Thompson's Blog

Cleaning the House of Worship
Mark 1:21-28

1:21 They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. 22 They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. 23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, 24 and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” 25 But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” 26 And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. 27 They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching–with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” 28 At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.

This morning’s scripture lesson is a textbook case of institutional pathology confronted by an exceptionally self-differentiated leader. I’m able to say this because I’m fresh out of my second continuing education class on the Murray Bowen Family Systems School of Therapy. This class falls in to the broad category of leadership development, and our instructor, Rev. Doug Hester, tries to help us understand the ways in which institutions can not only harbor but sometimes encourage unhealthy patterns of behavior for generations, and how we pastors have been trained by our own family systems to deal with problems in relatively automatic ways that aren’t necessarily helpful.

What we family systems theorists would hypothesize is that this synagogue had not only learned to adapt to the unfortunate condition of the man with an unclean spirit, but they had probably made special accommodations for him. I’m guessing everyone knew where this man with issues liked to sit and they made sure his place was available to him. They might even have given him a leadership position of some kind to feed his need to have some official control over that important institution. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but everybody knew his parents and grandparents, and nobody wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings. There were probably some furnishings in the synagogue with this family’s name inscribed upon them.

It wouldn’t have been easy to keep this man happy, but I’m guessing everyone did their best to keep him from having one of his episodes. In fact that might well have become their main objective. I don’t know what was going on in that synagogue, but they seem to have been very accommodating to this man whose life was held captive by an unclean spirit. For whatever reason, that unclean spirit had been comfortable within that synagogue until Jesus showed up to teach, and what he said was very threatening to this man’s circumstances.

I may be all wrong about this. It could be that this demon possessed man had never set foot in that synagogue before. The text doesn’t address where this man came from, but when the man speaks he seems to be speaking for the group. He asks the question, What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? As I say, we don’t know what this man’s role in that religious community was, but I can’t help but think he played a large role. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive to the potential of religious organizations as being particularly sensitive to pathological behavior.

I should tell you that the title of the recent class I attended was “Insensitivity Training: Changing the Focus of Pastoral Care”. And the first question our instructor posed was this: How often do we get tyrannized by the sensibilities of others?

I’m probably operating with an analysis in search of a problem, but I believe there is some truth to what I’m thinking. Religious institutions are notorious for giving safe harbor to bad behavior. And church leaders are well equipped to not deal with bad situations. I think we religious people often confuse compassion for people with enabling people to maintain bad behavior. We exercise empathy when we should expect responsibility, and that kind of behavior extends and compounds problems instead of creating opportunities for healing and resolution. I’m telling you, I took good notes during my class.

Whether the man with an unclean spirit was someone the community overly accommodated or not, this is an issue that can crop up in our lives, and in this situation Jesus does provide a different model of dealing with the issue than we kind-hearted Christians often utilize. He didn’t act as if nothing had happened, he didn’t save his reaction for private conversation when the man wasn’t around, he didn’t back down and apologize to the man for offending his sensibilities – he addressed the actual problem within the man – which resulted in the man being healed and the whole community experiencing a revival of sorts.

Clearly Jesus was an early student of the Murray Bowen Family Systems School of Therapy.

I think this is a really helpful story for us to examine. It’s easy for us to get caught up and distracted by the language of being possessed by an unclean spirit or a demon – we modern people don’t normally use that kind of language to describe people who’s lives are all torn up, but I don’t think this man in that synagogue is an unfamiliar character to us.

Thinking back, one of my finest moments of ministry occurred when I was the pastor of the West Helena United Methodist Church. It was a good church, and I enjoyed many good relationships within that church. But there was a man in that church who was not possessed by a demon, that’s far from how I would describe him, but he did have what you might call a difficult personality. He could see the problem with anything you might be trying to undertake and he would let you know about it. You might say that was his gift, and he exercised it freely. He wasn’t necessarily wrong about how he saw things, but he wasn’t very tactful in how he expressed his opinions. He was a good-hearted person, and he worked harder than most people to keep the church going, but as I say, he could be difficult.

I had initiated a Fat Tuesday pancake supper one year, and I had sort of gotten it organized, but we hadn’t sold that many tickets in advance and the weather was threatening, and as we were getting ready Pete was identifying everything that wasn’t quite right and what should have happened and how unlikely it was that anybody was going to show up and the moment arrived when I had heard all that I could stand. I became possessed by some kind of spirit and there in the kitchen in the midst of all the other United Methodist men I said: Pete, I know we’ve got some problems but it’s not helping for you to keep talking about them. If you don’t want to be here you can leave, but this supper is going to happen, and if you are going to stay I need for you to stop complaining.

It got real quiet for a moment, and then he responded by saying, OK, and he proceeded to keep working and to stop complaining.

You would think I would have learned something from that moment about the importance of direct communication, and maybe it helped me a little bit, but it’s not easy for us good southern Christian people to be that direct. I can get there, but that’s not how I was trained to behave in my family of origin.

In all honesty, this is an unusual church in regard to the lack of petty controversy. I’m not sorry about that, and I think it does speak to an aspect of this church that’s unusually healthy.

I was talking to a man one day from my hometown who is a very faithful member of 1st United Methodist Church in Wynne. He was telling me one day that his daughter lives in Little Rock, and that her apartment isn’t far from our church. He expressed some distress at the fact that she wasn’t going to church anywhere. At one point he told me that she just doesn’t like to go to church. And I responded by saying that she should come to QQUMC because there are a lot of people who come to this church because they don’t like to go to church.

He said he really didn’t know what to make of that. I wasn’t sure exactly what I meant by that either, but I think I was trying to speak to the fact that many of you have come from churches that were too caught up in the wrong things.

And I think that has made for a healthier and more harmonious community. In spite of the age of our facility, as most of you know, this is a relatively young church. The first church that occupied this sanctuary had a significant internal struggle in the late 1980’s which resulted in the relocation of that church, and that conflict is what opened the door for this church to get started. It’s an interesting study in organizational dynamics. It is a sad story in a number of ways, but one unintended consequence of that unfortunate battle is that something new and different was able to take hold here, and that wouldn’t have happened if that conflict hadn’t occurred.

That struggle gave birth to a new church, and our newness is an asset in many ways, but the downside of being a relatively young church is that people aren’t so deeply invested here. Consequently, people are more likely to leave if something doesn’t feel quite right than they are to engage in advocacy for change.

We have a good amount of harmony here, and that is great, but we shouldn’t be afraid to engage in a little conflict every now and then. I can’t really believe I’m hearing myself say that, and I’m really not inviting you to open that proverbial can of conflict on me, but this is a valuable organization, and it will always need honest and direct input.

We don’t just need to get along – we need for this to be a place where truth of Jesus Christ prevails and healing happens. This is a uniquely good church. I think yesterday’s memorial service for Randy was a great testimony to the goodness of this church. That service highlighted how right it is for the church to be truly open to people of all ages, nations, races, and sexual orientations. I was so proud yesterday to be the Sr. Pastor of the church that Randy Jones chose to attend.

This is such a good church. And we need you all to continue making it a better church. If there’s something that doesn’t suit you don’t quit coming – say something. Don’t be mean, and don’t expect everybody to do what you say, but stay engaged. Dig in, pray to God for guidance, love your fellow parishioners and your pastors, and work to build the kind of church where all people are welcome and demons are threatened!

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Captivated
Mark 1:14-20

1:14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” 16 As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea–for they were fishermen. 17 And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” 18 And immediately they left their nets and followed him. 19 As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. 20 Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

I feel very fortunate to not have been burdened by an over-abundance of charisma. There are times when I wish I had a bit more ability to overwhelm people with the power of my presence, but for the most part I’m grateful I haven’t had to figure out how to harness that monster. I’ve known a few people that were touched with whatever it is that gives some people that extra dose of sparkle, and it hasn’t worked out very well for most of them. Some of them are still alive, but they aren’t necessarily in good places.

Charisma is one of those things that you don’t really know how to define, but you know it when it shows up in the room. Charismatic people are the kind of people that seem to know exactly what they are doing and they usually know what other people need to be doing as well. The gift of charisma usually presents itself before a person has the wisdom to use it, and that’s why it often plays out badly. It would be nice if you could develop charisma after you turn 55. That would be a nice thing to look forward to, and it might even make for a more civilized world.

If charisma was something you could develop after you have grandchildren there would probably be a lot more amazing playgrounds than there are super-stretched limousines and wacky cults. Immaturity and charisma is a dangerous combination. I’m not sure what God was thinking by enabling such a combination.

But charisma isn’t all bad, and it doesn’t always lead to disaster. There are young people who are able to channel their charisma in healthy ways. I think there are people who figure out how to work with it. I’m thinking about this personal attribute we call charisma because Jesus had to have had a good dose of it. Jesus has very little to say to these people who are out fishing but they immediately drop what they are doing and follow him.

