Welcome Home - Romans 12:1-13

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.
For by the grace given me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.
Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Today, we find ourselves in an interesting position as a congregation. Today is sort of a Sunday between the Sundays, the time between the times. Last week, Ron Smith preached his last sermon as our senior pastor, and next week, John Fitzgerald will preach his first sermon as our senior pastor. Today is a special Sunday, but you won’t find it on any liturgical or civic calendar. I personally refer to today as “Bridge Sunday.” Today represents the bridge between a senior pastor named Ron and one named John. Since last Sunday, many of you have come in to talk about a number of issues, and have probably been disappointed to hear me say, “We’re not going to discuss that until July 1st.” In fact, in the last week, that’s probably the phrase I’ve used most commonly.

Our text this morning reminds us that we are all members of Christ’s body, and that each of us has a role to play in that. In this interim period, my role has been to celebrate one era, but also to prime the soil for the new thing God is about to do in our midst. May we pray.

Finish this sentence for me: “Don’t talk to . . . strangers.” It’s something drilled into our heads shortly after we voice our first words. We are conditioned to think of strangers as a likely source of danger. If you don’t know someone, we’ve been told that they probably seek to do you harm. As a result, we’ve gradually come to live in increasingly private settings; after all, “public” is that place you’re likely to run into those dangerous strangers. Our society knows this rule, too! Try breaking the rule sometime. Step into a crowded elevator, face the back of the elevator, and see how uncomfortable people get. Make eye contact with people in a fast food restaurant. Try these, and you’ll know what it feels like to be a stranger.

But our text this morning tells us to show hospitality to strangers. It goes a bit against our natural inclination, but let me tell you, it’s vitally important. In the context in which the book of Romans was written, Christian missionaries and evangelists were dependent on the hospitality of the church in the towns they passed through. But in our context, it’s vitally important as well.

Two years ago, I came to you as a stranger. Other than what you heard from staff-parish, most of you did not know me. But you showed and continue to show hospitality to me. Several of you sent notes before I even arrived. When I realized that my Saturn could not be towed behind the moving truck, two members of the church drove to Durham on moving day to drive my car to Boone while I drove the truck. You brought meals to my home that first week. Since then, so many of you have invited me to meals in your home and on the town, invited me to play golf, shared special moments in your families’ lives, and let me know that I am no longer a stranger. You have extended hospitality to members of my family who have come to visit to the point that my mom refers to Boone as her “mountain residence,” and you have included them in your prayers during difficult times in their lives. Ministers often talk about the way their congregation’s ministry to them far exceeded their ministry to the congregation. Not only did you minister to me, you threw your arms wide open, and said, “Welcome Home.”

Now, I know the bishop and the district superintendent said you had to make me feel welcome. But, I also know you did it, not because you were under orders, but because hospitality in this church’s DNA. You do it, because you recognize that part of your role in being part of the body of Christ is to make other people feel welcome.

Next Sunday, a man named John will stand in this pulpit and deliver his first sermon as the senior pastor of Boone United Methodist Church. He comes to us, not as a stranger, but as another member of the body of Christ. You know how I sometimes tell you, “There are no strangers in the body of Christ – only brothers and sisters whose names we don’t know yet”? Well, we know their names, and we will greet them as extended members of the body of Christ. We don’t really know them yet, and they don’t really know us, but that doesn’t matter. We welcome one another as Christ welcomes us. As a congregation, I pray you will show the same hospitality to the Fitzgerald family – to John, his wife, Chris, and his sons Ben and Alex – that you showed to me. I hope you will throw your arms wide open, and say, “Welcome Home.”

This is what Christians do. When the body of Christ gathers, it is always aware of who its members are on any given occasion. It is aware which of its members are hurting, and which are celebrating. It is aware of who has been there for years, and it is aware of who is there, perhaps, for the first time. And, when the body of Christ gathers, it is also keenly aware of who is not present. This is what the church does. It makes itself a friend to the friendless, provides hope to the hopeless, a spiritual home to the homeless. Most churches, if you ask them, would tell you they’re a friendly church. Usually, what people mean is, “That’s where my friends go! People know me by name.” But friendliness is a factor that is usually viewed from the inside-out, and on the outside of those circles, the perception is quite different.

