woodworkingpastor

[woodworkingpastor]

Mission -- Luke 10:1-12 -- Second Sunday of Lent -- March 5, 2023

During our church retreat last month, I asked you this question: “If you could take the essence of who we are as a congregation and imagine that as a restaurant, what kind of restaurant would we be?” 

I appreciate your willingness to play along. It was fascinating, although not surprising, at how many of your descriptions included the words family or home: family style, homestyle, down home, mom and pop, etc.

Your examples of existing restaurants were also remarkably consistent: Cracker Barrel, Homeplace, Roanoker, Great 611 Steak Company were each mentioned several times. This, too, really isn’t all that surprising. These are all the kinds of places you might go out to eat with your family!

I intend to save your responses, because I can imagine that data will be useful in other settings. The reason I asked the question, however, was to imagine a restaurant as a metaphor for the church’s mission.

Restaurants largely assume that customers will come to them (drive through, take out, and Door Dash notwithstanding). Restaurants exist at an established location, with a particular atmosphere, cuisine, and sometimes even a celebrity chef! Successful restaurants go on to establish franchises, so that even when you’re away from home you can go to that restaurant and know you can get your favorite meal.

Churches are like that—or at least they have been since the beginning of the fourth century. We’re so used to identifying “the church” with a piece of local real estate and a building that we even call the building we gather in “the church.” Where’s the meeting tonight? “Down at the church.”

This is not a biblically accurate description. When Paul wrote to the Philippian Christians, he wrote

To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi (1:1).

And when Paul wrote to Philemon, he addressed

The church in your house (v. 2).

Also think about the time when Jesus teaches the disciples the steps of conflict resolution. In the last step, the offended person is to

tell it to the church (Matthew 18:17).

Of course, no one thinks that Jesus meant we should get in our car, drive to the building, stand outside, and air our complaint at the brick walls! The old Brethren had it right when they named structures like these the “meetinghouse.” It’s a much better name because we are the church!

But here’s the crux of the issue: what would happen if we imagined ourselves more like a food truck, and less like a restaurant? 

Food trucks have some distinct advantages over brick-and-mortar restaurants: most notably, they come to you! Food trucks don’t depend on people finding them so much as they work to find the people, often in collaboration with other food trucks at a food truck park.

How could this be a helpful metaphor for how the church understands it’s mission?

The question might be understood as a matter of how we see ourselves in relation to the rest of the world. What is the right balance between a healthy congregational life in this space and our proclamation and demonstration of the Good News in places where it is needed?

Sent among wolves

Jesus’ instructions to the 70 “sent ones” in Luke 10 teach us that an important aspect of the church’s identity (the people, not the building!!) is that we are sent to create community. We can go all the way back to the very first pages of the Bible to find that reaching toward humanity to create places for people to be in relationship with God is a fundamental aspect of God’s character.

God spoke; the universe came to exist, and people were placed within it.

God called Abram and told him to go from the place he was to a place where God would establish a people.

God sent Moses to Egypt to bring the people out of slavery.

The Holy Spirit equips some to be “apostles, and prophets, and evangelists,” to be at work beyond the borders of the community, engaging people with the gospel.

When we participate in this “sent-ness” of God, we are participating in something that is at the very heart of God’s desire for people. We’re doing the kinds of things and creating the kinds of community that God desires. An important part of our work “in here” is to equip the church to function “out there,” taking the kingdom to the world around us.

“Sent-ness” is closely connected to the servanthood Jesus demonstrated throughout his entire ministry. The same nature of God that is always reaching out to create opportunities to be in relationship with God also exists in the sent-ness of Jesus. Some of the very first generations of Christians sang about Jesus’ servanthood and sent-ness when they sang the hymn that Paul included in Philippians 2. Jesus

did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited but emptied himself…and became obedient to the point of death…so that…every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:6-11).

Urgency

To make his appeal to these sent ones, Jesus finds a metaphor from the world of agriculture: there is an urgency to the harvest. The harvest must be gathered when the crops are ripe, otherwise the opportunity will be lost forever.

When I was in seminary, I worked for Lynette’s uncle Jim on his strawberry farm. Strawberry season in August County, VA ran from May 20 – June 20, and it was an “all hands on deck” enterprise. Other things could wait; the strawberries needed attention. What was interesting were those times throughout the rest of the year when Uncle Jim would need some help tending to things around the farm. We worked diligently on those projects, but the pace was much more relaxed. There was no urgency when there was no harvest.

The church exists for the ultimate benefit of our non-members. But that doesn’t mean that the work will be easy or that those who are sent in the name of the church will be welcomed with open arms. Wolves roam about. Sometimes those wolves harass, threaten, and even harm the sheep. But is that to be a deterrent to us? Is the presence of opposition to the mission of Christ and the church a reason to stay within the protective boundaries of our meetinghouses?

No, it’s not. Almost each year during Advent, we hear Scripture that describes the ultimate destiny of wolves—they are to live in harmony with the sheep. The church has a plan to help the wolves imagine a new relationship with the sheep!

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them (Isaiah 11:6).

Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, Egypt in the early 400’s, said this about the church’s mission as sheep among wolves:

How then does [Jesus] command the holy apostles, who are innocent men and “sheep,” to seek the company of wolves, and go to them of their own will? Is not the danger apparent? Are they not set up as ready prey for their attacks? How can a sheep prevail over a wolf? How can one so peaceful conquer the savageness of beasts of prey? “Yes,” he says, “for they all have me as their Shepherd: small and great, people and princes, teachers and students. I will be with you, help you, and deliver you from all evil. I will tame the savage beasts. I will change wolves into sheep, and I will make the persecutors become the helpers often persecuted. I will make those who wrong my ministers to be sharers in their pious designs. I make and unmake all things, and nothing can resist my will.”

Jesus sends us into the world amongst wolves because the mission of the church is to demonstrate that in God’s kingdom, even those who oppose our kingdom work can come to live in harmony under God’s benevolent Lordship. What a remarkable demonstration of God’s character as one constantly sending and going and creating spaces for relationship, work that continues through Jesus’ servanthood to facilitate those relationships makes room even for those who would oppose those plans!

Hospitality

Fundamentally, when we begin to imagine ourselves as more food truck than restaurant, we might begin to see that our connections to those around us are relational, not transactional. Jesus assumes that sent ones are willing to play the role of guest, not host: to be out and around other people and begin to build relationships where we are invited into other’s lives as guest, not critic.

This is important, because the church’s mission is attempted in a time when people are increasingly unable or unwilling to engage in reasonable relationships. Ours is an age of chronic anxiety and strife. I mention this often because I know that we all see it every day. If we would compare our network of relationships to a brick wall, somedays you can almost see the mortar eroding away, and the tension and fear of collapse that causes, with everyone trying to just hang on to their own little section of the wall for dear life. Too often, the church has been part of that problem, acting as if our role is to go out into the town square and act as critic, instead of showing up with our mortar and a trowel seeking to repair and strengthen our relationships.

Jesus instructs these “sent ones” to trust that as they go, they will receive the gracious hospitality of strangers, and he tells them to be good guests. Be content with what is offered, and minister to those around you.

Think about your neighbors and/or co-workers for a minute. Do you know what they neighbors pray for, and what they celebrate, and what they fear?

The assignment for those who are sent is to create community, care for the physical needs of the people around us, and to announce the gospel of the kingdom.

Food truck theology is an opportunity to really understand how places have importance. Places are important because people live in places. We’re not so far off from this as we might imagine:

Sleep in Heavenly Peace is essentially a food truck—there’s even a truck! People go out from here to work with people who are not part of our congregation, for the benefit of others.

Plawkers get together in a particular place to bring beauty to a neighborhood by picking up trash.

Our young adults have begun regular meetings at Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts.

At our retreat, we talked about having a picnic in a park. A backyard Bible Study wouldn’t be out of the question. 

It is a constant struggle to move away from questions like, “How many people were at church last Sunday?” or “How large was the offering?” These are important questions, because each person we count in attendance is someone who had an encounter with Christ and the church. Each dollar in the offering is a gift toward our mission. Even food trucks need to think about these things.

As we count people and offering, we must constantly be aware of some other questions: “What is God doing in your neighborhood?” “What efforts are there to engage injustice?” “What gifts have you seen being leveraged in the community for the common good?” “What do you love about the neighborhood that you want to see grow?”

These are questions of mission that move us from an inward to an outward focus, from maintenance to mission. They are questions that engage us in the activity of reaching out and creating community, something very close to the heart of God.

[woodworkingpastor]

Tempt -- Matthew 4:1-11 --  First Sunday of Lent, 2023

In preparing my sermon for this morning I noted that I preached this same text last year on the First Sunday of Lent—51 Sundays ago, as it turns out. What encourages me is that after I had again gone through my preparation, I found I had arrived at the same conclusions this year that I did last year: namely, that this passage is not talking about the particular temptations to sin that we face but is asking us if we are prepared to trust God.

Temptations are matters of great significance about which various New Testament writers have important things today. We live in a time where so many addictive things are encouraged openly even as we observe the rising damage done to our physical, mental, and relational health. One need look no farther than the sudden availability of sports gambling, with the ever-present advice on how to find help for gambling addiction, or the mounting evidence of how damaging social media is to our youth (especially our pre-teen and teenage girls) to understand how dangerous this boundary-less path is that we are on.

But this does not change the fact that this is not a text about these types of temptations. The bridge that connects our life experience to the text is that those things that tempt us—in whatever form they come—reveal our commitment to our fundamental identity.

Our identity is tested in the wilderness. Matthew tells us that:

Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished (Matthew 4:1-2).

The desert is one of the more demanding places on earth in which to live. The “desert” moments of our lives—be they literal or (more likely) metaphorical—are the circumstances we face when are at the end of ourselves and are forced to deal with our ultimate limits. If it came right down to it, what would we do to survive? To protect our reputation? To feed our family? To satisfy our lusts or our insecurities?

The identity that we are tempted to betray is that of the church, the set-apart people of God.

This has always been a temptation for God’s people. The story of Jesus’ temptations is in many ways a redoing of the Exodus from Egypt. If you remember your Sunday School lessons, then you will recall the Hebrew people’s slavery in Egypt, and how God sent Moses to demand Pharoah let the people go. 10 plagues later, the people are set free, only to have Pharoah change his mind and pursue them to the banks of the Red Sea. God delivers the people from Pharoah’s army through the Red Sea and on to freedom.

Having been led through the Red Sea and into the desert as God’s chosen, set-apart people destined to be the ones through whom all peoples were reconciled to God, the people immediately face temptation. Would there be enough to eat? Would there be enough to drink? Who will take care of us?

So too, Jesus has emerged through the waters—this time the waters of baptism—having heard from heaven:

This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased (Matthew 3:17).

And now each of us, having emerged from our own waters of baptism, are called to be that set-apart people in our generation; to “Continue the Work of Jesus” as we Brethren like to say.

The call is challenging, because we, too, have to face the difficulties. Will we reject the temptation to tribalism that is rooted deeply within each of us and fanned into a furious fire by the culture wars of our day? Will we live with an open hand extended toward our neighbor with the hope that the possibility of peace and relationship will be more valued more than fear and exclusion. Will we trust that our future will be well, regardless of the latest swing of the stock market? Will the future of our church be strong, even as we note a rising cultural disinterest in the hope of the Gospel?

The Christian season of Lent is an opportunity for spiritual renewal, of walking with Jesus toward the cross. It is a journey that begins in the desert, where we can confront those things that threaten our identity and find healing in the presence of Jesus.

Confronting the tempter

The temptations to turn stones to bread and to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple speak to Jesus’ credibility as the Son of God. “If…” is a terribly accusatory way of asking someone something, because when the question is put to us in that form, the intent is to cast doubt or throw shade. “If” is not so much a question as it is a manipulation of the person to whom it is directed. And even though questions formed in this fashion really say more about the one asking the question than the one to whom they are asked, the temptation to betray our commitments so that we may be proven in the eyes of another is real. How many times have we heard (or asked!) questions that began with if? “If you really loved me…” “If you really cared…”

The temptations the devil hurls at Jesus aren’t intended to question Jesus’ identity; they question Jesus’ allegiance. Will Jesus be a servant who comes to reconcile the last, little, lost, and least, or will Jesus be just one more carnival act that dazzles willing audiences with amazing feats of skill? Will Jesus be a Savior or a showman? Will Jesus introduce people to life in the Kingdom of God, or will he be a hawker of religious goods and spiritual trinkets?

The third temptation is of a different sort, as it reveals that Kingdom work is done on contested ground. We should not overlook the tempter’s statement, “All these I will give…”. They were his to offer because of sin. All things may have been created, “in, through, and for Jesus” (as Paul writes in Colossians 1), but Jesus does not currently have home-field advantage.

Jesus answers each of the tempter’s snares by appealing to Scripture. No tricks, no clever turn of a phrase, just a deep understanding that whatever and whenever temptations come our way, God has been revealed to us both in Scripture and in the person of Jesus. We need appeal nowhere else but to the core of Scripture to find our purpose and our value.

Remaining faithful in the desert

Desert experiences strip us bare and force us to confront our unvarnished selves. They are not inherently bad, for, in the words of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, they teach us that:

the devil is but another name for our impatience. We want bread, we want to force God’s hand to rescue us, we want peace—and we want all this now. But Jesus is our bread, he is our salvation, he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger, idolatry, and war to witness the kingdom that is God’s presence. The Father will have the kingdom present one small act at a time (Matthew, 55).

We see what happens when, in our desert moments, we succumb to impatience and attempt to take matters into our own hands—people get hurt. Over recent months I’ve been following the cover-up of sexual misconduct and abuse by leaders in the Southern Baptist Convention; church leaders (all men) who had documented evidence of wrongdoing by a number of pastors decided that their attempt to preserve the public reputation of the church was more important than protecting abused women in their churches, and so they dismissed the women who bravely told their stories of abuse until the accumulated weight of the stories was too big to continue hiding.

Similarly, each day our communities deal with gun violence that is enabled by allowing virtually unrestricted access to guns, knowing that many of those guns will be purchased legally then handed off illegally to those bent on violence. It’s yet another case where many want something dangerous to be unrestricted and yet want to refuse to connect the dots to the damage done.

Lent is an opportunity to strip away the extraneous aspects of our faith, to leave behind all the ways we are tempted to say, “Jesus and…”. It is an opportunity to cut through all of the “isms” of our day, to reject the opportunities we have to take what we know of Jesus and add to him all the trinkets and wares and ideas and philosophies that appeal to our senses. What we find when we examine these matters is that often what we want the most are really the accoutrements that we have added to make the real thing seem more appealing.