The extent of the charisma of Jesus isn’t fully illustrated by his interaction with Simon and Andrew because I’m thinking they were the kind of fishermen who were out trying to catch something to eat for lunch. These two didn’t have what we might call a fishing enterprise. They weren’t fishing from boats – they were standing in shallow water casting their nets near the shore. Following Jesus may have seemed like an economic opportunity for them. And I don’t know this, but I’m guessing they weren’t exactly hauling them in. Catching fish can be a feverish experience in itself. It would take an overabundance of charisma to get the attention of men who are in the process of catching fish, but that was not the case with those two. Jesus invited them to join him in the enterprise of catching people and they immediately followed him.

It’s funny to think about this business of being fishers of people. We Christians have fully embraced this language of ensnaring other people in our cause. And we do that because we trust what Jesus was doing. We know that Jesus wasn’t full of himself. We believe we are inviting people to experience an ultimate form of freedom by following Christ, but this first encounter has a lot in common with the way an unhealthy cult gets started. A person with a powerful presence who solicits allegiance from people who are searching for food doesn’t always go well.

But James and John weren’t hungry. You might say they were in the fishing business with their father. They had employees. James and John had careers lined up, but there was something about the way Jesus invited them to join him that spoke to them in a deep way. They left it all and followed Jesus.

It’s probably some kind of heretical distortion to imply that Jesus was able to convince these men to follow him because he had a charismatic personality. There isn’t any reference in any gospel that I know of that addresses the personality of Jesus, and I’m not saying that it was simple charisma that persuaded these four to drop what they were doing and follow him. Jesus didn’t bank on his winning smile, his heavenly voice, or his penetrating eyes – the things that charismatic people generally depend upon in order to gain control of other people. Jesus had the presence of a rock star, but he wasn’t just an inflated personality behind some talent. There was something powerfully transforming about his presence.

And I’m wanting to know what that was. I want that because I often feel like I’m still in the boat with the hired hands. It’s easy for me to feel caught up in those tasks that are much more like fishing for fish than the work of a person who has become a fisher of people. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the tedium or the tragedy of life.

Of course this last week has been a particularly hard one for everyone who knew Randy Jones. It’s been a challenge to feel the nearness of God’s kingdom because we’ve lost a truly beautiful person. If you knew Randy you know what I’m saying. He had the best smile. He had the nicest demeanor, he had the kindest touch, he had the softest heart, he had the best wit, and he had a terrible car accident last week. It’s a devastating turn of events. It’s a terrible blow for our church, and it’s an unimaginable loss for his husband, Drexel.

This hasn’t been an easy week to be in touch with this good news that Jesus announced. It’s been a lot easier to feel the pain of bad news. But there’s something in this morning’s passage that we need to keep in mind. Jesus announced that he had good news while he was standing in the shadow of John the Baptist’s arrest. We need to remember that the good news that Jesus offered doesn’t depend on everything going as we want it to go in our daily lives.

Jesus wanted us to know that the good news he came to bring is available to everyone at all times. This is powerfully good news, but we’ve got to make some adjustments if we want to see it. Jesus said we must repent. Actually that’s not what he said. Repent is the word the English translators generally use to describe what he said, but that word has taken on some connotations that Jesus may not have intended. We really don’t know what Aramaic word Jesus actually used, but the Greek word that Mark used in his gospel was metanoia, and that word refers to the need for us to have a change of mind.

We’ve turned this call for repentance in to the need for us to have regret and contrition, but I believe Jesus was more interested in us seeing the world differently than for us to identify our personal inadequacies. A transformed view of the world may well lead to a new way of living, but the good news of Jesus Christ is rooted in seeing who God really is – not in seeing who we aren’t.

I think this means is that we need to understand that the picture is much larger than we generally see it. There’s something more important than these endless tasks that are before us. There’s something more critical than maintaining our enterprises and honing our skills at those things that bring us food. There’s something more lasting than our lives and our relationships.

This isn’t an easy thing for me to get my mind around, but I know I want it, and I believe this is what Jesus had to offer. It was so real to Simon and Andrew and James and John that they dropped what they were doing and followed him. And I don’t believe they did what they did because they were more spiritually oriented or more devoted to Christ than the rest of us. I believe they just got a clear view of what Jesus was about and they knew that’s what they wanted.

They had the good fortune to see Jesus for who he was and what he offered. They didn’t hesitate to take up his offer to follow him, but I think it’s worth noting that they didn’t have such a clear view of the good news every day. The gospels are filled with stories of the way those same disciples failed to see what Jesus was doing.

The nearness of the kingdom of God is an illusive quest, but I don’t think there’s anything better to seek or comforting to find. It isn’t easy, but I trust that the living Christ continues to come our way and to offer us the same good news he had for those first disciples. The need for us to change still stands, but if you are like me you are hungry for some change. I want to see things differently because what’s easy to see is painful to view.

Bad news can come quickly and it can be an overwhelming presence in the room, but the good news that Jesus offered endures forever. It’s not as obvious as I wish it would always be, but it’s a captivating offer that can’t be ignored. This process of being called and being sent goes on and the kingdom of God remains near. This was the good news that Jesus offered those first disciples, and this is the good news that is here for us.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Nathanael’s Journey
John 1:43-51

1:43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” 44 Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 45 Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” 46 Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” 47 When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” 48 Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” 49 Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” 50 Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” 51 And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

If you saw any kind of news this last week you probably saw the cover the latest edition of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. They printed and immediately sold out 3 million copies, which was 50 times their usual circulation of 60,000 issues, and then they printed an additional 2 million copies to meet the demand for the magazine. I was curious as to what kind of cartoon they would portray on the cover, and I think what they came up with was some inspired journalism. The cartoon was a drawing of the Prophet Mohammad with a tear coming from his eye, and he was holding a sign with the now-familiar phrase, I am Charlie. It also had the heading, All is forgiven.

Now I know that it’s an official act of blasphemy to portray the Prophet Muhammad in any way, so I know there’s something there to annoy the Islamic hard-liners, but for the most part I think that cartoon contains a powerfully positive message. It’s an image that shows how much more important it is to be compassionate than it is to be righteous. If there is anything the world needs right now it is for everyone in every faith tradition to reclaim the prominence of compassion. I love the message of that cartoon.

Unfortunately, I think terrorists are people who have no sense of humor or compassion, so I’m sure this cartoon will do little to reduce the threat of violence that religious extremists pose to the world, but what the world desperately needs is for people who kill in the name of God to take another look at what God actually desires for the world.

That process of taking a new look at who God is and what God is like is actually what we see going on in this morning’s passage of scripture. Our standard understanding of Jesus isn’t as obviously redefined in this passage as was the usual portrayal of Muhammad recast on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, but if you take a close look at what goes on in this passage you might see someone taking a new look at an old tradition and being totally reoriented by what they saw.

This is the first time Nathanael ever appears in any of the stories about Jesus, so we don’t know who Nathanael was, but the nature of the dialogue between Philip and Nathanael indicates that he was what we might call, a good Christian boy. Nevermind that he was Jewish. You could think of him as a good Jewish boy if you grew up in a Jewish neighborhood, but most of us grew up around Christians, so we generally think of our good Jewish neighbors as good Christian people.

And that’s the kind of person Nathanael was – he was good people. His name gives it away, Nathanael means, gift of God. He had a godly name and he tried to live up to it. Philip knew this about Nathanael and that’s why he went looking for him after he met Jesus and came to believe he was the one that all the good religious people were looking for. Nathanael was probably the most religious person Philip knew, so he went and told him what he thought about Jesus. Phillip told him that Jesus was the one who Moses and the prophets had talked about and that he was the son of Joseph from Nazareth.

Now Nathanael had studied his Bible. We know this because hanging out under the fig tree was another way of referring to the work the rabbis did of studying the Torah. I don’t know if rabbis were actually known for studying the Torah under fig trees, but if you were known as a person who hung out under the fig tree you were known as someone who knew their way around the Torah.

So what we know is that Nathanael was a gift of God who studied his Torah. Philip figured Nathanael would be excited to hear that he had found the long-expected messiah, but when he told Nathanael he needed to come meet him, Nathanael wasn’t so quick to buy in to the situation because Nathanael was a scholar. He knew his Bible and he what kind of people lived in the region of Nazareth. Those people weren’t known as good people.

But Philip was Nathanael’s friend, so he followed him anyway. Nathanael was willing to meet this Jesus, but he didn’t expect him to be the messiah. Jesus didn’t fit the profile that his Biblical scholarship had provided him.

I really do understand this character, Nathanael. Because I was once a good Christian boy. I was a person who had a very clear understanding of who God is and what it meant to live right and to be acceptable to God. I was not always the largely confused and conflicted person you now know me to be. I used to understand what God expected. That was before I got involved with the Wesley Foundation when I was a student in Fayetteville.

I wasn’t a perfectly well-behaved young man when I was in high school, but I did my best to meet the high standards I had come to believe our loving God expected of people who didn’t want to burn in hell for eternity. I was a faithful church-going person. I wasn’t exactly a Biblical scholar. In fact I didn’t really know much of what it said, but I considered it to be a powerful good luck charm, so I usually knew where my Bible was.