The analogy I draw is that most churches who claim to be friendly are, in reality, a lot like the family dog. The family dog is affectionate toward members of the family, but has a tendency to bark at strangers. When members of the family show up, the dog greets them with a happy smile, but when strangers approach, they receive a hostile welcome.

Some of this is so interesting to me because I was a Communication major as an undergraduate. I love to study the ways people interact, and the signals that are being sent through nonverbal means. It’s not only what people say that matters, it’s how they say it, in what posture that makes such huge impact. Let’s bring this back to the friendliness factor of a church.

Imagine, the conversations that typically happen in the hallways before and after church events. From the inside – there you are with two or three friends, talking about some common interest. Imagine yourself on the outside, though – you’re likely to see a circle of backs – closed off, inaccessible. On occasion, someone may glance back over their shoulder and say, “Hey, who’s the new person over there?” which, of course, refers to you. It’s not a very friendly feeling. Or, suppose worship is about to begin, and you come into the sanctuary, sit in your usual spot and strike up a conversation with your usual friends who also sit right near you. Two rows away, sitting quietly and patiently – and alone, is a new family – hoping someone might talk to them and say hello. The mother cradles an infant in her arm, and might want to know where she could find the nursery, or at least a restroom where the child could be changed, but because no one has talked to them, we miss an opportunity to make someone feel at home. Now, during this time, things are happening that reinforce our understanding of our church as a friendly place. We’re having friendly experiences with our friends, probably not even aware that we’re neglecting our guests. We think we’ve put out the welcome mat, but in reality, we’ve hung the “Do-Not-Disturb” sign.

Now, hear me carefully – I’m not saying we’ve done an overall poor job. On the contrary, this church does reasonably well in welcoming guests compared to most others. But, we could always do a little better.

The next time you’re having a conversation in the hallway, ask yourself if, from the outside, your posture appears to be “closed” or “open.” If it’s closed because of the nature of the conversation, let me suggest that you take the discussion to a more appropriate location – it’s called not airing your (or other people’s) dirty laundry in public. When you arrive in the sanctuary, take a look around for people who look like they need to be welcomed, rather than immediately gravitating toward your friends. Same thing after service – practice what I call the “three-minute rule” – for the first three minutes after worship ends, only talk to people you don’t know rather than the people you already know and are probably going to end up going out to lunch with anyway. It seems like such a little thing, but you have no idea how far it goes toward making someone feel noticed and appreciated. It is a little thing you can do to say, “Welcome Home.”

The simple fact of the matter is that, “people remain part of a Christian congregation because of the quality of love they experience in human relationships. People may join a church because of a fine youth or music program, preaching, or leadership – but people remain in a church because they have found loving friendships and loving relationships. People have found not just ideas of love and ideals of love, but genuine love in human form” (Edward Markquart).

And that’s the extreme center of the Gospel message: Jesus was God’s genuine love in human form. Jesus was the very embodiment of God’s love, we in the church are members of his body – that makes each of us bearers of God’s love to the world. We are ministers of reconciliation to each other, and to the world.

“The mystery of God, captured in a message about what God has done, is now entrusted to us. And what God has done is reconciliation. In the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, God has been revealed as one who is perpetually turning toward us to welcome us home” (Richard Lischer, The End of Words).

Friends, this morning I invite you to not only hear the Good News; I invite you to be the Good News. God has turned toward us, offering us reconciliation and a relationship with him through his Son. “Reconciliation is not a theological option, a specialized ministry, or the subject of an occasional sermon. Every congregation is a reconciling congregation” (Richard Lischer, The End of Words). God has turned toward us, offered us a wonderful gift of reconciliation to himself, but even more – he has empowered us to be reconciled to each other. So right now, everyone stand, and hold hands with someone on your left and on your right. That person on your left is a gift from God to you, the person on your right is a gift from God to you, and you are a gift to each of them. Tell each other that!!!