There is no ultimate allegiance of Jesus with worldly things or agencies or institutions. Jesus does not bear the sword. Jesus does not identify with a certain brand of politics. Jesus is not only about social justice. To quote Mennonite scholar Myron Augusburger,

I believe in justice; but I am not a preacher of a gospel of justice, but of the gospel of Christ who calls us to justice…I believe in peace; but I am not a preacher of the gospel of peace, but the gospel of Christ who calls us to peace…We must beware of the ultimate plagiarism, that of borrowing great concepts from Jesus…but not proclaiming the Christ who empowers those concepts…”

As walk with Jesus this Lenten season, the cover art on the bulletin suggests a stripping away of all that is not essential, removing what is unneeded so that what remains can be used for it’s intended purpose, so that we may learn that God is our provider, our protector, and our portion, who is bringing us through the wilderness and on to the Promised Land.

[woodworkingpastor]

Be reconciled to God -- 2 Corinthians 5:20 – 6:10 --  Ash Wednesday 2023

In the Christian classic, Dark Night of the Soul, medieval mystic Christian St. John of the Cross exposes the aspects of our faith that are mere pretense: all the games we play to convince ourselves that we are something other than completely dependent upon the grace of God. We have a bad habit of portraying our faith and actions in the best possible light. Excuse and justification are our native tongue. John of the Cross will have none of this plain, heathen mischief.

Referring to the practice of Christians in monasteries having a confessor—someone with whom they met regularly to confess their sins and seek guidance for faithful living—one example John gives is how the sin of pride becomes a stumbling block:

Many…desire to be the favorites of their confessors and to become intimate with them, as a result of which…they are too much embarrassed to confess their sins nakedly, lest their confessors should think less of them, so they palliate them and make them appear less evil, and thus it is to excuse themselves rather than to accuse themselves that they go to confession (7).

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point. We have a tendency toward spiritual vanity that prevents our honesty about our need for reconciliation with God. It is always easier to believe that someone else’s sin is worse than our own.

Ash Wednesday is both a reminder and a discipline that disavows us of that error. We cannot only evaluate our faith by looking at it from the end when we will be forever united in Christ. Our discipleship is strengthened by remembering where we were and where we are as we have answered Jesus’ call to, “Come, follow me.”

This is Paul’s point in our Scripture reading for today. Paul had a tall task with the Corinthian Christians:

He needed to translate faith into terms persons for whom the Gospel is both foreign language and foreign culture could understand.

He needed to confront their many and obvious sins—behaviors that were considered normal for where they lived. Paul couldn’t appeal to a sense of shame for these actions, because people had no shame about them.

In all of this, Paul refuses to deviate from the message: “Be reconciled to God.” That’s it. Be reconciled to God. Borrowing a term from the legal world, reconciliation begins when persons with seemingly irreconcilable differences arrive at the negotiating table and ends with those persons in agreement that extends to the finest of details on the new terms of relationship.

This is us. Our differences with God were irreconcilable until Jesus became our reconciliation. Our Easter faith begins in earnest on Ash Wednesday.

Ash Wednesday strips away the pretense, the arrogance, and the spiritual laziness with which we examine (or don’t) the life that we share in Christ. It doesn’t cut to the chase with the hallelujahs of Easter Sunday and allow us to rest on the laurels of Jesus’ victory over sin and death. Even as Christ’s work has already been counted to our benefit, Ash Wednesday invites us to move more deeply into the love Jesus has for us and gladly do the work of owning the truth that we are the righteousness of God. Our spiritual practice must contain a healthy dose of humility.

Over the past few weeks, many people have watched a tremendous spiritual renewal/revival that happened at Asbury University in Kentucky. A regular, mid-week chapel service that contained (by the preacher’s own admission) a very mediocre sermon simply didn’t end. People kept worshipping Jesus. The gospel choir came up to sing their closing song and the song continued for days! Lives were changed. People traveled across the country to bear witness and take part.

One word that has been repeatedly used to describe this event was “humility.” People came to worship in humble honesty, trusting that God would receive them, transform them, and walk with them. They came as sinners in need of grace; as faithful disciples wanting to go deeper in their commitment to Christ.

That is our invitation this Ash Wednesday: to come to Jesus in humility; to leave behind all pretense; to repent of the plain heathen mischief that we use to justify ourselves, and that we will be received with love and grace. We cannot avoid the fact that we are dust, and to dust we will return. We can trust in God’s power to make that dust into something beautiful and useful in his Kingdom.

[woodworkingpastor]

I owe the Lord a morning song --  Lamentations 3:21-24 -- Sunday, February 19, 2023

I owe the Lord a morning song!

I want to begin this message by telling you where it will end: the value of a “morning song” is in both the truth it proclaims and in the discipline of proclaiming it.

One of the most delightful experiences I had during Covid came when nursing home restrictions had relaxed enough for me to be able to visit Vivian Prillaman. We talked about a lot of things during that first in-person visit, including Vivian’s description of her Sunday morning devotional practice during that time. Every Sunday morning at 11:00, Vivian would get her Bible, and her hymnal, and would sit down with the bulletin and the sermon manuscript we’d mailed to her, and she would join us in worship. Vivian sang the hymns, recited the litanies and prayers, and read the Scripture and sermon.

Isn’t that a delightful testimony?! It’s one example of someone practicing their faith when they recognize they “owe the Lord a morning song.” Vivian’s example teaches us the value of proclaiming this reality.

Last Sunday, we considered the hymn Abide with me and its recognition that “night” can be a time of great of anxiety and fear. Our Call to Worship today comes from Psalm 27:1 and asks, “Whom shall I fear?” In the dark hours of the night, we might create quite a list.

The truth is, we don’t even need to create a list; Chapman University has already done it for us. Each year researchers survey the American public and they publish the list of things we fear the most. For 2022, the top-5 fears were:

Corrupt government officials;

People I love becoming seriously ill;

Russia using nuclear weapons;

People I love dying;

The U.S. becoming involved in another world war.

But when the night is past, how do we respond in the light of a new day? Are the experiences and anxieties of night the only ones to be considered, or does the light of a new day offer its own perspective?

Many times, that answer is a matter of choice. This is not a choice that goes happily along, whistling past the graveyard, living in denial of the difficulties that are before us. It is a choice that recognizes a fuller understanding of our lives by naming the goodness of God.

The hymn I owe the Lord a morning song help us in this, because its language is broad enough to cover most any circumstance we may encounter. Amos Herr did not write this poem and compose the tune way back in 1890 after tossing and turning all night, wracked with anxiety over some great difficulty. He wrote it one winter Sunday when so much snow had fallen on his Lancaster County, PA property he couldn’t make it to worship. But he felt that snow or no snow, he “owed the Lord a morning song,” for at least the fact that he didn’t “wake up dead”!

Amos Herr recognized the gift of another day, and he asked God to direct his paths. There is a powerful simplicity to these lyrics that point us to the spiritual benefit of singing a morning song, regardless of our circumstances.

A reason to lament

Waking up on a snowy morning is decidedly not the context of Lamentations 3—or any part of the book of Lamentations, for that matter. The Book of Lamentations is a spiritual reflection on the destruction of Jerusalem, and these verses are the only “uplifting” section in the entire book. That is an important point. Even as the poet acknowledges the destruction of Jerusalem and the physical loss of home, property, family, security, and the presence of God, he or she made the definite choice to “owe the Lord a morning song.” The poet refuses to have his or her entire existence defined by the destruction that is visible all around and the absence of God’s active blessing that the destruction represents. Emerging from verse after verse after verse of despair, the poet summons up the courage and the faith to shift gears:

These are words of conviction; a bold statement of faith and trust in God. The poet proclaims, “Even in the midst of despair and judgment, I still have agency. I still have a voice. I still have a choice to remember God’s presence and activity.”

To affirm of God’s loving-kindness

Context matters, doesn’t it? Amos Herr gazed out his window in Lancaster County, PA on a snowy winter morning in 1890 and penned a lovely hymn of gratitude and praise. The poet of Lamentations gazed out their window and saw something that looked like Vicksburg, MS, or Atlanta, GA, or Richmond, VA in the early 1860’s, and penned a long poem of despair with a brief glimmer of hope in the middle. For those who lived through the destruction of those cities during the Civil War, I do wonder if there was any recognition that the destruction that stretched for as far as the eye could see was the outcome of the practice of owning human beings?

There is a popular notion that God’s judgment comes in the form of lightning bolts thrown down from heaven to strike people dead; but the reality is much more frightening—God allows us to realize the consequences of our own unjust, unrighteous actions.

A significant assumption the author of Lamentations brings to this poetry is that the destruction the people had experienced was an indication of God’s judgment. But in the face of that, the poet realizes, at least in a sense, that he “owes the Lord a morning song.”

The poet calls to mind God’s “steadfast love.” This is much more than the words found inside a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card; the concept of God’s steadfast love is one of the major theological concepts of the Old Testament. It is the understanding that God’s love outlasts God’s anger. Even when God’s judgment comes upon us in the form of the consequences of our own actions, even when we feel the wrath of God through the disasters of our own making, even though (as one Biblical scholar says) “wrath is a true word, a right word, sometimes an inevitable word...it need not be the last word.” God’s love outlasts God’s anger, and we can return to God with our morning song and ask God to once again “direct me in [God’s] way” as Amos Herr’s hymn calls us to do.

New mercies

Our “morning song” is not yet complete, though, because the poet of Lamentations can also celebrate that the expression of God’s steadfast love is not a one-time offer; God’s mercies are new every morning. No recycled mercies. No spiritual leftovers from a prior time of God’s blessing. New mercies which appear as God’s warm compassion which goes the second mile, is ready to forgive sin, and is eager to replace judgment with grace.

One of the more fascinating concepts in Old Testament vocabulary is the relationship between the words womb and compassion. The meaning of the word compassion comes from the word womb. It is an unexpected twist of linguistics of how a word that describes something physical—part of a woman’s body—can expand to describe an emotion. But maybe if we stop and think about it for a minute, we realize it’s not so difficult to imagine after all. All we need to do is consider how quickly an expectant mother will form a deep emotional attachment to the child in her womb. From the earliest recognition of pregnancy, compassion is the response to vulnerable new life. It’s one of those times when we understand God from “the lesser to the greater.” If we can understand the fierce love a mother has for her unborn child, how much more does God feel compassion for us, and to allow that compassion to govern relationship with wayward children, extending the opportunity to come back home; but not only to come home but to also begin walking back from the mess we have made of our lives.

I owe the Lord a morning song

Why do I owe the Lord a morning song? Because life is fragile, but God is enough. Whether the anxieties that keep us tossing and turning at night are the kind that are common to us all, or are the accumulation of a lifetime of turning away from God, we can begin again by looking the new day head on, counting on God’s loving-kindness, mercy, and portion to sustain us through the fragility of life. Or to use Amos Herr’s words from the hymn, we can ask God to

I was so blessed by Vivian Prillaman’s testimony the day she shared it with me. She found a way in a complicated set of conditions brought on by life, health, and circumstances to sing a morning song. It was a choice of commendable faithfulness.

She came to that place of faithfulness from a lifetime of doing what we are doing this morning—gathering with the congregation to together sing a morning song. For all the times we find ourselves struggling with matters of life and faith, we can lean into the blessing of the gathered congregation and realize that it takes a congregation to support us and restore us in difficult times. We do this by reciting to one another our litanies and prayers; we do it by proclaiming Scripture and sermon; we sing it to one another in our hymns.

A morning song calls us out of our darkness and difficulty and helps us see that God’s steadfast love and daily new mercies have as more to say about our lives as do our struggles. The value of a “morning song” is in both the truth proclaimed and the commitment to proclaiming it; it is as much a choice as it is an acknowledgement of the truth that God will

[woodworkingpastor]

Abide with me -- Psalm 102 -- Sunday, February 12, 2023

This week was like every other week in that there were many newsworthy events that caught our attention. Some were tragic, others set your teeth on edge. There was one significant event from the world of sports that I call your attention to: Lebron James breaking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA career scoring record.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to achieve something that no one else in the history of the universe has ever done? Did the Guinness Book of World Records fascinate you as much as it did me? There was always one kid in our elementary school class who would use their Scholastic Book Fair money to buy the Guinness Book of World Records. When the books arrived, we’d get together and look at the tallest and shortest people, the person with the longest hair and fingernails (among other things!).

We may never be world-record holders ourselves, but I suspect each of knows something of this. Maybe it comes in the form of learning a new skill or technique in our favorite hobby. For some it might be when choir or bell choir learns a particularly challenging anthem. One for me was when in 2013 I ran my personal best half-marathon—an achievement that eventually came with the realization that for many reasons, I’ll never surpass that time again.

Hear my prayer, O Lord; let my cry come to you.

It is the realization that records will be broken and that inevitably our skill and potential will succumb to the passage of time that I want us to think about today. The uncomfortable but relentless truth that the bright possibilities of daytime become lost in the darkness and uncertainty of the night moves us toward today’s sermon and the themes that the hymn Abide with me confronts.

I must admit that after last weekend’s joy-filled and uplifting retreat, it’s a bit difficult to preach on a challenging topic like this one—I really should talk to the person who schedules the sermon topics! But isn’t life like that? The good and the bad all jumbled up together demanding that we take all of it, regardless of our personal preference.

Abide with me (#653) is a poem written by Henry Lyte, a pastor whose declining health required early retirement from his parish and relocation to another town. It presents a complicated topic; we should always encourage people take care of their health. This does not mean that it is easy to do so, especially when “taking care of myself” means “my world becomes smaller.”

The poetry is brutally honest about Rev. Lyte’s outlook on life at this moment of his life: darkness deepens, helpers fail, comforts flee, earth’s joys dim, change and decay are all I see, etc. Consider verses 1 and 2:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; / the darkness deepens; Lord with me abide. / When other helpers fail and comforts flee, / Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; / earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away; / change and decay in all around I see; / O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

I chose this hymn because I wanted these last two sermons on prayer (which are part of an occasional series that began last October) to illustrate how the hymnal can aid us in our prayer. I was looking for an “evening hymn” for this Sunday and a “morning hymn” for next Sunday. It doesn’t take long, however, to realize that if we limit the definition of “evening” to “the time of day when the sun is setting,” then this hymn might be miscategorized. But we understand “evening” to more broadly refer to “the end of things,” then we begin to see it differently.

Abide with me provides an opportunity to examine our lives—something we may very well be inclined to do at an evening prayer service, either here or at Camp Bethel.  That comes out in several verses of this hymn that are not included in our hymnal:

Come not in terror, as the King of kings, / but kind and good, with healing in Thy wings; / tears for all woes, a heart for every plea. / Come, Friend of sinners, thus abide with me.

Thou on my head in early youth didst smile, / and though rebellious and perverse meanwhile, / thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee. / On to the close, O Lord, abide with me.