But it didn’t really bring me that much good luck as a freshman in college. In fact I became pretty miserable and depressed. I’ll spare you my thorough psychoanalytic profile, but I decided to solve my problem by transferring from Hendrix to Fayetteville for my sophomore year. I was going to study my way out of my misery, and I took a full load of pre-engineering classes. I don’t remember everything I took that semester, but I do remember that’s when I had my first encounter with Calculus, and it ramped up my misery level to a new high.

My beloved youth and children’s director back at the 1st UMC in Wynne, Emily Cockrill, had told me I should go by the Wesley Foundation in Fayetteville and meet her friend, the director, Lewis Chesser. I had done that, and I took an instant liking to him because he rode a bicycle to work, but I was a little put-off by some of the language he used to describe his experience with some of the hills around Fayetteville. He used a word or two that good Christian boys didn’t generally use.

I began going by the Wesley Foundation often and I met these people who were really interesting to me, but they didn’t really fit the profile of the kind of people you usually met in church. You might say they were the kind of people who came from Nazareth. I didn’t really know what to think about people who seemed to be interested in talking about who Jesus was but who weren’t particularly well-behaved people – at least not in the narrow way I defined it at the time.

But I was trying to keep up with my homework and I was miserable. I was living off campus in a house with two older graduate students – one of whom I knew from childhood. The other one was his friend, and I considered him to be the poster-child for someone destined for hell. I won’t go in to that, but our household was a toxic environment – biologically, chemically, and sociologically. I tried not to spend much time there. I often did my homework in the library of the Wesley Foundation, and one night I was trying to do some Calculus and it was literally driving me nuts. There was a thunderstorm raging outside, but I was so upset with my inability to understand what I was doing I decided I would rather walk home in that storm than to deal with those numbers any longer.

I packed up my backpack and put my gortex rain-jacket on and I had taken one good step out of the door when this bolt of lightening struck something across the street and the crash of thunder caused me to jump back against the wall of the building. One moment later I heard this Middle Eastern accented voice come from above that said: Thompson, this is your God! I was frozen for a second, until I heard that same voice start chuckling, and I realized it was this Greek guy named Costas who lived on the second floor of this old house that was on the Wesley Foundation property. He had been sitting by his window watching the storm and he played my precarious situation perfectly when he saw what happened. I didn’t think it was so funny, and I proceeded to walk home in that storm.

I remember having a pretty frank conversation with God on that walk home. I suggested that He (and yes I was pretty sure God was a man) just go ahead a take me out with a bolt of lightening. I think I considered it to be a form of grace that enabled me to get home alive, and I think I can point to that night as the beginning of the transformation that I’m continuing to undergo in regard to how I understand God to be.

I showed back up at the Wesley Foundation the next day, and of course Costas had already spread the story of my encounter with God, and that pretty much initiated me in to that non-traditional religious community. It was at the Wesley Foundation where I began to hear sermons based on what Jesus actually said and did, and my image of God became much less punitive and far more compassionate.

We don’t know what Jesus had seen Nathanael doing under the fig tree and what it meant to Nathanael to hear that Jesus knew what he had been doing, but it was an exchange that redefined what Nathanael expected from the messiah. He had to let go of what he thought and become open to a new relationship with God. And that was a good thing. The heavens had not been so previously open.

So I’m not saying I’m against religious fervor. It’s not a bad thing to be as disciplined and as resolved as you can be in seeking to serve God as you know God to be. And I’m all for diligent Bible-study, because such study can show you how many different ways God is defined. Religious training can be a good thing, but if you aren’t careful it can get in the way. I can testify that you can become too sure of who you think God is and what you think God expects.

Fortunately, God isn’t easily contained! And I’m grateful that we have these experiences that disrupt our familiar concepts and comfortable understandings. God wants to be in a relationship with us, but it isn’t a relationship that is defined by clear rules or traditional roles. It’s better described by the sight of the heavens being opened with angels ascending and descending – sometimes riding on thunder and lightening.

Our relationship with God is far more mysterious than can ever be prescribed and I believe this story of Jesus and Nathanael is a portrayal of the type of transformation that happens to all of us when we encounter the living Christ.

Nathanael’s journey is our own journey. And what a journey it is!

Thanks be to God.
Amen

Called to Life
Mark 1:4-11

1:4 John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 6 Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8 I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” 9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11 And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

There really isn’t a 12-step recovery program for the things that control my life. I don’t know of any Starbucks coffee recovery groups. There may be some, but I wouldn’t go because I’m not yet willing to gain control of that compulsion. And I generally follow the American Medical Association’s guideline for alcohol consumption, so that seems largely under control. I don’t consider myself addicted to any of my electronic devices. I might spend an abnormal amount of time listening to books on my iphone, but I don’t think it’s exactly detrimental to have logged 50 plus hours of books about American history over the past couple of months while raking leaves or engaging in other mindless tasks.

But I don’t have all of my compulsions under control. There’s this thing I do that’s sort of ugly, but I can’t stop myself. In fact I don’t want to stop – I am an unrepentant duck hunter. I’ve owned up to this before, and some people have found this to be disturbing.

In all honesty, it’s a little disturbing to me, because I love ducks. I think they are beautiful and amazing animals. I love to watch them and I love to hunt them. It’s a behavior I can’t really explain or reconcile within myself. I can give you a well-reasoned justification for the activity and how it puts me in touch with the fact that anytime we eat meat there is an animal that has been killed. I can justify the behavior, but I don’t do it because it makes sense. It’s just something I’m compelled to do – it’s primitive.

And it’s cultural. It’s something I got to do when I was a child and I’ve never gotten over it. I would hunt with my father, and my grandfather, and a few other men. I never learned to call ducks when I was a child because we had Hubert, and Hubert knew how to talk to them. He was a very authoritative duck caller.

But Hubert had to retire from duck hunting at some point, and I decided I wanted to learn to be a duck caller. Soon after I started trying to call ducks I was out with my father one morning and I asked him what he thought of my calling and he said, Well, it’s loud.

I thought that was a pretty good assessment of my calling, and in some ways that describes my attraction to duck hunting – it’s loud. Now I don’t think it’s the voice of God that calls me out into flooded places before daylight during the winter, but it’s something akin to the voice of God. I’m certain I could live a whole, happy life if I never pulled on another pair of waders, which indicates that it’s something less than the voice of God that calls me to hunt, but anytime I’m provided with the opportunity I won’t show up late.

I don’t wish to trivialize the baptism of Jesus by comparing it to my compulsion to go duck hunting, but on some level I think Jesus was drawn to what John the Baptist was doing down at the Jordan River in the same way I’m driven to go duck hunting. The forces that drove Jesus to the Jordan river were more than primal and cultural – I believe that the Holy Spirit was part of that mix as well, but I don’t think Jesus could have stayed away from what John was doing because it was an authentic expression of faith in God, and that’s exactly what Jesus was all about.

In the Gospel of Mark, we are provided with very little introductory information about Jesus or John the Baptist prior to the story we just read this morning. You might say this is the way Mark introduces Jesus. We aren’t given any information about where Jesus or John came from, but John’s primary invitation was to people who felt the need to repent of their sins and to live a new life in relationship with God.

John also made this announcement that he was preparing the way for one who was greater than him and who would immerse people in the Holy Spirit, but Jesus didn’t show up and make this announcement about himself prior to his baptism. Jesus showed up like everyone else, and John baptized him like everyone else.

I like the way Mark tells this story. Other gospel writers build in some resistance on John’s part to baptizing Jesus – the indication being that Jesus had no need for repentance. I don’t need for Jesus to have been someone in need of repentance, but I do like the idea of Jesus not disassociating himself from those of us who do.

Conventional Christianity seems to put a lot of emphasis on the perfection of Jesus. I’m sure we’ve all heard someone say that there’s only been one perfect person and that his name was Jesus. People usually use that line to comfort someone who’s done something really ridiculous, and I guess that’s not a bad thing to say to someone who has fallen in a ditch. But I don’t need for Jesus to have been this perfectly pure person. I’m much more nourished by the concept of a savior who knew what it felt like to fail and to get going again in a better direction.

We don’t know what drove Jesus to be baptized by John, and I’m really comfortable with that. In fact I love to think that Jesus didn’t quite understand what drove him down to the river to be baptized. I know I don’t quite understand what drives me to do what I do, but I’m trying to learn to be sensitive to those better spirits that drive me and to avoid those other ones.

What we do know is that Jesus and everyone else experienced some clarity when he came up out of the water. Jesus did show up at the right place, and it marked the beginning of his public ministry.

I think this story is a good illustration of how the Holy Spirit can work in each of our lives. We don’t know that it was the Holy Spirit that drove Jesus to be baptized, but Jesus had enough sensitivity to the authentic presence of God to show up where God seemed to be at work, and it turned out to be a very clarifying event. Jesus went to the place where people’s souls were being nourished, and he left as the most powerful source of nourishment the world has ever known.

We don’t generally step in to places with full knowledge of how we will come out of the situation, but when we follow those promptings that seem to be where God is leading us we often will find new clarity about who we are and what we are to do.

