Thompson's Blog

The Lord Is My #
John 10:11-18

10:11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. 12 The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away–and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. 13 The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. 14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”

What in the world does that symbol we call the hashtag represent? And why would I say that the Lord is my hashtag? I’m not the best person to explain what the hashtag symbol now represents, but I don’t want the truth to get in the way of what to say about it, so I’m going to explain it the way I understand it. I am a bit of a tweeter, so I have some sense of what it is, but I’m sure there are people in this room who have no idea why people even talk about hashtags. Why I would say that the Lord is my hashtag is probably a mystery to everyone, and it may remain a mystery at the end of my sermon, but I hope I can make some sense of this odd phrase I’ve formulated and claimed.

Even though I am a bit of a tweeter I can tell you that I have found the hash-tag symbol to be perplexing. Before I went on my bike journey to the Atlantic I was encouraged by Kelli Reep, my twitter tutor, to end my tweets with a hashtag in front of the words pedalthompsonpedal, but my phone was slow to remember that phrase and I got tired of typing it. I also didn’t quite get it, so I quit doing it pretty early on.

I’m still not one to utilize hashtag language in my rare tweets, but I’ve come to understand it’s use a bit more. The most helpful thing was to read an anecdote about how the hashtag acquired it’s place in the tweeting world, and I’ll say a bit more about that in a moment. I may not convince you that it’s perfectly reasonable for me to declare that the Lord is my hashtag, but it means something to me. And part of what I’m hoping to do this morning is to bring some attention to the way in which we seek to communicate the good news of God’s unbounded love for us in this rapidly changing world. It’s sort of bizarre to speak of God as my hashtag, but how normal is it for us city dwelling, keyboard punching, grocery shoppers to refer to Jesus as the good shepherd. Granted, you don’t need a degree in husbandry to get the basic concept of shepherding, but we have no idea what it was actually like to be a 1st Century Palestinian shepherd.

The shepherding economy that dominated the land of Palestine provided a nice metaphor for the early Hebrew poets, for Jesus, and for those who wrote about Jesus. This shepherding language has stuck around because it basically makes sense, and it makes for nice imagery. I will say it’s not particularly inspirational for us to think of ourselves as sheep. In terms of animal achievement and behavior, sheep function under a pretty low bar, but such animals need good oversight and it’s nice to think of God as our shepherd, and of Jesus as the good shepherd.

I can affirm that this shepherding language still speaks to our relationship with God in a benevolent way, but we live in a much more complex economy. We don’t handle animals for a living – we manage digits. And some of the most dangerous predators we face don’t have fangs and claws – they have software programs that wreak havoc in our lives through wireless signals.

We operate in a complex and strange economy, and it’s shifty. It’s hard to keep up with how things work and what things mean.

Of course this is reflected in the way we communicate, and one huge change that has occurred during my lifetime is the way we use symbols on the keyboard. Now I totally avoided computer programming when I was in college, so I never caught on to what back-slashes and forward slashes and colons meant when you were telling a computer what to do. But I can remember how dumbfounded I was when somebody tried to explain to me how email worked. Why I was going to be twmurray@juno.com made no sense to me, but I began using the symbols I was told to use, and I’ve sort of learned to do what I’m supposed to do without even wondering why we do it.

You can’t find me @juno.com anymore, but you can follow me on twitter, and I might even start using a hashtag every now and then because I finally sort of get it. And here’s my short tutorial on how twitter works. If you really want to understand how it works you should talk to Kelli or most anyone else in the room, but as I say, I’m more interested in communicating what I think than what is true.

If you abide in the twitter universe you have an address which is a name that begins with the @ sign. Don’t ask why – it just is. And once you have an account other people can notice that you’re there and they can choose to follow you. And what that means is that anytime you type a short message and send it out it will go to everyone who has chosen to follow you.

And here’s where this hashtag business comes in to play. If you want to send out a thought about something that you want to be seen by people who don’t follow you can put a hashtag in front of the key word or phrase and then whoever searches for that hashtagged phrase will see what you wrote. If you are interested in a subject that others have probably tweeted about you can search for that subject with a hashtag in front of it, and you will see what everyone else in the world has had to say about that particular word or phrase.

I read in the Urban Dictionary that this may have come about when Flight #1549 went down in the Hudson River and so many people saw it and began tweeting about it. Early on, someone concluded their tweet with the hashtag preceding Flight1549, someone else retweeted the message, which got retweeted a few thousand or million times in a short period of time, and when people wanted to get more information about the situation they would do a search for #flight1549. And this is how the hashtag came to be reborn as a symbol to seek information about a previously identified topic.

This may not make sense. It may not even be true, but it helps me to understand it. And the way I understand it – you use the hashtag to identify what it is you are wanting to know about. The hashtag symbol is the symbol of whatever it is you are focused upon.

We live in a world where the way in which we communicate is changing quickly and constantly. And while the way in which we communicate is in perpetual flux, the essence of what we communicate doesn’t really change. We are all still trying to stay in touch with people we love and care about, and we are still trying to understand the things that are most important to us.

Jesus used the imagery of a good shepherd to speak of the way in which he tried to get people to follow him in to the true fold – in to the place where they would find life and find it abundantly. He spoke of the way in which a good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep, and how sheep are able to recognize the voice of the good shepherd.

Where do we go to find that voice? And once we’ve heard it how do we help other people recognize that there is this voice out there that’s calling for us to find life and to find it abundantly? That is the challenge we face, and the opportunity we have. The challenge is that we are inundated with information and opportunities to learn about anything under the sun. Our access to information and to the messages of people from all over the world has never been greater and it grows every day. It’s actually overwhelming to think about what we can learn, what we can see, and what we can spread. If fact it’s possible to be totally occupied with incoming information that will lead us nowhere and to find enough entertainment to keep us satisfied with our lack of understanding.

Our challenge is to gain access to those things that will actually gives us life, and to help others find their way in to that light.

If we are people who consider the Lord to be our shepherd, and people who see Jesus as the good shepherd, then I think it also makes sense for us to be people who consider the Lord to be our hashtag. Because when I say that the Lord is my hashtag I’m saying the Lord is what I’m wanting to talk about. If the Lord is my hashtag it’s the Lord that I’m wanting to be about. The Lord is my hashtag because it’s the Lord I’m wanting to know about.

The Lord is my hashtag. It’s not good poetry, and you may not get it, but in some way that line grabs me in a way that shepherding language doesn’t. I don’t know any shepherds, but I know a lot of people who use hashtags to bring emphasis to the issues of our day, and I want the love of Christ to be one of those issues.

The way in which we communicate with each other is in a constant state of transition, and it’s not easy to remain current with the technology. It can be rather intimidating to try to keep up with the ways in which we share important information, but you can also say that we’ve never had such good tools for the work of sharing the news of God’s abundant love for all of us. The truth is that our challenge remains the same. The Spirit of God has always been a mysterious presence, and there’s always only been only one thing necessary in order for us to experience and to share that mysterious truth. All it really takes is a loving and willing heart.

We live in an odd world, but it’s always been this way, and God is still here with us. Whether the Lord is your hashtag or your shepherd the good news is that when this is the case – you shall not want!

Thanks be to God.
Amen

Aching for Life
John 20:19-31

(Prior to preaching this sermon, the Chairperson of our Staff Parish Relations Committee, Carol Kennedy, announced that QQUMC will be receiving a new pastor following Annual Conference this summer, and that I will be moving to a new appointment at that time. At the moment, I’m unaware of where my next appointment will be, but I anticipate learning of my new assignment soon)

20:19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” 24 But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. 25 So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” 26 A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” 29 Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” 30 Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. 31 But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

Knowing that Carol would be making this significant announcement this morning, I knew I would want to say a few words about this new development. And the first thing I want you to know is how good it has been for me to be the pastor of this church. It has been a really rich and enriching experience for me. I have felt really well matched for this church, and I feel good about what we’ve done together over the past 6 years. I’m grateful for the freedom and support I’ve experienced here. I like to think I’ve done some good work and I don’t have any significant regrets about anything I’ve done. I feel really good about what has gone on since I’ve been here.

But I do have one regret – which is that we haven’t grown in a significant manner. We haven’t hit the numbers that this church needs, and that troubles me. I don’t like the fact that we aren’t able to pay all of our obligations, and that’s largely what has brought about the upcoming change. But before you think we’re somehow getting punished by upper management, you need to know that I’m the one who has largely brought attention to this situation. I’m probably more unsatisfied with the way things are than they are at headquarters, but I’m also more conscious of the way things are than they are, and I’m the one who feels like something needs to change.

In all honesty I’m really sad to be leaving, but I also have a clear sense of it being time for me to move. I care about what happens here, but I think it’s time for me to pass the baton. I like to think it’s the Holy Spirit that has prompted this move, but it’s never easy to judge those things. I know that change is anxiety producing. Believe me – I can tell you a lot about that. I am currently very suspended. I have no idea where I will be appointed, and when I am not in a panic about that I recognize that change provides opportunity for growth, and I pray that will be the case for us all.

What I also know is that this is not a tragic circumstance. I’m reminded of a story my dentist told me one day while I was being held captive in his chair with sharp instruments in my mouth. He’s a fellow United Methodist here in town, and his church was experiencing some staff turnover a couple of years ago which resulted in some significant membership turmoil. There were people leaving the church because of what was going on, and my dentist said it was the subject of constant conversation in their Sunday School class.

