Thompson's Blog

The Gift of Clarity

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

The Battle For Life

Matthew 10:24-39

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Our Uncontainable God

Matthew 28:16-20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be to God. Amen

Directed By The Spirit

I Corinthians 12:3-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Upward Mobility

John 17:1-11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborating With God

John 14:15-21

15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. 17 This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. 18 “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. 19 In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

Have you ever wondered why that online source of knowledge about everything you have ever wanted to know is called Wikipedia? And why every other online source of specific information uses that same prefix? What is it about wiki that makes it fit on the front of wikileaks, wikihow, and wikibuy?

I Googled this question about the wiki word, and of course I found some information about it in Wikipedia.

The first wiki-styled website was developed by a man named Ward Cunningham in 1995, and the distinguishing feature of that website was that it was designed to be user-editable. I don’t know what that original website was focused upon, but it was created in such a way that it could be edited by other users. Over time, some editing controls were put in place to keep it from becoming absurd, but his intention was to make the exchange of information more democratic and more efficient.

Mr. Cunningham decided to call his website WikiWikiWeb because he had travelled to Hawaii one time and the shuttle bus that carried people from one airport terminal to another was called the Wiki, and that name came from a Hawaiian word that means fast. He almost called his website QuickWeb, and while that might have made it easier for the rest of us to understand what he was talking about it didn’t have the notability of WikiWikiWeb, and that turned out to be a powerful decision. He basically changed the language we use to describe a certain type of online interaction.

Because now, anytime a website is designed to allow a degree of online collaboration it gets labeled with this wiki prefix. So whenever you read a definition of something on Wikipedia it is information that has been submitted by a number of different people, and all entries on Wikipedia continue to be adjusted. There’s some oversight in the process, but it’s a more open process than having one team of people generating all of the information.

I don’t understand computer programming, but I do understand the concept of sharing, and I think the primary intent of wikiness is this notion of sharing and interacting – which brings the scripture to mind.

What I hear Jesus saying in this passage is that a new collaborative opportunity grew out of his departure. Jesus was not going to leave his disciples orphaned. The relationship between Jesus and God and us was going to change, but it wasn’t going to be diminished. Jesus would not be with us in the form of a single person, but Jesus would be available to all of us in the form of a spiritual guide.

There is one sense in which I understand this very clearly. When there is someone around who does things for us we aren’t inclined to do things for ourselves. When my mother died I saw my father learn to do things he had never done when she was around. I had seen him load the dishwasher, but I don’t think he had ever been authorized to actually turn it on. He knew where the washing machine was, but I don’t think he had ever actually sorted laundry. I’m not sure he ever caught on to that, but the fact is that we generally don’t learn to do new things while people who are more capable of doing those things are still around.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the summer after I finished high school I took a three week Outward Bound Course. It was designed to be a personal growth experience that was set in the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico. I really didn’t know what I was stepping into, but I showed up where I was told to be on a given day, and soon after I got there I was given a backpack and other essential equipment. Our leader introduced himself and the other 8 people I would be with for the next three weeks, and then he told us to go over to a pile of food and figure out what we would need to live on for a week.

He didn’t go over and tell us what we needed. He told us to go figure out what we needed and to divide it among ourselves because we would be carrying it and we wouldn’t be resupplied for a week. So we went from being newly acquainted with one another to the exercise of trying to reason with one another. Our leader didn’t see his job as our caretaker. He was the facilitator of a group experience, and he didn’t just want to make it easy on us. It was a pretty interesting experience. We went from being newly acquainted to jokingly familiar with each other in pretty short order. Outright hostility soon followed, but so did some reconciliation.

It was a powerful experience for me, and it wouldn’t have been as powerful if our leader had not been as removed from us as he was. He gave us general objectives, and he provided some essential instructions, but he didn’t do things for us. It was messy in some ways, but it made us become as cooperative with one another as possible.

I’m seeing what God did through Jesus in a similar way. Jesus lived in a way that captured the attention of many people. The way he healed and taught was absolutely compelling to many and of course very threatening to others. Jesus didn’t set out to make a name for himself, but he became un-ignorable. Masses of people were drawn to him for help, and clusters of others were drawn together to conspire against him. Jesus became the focus of much attention in a good and bad way.  People who were looking for redemption from God found it in Jesus, while those who were using God for their own benefit found him to be in their way.

Jesus knew that this wasn’t going to play out well for him on earth. He knew how the world dealt with those who turn people’s attention to God, but he also knew that the leaders of this world couldn’t stop what was going on between he and God. And Jesus knew that something even more significant would happen for people after he was killed. Jesus could see that God was going to extend his work in a profound manner after he departed from this world. This work of collaborating with God didn’t end with the departure of Jesus – it took on a new form.

Jesus said God was going to do a new thing after he was gone – God was going to send us the Advocate. The Greek word John used was Paraclete and in Greek, the word was used to describe one who has been called to our side, and this is good news for us. And while we would probably prefer to have Jesus in the flesh, the truth is that it’s far better for us to have Jesus in the Spirit. It isn’t easy for us to follow the commandments of Jesus, but if Jesus was in the neighborhood we wouldn’t even try. We might turn out to see what he was doing, but we wouldn’t be inclined to do the things he did.