I’m so sad about what has transpired in France over the past few days. I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to criticize the way in which some people of other religious faiths follow dark paths with deep religious conviction. What those terrorists did in France is a distortion of what the core teaching of Islam is all about. I don’t know what forces shaped the lives of the people who engaged in those horrific acts of violence, but it is the opposite of what Jesus was baptized in to and what we are invited to become immersed into as well.

By going down to the Jordan River Jesus identified with people who were lost and he associated with people who were in need of repentance. Jesus became the one who offered people a better way of living because he didn’t disassociate himself from those who weren’t conducting themselves in acceptable ways.

I don’t know how to fix what’s wrong with other faiths, but I believe we have a story that the world is in need of hearing. It’s the story of how God chose to be in the life of a man who overcame evil with love. A man who didn’t see himself as better than those who were impure, but who offered everyone the chance to get on a better path. Our story is of a man who didn’t consider the use of violence to be the way to solve the problem of ungodly behavior.

This is the story in to which we are baptized. It’s a story into which that we must learn to immerse ourselves and to allow ourselves to become the new beloved children of God. We are invited to be the people with whom God is pleased.

Our world is saturated in death right now. And many people are inclined to believe that we need more instruments of death to overcome the agents of death. I’m not so naïve to believe that we don’t need to exercise great diligence in seeking to understand what is going on and who is involved, but I also believe we need to remember the powerful story that we have been given. I don’t know what it is calling us to do or where it will call us to be, but it’s a story that can far surpass the power of the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo.

It’s moving for me to see the people in the streets of Paris who believe that there needs to be freedom to satirize every powerful person and organization. I believe this as well, but the world needs more than satire. The world needs hope. And I believe the message of Jesus Christ is a message of hope. The message is that new life is a possibility for all of us. Redemption and reconciliation can happen.

I think we all have some loud callings in our lives. Some of those callings are pretty trivial and meaningless. It’s a challenge to understand how responsive we need to be to those odd directions we are inclined to go, but we need to nourish that calling we have from the one who calls us to life.

I believe Jesus Christ is calling all of us – baptized or not – into a new way of living and of associating with one another. Jesus understood what life is all about, and he wants us to become the beneficiaries and the bearers of that new life.

The world is full of people who now are choosing to associate themselves with Charlie Hebdo. I’m inspired by their demonstration, but I wish the streets would be filled with more people who want to be associated with Jesus Christ – the one who showed up at the Jordan River and got in line to be baptized.

Thanks be to God for this powerful story of how God chose to be with us, and how God enables us to find true life in this world that is so torn by death!

Amen

Shepherd’s Lives Matter
Luke 2:1-20

2:1 In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 All went to their own towns to be registered. 4 Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. 5 He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. 8 In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see–I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” 15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” 16 So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. 17 When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19 But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

We’ve got a beautiful picture here. We’ve all seen it a thousand times on Christmas cards and in crèche’s of all kinds. This scene of the baby Jesus lying in a manger with kind people and well-behaved animals all standing around in a soft barn with perfect lighting provided by a star. Who wouldn’t want to begin life in that place?

Unfortunately that is pure make-believe. And I’m not talking about the supernatural elements of this story. I don’t care to debunk any mysteries about the way in which Jesus was conceived or how Joseph and Mary ended up in Nazareth – stranger stories get told every day about where children come from. I’m not disturbed by the extraordinary part of this story. What bothers me is how cozy and disinfected this barn is portrayed, and how revered the shepherds have become.

You need to erase the quaintness of herding sheep from your mind. I know the idea of shepherding gets good play throughout the Bible, but don’t kid yourself about the work – it was not the career choice of people with options. The contrast between the metaphor of shepherding and the reality of the work couldn’t be more extreme. It’s remarkable that the most highly revered Psalm is the one that speaks of the Lord as our shepherd because actual shepherds weren’t welcome in the synagogue. It stunk to be a shepherd – literally and figuratively.

Jesus was born at a time when it was really important to the leaders of Israel to follow the proper cleaning rituals, to do nothing on the Sabbath, and to show up at the Temple for all of the major religious feasts. The Pharisees kept close tabs on those who were following the proper religious protocols of the day those who weren’t. And if you worked as a shepherd your name wasn’t on the good list – it was on the other list.

It’s fine for the Lord to be a shepherd, but God forbid that your son become one. You became a shepherd when other jobs weren’t available to you. It may seem strange to us that a community which depended on having sheep would have such contempt for the people who took care of their cherished commodity, but I don’t think we have to look far to see another community that disregards the people who keep the economy operating.

First century Israelites needed wool and mutton in the same way we need gasoline and high-fructose corn syrup, and I’m thinking that the people who keep our cars running and our minds racing through the night are treated in much the same way the Pharisees treated the shepherds. I’m thinking the shepherds of Jesus’ day are much like the late-night convenience store workers of our day. Where would we be if we couldn’t drive at any hour on any day and trust that we are within reach of gasoline and a bottle of Starbucks Mocha Frappuchino? I don’t think anyone aspires to work the graveyard shift on Christmas Eve at a convenience store, but what would we do without the people who do that work? It’s one of those essential occupations that few people long to have.

Shepherding was dangerous work that was poorly compensated and completely unappreciated. And I’m thinking this is also true of many occupations within our society. People who work the graveyard shifts at convenient stores come to mind because I think they probably have about the same social standing as the shepherds of Jesus’ day. Convenience store clerks aren’t as religiously stigmatized as shepherds were, but I don’t think anyone thinks it would be quaint to stand behind the counter of a convenience store at 3am.

We’ve turned the shepherds in to characters fit for Hallmark cards, but God didn’t choose to include them in this story because of their good looks and respectability. God included them in this story to remind us how differently the Kingdom of God is organized, and what kind of savior this baby named Jesus would grow to become.

It’s natural for us to turn this dirty makeshift shelter in to a lovely nativity scene because it is a beautiful story in so many ways, but we don’t need to lose sight of the real beauty of this story. We need to be reminded that Jesus wasn’t born in to a proper and quaint situation and his birth was first announced to the least significant people in the community.

Fortunately we don’t have to remind ourselves of this truth. In spite of the way this story has been disinfected and made respectable, God continues to find ways to reveal the scandalous nature of this story.

The United Methodist Church I attended when I was growing up in Wynne, Arkansas was a remarkably proper place. And it was full of fine people – many of Wynne’s finest attended the United Methodist Church. And I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. That church had many nice people in it – and it had one person who really didn’t fit the standard profile. Rual Cook was his name, and he didn’t blend in with the community. He had been psychologically damaged in WWII (shell-shocked is how I remember him being described), and it left him in a world of his own. He lived alone in a very dirty house. He did yard-work for people, and he didn’t clean up very well, but every Sunday he would put on his one suit and come to Sunday School and church. I could show you where he sat every Sunday in that sanctuary. In fact there’s probably a spot on the pew where he sat.

As a young person, I never had a lot of interaction with Mr. Cook, but every Christmas my mother would fix a nice box of food for him and she would get me to deliver it. Stepping in to Mr. Cook’s house wasn’t like stepping in to anyone else’s house that I knew, but I can still remember how gracious he was, and how blessed I would feel by that experience.

Mr. Cook was one of the most insignificant players in the life of the city, but he played a powerful role in the story of that church. When Mr. Cook died I was asked to help conduct his graveside service and it was then that I came to the realization that it wasn’t the church that took care of him – it was Mr. Cook who brought a great gift to that church. He was the worst dressed man in the church, he was the most disenfranchised member of that community, and he provided us with the best news that any of us ever get – which is that God doesn’t function in the same way that this world operates. God doesn’t measure us the same way we are measured by other people, and God invites us to see one another in this new and holy way as well.

This nativity story isn’t quaint – it’s revolutionary. It’s the story of how God chooses to be with us and how God intends for us to become. It’s not just a beautiful story – it’s a story that has the power to move us in new ways, and to change how we treat one another. It’s a story that reveals the true nature of our God, and how well we are loved – how well we are all loved. This isn’t a quaint story of something that may have happened a couple of thousand years ago – this is the story of how God continues to arrive in our world. Jesus continues to show up in the most out of the way places, and God uses the most unlikely people to remind us of how things are in the Kingdom of God.

Thanks be to God for the gift of this reoccurring story that disrupts our order, stirs our hearts, comforts our souls, and renews our lives. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Voice
John 1:6-8, 19-28

1:6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 19 This is the testimony given by John when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” 20 He confessed and did not deny it, but confessed, “I am not the Messiah.” 21 And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the prophet?” He answered, “No.” 22 Then they said to him, “Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” 23 He said, “‘I am a voice crying out in the wilderness, Make the Lord’s path straight’, just as the prophet Isaiah said.” 24 Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. 25 They asked him, “Why then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet?” 26 John answered them, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, 27 the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” 28 This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing.

I’m not immune from getting sucked in to the world of mindless television, but The Voice isn’t one of the shows that lures me in. I prefer pure over-the-top fiction to pseudo-reality based television shows. When I want to watch real people scratching and clawing to get what they want I turn on the news. I’m not sure that you ever really capture reality when a film crew is on hand.