He said that as they gathered one Sunday morning someone brought up the subject, and they started talking about what a tragedy it was that so many people were leaving the church, but there was a firefighter in the class who had heard about all he wanted to hear on the subject and he brought some perspective to the situation. He said something to the effect that they were experiencing some misfortune, but that it wasn’t a tragedy. He said he knew what tragedy looks like because he saw it regularly, and church turmoil doesn’t rise to the threshold of tragedy. My dentist said that really put things in perspective for him, and it sort of does the same for me.

This is a significant change, it’s sort of scary, but it’s not a toxic waste spill. In fact it might be that we’re all getting a load of spiritual compost. That’s about all I know to say about this. I can’t say for sure that the Holy Spirit has prompted these changes, but the Holy Spirit is certainly on hand to help us navigate the new landscape, and I think we can all take comfort and assurance from that.

And speaking of the Holy Spirit – what I want to think about now is what’s going on in this story about Jesus appearing to the disciples as they had assembled in their anxiety behind closed doors. This story contains some elements that are unique to the Gospel of John, and it’s a rich story. I think it’s a story that contains some characters that we can understand. In fact, the notion of people gathering with anxiety behind locked doors is an altogether familiar circumstance to most of us. We may not have found ourselves cowered down in fear of arrest and torturous death, but I dare say there are some fearful intruders we all hope to avoid. There’s a knock on the door we don’t want to hear, a doctor’s report we don’t want to read, or a call we don’t want to get.

There are many life-stealing situations that we all face, and there’s a lot of unmet yearning for life-giving opportunities. The disciples faced a very specific life-threatening situation, but it’s not unusual to find ourselves cowered down in unsettling situations, and I love this image of the risen Christ being able to penetrate the barriers we’ve erected in hope of staying safe. Barriers provide some cover, but life doesn’t happen behind barriers – life happens when we come out from behind the barriers. Barriers can be useful, but they don’t give us what we really need.

The disciples were as good as dead as they gathered together behind that locked door. They were still breathing, but they weren’t really alive – not until Jesus came in and infected them with the Holy Spirit. It was then that they truly came to life and were empowered to embrace whatever the world would fling toward them. They were touched by the life-giving spirit of Jesus Christ and that changed everything for them.

There’s this beautiful story that I of course heard on NPR. It was a compressed story that came from a podcast called, Invisibilia, and it was about this man named Martin Pistorious, who was stricken with cryptococcal meningitis when he was about 12 years old and it caused him to lose his entire ability to function. It was sort of a gradual loss, but over the course of a few months he went from being totally functional to being totally dysfunctional. He couldn’t do anything, and the doctors told his parents to take him home and keep him comfortable until he died.

But he didn’t die, and he remained in that state of total unresponsiveness for more than 12 years. He was totally unconscious for the first few years, but his mind slowly began to wake up and he became totally aware of what was going on about 4 years in to the situation. He was totally awake, but he was completely unable to communicate his situation to anyone.

And that went on for years. He was in that state for about 8 years before his family began to recognize some intentional movements on his part, but even then the doctors told them that he had the mind of an infant. With encouragement from a kind-hearted nurse they got a second opinion on the state of his mind, and that is when he began to reconnect with the world. He still can’t talk, but he communicates with a voice activated computer, and he is totally reconnected with life.

The really interesting thing is to hear him talk about where his mind went during those years of disconnection. He said there was a period of time when he totally disassociated himself from his thoughts, and he did that because he had terrible thoughts. He was tormented by his thoughts. He would think about how alone and worthless he was, and in order to deal with that he said he became detached from his thoughts. That was the barrier he erected to protect himself, but at some point he began to reengage with the world in his mind.

He was in an adult day-care center where they thought he had the mind of an infant, so they put him in a room where they played perpetual Barney reruns, and he developed this deep dislike of Barney, and he learned to tell time by watching the movement of the shadows across the room, and he learned to predict when his father would come get him away from Barney.

He went from seeing his mind as his tormentor to seeing it as his only functional tool, and he used his mind all day to resist the bad things that were happening to him, to enjoy the small blessings of the day, to imagine, and to analyze what was going on. He came back to life in his mind, and amazingly he reconnected with his family and friends. Eventually he became a website designer, and at age 33 he got married.

It’s truly a story of a person who went from death to life, and while there is no mention of his faith journey in this story, what I heard him talk about is how much he ached to be reconnected to life, and in a rather miraculous manner he did.

Jesus didn’t step in the room, turn off the Barney reruns, and restore him to life in an instant, but Jesus comes to us all in different ways. Thomas certainly had a unique encounter with the living Christ, and while there are a number of ways to interpret what that episode is all about, what stands out to me is not how much doubt Thomas had but how much desire he had for the resurrection to be real.

It’s a good thing to be filled with desire for life to be meaningful. We shouldn’t be content to have adequate barriers erected to keep us relatively secure. It’s a good thing to have some appetite for life and not to settle for those things that just keep us alive and sedated. Jesus Christ didn’t go to the cross in order for us to enjoy HD TV. I’m not saying there isn’t some fine programming and equipment out there, but Jesus wants us to know what it is to truly be alive. And Jesus has shared his breath with us so that we will get out from behind our safe and predictable walls and find some life.

I take great comfort in this story of Jesus coming to his disciples because I believe Jesus is trying to break in to all of our lives. In fact we can’t create enough barriers to keep him out.

And thanks be to God for that!
Amen.

God’s Religious Freedom & Restoration Act
Mark 16:1-8

16:1 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 8 So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.

I’m so happy that we’ve arrived at another Easter morning! I’m always so relieved when Easter finally arrives. Lent isn’t a particularly pleasant spiritual season, and I usually find Holy Week to be downright difficult. I tend to walk around during Holy Week with low-grade guilt – which is a lot like having a low grade fever – but it’s my heart and my mind that feel strangely out of sorts. Holy Week is that awkward period of time between the moment when Jesus’ followers got all excited about his arrival in to Jerusalem and when they totally bailed out on him and allowed him to be arrested and crucified. Holy Week reminds me of how thin his support really was, and I can identify with those people who scattered when things got seriously costly.

So I’m glad we’ve gotten to Easter – it’s the day when we are reminded that the universe has been put back on course. I think of Easter as God’s offer for a do-over. It’s our annual mulligan. Ok, you sliced last year so far out of bounds you don’t even know where to start looking for it, but today the scorecard is empty – it’s time to try again.

I like the message of Easter – we failed, but God stepped up and set things right. Jesus shouldn’t have been rejected, and he wasn’t. Not by the One who counts, and God has given us another chance to follow Jesus in to the light of life.

Easter is all about forgiveness and opportunity. Jesus was rejected by the hyper-religious people of his day, but God has given us a new opportunity to get this religious business right. Of course this message is available to us before Easter morning each year, but it’s on Easter that we are reminded of what the Christian faith is all about. The miracle of Easter is not just that something supernatural happened – the miracle of Easter is that God didn’t give up on us! And when you think about what our fore-fathers did to this man who embodied the very presence of God it’s unfathomable that God would have chosen to reestablish the relationship only three days after Jesus was crucified.

I love the forgiving and inviting message that God provided for us on that first Easter morning. It’s a miraculous message to receive after the events of Holy Week, and while I’m usually tuned in to my personal and our corporate guilt during Holy Week – the message of Easter came a little early for me this year. Holy Week wasn’t as full of dread as I usually experience it to contain.

Maybe I should feel a little extra guilty today for not remaining as guilty as I know myself to be. I know I would have been right there with Peter and the others who fled when courageous faith was called for, but last week I was reminded of how good it can feel to be with people who are trying to get close to Jesus.

I very literally had that experience last week. Many of you were here last week when we had a giant Jesus puppet for our Palm Sunday processional. It’s a puppet that’s about 8’ tall and is built on to a backpack frame and designed for a person to wear. He’s got a powerful head of hair and a beard and when you put a sign in his hand that says Love Thy Neighbor he’s a pretty convincing Jesus. I put the Jesus puppet on last Monday and went down to the prayer vigil that was held in front of the Governor’s Mansion, and let me tell you – it was a powerfully good experience!

The prayer vigil was called in response to the House Bill 1228 that was called the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act that many of you know about. While that’s a fine sounding piece of legislation it would have provided defense for people who wanted to use their religious convictions to withhold service from people they don’t approve of. It seems like it was specifically designed to legalize discrimination against the LGBT community, and as you all know this issue got a lot of press attention this week. It all turned out better than I expected it to, and I’m happy about that, but what I’ll remember for a long time is how well Jesus was welcomed to that vigil. It made people so happy to see this giant Jesus. I know it wasn’t me people were so glad to see, but I was the one who was standing inside of Jesus, and there were all of these people taking pictures of Jesus and wanting to get their picture made with Jesus. It was giant Jesus that people were loving, but I was feeling it.

You just can’t buy that kind of therapy! It was a deeply good experience for me. In fact it helped remind me of how beloved Jesus is. And it reminded me of what a good story our religious faith is built upon. There are a lot of people out there who love what they know about Jesus, but many of those people have no use for the church.

