’s no big deal for most decks, but this yurt platform was designed with 30 posts underneath it. And it needed six more posts to hold up the entrance ramp and rear steps. So this project was going to require us to dig 36 large and square holes in a yard that was filled with tree roots and large rocks.

I agonized over how to get those holes dug. I went to a couple of tool rental companies to see what kind of equipment they might have to expedite that process, and no one ever presented me with what I considered to be the magic power-tool. But one day one of my board members brought a man over to talk about the project, and this man assured me that he could dig those holes just like I needed them with a small back-hoe. He was so confident – and I was so relieved. We drew up a contract, and I paid him a portion of the fee on the front end so he could go rent what he needed.

My board-member friend and I arrived at the Wesley Foundation early the next morning before the man was due to arrive. I remember sitting outside drinking our coffee in great anticipation of what was going to happen that morning. About 30 minutes after the man was due to arrive we both began to have that sinking feeling you get when you begin to suspect that you have been conned. The man never showed up that day or any other day. He did make the mistake of answering his phone a couple of days later, and I at least had the opportunity to ask him what he thought God would think of him stealing money from the church. He agreed that it probably wasn’t something God would like, but that was the last communication I ever had with him.

But that experience had an unintended consequence. I felt so angry and humiliated by the scam it gave me the determination I needed to get those holes dug. My District Superintendent at the time considered this a dubious enterprise, and I couldn’t bear to give him the satisfaction of failure. So with the use of plain old shovels, picks, go-devils, axes, a sawzall, post-hole diggers, and a couple of big heavy iron poles we got those holes dug. And when I say we, it was me and whoever happened to drop by during those hole-digging days, and there were quite a few people who got in on that activity. It was an epic undertaking and a glorious experience. For about two weeks I had an incredibly clear agenda. The work was hard, but the yoke was easy. I had no doubt what needed to happen and we got it done. I almost felt grateful to that man who ripped me off. I don’t think I would have had the wherewithal to engage in that undertaking if he hadn’t lit that fire in my belly.

And I’m thinking this is often the way it goes with our efforts to follow Jesus. We spend a lot of time and energy in relative states of confusion about what it is that we need to be doing. Good cases can be made in regard to the various directions we need to go – there’s always a lot of information to be gathered before we actually take action in some way. There’s always something else to be considered before we move in a bold manner. Stalling often seems like the prudent thing to do. But gratefully there are these people or circumstances that come along that call us to action. The situations aren’t always pretty, but the need becomes clear.

It’s interesting to think about the people and circumstances that helped shape John the Baptist. John the Baptist was a pure hearted man, but he grew up in the midst of a highly compromised religious community. I’m guessing John the Baptist became as extreme as he did because he saw how phony and distorted the religious executives of his day had become. The scribes and Pharisees were so proud of their vestments it made John the Baptist want to wear animal skins. And they were so careful to observe their food laws it propelled John the Baptist to eat bugs. They used their authority to keep people under their control and confused about who God was and what God required it lit a fire in his belly that enabled him to speak truth with power to all the people.

We might think of John the Baptist as being a somewhat bizarre character, and certainly there were people during his own lifetime that thought he was out of his mind, but it’s not that hard to see that he was driven to those extremes by the maddeningly unfaithful nature of the religious culture of his day. John the Baptist didn’t decide we wanted to go do something unusual – he simply couldn’t be a part of what was going on in Israel at the time. There comes a time when action becomes easy. He was yoked to the truth of God and not to the phony religious leaders of his day and it made him stand out in a remarkable way.

John the Baptist went to extremes to express his faith, and certainly he was considered too extreme for some people – people who were more concerned with the way things looked than with the way things were. And those same people considered Jesus to be too common. They weren’t prepared for their messiah to eat and drink with anybody – especially with nobodies.

It’s sort of incredible that many of the same people who thought John the Baptist was too extreme considered Jesus to be too common, but this probably isn’t anything shocking to any of us. In fact there’s a sense in which I find this to be rather comforting. We modern Americans didn’t start the tradition of trying to make our religion conform to our lifestyles. There’s always been a lot of tension between the demands of faith and our comfortable patterns of existence. We don’t want our lives to be as disrupted as John the Baptist thought they should be, but we want our savior to come to us in a highly exalted manner. John the Baptist was too unusual and Jesus was too normal. We religious people can be pretty particular about the way we want God to come to us.

And I’m not unsympathetic to this human predicament that we are often in. It’s not easy to discern the truth. As I said, I find myself in almost perpetual dismay about the way I should be living my life. There’s an infinite number of good causes to get behind and an equal number of people who would love for us to join with them in their good fight. Some people are convinced the secret to life is found in what you eat or not drink, others advocate yoga, some people think you can only hear God speak in Pentecostal tongues, and others would say they find God on the lake at dawn. You might say we’ve got a lot of options when it comes to encountering God, but you could also say we worship a lot of false Gods – gods that we have created to suit our needs and comforts.