And then there is this one that I believe is my favorite—again, not in our hymnal, but included as verse 3 in one listing I found:

Not a brief glance I beg, a passing word, / but as Thou dwell’st with Thy disciples, Lord, / familiar, condescending, patient, free. / Come not to sojourn, but abide with me.

Whether we use this hymn in the evening or at a time when we face the loss of important things, a question comes to mind:  Do we trust God in the night times of our lives?

As profound as the poetry is in this hymn (and it is profound); as beautiful as the tune is (and it is beautiful), the hymn provides no answers. We come to the end of the hymn with exactly the same request we had at the beginning, “Abide with me.”

Night presents many difficulties.

Biblically, there are two broad understandings of night. The first is the Jewish notion of the day beginning at sundown. Viewing the day from this perspective can be reassuring, for it means we start the day by going to bed. Relinquishing control, we trust that God will care for us throughout the vulnerability of the dark.

This is important precisely because the Bible also recognizes that night can be dangerous and uncertain. Recently, I’ve been listening to the podcast The End of All Hope. It’s a serial science-fiction podcast, telling the story of three colleagues who travel from San Diego to New York for a work conference, just at the time Earth is attacked and invaded by aliens. An odd premise, perhaps, but it raises some interesting questions, because as the characters acquire a car and attempt to drive back to California, nighttime presents a question: do they stop and rest, or do they drive in shifts and keep going. Night is dangerous because they can’t see the aliens as well, and they can’t trust that another human might not sneak up on them and try to steal their car.

And while I would assume that none of us are concerned about alien invasions, we know that sometimes the night is filled with anxiety, as our worries spiral more out of control with each toss and turn. The nighttime is often when we confront our deepest fears.

This is the subject of Psalm 102.

Interpreting Psalm 102 is not rocket science, it is human experience. Reading through verses 1-12 we recognize ourselves. And whether these words are honest reflections on some really hard times or the Psalmist wallowing in self-pity—there is room for either interpretation—the Psalmist leaves everything on the table. This is a person being honest about the perceived absence of God. Psalm 102 grants permission to get our complaints out in the open, reminding us to interrogate our own emotions to make sure they’re not leading us astray.

But unlike the hymn Abide with me which leaves the invitation to God unanswered, Psalm 102 arrives at a firm conclusion: Whatever the future looks like, that future is in God’s hands. We can trust that God is with us; we can move forward into the future trusting Jesus’ words from the end of Matthew

And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20).

The struggle with spiritual night and the silence of God is one that has troubled Christians for generations. The reality that God is trustworthy and has not abandoned us has been an important spiritual lesson for those same generations.

Come be my light is the controversial spiritual biography of Mother Teresa; controversial because she intended her letters to be destroyed, not published. When the book was published, the world learned that as a young woman, Teresa heard God’s call to serve in India. After that, she never heard from God again. Pope Benedict said of her, “all believers know about the silence of God.”

The Psalmist and others have learned that whatever the future holds, the future is in God’s hands. For while the Psalmist here can say

Hear my prayer, O LORD; let my cry come to you. Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress. (Psalm 102:1)

The Psalmist can also say

But you, O LORD, are enthroned forever; your name endures to all generations (Psalm 102:12). 

Writing in 1874, British pastor Charles Spurgeon wrote

Men will forget me, but as for thee, O God, the constant tokens of thy presence will keep the race of man in mind of thee from age to age. What God is now he always will be, that which our forefathers told us of the Lord we find to be true at this present time, and what our experience enables us to record will be confirmed by our children and their children’s children. All things else are vanishing like smoke, and withering like grass, but over all the one eternal, immutable light shines on, and will shine on when all these shadows have declined into nothingness (The Treasury of David, v. 4, p. 422).

Reflecting on this same Psalm about 1500 years earlier than this, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote

When the time came for God to show mercy, the Lamb came. What kind of Lamb is it whom the wolves fear? What kind of Lamb is it who, though killed, kills the lion? For the devil has been called a lion, going about and roaring, seeking someone to devour; by the Lamb’s blood the lion has been conquered (ACCS, v. 8, p. 210).

In many ways, Psalm 102 describes life and faith in a way not unlike last weekend’s talk about passing the baton. The lap we are running may not be the final lap of the race. But it is a lap of the race. And if it’s not the final lap, then we know that there is someone at the start/finish line, waiting for the baton to be passed to them so they can begin their portion of the race. And we know that there is some One at the finish line, waiting to welcome us home. In the darkness of the night, our job is to continue reaching out to God, asking God to “abide with me.” In the darkness of the night, we continue to affirm our faith, continue to reach out to God, believing that

The children of your servants shall live secure; their offspring shall be established in your presence (Psalm 102:28).

[woodworkingpastor]

Life is good…again! -- Psalm 93; Philemon -- Sunday, January 29, 2023

Two Sundays ago, our worship focus was on praying when all is well, symbolized by the words “good” and “ordinary.” Last Sunday, we considered praying when nothing is well, reflecting on the Coronavirus and tragedies that come upon us all of a sudden.

Today, we turn our attention to those times when all is well again.

Think with me for a minute about the beach. After some of the weather this week, sitting in a beach chair reading a good book while listening to the rhythmic sound of waves going in and out as you bask in the warm sun sounds magnificent!

Magnificent, that is, until you get a grain of sand in your eye. And “just like that,” something that is a source of joy and relaxation becomes an irritant. All sense of relaxation stops as your body activates its defense mechanism to expel the grain of sand.

But what that same grain of sand ends up inside an oyster? The sand is an irritant to the oyster, too, but the oyster activates an entirely different defense mechanism. The oyster protects itself by encasing the sand with layers of nacre, a process that can go on for years. The oyster responds to the irritant by turning it into something beautiful.

How do we respond to irritants? Do we try to get rid of them? Or do we turn them into something beautiful?

One of the real challenges with the Psalms is that because they are so experiential, we don’t know what to do with many of them until we can identify a similar experience. We also bring a reluctance to apply spiritual language to our struggles; preferring to deflect it with statements like, “I know things are bad, but so many people have it worse.” Once we’re there, though, the Psalms teach us how to pray in many different circumstances. Sometimes all is well. Other times nothing is well.

There’s a third season of life we want to look at today—and interestingly, some of the testimonies you shared last Sunday anticipated this third season. It’s those times when you’ve been through a difficult season of life and have emerged on the other side of the irritation to find life and health and spiritual strength, but with a reshaped outlook on life. The tears you cried in the face of the irritation didn’t expel the irritant, they transformed it.

These are the so-called “Prayers of Reorientation.” In many ways, they are summed up by the hymn Amazing Grace. What does it mean to be a congregation that sings, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see”? We might think about what it means for us to sing it; but we might also think about what it means to let someone else sing it, especially when we remember that person when they were lost and blind.

Psalm 93 (included as the Call to Worship) is an affirmation that what God has promised will come to pass, even when we cannot see it. At its core, it is an affirmation that our faith itself is a “prayer of reorientation.” Whether that reorientation comes from leaving behind a life of sin or by emerging from the depths to find hope, our prayer of reorientation is a song of praise to God when we have learned anew what God is doing in our lives.

How does a congregation of different kinds of people at different places in their spiritual journey share words like those found in Psalm 93 with spiritual integrity?

Philemon’s irritant

Paul’s letter to Philemon illustrates the choice we have when life offers us an irritant. This short letter doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves, mostly because it’s too hard. The letter is a primer in basic Christianity: when we are confronted by an irritant, will we be an eyeball or an oyster beautiful?

For me, part of Philemon’s appeal is unpacking the backstory—how did events end up with Paul charging Philemon to “welcome [Onesimus] as you would welcome me”? Wonderfully, there are clues:

Philemon and Apphia (likely either Philemon’s wife or sister) have a church that meets in their home. This and the fact that they have at least one slave suggests a certain amount of wealth. Perhaps more importantly, in Roman culture, their entire household would have been present—a group that included any slaves.

Prior to this letter, Philemon’s slave Onesimus ran away, and seems to have stolen some money before he left. Both actions are against the law, and the death penalty is not out of the question. And regardless of whether he regularly attended worship in Philemon’s home, Onesimus not yet a believer.

Somehow—we’ll just say “by the grace of God” because we really don’t know—Onesimus ends up with Paul, and Paul leads him to faith in Jesus. And now Paul has an interesting situation on his hands:  On the one hand, he is harboring a fugitive. But when Paul looks at Onesimus, he doesn’t see a fugitive; he sees a brother in Christ. This “new orientation” has changed the situation. You see, Paul has already dealt with his irritant! The grain of sand in Paul’s eye came on the Damascus Road, when the risen Christ confronted him and told him he was doing everything wrong. Paul responded to that irritant by making a pearl, accepting the invitation to missionary service. From this position of reorientation, Paul looks at himself, and at Onesimus, and at Philemon and he sees things differently. He sees that because they are all “in Christ” the old ways of relating to one another no longer apply. The Roman culture had its opinions on how Onesimus should be treated. Philemon and Apphia’s neighbors and colleagues and business associates had their opinions on how Onesimus should be treated. For Paul, none of that matters.

But on the other hand, Paul is in prison and he cannot be sure how Philemon will respond. There is a chance that Philemon will respond to the irritation Onesimus has caused as if it’s a grain of sand in his eye.

Paul sends Onesimus back home, and asks Philemon to receive him

no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother (v. 16).

Paul asks him to do something radical—to change his mind in light of his new life in Christ!

Earlier in the letter, Paul says something very intriguing. He says to Philemon,

I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ (v.6).

That phrase, “the sharing of your faith” is what is interesting, because it’s a phrase we use, too. When we use it, we generally mean telling someone about Jesus so that they might come to faith. Other times we might use the phrase to describe ways we reach out to the community, like with our bed build yesterday. Those are both fine uses of the phrase, they’re just not what Paul means here.

Paul is setting Philemon up. He wants Philemon to construct a church where he and Onesimus and everyone else in this congregation could joyfully recite Scripture like Psalm 93 together or could sing hymns like Amazing Grace together—scripture and hymns that affirm what God is doing in our lives, even if it’s not yet visible, even if no one else believes it. Paul wants Philemon to look at Onesimus and see a brother in Christ, not a runaway slave.

That’s likely to be hard for Philemon because his colleagues in Colossae have a vested interest in keeping order in society. If maintaining good social order is your goal, then runaway slaves are a very significant irritant.

Somewhere along the way, the church got a bit confused about its purpose. There have been many times when church folk have acted as act as if the role of religion is to preserve what is good and decent and moral in society. But what if the church isn’t called to make people “good”? What if the church is called to make people “other.” In another place in the New Testament, the apostle Peter would write to his congregation and say

you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light (1 Peter 2:9).

That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Isn’t it great to think about how much God loves us! The challenge comes, though, just two verses later when Peter says,

Beloved, I urge you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the desires of the flesh that wage war against the soul (1 Peter 2:11).

“Aliens and exiles? What do you mean? I’m from here.” That doesn’t feel so good. But it is the consequence of being God’s own people. We’re not called to be “good,” we’re called to be “other.”

This is the grain of sand in Philemon’s eye. His understanding of what is “good” (following the laws of the land) meant that what Onesimus did was “bad” (a slave who is both fugitive and thief). And from a former way of thinking of things it’s all true. But this isn’t a prayer of orientation; it’s a prayer of reorientation. Paul’s point is that because Philemon is in Christ, the old ways of thinking are no longer sufficient to make sense of your circumstances. Let the irritant turn into a pearl, Philemon; welcome Onesimus home as a brother and see what beautiful thing you will create.

I ran across a sermon clip from pastor Zach Lambert on Twitter this week, and he says something I found helpful:

I grew up hearing so much about what a good Christian was supposed to do each day—the boxes I was supposed to check. But I heard almost nothing about how a follower of Jesus was supposed to show up in the world; it was all about practice and it was not much about posture.

What I’ve come to understand is that are practices are pointless if our posture isn’t Christlike. Things like prayer, Bible reading, going to church, giving, etc.—it isn’t long before we get tired of them, or we even grow resentful of them, or we just abandon them altogether. And I’m convinced we do this because we’ve too often made Christianity a list rather than a lifestyle. Our practices our pointless if our posture isn’t Christlike. You can pray before every meal, even when you’re out at a restaurant and still be a jerk to the waitstaff. You can read your Bible every morning and then get in your car and go to work and exploit people. You can evangelize on the street corners with big signs and megaphones while completely ignoring the people sleeping beneath the overpass ten feet away. Without a Christlike posture, our practices don’t matter.

Prayers of a New Orientation

Our new orientation of life and faith is the reason we emphasize the great theological truths of our faith. Each year we celebrate Advent and Christmas with magnificent decorations and hymns and worship services, because we understand that Jesus’ Incarnation is a fundamental aspect of our faith. We seek to have in us

the same mind as was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

Each year, we celebrate Lent and Easter with great purpose and intention and care, because we understand that Jesus’ Resurrection is a fundamental aspect of our faith. We seek to worship Jesus

who humbled himself, and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

As we acknowledge these great truths of the faith, we reject a theology that offers us a Jesus to worship without a neighbor to love. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of celebrating our faith but viewing our neighbors as an irritant. And maybe they are an irritant, and maybe that’s the point. Instead of viewing that irritant and longing to go back, maybe we should trust that the Holy Spirit is pulling us forward, creating something beautiful where former slaves and their wealthy patrons are transformed into something more than good, something that is “other” and brings glory to God.

[woodworkingpastor]

Great Prayers of the Church -- Nothing is Well -- Psalm 13 -- January 22, 2023

How do we pray when life is terrible and God is nowhere to be found?

Last Sunday, I asked you to keep two words in mind throughout the sermon: good and ordinary. Our purpose was to think about what it means to pray in the ordinary times of life when “all is well.”

Today I want us to think about those times in our lives where it seems “nothing is well.” I say this knowing that “those times” could be “right now.” And so instead of holding two words in mind this morning, I want to give you to images to consider: Is it important that a sermon on how to pray when nothing is well be “wrapped up in a bow” so you can leave here with a comforting answer? Or is it enough for me to say, “I’m not sure what the way forward is right now for your situation, but here’s a pop bottle for you to bust up against the back wall of the Sunday School wing to work out your anguish?

I offer this light-hearted entry into a serious matter because it is important that we talk about how we sustain our faith in those times when it feels like God has abandoned us, or when all that we thought was familiar and true seems unfamiliar and false, or when old ways of being the church no longer seem to work. I raise the issue because you talk about these things with me all the time.

It might be that one of the biggest challenges with our living right now has been the perceived loss of control over our lives, and the seeming inability of those things that brought meaning to our lives to function in a helpful way. Covid has clearly been a huge part of why that is, whether the issue is people we know and love getting sick and/or dying, or just the impact it has had on the structures of society.

But that’s not the only thing. The response to Damar Hamlin’s injury has been both touching and fascinating to watch. Thankfully, he is beginning to move forward with his life, even though it is not yet clear what that future holds, at least as it concerns his NFL career.