Of course in light of the recent deaths that have occurred at the hands of police officers – I’m all for adding body cameras to those who are on the front line of crime response. I think it would be helpful for everyone involved. It will protect the innocent and moderate the behavior of the guilty. Unfortunately what we are seeing on the news is way too much like a bad reality tv show. There is this growing movement called Black Lives Matter, and today has been designated by the leaders of that movement as Black Lives Matter Sunday. It’s unfortunate that we have to have demonstrations to make the point that black lives matter, but that’s a message that needs to get out. Everyone matters, and I hope the day will come when we don’t have to be reminded of this.

I guess the world is in the mess it’s in because there is this tendency to value some lives more than others and to give more attention to some voices than to others. We live in a world that’s inundated by a cacophony of voices, and we don’t always pay attention to the right voices, but this morning we are invited to hear the voice of a man who called for people to prepare the way for the One who’s voice would change everything.

I’m focused on the power of voice because when pressed to identify himself, this man named John, the one we know of as John the Baptist – he identified himself as a voice. When the Pharisees insisted that he let them know who he was, he quoted this passage from Isaiah: I am a voice crying out in the wilderness, Make the Lord’s path straight.

I’m wondering how many of us would ever think of ourselves as, a voice. I’m guessing there are a number of people who might think of themselves in that way, but I’m not one of them. I don’t think of myself as a voice. I like to think I’ve got good hands, but I don’t have much of a voice. It’s sort of ridiculous that I make a living as a public speaker. Of course that may also explain the lack of public that shows up to hear me speak. If it wasn’t for my ability to say remarkably witty and insightful things I think I would be a dreadful preacher.

There are many of us who don’t have particularly powerful voices, but there is no shortage of people who have stage-worthy voices. I don’t think The Voice has trouble getting people to show up for their auditions. There are a lot of people who want to share their voice with the public, and that’s a beautiful thing. A great voice is a thing to behold. It’s a wonderful experience to hear a great voice. We are healed by good voices, we are inspired by good voices, we are moved by good voices. There may not be anything more humanly powerful than a beautiful voice.

Of course God doesn’t depend on the quality of a person’s voice to use them to do powerful things. Moses didn’t think he was qualified to lead the people of Israel because he thought he had a weak voice, but God didn’t consider that to be a problem. God provided a bit of a work-a-round by incorporating Aaron in to the communication process, but a weak voice is no obstacle for God. A weak voice is no excuse to not get involved in God’s work of redeeming the world.

We don’t know what kind of vocal strength John the Baptist had, but we know he had a powerful message. John was calling for people to change their lives, but he didn’t consider himself to be the one who would change everything. He was a voice, and he wanted people to be prepared for the voice.

John the Baptist didn’t refer to Jesus as the voice, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think of what he was saying in that way. John thought of himself as a voice crying out for us to be prepared for the voice. It’s not easy to be prepared to hear the voice of Jesus, but I like to think of that as the nature of our calling as Christians. We are people who aspire to hear the voice of Jesus – the voice of the One who speaks for God.

It’s amazing how powerful the sound of voices are to us. You can hear a song and be transported back to the place or the period of time in your life when you first heard that song. You can hear the sound of a familiar television character’s voice and be transported in to the reality of that show. You can hear the sound of a loved one’s voice or laugh and experience immediate wellbeing or the sound of an adversary and be put on full alert.

I’ll never forget this conversation I had with my father a few months after my mother died. We were driving back to Little Rock from my cousin’s wedding in Dallas. We had been driving for a few hours and my father said he was having a hard time remembering the sound of my mother’s voice. He asked me if I could remember the sound of her voice. As I thought about it for a moment it occurred to me that I could still hear the sound of her laugh, and there was also a phrase I could hear her say. It was a phrase I often heard her say to my father, and I told him what it was. I told him I could still hear her saying to him, Buddy, if you would just listen! Luckily he was sort of amused by what I said, and I think that line rang a bell with him.

I think John the Baptist was a little bit like my mother in that way. He was conscious of the fact that we are often inclined to turn our deaf ear toward essential messages. My mother could strike a tone that would call me to attention, and I think that’s what John the Baptist was doing for the leaders of Israel. John the Baptist didn’t think of himself as the voice, but he was a powerful voice, and he continues to call us to attention.

It’s never easy to discern the voice of Christ, but it’s particularly hard when we give an inordinate amount of attention to all the other voices that are trying to get noticed. It’s especially hard when we think the most important voice out there is our own.

Of course it’s important to pay attention to those voices that are out there and it’s important to utilize our own voices, but without some guidance from the voice we can become caught up in a really ugly chorus.

As I mentioned earlier, I fully believe there is an important message coming out of this Black Lives Matter campaign. Our society has been overly tolerant of a pattern of abuse that has been directed toward black men. There is some righteous anger being expressed right now and it’s easy for me to believe that this message resonates to what Jesus had to say. Jesus raised his own voice against injustice, but he never added his voice to the advocates of hate – even toward those who carried out evil agendas.

And this is what makes it so hard to hear what Jesus is saying and to join our own voices to his own. Our challenge is to tune our ears to hear his voice and to train our own voices to become powerful instruments of love and peace and justice.

My friend Mark has begun taking voice lessons. He doesn’t claim to know how what he is learning is going to enhance his vocal ability, but he’s an engineer, and he tried to explain to me what he has learned about the mechanics vocal sound. The lungs are more or less the engine of sound, and how well you control the air-flow certainly has an impact on the quality of the sound you produce. The vocal chords actually generate the sound, and of course there’s some training that goes in to how tightly or loosely you hold those chords as the air passes through them. Then there’s the shaping of the sound with your throat, mouth, tongue, sinus cavities, and skull configuration. There’s a good amount of control you have over the resonance of the sound you produce, but of course some people simply have better heads than others when it comes to sound production.

The mechanics of voice is interesting, and I think it reflects the way in which there’s always a relationship between the hardware and the software. There’s always a relationship between what we have and how well we learn to utilize what we have. I think this creative process of generating voice is also a reflection of how we can learn to join our own voices with the voice of God.

It’s God’s breath than powers us. Some of us constrict the amount of God’s breath we allow to pass through us, but there’s some divinity in all of us. We can choose to waste God’s breath by choosing to remain silent or by twisting it for our own purposes. We can make some devious sounds with God’s breath, but it’s purpose is to speak and to sing the words that bring comfort and healing.

I believe we are all invited to become incorporated in to the voice of God in this world. It’s a powerful invitation. It’s a beautiful opportunity. It’s a difficult challenge. It’s a mysterious undertaking. It’s a gift. It’s a job. It’s a solo act. It’s a face in a choir.

I believe the voice of Christ speaks to all of us in ways that we can understand if we will heed the words of those people like John who see the world for what it is and call for us to pay attention to how God intends for it to be. The voice is speaking. Listen, learn, sing, speak, pray, and rejoice!

We are not alone — thanks be to God!
Amen.

The Road to Regeneration
Isaiah 40:1-11

40:1 Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. 2 Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins. 3 A voice cries out: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. 4 Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. 5 Then the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together, for the mouth of the LORD has spoken.” 6 A voice says, “Cry out!” And I said, “What shall I cry?” All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. 7 The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass. 8 The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. 9 Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!” 10 See, the Lord GOD comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him. 11 He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.

It wasn’t easy for me to get a preaching grip on this Isaiah passage until my friend Gerald Cound insisted that I take a look at an article in his favorite magazine, Resurgence. I only gave the article a superficial reading at that moment, but what the writer was talking about put me in touch with the prophet Isaiah. I begged Gerald to lend it to me so I could read and digest the article, and it’s a powerfully prophetic piece of journalism. He’s not quick to let go of his new editions of this magazine because he doesn’t always get them back as quickly as he would prefer, but he recognized my desperation and let me have it. This magazine isn’t a religious publication, but the article dealt with what I believe to be the earthly manifestation of our belief system – the economy. It may be a bit of an overstatement to describe our economy as the manifestation of our true beliefs, but I don’t think it’s far from the truth.

What we think of as the economy is a vast and complex structure that no one group or agency controls. And it’s not like any of us have much input on how our economy operates, but I think it’s helpful to think of our economy as the creature that best represents what we believe to be true. The writer of the article, Dr. Herman Daly, is an economist who worked for the World Bank in the late eighties and early nineties, and is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. The article he wrote was entitled, Why we need a Steady-State Economy, and while I don’t fully understand much of what he had to say, what I do understand him to say is that our current perpetual expansion and utilization of resources is unsustainable.

And I find in his words a call for us to examine what we believe to be fundamentally true about our way of living on this planet. His article calls in to question how well we are caring for creation, and I believe that reflects our understanding of God.

I’ll say a bit more about this in a moment, but for now I want to shift attention to the prophet, Isaiah. I’ve actually experienced another one of those cosmic convergences this week – this same passage from Isaiah (which is one of the recommended readings for this second Sunday of Advent) was included in the material we covered in the daytime Disciple Bible Study group this week. Nobody arranged for this to happen – as I say, it’s a cosmic convergence. I think that has happened one other time over the past few years, but in addition to this remarkable coincidence – these words from Isaiah also inspired some of the music Diana had already arranged for the choir to sing this week. It’s not my intention to induce the rapture this morning, but we’ve got some powerful forces coming together today.