And I’m not saying that I blame them for being so turned off by what is often portrayed as Christian faith. There are a lot of institutions and individuals who claim the name of Jesus in order to promote their own narrow view of reality, and I hate that about our faith tradition. So much of what goes on in the name of the Christian religion is actually quite opposite from what Jesus taught, but their primary offense is against God – the One who breathed life back in to that community of followers who first knew and loved him.

What we are celebrating today is what those first followers experienced on the first day of the week following his crucifixion, and what they experienced was the profound sense of his presence three days after his death. Each of the gospels tells the story a bit differently, and what that says to me is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a reality that largely defies verbal description. The resurrection wasn’t experienced in one definitive manner, but that’s not to say it wasn’t real. I’m convinced that God really did do something on that first Easter, and what God did changed everything. The love of God that was in the life of Jesus came back to life on Easter morning, and that is what we are celebrating today.

I like the way Mark tells the story. I like the fact that the women who went to the tomb didn’t actually see Jesus. I like that because I haven’t seen him either. A man in a white robe just told them that he had been raised and that was all they needed to hear. This morning you’re hearing a man in a black robe tell you that he has been raised, and I hope that’s all you need to hear!

There was something profound about that encounter because it scared them to death and sent them running away, and that’s very satisfying to me. The women fled in fear, but they didn’t leave in despair – which is how they would have felt if they had only encountered a dead body.

Easter morning doesn’t scare me – it gives me hope, but I think it’s reasonable for those women to have been frightened. I think I would have been frightened if I had been the first on the scene following an act of God that totally disrupted what I understood to be the way the world operated. I wasn’t exactly frightened by the words of Governor Hutchinson who asked the legislature to recall the bad legislation that they had produced, but I was shocked. And I think it would scare me to death if suddenly all of the most powerful people in our world began looking out for the most vulnerable people in the world. It would leave me wondering what in the world is going on. Unexpected profound changes can be frightening – even when they are good changes.

What I really wish is that people would suddenly become shocked by the goodness of religious people in this country and in the world. There are so many bad things that are done in the name of religion people aren’t even shocked when religious people act hatefully. Non-religious people almost expect religious people to behave badly, and hyper-religious people like to generate fear that non-religious people are going to take over the world. We’ve got some unfortunate religious dynamics afloat these days, but I’m not going to let that distorted religious debate get in the way of what I believe we are celebrating today – which is a truly beautiful thing.

God didn’t over-react to the bad religious behavior of people who thought they were serving God by killing the one who promoted the rule of love above all others. I hate to think of what would have happened if God had been guided by religious conviction when it came time to react to the crucifixion of Jesus, but that’s not what God chose to do. God didn’t react with the predictable form of religious conviction — God reacted with love, and by doing that, God has established a new standard for us religious people to follow.

What we are celebrating on this Easter morning is the passage of God’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act and it was designed to remove all excuses from us to treat anyone with anything less than complete love and respect. The resurrection of Jesus Christ comes to us as a gift, but it’s a gift that comes with instructions, and the instructions are for us to treat one another as we have been treated by God. God didn’t use religious convictions to condemn us for our failure – God revealed what it looks like to be truly free and religious.

God breathed life back in to the body of the one who allowed love to be his guide.

And we are that body.
Thanks be to God.
Amen

11:1 When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples 2 and said to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. 3 If anyone says to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.'” 4 They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, 5 some of the bystanders said to them, “What are you doing, untying the colt?” 6 They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. 7 Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. 8 Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. 9 Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! 10 Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” 11 Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

I don’t know if it’s credit or blame that I deserve for this morning’s giant Jesus puppet. But I didn’t act alone on this deal. Melissa James was my primary co-conspirator. A few of the young people got their hands messy one night. My wife gets all the credit for redeeming his face with paint. Anne Weaver was on board with helping create his robe until she broke her wrist, and I’m so grateful for Brian Minyard’s willingness to be the wearer of the puppet! Next time he’ll know better than to answer a phone call from the preacher on a Saturday morning.

I must say that it was an interesting process for me to try to create a larger-than-life Jesus head. I found a web-site that gave instructions for making a large paper-mache head, and it sort of worked, but it’s not the way I would do it again. The method didn’t lend itself to a well-proportioned head. It made for a large head, and that’s what I was after, but I can tell you that his head was not shaped properly.

It was a good exercise for me to spend time thinking about what Jesus would have looked like. I found myself paying a lot more attention than I normally do to the way people’s heads are shaped. I’m not sure what look I was after, and while I’m sure this is a mangled portrayal of Jesus, you should have seen it before I fixed it. It was much worse early on. I found myself wishing I could create a really handsome Jesus, but that was more about my own vanity than in trying to create the right look for Jesus. From what I can tell, people weren’t drawn to Jesus by his looks. I’m not saying he was unattractive, but it wasn’t his surface appearance that made him so desirable.

I spent a lot of time this last week creating what you might call a mask of Jesus, but I think one way of describing who Jesus was – is to describe him as a man who didn’t wear a mask. Jesus wasn’t someone who pretended to be someone other than himself. He was a bit secretive at times. He didn’t want to be the object of too much attention — particularly in the early days of his ministry, but that was because he knew that crowds of people wouldn’t see him for who he was. Jesus didn’t trust the acclaim that came with fame. He recognized the way in which we often love who we perceive others to be and not who they really are.

Jesus spent much of his time trying to reveal who he was, and who he was not. There was a whole lot of expectation for him to live down, and he did his best to discourage people from following him for the wrong reason. He repeatedly told people to expect hardship if they followed him, but they followed him anyway – not because they understood what he was doing or where he was going but because our illusions of ourselves and of others are hard to destroy.

I had a stray dog come up and visit with me when I was on my bike trip last spring. I was taking a break in the shade in the countryside. There were a few houses here and there, and this dog came up from somewhere and just hung around while I was sitting in the shade. I got ready to go and that dog started following me. I yelled at him a couple of times to go away, but he kept running after me. It was sort of hilly and I would get good distance from him going downhill, but he would gain ground when I started going up hill. It wore me out trying to get away from him, but I finally lost sight of him. Clearly he had no idea where I was going.

I don’t think Jesus tried to shake people the way I tried to shake that dog, but he didn’t just want a bunch of followers. He wanted people to see him for who he was – not for who they wanted him to be.

Until it came time for him to enter Jerusalem – and then he allowed people to simply get excited about his arrival. He knew that there were all kinds of misunderstandings about him, but he didn’t rain on the parade. He accepted the praise of all the people who had no idea who he really was and what he was going to do. You might say he allowed people to put all kinds of masks upon him, but he was never confused about who he was and what he intended to do.

Jesus knew exactly what he was doing when he went along with this crowd that welcomed him in to Jerusalem. The text reveals details about how he had made these very specific plans for his arrival in to Jerusalem. We’re told that he sent two of his disciples in to town to retrieve a colt that no one had ever ridden, and that they were to bring it to him. He told them exactly what to say when someone asked them what they were doing, and it went exactly as he had said it would. Jesus was very clear about what he was doing, and what would transpire.

The fact that they were to get a colt that had never been ridden is a strange little detail. Some speculate that it might have pointed to the ceremonial quality of the animal, but I’m thinking this detail is designed to alert us to the fact that Jesus was about to do something that no one had ever done before. Of course when you get on a colt that’s never been ridden I’m thinking you are introducing a significant variable to the situation. Of course it could be that that colt was the only creature who truly understood what was really going on and he was totally cooperative with Jesus. Sometimes it the non-human animals who are the most sympathetic to what’s going on in our lives.

This was quite a parade that accompanied Jesus in to Jerusalem. Jesus was surrounded by people who had all kinds of agendas, and there’s no indication that there was anyone who truly understood his agenda. I’m guessing most of the people who were ushering him in to town were hoping he was going to spark a revolution and get them out from under Roman occupation. Others were just hoping to get close enough to him to experience one of those miracles they had heard people talking about, and then there would have been others who had never heard of Jesus but were always up for a good mass movement of some kind. Jesus was accompanied by a lot of people, but he might not have ever been more alone.

If you find Palm Sunday to be an emotionally confusing celebration I’m right with you. I’m really not sure how to feel about a day like this. It’s the day we celebrate the dramatic entry of Jesus Christ into Jerusalem, and it’s a painful reminder of how misunderstood Jesus really was. We want to whoop it up for our guy who entered Jerusalem with the means and resolve to change the world, and we now know that it would cost him his life.

It’s not easy to hold together a sense of celebration and sorrow, but I think this passage invites us to embrace both of these emotions on this day we call Palm Sunday. I think it makes sense to have a good time parading a giant Jesus in our sanctuary because we aren’t unlike the people who were excited about the big arrival of Jesus in to Jerusalem. The people who welcomed Jesus in to Jerusalem weren’t being malicious. They were genuinely excited about what they thought he was going to do, and what he was going to do was truly extraordinary – but they had no idea what that was.

The arrival of Jesus in to Jerusalem is something for us to cheer – and to bemoan. It’s an event that is worthy of our gratitude, but it’s also a story that contains a startling revelation. It’s a story that reveals how mistaken our expectations can be, and how costly this journey often is. Following Jesus is not a walk in the park on a sunny spring day.