Look around – THIS is what the body of Christ looks like!!!! What a wonderful gift we are to each other!!!

But together, we are a gift from God to our community and our world. So together, let’s go out there, let’s spread our arms wide open, and say “Welcome home.”

Hearts on Fire - Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and Arabs – in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Indeed these are not drunk as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:
‘In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy. And I will show portents in the heaven above, and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and smoky mist. The sum shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of Lord’s great and glorious day. Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

I was taking a class in seminary on the person and work of the Holy Spirit. The professor was a fire-anointed African-American Pentecostal pastor. As often happened, one day we were discussing the ways different denominational groups express themselves in worship, and being at a Methodist seminary, he began to pick on the Methodists. He wondered aloud, if the Methodists even had the Holy Spirit anymore. Oliver Box, a good friend of mine from Mississippi, put up his hand and said, “Dr. Turner, the Holy Spirit still shows up at the Methodist Church. He just knows to mind his manners when he’s there.”

For so long, we’ve put up with this good-natured taunting from our Pentecostal and Charismatic brothers and sisters that, perhaps we’ve started to wonder if they’re right. Is it possible, as they suggest, that the Holy Spirit missed us? Have we lost Him? These are questions I’ve wondered from time to time, and I imagine many of you have as well.

Before we proceed any further, let me share where I’m coming from on this issue. My roommate in college was a tongue-talking, pew-jumping Pentecostal. During those years, I attended two different churches many Sunday mornings. At 8:30, I went to the high, formal service at the Duke Chapel-esque United Methodist Church in downtown Rochester. At 11, I went to the non-denominational Charismatic Community Church near campus. The experiences in these two communities could not have been more opposite from each other, but I loved them both. Since then, whenever people ask about my preferred worship style, I tell them I am a “high-church-charismatic.” May we pray.

Comfortable, settled, and fat
William Buckley once said, “You may be able to bring up the subject of religion at a fancy dinner party once, but if you bring it up twice during the evening, you won’t be invited back.” Our society has no problem with religion, so long as its personal and private, decent and in good order. Don’t be too exuberant, don’t talk about it too much, lest someone accuse you of being a fanatic. Everyone knows that religious fanaticism is the worst kind of fanaticism.

The situation was not much different during that Pentecost celebration. Now, some of you are asking yourself what this strange word might mean. You suspect it might have something to do with five, as in a Pentagon, and you’d be correct. Multiply that five times ten, and the number fifty tells you something about this day. It occurred fifty days after Passover, and was the Jewish celebration to mark the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai. Beautiful liturgies and music had been written to help the people remember and celebrate.

In an upper room somewhere in Jerusalem, Jesus’ followers – probably about 120 of them – gathered. The room was decorated with flowers, because according to tradition, the desert burst into bloom when the Law was given. As good Jews,they began to proceed through the familiar prayers. Candles were lit, and someone began to pray: Barukh Ata Adonai: Blessed Are You Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has kept us in life, and enabled us to reach this season. Though the liturgy was predictable, it was also familiar and comfortable.

But suddenly, into a routine that was comfortable, predictable, safe, tied-down, neat and under control, God showed up in a surprising way. A mighty rushing wind, heads anointed with fire, the good news proclaimed in new and unfamiliar languages. God was doing a new thing, and it made people a little uncomfortable.

A friend of mine was talking about the church in which she grew up – a large, downtown, First Baptist Church in a midsize Southern city. It was a fashionable place, a stately colonial brick building on the town square – a place to see and be seen. It was a proper place, where everyone followed the rules, where decent, polite order was the name of the game. One day, the Spirit moved on a woman in the congregation, and she raised her hand quietly in her seat. My friend, around 8 at the time, asked her mother if that lady had a question for the preacher.