Like many powerfully poetic words, these words from Isaiah aren’t easy to comprehend, but they’ve had a powerful impact on people over many centuries. What we know of as the Book of Isaiah was actually written over the course of about 200 years – beginning in the middle of the 8th Century BCE and concluding in the early 6th Century BCE, so what we have are actually the words of more than one person who carried on the message of Isaiah. It’s sort of incomprehensible to us that someone would write a book without getting all the credit, but that was a different day, and a different economy. The people of Israel were much more communal than we are. They had a greater sense of community prosperity and community failure. Certainly they also understood individual achievement or debacle and individual fortune or misfortune, but they had these national trends, policies, and practices that either put them in good standing or set them on a course for disaster.

The prophets were those who could see where the nation was heading and they provided an interpretation of why they were going there. This prophet Isaiah spoke out against the extent of injustice within the nation of Israel and the folly of creating unholy alliances with neighboring pagan states. Isaiah called for people to be faithful to the God of Israel, but they didn’t do that so well, and when they were overrun by the Babylonians Isaiah helped them understand that to be a consequence of their unfaithfulness.

Many of the Israelites were sent in to exile in Babylon, and then when Cyrus the Persian conquered Babylon, it was Isaiah who identified that as an act of God that would enable the Israelites to return to Israel and to restore Jerusalem. That is the context for today’s passage. These words of comfort and restoration were for the people who had been in exile and who were being provided a way to return to the land they called home.

To study the book of Isaiah is to try to get your mind around the faith and the politics and the economy and the sociology of people who were living in the middle east about 2600 years ago. It’s not easy for us to understand, and it’s not entirely obvious what bearing those words have on our lives today, but they serve to remind me how connected we also are to the fate of our larger community.

Certainly we all have our individual issues, and most of us are trained to become entirely focused on the details of our individual lives. How well we are doing as individuals is far more important to most of us than how the national economy fares. Where we are headed isn’t nearly as important to most of us as where we are right now and how things look for the immediate future.

And I think this reflects one of our corporate or communal beliefs. I think we believe God is more attentive to us as individuals than to the world in general. I don’t think we are inherently unfair people. I don’t think any of us want to prevent anyone from acquiring wealth, but I don’t think any of us really want to think about what the world would look like if everyone in the world had as many cars and drove around as much as most of us do. I don’t think we want to imagine what kind of pressure it would put on our natural resources if everyone in the world lived in homes as large and as well heated and cooled as most of us have. I don’t think any of us want to limit the comforts of the millions of people who live in squalor across the globe, but the truth is we can’t drill deep enough to run all of the power plants and to fill all the tanks of the cars if everyone had what most of us have.

Our economy seems pretty stable. Most of us don’t anticipate that it’s going to crumble anytime soon. In fact many of us who are the beneficiaries of it’s good fortune trust it to take care of us, but when I read this article about the unsustainable nature of our global economy I felt like I was reading something that could have been written by the prophet Isaiah. And not the one who spoke of comfort, but the one who warned of looming exile. It reminded me that while we all operate our own little enterprises and maintain our own personal financial portfolios with various degrees of success – we are all citizens of the same planet – and there are no borders when it comes to environmental collapse.

Now, I know we’re approaching Christmas. It’s the season to hang lights, eat large, and max-out the credit card. I don’t mean to play the role of the Grinch who stole Christmas. In fact I probably love the extravagance of Christmas as much as anyone, but I’m also troubled by our corporate unwillingness to engage in serious examination of where our economic policies are leading us. And I’m not just talking about the failure of any one political party to see where we are headed. The truth is the global economy is unsustainable. We assume there will always be more of what we need, but the earth is only so big, and the bubble we call our atmosphere is actually very thin. God’s not making any new water, and we can’t send our toxic waste to the moon. We know what we have to work with and we aren’t doing a great job of managing it.

I’m no prophet. I’m not an economist either, but I believe the people who are doing the math and telling us that we need to find a new way to live together on this big round ball we call home. What I do know is that this world is a beautiful place to live in so many ways, and I believe there are currently too many people who aren’t able enjoy it’s fruits and if we aren’t careful there won’t be much left for those who have not yet arrived.

I don’t just believe we are headed for doom. I believe I don’t know what the future holds. I also believe our chances for a vibrant future are greatly improved if we will make more room for Jesus in our hearts. I don’t believe Jesus is going to magically prevent us from experiencing any kind of environmental, political, or economic disaster, but I do believe that if we will seek to be near to Jesus, and to trust in his abiding presence we will be more equipped to deal with the challenges that face us as the human family.

I believe it’s people who truly love Jesus who are the most likely to push to find new and better ways for us to live together on this planet. We need good scientists in this world who can do the math and study the data, but I believe it’s going to be the people who love God and who love their neighbors as themselves who will have the courage to let go of old patterns of behavior and embrace the new world that we are approaching.

We aren’t in charge of this planet – we’ve just been invited to stay here for a while, and we need to be as hospitable as possible for everyone involved. That’s the kind of economy Christian discipleship demands.

As I indicated earlier – I enjoy this overindulgent season as much as anyone, and I’m probably not going to do anything differently than I have in the past, but I’m also trying to think about the future, and how to find this illusive path to global regeneration. Individually we are sort helpless to bring about the kind of changes that our world is crying out to experience, but there are ways that we can be more helpful than hurtful, and we need to be in search of those opportunities.

Wise investments take on a whole new meaning when you take the words of Jesus to heart, and when you think of the Kingdom of God as being your dream community. Don’t think of Advent as just the beginning of a new religious cycle of events – think of it as the beginning of a new way of living on earth – I believe that is the kind of conversion God most desires.

Amen.

Blue Sunday
Mark 13:24-37

13:24 “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, 25 and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26 Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. 27 Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. 28 “From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. 29 So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. 30 Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. 31 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. 32 “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. 33 Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. 34 It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. 35 Therefore, keep awake–for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, 36 or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. 37 And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.”

In the 1940s, my grandparents built a little lake and lake-house in the woods up on Crowley’s Ridge. To get there you would turn off Highway 64B about 3 miles east of Wynne onto a dirt road that wound through an apple orchard. When you came out of the orchard you would go down a short piece and then cross a low-water bridge (which is basically a slab of concrete that the creek flows both over and under) – then you would climb this steep hill that felt like it went straight up. When you got to the crest of the hill you had to hope there was a road on the other side and there was. There was a one lane path on top of a levee that cut across the lake, and the last adventure was to cross a narrow metal bridge that went over a cut in the levee that connected the two sides of the lake.

You may not fully visualize this trek, but what you need to understand is that while this piece of property wasn’t very far from town it was quite a journey to get there. It wasn’t exactly treacherous, but it tested your nerves to drive through the creek, up a steep hill with a blind pinnacle and across a bridge that wasn’t much wider than a car. And it was worth the effort. It was a wonderful little spot on the planet.

I did a lot of fishing out there with my grandfather, and as I was growing up my parents arranged many gatherings out there with other families with kids during summer evenings which was great – even though it was a spooky place for a kid at night. My family and I never spent the night out there, but it had two little bedrooms and a bathroom with a metal shower stall. It was a great little get-away place, and I loved going out there.

One summer when I was in college I convinced my parents to let my friend, Richard, and I stay out there. They didn’t really like the idea, but they let us, and it was an interesting experience. Honestly, it remained a somewhat frightening place to be at night, but it was fun to live in that relatively exotic location. The cabin had running water and electricity, but there wasn’t a land line for a phone out there, and of course cell phones were unimaginable in the late 70’s. So between the circuitous route and the lack of communication you felt pretty isolated when you were out there.

Near the end of that summer I left town for a couple of weeks, and when I got back I decided to ride my bicycle out there one afternoon to check on things. I got out there and when I walked in I encountered what can almost be described as a bad apocalyptic vision. The cabin was in total disarray. Most of the wooden furniture was stacked up in one corner with magazine pages wadded and stuffed in various places between the pieces – ready for torching you might say. Liquor advertisements had been torn from magazines and stuck on the walls where pictures had formerly been hanging, and in other places there was white paint randomly brushed on the dark paneled walls.

There was sort of a cot in the middle of the main room under a ceiling fan, and the door that led to the back part of the cabin where the bedrooms and bathroom were was shut – which was unusual. I walked over to the kitchen area of the big room, and that’s when I noticed that there was a pan of water boiling on the stove.

That was the moment I decided I needed to get out of there. Needless to say, I rode home pretty quickly. I called the sheriff’s office and they made arrangements for me to ride out there with a couple of officers. We tore out there in the squad car and they entered the cabin with guns drawn. They even kicked open the door to those back rooms in that classic cop-fashion, but it wasn’t latched so they didn’t have to break anything. Nobody was there, but they examined the situation and asked me several questions. And as the main officer was writing up the report and going over the facts of the situation I came to realize how close to an episode of Mayberry this was because the officer suddenly looked up at me and said, You know – I believe that guy’s been staying out here!