I don’t like the fact that we don’t have Jesus in the flesh, but we do have access to Jesus, and Jesus has access to us as well. We don’t have Jesus the way that the original disciples had Jesus, but we’ve got a wiki form of Jesus. We’ve got this ongoing opportunity to collaborate with Jesus. As Christians, we aren’t just people who revere the amazing work Jesus did – we’re invited to share in the work he continues to do. We’re challenged to make ourselves available to Jesus, and we’re privileged to be used by this abiding Spirit of Jesus to be used in the work of God.

Now while this everpresent Spirit of Jesus is a mysterious thing, it isn’t an arbitrary thing. John gave this Spirit a name that had some meaning to it. We call this Spirit the Advocate, which indicates that there is a certain type of work to be done – it’s the work of advocacy, which is work that’s done on behalf of others. This Advocate doesn’t just move people to do unusual things, it moves people to continue the work of Jesus to bring peace and wholeness into the lives of those who are being overwhelmed, overpowered, and overlooked.

I recently listened to a novel that was set in England during the first year of World War II, and part of the story focused on the work that was done at Bletchley Park to decode and decipher intercepted German messages. That novel got me interested in the whole story of codebreaking, so I just finished a non-fiction book about Bletchley Park. And it’s an amazing story. The Germans had these Enigma encryption machines that made it all but impossible to decipher their messages, and that’s what moved the British to put together this secret code-breaking institution at Bletchley Park that coordinated the work of thousands of people who worked in shifts around the clock to do the work of decoding messages.

Of course I’m amazed that there are people who had the minds to create those encryption machines as well as those who figured out how to create other machines that could decode the messages. This is where much of the pioneering work of computer science began, but it’s also amazing that there were these thousands of people who did really menial tasks day after day for a couple of years. It took a world of people doing mind-numbing tasks to operate these complex decoding machines and to do everything else that was necessary to carry out this massive undertaking.

And they couldn’t tell anyone what they were doing or what they did for several decades. Maintaining perfect secrecy was essential, and for the most part they were able to keep this endeavor a perfect secret. Most of the families of these remarkable people who worked at Bletchley Park thought their sons and daughters and siblings were doing meaningless clerical tasks that had no real bearing on the war effort.

I guess I’m just struck by the extent of collaboration that was in effect with this project. People were given clear tasks to do and they were conditioned not to ask why. On some level it was important that nobody really knew what other people were doing. They didn’t want many people to understand what was going on. So people were trained to do their one task with as much focus as possible and to trust that it was something that needed to be done.

I’m thinking this is the attitude we disciples are to have about our work of following Jesus, but this isn’t easy for us to do. We’re sort of conditioned to think we need to know now what will come of whatever we do. We’re living in a wiki-world, and we expect results quickly, clearly, and easily about everything we do. It’s not easy for us to be as patient we probably need to be when it comes to doing the work of God in this world, but our situation isn’t all bad.

Our computerized world has also provided us with some amazing opportunities to collaborate with people in incredible new ways. Our ability to be in communication with each other is beyond comprehension, and this can enable us to carry out God’s work in some powerful new ways. But there’s one thing the computer hasn’t provided for us. It hasn’t given us automatic access to the Advocate.

Gaining access to the spirit of Jesus Christ isn’t something we are able to do with a couple of keystrokes. The spirit of Christ has been provided for us, but we’ve still got to do the work of conditioning our hearts to understand the language of love in order to hear and understand those messages that God intends for us to get. The language of love isn’t encrypted in order to remain hidden from us, but it takes a lot of practice at carrying out the menial tasks of caring for one another to fully understand this language of the heart.

We have this opportunity to collaborate with God as those who continue the work of Jesus Christ in the world, and God will enable us to know what we can do if we will do the work that love requires. God has some unbelievable projects in mind for this world, and God is hoping we will get involved. It’s amazing what people can do when they put their minds to it, but it’s divine when people give themselves to God and do as the Advocate instructs.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Dwelling With Jesus

John 14:1-14

1 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And you know the way to the place where I am going.” 5 Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. 7 If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” 8 Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” 9 Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? 10 Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. 12 Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. 13 I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.

It was just after the last supper that Jesus spoke these memorable words to his disciples. Of course one of the things that makes these words memorable is that we often hear them read at funerals. It’s fitting that we read this passage on such occasions because it very clearly addresses the expectation of life after death. Jesus didn’t want us to live in fear of death. Jesus wanted us to live with the understanding that our relationship with God doesn’t end at death. He wanted us to trust that the kingdom of God is a community that extends beyond this world.

Of course this wasn’t something that the disciples were wanting to hear. Jesus spoke these words prior to his death, and they weren’t happy to hear him speak in that way. I think they were still hoping that Jesus was going to enter Jerusalem and establish a more tradition type of kingdom. Jesus had been telling them what was going to transpire, but it was hard for them to equate crucifixion with glorification. Their hopes for a glorious kingdom on earth had not yet died, so it wasn’t easy for them to hear him talk about going to prepare a place for them anywhere other than Jerusalem.

The disciples were frequently confused about the things Jesus said and did, but I think this is to be expected when someone embodies and articulates the truth of God. An eternal kingdom isn’t as easy for us to comprehend as a temporary kingdom. What Jesus wanted us to see and to understand isn’t easy for us to get our minds around.