What I believe is that it’s never easy to find that direct path to communion with God, and one of the things that makes it hard is that we don’t like to get off the path we’re on. We want Jesus to join us where we are, but unfortunatley that’s not where we’re most likely to find him. Jesus doesn’t meet our expectations, but the beautiful thing is that Jesus generally finds ways to disrupt our thinking and our comfortable way of living and provide us with some clarity about what we need to do.

This isn’t a pleasant process, but it is a profoundly satisfying undertaking. I wanted to find an easy way to get those 36 holes dug, and I was willing to buy in to somebody’s fantasy about how we could get those holes dug, but something happened that was so much better than paying somebody to solve my problem. I was given the gift of clarity about what we needed to do, and I was able to share that gift with other people. We were digging holes for Jesus and with Jesus and that might be some of the best work I’ve ever done. When we finished we had this amazing pile of roots and rocks that we had excavated in the process of creating those footings for that yurt. That pile of debris looked like an altar to me.

I really don’t think there is any burden lighter than to be yoked to Jesus of Jesus – regardless of how difficult that work may be. I believe it’s a gift to understand what it is that Jesus has called you to do. It’s so much better than the curse of confusion that I think many of us experience on a regular basis.

I don’t say this to heap further pain on those of you who, like myself, experience a good amount of distress about what it is we need to be doing. I honestly think confusion is a far better thing than delusional clarity about what you need to do, and I don’t think that’s an unusual circumstance. I believe there’s probably more false clarity than actual clarity, and I believe it’s more helpful to maintain an attitude of searching for truth than to settle for a reasonable substitute for truth. I believe God is more sympathetic to confusion than to false advocacy.

I primarily believe God is with us in our struggles and God wants us to find our way. I believe God wills for us to discover the truth and to give ourselves to the work of bringing God’s truth in to this world. It’s hard work because the world doesn’t generally welcome God’s truth, but it’s a gift to discover such work, and there’s not a lighter yoke to be borne.

There’s no end to the ways in which we can bear the love of God in to this world, and that’s the work we are called to find and to do.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

The Battle For Life

Matthew 10:24-39

24 “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; 25 it is enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they have called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household! 26 “So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. 27 What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. 28 Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. 29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 And even the hairs of your head are all counted. 31 So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows. 32 “Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; 33 but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. 34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; 36 and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; 38 and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.

Last Monday, Sharla and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary, and we decided to mark the event by going to a movie. We copied the idea from our daughter and son-in-law who had celebrated their anniversary the week before by going to see Wonder Woman, and we decided to do the same thing. And I’m telling you, that’s about the best anniversary present we could have given ourselves – the price was right and it was totally satisfying. I won’t ruin it for you by telling you what goes on in that movie, but as you might imagine, the forces of good triumph over the forces of evil, and they do it in a clever and entertaining manner. I shouldn’t build it up too much. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but it was good in so many ways. I rate movies in terms of how they compare to the movie that in my opinion set the standard for greatness, and I have to say that Wonder Woman is better than Rocky.

It’s fun to watch a fictional portrayal of the clash between good and evil – especially when the characters who represent the good prevail over the clearly defined representatives of evil. I love a movie with well-motivated main characters who go up against powerful villains. But it’s not so much fun to deal with these things in the reality of the world. We rarely see this conflict play out in such a satisfactory manner in the world we actually occupy. Most of the time the battle between good and evil is just not so well defined, and other times it emerges in terribly tragic ways.

This passage of scripture raises the issue of the way powerful forces are engaged in battle. These words come to us in response to the hostility that Jesus experienced from powerful people, and he spoke to his disciples of the hostility that they would experience because of their association with him. This conflict between the presence of God in the world and the embodiment of evil does not play out as nicely in the world as it does in Hollywood productions, but Jesus didn’t want us to be confused about the ultimate outcome. Jesus spoke these words in order to bring awareness to us for what to expect and how to interpret the events of the day. He didn’t want us to lose confidence in the power of God to transform the world when it appears that evil is prevailing.

These are some serious words we are getting from Jesus today. He was speaking of the battle between good and evil and how it leads to life and death. These aren’t easy words to hear from Jesus because they identify the consequences of making the wrong choices with our lives.

He told us not to fear those who can kill the body, but to fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell. This is a powerful message from Jesus, and we need to hear what he’s saying. Jesus made it very clear that we can make choices in this world that send us to the dump. The word hell is used here in place of the word gehenna, which is the word Jesus used, which referred to the most awful place to be found around Jerusalem. Gehenna was where they took and burned all of their refuse. Jesus wanted us to know that there is this possibility of living in such a way that we are making ourselves available for life in the city dump.