Today’s story highlights the essence of the struggle we have as Christians. I think we have this desire to be a part of something big and dramatic and powerful and life changing, but the way of discipleship is costly and hard.

We don’t get to wear the masks we like to wear, nor do we get to place the mask on Jesus that will turn him in to the savior we want him to be. Unfortunately we don’t get to create him in the image we prefer. To follow Jesus is to seek to see him for who he is, and to want to be seen for who we are. This can be a frightening undertaking because we can be terribly confused about both Jesus and ourselves, but seeing those truths are the source of our salvation and the avenue to true life.

This story of the way Jesus entered Jerusalem is a story that designed to make us wonder. We don’t know what Jesus was thinking when he walked into the Temple and looked around, but I believe the way this story ends invites us to look around and reflect on who we are and what we are doing.

There is a lot of mystery surrounding the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, but it’s not that hard to see what Jesus considered to be important. People put a lot of different masks on Jesus, but there was only one real look on his face, and it was the look of a person who loves us all and who challenges us all to love one another. He had the look of undiscriminating love, and that is not a familiar face to any of us. In fact some people feel like their affection for Jesus calls for them to engage in discrimination.

But this story invites us to try to see the ways in which we are blind to the truth about Jesus and ourselves. Jesus isn’t larger than life – Jesus is life, and Jesus wants us to be truly alive as well. I invite you to take a fresh look at who Jesus is and to discover who you really are. Jesus didn’t just want attention – Jesus wanted to be seen for who he was, so that we might see who we can be.

Thanks be to God for the remarkable way God continues to be unmasked before our very eyes. Amen

The Unspoken Truth
Jeremiah 31:31-34

31:31 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt–a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

The prophet Jeremiah lived a tough life. He lived during a difficult period of time for the nation of Israel, and his life was made even more difficult by his compulsion to speak truth to power. At an early age he felt called by God to do this work of exposing the unrighteousness of their nation, and while he initially resisted the prophetic role that God called him to assume, he came to fully embrace it. And he suffered for it. Jeremiah was known for his ability to clearly reveal how the people of Israel were offending God in their personal lives as well as through the public policies of their kings and priests. What Jeremiah had to say was not well received by the various kings that assumed the throne during his long life, and while they never could bring themselves to actually kill him – they didn’t hesitate to have him beaten, imprisoned, and otherwise humiliated.

Jeremiah lived about 6oo years before Jesus was born, and he was living in Judah, the Southern Kingdom of Israel, in 587 BCE when the Babylonians ransacked their country and destroyed the Temple. Jeremiah had seen this coming, and he had offered an avenue for salvation, but neither the people nor the leaders wanted to hear it, and the nation fell. Those were dark days for the people of Israel. The Temple was destroyed, their king and all of the other leaders of their nation were carried off into exile, and it appeared that they had been abandoned by God.

Jeremiah might well have used that occasion to say, I told you so, but that’s not what he chose to do. Jeremiah remained in Judah while the bulk of the population was in exile, but he continued to speak to the people, and he had a new message. The new message was that this experience of destruction and exile was not the consequence of being abandoned by God – it was the beginning of the new way in which God would be present with them. Yes, their circumstance was the consequence of their unfaithful behavior, but their relationship with God was not destroyed. They could learn from what had occurred, and their relationship with God would be enhanced.

That is the context of these words we have from Jeremiah. Jeremiah was writing words of comfort and support to people who’s lives had been totally disrupted and their understanding of God was in question. They considered the Temple to be the place where God was encountered – they considered the Temple to be the dwelling place of God, and the Babylonians had turned it in to a pile of rubble. They weren’t sure what to make of that, and Jeremiah was offering an answer. The Temple was gone, but God was still present. Their leaders were humiliated, but the word of God was still available. In fact, the word of God had become more available to them.

I don’t know about you, but I find these words to be powerfully compelling. I love this idea of God’s word being placed directly inside of our hearts. I’m thinking it’s the first form of direct deposit. It’s not a paycheck that’s being deposited, but God chose to directly deposit this most significant asset directly in to our hearts. And I’m thinking this would have been such good news to these people who were accustomed to their wellbeing being brokered by this institution that had totally crumbled. It would have given them hope for a new future.

It wasn’t a guarantee for a new and successful future, but it revealed the possibility for a new way of living in relationship with God, and even though they often strayed from living in a faithful relationship with God – the people of Israel believed that their wellbeing was in the hands of God.

It was a huge tragedy, but in some ways, this national catastrophe was a levelling event for the people of Israel. It removed the necessity of a qualified agent to stand between God and God’s people.

This may not have been good news to the class of people who held the priestly franchise, but they weren’t really in a good position to dispute these good words from Jeremiah. He was providing an interpretation of what happened that made sense and he was offering hope for the present and the future. They were in a horrible circumstance, but Jeremiah was saying that God was with them where they were.

Having personal access to God’s instruction is a great gift to us all, but that doesn’t mean we always know what to do with it. Just because you have something doesn’t mean you know how to use it. We can use good tools really dangerously.

For some reason this text reminded me of an experience I had with a tennis racquet one time. I’ve never been much of a tennis player, but I used to go out and play occasionally. I’m much better at hitting stationary objects than I am at hitting things that are coming at me quickly, so I’ve just never really embraced tennis. But I go along with other people who want to play, and I was out with some family members one summer morning at a tennis court. We had finished playing, and I started hitting the ball straight up in the air. I kept trying to hit it higher and higher, and I was getting some good attention, so I was swinging harder and harder, and it culminated in a swing that was so hard I couldn’t stop the racquet before I hit myself in the head with it.

I didn’t pass out immediately, but I knew I had taken a significant blow. I put my hands to my head to stop the bleeding, and I kept them there until I got to a nearby bathroom where a Dr. friend was also on hand. He had me remove my hands from my head, and as soon as I saw the knot and the blood I immediately passed out.

I’m the only person I’ve ever known who has knocked their-self out. I don’t guess if was technically a knock-out blow, but it was close.

I think the thing that story illustrates to me is how unaware I was of what I was doing – and the dangerous trajectory my actions had placed me upon. As far as I know, there haven’t been any lasting consequences of that stiff blow to my head, but you never know about such things. That actually could explain a lot about what I’m inclined to do and not do.

But I think we are often unaware of the trajectories of our lives. God has placed some divine wisdom within each of us, but it’s not unusual for us to engage in some personal foolishness – and I’m not just talking about doing stupid things with tennis racquets. The really unfortunate things we do have more to do with ignoring the plight of the poor, advancing initiatives that serve ourselves, getting overly focused on things that don’t matter, and glossing over the things that do.

I’m not convinced that the words of the Prophet Jeremiah would be any more welcomed here in Arkansas right now than they were in Judah before the fall of the Temple. In fact just as Jeremiah was blamed by the false prophets of his day for being discouraging to the people, and I’m guessing he would be accused of doing the same for us.

Prophets are never well regarded by the communities that they serve. And even though Jeremiah was seen as someone who was bringing an ominous forecast to the people of Judah – he was trying to be helpful. He was viewed as a troublemaker because he wasn’t saying what people wanted to hear, but they would have been far better off if they had listened to what he had to say.

I might not have listened if someone had told me I was going to hit myself in the head if I kept doing what I was doing. It may be that I had to actually do what I did before I would believe it, but I sure would have been inclined to listen to what they had to say afterward.

And that’s the way the people of Israel felt about Jeremiah when they found themselves in Babylon without a king or a temple. They had lost what they thought they needed, but it turns out they still had what they really needed. And so do we.

There are always a lot of things that are not going the way we want them to. We could each generate a pretty good list of the things we don’t consider to be going well on so many different levels. It’s hard to watch a developing disaster and feel helpless to stop it. It’s important to try to bring attention to the situations we believe to be wrong, and I thank God for those people who do the heroic work of speaking truth in situations where it would be easier to remain silent.

It’s hard to speak up when it’s easier to go quietly along with whatever is happening. It’s hard to speak up when you know your perspective won’t be appreciated, but the truth is never contained forever. And it’s always a good thing to aspire to be associated with the truth. There are people who do a good job of keeping the truth contained, and sometimes we get confused about what is true and what is convenient, but you can’t silence the One who is still able to make those direct deposits of truth within our hearts.

God’s truth will always emerge, and God’s people will always find comfort in this reality. We might not be where we want to be when we experience that truth, but God’s willingness to be with us wherever we find ourselves to be will always be good news.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Believing Out Loud
John 3:14-21

3:14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. 16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17 “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. 20 For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. 21 But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

This reference to Moses lifting a bronze serpent in the wilderness isn’t one of those Old Testament stories that we 21st Century Christians give much attention, but it seems to have been an important image to our early Christian ancestors – particularly our ancestors who were Jewish before they were Christian. Those early Jewish followers of Jesus were much more familiar with these stories from the Torah, and this story about Moses lifting the bronze serpent in the wilderness would have been a story they knew well. It was their version of Snakes on a Plane. Of course they would have referred to it as the story of the snakes on the plain.

The story is that the people of Israel were growing tired of eating manna and quail every day out in the wilderness and thy started complaining about the situation God had put them in. They were talking about how much better they had it while they were back in Egypt, and God responded to their complaining by sending them a bunch of snakes. I don’t guess there’s anything that gets our attention quicker than a bunch of snakes. People went from complaining to begging Moses for relief, and with that God instructed Moses to fashion a bronze serpent on a pole and to lift it up for people to see. When people viewed the bronze serpent on the pole they were healed of their snake bites and they lived.