I think most of us can identify with Philip, who wanted Jesus to be a little clearer about what he meant. Philip was a little weary of the images Jesus used, so he just came out and said what many of us are inclined to think. He said, Lord, just show us the Father and then we’ll be satisfied – which isn’t exactly a small request. It’s almost as if he said, just give us everything and then we’ll be satisfied. Philip sticks his neck out, but he’s not alone in his thinking.

Now maybe we can be a little critical of Philip because he was with Jesus when Jesus turned water in to wine, restored the sight of a man who was born blind, fed five thousand with two loaves and three fish, walked on water and raised Lazarus from the dead, but apparently that didn’t answer all of his questions. And maybe the point is that nobody will ever have all of their questions answered about the reality of God. The boundless nature of God is not something we can get our minds around, but even those of us who weren’t with Jesus when he did those miraculous things have been given all we need to know about the reality of God.

It’s probably natural to be like Philip and want more evidence of the presence of God, but we’ve all been given all that we need. God knows the language of our hearts, and God knows what we need to hear in order to trust that God was revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but it’s still not easy to be a faithful follower. It’s hard for us not to let our hearts get all twisted up and troubled.

And Jesus knew this about us as well, and that’s why he told us not to let our hearts be troubled. Jesus knows we need to hear this, and he’s very clear about there being plenty of room in God’s big house, but it’s hard not to worry about all the things that are going on in our own little worlds.

Jesus didn’t want us to be burdened by the troubles of this world. Jesus wanted us to find our way in to our eternal home, and while I believe that our place in God’s home becomes much clearer to us after we depart from this world, I’m also convinced that we can get a foot in the door of God’s home while we are still occupying real estate on Earth. Jesus promised us a room in his Father’s house, but I sort of wish he had used that occasion to talk about his mother’s home.

And I’m going to use the occasion of Mother’s Day to invite you to think of the place that Jesus went to prepare for us as being in the home of our eternal mother. I’m not advocating that we change the language of the Trinity, but I think Jesus provided us with this image of providing room for us in his Father’s house in order to appeal to our affection for home. I don’t think Jesus was talking about the architecture of the place when he spoke of preparing a place for us – Jesus was talking about going home. Jesus was using the language of the heart when he said he was going to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house. I think Jesus was telling us that what he came to offer was the opportunity to dwell in the comfort of an eternal home, and for many of us, the comfort of home was established by our mothers.

I know this isn’t the case for everyone. Mothers are a lot like human beings – they don’t always give their children a taste of heaven, but a good mother is wonderful thing. In fact I would say it’s a divine thing. I’m pretty convinced that for most of us our image of God is highly influenced by the way we were treated by those god-like people we knew as our parents. It’s an image we have to get over to some extent, but I think the way we are nurtured as small children has a powerful impact on us, and for most of us that most primary impression of the world was given to us by our mothers. Fathers provide a lot of comfort as well – I’m not wanting to exclude us from the picture, but mothers are often the best at this comfort thing.

At least this was my experience. I was very fortunate to have had the mother I had. Now I could give you a list of things she might could have done better, but it wouldn’t be a long list. She made me feel welcome in the world, and I’m grateful to her for that. She was a very comforting person, and when I hear Jesus telling his disciples to not let their hearts be troubled I find myself remembering how well my mother could bring comfort to my troubled heart when I was a child.

My mother was a loving person, but she wasn’t what you would call an easygoing person. She didn’t have an overbearing personality, but she had a powerful presence. In fact, she didn’t really have to use words to let you know how she was feeling. We had some difficult times, but we mainly had good times, and I’m so grateful to her for giving me a powerful sense of belonging. She enabled me to know how good it is to have a place in a home. I had a good father as well. I don’t mean to take anything away from the role he played in my life, but I think it’s accurate to say that my mother defined our home, and I was blessed by the way she did that.

So when I hear Jesus talking about not letting my heart be troubled because he is going to prepare a place for me in his Father’s house I find myself thinking about that sense of belonging that my mother provided. I believe Jesus wants us all to experience the most profound sense of belonging, and I believe we attain that by trusting and loving and following him.

Jesus said a very bold thing to his disciples after he told them not to let their hearts be troubled and how he was going to prepare a place for them. It was in response to Thomas saying he didn’t understand where he was going that Jesus said, I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

I think this is a passage of scripture that’s easy for us to misinterpret. I think the first thing that comes to mind when we hear these words is that we Christians have clearly made the right choice – that by claiming Jesus Christ as our savior we have put ourselves on the only legitimate avenue to God. Some people read this text as reason to gloat. Some Christians might be inclined to want to start chanting: We’re number one!! We’re number one!!   But I don’t think that’s the proper response to what Jesus was saying.

If you simply pull this text out of the context it’s easy to think Jesus was simply saying that anyone who worships God without using his name will never find their way to God, but I don’t believe that was his intent. It’s essential look at what was going on when Jesus spoke those words. It’s important to remember what Jesus had just done before he began this after-dinner speech. The last thing Jesus did before he began speaking to them was to wash their feet, and he did that to remind them of the way they were to treat each other.