It made everyone uncomfortable to have the Spirit show up off script. The religious establishment has a way of being uncomfortable when the Spirit shows up like that. On that Pentecost so long ago, some of the onlookers heard the disciples speaking in strange languages, and they made fun. “They’ve been drinking – they’re filled with new wine,” they said. During his earthly life Jesus was accused by many of being a drunkard and a glutton. It would only make sense that his followers would do the same thing. After all, hadn’t Jesus himself taught that a disciple is not above his teacher (Mat 10:24)?

Outward sign of an inward grace
In Christian circles, a lot of ink has been spilled over the significance of what people saw on that day – mighty wind, tongues of fire, the sound of foreign languages. In reality, these things are signs that point to something greater. I’d like us to think of these things sacramentally – that is, I’d like us to think of them as outward signs of an inward and spiritual reality.

The reality these signs pointed to was a changed heart – hearts touched by God, hearts that were on fire with his Holy Spirit.

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost some of the heat out of this fire. Perhaps since the rise of Pentecostalism, those of us in the mainline have left the Holy Spirit up to them. That fits a little better with their culture and ethos. That’s their thing, and that’s okay, but let’s leave it to them, we tell ourselves. Once a year, as a sort of consolation prize, we pull out the red altar cloths and banners, the songs and prayers center around the Holy Spirit, but I wonder if our hearts are really on fire the way God intended for them to be.

Perhaps we’ve forgotten our roots. I’m not only talking about our early church roots on that day in Jerusalem, I’m also talking about our Methodist roots. John Wesley, attending a prayer meeting one evening on Aldersgate Street, records in his journal the feeling of his heart being strangely warmed. We Methodists already have language for this! John Wesley, a priest and son of one in the Anglican Church, Oxford-educated, privileged – had a run-in with the Holy Spirit that would forever leave its mark on the world. The comfortable, settled, familiar religious establishment – filled with the Spirit – it happened in Jerusalem, it happened on Aldersgate Street, and it happens today – around the corner and around the world.

What you or I might call exuberant, or unruly, or uncivilized, the rest of the world simply calls Christianity. Just take a look at Anglicans in Africa – Anglicans, you know, Episcopalians? Pallid, sallow-faced protectors of time-honored liturgy and tradition? Take a look at Anglicans in Africa, whose services typically last well into the afternoon, and whose membership is swelling by record numbers. Take a look at Presbyterians in South America – Presbyterians – you know, the frozen chosen? Watch as they dance and sway and offer themselves completely in praise and devotion. Take a look at Methodists in Korea – Methodists - you know, we who do all things in moderation? Spend four hours a day with them in prayer and see if God doesn’t start to do unexpected things on you, too.

Fire kindles fire
All this is happening, we see it everywhere, and we’ve been standing on the sidelines wondering when we’re going to get our chance. And maybe that’s just the problem. God has not called us to observe, God has called us to get in the game. We’re not standing on the promises, we’re simply sitting on the premises.

In a Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King commented on just this situation. “The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.” He says that we have become like thermometers, who merely record the temperature, rather than thermostats, who set the temperature. This switch from thermostat to thermometer happened long ago, but it was so subtle we didn’t even notice. The church continued on, thinking it’s still consumed with Holy fire, when all that’s left is a tiny little ember surrounded by cold, dead, ash.
But the ember is still there. It’s not that we never received the fire, or that it went out – we just let it grow a little cold. The fire still burns, down in the pit of your soul and mine. The wind of the Holy Spirit can still fan it back into flame.

The Holy Spirit has done it before and will do it again, if you and I will provide a little help. Let’s give the Spirit some room to work. Let’s clear away those things which are already burned up and won’t burn anymore. Let’s release our tight control over our lives and admit that we need the Holy Spirit to fall fresh on us yet again, to stir up our hearts with wind from heaven, and to consume our lives with holy fire.

Our lives will never be the same, but that’s the good news. God did not send first his Son, and then his Spirit, because he wanted us to remain unchanged. Rather than serving as defenders of the status quo – the Church has the opportunity to return to its original God-given mission to be light in the darkness, to be fire in the wilderness, to be a foretaste of the kingdom of God. What is the kingdom of God, you ask? Romans 14:17 says it’s “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.”