It’s an unusual story, and while it raises a few questions about God’s sensibilities it’s ultimately a story of how God provided for the wellbeing of the people of Israel while they were in the wilderness. It’s a story about how God once again rescued the Israelites from death.

Looking at a bronze serpent lifted up on a pole isn’t a particularly appealing thing to do, but it was a life-saving thing to do, and John found some kinship between that faith experience, and this new thing that had happened with Jesus. Jesus had been lifted up on a cross which was a terrifying form of death, but for John, that image had become transformed into a symbol of the life-giving power of Jesus.

I mentioned last week of how I’ve become convinced of the deeply Jewish roots of the Book of John. My perspective has been greatly influenced by this book I’m reading that was written by this retired Episcopalean bishop, John Shelby Spong, who puts forth the argument that the Book of John articulates the experience of early Jews who were rejected by the mainstream Jewish community because of their faith in Jesus. And their experience was of finding true life through this man who was killed in that horrific manner. What was intended to be the ultimate form of humiliation, rejection, and defeat had for them become the most glorious moment of Jesus Christ’s life. By going to the cross Jesus had shown them that true life was not found through self-preservation, but through self-giving love, and they embraced this image of Jesus being lifted up on a cross.

John is the only Gospel-writer who made this connection between Jesus being lifted up on a cross and Moses lifting the serpent in the wilderness. It’s a unique comparison, but there’s a powerful message here as well, and I think it was a particularly rich comparison for those early Jewish followers of Jesus. In fact I’m thinking they probably saw a bit of contrast between what Moses provided and what Jesus provides. While Moses provided a way to prevent the death of the Israelites while they were in the wilderness, what Jesus provided is far more than the prevention of death – Jesus provided access to eternal life.

The early Jewish followers of Jesus fully embraced their spiritual history, but they placed their spiritual future in the hands of Jesus – who they saw as the culminating gift of God to the people of Israel. Which is so well articulated in this wildly familiar verse: John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

This is a beautiful verse of scripture. It’s a wonderful verse of scripture, but in some ways it has the power of a worn out bumper sticker. It’s been overused – maybe even abused. You don’t see as many of the giant John 3:16 posters in the end-zones of football games during field goals or extra-point attempts as you used to, but this passage has been highly utilized by people who portray Christianity in a manner that sort of puts me off.

I don’t really know how to expose the inappropriate way that verse has been used. It’s more of a feeling that I have about the way it’s been used than I know how to describe it’s misuse, but I feel that it has often been used to oversimplify the long and rich relationship that has been going on between God and the world since the beginning of time. It’s probably not very helpful for me to tear down what has meaning for someone else, but I also think this verse has been used to define who is right with God and who isn’t. Some would use this verse to divide the world between the believers and the losers, and I don’t think this is what John intended.

This extended passage does get in to this reality of people not being right with God, but such judgment has far more to do with what we focus upon than how God chooses to see us. It’s not God that cuts us off, but it is possible for us to choose to live in darkness rather than in light.

Many Christians would say that our access to eternal life depends upon our belief in Jesus, and I won’t necessarily argue with that premise, but I will argue that it makes a huge difference how you define believing in Jesus and how you understand the concept of eternal life. And it seems to me that the way John understood the concepts of believing in Jesus and finding eternal life are far different from the way we are often inclined to define them.

We often equate believing with giving our mental approval of something, but I don’t think that’s what it meant for John. For John, believing in Jesus wasn’t just a matter of belonging to a particular group of people who were affiliated with Jesus. John portrays believing in Jesus as an act of trusting in the way that Jesus lived, of rejecting the dark forces that put Jesus to death, and of embracing his self-giving manner of loving other people. To believe in Jesus is to believe that you can find your way to God in the midst of any kind of trial or tribulation, and it calls for us to deal with our trials and tribulations in a very particular way.

Believing in Jesus is an act of defiance to whatever powerfully dark forces may be at work in the world, but that same belief requires us to reject those dark forces with love in our hearts – which is the hard part.

There’s a great interdenominational campaign going on that’s called Believe Out Loud. It’s sort of an online movement that seeks to give voice and encouragement to Christians who have non-traditional sexual orientations. There are people around here who wear believe our loud buttons. It’s a phrase that serves to remind us of the importance of giving voice and power to people who have been marginalized by traditional Christianity. I think the book of John speaks to the importance of believing out loud because believing isn’t a quiet undertaking.

But God’s love is always more challenging than we want it to be, and I was reminded of that by an essay I read on the progressive Christian website called Patheos.com. The essay was written by a professor at SMU named Dr. Maria Dixon. In addition to several other degrees, Dr. Dixon has a Master of Divinity from Candler School of Theology, but she teaches in the field of communication, and she is very familiar with the landscape of undergraduate misbehavior.

Dr. Dixon is an African American woman, and she wrote an essay about the ugly incident involving the fraternity pledges at the University of Oklahoma. If you don’t know what I’m talking about consider yourself lucky, but there is this video of these young white men – she would call them pre-adults, singing a horribly racist song on a bus, and Dr. Dixon didn’t like the way the school officials handled the situation. She didn’t take issue with the outrage they expressed, but she didn’t think total rejection was the most helpful thing to do.

She wrote a great essay about what she thought could have happened to turn the situation in to more of a teachable moment, but she also owned up to the unlikeliness of such a thing happening. She concluded her essay with the following paragraph:

Look, I know it is easier just to be done with these students. Bashing them is incredibly popular and dismissing them from the island of humanity appears to be all the rage. Unfortunately, I am called to the two most idealistic professions—teaching and preaching and I believe in the power of conversion. I believe in the power of Grace. I believe in a God of Second Chances. I believe in a God who is a master teacher.

Her essay reminded me that this business of believing out loud is a perpetual challenge to our pre-perfect souls. Just when we think we know who the enemy is and what we need to do to them – we get a glimpse of the one who chose to be lifted on a cross so that we could see what love really looks like and how to obtain true life.

To believe in Jesus is to believe out loud that there’s hope for us all. We are called to boldly resist the dark forces that are at work in our world, but probably our largest challenge is to resist the endless forms of darkness that we are each tempted to embrace. Living in the light has always been a challenge, and it always will be, but God has provided us with a great gift. For God so loved the world God didn’t send more snakes to get our attention – God gave us Jesus, and if we will truly believe in him we will find our way into the light and experience this gift of abundant life.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Relocating the Temple
John 2:13-22

2:13 The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. 15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” 18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

For some people, this story of Jesus creating chaos in the Temple is one of the most endearing stories in the Bible. I mean it’s nice to hear about Jesus healing blind people, and relieving other people of all kinds of suffering, but I’m thinking this story of Jesus going in to this highly regulated religious marketplace and tearing things up is the stuff of dreams. This may be one of the most referenced stories in all of the Gospels. People like to point out that there was a day when Jesus had had all he could take, he got mad, and tore some things up. I dare say there’s been a lot of people who have sought to find justification in this passage for bad behavior, and that’s not such a good thing, but I think you can find some legitimate justification for disruption in this passage. It’s not unreasonable to have some outrage about the way important institutions operate.

I don’t think this story justifies road-rage or any other self-justifying fits of outrage, but it’s nice to see Jesus offer some physical resistance to a bad situation. Certainly this disruptive outburst was not well received by the people who were selling the unblemished animals or those who had the money changing franchise at the Temple, but the thought of Jesus tearing in to a corrupt system has had a lot of appeal to a lot of people over the centuries.

Of course your opinion on the value of something getting torn up depends on the nature of your interests.

My mother grew up on a farm just out from a little town in southwest Arkansas called Garland City. Garland is on the road from Texarkana to Lewisville and it sits right on the west bank of the Red River. That was an area of the world that my grandmother’s people had inhabited for a few generations – I’m honestly not sure how long they had lived there, but they had been there for a while before my mother came along. My great grandmother’s brother, who was known as Uncle Son, was a partner in the ferry operation that crossed the river there at Garland City, and that was a nice business to be in – until the highway department decided to put in a bridge. They built the bridge, but just before that bridge was completed it mysteriously blew up.

This wasn’t good news for anyone other than Uncle Son and his partner, and consequently they were the primary suspects in the situation. There was a trial, and Uncle Son wasn’t convicted of anything, but it was hard for people who knew about the situation to believe that he was unaware of what had transpired. As far as my grandmother was concerned there was no connection between Uncle Son and that explosion, and I wouldn’t be telling this story if I thought my grandmother would hear me make such an implication. My Uncle Jack made that mistake at a family gathering one Thanksgiving, and she was terribly upset that Jack would make such an insinuation. That wasn’t a subject that ever came back up when she was around. Regardless of how little or how much involvement he had in that bridge explosion, what that story illustrates to me is how differently people can view acts of great disruption.

It’s interesting that John places this story early on in his account of Jesus. The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all place this story at the end of his ministry, and in the way they tell the story that was the event that convinced the religious authorities that Jesus must be eliminated. But John does something different with this story. John places it near the beginning of his portrayal of Jesus. John chooses to reveal the extent of the conflict that existed between Jesus and the Jewish authorities from the very beginning, but the early placement of this story does something else as well. John is inviting us to see Jesus as the new Temple – his followers are to see him as the new place to go and to find God.