Yes, Jesus pointed to himself as the only way to get to the Father, but he wasn’t pointing to himself as the one who knew the magic words that would open the gate to God’s kingdom. Jesus pointed to himself as the person who fully understood and practiced the perfect love of God. Jesus understood himself to be the way the truth and the life, and when he finished teaching his disciples everything he knew and praying for them to remain true to what he taught he willingly went to Jerusalem to face death by crucifixion.

Jesus didn’t speak these words in order to provide us with an attitude of religious superiority. Jesus spoke these bold words in order to remind us of how we are to live if want to dwell in the house of the Lord. Yes, it’s a privilege to abide in one of those rooms that Jesus talked about, and it’s a gift, but we need to have the right attitude about what it takes to be full participants in the household of God. The worst thing we can do is to have an attitude of superiority. The best thing we can do is to maintain an attitude of love and generosity toward everyone else.

When Jesus spoke of himself as the way, and the truth, and the life he had just washed their feet and he was about to give his life as an act of sacrificial love. The privilege that comes to us as Christians is the privilege to practice unbounded love. It’s like the privilege of being a mother or a father – you do whatever it takes to give life to your child.

We really have been provided a great gift from our heavenly Father – who is also our heavenly Mother. The son of God, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ has revealed to us the way to live as children of God. He provided us the truth about the power of love, and he has invited us to live the life that never dies.

So, Do not let your heart be troubled, believe in God, believe also in him.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Flocking to Jesus

John 10:1-10

1 Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. 2 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” 6 Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. 7 So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and bandits; but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

You can spend a lifetime in Arkansas without having any live encounters with sheep, but if you spend any time in church or in Sunday School you become exposed to the image of shepherding. I don’t guess I’ve ever known an actual shepherd, but I’ve been reading  the 23^rd Psalm for years, so I think nothing of saying that the Lord is my shepherd. It’s interesting to think of how much the economy of Jesus’ day influenced the language of our faith. It makes me wonder what images Jesus would have used if he had been from Arkansas. Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not leave Wal-Mart through the check-out line is a thief and a bandit. I don’t know if this would have made it through the centuries.

But the shepherding language has stuck, and it has created a curious situation for us. This is a case in which many of us are more familiar with the metaphor of shepherding than we are with the nature of the job. I become aware of this when I encounter texts like this where the terminology becomes more specific. I had to google sheepfold to find out what Jesus was talking about.

And the passage makes more sense when you know what a sheepfold is. Basically an ancient Palestinian sheepfold was a large pen made with rock walls that were often topped by thorns to keep thieves from climbing in and stealing sheep. Each village would have it’s own sheepfold where different shepherds would bring their flocks at night or for a period of time. Different flocks would mingle in the fold until their shepherd would come and call them together and lead them out. These people generally raised the sheep for their wool, so they would have the animals for years, and there would be a lot of familiarity between the shepherd and his sheep. The sheep would learn the voice of their shepherd, and they wouldn’t follow the song of anyone else.

Jesus used this image of sheep recognizing the sound of their shepherd’s voice to describe the way in which his followers respond to the sound of his voice.

When I was going through the process of becoming an ordained minister I was administered a test called the MMPI – the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Actually because of a couple of mixups I took that test on 3 different occasions over the course of a few years. It’s one of those tests that asks a question and you choose between answers like: always, sometimes, rarely, or never. It got to where I could remember the questions and I did my best to answer them in a consistent manner. I didn’t want to present myself as having multiple personalities. I’ve pretty much forgotten what it asked, but there’s one question that I never really knew how to answer.

The question was: Do you hear voices?

And that’s an interesting question for a Christian to ponder. Do you hear voices? Now most of us know not to admit to hearing voices. People who hear voices aren’t known for behaving well. Some people take pills to keep from hearing voices. But who are we as Christians if we aren’t people who somehow hear the voice of Jesus? This very text indicates that it’s important to hear his voice and follow him.

I really can’t remember how I answered that question. I think I knew I should probably say never, but I also believe that I’m in need of hearing the voice of Jesus. I really wasn’t that concerned about how that would appear on my test results, but I remember being largely stumped by the question. Do I hear the voice of Jesus or don’t I?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a lot of voices in my head. Now before you make too much of this let me say that I don’t actually hear voices in my head. There’s a lot more silence in my head than there is a cacophony of voices telling me what to do. I don’t really hear different voices, but I find myself considering what others would say to me if they were in the room.

Of course this is what some people spend years and thousands of dollars trying to figure out by going to see a therapist. This isn’t a bad thing to do. In fact I think we would probably all do well to have access to someone who would listen to us as we wonder why we do the things we do, but hearing the voice of Jesus is a far different thing to hear than the voice of a mother or a father or a sibling or a spouse. We all know the needs and desires and agendas of the people who are naturally close to us, but the voice of Jesus is a different thing. It isn’t something we are accustomed to hearing. The voice of Jesus is like no other.

The voice of Jesus is that voice that calls us to a place that isn’t as familiar as the place where we are born or where we currently reside. The voice of Jesus is that voice that calls us to become extraordinarily loving.

I know a couple who have recently undergone the process of becoming approved as a home for a foster child. These aren’t people who are needing to do this for any reason other than their desire to make this world a more hospitable place for someone who’s world has been defined by insecurity and turmoil. What I know about this couple is that they are seeking to follow Jesus, and I can’t help but think that this is something that they have been encouraged to do by the voice of Jesus. This isn’t an easy thing that they’re doing, but I also believe it’s the kind of thing we do that puts us in touch with the thing Jesus referred to as abundant life.