It has been fascinating to see how people responded to his near-death. It seemed everyone was talking about it, whether they watch football or not. In the loss of control, one thing people found they could do was donate to his charity: to date, $8.6 million was donated to a charity he’d been hoping to raise $2,500 for!

The morning after the game, sports commentator Nick Wright offered up a very honest assessment of people’s collective feelings about a tragic situation that touched our fear about not being in control of our lives.

In the absence of answers, into the uncertain fear of not being in control of our lives, Nick Wright describes how we respond to situations like these. What do we do? Who do we blame? Where do we go to complain? This is the subject of Psalm 13. How do we respond when tragedy or other profound difficulty impacts our life and not only are there no answers, God is nowhere to be found?

Psalm 13 and the gift of lament

Psalm 13 gives us permission to be honest with our experiences. The Psalm begins with five questions—four of which begin with “How long?”—that seem to increase in intensity as the Psalm progresses. Reading these verses repeatedly, they might start to sound like the questions that swirl in our own minds as we toss and turn in our beds late in the nighttime hours, or as someone starts to give expression to their concerns and becomes upset to the point of becoming hysterical the longer they talk.

It is entirely possible that part of the Psalmists anguish concerns the seeming absence of God, a condition that the Psalmist would likely interpret as God’s anger. If the Psalmist was familiar with their Bible (our Old Testament) this is likely how they interpreted the situation. Some have speculated that Psalm 13 was written by King David after his sin against Bathsheba escalated and nearly brought down his entire kingdom.

But this isn’t necessarily the case.

One of the real problems with Covid has been the impact on congregational life. Somehow our relationships and our commitments got weakened a bit, and we’re finding that some old, familiar programs and ministries and organizations that have enriched our lives in numerous ways are near the verge of collapse.

Society feels this way as well. Basic things like finding employees and getting your mail delivered on time feels more complicated than it once did.

Maybe the struggle comes from a challenging medical diagnosis, or a failing relationship. Maybe it comes from a business or educational failure. You need to get in touch with your own “Psalm 13 circumstance.” Whatever it are, I do sometimes wonder if our biggest frustration is simply the loss of control. That’s what Nick Wright describes in the video clip. All the things that people got angry at or pointed to as possible solutions were just different ways of trying to make sense of an extremely dangerous and frightening event and in so doing, regain a sense of control over their lives.

But what if there is no control to be found?

That is when we might be tempted to reach for the pop bottle. Verses 3-4 are our permission to do that. For all of the glorious hope we have of an eternity secure in the presence of Jesus, the Bible is familiar with the language of lament. We don’t have to pretend that the security of our future renders us impervious to the pains of the present.

Somewhere along the way, we became influenced by the idea that admitting failures, recognizing past sins or mistakes was somehow a sign of unfaithfulness. I suspect it is because we live in a culture that only values greatness and success and has very little capacity for honest reflection on its shortcomings and failures. How are we to give honest expression to the unexplainable silence of God in the midst of life’s tragedies if admitting doubts is interpreted as unfaithfulness.

You might remember that last Sunday I admitted to feeling a bit guilty about talking about situations that are “only” good. How do we talk about “good” in a society that only values “great”? If we have trouble talking about “good” then how can we expect to talk about “terrible”?

Psalm 13 preserves in Scripture angry, heartsick, frustrated children of God raging into the silence demanding an answer and a way out.

What the Psalm doesn’t do, however, is leave us there. That’s partly why I asked you at the beginning to consider if you needed the sermon to give a solid explanation as to why God seems silent at times or if it would be enough to hand you a pop bottle and say, “I don’t know the answer, but I do know it’s ok to be honest.” Psalm 13 doesn’t answer that question for us, but it does give us something to hold on to.

The Psalmist’s complaint of “How long?” suggests that time is the problem—the silence, the suffering, the uncertainty, or whatever it is was tolerable for a while, but that line got crossed somewhere in the past, and now the sheer length of time for this season of life has become the problem. Time has become our enemy.

Verses 5-6 remind us that time has also been our friend. God has worked for long stretches on our behalf, and this counts too! It teaches us that doubt plants its feet in hope. Our hope is not dependent on our skills or the latest leadership models. Our hope is not found raging about this or that or the other supposed problems to what is before us. Our hope is in the Spirit of Jesus who is alive and working in this moment, even if we can’t see it. Sometimes God’s silence is due to our having outgrown the explanations we’ve known for so long. Sometimes we can’t make sense of our current situation because what we know—or the pieces we can control—are inadequate answers for what we are facing. God’s seeming silence is an invitation to growth.

The medieval Christian writer John of the Cross reminds us of this in his book The Dark Night of the Soul. Sometimes the seeming absence of God is the inadequacy of the way we have been pursuing God. Groping through the absence strengthens us for what is to come.

John of the Cross teaches us that:

It is well for those who find themselves in this condition to take comfort, to persevere in patience and to be in no wise afflicted. Let them trust in God, who abandons not those that seek him with a simple and right heart, and will not fail to give them what is needful for the road, until He bring them the clear and pure light of love.

Psalm 13 is an invitation for us to hang on, to reach out to God from wherever we are.

Do we know the one who invites us to reach out?

Nick Wright had a more to say on the morning after Damar Hamlin’s injury. After expressing his frustrations with all the bad answers people were coming up with to explain the unexplainable, he confesses some of his own frustrations at not having anyone to reach out to.

Compare that response with that from Dan Orlovsky, another sportscaster who is also a Christian—someone who does know where to turn.

His prayer is not particularly eloquent, but Psalm 13 prayers are not expected to be. It is a prayer that has planted its feet on hope and reaches out from the painful unknown.

When nothing is well, Psalm 13 gives us permission to question and rage, and an invitation to reach out to God.

As you consider your own circumstances, what image describes you this morning? Has thinking about Psalm 13 given you an answer—even if it’s not so clear cut as a gift-wrapped package—or are you ready to reach for that pop bottle and express your frustrations?

[woodworkingpastor]

Great Prayers of the Church --  Prayers of Orientation: All is Well -- Psalm 133 -- January 15, 2023

It will be helpful if you will keep in mind two words this morning:  

But first, a story.

I remember the moment distinctly. It was the Friday before Thanksgiving in probably 1997 or 1998. I was on Grace Chapel Road just south of Harrisonburg on my way to Dayton Church of the Brethren, where I was youth pastor. As I was driving, a sense joyful anticipation for the approaching family gatherings, church services, and traditions related to Thanksgiving and Advent and Christmas washed over for me with an intensity that it never quite had before.

It’s not that I hadn’t enjoyed these things in the past; I’ve always looked forward to family gatherings. But at that moment, a delightful wave of anticipation rolled over me in a way it never had before. All was well, and I was looking forward to the coming weeks with great anticipation.

That appreciation of the holiday season has only grown in the years since then. When we moved to Roanoke, I began running in the Star City Half-Marathon on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Training for this race began in earnest in the heat of late August and early September. As the years went by and the race came around again, I came to enjoy the rhythm of the late summer heat becoming colorful leaves falling upon the streets, as August’s heat became November’s chill and layers of clothes were added to compensate for falling temperatures.

All of this has served to make fall my favorite season of the year.

What also happened, though, was I began to dread the approach of January, February, and March. It was the kind of dread that was always worse in anticipation than reality. But because there was so much to look forward to from September through Christmas, the ordinariness of winter seemed completely uninspiring.

What I finally realized is that there is nothing wrong with these winter months. They’re just January, February, and March, and the fact that they don’t contain as many significant traditions doesn’t mean that life isn’t good. Living in these ordinary days is an opportunity to learn to find value in the ordinary, to recognize that just because we are in a season of life that doesn’t deliver the extraordinary, there are still so many ways in which life is good and we can give thanks for what we have. The ordinary seasons of life can become a rich source of inspiration for prayer.

That is what I want us to think about today: what does prayer look like in the ordinary seasons of life—times when everything is fine, there are no significant crises or difficulties in our lives, and things are just more or less going along in the day-to-day rhythms of living. How do we pray the ordinary?

The significance of Psalm 133

Psalm 133 provides an example of this with its opening statement:

If anything can be remarkable for being ordinary, Psalm 133 seems like it could be it. For all the topics we find in the 150 Psalms—from singing God’s praises with loud instruments to loudly complaining about the unrighteous prospering and everything in between—Psalm 133 makes only one affirmation: unity is good and pleasant. Of all the things the Psalmist might have chosen to write about, the author lifts up unity.

Let’s follow the Psalmist’s lead and reflect on the goodness of unity as a motivation for our prayers. Where might we begin? Possibly by focusing on all that is good in our lives. Our church board did this about a year and a half ago as we were making our first attempt to return to some sort of post-Covid normalcy. We set aside time to name all we had experienced during Covid that was good. I was amazed at how much there was to say. We certainly didn’t ignore the bad; what we did have was a great conversation about all the good things that happened in our church.

We should never underestimate the important interior work of prayer, where prayer becomes a means of reorienting our lives around the things God is interested in. Psalm 133 helps us in that, pointing us to the therapeutic value of naming what is good. Naming those areas of life which are good literally reframes out outlook and attitude. How often is it that we come home from work and complain about all the things we are frustrated with? How often is it that time spent on social media makes us angry at people we’ll never meet or situations over which we have little control? All of those things are there, and they should be dealt with. But negativity can be addictive. Naming what is good is not an invitation to stick our heads in the sand and ignore what is bad, it is an opportunity to rewire our brains and our spirits with a fuller view of life.

When it comes to seasons of the year, I still prefer September and October to January and February. But hiking is often more enjoyable in January than in September—and it’s certainly better than July! All things being equal, I would rather hike on a day when I’m cold at the beginning of the trail than when I’m sweating profusely at the end of the trail.

Now that Christmas is past us, what if we adopted the spiritual practice of daily naming five things in our lives which are good? Leave off the things that are great. Hold off on the things that are bad. In the ordinariness of your life, in those places where you can truly sit back and say, “You know, all is well” what are the things that are good?

Is unity ordinary?

From there, we might move to prayer about unity—not how we would have unity if other people would simply do things my way, but how unity might be achieved by acknowledging our own shortcomings.

One author who writes about this is Thomas à Kempis. His book, The Imitation of Christ, is one of the classics of Christian spirituality. Written sometime prior to the year 1470, the book describes the spiritual disciplines necessary for life together in a monastery. I enjoy reading these spiritual classics because they help me realize that people are people, regardless of time or place. For all the problems that smartphones and social media create—and they create plenty—people were hard to get along with in 1470 in all the same ways they can be hard to get along with in 2023! Living together in unity is not automatic—even for people who choose to withdraw from the temptations of public life to pursue Christ behind the gates of the monastery!

Thomas à Kempis writes about that; and in one significant passage he offers this counsel:

Take pains to be patient in bearing the faults and weaknesses of others, for you too have many flaws that others must put up with. If you cannot make yourself as you would like to be, how can you expect to have another person entirely to your liking? We would willingly have others be perfect, and yet we fail to correct our own faults. We want others to be strictly corrected, and yet we are unwilling to be corrected ourselves. (Section 1, Chapter 17).

Wow! Is anyone else feeling a bit offended?! Thomas à Kempis directs our attention back to prayer as necessary interior work to refine our own lives. It doesn’t mean that we always ignore hurtful things others do; this is not an invitation to be a doormat. Jesus tells us

If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone (Matthew 18:15).

It does mean that there are a certain number of things that we ought to overlook in another person, and we might have to pray for the grace to do so. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount,

first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye (Matthew 7:5).

Praying the ordinary

When it comes to congregational prayer, I would never want to take the “Joys and Concerns” out of the worship service. That does not stop me from wondering, though, how we might benefit from occasionally using that time to name and pray the ordinary. That’s what we’re going to do today. The offertory serves a dual purpose this morning: we will receive our offerings. But I want you to use the opportunity to ponder what is good in your life. How do you answer these questions:

[woodworkingpastor]

Grief -- Psalm 88:6-7 -- Blue Christmas Remembrance Service -- 5th Avenue Presbyterian Church -- December 21, 2022

One of the greatest promises in all of Scripture is that if you do good, you will be rewarded, and if you do bad, you will be punished. This is no small thing in Scripture. It is one of the most significant truths of the Bible, one that you can quote chapter and verse upon. We teach our children various forms of this truth, encouraging them to work hard, to be kind, to show up on time and do a full day’s work, and to stay out of trouble. We do this because we have found that life generally goes better when we live this way.

One of the great surprises of in all of Scripture is how much space is given to people wrestling with God when life does not work out this way. This, too, is no small thing in Scripture. It, too, is one of the most significant truths of the Bible, one that you can quote chapter and verse upon. It is a truth represented in Psalm 88. We find that the Bible to be very knowledgeable about what happens in the depths, the place where the Psalmist finds him or herself.

The depths are exactly what we think they are. The Bible presents them as the bottom of a body of water where we have lost any sense of control over our lives. There is nothing that we can reach for to find security; no stable place that we can touch with the tips of our toes that suggests a safe place upon which we might stand. The darkness of the depths precludes our being able to discern up, down, left, or right as the currents push us to and fro.

It may be that if we were the ones drowning in the literal depths, we might imagine someone throwing us a rope or a life jacket. But we are often alone in the depths of suffering, abandoned by friends who don’t know how to respond—so not only do they say nothing (which is often helpful), they end up staying away (which is often unhelpful).  

The gift of Psalm 88—if we have eyes to see and ears to hear (which, in our grief, we may not)—is that the Psalmist is not silent. Psalm 88 is an embarrassment to those who insist that faithful life in Christ will render us free from grief, sorrow, or depression. For however abandoned the Psalmist feels in these verses—and they feel mightily abandoned—the fact that the Psalmist continues to cry out to God is itself an indication that they have not given up all hope. The Psalm offers no explanation on why they are suffering. It offers no speculation on why God is silent. Psalm 88 simply gives us a report on what life is like in the depths of grief and the perceived absence of God. The sky might be empty. The prayers might be bouncing off the ceiling. Yet the Psalmist prays on.

This is not polite prayer. It is brutally honest prayer. As Walter Bruggeman says, Psalm 88 contains words that are “not to be used frequently, but for the limit experiences when words must be honest and not claim too much.” (The Message of the Psalms, 78).

It is hard to hear truth when we are in the depths of grief. On this blue Christmas the lifeline I have for you is that the Bible is familiar with grief. When “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us,” that Word understood human suffering. God is with you.

I want to conclude with a story that might seem at first glance to trivialize grief. It’s a story about grief set in the world of Winnie the Pooh.  Like the best stories, it tells the truth in a way that we can hold on to, even in grief.

It occurred to Pooh and Piglet that they hadn’t heard from Eeyore for several days, so they put on their hats and coats and trotted across the Hundred Acre Wood to Eeyore’s stick house. Inside the house was Eeyore.