In the study group I attend each week we are currently reading a book by Bishop John Shelby Spong called, The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about reading this book because I tend to think of that author as someone who just likes to point out what’s wrong with traditional Christianity, and I don’t tend to have as much appreciation for the bulk of the Book of John as I have for the other Gospels, but I have found this book to be a very interesting interpretation of the Book of John. Bishop Spong has sort of redeemed the Book of John for me. In fact he owns up to not liking the fourth Gospels as much as he liked the other gospels until he came to see it in a new light.

It’s no secret that the Book of John was the last of the gospels to be written and that it was probably produced about 70 years after Jesus had been crucified. The Jewish Temple had been destroyed for about 30 years at the time the book was put together, but the Jewish community was still strong. It was held intact through meetings at local synagogues – which were sort of like local churches. But there had been a great rift develop between the traditional Jewish community and the Jews who believed that Jesus was the messiah, and the Jesus following Jews weren’t welcome in the synagogues.

Spong believes that the Book of John is the product of someone or a couple of someones who came out of that rejected Jewish community of believers in Jesus. These people had a very interesting perspective on Jesus. They were living in really harsh circumstances. They weren’t welcome in the traditional Jewish community. They weren’t valued by the Roman authorities, but they found Jesus to be the source of true access to God, and because of that they were willing to deal with the troubles they faced.

That perspective has given me a new appreciation for the Book of John. In all honesty, the book can get pretty tiresome in the way it repeatedly puts so much emphasis on the figure of Jesus. As opposed to the other gospels that are filled with parables and other teaching moments, in the Book of John there are a lot of passages where Jesus seems to be talking about himself. In some ways it seems that Jesus was sort of full of himself – that what Jesus wanted more than anything else was for people to pay attention to him.

And there is a lot of truth to that, but it wasn’t because he wanted to be the object of adoration. What he wanted was for people to find their way to God through him – regardless of what was going on in this world and in their lives. Spong believes the Book of John is the testament of people who found their way to God through Jesus and that’s why it’s so important to focus on him. It was their focus on Jesus that got them rejected from the synagogue and in many cases from their families, but it gained them access to God, and that was why they sought to stay so focused upon him.

John uses this story of Jesus disrupting the Temple to illustrate the way in which Jesus had become the new Temple. These words about how he would rebuild the Temple in three days is an affirmation that people would continue to find access to God through his resurrected presence.

This book that I rather reluctantly embarked upon reading has redefined the way that I see the Fourth Gospel. What previously struck me as a book that was trying to convince me of how much more divine Jesus was than any other previous prophet is not what it’s about at all. I’ve come to believe that the writer of John is not trying to turn Jesus in to a person who was equal with God, but as the person who best enables us to see God. This may not sound like a profound difference, but it is to me. The Book of John calls for us to pay attention to Jesus, but the goal is not to see him – the goal is to see God.

I think we often get focused on the wrong things. Clearly this business that was going on in the Temple only served to distract people from seeing the nature of God, and Jesus had no patience with such foolishness. Our challenge is to learn to see what it is that we are overly focused upon, and not to spend our time and energy protecting practices and policies that keep us from seeing who Jesus is and what God is like. What are the Temples we have created that need to be disrupted?

Bishop Melvin Talbert is a retired United Methodist Bishop. He is an African American man who was born in the deep south, but spent much of his time in ministry and in the Episcopacy on the west coast. He was an active participant in the African American civil rights struggle, and he takes great pride in having spent three days in jail with Dr. Martin Luther King. Most recently he made national news by officiating at a same-sex marriage between two United Methodist men near Birmingham, AL. Charges were brought against him, but it was resolved through the process of just resolution.

Bishop Talbert worked to eliminate racial civil rights abuses and now he he’s working to establish and to protect the civil rights of non-heterosexual people – within the United Methodist Church and in our nation.

There are a lot of people who don’t think he’s behaving like a Bishop aught to behave. And that may be true. Maybe Bishops aren’t supposed to create controversy, but it looks like people who follow Jesus are supposed to tear up religious practices that get in the way of our view to God.

Bishop Talbert was scheduled to preach here in April, along with the Director of the Reconciling Ministry Network, Matt Berryman, but a scheduling conflict arose and he had to cancel. I hope we can reschedule him to be here and to remind us what it looks like to love Jesus more than you love your own position – or even your life.

Life is hard. Sometimes bridges come along that destroy our established ferry operations. Sometimes we retaliate inappropriately.

Sometimes we see where a bridge needs to be built, but we see how large the challenge will be, and we fear the cost to ourselves and to our positions.

Jesus understood the fears, the costs, and the benefits of what it meant to live with actual faith in God, and he is our true guide for finding our way to God. Regardless of what’s going on in our lives we will be well served by the work of staying focused on him. He doesn’t need our attention, but we need his light to guide our thoughts and our actions.

Thanks be to God,
Amen.

What Was Jesus Thinking?
Mark 8:31-38

8:31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” 34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”

Sharla and I had a nice adventure last Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. We literally slipped up to the lodge at Mt. Magazine State Park as the snow began to cover the road. It was some good drama. We weren’t sure if we were going to make it. The snow was falling harder and harder and it was getting darker and darker and colder and colder as we ascended the mountain. Sharla had gotten in the back seat to eat something at some point on the drive, and she had decided that was a good place to remain. But she was being a good back-seat driver – she would just calmly remind me every now and then that it would be better to slide off on the ditch side of the road than the drop-off side.

We were so relieved to pull up under the majestic covered driveway of that lodge.

It was great to be up there for last week’s first snow episode. We had been hoping to get up there under those conditions and we timed it just right. Sharla did have a bit of a scare when we first got there. She went to the room while I went to park the car – which took me a little longer than she thought it should have, and she couldn’t get the door key-card to work. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that Stephen King movie called The Shining, but if you have you know what kind of creepy feeling she had for a moment as she stood in the deserted hallway of that snowbound lodge. If you haven’t seen the movie don’t worry about it – it has nothing to do with Jesus.

And it’s the drama that surrounded Jesus that we’re here to talk about this morning. There’s a lot of drama going on in this morning’s scripture, but it’s not good drama. Today’s scripture is the story of the bad reaction Jesus got from Peter after he told the disciples what was about to transpire in Jerusalem. Peter didn’t like what he heard Jesus saying, and Peter told him that it was a bad idea. Jesus then jumped on Peter for saying what he said. Jesus had set a clear course, and Peter engaged in what we might call some unwelcome back-seat driving.

But I get where Peter was coming from. It’s always easy for me to get in to the mind of Peter. It’s not so easy for me to get in to the mind of Jesus, but I get Peter. Peter had his own plans – he thought he could see where this thing with Jesus was going and he liked it. They were headed to the top! Things were falling in to place. People were talking about Jesus. People were looking for Jesus. People were getting excited about Jesus. Things were about to start happening in Israel. It had become clear to Peter that Jesus was the real deal. He considered him to be the savior of the nation – Peter had just made that pronouncement. He had just finished professing his belief that Jesus was the messiah. And that was no small deal – such a belief had profound implications! Unfortunately he didn’t understand what those implications really were.

Actually, Peter’s plans made a lot of sense – in a human sense. It makes sense to want to replace terroristic systems with more humane systems. And it’s not that Peter’s plans were poorly motivated. The way the nation of Israel was being run was horrible. The Roman installed governor had no concern for the wellbeing of the people of Israel. The system was designed to keep Roman rule in place at all costs, and it was a very costly system. The people were heavily taxed and the policies were violently enforced. The Jewish collaborators substituted allegiance to God for job security and material comforts, and you can’t blame Peter for wanting this ungodly arrangement to go down in defeat by the hand of this man of God.

What made sense to Peter was for Jesus to fix their broken nation. Peter expected Jesus to somehow assemble an army that God would somehow empower to overthrow those dirty collaborators and their godless government. I think it’s the same logic that I saw illustrated on the news the other night. They profiled a former US soldier who has gone back to Iraq as a civilian in order to fight along-side the local Christian militia to overthrow the soldiers of ISIS. I can’t fault this young man from Detroit for having a lack of bravery or commitment. It’s actually pretty amazing that he self-financed his way back to the most dangerous spot in the world to engage in armed resistance to a movement that he considers to be a threat to the people of God. What he and others like him have chosen to do is impressive, and it makes sense on some level – but it’s not the same kind of sense that Jesus was using.

I’m not exactly sure how Jesus would sort out the problems in Syria and Iraq. Jesus might well go and get himself killed, but he was not one to do the killing.

It’s not easy to get in the mind of Jesus, but he gave Peter and the other disciples a piece of his mind, and we need to hear what he had to say. Because what he had to say is informative of how we are to operate as well. Our challenge is not to operate with human sense, but with divine sense.

And this is particularly challenging because we’ve used our good human sense to make sense of why Jesus gave himself over to the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes and then to death on the cross. This was not a strategy that made sense to Peter, but we’ve found a way to make sense of it. We’ve latched on to this concept of Jesus needing to die for our sins. We’ve come to accept that it made sense for Jesus to die on the cross – that it was a good thing for him to do. And I’m not saying that it was a bad thing for him to do, but we’ve turned that act in to something that’s easier for us to accept.