We are remarkably individualistic in many ways. We guard our personal usernames and passwords of our various accounts with great diligence. If you are like me you need an app on your phone to contain the various names and passwords we use to gain access to our personal accounts. I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose or forget the password to that account. We are very individualistic when it comes to managing our personal business, but I think we are a lot like sheep when it comes to doing what’s expected of us. We have our individualistic agendas, but we’re also guided by our desire to blend in with the flock.

We don’t tend to think of ourselves as having a flock mentality, but we’re probably guided more by the flock than we may realize. What we eat, the way we dress, what we watch, and what we do is highly influenced by the flock to which we are associated. There are some flocks to which we are officially aligned, but there are others that we are less aware of, and I think we need to pay attention to the agendas of the various flocks to which we belong.

Just as the Pharisees of Jesus’ day weren’t providing leadership that actually led people into closer communion with God, I’m sure there are some voices to which we pay attention that aren’t leading us toward the abundant life that Jesus came to provide. Just as Jesus stood in sharp contrast to the accepted leaders of the flock in Israel 2000 years ago, Jesus is most likely calling us to step away from some of the familiar and comfortable trends of our day.

I listened to a heartbreaking story the other day about a woman who worked as an Iraqi translator in the early part of the war in Iraq. She became invaluable to the military commanders that she was working with. She became such a powerful source of information she was nicknamed, The Lion. She loved the work she did and she was really proud of what she did, but she was also devastated by the consequences of her work. Both her husband and her closest friend were killed because of her cooperation with our military. She had to flee the country along with her children, and she’s been living as a refugee in Jordan ever since. In spite of the recommendations of several military officers her application for asylum in our country her requests have been denied because of the fear we have in our nation of terrorists.

And of course it’s not unreasonable for us to want to be careful about who can enter this country, but our fear of terrorists has produced some policies that have done great harm to many individuals who have made great sacrifices for our country. And this is often the problem with a flock mentality. A flock can be very reactive to anything that poses any kind of threat to our personal security. And I think there are people who want us to maintain a level of fear in order to more easily control the behavior of the flock.

I think one way to see the difference between the dishonest leaders of Israel and the voice of Jesus was that the Pharisees and other religious authorities of Jesus’ day did their best to control the flock through fear and intimidation. There were severe consequences of not following the religious protocols of the day. For most people it meant that you were somehow ostracized from the flock if you didn’t do as you were expected. Of course Jesus was such a threat to the leaders of the flock they were moved to plot his execution, but Jesus didn’t lead his flock with the tactics of fear. In fact one of the things he said on many occasions was to fear not.

I think this is something that we need to recognize in ourselves. Are we motivated to do the things we do out of fear? If we are, I don’t think it’s the voice of Jesus that we’re hearing and following. In fact, Jesus may very well be calling for us to move in some frightening directions, but he doesn’t want us to be afraid. I know for a fact that my friends who recently opened their home to a foster child were terribly nervous about what that would be like.

But I also believe that it’s those steps we take that carry us out of the safety of the familiar flock that put us in touch with the flock of Jesus. I don’t believe we are all alone when we hear the voice of Jesus calling for us to take new steps in the direction of love. There is a flock of people who have responded to the voice of Jesus and there’s no better company to be found.

It’s not unreasonable for us to think of ourselves as one of Jesus’ little flocks, but it’s also important that we remain vigilant in the effort to hear the voice of Jesus. I know it’s a little crazy to talk about trying to hear the voice of someone that we don’t really see, but it’s the best way I know to describe what it is that we’re called to do. As Christians, our primary task is to live in this world without being controlled by the expectations of this world. We aren’t just to hear and respond to the various voices of conventional wisdom that are telling us how we are to be and what we are to do. Most of the voices we hear in this world are speaking to our fears and our self-serving desires, and those voices aren’t telling us where we are going to find true life.

It’s the voice of Jesus that can lead us to that place, and it’s his voice that we are challenged to hear. Jesus does continue to speak, and by the grace of God we will have the ears to hear and the wisdom to follow him.

Thanks be to God.

Amen

Hidden Treasure

Luke 24:13-35

13 Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, 14 and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. 15 While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, 16 but their eyes were kept from recognizing him. 17 And he said to them, “What are you discussing with each other while you walk along?” They stood still, looking sad. 18 Then one of them, whose name was Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” 19 He asked them, “What things?” They replied, “The things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, 20 and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. 21 But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things took place. 22 Moreover, some women of our group astounded us. They were at the tomb early this morning, 23 and when they did not find his body there, they came back and told us that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive. 24 Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said; but they did not see him.” 25 Then he said to them, “Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! 26 Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” 27 Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures. 28 As they came near the village to which they were going, he walked ahead as if he were going on. 29 But they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. 30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. 32 They said to each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?” 33 That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem; and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. 34 They were saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!” 35 Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

I graduated from high school in 1976 – right in the middle of what is arguably one of the most eclectic decades of the 20^th century. There was a lot of change during those days, and there was a lot of insecurity about the future. The war in Vietnam was over, but it had left a scar on our national psyche, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973 exposed an area of significant vulnerability, but it was over as well. We were armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, so the possibility of a world-ending skirmish with the Soviet Union was in the air, but of course nobody wanted that.