“Hello Eeyore,” said Pooh.

“Hello Pooh. Hello Piglet,” said Eeyore, in a glum sounding voice.

“We just thought we’d check in on you,” said Piglet, “because we hadn’t heard from you, and so we wanted to know if you were okay.”

Eeyore was silent for a moment. “Am I okay?” he asked, eventually. “Well, I don’t know, to be honest. Are any of us really okay? That’s what I ask myself. All I can tell you, Pooh and Piglet, is that right now I feel really rather sad, and alone, and not much fun to be around at all. Which is why I haven’t bothered you. Because you wouldn’t want to waste your time hanging out with someone who is sad, and alone, and not much fun to be around at all, would you now.”

Pooh looked at Piglet, and Piglet looked at Pooh, and they both sat down, one on either side of Eeyore in his stick house.

Eeyore looked at them in surprise. “What are you doing?”

“We’re sitting here with you,” said Pooh, “because we are your friends. And true friends are there for you, even if you’re feeling sad, or alone, or not much fun to be around at all. And so here we are.”

“Oh,” said Eeyore. “Oh.” And the three of them sat there in silence, and while Pooh and Piglet said nothing at all; somehow, almost imperceptibly, Eeyore started to feel a very tiny little bit better, because Pooh and Piglet were there.

[woodworkingpastor]

A Cornerstone of Love -- 1 Peter 2:4-10 -- Fourth Sunday of Advent -- December 18, 2022

Today’s Chrismon may be the most uninteresting one of the group: it’s a block with more Greek letters, not unlike those alphabet blocks we played with as children! But just as those alphabet blocks have an age-appropriate educational value, so too does this Chrismon! This Chrismon symbolizes a cornerstone, and the various combinations of letters are all Greek abbreviations for “Jesus” or “Jesus Christ.” We also have another occurrence of the fish symbol, as well as an anchor. Every aspect of this Chrismon is a reminder that we find our purpose in the secure foundation of Jesus Christ.

The cornerstone metaphor is a significant choice by the various New Testament writers who use it. For much of human history, a perfect cornerstone was essential for securing a building’s foundation. The cornerstone defined the significant dimensions of what was to be built. Because of that, the choice and shape of a cornerstone was critical for the security of the entire building.

Cornerstones are much less important in modern construction, and instead fill a symbolic or aesthetic purpose. Our own church has several cornerstones that indicate when various parts of the building were constructed. In other places, you might find cornerstones with the name or seal of the government agency or business engraved into them. Sometimes cornerstones are time capsules—including the cornerstone at Central Church of the Brethren.

The importance of a strong spiritual foundation is made clear throughout the New Testament, and Peter is no different. He wants his congregation to know that their spiritual foundation is determined by Jesus, the cornerstone of their faith. In thinking about Peter’s message, it is important to try to remember how insignificant Christianity was in these years, and what it must have sounded like to write to a group of people probably meeting in someone’s home that the faith that shaped their lives was the means through which all persons could be redeemed.

But that’s Peter’s message. Their Messiah had been rejected and crucified—and yet he is the one who is a chosen and precious cornerstone. Their Messiah whom they proclaim risen from the dead is the living cornerstone. Jesus is the one through whom they are being built into a spiritual structure to proclaim the mighty acts of God. It is through them that the world will come to know of Jesus.

It had to sound a bit far-fetched in their day. Honestly, it sounds a bit far-fetched in ours as well, especially to those who approach faith as one more consumer choice where we are free to pick that which offers the most comfortable set of spiritual goods and services. Peter doesn’t offer that option, because it’s not a foundation worth building upon. He is also not here offering his congregation an invitation to “come and be saved;” he is offering them an opportunity to be included in the reconciliation of the whole world. His entire point is a long list of metaphors that tell them they are being made into something—everything from a spiritual house to a chosen race to a royal priesthood to a holy nation. We—the church built on the foundation of Christ—are the means through which the world will come to know Jesus.

Our theme for the Fourth Sunday of Advent is “love”, and you might have noticed that the word love isn’t mentioned a single time in this passage. But the inference is there. The church is a network of love where people come to know the One who loves best of all.

It may be that one of the greatest opportunities presented to the church is to offer an alternative to the loneliness of our times. Too many of our relationships were becoming virtual before the pandemic forced us learn how to relate through a screen. Loneliness is becoming epidemic.

A recent survey on this topic indicates the number of people with only three or fewer close friends doubled between 1990 and 2021; while the number of people reporting no close friends increased by a factor of four. Loneliness’ impact on our well-being is equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

One of the great gifts the church offers people are deep relationships defined by love. Throughout the Gospels, people consistently came to Jesus and found that there was plenty of room to learn and grow and change. That change isn’t necessarily easy, but it is possible. People with nothing found Jesus to be the safest place in the world.

We are a spiritual house built on the cornerstone of Jesus, offering a kind of love that points people to the One who loves them best of all.

[woodworkingpastor]

Catching Joy -- Matthew 1:18-25 -- Third Sunday of Advent -- December 11, 2022

Today’s worship theme contains the most unlikely combination of emphases we’ll encounter this Advent season—each of them significant on their own, but a combination that is interesting (in the best possible way!).

Earlier, Trenton and Kristin lit the candle for the third Sunday of Advent, which calls us to consider the joy we have in our faith. This is the primary theme of our worship today, as I have given the sermon the title, “Catching Joy.”

There is the Chrismon symbol of the fish with the letters ICQUS. This is the Greek word for “fish,” which early Christians turned into an acronym meaning Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. The fish is a convenient symbol because of the Gospel account of the calling of the disciples to be fishers of people. There are a number of similar images on the tree today; as before I encourage you to come find them. You might also check the car in front of you the next time you are at a stoplight; the fish symbol is still out there!

Our Gospel reading reminds us of Jesus’ birth announcement to Joseph, someone who might be a bit overlooked in our nativity and Christmas celebrations, but who was instrumental to the process of Jesus coming into the world!

Perhaps we would do well to consider these pieces as ingredients for a recipe: when we mix them together, how will we end up with joy? Where is the joy in this passage?

Searching for Joy

Maybe a reminder of how the Gospel writers approached their portrayals of Jesus will be helpful in our search for joy. Christmas pageants and live nativities typically present a mash-up of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth. But when we look at them one at a time, we might remember that:

Luke offers what I would call a “biblical” account of Jesus’ birth; it is biblical in the sense that Luke takes care to connect the dots from the events of Jesus’ birth to both the promises and prophetic challenges in the Old Testament, reminding us that God’s intent is to put the world to rights.

John provides more of a “theological” explanation of Jesus’ birth. John seems to be writing to the Roman world around him, and the connections he wants to make are to those steeped in Greek and Roman philosophy and culture. In John we learn that the divine Logos takes on human flesh. “The Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Matthew offers a “biological” and “genealogical” understanding of Jesus’ birth. Like Luke, Matthew wants his audience to know how God’s work in Jesus is connected to what God had done in the past. To do that, Matthew makes clear that God has chosen to work through human processes—genealogies and childbirth are how Matthew roots his Gospel.

It is a significant source of joy that the story of God has always included people. You might say, “Well, of course it would! Who else—or what else—would God be interested in?” That’s not my point. My point is that we are not an afterthought in God’s story. We are the main characters. It’s not as if we auditioned before God for some kind of part in the play, didn’t make the cut, and then was told, “Well, we could always use another person in the chorus.” Or when we see the closing credits of life’s movie on the big screen in the kingdom of God, I don’t think any of us will find ourselves listed as “Woman #4” or “Bellhop.” We will be named for our role in the story!

God’s story has always included people. If we were to back up a bit in Matthew’s Gospel and read every worship leader’s favorite passage—the genealogy—we would find that Jesus’ genealogy is filled with faithful people and unfaithful people. There were some who were given great opportunity and managed to underwhelm. There were others who most everyone thought weren’t worthy of being included in God’s story, but there they are, all the same.

By including people, God entered the world through a biological process. How that process came about sounds unusual as we read about it here. But God has already established that nothing is required to make something. Jesus would be born through a human process. Mary’s pregnancy would include all the discomfort and pain and promise and delight that comes with pregnancy. Jesus would be born through a human process that would disrupt human processes. People were going to talk. Joseph and Mary would both be victims of conversations that quickly changed when they walked into the room. Can you imagine the small-town gossip this would create? Is there any wonder that “Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country…” to stay with her cousin, Elizabeth?

Working through human processes to include people in the plan of salvation meant that Jesus was adopting the vulnerability of humanity. At the most vulnerable points of his life, Jesus was cared for by others: at his birth and death, Jesus was cared for by his family and friends. In his temptation in the wilderness and in his testing in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was cared for by angels. It is a remarkable thing, really. Scripture affirms that every blade of grass and mountain vista and star and planet and quark and photon was created through Jesus and for Jesus. And yet someone had to change Jesus’ diaper. Someone had to take his body down from the cross and wrap it in grave clothes.

Early Christian theologians wrestled long and hard with what all this meant. What did it mean for God to become a human being? How could eternity inhabit a body? How could divinity and humanity exist? The church’s best conclusion has simply been to affirm this truth and embrace the mystery that Jesus could not bring salvation to any part of humanity that he did not inhabit or experience. The divinity given by the Holy Spirit and the humanity provided by his mother would exist in the one man, thus making the salvation of humanity possible.

The joy of grace

If God was going to be with God’s people, then the story must be a story of grace. From the very first pages of Scripture, it has been apparent that if you’re going to deal with people, then you must account for sin.

This is Joseph’s dilemma. When we enter the text at verse 18, Matthew is catching us up with things that have already happened. The arrangements for Joseph and Mary’s marriage have already been made; likely the only thing left to do is for Joseph to finish building an addition to his house or finishing an apprenticeship program. Mary’s pregnancy has become known, and Joseph hasn’t believed her story. He has chosen “to dismiss Mary quietly.”

This is itself a sign of grace, although we might have trouble seeing it. The Old Testament law considered adultery such a significant act of evil that it was a capital crime. That is a very hard line on sin, to be sure; a hard line chosen because of the potential damage an extra-marital affair would have on a small, rural community with many deep family connections. This is something that is not too difficult to imagine in our own times.

But Joseph is not concerned with following the letter of the law. I believe Joseph sensed grace. In his mind, there needed to be consequences, but he seems to have had no desire for Mary to be publicly humiliated.

He sensed grace. His dream showed him the full measure of what grace would entail. And in showing grace to Mary, Joseph would come to understand the costliness of grace. Every time Joseph looked at Mary’s expanding abdomen, he would likely have to remind himself, “I believe you, Mary. This child is from God.” God demonstrated great grace to Joseph in helping him see this next step; and when it was pointed out to him, Joseph took it.

It makes me wonder if part of the reason God chose Mary was because Joseph was in her life. I do not say this to take anything away from Mary. Her bravery in saying yes to Gabriel’s invitation demonstrates a courage beyond all description. Her prophetic understanding of just how Jesus would work in the world, seeking justice and fairness for the lowly and the hungry reveals a magnificent depth of spiritual understanding.

With Joseph, we see someone who seeks grace; someone who was willing to follow up that offering of grace with the costliness of their personal investment. It was Joseph who would take a very pregnant Mary with him to Bethlehem; it was Joseph who would take them to Egypt to preserve Jesus’ life from a tyrant king; it was Joseph who would return to Nazareth and raise Jesus according to the traditions of their faith.

Both Joseph and Mary teach us how to live our lives with a sensitivity to what God wants to accomplish through us, and it is to us that Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, is born:

For the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.

“They shall name him Emmanuel” which means, “God is with us.”

This is joy: that God did not leave us as we are, but made a way for us to be brought back into the family, to be made new, and to play a part in the coming Kingdom of God.  With joy we sing of Jesus, “You are making all things new.”

[woodworkingpastor]

A sign of peace -- Isaiah 11:1-10; Matthew 2:6 -- Second Sunday of Advent -- December 4, 2022

I am regularly perplexed by the lack of support—and even the outright opposition—to our denomination’s peace witness. Even after we acknowledge the reality of evil, the presence of enemies, and the very real threat their existence creates, it puzzles me why some people do not want to be associated with a church that attempts to put the very words of Jesus into action in our lives and to be involved with people in places where there is conflict, injustice, or structural disadvantage.

What is so threatening about beating swords into plowshares, weapons into farming implements? Just this week I read an article about the dangerously low levels of the Colorado River, and how that is threatening both Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam—a water supply serving 1 in 10 Americans. In the face of such a reality, how many more guns, bombs, and fighter jets do we really need?

For me, it calls to mind this poem from the prophet Isaiah, who looks at his people’s desperate situation and encourages them with the words

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse…

Is that enough of a promise on which to hang our hopes? A small sign of new life out of something that seems too far gone to be of any use?

The promise of continuity (Isaiah 11:1)

Isaiah 11 is one of the major waystations on what we might liken to a highway that travels the length of the Bible. There are many topics and threads and personalities that we can trace through Scripture for life application, and we do this often. The main road through the Bible, though, is one that begins with creation in Genesis, extends through the Fall, continues through Jesus’ birth and death which we recognize each Advent and Easter, and ends with new Creation in Revelation.

It might easily be likened to the many highways that go all the way across the United States. 

When I was young, my family would vacation in Ocean City, MD. When you leave Ocean City on US Rt. 50, you pass under a sign that says, “Sacramento Ca 3037.” (There’s an analogous sign in Sacramento). 

I remember being fascinated by this sign, and the thought of being at the beginning of a stretch of pavement that literally reaches across the country fascinated me to no end. Maybe someday I’ll drive to Ocean City, make a U-turn, and head west!

One of the characteristics of Rt. 50 is that it is considered one of the lonelier roads in America, because once you cross the Mississippi River, the highway passes through some of the more isolated sections of the western states and does not visit many of the major cities. That’s the case with Isaiah 11; we are on the main highway of Scripture, but we are on one of the lonelier portions of it. In 2003, Lynette and I drove from Sacramento, CA to Boise, ID, and we decided to drive east on Rt. 50 as long as we could. We went up through Lake Tahoe, then down into Carson City, NV. I will tell you, those miles of highway east of Carson City give new meaning to the word desolate. This is Isaiah’s situation; but the desolation of the people’s spiritual life does not prevent the prophet from looking backward from whence the people have come and recalling the promise to King David

A shoot will come out of from the stump of Jesse.

(Jesse is David’s father, if you recall.) This particular promise is itself a continuation of the promise made to Abraham, which is itself a continuation of work that God began at creation.

It is a promise to not only work with people, but to work through people. To demonstrate that God was serious about that promise, human beings were given a certain kind of power: power to “fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion…over every living thing that moves upon the earth;” power to “till it and keep it.” This power was to be used in keeping with God’s original intention, to live and work in a place where life could be enjoyed to the fullest measure.