We’ve turned it in to something he needed to do in order to fix the world. We’ve unfortunately turned this powerfully confounding act of self-giving in to a scripted act in a cosmic drama. And by doing this we’ve turned his incredibly challenging portrayal of love in to the necessary work of a messianic hero.

We’ve found a way to make sense of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. We’ve turned it in to something we can accept. We’ve chosen to believe that Jesus was just playing his role in the cosmic drama of good vs. evil, or God vs. humanity. God was unhappy with the way humans were behaving, and Jesus appeased God with the perfect sacrifice of himself – a concept that makes perfect human sense.

I’m not diminishing the extent of this gift that Jesus gave to the world, but I do want to challenge the notion that the death of Jesus on a cross was something God had designed and Jesus had to do. I refuse to believe that Jesus was simply an actor in a divine drama because I think that’s an exercise in making the story more bearable. I think that’s a way making human sense of the story and when we do that we avoid the challenge of thinking with divine sense. I’m convinced that it’s much easier for us to believe that Jesus simply knew what God had instructed him to do than it is for us to believe that the Son of Man had enough faith-inspired courage to trust that God’s kingdom would prevail and he would live on even if he was killed.

Was Jesus thinking? Or was he just doing what he was programmed to do? Was Jesus a human being who operated with divine sense, or was he simply operated by God? This is a deeply theological question. Great councils have been assembled over this question, books have been written to answer this question, churches have been split over this question, I guess wars have even been fought over this question. You may not find yourself thinking about this question very often, but regardless of how you might answer this question, how you live probably indicates what you believe. Do you find yourself trying to think as Jesus would think, or are you content to revere Jesus for doing what he did?

What jumps out at me in this passage is just how confounding Jesus was to the person who was most closely associated with him. Peter loved Jesus, he believed in Jesus, he wanted to follow Jesus, but he didn’t like what Jesus said he was going to do. What made sense to Peter is not what made sense to Jesus. Peter wanted Jesus to fix the brokenness of Israel, but Jesus wanted Peter and the rest of us to see how to find true life in the midst of this broken world. Jesus thought with the mind of God, and I believe this is what he invites all of us to do. I don’t believe our job is just to revere Jesus for the great work he did to reconcile humanity to God – I believe Jesus invites us all to join him in the humanly illogical work of reconciliation. It’s humanly illogical because it often involves loving the very people who give you the most grief.

Jesus didn’t invite his followers to pick up a sword and go kill a Roman collaborator – he challenged them to pick up their own cross and to follow him. And we are them.

This is a challenging passage of scripture for those of us who spend most of our time using our good human sense. We have to use our human sense to keep ourselves fed, and clothed, and sheltered, but it gets in our way when we start looking for true life. Nobody ever said it’s easy to follow Jesus – if they did they weren’t very familiar with the story. I believe Christian discipleship is an enterprise that raises more questions than it answers, but even the questions it raises are nourishing to ponder. What was Jesus thinking? What is the living Christ thinking?

Thanks be to God for the life of this man who didn’t do what we wanted, but who knew what we needed, and who continues to live among us in order to challenge us, to nourish us, and to show us the way to find true life in the midst of this broken and beautiful world.

Amen.

Up and Down With Jesus
Mark 9:2-9

9:2 Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, 3 and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. 4 And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. 5 Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” 6 He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. 7 Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” 8 Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. 9 As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Six days ago, Bishop Mueller took Richard and Mark and Mike and Susan and Bud on a journey up to Mount Eagle, where they had conversation about all the United Methodist churches and pastors in Arkansas. I don’t know if any mysterious transfigurations occurred or voices from clouds were heard, but I can testify that it had an effect on me that was very similar to what happened to Peter and James and John. I have been struck by the need to listen to Jesus.

I’m not saying I’m doing a good job of staying focused on the words of Jesus, but this annual custom of the Bishop gathering to confer with all the District Superintendents about pastoral appointments often causes thoughts to arise and conversations to occur that are no more useful than the words Peter blurted out about building three booths to honor Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. I haven’t had such a vision nor have I heard a voice coming from a cloud telling me to listen to Jesus, but I did hear a story on the radio last week that caused me to get quiet and remember what Jesus taught.

I think I’ve mentioned before that this annual institutional process of matching pastors with churches doesn’t really bring out the best in everyone. Maybe it ramps up the prayer life of a few people, but I would want to examine the content of those prayers before I would declare that to be a purely positive consequence. I dare say our pastor appointment system is one of the oddest personnel deployment systems at work in our country. I think if you wanted to design a system that would create as much anxiety, frustration, insecurity, inequality, and jealousy as possible you might well find a blueprint in the way that United Methodist Ministers are appointed to churches in Arkansas. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have some advantages over other denominational systems, and it might even have some strengths, but in my opinion it’s a terribly unsettling creature.

With this being the opening week of the official appointment making season I’ve been feeling a little worked up about it all. I’m sure you are surprised to hear me say that my mind occasionally wanders away from the words of Jesus, but sometimes it happens. I found myself thinking about some what if situations. What if the Bishop decides to do this! What if he decides to do that! I can generate some righteous indignation pretty quickly when I start thinking about what may or may not happen. This appointment process can cause me to lose focus on Jesus every now and then.

Honestly, my mind wasn’t in a very good place as I was driving home last Tuesday afternoon. I was agonizing over some of those what ifs, but my mind was suddenly silenced by this story that I heard on the radio. It was on that NPR show called Here and Now, and it brought to my attention the actual economic hardship that the recent snowstorm in New England has placed on the working poor.

When I think of a huge snowstorm I’m inclined to sort of romanticize the situation. Salaried people like myself tend to equate transportation shut-down with unplanned vacation days, but that isn’t how it feels to the working poor. For those who only get paid for the hours they work – this snowstorm has been a nightmare. Its one form of a nightmare for those whose jobs are shut down by the snow, and it’s another type of nightmare for those who have jobs that require them to show up regardless of the weather. One of the terrible ironies of our economy is that many of the people who are on the lowest end of the pay scale have the most essential jobs.

White collar workers can often stay home or work from home during weather-related disasters, but food-service workers and personal care attendants have to show up if they want to keep their jobs and pay their rent. Buses can’t stay on their schedule, but workers have to show up on time. For many, the nightmare is enhanced by their need to find childcare for their children who are out of school while the parents spend extra time getting to and from work.

The woman being interviewed on this show told this story about how she passed a woman with a sleeping toddler waiting at a bus stop as she was driving home from work at one in the morning. The woman driving the car stopped and picked up the woman and her child and gave them a ride to the shelter where they lived. This woman worked in food-service at a prestigious university, and after getting off work she had picked up her daughter from the person who had been keeping her that day, and she had been riding and waiting on buses for hours.

It was a heartbreaking story, but I was glad to hear it. That voice from the snowstorm redirected my thinking. It silenced my peer rivalry and my speculative thinking for a moment and it reminded me of my good fortune. I and my family will be fine – regardless of what the Bishop decides to do. You and this church will be fine regardless of what may transpire – as long as we all can remember to listen to Jesus. I don’t meant to ramp up appointment season drama for you, but the truth is that change is always a possibility in the United Methodist Church. I assure you I don’t know if anything’s going to change in regard to the pastoral leadership of this church, but it could happen, and I think I hear Jesus saying it will be ok if it does.

I don’t always hear Jesus well – in fact I don’t always try to listen for what Jesus taught, but I’m reminded that as Christians, this is what we are all called to do. We need to be reminded to listen to Jesus because it’s easy to lose focus on his words and to allow other messages to fill our minds with anxiety, jealousy, fear, and distrust. Fortunately we are in good company when it comes to having a hard time keeping our minds focused on the words of Jesus. Simon Peter, himself, had a hard time listening to Jesus.

There on the mountain, Peter had started talking when he needed to be listening. And six days earlier Jesus had rebuked Peter for not listening to what he was saying – that was right after Peter had recognized and announced that Jesus was the messiah. Peter could get it – and then he could lose it. And get it again, and lose it again.

I’m so familiar with this holy roller-coaster. I go up and down on it all the time. I do it every week – several times a week. As a preacher, I find myself needing to think about the things Jesus said and did and what he wanted us to see and to do, and I try hard to figure out how to get you to see what I’m thinking Jesus would want us to understand. I get real focused on Jesus almost every week – for a little while. I don’t know if I’m able to communicate what I hear Jesus saying, but on some level I try to listen to something Jesus said every week, and sometimes I get it. I get it – and then I lose it.

I can turn around quicker than Peter. I can go from loving Jesus and wanting to follow him to strategizing about how I can get what I think I need to make my life a bit more comfortable or interesting without breaking my stride. It’s an amazing quality that I share with Peter. Maybe you do too.

It’s easy for me to get confused about what’s most important, and I’m so grateful to the people who remind me of what’s really important. It’s so easy to get focused on what we think we need and what we want to happen, and what Jesus talked about more than anything else is the need for us to live with compassion for others and the importance of reaching out to those who are in actual need right now.

It’s interesting to me that the name of the radio show that got my attention is: Here and Now. Jesus never used those particular words, but I think those words resonate well with his words. Jesus didn’t want us to focus on what might happen in the future. I think Jesus wanted us to be alive right now and to be sensitive to what’s happening right now.