I’m not a person who has a clear understanding of how God sorts us out after we die. I can tell you I’m hoping for a lot of mercy, and this leads me to be optimistic about what happens to us when we die, but that’s about as specific as I can get. I have a close friend who is a fellow United Methodist minister who isn’t counting on as much mercy, and he’s much more concerned about the judgement we’ll face in the afterlife. He hopes I’m right, but he isn’t counting on it, and it’s probably accurate to say he’s a more fervently religious person in his life and in his preaching. My feeling is that there isn’t much hope for any of us if we don’t encounter a good amount of mercy and grace when we depart this world, but what I do see very clearly is that we find ourselves in hell on earth when we give ourselves to the wrong agenda.

I take these words about heaven and hell seriously, and I’m inclined to believe that we step in to these places before we depart from this world. I’m sure they extend in to the next world in some way, but what I know to be true is that we sometimes manage to cooperate with the Holy Spirit and we find ourselves in that place of heavenly peace, and sometimes we associate ourselves with the embodiment of evil and we find ourselves in hell.

And the scary thing is that it’s not always easy to see the ways in which we are making the choice between serving God and serving evil. I think evil is very insidious in this way, and the relative state of civility within our society sort of masks the way in which evil is in our midst. We don’t always see the impact that some of our choices and our appetites have on other people in the world.

I just finished listening to a book about the British explorer, Percy Fawcett, who spent a lot of time in the Amazon basin in search of the mythical city of El Dorado – sometimes referred to as the city of Z. The torturous conditions that he encountered made me wonder why anyone would have done what he did, but he was driven to explore and to record what he saw. This was in the early 20^th Century, and one thing that happened around that time was the discovery of rubber in that region of the world.

The industrial revolution in Europe fueled demand for rubber, and that gave rise to terrible abuse of the natives of that region who were forced by unscrupulous contractors to extract raw rubber from wild rubber trees. Percy Fawcett was very sympathetic to the plight of those South American Indians and he documented the abuses in his journals. That region became known as the devil’s paradise because of the terrible evils that were perpetrated on those people. And those evils were largely unknown to the people of Europe who were enjoying the benefits of that terrible trade.

I think we all probably engage in a degree of willing ignorance about the far removed consequences of our behaviors. It would probably be paralyzing to live with perfect awareness of the various ways in which we cause harm to ourselves and others by the lifestyles we enjoy, but I think this message from Jesus is that we need to have a reasonable amount of fear of living lives that are complicit with evil. We don’t need to fear the things that threaten our bodies or our cherished lifestyles – we need to fear those things that threaten our spiritual wellbeing. Those things aren’t as easy to see as the things that threaten our lives, but those are the things Jesus wanted us to see and to avoid.

Of course sometimes the presence of evil becomes all too clear to us. As we all know, evil has recently reared it’s ugly head in our community in a very real way. The shooting death of Lt. Weatherford can’t be explained apart from the presence of evil in our world. Evil was at work on that day, and it left a wake of death and destruction. It’s a terrible thing that occurred on that day, and it’s hard to know what to say about it, but I think we need to seek some understanding of what transpired. I’m not saying we need to know more details about the crime. I’m thinking we need to understand why crime is more attractive to some people than honest work. And why does a young person think that a gun is going to help them get what they need?

There are spiritual roots to these life and death problems, and these aren’t problems that are going to be solved without some spiritual renewal. I’m not saying we need a tent revival to solve our problems. Certainly there’s always room for us all to hear the good news of God’s love and presence effectively communicated and exhibited. What I am saying is that before we can know how to go about fixing the brokenness of our community we need to be in prayer for our own brokenness and need for spiritual renewal.

Jesus didn’t want us to live in fear of people who can kill us. Jesus wanted us to live in fear of those things that do harm to our souls. What happened to Lt. Weatherford and his family is about as terrible as anything that can happen, but it can get worse if we don’t guard against the other tragedies that can come from this terrible act. We’ve been slapped by the hand of the devil, and we need to respond by reaching out for the hand of Jesus.

And this isn’t an easy thing to do. As I said earlier, evil is an insidious presence. Some of the worst things can have the façade of goodness. Who would have known that the rubber ball children in England were playing with in 1900 was filled with the blood of innocent people?

We need to keep in mind that people didn’t reject Jesus and call him the devil because they knew what they were doing. Nobody in their right mind ever decides that they would be better off by standing in opposition to the son of God. There were a lot of seemingly good people who couldn’t see who he was and where he had come from. They were confused about who he was and what he was doing. Jesus wasn’t easy to understand and to follow because he didn’t lead people down a familiar path.

Jesus recognized that he was going to create terrible conflict within families and within communities because the ways of God don’t generally match up with our most immediate needs. Watching out for our souls is different than watching out for our bodies. It’s often easier to know what we need to do to protect our physical lives than it is to watch over our spiritual lives.