This combination of both tension and relief produced some interesting fashions, and some great music. It also gave rise to the back to the land movement. I wasn’t a full participant in all of the oddness of the 70s, but I wore some of the crazy clothes, I loved the music (and still do), and I was fascinated with the kinds of things you could learn about in the Foxfire series of books. The Foxfire series of books came out of rural Appalachian Georgia, and they described how to build log cabins, butcher hogs, smoke meat, make soap, and every other thing people knew how to do before there was a Walmart in every neck of the woods.

Now I enjoyed living in a house with a television, but I was sort of fascinated with this idea of living off the land. There was a time when I imagined the lifestyle of a self-sufficient-hunter-gatherer-shepherd-farmer to be far more compelling than a professional career that came with a healthcare plan and a pension.

So I collected all of the Foxfire books, and I would go to the Cross County Library and read Mother Earth News, but my favorite book at the time was called Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons. A book and a man made famous by Johnny Carson – who loved to make jokes about everything Euell Gibbons claimed you could eat if you were inclined to go find your food instead of buying it.

But I loved what Euell Gibbons had to say. His book described all of the wild foods you could find in various habitats and how to prepare them – along with a few anecdotes of how and when he discovered various wild delicacies. I didn’t find much of what he had to say to be easily accessible, but I actually did stalk some wild asparagus. Other than where it grows, there is no difference between wild asparagus and domesticated asparagus, and one interesting thing he said about asparagus is that you can often find it growing wild along railroad track levees.

There was a railroad track that ran behind my grandparent’s house, and I discovered that there was in fact some asparagus growing in places along that levee. I would have to walk about a half a mile to find a dozen sprouts, but they were there, and finding an asparagus plant was like finding a hidden treasure.

Those asparagus spouts weren’t easy to find – even when you were looking for it, but I never would have seen these plants if I hadn’t been alerted to watch for them. That was about the most success I ever had as a back-to-the-lander, but it was a good lesson for me to pay attention to what may be at hand.

I never would have thought to look for asparagus along that levee if I hadn’t been told of it’s possibility, but that little exercise has left me looking a little closer to see what I might find regardless of where I might be walking. Once you’ve found something in a surprising place it leaves you being more sensitive to finding other things in surprising places.

And I don’t guess anyone ever encountered as good a thing in a surprising way as when Cleopas and his fellow traveler suddenly came to realize they had been walking with the risen Christ for several miles. They hadn’t expected to see him, and they weren’t able to recognize him until that moment when he did the thing he had done with his disciples at the last supper. It’s interesting to think about how this all happened. How could they have not recognized him as they went along? And then, what exactly transpired that enabled them to see who he was? We don’t have easy answers for these mysterious things, but what we do have is the testimony that these men encountered the living Christ when they invited him to stay with them and they broke bread together.

And you can bet that these men never saw a stranger again without wondering if he or she might be the risen Lord who had come to spend a little time with them. I dare say they never missed an opportunity to give thanks to God before they broke and shared bread. And you can’t read this story without thinking that this could happen to one of us. You just never know where you will encounter the presence of the living Lord, and it’s always a good idea to get together and to share blessed bread.

I said the 70’s were sort of strange days, but I don’t guess there’s ever been a time that wasn’t unusual in some way. In some ways this world just keeps getting stranger, but there is one way in which this world never changes. The world is almost always torn up in some terrible ways. We don’t all suffer equally and there are certainly some places that are more torn up than others, but none of us get through life on Earth without being touched by some breathtaking pain.

These men who were walking to Emmaus were certainly feeling the stab of unfathomable loss. They weren’t out enjoying a hike in the park. They were slogging through the aftermath of a terrible tragedy when Christ joined them on the road, and that’s often how it happens for us.

I had a couple of friends in seminary who experienced an unfathomable loss a few years after we had all graduated and gone on to our various lives. Kelly and Dale were two really nice people who met and married while they were in seminary, and they both went back to Alabama to work as pastors. They each had their own church, and on Palm Sunday in 1994 a tornado dropped out of the sky and hit the church where Rev. Kelly Clem was the pastor. It happened just as their worship service was about to begin and it killed twenty people in the congregation – including Kelly and Dale’s 4-year-old daughter.

I had lost touch with them, and I still haven’t been in touch with them, but I’ve followed their story to some extent. There was a video produced not long after the event that was pretty incredible to watch, and there have been a few different articles in various publications about them. They were as devastated and lost as you would expect anyone to have been in the aftermath of such an event. There are no guidelines for how to proceed after such a thing, but they proceeded about as gracefully as anyone could. It’s an event that forever changed them, but it didn’t destroy them.

In one article, Kelly made it very clear that nobody can fully understand what someone else is going through, but her loss has clearly sensitized her to the loss of others. She doesn’t pretend to know what it’s like for anyone else to lose a child. She makes no assumptions about what other people experience, but she said that she never felt as if she had been abandoned by God. Even as she felt the rawest pain she sensed that God was with her. She was somehow able to connect the suffering of Christ with her own suffering.