I’m not sure how the words of Jesus fit in with our appointment making system. I don’t doubt that the Bishop and the cabinet are doing their best to place people wisely and appropriately, but the truth is that there’s so much money involved in this preacher appointment business it’s probably pretty hard for them to keep the words of Jesus front and center. Money screams loudly. Jesus speaks quietly. I know it’s hard for me to remain unconscious of the figures, but Jesus doesn’t want us to look for the most financially lucrative and prestigious positions in order to find true life.

Listening to Jesus is hard work. In fact it’s probably impossible for us to stay focused on his words, and I’m so grateful for the ways in which my life gets interrupted by the words of Jesus. I’m sure I’m not finished getting worked up about what may or may not happen within our Arkansas United Methodist family, but hearing that story of the woman and her 3 year-old daughter who are struggling every day to stay warm and fed and housed provided me with some much-needed spiritual perspective.

Peter went up and down with Jesus a number of times, and I’m guessing we are all destined to do the same, but I also hope we can learn a little something along the way. God provided a voice from a cloud that got Peter’s attention, and God continues to provide us with stories and experiences that enable us to see what’s truly important.
Thanks be to God for providing us with the grace to occasionally get it! Amen.

Making The Right Call
Mark 1:29-39

1:29 As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. 30 Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. 31 He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. 32 That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. 33 And the whole city was gathered around the door. 34 And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. 35 In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. 36 And Simon and his companions hunted for him. 37 When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.”38 He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” 39 And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I’m not a big fan of the NFL. I rarely watch a professional football game during the regular season, but I usually tune in to the Super Bowl, and I always find some reason to be for or against one of the teams. I decided I would root for the Seahawks this year. I think I based my decision on the demeanor of the Seahawks’ coach – Pete Carroll. The coach for the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick, has a powerfully unhappy face, and it sort of puts me off. He’s clearly a good football coach, and he might even be a great person to have over for super on a Friday night, but that’s not the message that you get from the look on his face.

When you have no allegiance to either team it’s easy to find something more appealing about one team than the other, and that’s what I look for – a shallow reason to prefer one team over the other one. I preferred the look on Pete Carroll’s face and I found the uniforms of the Patriots to be pretty bland, so I was all for the Seahawks. Primarily I primarily wanted an interesting game, and it was that! It was an exciting game up to the last moment, and then my coach blew it! The Seahawks were four points behind, but they had the ball on the one yard line with 3 plays to go and 30 seconds on the clock – and they attempted a pass to a guy who was in the middle of this mass of humanity and it was intercepted.

Lou Holtz once pointed out that there are 3 things that can happen when you throw a pass and two of them are bad. I only had been a Seahawks fan for about 3 hours at that point, but I was infuriated by that call. I really can’t imagine how actual fans were left feeling at that moment. I’ve heard a couple of people defend the wisdom of that call, but I don’t buy it. I think it’s likely that that call will go down in history as the worst play ever called.

The winner of the Super Bowl has no impact on anything of any real significance, but I found that situation to bring a lot of attention to this exercise of decision-making. I went to bed last Sunday night troubled by the way that football ended. I think my feelings were split between being annoyed that Coach Carroll had led my freshly chosen team to defeat, but I think I also was tormented by the thought of how badly he must have felt when that game ended so badly. It’s easy for me to imagine myself making the wrong call – I wasn’t just annoyed – I was feeling his pain. I know what it feels like to be in that club. I don’t always make the wrong call, but I know what it feels like to do that.

Part of what it means to be an adult human being is having to make a lot of decisions – and that’s not necessarily the fun part. When you are a kid you think you want to have more freedom to make your own decisions, but it’s when you become authorized to make your own decisions and decisions for other people that life gets complicated.

The events of this first chapter in Mark make me think that Jesus knew what it felt like to have to make difficult decisions. The fact that he moved so quickly from one situation to the next gives the impression that Jesus knew exactly what he needed to do next, and I don’t doubt that he had a good amount of clarity in regard to where he needed to be and what he needed to be doing, but I don’t think he made those quick decisions without engaging in some good old-fashioned soul searching. He was decisive, but I don’t believe he was on autopilot.

To watch what Jesus does in this first chapter of Mark is to watch a man on a clear-minded mission. What we see in Jesus are the actions of a man who appears to know what he needed to do. He seamlessly went from one spot to the next and he responded to the various circumstances he encountered without delay or misstep. He was on his game. Of course this first chapter is the beginning of the first quarter, so to speak, but we don’t get the sense that he had any sense of ambivalence about where he needed to go and what he needed to be doing.

And of course this is no big deal if you are inclined to think of Jesus as the pre-programmed Son of God who never had to wonder where he needed to be or what he needed to be doing. If Jesus was of a different biological and spiritual substance than you and I he had no choice but to do what God would do. He would always do the right thing if he had the wisdom of God perfectly downloaded into his brain. If that were the case it would be amazing if he ever did anything that wasn’t perfectly prescribed by God. And of course we don’t know of anything he ever did that wasn’t becoming of a perfect God-man, but Mark includes a piece of information that indicates to me that he wasn’t removed from this process of trying to understand where he needed to go and what he needed to do. If Jesus was perfectly programmed to do what God would do, I don’t know why he got up and went off to pray so early in the morning.

I find this little detail to be very endearing of Jesus. He wasn’t perfectly programmed. Like the rest of us – Jesus had to make some difficult decisions. There were a lot of people parked around the home of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law who were in need of him, but he chose not to stick around. I sort of hate to think about what those people had to say about him when they got word that he wasn’t coming back. You can bet there were some Monday-morning quarterbacks claiming he had made the worst decision ever, but I’m thinking there were some others who came to discover that God wasn’t just available through the physical presence of Jesus. I’m guessing there were others who came to understand that the good news Jesus offered wasn’t limited by his physical presence.

I trust that there were others who continued to find healing and relief at the home of Simon Peter’s mother in law. She didn’t get up and ask what she could do. When Jesus lifted her up she knew what to do – she began to serve others – and that’s what Jesus wanted everyone who heard the good news to do. It would have been tempting to do what the crowd expected him to do – which is to continue to serve the multitude of people who had arrived at the house and who expected him to provide them with what they thought they needed, but Jesus had to get in touch with that deeper voice that reminded him that he didn’t just need to meet the expectations of those desperate individuals – Jesus had a message he needed to get out to the multitudes.

I’ve been listening to The History of the Civil War, by Shelby Foote. His book is divided in to three volumes, and I’m only about half-way through the second volume, but it’s been very educational for me. I didn’t know very much about that brutal chapter in our history, and I now know more than I want to know in some ways, but one thing that’s particularly interesting to me is the way that the military leaders of both sides made the decisions that they made. It’s quite a study in the decision-making process. The various commanders were motivated by a variety of factors – not the least of which was public adoration and peer rivalry. You would think in situations where life and death were at stake there would be more attention to actual competency, but that doesn’t seems to be the case.

And of course religious conviction was part of the mix. For Stonewall Jackson, the Civil War was on the level of a religious crusade. But many of the military commanders were very rank conscious and they weren’t just motivated to stay alive – they wanted to be recognized as successful leaders. And this was the case with the leaders of both sides.

Of course I’m hearing the story of the war filtered through the perspective of one man, but he didn’t make up the attitudes of the military leaders – Shelby Foote read endless diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, and other official documents that revealed the thinking of the various decision makers of the war, and in addition to doing what they thought would properly prosecute the for the best results of their cause – many of the commanders of the day had an eye for what would enable them to make the best showing for themselves.

And I totally understand that. It doesn’t bother me that people often engage in self-aggrandizing activities. I’m happy for people to get credit for work well done. As Muhammad Ali once said, It’s not bragging if you can back it up. But it’s not so pretty when people are guided by the thought of how they will be perceived by their peers, superiors, and the public at large.

It’s hard not to want to make decisions that are highly regarded by other people. Sometimes it’s just one person you are wanting to impress. Sometimes there are a bunch of people hanging around the house that have a strong agenda for you. You might even find yourself in that rare position where millions of people are glued to their televisions waiting to see what you will choose to do. Many times what you decide will have very little impact in the grand scheme of things, but from what I can tell, the most essential thing any of us can do is to attempt to be in touch with God before we do anything – which is how Jesus chose to operate.

The voice of God isn’t easy to hear. In fact if you are like me, you rarely have that absolutely clear sense of what God would have you do or say, but I know it’s essential to seek the wisdom of God in all that we do. If nothing else, the exercise of seeking to be in silent contact with God at least removes you from the cacophony of voices of those who think they know what you need to do and who don’t restrain themselves from letting you know what they think.
The house of Simon Peter’s mother in law was surrounded by people who were desperate for contact with Jesus. The disciples themselves were pressuring him to get back to the house and take care of them, but Jesus was focused on the one voice that he knew he needed to hear, and that was what enabled him to do the work that we continue to celebrate today.

It’s easy to get caught up in the pressure of the moment to take care of whatever seems to be bearing down. When that’s the case, remember what Jesus did. Step away from the voices that are the loudest, and seek to hear the word of God.

Thanks be to God for that mysteriously peaceful word that can come to us when we are in the most need of hearing it.
Amen.