Friends, that’s exactly what the world is so desperately hungry for. They don’t need a church that is cold and empty, more interested in self-preservation than in making a positive difference in people’s lives. They need a church whose heart burns with the Holy Spirit.

There is a time in this church’s history when the building itself was consumed with fire. Sure enough, the whole town came out to watch the spectacle.

Imagine how much more spectacular it would be for this church to be consumed with holy fire. What the world needs is for the Church to burn once again, not literally, of course, but with the Holy Spirit - over our boundaries, leaping over our walls, throbbing, intruding, calling forth. And when that happens, one thing is for sure: catch on fire with the Holy Spirit, and people will come from miles around to watch you burn.

Praise! Psalm 150

Praise the Lord! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament!
Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness!
Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp!
Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!
Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that breathes praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

I grew up in one of those Methodist churches that holds services on Sunday morning, again on Sunday evening, and then on Wednesday night, while the children were in Kids Club and the teens were in youth group, a few brave adults met in the church library for prayer meeting. My dad said you could always tell how popular a church was by who showed up on Sunday morning, how popular a preacher was by who showed up on Sunday nights (Dad soon deduced he was not a very popular preacher by this standard), but you could always tell how popular God was by who showed up to Wednesday evening prayer meeting.

In the church’s calendar, this Sunday after Easter is, in many ways, the equivalent of the Wednesday evening prayer meeting. Last Sunday, there were lilies all over the front of the church, a huge choir that sang an impressive anthem with timpani, children everywhere you could see, trumpets announcing the resurrection, and a healthy crowd at both services. Today, the choir is off, the brass is gone, and the preaching duty falls into the lap of the lowly associate pastor. In many ways, this might feel like a letdown after such fanfare last week.

Then, the text for this morning is read, and we find God calling in a voice loud and clear. God is calling, inviting, each of us into a life of praise. We quickly realize that today is also Easter. Easter is technically a great 50-day celebration that will last until Pentecost, but for Christians, Easter is everyday we declare God’s victory over the powers of sin and death. Easter is every day we claim this power to transform our lives. In light of this wonderful news, we have one option: praise! May we pray.

Wired to worship
It seems that, as a pastor, people tend to bring to me their big questions. They are questions that humanity has wrestled with for centuries, and obviously failed to provide satisfactory answers to. There was a time in my life when I thought that serious Christian faith meant having a set of answers to these questions. I gradually came to realize that my faith needed to be than a set of stock answers, and I’m at a point where I am comfortable living in the midst of unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions. In my Bible studies, classes, and other small groups, I encourage everyone to ask questions, no matter how trivial, difficult, controversial, or impossible to answer.

Several months ago, I received a letter from an ASU student who wanted an answer to one of these questions. He simply asked, “What is the meaning of life?” I sat down and began to write out a response, and six pages in, realized I hadn’t even begun to answer his question. I was still clarifying the issue, laying out the territory from which this question is typically answered, and probably muddying the waters more than this young man probably cared for.

“What is the meaning of life?” The answer to this question will depend on our perspective, our background, our education, our goals, and our dreams. The answer to this question will depend on what dominant narrative we subscribe to.

So, as Christians, what is the meaning of life? Even different churches with different theological perspectives will answer this question differently. Yet, these perspectives focus so closely on the details that they tend to lose sight of the big picture. They focus so much on method that they lose the message, and worse yet, allow the method to become the message.

So, as Christians, what is the big thing? What is our purpose? What is our meaning? What are we here to do?

Fortunately, we don’t have to answer this question alone. There is a great cloud of witnesses that has gone before us – brothers and sisters who have left us with their collective knowledge and experience, with whom we are united, and from whom we can benefit. St. Augustine wrote that “Our hearts are restless until they rest in [God].” By this he means we were created with a natural inclination to praise. We worship through our time, our talent, and where we place our treasure. We devote these resources to a variety of things, but we find the greatest peace when they are devoted to their true aim – God. Why is this? God is our creator, our designer, so to speak. Who knows the creation better than its creator? God created us with a natural magnetism back to God. The Westminster Catechism, a document used in Christian formation for centuries, sums it up nicely: “The chief end of [human]kind is to glorify God and enjoy [God] forever.”