This truth became particularly clear to her several years after the event when she and her family were on a trip to Spain. Here’s something she wrote in an article for Interpreter Magazine:

As my family toured around, I became transfixed by a beautiful sculpture with Jesus on the cross and Mary standing beneath him. Tears gleamed in her eyes, and her arms were posed as though cradling a child who is not there. Tears welled up in my eyes, as I had a moment of understanding. “This is my life, my story,” I thought to myself. “I am part of God’s story.”

Terrible things happen in life, but the good news is that God is with us when those terrible things happen, and it’s often in those terrible moments that we see how our own stories are connected to the most beautiful story that there is. We don’t always see this so clearly in the heat of horrible moments, but those moments can make us extra sensitive to the horror of what Jesus experienced, and hopefully more open to the truth of his resurrection as well.

This story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is not just the story of what happened to one man 2000 years ago. It’s as Rev. Kelly Clem came to realize – This is my life, my story. When you look at Jesus on the cross, you are looking at pure vulnerability, horrible pain, and unfathomable wrongness – but you are also looking at an act of perfect love. Jesus on the cross is the perfect portrayal of God’s love. God’s love was executed and buried, but it didn’t stay that way, and we are celebrating that truth today.

We don’t all discover this truth and our connection to it in the same way, but knowing this is the truth makes us keep an eye out for it. I suspect that one reason Kelly Clem didn’t feel abandoned by God when she lost her child was that she was already very familiar with the story of Christ’s crucifixion. She had known in her mind not to equate devastating loss with divine abandonment, and I’m guessing that helped her during her experience of unfathomable loss. She knew to keep looking to Jesus for help, and it came.

There are events that happen in this world that wound us deeply, and deep wounds leave scars, but God wills for our souls to do more than fully recover – God wills for us to find new life regardless of what has happened to us.

You have to keep an eye out for it. The truth of Christ’s resurrection from the dead isn’t easy to see or believe. Like the travelers to Emmaus who didn’t recognize who was with them for the longest time, we can remain oblivious to the presence of the resurrected Christ in our midst. But I’m telling you that as surely as you can find asparagus on a railroad levee or beauty in a 70’s love song, you can find new life in Jesus Christ – even if you are feeling as good as dead.

This is the good news – thanks be to God!

Amen.

The Germ of Life

John 20:19-31

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

This story of Thomas and his refusal to believe without seeing is one that many people find some level of kinship with. I can see myself in Thomas to some extent. It’s not that he didn’t trust Jesus – it’s more like he was having trouble trusting his friends. Or maybe it was just that he felt like he had missed out on something and he wanted what they had. That’s certainly an emotion I can find within myself. Few of us are as demanding of proof as Thomas was, and fewer of us have such visceral experiences of the resurrected Christ. Most of us find reason to trust this story without extraordinary encounters with the risen Lord of Life.

But some people have powerful experiences that convince them of the resurrected Christ. The Christian writer, Ann Lamotte, tells the story of how she felt like Jesus was following her in the form of a cat for a couple of days, and then as she lay in bed recovering from years of alcohol and drug abuse she had this sense that Jesus was crouched down in the corner of the room watching her. She said he wouldn’t leave her alone so she gave up her old way of living and started following him.

I’ve never had an encounter with what I considered to be the actual man, Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified and raised from the dead, but I do believe I’ve encountered people who were infected by his spirit and they passed the germ on to me. And that’s what Jesus did to those disciples who were gathered in that locked room out of fear of their religiously persecuting peers – he breathed on them and infected them with the Holy Spirit.

This is a really interesting image for me to ponder – this experience of being breathed on by Jesus.

Getting breathed on is something most of us do our best to avoid. I don’t really know how it is in other countries, but we Americans do our best to keep our breath to ourselves, and to avoid the breath of others. And when we do share our breath with other people we want it to be pretty scrubbed.

And of course we know that you can catch things from the breath of other people. I love my little granddaughter, but daycare has provided her with some powerfully infectious breath. She happily shared her breath with Sharla back in the fall and she was sick for weeks. We adults know to watch out for infectious breath. We don’t always succeed at keeping our safe distance, but understand the concept.

So if find this image of being breathed on by Jesus to be pretty intriguing. The idea of catching something from Jesus is a powerful concept, and it’s an easy way for me to imagine the Holy Spirit being transferred. We generally think of infectious breath as being a bad thing, but could there be anything better than being infected by the germ of Jesus Christ?

I’m remembering something along these lines that happened in the wake of my mother’s sudden death. People were bringing all of this food over to my parent’s house, and we were needing more refrigerator space than we had. My mother was a person who had trouble throwing things away. She kept a clean and neat house, but every drawer, closet, storage space, and refrigerator was stuffed to the gills. And of course she had more than one refrigerator. There was a refrigerator in an outside storage room that had items of all sorts of unknown origins and dates.

A neighbor came over and offered to help in some way and I took her out to that refrigerator and I told her to throw out anything she wouldn’t eat because we needed space for the good food that was pouring in. After a while I went out to check on the situation and as she was telling me what she had done she pointed to this one mass of white goo in the trash bag that she said she had no idea what it was, and I suddenly felt ill because I realized she had thrown out my mother’s sour-dough starter.