Tragically, humans soon decided to go their own way, and in doing so the power that they God had given them to accomplish beautiful and life-giving things began to be used for selfish, evil purposes. It is a remarkable sign of grace that God continues to work through the people to whom he made the original promise. God had so many opportunities to bail. Yet God continues to work through us.

But from this vantage point on the highway, Isaiah is also looking forward. We have the privilege of looking all the way forward to the end, further even that Isaiah could. From there, we see the promise of Revelation 22:13, where Jesus announces himself as

Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End

a declaration that is remembered on today’s Chrismon with the Greek letters alpha and omega. To push the highway metaphor a bit too far, Jesus is the “Ocean City and the Sacramento” the beginning, the end, and the maker of the road itself!

Here in Isaiah 11, it probably seems like we’re stranded alongside the road with the hood up and steam pouring out of the radiator, wishing we’d had that check engine light looked at while were in St. Louis, but here we are in the Nevada desert with nothing left to do but start walking west, hoping to find someone who can fix our car.

We might even think about the settlers who passed this way 175 years prior. Not everyone who headed west in the wagon train days survived the journey. But most of the group would, and it would be up to them to carry on the dream. The dream is still alive in Isaiah 11, even if it doesn’t look like much at the moment.

How will this ruler operate? (Isaiah 11:3-5)

The promise may seem faint, but it is there nonetheless. Into a world of corruption and inequality, this shoot from the stump of Jesse will operate in a way that benefits all. He will be known by great wisdom and understanding; qualities that will be used to face the difficult realities of life and deal with them fairly. He will be known for counsel and might; the ability to account for the often-competing needs of the many and the few. He will be known for knowledge and fear of the Lord; this one will live with a faith that honors God.

These qualities sound like they are just another set of characteristics of the political kingdoms-of-this-world. But I will argue a different point; I encourage you to see in these qualities the skills of a shepherd—one who is concerned with the needs of both the individual and the whole.

The problem of peace

Knowing these things about God, why isn’t this peace universally sought after? Perhaps because if the shepherd is going to account for the needs of both the individual and the needs of the group, some will have to give up their positions. For all to be well, those who contribute to the unwellness of others will lose some of their position.

If the wolf will lie down with the lamb, the wolf needs to find something else to eat. The one with the most power has to make the most change.

If the weaned child will place its hand on the adder’s den, the snake needs to trust that the child is no threat. In this case, the one that feels vulnerable needs to learn to trust.

In the early 2000’s, the Church of the Brethren began a new phase of mission work in South Sudan. One lesson we learned is that peace is hard. Consider the case of neighboring farmers—one of whom fled their home for the relative safety of a United Nations refugee camp; the other who stayed at home and began working both farms to better provide for his family. How will the farmer who stayed—and worked extra hard in a very dangerous environment)—feel about his neighbor who returns? Will he gladly give up the land he thought had been abandoned? Who decides how they will get along?

Peace is difficult, but it begins with the possibility that another way of interacting can be imagined. Isaiah 11 is not a call to action; the text doesn’t ask us to do anything. It is instead a portrayal of good news. This is the promise at the end of the highway, and like the settlers who crossed America, the destination is worth the struggle and sacrifice.

Something that causes difficulty in our culture these days is that more stories are being told—stories that complicate our understanding of how things were and how things are. Stories that must be accounted for as we work for how things might be.

A long time ago, I officiated the funeral of a dear lady who left behind two nieces who absolutely adored their aunt. We worked very hard to organize a memorial service that honored their aunt. One of the details they wanted was an open microphone for people to share stories of their beloved aunt. One of their cousins came to the mic and began to share. His primary offense (in my mind) was that he missed several excellent opportunities to stop talking and return to his seat. But the two ladies with whom I’d planned the funeral were horrified. Mind you, everything the man said was true, and none of his words were inappropriate or all that out of order. But his stories did suggest that this beloved aunt’s life was a bit more complicated than the nieces wanted portrayed.

Dealing with things with the spirit of wisdom and understanding requires dealing with uncomfortable truth. And it is perfectly reasonable to think that when people learn stories that show things in a different light, that they might begin to reconsider the present and the future.

As humans, we are unique on earth in our ability to imagine a future that does not yet exist. It is one aspect of the imago Dei (the image of God) within us. Our imaginary traveler on US 50 somewhere in Nevada can simultaneously remember the beaches of Ocean City, MD and anticipate the new life in Sacramento.

This is where power that God gave human beings at creation comes back into the story. We have the power to enact change—to see the vision of a new life at the end of the highway and start moving in that direction. We can see something and begin working with people and institutions to bend things toward a certain end. It’s the basic lesson of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The moment of truth comes when Ebenezer Scrooge recognizes that his past does not have to dictate his future. It’s the basic definition of grace. We can use this power to participate with God, or we can use it to work against God. We can use this power to seek the best for people, or we can run over people. We have the power to both envision and move toward a certain future.

The promise in Isaiah offers us the image of a peaceable future, where mortal adversaries become partners in the Kingdom of God and the knowledge of God is as well-known and widespread as the oceans that cover the sea.

This, dear church, is the promise of peace that this One whose coming we remember—and whose coming again we anticipate—offers to us. Conflict is unavoidable, but permanent hostility is not the only possible outcome. We just need to decide to make the trip toward peace.

[woodworkingpastor]

Hope Lifted Up -- First Sunday of Advent -- Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14 -- Chrismon: Brazen Serpent on Tau Cross

To everyone who hopes worship will be “all Christmas, all the time” until December 25, for everyone glad that Q99 switched over to Christmas music two weeks ago, I offer my annual “defense of Advent” speech: Advent is a spiritual discipline in a “Mission Impossible” kind of way—your mission, should you choose to accept it, is an opportunity to grow closer to Jesus by reimagining your life’s priorities and deepening your understanding of Jesus—his humanity and his divinity. At a busy time of year rich with both tradition and meaning, there is an opportunity to take control of our schedules and prioritize our spiritual life. It is an opportunity to be religious in an irreligious world.

When we call something a “discipline,” it means we participate in that activity regardless of how we feel about it in the moment. When I’m running just to get some exercise, it’s easy to stay in on a cold or wet day. But when I’m training, I put on the extra layer or the rain jacket and head out anyway. Feelings take a back seat to purpose.

The spiritual discipline of Advent offers a choice to repent and reorient our lives in the direction of Jesus—to pick up practices that facilitate our spiritual growth. One way we will do that in worship is by giving attention to the symbolism of the Chrismons featured on the tree.

The word “Chrismon” is a combination of two words: “Christ” and “monogram.” The tradition was born at Lutheran Church of the Ascension in Danville, VA, beginning with the efforts of Rev. George Pass who began crafting symbols about Jesus for the congregation’s Christmas Tree in 1940. The idea was expanded into its current form by Frances Spencer in the late 1950’s with these symbols that artistically communicate theological truth about Jesus. Examine them closely at some point; you’ll see a wide range of symbols, crosses, monograms, letters, and words that expand our vocabulary and understanding of Jesus. There is a sheet in the pews that describe some of what is here, and you can also find an abundance of information on the Internet.

Each Sunday during Advent we will focus our attention on one or two of the Chrismons. We begin today with what looks like a snake on a pole—perhaps because I can’t think of something anything that, at first glance, seems to have less to do with Christmas as any of the symbols. How does this symbol point us to Jesus?

A strange story from Numbers

To find the answer to this question, we need to go back to the Old Testament book of Numbers. Not many of us pay attention to Numbers; perhaps because our plans to read the Bible through from cover-to-cover died somewhere in Leviticus. If we’ve heard the story about the serpent on the bronze pole at all, it’s likely because it’s mentioned in the New Testament just two verses before what is probably the most famous passage in all of Scripture, John 3:16!

The book of Numbers addresses events in the Hebrew people’s desert wanderings over a period of 38 years—from 2 years after their rescue from Egypt to the cusp of their entering the Promised Land. The name given to the book in the Christian tradition comes from the two censuses that are described in its pages, the Hebrew tradition titles the book from the first three words of the Hebrew text: “In the wilderness.”

One detail that makes Numbers a challenging read is how focused the early chapters are on the “mechanics” of faith. The infrastructure and organizational details that a group needs to have to function well don’t typically make for page-turning reading! It might be compared to the instruction manual for making Chrismons; it is an essential piece to making this tree possible—both in how to make the Chrismons and in what they mean—but that doesn’t mean I want to read it while sitting on the beach. But aren’t we thankful that someone took the time to both write the book and to follow the instructions to make the Chrismons!

So it is with Numbers. The author tells the story in a particular way for a particular reason. Numbers gives a historical account of the people’s unfaithfulness. To quote Emily Dickenson, the author of Numbers “tells the truth, but tells it slant.” Can you imagine the anniversary committee of a congregation preparing the program for the 50th or 100th anniversary of the church and making a historical presentation of all the times the congregation got things wrong! It’s hard to imagine such a thing—but right here it is in Numbers. For all the people who are surprised when Christians don’t represent God well, I always want to say, “You obviously haven’t read the Bible…it’s all right there!”

The story of the serpent on the pole begins with the people “speaking against” both God and Moses. Their trip through the wilderness is taking much longer than expected with much more opposition than anyone wished for. Even though slavery was a horrific experience, they were not used to having to live the way they were living. Change is always hard, even when the change moves you in a healthier direction.

To say that the people “spoke against” God and Moses is a rather tame translation; the Hebrew suggests rebellion, not grumbling. The people are on the verge of deciding that they can live better on their own instead of trusting God and his appointed leader, Moses. This isn’t the first time the people have threatened revolt.

This is what brings out the serpents. For modern congregations, this text portrays God in a difficult way. But don’t let that be a distraction to what is at stake here; the people are at a critical stage of their formation; how would things go for them if they abandon God now? The story is one of punishment because their spiritual rebellion would lead to disaster. The serpents are a harsh response that seem out of character with God; and yet in their rebellion, God offers a path to healing. Those who “look at the serpent of bronze and live” are given the grace to continue as part of the people of God; they can begin again and find both their humanity and their faith restored.

Here’s the thing: are we really any different? We might not expect to be bit by serpents, but are the ways we abandon God’s best hopes and plans for us and lead ourselves and our world into spiritual ruin any different from that of the Hebrew people in the desert?

Since last Saturday, 24 people have been killed and 64 people wounded in mass casualty shootings in America. Everything from an LGBTQ bar in Colorado Springs to a Wal-Mart breakroom in Chesapeake to a living room and downtown city street.

Today’s Roanoke Times has an article about Robin Reed, who is retiring from WDBJ this week. Robin notes that his pumpkins ripen about three weeks earlier due to the impacts of climate change.

How many of our Black Friday sale purchases came at the expense of persons working for a wage insufficient to provide housing and healthcare for their family?

And through it all, the church of “us vs. them” analysis and “thoughts and prayers” solutions distract us from making choices that address the basic humanity of people who are suffering. Never mind the serpents for a minute; are we really any less in need of repentance, someone to whom we can look and live?  

How often is it that our rebellion against God fundamentally takes the form of devaluing the relative worth of another person’s life? Jesus had a reputation as being a “glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Could the same be said of us? Are we as likely to be found associating with those who lived beyond the margins of what many say is acceptable?

Jesus’ invitation

It’s an important—if uncomfortable—point to consider, because for however much we love the grand promise of John 3:16

For God so love the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life

the foundation of this promise is based on this story from Numbers:

And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life (John 3:14-15).

This strange Chrismon symbol of a serpent on a cross shaped like the Greek letter “tau” reminds us of our need of a Savior. Our sinful acts are not simply “mistakes” or “excusable behavior;” it constitutes an act of rebellion against God. When the people in the wilderness looked at the bronze serpent on the pole, they were made whole—they were brought back into the community to work with God to put all things to rights.

This first Sunday of Advent is a reminder of hope—that because we have a Savior, we too have been brought back into relationship with God to put the world to rights.

At some point in our futures, each of us is going to stand before God, and we will be asked to give an account of in whom we placed our hope. We won’t be asked about our politics. We won’t be asked about our money. We won’t be asked about our power. We will be asked how the faith we confess connected with those who were hungry or thirsty or a stranger or in need of clothes or healing. The question asks us to consider how our faith in the babe in the manger changed our perspective on our neighbor.

Our faith should be visible in the interactions we have with those around us, especially the last, lost, little, and least. Our trust is in the One who died to reconcile all things to himself, that all the world would come to reflect God’s original intent.

[woodworkingpastor]

Great Prayer of Thanksgiving for Thanksgiving -- Psalm 46 --  November 20, 2022

In my newsletter article for Thanksgiving, I noted our tendency to answer the question, “How are you doing?” with, “I can’t complain.” Every now and then, however, someone will quip, “Well, I could complain, but I probably shouldn’t,” or, “I could complain, but there’s always someone who has it worse.”

The truth is, there’s plenty to complain about, if we’re so inclined. Some of it is perfectly justified; and lodging our complaint with “the management” or to the person who is treating us inappropriately is a healthy response that recognizes our own agency. We each have a voice that we can and should use to stand up for ourselves and demand that we be taken seriously.

Other times, however, our complaint is less justified and devolves into wallowing in self-pity, proclaiming “woe is me” over matters that grow into a level of frustration far beyond their importance.

Learning to distinguish between the two is a matter of maturity.

As we think about thanksgiving—both the secular holiday and the spiritual practice—perhaps we can see how our faith teaches us to find reasons to be thankful in the midst of life’s crises. Learning to trust in God’s presence and power—and simultaneously laying down our need to take matters into our own hands—is an important spiritual lesson.

Viewing Psalm 46 correctly

Our prayer series concludes this morning with another Psalm. When you ask people their favorite Psalm, Psalm 46 is one that make a lot of people’s lists. It is very well known for its majestic introduction

What’s not to love about these promises?!  Psalm 46:1 names three strong affirmations of God’s power:

God is a refuge—a place where we can safely hide when we are in trouble.

God is our strength—someone who invite us into the refuge and says, “Just stay here; I’ve got this.”

God is not just any kind of help, but a “very present help,” someone who is right there for us, in the moment, nearby, only a request away.

Martin Luther immortalized these words in the hymn A Mighty Fortress is Our God, a hymn that just begs for the majestic lyrics to be supported with the power of a pipe organ and a full-throated congregation proclaiming:

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing; our helper he, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.

Where Psalm 46:1 invites us to the majesty and splendor of God’s power and authority, verse 10 takes us to the other end of the emotional spectrum, commanding us to

It’s a verse that comes to mind when we are hiding away in our refuge—maybe in a place like Vesper Hill at Camp Bethel, or sitting on the bench in our prayer garden, contemplating the Prayer of St. Francis. This promise begs to be considered in the safety and quiet of the beautiful places of the world where we can set aside our difficulties and focus our attention on God’s love.