This is a critical moment in the life of this community. An evil event has occurred, and I have no doubt that this can fuel the growth of further evil, but this can also serve as an opportunity to express our trust in the presence of God. It’s not going to be easy to discern what to do or where to stand. I think we are all feeling pretty helpless to know what needs to happen. We aren’t on the set of a Hollywood production, but we are in a place that needs for us to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ.

There’s some specific pain in our midst, but we’ll always be waking up to some form of tragedy and loss, and it’s rarely easy to see the path of faithful discipleship. Many times, the very people we care the most about are encouraging us to sidestep the arduous journey of faith, but it’s the voice of God as it was revealed in Jesus that we are called to follow, and it’s down that path that we will find true life.

Life and death. Heaven and hell. Love and hate. These are real possibilities for each of us. How we choose to respond to the immediate challenges that face us will determine where we go and what will come. It’s a critical time to proceed with prayer and with care. This is a hard time, but it’s an important time, and by the grace of God we will get to a better place.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Our Uncontainable God

Matthew 28:16-20

16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Today is Trinity Sunday on the Liturgical Calendar. I’m sure that’s a day you all have circled on your calendars. Who doesn’t get excited about Trinity Sunday!

Being the relatively non-academic preacher that I am, I’ve never been an enthusiastic articulator of the theological concept of the Trinity. I’ve just never done much wrestling with how we define who God is and how God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are related. Creedal formulas are about as interesting to me as obscure mathematical formulas, but I do like a good story, and there’s some good drama behind the way we came to adopt the language of the Trinity. There’s also some good logic behind it.

The concept of the Trinity was first hammered out at the Council of Nicaea in 325CE under the supervision of Emperor Constantine, who called the bishops of the day together to establish a standard understanding of how God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit were all related. I don’t think Constantine had an opinion on how the formula should come out – he just wanted a clear policy.

The primary debate was between Arius and Athanasius – two men who each had a significant number of followers, but who had different opinions about the nature of Jesus. Arius was an advocate of the thought that there was a time when God was God alone. God later decided to enter the world in the unique form of Jesus, but according to Arius, Jesus wasn’t a coequal partner from the beginning. Arius had an image of God that was more along the lines of a monarch who made decisions about what needed to happen in what we might call a unilateral manner. Arius considered Jesus to be above us regular mortals, but not equal to God. There was a clear hierarchy.

It’s surprising that Constantine didn’t operate as the decider in this debate and go with that model of reality. It seems like that would have been the preferred choice for an emperor, but he was willing for the theologians to make their arguments and to put it to the will of the body, and it turns out that the position of Athanasius was found to be the most acceptable.

Athanasius argued that Jesus had been coeternal with God – true God from true God, as you will find it stated in the Nicean Creed. Athanasius believed that God was best represented by a relationship and not a monarch. The power of God was not exhibited in acts of force, but through perpetual self-giving to the other. The primary debate between Arius and Athanasius concerned the relationship between Jesus and God, but of course the role and origin of the Holy Spirit was also at play, and it was equally believable to Athanasius that the Holy Spirit had been in the mix from the beginning as well.

Constantine wanted a clear policy on these issues, and the Athanasian formula carried the day. The Trinitarian language that has largely been accepted by the Roman Catholic church as well as most protestant churches came out of this 4^th Century church council meeting, and we’ve been wrestling with this mysterious language ever since. Constantine was relatively kind to the losers of that epic debate. Arius and his primary followers weren’t executed. They were just exiled to a relatively remote island where they couldn’t rally much of a revolution.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not particularly interested in theological formulas, but I must say that I’m not unhappy that we have this Trinitarian language. I’m not someone who can elaborate on the finer points of this fundamental statement of faith that we regularly make, but I’m happy that we describe God as being more like a relationship than a monarchy. By describing God as a relationship between these three manifestations of God we have a much more mysterious and dynamic image of God than as a singular figure. Our concept of God isn’t easy to comprehend, but it’s so much more interesting than the authoritarian model that the Arians promoted. As Father Richard Rohr says in the introduction to his newly published book, The Divine Dance, a mystery isn’t something you can’t understand, it’s something you endlessly understand.

In that same book, Father Rohr credits William P. Young with bringing new interest to the concept of the Trinity with his novel called, The Shack, which was published in 2007. I haven’t seen the movie that has recently been released that’s adapted from that novel, but I did read the book, and while I didn’t find it to be entirely satisfying, I appreciated the way in which he created personalities for each member of the Trinity.

It’s been a few years since I read the book, and I don’t remember many details about the book, but what I found to be the most interesting thing about that book was the very personal interest each member of the Trinity took in the main character of the book. The book portrayed God as being much more accessible than we are often inclined to think of God as being, and I appreciated that about the book.