Now it’s not like that was starter that had been passed on to her from her ancestors in the old world. Her sour-dough starter was from a recipe that I knew about. I’m not sure how long she had kept that particular batch of sourdough going, but her sourdough bread and pancakes were something that my sister and I both loved, and having some of her sourdough starter is something I knew we would both cherish.

But I was looking at it in a trash bag with lots of other things in and around it. I tried to act calm, and I thanked her for what she had done, but I told her not to throw anything else in that bag. I went inside and got a spoon and a bowl and I managed to salvage about a cup of relatively pure sourdough starter. Over the next few weeks I fed that small amount of starter until I had enough to divide between my sister and I and we were both so happy to have it. It felt as if we were somehow preserving some of her germs.

We both kept our batches going for a few years. I kept mine at the Wesley Foundation where I regularly made bread to lure students in to a Bible study. Unfortunately I came in one day and discovered that someone had thrown my starter away thinking it was old pancake batter. That student saw a new facet of my personality that day. It was fortunate that before I said or did anything truly regrettable I remembered that I could get more from my sister.

It may have been an unhealthy obsession of some kind, but I loved keeping that starter going for a long time. I cherished the idea of keeping some of her good germs alive. My sister and I both let it go at some point. I think our children are pretty happy that they don’t have to keep their grandmother’s sourdough starter alive.

We don’t generally like to be infected by anything, but what we see in this passage of scripture is that we are invited to become infected by the breath of Jesus Christ and for that powerful germ to become the dominant force within our lives.

Given the gruesome way in which Jesus was killed, I can’t see that anyone would have continued to speak his name if people hadn’t caught something that brought them back to life. It’s entirely believable to me that those original disciples were assembled in a room behind locked door, but they didn’t remain in a state of fear and seclusion, and it makes sense to think that they caught what Jesus had.

We’re gathered here on the first day of the week, but we’re not behind locked doors. We don’t feel threatened by our association with Jesus, and I’m happy about that, but I can’t help but wonder if we haven’t somehow developed some immunity to whatever it is that lived in the breath of Jesus. I mean, has the world really become a place that’s more accommodating to the spirit and truth of Jesus Christ? Or have we somehow made the message of Christ more accommodating to the world?

This isn’t an easy question for us. I know there are people who have very clear answers to this question. There are people who can point to the exact ways in which the message of Christ has been coopted by the changing morals of society, and how this needs to be remedied, but I don’t think it’s so simple. I don’t believe the problem with the church today is our failure to adhere to the moral codes of previous generations. I’m not saying that we haven’t lost some valuable traditions over the years, but there are other traditions that needed to be lost. Our challenge as Christians is to continually redefine what it means to be faithful to Christ in our time, and this is never simple.

I’m sure there are ways in which all of us who call ourselves Christian fail to live as morally upright as a perfect follower of Christ would do. It’s important that we seek to define what it means for us to be faithful to Christ as individuals and as a faith community, but I don’t think this is ever a simple task. I believe the spirit of Christ calls for us to engage in the struggle to define faithful living, but we must always pursue this with humility and grace.

It’s a very personal struggle for each of us to figure out how to live in relationship with other people as we respond to the call of Christ in our lives. It’s just not easy to define how faithfulness to Christ should play out in everyone else’s life. I believe the rule of love calls upon each of us to treat one another with a near impossible level of integrity, kindness, generosity, and faithfulness, but I don’t believe it calls for us to decide exactly what that means for everyone else and then to judge them accordingly. I think we get lost in the weeds when Christianity becomes defined by many rules instead of the one commandment that Jesus taught – to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

This isn’t the one rule that guides the bulk of what goes on in this world, and the sad thing is that we are often more infected by those germs that guide this world than we are by the life-giving spirit of God.

It’s interesting to me to think about the competing germs that are in the air and how our lives are affected by these competing forces. It’s not as easy for us to identify the spiritual germs that are in the air as it is to culture the biological ones. We don’t have the spiritual equivalent of petri-dishes where we can take swabs from our mouths and see what grows, but I think it’s helpful for us to consider the what it is that’s guiding our hearts and minds to do what we do and to pursue what we pursue.

Like Thomas, we weren’t in the room on that first day that Jesus appeared to the disciples and breathed his breath on them. We haven’t had the extraordinary experience that Thomas had a week later, but we have had the good fortune of receiving this germ of life that came from Jesus Christ passed on to us. We haven’t had the actual breath of the resurrected Christ fall on our faces, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been touched by that holy bug that lived in his breath.

I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe it’s in our midst and can guide our hearts and minds in the direction of true life. As surely as we harbor all kinds of bacteria all over and in our bodies I believe we can harbor this holy germ within us as well and that it provides us with access to the kingdom of God.

I believe the church should be the place where people catch and share this holy form of infection that provides us with that kind of assurance and hope that those first disciples experienced. It’s not easy for us to maintain the kind of atmosphere where the air is thick with the presence of the Holy Spirit. We Christians have always found it hard to balance our spirituality with our materiality, but this is what we are called to do.

We have our obstacles, but we have a living advocate as well. This germ of true life that was in Jesus Christ is alive and well and in our midst. May we be infected by that same life-giving spirit that brought those first disciples and Thomas back from the brink of fear and dread. May the Holy Spirit that was in Jesus Christ fill our hearts and minds and souls and put us on that path of true and abundant life.

Thanks be to God. Amen