Those two verses are powerful in their own right; what really makes them powerful, though, are the verses in between—context that is brutally honest about the powerful forces attempting to take God’s place in control of the universe. Proclaiming God’s presence and power is not something we do while we’re whistling past the graveyard, pretending that we’re not afraid—or that there aren’t any monsters or threats or evildoers. We know full well that these things exist and are active. Instead, thankfulness comes from the direct experience of knowing that God is with us, helping us shake off a peevishness to life’s minor irritations while also strengthening us in our challenge to the legitimate injustices that confront us.

Doomsday scenarios

If you grew up in the 1970’s and 1980’s, you came to be shaped by certain fears. Some of these were real; others of them were only perceived or were at least amplified out of proportion. Those of you who grew up in other generations have your own lists of real and perceived fears.

For those of my generation, one of the more humorous fears was quicksand. You’ve probably seen the Facebook meme that says something like, “When I was a kid, I really thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it really is.”  There is a reason why we wondered about quicksand when we were kids: it is estimated that as many as 3% of all movies made in that era had quicksand in them; even TV shows like Gilligan’s Island, Batman, Lost in Space, and The Incredible Hulk featured scenes with characters getting slowly sucked beneath the surface, never to be seen again.

But other fears seemed more legitimate. The 1980’s brought us the faces of missing children on milk cartons, the risk of a depleted ozone layer, concern of nuclear war with Russia, the rise of crack cocaine. Every generation has its list of “doomsday scenarios” where the possibility of ecological and political disaster is a distinct possibility. Even though some of these things are either silly or get blown out of proportion, we know that others of them are quite real. What does it mean to live in a place where rising sea levels are encroaching on your home? What does it mean to live in a place where your neighbors—or even the person you share your home with—is a risk to your life? What does it mean to live with an incurable illness or an addiction, or to be denied a job or a promotion because of the neighborhood you call home?

We are surrounded by trouble—some of us more than others. But where do we find God? Right in the middle of the trouble, an unmovable force while others rage all around:

Psalm 46 is an affirmation that the troubles of this world, be they cosmic, ecological, political, or human, do not have the last word. God’s kingdom will come; God’s vision will in fact be done on earth as it is in heaven, and when that kingdom comes it will be a peaceable kingdom. It is Isaiah who paints this in the most beautiful language of the Bible, telling us of a day when

The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:7-9).

Psalm 46:9 tells us one of the steps between now and then:

If our intention is to take up arms to bring about God’s purposes, we should know that we have already lost, because God operates by different means.

As we stand here on the cusp of Advent, we are poised to remember that when it came time for God to begin that final movement toward the redemption of creation and consummation of all things under God’s authority, God chose to be clothed with human flesh and be born in a manger of Bethlehem.  As John says in the prologue of his Gospel,

Rejecting a tourist spirituality

Noting all of this, we should pay attention again to verse 10. I mentioned earlier that when we read the words “Be still, and know that I am God,” our natural inclination is to think of a place like Camp Bethel. There are absolutely times to get away for intentional focus on God. Whether it’s summer camp or Pilgrimage or some other opportunity, we should make time for silence and retreat in our lives. But it’s not what’s happening here.

I thought of this in a new way when we were in New Mexico with the workcamp a few years. 

I was sitting outdoors, marveling at the beauty of the desert and feeling very close to God, when I began to think about what we were learning on our trip: the drug use and alcoholism, the poverty, roads ruined by the trucks that drive in and out to support the natural gas industry’s fracking. My prayer of praise turned to one of confession over living a “tourist spirituality” that enjoys the beauty of a place without fully understanding the ugliness alongside it; blissfully unaware of how God might already be—or might want the church to be—at work participating in bringing about the peaceable kingdom in this place.

The call to “be still” in Psalm 46:10 is not an invitation to head for the hills for a time of spiritual renewal; it is call to “stop,” to abandon our efforts to take matters into our own hands and recognize that God will indeed be exalted among the nations. Psalm 46 teaches us to not get lost in despair that the doomsday scenarios of the world are hopelessly beyond anyone’s ability to change or avoid. It teaches us to repent of the ways we think we know better than God and try to handle things on our own. Psalm 46 focuses our calling on participating with God in the healing of this world.

We are not defined by our challenges and our options are not limited by our opponent’s behavior. We can learn to trust God whatever the circumstances of our life.

When it comes to being thankful this Thanksgiving season, there are so many things I can put on that list: good health; family; friends; a place to live. Many of you can create similar lists, and sometime during the upcoming week we should all sing the hymn Count Your Blessings and name all of the things for which we are thankful—name them one by one.

I also want to take the opportunity to go deeper and be thankful for the ways I am learning to trust God amid what sometimes appear to be doomsday ecological, political, and human challenges. I am regularly blessed by people whose lives are so much more complicated and challenging that mine, who roll up their sleeves and with a “Hallelujah!” on their lips, press on into the challenge, refusing to give up or give in.

[woodworkingpastor]

St. Patrick’s Breastplate -- Psalm 10 -- Sunday, November 13, 2022

One important detail of the Harry Potter series is the significant and well-placed fear of Lord Voldemort that exists in the wizarding world. Voldemort was a very powerful and very evil wizard who had shown no reluctance to unleash real harm on the wizarding world. People are so afraid of Voldemort that they refuse to say his name, relying instead on euphemisms like “He who must not be named” or “you know who.”

Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, thought this was a bad idea, and he regularly encouraged people to call Voldemort by his name. Near the end of the first book in the series, Harry Potter has just referenced “He-who-must-not-be-named.” Dumbledore corrects him, saying,

Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

It’s a point that is relevant for our own fears. A topic that we cannot over emphasize is how we will respond when evildoers impact our lives and get in the way of God’s plans. It’s a form of the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” We know that the Bible offers us a consistent assurance that if we are faithful and do what is right in God’s eyes, then God will reward us. The Bible also offers a consistent assurance that if we are unfaithful, if we choose to do what is wrong, then God will punish us. Such a theological perspective can be found from the earliest pages of the Old Testament on through to the latest pages of the New Testament.

Having said that, we know that life and faith doesn’t always work out that way. A long line of Christian tradition from the Bible down through our times shows us how people respond when God’s promises seem to either be thwarted or are a lot longer time coming that we had thought. I find an amazing feature of the Bible to be the amount of space that is given to people who want to complain to God for not delivering on those promises. That continues throughout the Christian tradition. Our faith leaves a lot of room for both complaint and lament as a means of being honest with God and strengthening our faith. We are not expected to maintain that smile on our face that says, “Everything’s great!” while masking the difficulties we are going through; ours is a faith that leaves room to engage the difficulties and the troublemakers and the evildoers of life head on.

I am also grateful that these stories are not all the same. St. Patrick’s story can almost be intimidating in its sacrificial challenge. But it is his story, and we should know it, alongside of other people’s stories that are much less heroic.

St. Patrick’s life and prayer are significant to us because they offer the example of someone for whom spiritual platitudes and pious generalities were meaningless; someone who knew what it meant to persevere in the faith and in God’s calling in the face of enemies who actively opposed their work. Psalm 10 does the same thing, giving us the vocabulary to use when we encounter enemies.

St. Patrick’s life

Patrick’s story requires we separate a bit of myth from truth. Many are familiar with the story of him charming the snakes in Ireland and leading them off the island; this is certainly false. There is also the legend that he used the shamrock as a means of teaching about the Trinity; this, too, has no historical support. What is known is that he was a person of remarkable courage and faith who had a unique method of evangelism that is relevant for our time.

Patrick was born in Britain around the year 385 to a family that seems to have only been marginally religious. Patrick’s father was a deacon but is thought to have taken on the role as a tax advantage, and not because he was particularly religious.

When he was 16, a group of Irish pirates attacked the community where Patrick lived and took him to Ireland, where he lived for six years as a slave for a pagan druid named Miliuc. Patrick was treated cruelly and forced to spend much of his time tending his master’s flocks in the fields away from people; it was here that Patrick was able to call on whatever faith understanding he had and develop the habit of regular, fervent prayer. In his Confession—the account of his life and faith—he records that it was not uncommon for him to pray over 100 times a day and 100 more times at night. It would turn out that this time of slavery was not wasted spiritually; being outdoors, learning to rely on his senses, and finding strength in regular prayer were characteristics that God would later draw out of Patrick as he developed his evangelistic methods.

One night while in captivity, Patrick heard a voice saying, “Soon you will return to your homeland.” He fled his captivity and walked nearly 200 miles to the coast, convincing a ship’s captain to give him passage to England. He returned to his parents, but soon felt a call to return not only to Ireland but specifically to his former captor to bring the Gospel to him.

Our appreciation of St. Patrick’s Breastplate will be greater if we can wrap our minds around how difficult Patrick’s life was. There is a reason that this prayer has been given the name “breastplate” because it is a prayer for protection from danger. Certainly, being an itinerant missionary in the early years of the 5th century would have been challenge enough. But the Irish druids—the local religious and tribal leaders—of that time were a force to be reckoned with. Patrick’s life was at risk for sharing the Gospel.

To give you a sense of what Patrick was up against, as his reputation spread throughout Ireland, he came to be seen as a person whose God had given him great power, greater, in fact, than the gods of the druids. It had been Patrick’s intention upon returning to Ireland to share the Gospel with his former captor; but this man grew fearful of Patrick’s reputation, and eventually locked himself in his house and set it on fire to avoid a confrontation with Patrick.

St. Patrick’s Breastplate

Because this prayer is likely new to us, take the insert out of your bulletin and let’s look at this together.

First, notice that the portion of the prayer included in the anthem this morning comes near the end. How many of you had heard those words before? Those are magnificent words that can really serve to orient our daily living with an awareness of Jesus with us.

Moving back to the beginning, notice that this is a morning prayer. The value of a morning prayer is in the opportunity to focus our thoughts on what is before us: the particular challenges or dangers or opportunities or trouble spots of the day. When you get up in the morning, what do you need to pray for? This is a great opportunity to pray with specificity. (The next time we do a series on prayer, it might be helpful to focus on prayers that are connected with times of day—something our hymnal is helpful with.)

Like the Jesus Creed, this prayer includes some confessions of faith as a reminder of the One to whom are prayer are addressed and the great tradition in which our lives are rooted. The work we do in following Jesus doesn’t revolve around us; it is rooted in a Person and in a great tradition.

Like the Prayer of St. Francis, Patrick’s prayer includes an obvious appreciation for nature, something we might expect from someone who spent a lot of time outdoors.

Connection to Psalm 10

I suspect that—like the other prayers we’ve looked at—there is much here that we can quickly appreciate and bring into our own prayer life. But St. Patrick’s Breastplate also includes two “stanzas” that seem strange. I mentioned these in the devotional guide and want us to think about them today and again on Wednesday night. We might have a harder time identifying with a prayer that includes references to the “black laws of pagandom,” or the “craft of idolatry,” or the need to be shielded “against poison, burning, drowning, [and] wounding.” These are not our experience. I don’t worry about these things; therefore, I don’t pray about them.

But that does not mean these words don’t have value. It just means that my worldview and life experience shouldn’t be considered normative. These words offer us a different opportunity to reflect on the nature of our enemies, because sometimes when life isn’t going the way we want it to go, it is because we have actual opponents either standing in our way or actively working against us.

This is where Psalm 10 can become helpful to us, because the Psalmist includes some of the harsher language in the Bible. Notice again verse 15:

Break the arm of the wicked and evildoers; seek out their wickedness until you find none. The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations shall perish from his land.

What does it mean to pray that the plans of our enemies fail?

Psalms 9 (our Call to Worship) and 10 are thought to have been originally one Psalm that recounts both God’s goodness in the past and wonders about God’s seeming silence in the present. Together, they are yet another case of the Bible affirming that life should turn out a certain way even as we acknowledge that sometimes it doesn’t.

Psalm 9 begins by praising God for all the wonderful things God has done—enemies have been defeated, the weak find protection in God, righteousness prevails. All the things we believe we have been promised are becoming reality in our living, and the Psalmist is thankful.

But then Psalm 10 begins with questions that we, too, have uttered from time to time:

Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourselves in times of trouble?

The “trouble” is the active sinfulness and evil of the wicked and unrighteous. They are not supposed to prevail—God has promised that the righteous will prosper—but here they are; to borrow a sports metaphor, the wicked and greedy oppressors are “running up the score.” Because we live in between Jesus’ incarnation and his return, we will have to grow accustomed to dealing with evil. Perhaps it is that we don’t pray this way because we don’t have enemies—or we don’t think we have any enemies, or we just aren’t paying attention. Our relative affluence provides a measure of protection from the really dangerous circumstances of the world. I’m not sure I can recall someone who was actively out to do me harm. Irritants? Sure. Annoyances? Regularly. But enemies? Not really.

But there was a lockdown at both Roanoke City high schools this year. Thankfully, there was no active threat. But those were our students and our teachers in those classrooms, sheltering in place in a classroom wondering if the person at the door is an assistant principle coming to check or a shooter coming to do harm. What kind of strong prayer language does this provoke in us?

How might a grandmother from NW Roanoke pray about her high school age grandson, after one of their friends is murdered?

How do we handle enemies? We deal with them directly.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had some ideas on this—enemies should be confronted nonviolently. He felt the church should be the thermostat of a community, drawing attention to the injustices in a place so that everyone could have access to the best of what America offers.

In wanting injustices stopped, he did not want bad things to come to his enemies; as he says in his famous “double victory” speech:

And one day we will win our freedom but we will not only win freedom for ourselves. We will so appeal to your heart and your conscience, that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.

Both Psalm 10 and St. Patrick’s Breastplate name enemies. The Psalmist prays that these persons would be actively stopped. St. Patrick prays for personal protection from their evil schemes. But either way, both the Scripture and this prayer deny us the privilege of a certain pietist sophistication that acts as if naming the “evils we deplore” (something we’ll sing about in a few minutes) shouldn’t be talked about. Naming our enemies provides a strategy for both prayer and action.

[woodworkingpastor]

The Prayer of St. Francis --Philippians 2:5-11 -- Sunday, November 6, 2022

The great opportunity before us in life is to be like Jesus. How do we allow God’s Spirit to transform our “heart, soul, mind, and strength,” so that we might perfectly, “love our neighbors as ourselves?” What would it mean for our lives to be like that of Zacchaeus, recognizing the ways we have cheated and defrauded our neighbors—and even to admit we have done so!—offering to give half of our possessions to the poor and to pay back four times what we’ve wrongfully acquired from others? Or, as Paul says to the Philippian congregation in today’s text, how are we to

Let the same mind be in [us] that was in Christ Jesus?