What I found to be a little frustrating was the way in which the characters who represented the three persons of the Trinity were always surprised at how oblivious the main human character in the book was to the ways of God. The three characters who represented the Trinity didn’t exactly ridicule the mere human being for his lack of understanding, but they often laughed at how poorly he understood the mind of God. And I thought that was a little unfair. We human beings usually have a hard time getting our minds around the ways of God. I personally don’t find that to be so surprising.

But this book, The Shack, brought a good amount of renewed interest in what the Trinity is all about, and that’s a good thing. I think we would all do well to try to assign personalities to the three members of the Trinity. It begs the question of how we understand the way in which God is manifested in this world and how we relate to those various manifestations of God.

Having the right understanding of the theological concept of the Trinity isn’t that important, but I’m convinced that our image of God has a powerful amount of influence on the way we live our lives. I’m so grateful that we have this rather mysterious concept of the Trinity as our primary understanding of God as opposed to one authoritarian figure who makes singular decisions about right and wrong and saved and doomed. As Richard Rohr rightly identifies in the title of his book, our relationship with God is more of a dance than it is an encounter with an authoritarian figure who sits on the throne and judges us without counsel from those who see us from various perspectives. There is a flow that occurs between the three forms of the one God, and we can get caught up in that flow as well.

I love to think of God as being represented by a mutually self-giving relationship. That not only makes sense to me, it’s instructive. It gives me a sense of how I am to be as well. I’m not to rule over whatever beings happen to fall under my authority. I am to do as God does – which is to live in a self-giving relationship with others.

Our scripture this morning is instructive. The resurrected Jesus gave his 11 remaining disciples this instruction to go out and make disciples over all the nations, and they were to baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. They were to go out boldly and with all the authority that had been given to him.

Of course what we think of as the Great Commission didn’t take place at a notable place with great fanfare. This message Jesus gave to these Jewish men who were ostracized from the Temple took place on an un-named mountain in a gentile region of the country, and this small group that Jesus addressed weren’t all convinced that the story was going anywhere. Matthew says some of them worshipped him and others doubted. Honestly, this scene would be comical if it were to be portrayed in a film.

But Jesus wasn’t being foolish or funny. Jesus spoke of the powerful authority they had to go out and spread the good news of God’s enduring and ever-present love, but his presence was the only evidence of that authority. They were without numbers, conventional resources, or even a likely story. There wasn’t any real reason they were going to be able to convince anyone to believe what had happened and what it meant for the world. But they proceeded, and they succeeded!

This business of spreading the good news of God’s enduring presence and power and love is an unusual undertaking and you just can’t predict the way it’s going to play out. The power of God doesn’t manifest itself in conventional ways. It really does get spread more like a dance than an edict.

One day in the New Vision Newport program we were shown a video of a phenomenal event that took place at an outdoor concert of some kind somewhere. It was sort of grainy video, but what occurred was very clear. It wasn’t a very high energy event. There were a few people spread out over a hillside. You could hear some music in the background, but everybody was just sitting lazily in the sun – except this one young man who was dancing very enthusiastically by himself.

He danced that way all alone for about a minute. And then one other guy joined him. And then one other person, and then a small group of people joined in the dancing, and all of a sudden people were pouring in from all directions to join in on the dance. All of this took place over the course of about 3 minutes. Google the dancing guy video. It’s a pretty remarkable piece of video that has some interesting commentary about leadership.

And I think it probably explains a lot about the way the church has grown from that feeble group of 11 men on a single hillside to a community that can be found on almost any hillside in the world. It might well have looked foolish for those first disciples who went out to share what they had experienced with Jesus Christ, but they were committed and convicted of the importance of spreading this good news, and as we all know, the power of God gets exhibited in unpredictable ways. It took a while, but the story and the community went viral. Just a few people started sharing their understanding of this divine dance between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and more and more people joined in on the dance.

The love of God is powerful in an infectious way. It’s an uncontainable presence that touches us in ways that we don’t fully comprehend but is overwhelmingly real.

We have all been invited to join in on this divine relationship that moves us in ways that heals our brokenness and brings joy to the world.

Thanks be to God. Amen

Directed By The Spirit

I Corinthians 12:3-13

3b No one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. 4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5 and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. 7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8 To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10 to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11 All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. 12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body–Jews or Greeks, slaves or free–and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Today is Pentecost Sunday. It’s the day we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit in to the world and the birth of the church. It’s called Pentecost because it occurred 50 days after Easter, and pente refers to 50. Many Jews were in Jerusalem on that 50^th day because it coincided with the Festival of Weeks, which was a celebration that happened at the time of the wheat harvest, and it commemorated the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai seven weeks after the Exodus.

You might say there was a mighty convergence that occurred on that day. People were in Jerusalem to commemorate their religious heritage and to celebrate their harvest when all of a sudden this mighty wind swooped through town and established a new channel of communication with God. In many ways it disrupted the city and the Jewish community, but it wasn’t just disruptive – God sent the Holy Spirit to bring people together in a new way. It was God’s effort to establish a new form of unity between people and with heaven. It was an event that would change the world forever.