I don’t know if they ever found the person who had created that odd mess. At some point they told us a drifter had been picked up in a nearby town who had been charged with arson and they suspected it was the same person. It was an unfortunate situation that sort of ruined my desire to spend any more nights out there. We cleaned up the place, but it was never quite the same for me. It’s still out there, but it’s in a terrible state of disrepair.

I’m sorry to spend such a long time telling a relatively trivial story, but what this story illustrates to me is the way in which the beauty and the belligerence of this world are so intertwined. That place was wonderful, but it was also unnerving. It was near town, but when you were out there you could feel pretty cut-off from everyone else. I always imagined it would be a good place for a deranged person to hang out, and sure enough it was.

The reality of our situation is that we live in a world where the beauty and the ugliness of life are never far removed from the other. The hard edges of life are rarely far removed from our great joys. About 10 years after my grandparents built their wonderful retreat my grandmother was in a car accident and she spent the last 20 years of her life as a quadriplegic and unable to take care of a spot she dearly loved. There is no way to keep the bad times at bay – but the opposite is also true. When we are in the midst of trouble we aren’t beyond the reach of deliverance.

Mark, the gospel writer, was addressing his words to people who were living in very harsh circumstances, and he was writing about a person who was the victim of the cruel hand of power hungry men who had no concern for the truth. Good times weren’t near to the followers of Jesus who were living in a territory that was occupied by Rome. But Jesus didn’t want anyone to ever think that the terrorism of the day would prevail. Jesus wanted his followers to always be watching for the glorious arrival of God’s delivering presence.

These words from our scripture lesson this morning are pretty cryptic. In fact it’s easy to just want to dismiss them. The sun and moon and stars remain in their place, and there has been no report of the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory – at least not any kind of report that a meteorologist could provide. But I don’t want to overlook the truth of these words. I believe the glorious delivering power of Jesus Christ continues to arrive. I believe it came to that first generation, and I believe it can come for us.

The little things that we construct in life to bring us pleasure are nice, but they never really last. We can generate some beautiful things in this world, but they can be torn up in an instant. There are no everlasting things on earth – Jesus reminds us that the earth itself is a fleeting thing. Probably the most persistent thing on earth is the presence of suffering, but even suffering isn’t the most eternally substantial thing. Jesus taught that the love of our eternal God is the only thing that endures forever, and for that we are to keep watch.

It’s not easy to imagine the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory, but I’m guessing it can look a lot like a person wearing gloves who comes with a broom and begins to clean up the debris of a vandalized business in Ferguson, MO. I’m thinking the power and glory of the Son of Man can also appear in the form of a thousand people standing peacefully on the street to express remorse over the death of another young black man and the need for our terrible racial dynamics to be rectified. I don’t believe the power and glory of the Son of Man ever takes the form of indiscriminate violence. But it can show up in great force in ways that we can see if we are paying attention.

We talk about the season of Advent as being that period of time in the church when we prepare for Christ to be born once again into our hearts and into our world. Certainly it’s reasonable to hold an element of joyful expectation in our hearts, but I also think it makes sense to acknowledge that we are in need of deliverance.

There are many distressing dynamics in our world in our cities in our families and in our very selves. Bad things are happening on every level of life, and we need some deliverance. We don’t need to ignore our problems, we need to acknowledge them, we need to seek God’s guidance for the wisdom to deal with them, and we need to watch for the ways in which God chooses to address them.

You would think the arrival of the Son of Man in the clouds with great glory would be obvious to everyone, but it turns out that God is more likely to sneak in unannounced. If we don’t pay attention to what God is doing and how we might get involved in God’s holy work of sharing peace and demanding justice we will not notice God’s coming until the timely opportunity is lost. I’m thinking Jesus can come and go without our awareness – and if we aren’t careful we will become the ones who are saying, Hey, I think that guy’s been staying here!

But he’ll be gone. And we will remain unchanged.

Something needs to happen. Something good needs to happen for us all, and something good can happen for us all if we will seek to pay attention to the eternal claim of God upon our world, our cities, our church, and our lives. These aren’t easy times, but times have never been easy, and the good news is that we have a God who offers deliverance. Pay attention, and you might well see what God has in mind.

Thanks be to God.
Amen.

Hope For The Doomed
Matthew 25:31-46

25:31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; 35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38 And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39 And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ 40 And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ 41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; 42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

There is a sense in which reading this passage of scripture from Matthew leaves me feeling doomed. If Jesus is in that multitude of people who are hungry, cold, wet, and in need of some hot coffee or cool water – he knows I have done my best to keep my distance from him. Jesus knows how many times I’ve walked right past him over the course of the last week and left him out on the street without enough clothes or a comfortable place to stay. I’ve provided a little food and a few clothes, but I’ve done my best to avoid getting overly involved. I sure haven’t gone to see him in prison. The truth is that I do a good job of maintaining good boundaries between myself and desperate people.

Consequently, this passage leaves me feeling sort of doomed. Damned to hell I suppose. A couple of weeks ago I read a passage from a sermon that was composed by Rev. Dr. Augustus Winfield (the original namesake of this facility) who described hell in a powerfully graphic manner, and some of the language he used came right out of this very passage. He talked about hell being that place where the devil and his angels go to burn in eternity. I didn’t have access to his entire sermon, so I don’t really know what he said would land you in that eternally horrible place, but I feel sure his image of eternal punishment was influenced by this very passage of scripture.

And what jumps out at me this morning is just how well qualified I am to be in the ranks of the devils angels. I’m sure I don’t know all the ways in which I’ve turned my back on people who have needed my help, but I could give you a pretty good list of those I know I’ve ignored, and that doesn’t bode well for my inclusion in heaven.

I continue maintain my hope that the circumstances we face at the end of our lives on earth aren’t as black and white as this passage might indicate, but Jesus didn’t hesitate to point out that there are consequences to the choices we make. How we treat one another leaves us looking like sheep – or goats. Welcomed in to God’s glory – or cast into a very unpleasant place.

And I’m doomed. I don’t just ignore the people Jesus most closely identified with – I fail in so many other ways. I once attended a gathering of preachers where we were directed to break up in to small groups and discuss the fine points of tithing to the church. The conversation among my peers left me feeling like it was assumed that we were all members of that rare and highly disciplined group. They seemed to think it was only lay-people who failed to give the full 10% to the church, and I felt compelled to own up to the fact that I wasn’t hitting the high bar of 10%. I still don’t quit hit that magic double digit.

They didn’t put me out of the group, but someone raised the question of whether or not a true tithe required a person to pay 10% of their gross income or 10% of their net income after paying taxes. At that point one of my clergy brothers said that if you aren’t paying 10% of your gross income to the church you are stealing from God. I took his assessment sort of personally, so I raised my hand and announced that I was a thief — which sort of killed the conversation for moment. I may be a thief, but I’m not much of a liar.

And I’m certain I’ve got what it takes to be a goat. I have surpassed all of the requirements. The devil and his angels know my name and where I live. I’m doomed if Jesus scores us accurately.

But who can pass the test of perfect compassion?

Based on this passage of scripture, if we were to divide the room between those of us who know ourselves to be goats and those who would self-identify as sheep I’m guessing there would be more seats available in the sheepfold. Now I may be wrong about that. I know this is an exceptional congregation. And you may be holding out great hope that I will one day become as sheeplike as the rest of you, but I’m telling you – it’s more likely that it will snow in that eternally hot place before I let go of all my goatlike ways.

I haven’t given up on getting better. I embrace the Wesleyan notion of going on to perfection, but there’s a long way to go on that journey. Fortunately my hope doesn’t depend on my ability to be as compassionate as God calls me to be. My hope is rooted in the perfect compassion of God, and God’s willingness to remain with imperfect people.

One of the things that stands out to me in this passage is how surprised everyone was to find out how they were viewed by God. Both the sheep and the goats were amazed to find out how their lives were being measured. We can’t act surprised to find out that it’s important to care for one another and particularly important to watch out for people who are especially vulnerable. It’s no secret that it’s important to help those who are in no position to return our favors, but how that works out for us is rather mysterious.

I’ve given you a hint of the ways in which I’ve failed to be as compassionate as I know I should be, but I als know how amazing it feels to do what Jesus asked us to do. The surprising thing is not just how badly we can fail to love our neighbors as ourselves. The truly surprising thing to me is how rewarding it is to care for someone who’s suffering.

I don’t believe this passage today is a warning of how we are judged by God at the culmination of time or even at the end of our own lives. I believe this little story reveals how perfectly Jesus can be with us in the normal course of a day if we will live with some sensitivity to those who are around us. This isn’t a story that exposes the nature of divine scorekeeping. This is a story that reveals the surprising way we come to experience the presence of Jesus in our midst when we take those steps out of our own self-absorbed lives and in to the life of someone who is wounded, weary, or neglected.

None of us have the capacity to fix the life of somebody else, and it’s good to recognize those sacred boundaries that exist between us all, but a compassionate word can feel a lot like the breath of God to a person who is hurting, and I believe God finds ways to bless everyone who is involved in those holy moments.