As we continue exploring the so-called “great prayers of the church,” today we shift from prayers found in Scripture to prayers from Christian history. It is helpful to remember that we are not the first ones to have questions about Christian living, and we are not left to figure these things out on our own. We have the benefit of learning from those who came before us, as Christian history is filled with examples of faithful believers whose lives are a gift that show us how we might engage both Scripture and our times. Paying attention to the lives of people like St. Francis can encourage faithful living in our own times.

The Life of St. Francis

St. Francis was born in 1181 as Giovanni Francesco Bernadone, the son of a wealthy merchant whose aspirations for his son were that he follow in the family business and continue the family tradition of wealth and influence. Young Francis had a reputation of living a worldly, carefree life; it was said of him that he “outshone all his friends in trivialities.”

Francis’ transformation began in the year 1202, when he marched off to war, only to be taken prisoner and held for a year before his father could arrange ransom. Upon returning home to Assisi, Francis’ recovery required another year; it was during his recovery that he began experiencing dreams and visions from Jesus, one of which included the message, “Francis, go repair my house, which, as you can see, is falling completely to ruin.” Francis initially interpreted this message as a call to repair the chapel where he prayed, and he immediately began selling off his family’s possessions to fund the chapel repairs.

His father was predictably furious when he learned this news, and took his son to the local bishop, hoping the bishop would force Francis to renounce such unseemly behavior and require him to repay the expenses. Instead, Francis removed his clothes and laid them at his father’s feet, saying, “Up to today I called you ‘father’ but now I can say in all honesty, ‘Our Father in heaven.’” Francis walked out of the cathedral to become a hermit and an itinerant preacher.

One of the qualities for which Francis is remembered is his deep appreciation for nature. His Canticle of Brother Son—from which the hymn All Creatures of our God and King is derived—is a poem that praises God by personifying various parts of creation:

Most High, all-powerful, all-good Lord,

all praise is Yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessings.

To you alone, Most High, do they belong,

and no mortal lips are worthy to pronounce Your Name.

Praised be You my Lord with all Your creatures,

especially Sir Brother Sun,

who is the day through whom You give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,

of You Most High, he bears the likeness.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars,

in the heavens you have made them bright, precious, and fair.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,

and fair and stormy, all weather’s moods,

by which You cherish all that You have made.

Praised be You my Lord through Sister Water,

so useful, humble, precious, and pure.

Praised be You my Lord through Brother Fire,

through whom You light the night

and he is beautiful and playful and robust and strong.

Praised be You my Lord through our Sister, Mother Earth

who sustains and governs us,

producing varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

Praise be You my Lord through those who grant pardon

for love of You and bear sickness and trial.

Blessed are those who endure in peace,

by You Most High, they will be crowned.

Praised be You, my Lord through Sister Death,

from whom no-one living can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin!

Blessed are they She finds doing Your Will.

No second death can do them harm.

Praise and bless my Lord and give Him thanks,

and serve Him with great humility.

By the year 1209, Francis had gathered a small band of brothers who wished to share in his life and ministry. In keeping with the expectations of religious orders of the day, Francis wrote a “Rule” to govern their living and sought official approval from the Pope.  Pope Honorius affirmed the creation of the First Order of Franciscans, also known as the Order of Friars Minor. The Franciscans exist to this day, fulfilling their baptismal consecration and responding to the divine call by abandoning themselves totally to God supremely loved, with the profession of obedience, poverty, and chastity, to be lived according to the spirit of St Francis. This is accomplished through prayer and devotion, mission and evangelism, study, and fellowship. In the spirit of St. Francis, those accepted into the order relinquish earthly possessions and money, depending on the generosity of others to live and accomplish their mission.

Oddly enough, it is widely accepted that the prayer attributed to St. Francis was not actually written by him; parts of it seem to be from someone associated with Francis, while other parts come from an unknown source. Those details of history can be irritating to some, but we will consider the prayer all the same, for when we consider both Francis’ life and the prayer that bears his name, we are offered a lifestyle of words and deeds that recognizes ways in which following Jesus runs counter to any culture in which we might live.

The virtue of simplicity and humility

It is this counter-cultural character of the prayer, regardless of its author, that is the prayer’s greatest benefit to us. I began the sermon by saying the great opportunity before us is to be like Jesus. The great challenge before us in that pursuit is in discerning how and when to be different from the culture around us. Contrary to what some will tell you, there is no such thing as a Christian culture. There is no such thing as a Christian nation. Any time we encounter the word “Christian” being used as an adjective, we would do well to run in the opposite direction because using Christian as an adjective relegates the word to secondary status. There is no “Christian culture.” There are only Christians living in a culture. Difficulties abound when we attempt to mix the two.

We also can’t say that people like St. Francis somehow had it easier than we do; the truth of the matter is that it was Francis’ pursuit of Jesus that led him to choose between his family, his money, his status, and Jesus. There is no way to be like Jesus without embracing sacrifice; sacrifice is, by definition, costly.

I suspect what people find most appealing about Francis are those things that were countercultural both in his day and in our own—his simplicity and his humility. Simplicity and humility are out of fashion with American culture; they’re right up there (or maybe right down there, depending on who is measuring) with peacemaking. It’s more subtle than the awareness that our media-saturated culture is like a beast that must be fed with constant attention. And the challenge goes even deeper than what I perceive to be an increasing need to be right—and the inability to make allowance that someone else may realize something that hasn’t yet occurred to us. There is a strand of American Christianity that currently rejects outright values like simplicity and humility, offering instead a strident, no-compromise, authoritative, hyper-masculine view of the faith that sees every point of disagreement or challenge as a hill to die on.

Simplicity and humility remain, however. By nature, they sit off to the side waiting to be dusted off when we’re ready to listen. And I suggest that these two virtues are related, as both speak of my willingness to be available to you.

Simplicity is the freedom from things. As the early Quaker leader John Woolman said, to live simply is to live “free from outward cumbers.” To pursue simplicity is to seek to live free from any entanglement that prevents us from responding to the light. Simplicity prevents our commitments from being distorted or fueled by other distractions, allowing us to focus our attention on the things that God finds most pleasing—loving God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbors as ourselves, perhaps?!

Our goal in choosing simplicity is neither self-sacrifice nor deprivation. It is the voluntary laying aside of certain hindrances so that we might best pursue a different goal, that we might satisfy our deepest longings in Christ.

In many ways, humility can be seen as a special form of simplicity; where simplicity asks us to consider how our attitude toward our possessions impacts our availability toward God and others, humility asks us to consider how the attitude we have about ourselves impacts our availability toward God and others.

The Prayer of St. Francis is a wonderful opportunity to consider how the pressures and values of this world shape our attitudes toward others. Are we trending toward fear, anger, and increasing hatred toward those outside our tribe? Or are we trending towards curiosity, empathy, and understanding others better? Which one is the way of Jesus?

The connection to the prayer of St. Francis

If we will allow it, the prayer of St. Francis connects us with Jesus. Laying down those things that tempt us to focus/grab/hold on to ourselves, we will have more room in our lives to be present to others around us.

Make me an instrument of peace” is so much more than wishful thinking. It is the first step to a transformed life. No one runs a race or masters a skill after the first day. There wells up within us a desire to change and grow; and then after that the pursuit comes as we rearrange our goals and priorities and begin bending our lives in the direction of the goal—in this case, the other. The Prayer of St. Francis teaches us to shift our priorities from self to other in intentional, concrete ways:

Where there is hatred, let me sow love

Where there is injury, pardon

Where there is doubt, faith

Where there is despair, hope

Where there is darkness, light

Where there is sadness, joy.

Recognizing that  

it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

This is after the pattern of Jesus who

though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).

The pathway to being like Jesus involves laying down both self and things that we might best be available to hear God’s call and be available to others. In this, St. Francis way—and the prayer that bears his name—offers a way forward to the transformation we need.

[woodworkingpastor]

The Jesus Creed -- Matthew 22:34-40 --  Sunday, October 30, 2022

The prayer-foundations of our faith

When I was a boy growing up in my home church—probably in the 1st or 2nd grade—I had the privilege of being in Evelyn Harpine’s Sunday School class. Mrs. Harpine taught Sunday School at Bethel Church of the Brethren in the village of Mayland for 37 consecutive years; two entire generations of children benefitted from her consistent, faithful presence.

As young elementary students, Mrs. Harpine met us where we were, teaching us what it means to love Jesus and be part of a church community at a level that was appropriate for our age, before sending us off to the next classes that continued our spiritual formation on our way to adulthood.

Her nurturing provided a foundation to our faith; and like a good foundation for a home or a building, her work wasn’t always so visible—I have only the vaguest memories of being in her class—but here I stand, nonetheless!

In many ways, these first two prayers in the Great Prayers of the Church series are like Mrs. Harpine’s Sunday School class—foundational to our faith. In times when the church placed a higher priority on catechism—using summaries of the principles of the faith to instruct believers—it was nearly universal that the Lord’s Prayer was used as a teaching tool for new Christians to learn how to be in communion with God. As we saw both last Sunday and Wednesday night, whether we take it as given to us or use it as a framework for an expanded prayer form, the Lord’s Prayer provides to us the basic elements of an intelligent and sustaining prayer life.

That is also the case of today’s prayer, the so-called Jesus Creed. This is the term that theologian Scot McKnight gives to the Greatest Commandments from Matthew 22. You might have noticed that this so-called prayer doesn’t exactly feel like a prayer, and you would be right about that. The commandments to

love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind

and to

love your neighbor as yourself

are closer to an affirmation of faith, a short statement summarizing the basic elements of our faith.

I will leave it to you to decide how important that distinction is. For my own prayer purposes, I have often found it helpful to affirm a statement like the Jesus Creed as a reminder of the core commitments of my faith, and how it is that God calls me to live. If for whatever reason it concerns you that these don’t sound very prayer-like, then just add the phrase, “Lord help me to…” in front of each one, and voila! you’ll have a prayer!

Context is important

As we consider these words, let’s ask ourselves what they meant to Jesus. When we arrive in Matthew 22, we find ourselves in the middle of Holy Week, a week where Jesus had an increasing number of confrontations with both religious and political leaders about the nature of the kingdom of God. Our text this morning comes as part of a contest between Jesus and the other religious leaders who are trying to trap him into saying something that they can then use against him.

People really haven’t changed all that much over time, have they. What Jesus’ opponents want to do is to get him on record as having made a particular statement so that they can say “Aha! I told you he was that way—see what he said!” They want to find one statement by Jesus and then use that to characterize the entirety of his life by that one statement.

Jesus, of course, knew exactly what they were up to and found a way to confound them every time, finding the flaws in their rigidly binary way of thinking about how we are to live in relationship to God, to our government, to people who die without leaving an heir for their children, and other challenging Biblical texts.

Matthew tells us that this particular question is a test—it’s a test in the form of a trick, because no self-respecting Pharisee would elevate one law over all the others. To them, it would be a bit like asking, “Which one of your children do you love the most?” The Pharisees—to their credit—took Scripture very seriously and wanted to emphasize that all of the laws were equally important.

The difficulty with emphasizing everything is that it becomes a limiting view of Scripture. The Jewish tradition recognized 613 laws in the Old Testament that were to guide people’s lives. How is it possible for any of us to keep track of 613 tasks? We ultimately can’t—so we end up focusing on the biggies or we work out in our own minds which ones are the most important and focus on those. It’s like saying to our teacher, “Just tell me what I need to know for the test” and I’ll be fine!

I read a story about a pastor who moved into an aboriginal community in Australia as a mission worker and then later stayed when he met his wife and they were married. One of the fascinating things he learned there was that when two aboriginal people meet one another for the first time, they don’t say “Hi, how are you?” they say, “Who are your relatives?” Knowing that piece of information allows you to order the rest of the world. When the world is complicated and there are threats all around, knowing to whom you are obliged is important; it brings clarity to what you must do and not do. You know who to love and who to hate. We like to limit our perspective because it makes life easier and more comfortable.

What I find attractive about Jesus’ response is the way it encourages us to take an expansive view of Scripture. Rather than boiling things down to a score-sheet that we can pull out of our pockets and say, “OK, the rules say that in this situation we’re supposed to act this way and not that way,” Jesus gives us a thought experiment: take what comes your way and ask yourself, “What does it mean in this situation to love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength? What does it mean to love my neighbor?”

You might remember this same teaching coming in Luke’s Gospel. In that situation, the person asking Jesus the question had a follow-up question: “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus’ reply was the Parable of the Good Samaritan, where we are not asked to consider what we might do if we see someone lying half-dead in a ditch, but whether we have it in our heart to value someone whom it is culturally acceptable to hate. The Great Commandments teach us that if we can, in fact, learn to love God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, then we will need to learn how to love outside our tribe. Knowing the answer to the question “Who are your relatives?” is no longer sufficient for faithful Christian living, for Jesus calls us to love our God, our neighbor, and even our enemies. It’s a kind of love that will in many ways make life much more complicated, because loving beyond our tribe will never be popular. But it is the destination of this journey we are upon.

Praying the Jesus Creed

Earlier this week I met with a group planning a memorial service for victims of gun violence. Along the way we were wrestling with how a particularly emotional part of the memorial service will be best designed.

One of the committee members asked, “What is the purpose of this memorial service.” When another member read that from our minutes, the first member said, “Then these other important issues are not our concern. Our task is to do this.” We were able to move forward fairly quickly.

When it comes to our transformation in the Jesus Creed, I noted in the devotional guide how helpful it can be to affirm our core values in moments when the demands of life begin to wear us down. When we are confronted with the temptation to sin, we might rightly pray, “Jesus, lead me not into temptation.” We might also choose to say, “Jesus, help me to love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

When we are angry with our neighbor and more inclined to wish them harm than good, we might pray, “Jesus, forgive me my sins, as I forgive those who sin against me.” We might also choose to say, “Jesus, help me to love my neighbor as myself—let me give my neighbor the same benefit of the doubt I so quickly give to myself.”

The Jesus Creed is Jesus’ answer to what it means to be committed to the Kingdom of God. As theologian Scot McKnight says,

A spiritually formed person loves God by following Jesus and loving others. In addition, the spiritually formed person embraces the stories of others who love Jesus.

Because Jesus’ mission was to establish the kingdom of God—the society in which the Jesus Creed transforms life—a spiritually formed person lives out kingdom values in the Society of the Jesus Creed. As navigators need the North Star for direction, as hikers need a compass, and as vacationers need a map and a goal, so the followers of Jesus need a clear vision of what the Jesus Creed looks like when lived out.

Jesus has given it. His category for spiritual direction is the term kingdom. Jesus uses kingdom for the society in which the Jesus Creed transforms life. Those committed to the kingdom form a society, which we now call the church. The kingdom’s values are transformation, a mustard seed, justice, restoration, joy, and an eternal perspective (The Jesus Creed, 123-124).

If we want to reshape our image of Jesu by turning to the real Jesus to see what he was all about, then we will have to make this term kingdom a close friend.