There’s a nice article in this month’s edition of Arkansas Living, which is a publication of the Arkansas Electric Cooperatives Corporation. It’s an interview with a good United Methodist woman named Laurel Ellis, who is someone I’m acquainted with from Wynne. She will have her 102 birthday in August, and Mrs. Ellis currently lives in a retirement home that my father lived in for a period of time after he had a stroke. She grew up and lived in what’s known as the Jolly Ellis community which is on the west side of Wynne, and this article focuses on her experience with the arrival of electricity to that community.

That part of Cross County is served by Woodruff Electric Cooperative, and she can remember when they first put up the poles and ran electricity to their home. This was in the late 1930’s and she was married with one young child at the time. They were living in a house that was lit with a kerosene lamp and heated with a wood stove. The only refrigeration at the time was provided by a hole in the ground lined with cardboard that would hold a large chunk of ice. Their first electric device was a single light bulb that hung from the ceiling, which was amazingly helpful to them, but she said the first appliance she got was a washing machine – which turned a day-long project in to a relatively automatic process.

It was interesting to read of the way the arrival of electricity changed their lives, and how grateful she was for how it had effected them. It’s amazing to me how close we are to a world that was largely unelectrified. The arrival of electricity was such a good thing for so many people, but I guess we’re currently dealing with the downside of this progress. We’re heating up our atmosphere generating all of that electricity, and our next challenge is to figure out how to keep our cherished appliances going without doing ourselves in.

It seems like there’s almost always a downside to the advancements we make. In addition to all of the great appliances and devices that we enjoy, one of the most amazing things we have is access to information. It’s unfathomable how easily we can gather information about whatever it is we want to know. You might say we’re bombarded by information, but there’s a downside to this as well. We’ve got access to a world of information, but our access to the truth remains very illusive, and the largest obstacle between us and the truth is largely self-imposed. Our access to the truth is deterred by what we think we already know.

When we already think we know something it influences where we go to learn more about what we are inclined to believe. This has become a terrible problem for political discourse in our country. Our appetite to know more about what we already believe motivates some of our most popular news organizations to deliver the news with a clear bias. Right leaning news outlets provide information that right leaning consumers want to hear and left-leaning news outlets provide information that their constituents want to hear. Our most respected news organizations try hard to present the news from an unbiased position, but what that means is that we become suspicious of anything we hear that conflicts with what we believe to be true.

It’s an unfortunate pattern of behavior in our country, and it isn’t serving us well. I hate to mention the all-too-familiar phrase, fake news, in my sermon this morning, but that has become a popular way of labelling any information that we don’t find to be convenient. I’m not saying that there isn’t such a thing as fake news, but one person’s fake news has become another person’s gospel truth. We as a nation are huge consumers of information and terrible discerners of truth.

But I had an experience this last week that put me in touch with the difference between seeking information for justification and seeking information for knowledge. It happened because I’ve embarked upon a project that I don’t understand.

After hearing of my affection for sailing my little 8’ plastic rowboat, Jim McLarty very graciously provided me with a 16’ Hobie Cat sailboat that had been parked out at the airport for a few years. It’s a 1976 model, but it’s classic design that hasn’t really changed over the last 40 years. But between the trailer and the boat there are a few issues that need to be addressed, and I’ve been trying to get it both roadworthy and seaworthy.

Jim gave me the original handbook and a few other materials that are helpful, but as you know, the internet has all the information you would ever want about anything, and I’ve found some really helpful videos about all sorts of things. I haven’t gotten to the point of watching a video on how to sail a boat like that, but I’ve been able to see how to take things apart and put things together. I’ve also been able to find and order the parts I need. If I happen to get it all together and if I learn how to operate it I’ll try to organize an event on Greer’s Ferry Lake one day. There are some significant if’s in that sentence, but maybe everything along with the weather will cooperate one day.

But my main point of this little aside is that there’s a far difference between searching the internet for information that you know you need to have and scanning the internet to find further evidence to support what you already think. One is motivated by your need for knowledge you know you don’t have and the other is to bolster sense of righteousness.

Now I’m not saying it’s a terrible thing to pursue information that will feed your righteous indignation about one thing or the other. I know I can’t keep myself from some recreational reading of articles that will feed my appetite for outrage. But it’s such a different thing to approach a subject with desire to learn than it is to gather information to build a case for what you believe.

And I’m thinking there’s a powerful lesson here in regard to the way we engage with something more amazing and all-encompassing than the internet. I think it’s hard for us to imagine, but the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world was more life-changing than the coming of electricity to a rural community, and more empowering than the internet. Like so many other things we take for granted, I don’t think we recognize the kind of influence the Holy Spirit can continue to have on our lives. While it entered Jerusalem in a spectacular fashion, it’s enduring presence isn’t so dramatic – at least not in an obvious way. It doesn’t call attention to itself, and for this reason we are often oblivious to it’s presence.