Our king doesn’t reward with public pronouncements or grand positions. Our king provides us with rewards that don’t expire or become inaccessible. God blesses us in really surprising ways when we engage in this holy work of being compassionate to one another at critical moments.

We do fail. And there are consequences to those failures. When we fail to live we compassion for other people we have to spend more time alone with our selfish selves – which is probably not that much different from an eternity with the devil and his angels.

We aren’t perfect, but we are loved by a God who doesn’t want us to live in isolation from one another. God wants us to be happy, and God knows we need to experience the joy that comes with caring for other people. We aren’t perfect, but we aren’t doomed. Jesus knows that we need to learn to give of ourselves, and God will always provide us with those holy opportunities to flee the wrath of selfish isolation and in to the joy of God’s holy herd.

Thanks be to God.
Amen

God Talk
Matthew 25:1-13

25:1 “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3 When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; 4 but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5 As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 6 But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7 Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. 8 The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9 But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ 10 And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. 11 Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12 But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ 13 Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

When I sit down to prepare a sermon I usually take a look at what I’ve had to say in the past about whatever passage of scripture I’m intending to use for my sermon text. I always find something in those previous sermons that makes me cringe, but there’s often something worth salvaging and somehow repackaging. I’m what you might call old-school or hopelessly stubborn in my preaching routine, but I like to use the lectionary (the standardized readings for each Sunday) for my preaching texts, and as I’ve pointed out before, I generally use the gospel lesson. The lectionary cycle repeats every three years, and I think it’s accurate to say that I’ve worked through that cycle at least five times, but I couldn’t find a single sermon on today’s text.

Now part of that has to do with not wanting to dig through the hand-written sermons of my first few years of preaching – which I suspect would be particularly cringe-worthy, and there are some lost years in my computer files, but I have relatively accurate files for the last twenty years, and I don’t have a single sermon on this text. And it’s not because I read this text and decided to preach from one of Paul’s epistles or the Psalm for the day. I like this text – it’s odd in a good way. And it lends itself to saying whatever you want to say.

It’s a story that portrays one group of people as being wise and another group as foolish. Five of these bridesmaids were conscientious and got in to the party while the other five were dullards who got shut out. This is a story that emphasizes the value of wisdom, but it doesn’t really define the nature of wisdom, so I get to be the one to do that. What a great preaching text – I can’t believe I’ve missed out on it for all those years!

What this text does is to raise the question of what it takes to enter the kingdom of heaven. It doesn’t answer that question, but it makes you ponder that question. Jesus told this story in order to kindle desire to abide in God’s kingdom – to be one of those wise people who pays attention to essential matters and who gets ushered in to the grand banquet. Who wants to be one of those people who thought they were ready, but were shown to be deficient at the critical moment and failed to get in. This is a story that illustrates the reality of divine judgment and the consequences of spiritual failure.

Of course whenever you start talking about the possibility of spiritual failure our minds often go to the concept of hell. And I want to talk about that for a moment. I don’t know about the young people in the room, but people of my generation and older have been handed a pretty clear portrayal of hell, and you don’t want to go there!. For many of us, hell has been defined as the place you go when you die if you haven’t made the right arrangements with God. Many people continue to carry around that understanding, and I’m not in a position to say there’s nothing to that. I haven’t been provided with an indisputable memo from God on this matter, but my sense is that the frightening possibility of spending eternity in hell no longer has the credibility that it once did. I don’t think people fear the eternal flames of hell the way they once did.

I don’t have any research to back up my supposition, but I’m in touch with a few people, and I don’t sense that there’s as much fear of eternal damnation as there once was. And frankly, I’m not unhappy about that. I’m not saying I don’t believe there are consequences to living a spiritually ignorant life, but I don’t find that traditional portrayal of hell to be particularly believable or helpful. I think we need a new way of thinking about the consequences of spiritual failure because I think we’re living in a time where we’ve just done away with the old package without an adequate replacement.

And losing the fear of hell has been hard on the church. I suspect there’s a powerful connection between the erosion of fear of spending eternity in hell with the decline of attendance in church. I don’t know of any academic studies on this, but I’m inclined to believe there’s some truth to it. Fear of hell is powerfully motivating.

I dare say some fear of hell helped construct this very building. As many of you know, this church was originally named Winfield Methodist Church and it was named after Augustus R. Winfield. Dr. Winfield was the pastor of the second Methodist Church in Little Rock from 1880 until 1884, and that was the church that eventually became Winfield Methodist Church. And here’s an excerpt from one of his sermon’s:

Hell is a lake of fire and brimstone, prepared for the devil and his angels, and all that disobey God shall be cast into this lake, and burned forever. After you have been in hell one thousand years, the great clock shall strike one; but eternity has just begun, you shall burn forever.

I found this colorful excerpt from a book called Two Centuries of Methodism in Arkansas by Nancy Britton. It was noted that Dr. Winfield was known as an effective fundraiser. I’m guessing he could get pretty clear about what might happen if you weren’t as generous as he and God expected.

Fear of eternal hell was an effective preaching tool for a long time, but preachers like me in churches like this don’t have access to that ominous possibility any more. And like I say, I don’t regret that, but I’m also thinking we need to reclaim some urgency to exercise spiritual wisdom. This parable makes it pretty clear that Jesus wanted us to have some fear of missing out on something essential. His message was that people who live like those foolish bridesmaids will miss out on life in the kingdom of heaven.

A very notable American passed away last week. His name was Tom Magliozzi. I don’t know if he was Click or Clack, but he was one of the so-called Tappet Brothers of that groundbreaking radio show: “Car Talk”. Tom was the brother with the really big laugh. If you’ve never heard that show you need to tune in to our local public radio station, KUAR FM 89.1 on a Saturday morning at 9am and listen to one of the reruns. They stopped producing new shows in 2012 when Tom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but they haven’t stopped airing old shows.

In spite of the way Tom portrayed himself, he was no dummy – technically, emotionally or spiritually. He earned an undergraduate degree in economics, politics, and engineering from MIT, an MBA from Northeastern University, and a PhD in marketing from Boston University. He wrote a short online biography of himself, which is really entertaining to read, and he said the thing that drove him to pursue all of those degrees was the thought that he really wouldn’t have to work if he could become a college professor.

Tom’s theory about that didn’t turn out to be correct, but he was a person who tried very hard to live life to it’s fullest, and he wasn’t afraid to quit a job that didn’t feel right. One of his early jobs after he finished MIT was at a company that was about an hour away from his beloved fair city of Cambridge, MA. Tom was driving a little MGA at the time, and he was nearly smashed by a tractor-trailer rig. He said that as he sat in his car shaking and recovering from what felt like a near-death experience he asked himself this simple question, If I had bought the farm out there on Rt. 128 today, wouldn’t I be bent at all the LIFE that I had missed?

He drove to work, walked in to his boss’s office and quit. He said his boss was convinced that he had taken a job with a competitor. He said his boss couldn’t understand the actual truth. And the truth was that life was the issue. He didn’t like what that commute was doing to his life.

Things didn’t automatically fall in to place for Tom. He spent a good amount of time unemployed and underemployed, but he didn’t want to waste his life. He was in search of something more and a lot of people benefited from his unwillingness to live an unintentional life. He and his brother Ray eventually put together this radio show that did as much to soothe people’s souls as it did to help them repair their cars.

I don’t know that it’s possible to create urgency for ourselves. Sometimes it takes a brush with death or disaster to get our attention and to get us focused on the pursuit of life. Maybe we need to retain some fear of hell to keep us in search of the kingdom of God. I don’t think we need to worry so much about where we will abide after we die, but I’m inclined to think that we’re existing in hell when we don’t pay attention to the essentials of life.

I think what Jesus is wanting us to know is that it’s entirely possible to be unprepared for life in the kingdom of God. It’s possible to be very thoughtless about what it takes to be ready for life.

Earlier I said I was happy to get to define what it means to be wise, but I don’t know what wisdom may require of you. What I do know is that it’s not the same for all of us, and it’s not so easy for any of us to chart a wise course. Finding the course of true life requires us all to exercise courage, persistence, sensitivity, and attention to all the ways in which God’s truth is made known to us.

Sometimes it’s very clear. But there’s not a single answer for everyone. Tom Magliozzi knew that he didn’t need to be spending two hours a day driving to and from a place that didn’t feel like home. For someone else it might be essential to continue to make an arduous daily journey to a difficult place. The fact that the foolish bridesmaids couldn’t borrow oil from the wise ones says to me that we can’t count on the solutions of others to provide answers for ourselves.

The journey in to the kingdom of God is a difficult trek. It can also be long and boring and annoying. But to avoid the discipline of seeking God’s kingdom – to settle for some kind of life that may not be great, but is predictable and safe and full of nice distractions is to settle for some kind of hell. To settle for anything less than the true life that Jesus came to offer is to decline an invitation to the banquet.

I don’t believe Augustus was right about the geography of hell, but I know it feels like hell when you get left out of a party, and I don’t want that to happen to any of us. Pay attention, be prepared, love God, serve your neighbors, and you will enjoy the banquet!

Thanks be to God. Amen.