And even when we think to acknowledge it and to seek it’s guidance we are often more interested in gaining it’s blessing and support than we are in hearing it’s call and responding to it’s promptings. I think we often approach the Holy Spirit in the same we approach the internet when we are engaged in political advocacy – we think of it as a tool to provide us with more information to support what we already think. When we try to use the Holy Spirit in this way we aren’t truly accessing it’s power and presence.

I believe our challenge as Christians is to maintain the attitude of those who make no assumptions about our knowledge of God. This is not to say that we can have no knowledge of God, but we must never assume that we know too much about what God intends. I believe God seeks to use us and that God directs us in powerful ways, but God’s ways aren’t like our ways, and it’s easy for us to forget this.

I think this passage from Paul of the way in which the Holy Spirit uses us is a powerful testimony to the beautiful way in which we are to work with each other in order to function in this world as the living presence of the body of Christ. We aren’t all to do the same thing, but God has provided a way for us all to be guided by the same spirit that was in Jesus Christ.

We can’t really imagine what life was like before the Holy Spirit came blowing in to the world, but I think we can tell the difference between when we are actually listening for the Holy Spirit to guide and empower our lives and when we are trying to use the Holy Spirit to justify our self-generated agendas. If we are genuinely seeking we may find our lives as transformed as was the daily life of Laurel Ellis when electricity came to the western side of Cross County. But if we are using the Holy Spirit in the same way we often use the internet we are simply be puffing ourselves up with meaningless words and creating distance between ourselves and the truth.

The arrival of the Holy Spirit is a big and beautiful thing. It’s more life changing than electricity and it’s more expansive than the internet. If we as individuals and as a community of faith can learn to truly listen and respond to it’s powerful presence there’s no limit to what we can do. This is the biggest if that there is, but by the grace of God, we can and will.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Upward Mobility

John 17:1-11

1 After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, 2 since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 3 And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. 4 I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. 5 So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. 6 “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. 7 Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 8 for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. 9 I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10 All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. 11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.

This seventh Sunday of Easter is also known as Ascension Sunday. According to the account that’s provided in the first chapter of the Book of Acts, Jesus appeared to his disciples over the course of 40 days after Easter, and it was on that 40^th day that Jesus ascended in to heaven. Last Thursday was the Day of Ascension, but today is the first Sunday after that 40^th day, so it’s appropriate to incorporate the celebration of the Ascension on this Sunday.

But as you know, Jesus didn’t just want us to celebrate the remarkable things he did. Jesus wanted us to understand who he was and to find the kind of life that he embodied. Jesus wasn’t just out to create a huge fan base. Jesus wanted us to be participants in the life-giving endeavor in which he was a fully engaged. And this prayer that Jesus prayed just prior to his entry in to Jerusalem shows us the kind of ascension Jesus wants us to experience. He looked to heaven and prayed that we would experience the same kind of elevation that he had – even before he ascended in to heaven.

Jesus lived a glorious life, and he was on his way to Jerusalem to be fully glorified. We don’t normally think of being crucified as a glorious thing, but as John tells the story, Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to be glorified. In the book of John you don’t find Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane in an anguished prayer. According to John, Jesus considered being raised up on a cross to be the highpoint of his life. Jesus redefined the object of life. He didn’t want us to equate life with survival. Jesus wanted us to understand the nature of true life – which is to live in relationship with God. And Jesus knew that through his crucifixion was able to demonstrate how perfectly aligned he was with God.

Jesus was going to suffer in Jerusalem, but he wasn’t focused on the suffering he would endure. Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to be glorified. Many English Bibles refer to this glorious form of life as eternal life. Verse 3 says that to know God is to have eternal life, and while that word, eternal, speaks to the unending nature of this divine opportunity, it doesn’t really address the quality of this new life. And there are some other translators who use other words to describe the kind of life that Jesus was praying for us to experience. Some would say Jesus was praying that we would experience abundant life, but I’ve also seen it translated as prevailing life – which I find to be the most compelling form of life to obtain. Jesus wasn’t just praying that we would exist forever – Jesus was praying that we would embrace the kind of life that is glorious now and forever. Jesus was praying that we would experience a more prevailing form of life than what we experience under normal circumstances.

The fact that you’ve made the effort to come to worship this morning indicates that you are wanting the kind of elevated life that Jesus offered – regardless of what you call it, and this final prayer of his is an encouraging word for us. This prayer is a gift for us – Jesus wants us to find our way in to the kind of glory that he knows is available to us, and he’s doing what he can to help us, but he also knows of the obstacles that we face.

This quest for the best life possible isn’t unique to those of us who aspire to follow Jesus to that higher ground. I guess most people are in search of some kind of upward mobility, but people go off in a lot of different directions to obtain it.

On some level, I’m thinking that one of the most powerful engines that drives human behavior is this desire for upward mobility. I haven’t consulted any scholarly journals on the issue, but I think we humans have a powerful appetite to elevate ourselves, and this moves us to do some remarkable things and to behave in some extreme ways. This isn’t an original idea of mine. I think the Biblical story of the tower of Babel is a great illustration of this hunger to get ourselves to a higher place. And while this desire to build and achieve and obtain isn’t an inherently bad thing, it clearly can go in some bad directions. I don’t think anyone would argue that it was a wonderful thing for our ancestors to figure out how to make bricks and to build structures, but it’s not such a good thing to try to make ourselves equal to God, and it’s not unusual for this appetite of ours to achieve causes us to go too far.

I don’t think we can keep ourselves from looking up and wondering how we can get to a higher place. And this is a good thing. We wouldn’t have airplanes if there weren’t some people who were discontent to be tethered to the ground. The hunger to fly moved people to study and experiment and test and take huge risks. So much of what makes our lives more comfortable and interesting has come about because of this innate human hunger for life to be better. I don’t think this desire to get to somewhere other than where we are is a bad thing, but I think we all know that it can go in some bad directions.

This hunger for upward mobility can move us to pursue vain things in profound ways. Some people think they’ll find true life if they can make enough money. Some people think they’ll have it if they obtain enough fame. Some people think they can get it through a pill or a drink or a puff of smoke. I dare say we’ve all gone down some misguided roads in pursuit of the best life possible, but even bad paths can lead us to good places. There are a lot of people who have gained access to abundant life through the experience of doing all the wrong things. It’s interesting that one of the most redeeming things that can happen to us is to experience profound personal failure.

And the other side of this is that there aren’t any paths that automatically put you in touch with true life. I’m thinking it was the desire to get more out of life that moved me to go to seminary. It’s not easy for me to recall exactly what motivated me to pursue a theological education, but on some level I thought it would make me feel better to know a little more about Jesus. Seminary was a good experience for me, and I’m glad it turned in to a profession, but nobody needs to think that you become a more redeemed person by becoming a religious professional. I’m not sure if I thought I would gain access to the secret sauce of life by becoming a preacher, but I have come to know that this isn’t the case. Finding and staying on the path to true life may even be harder for a professional Christian than it is for those of you who haven’t made a career of following Jesus.

There are no automatic paths that we can get on that will lead us to the glorious life that Jesus experienced and invited us to obtain, but none of us are inherently barred from entry as well. We are all in need of God’s transforming love to turn our hearts around. It always involves an initiative of God to enable us to overcome our various forms of blindness and to see what true life looks like. It’s a gift of God to know God and to have eternal life. Jesus was facing elevation on the cross when he looked up to heaven and spoke of his final glorification. This is not the kind of elevation any of us are inclined to embrace, but Jesus was in prayer for us that we would find our way into such renunciation of conventional life.

It’s a beautiful thing that we have this passion for upward mobility. God has gifted us with this desire to get somewhere. It’s not a bad thing that we have this passion for movement, but it’s not unusual for us to try to rise above our circumstances in ways that are ultimately unsatisfying. Fortunately, it’s often at those moments of despair that we turn our attention to God. Probably the most unfortunate thing is when we find ourselves content enough to quit searching and yearning for a closer encounter with the one who knows what we need and who wills to provide it.

It’s good for us to look at Jesus, and to hear his prayer for us because he was the man who’s desire for upward mobility was perfectly directed, and his passion actually got him somewhere.

I also think it’s important for us to see that Jesus channeled his efforts in ways that run counter to the ways in which we generally pursue upward mobility. While we often try to rise above our circumstances in very physical ways – Jesus showed that real upward mobility occurs when our hearts are reoriented and our priorities are transformed. Our natural tendency is to think we get places by muscling our way up the ladder, but Jesus showed us that the real way to pursue upward mobility is to practice risky forms of self-giving love. We are tempted to think that we will get somewhere by promoting ourselves in attractive ways, but Jesus showed that the real way to get somewhere is to give of ourselves in costly ways.

Jesus revealed that there is such a thing as upward mobility. There is a way to rise above whatever circumstances we find ourselves in, and it’s not wrong for us to want to find it. The issue for us is to decide if we will be the kind of people who are looking get somewhere by standing on top of other people, or will we be willing to blend in with all the others who have let go of their lives and found their way into that highest level of existence.

Jesus is in prayer for us, and his prayer is that we would each live glorious lives, and that through our lives others would find their way into that glorious community we call the kingdom of God.

Thanks be to God for this prayer of Jesus Christ, who knows what we really need, and who is helping us to find it. Amen.