That’s the big thing! God hardwired us to be creatures who worship, and when we have found ourselves in such rich praise, the result is continual enjoyment of God’s presence. Another word for this continual enjoyment is communion – God’s intent in creation was perpetual communion, and when we surrender ourselves in true worship, we restore that communion which God intended us to enjoy. That’s the big thing! The rest is simply details.

Not seeing the forest for the trees
But have you ever heard that the devil is in the details? I believe this to be incredibly true in the ways in which we worship. The main thing is supposed to be continually praising God, but we’ve often focused so much on the way we praise that we soon lose sight of who we’re supposed to be praising in the first place. We find ourselves talking about the right and wrong ways to worship, and end up praising a form of praise instead of God. Uh oh! That young associate pastor has left off preaching and taken to meddling. If you’ll indulge me just a little more, I need to meddle a bit more before I bring some clarity out of this issue.

Let me put it in the context of today’s text. It reads “Praise the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him upon the earth! Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness! Praise him with the trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp! Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe! Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals!” Yet, the way we often interpret this psalm reads more like this: “Praise his sanctuary. Praise his mighty deeds. Praise his surpassing greatness. Praise the trumpet. Praise the lute. Praise the harp. Praise the tambourine. Praise the dance. Praise the strings. Praise the pipe. Praise the cymbals.

Do you hear the difference? We easily move from using these things to praise God to praising the very same things. Paul encountered a similar problem in the New Testament when he confronted the disciples of various teachers, all of whom placed greater value in their particular school of thought than in the Gospel those schools were supposed to teach.

To be sure, worship is a deeply personal experience. People need to be given opportunities to praise in authentic and genuine ways, yet we must always remember that the object of our worship is greater than the manner in which we worship. Let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees, and let’s not spend our time majoring in minors.

Some time ago, a man who had been stranded on a deserted island was finally rescued. His rescuers noticed three structures on the island, and asked the man about them. He explained that the first was his house. The third was his church. Puzzled, they asked him about the second building. He scoffed, “That’s where I used to go to church!”

Worship—true, authentic worship—is a unifying experience, not a divisive one. The text this morning gives us the powerful image of all creation being absolutely swept up in praising God. Though each provides something different, notice how well these things work together. No one is standing around asking “Are my needs being met in this worship experience?” “Will this worship gathering optimally reach our target demographic?”

Such an attitude about worship is evidence of a mature faith. It is somewhere beyond Burger King spirituality, where a bunch of self-absorbed individuals are each trying to have it their way. When we make worship about ourselves – about our likes, our preferences, our taste – we have essentially made ourselves the object of worship. When our own desires are the most important factor in the decision, we are saying that we are the most important party in the relationship. And so worship, something ultimately designed to connect us to something greater than ourselves, becomes simply another indulgent exercise of self-gratification. And when your opinions are different than mine, an argument is likely to ensue.

Rather than getting caught up in the details, of arguing over the music, over the format, over the time, or the architecture, or the color of the carpeting – instead of focusing on all these horribly minor issues, why don’t we focus primarily on a God whose name is Love, a God who is Light, a God who is Life, a God who transforms our brokenness into his wonderful wholeness. God did not send his Son into the world, allow him to die a death on a cross, and raise him to glorious new life in order for you and me to split His church over trivial issues. Some people like to rock and roll in church. Some like to meditate in silence. Some like to come to worship early. Some like to come late. Some people love to hear the organ; some people hate it. But who is wrong? Better yet, who is right? What if, instead of using that energy to tear each other down, we used that same energy to build each other up in love? What if we left the complaints, the grumbling, the arguments, the pettiness, and the divisions behind? What if we stopped trying to prove ourselves right by proving everybody else wrong? The moment we stop arguing against each other, and start worshipping with each other, I think we will see transformation happen.

And that’s the goal – to allow worship to change and transform us. May God have mercy on us if we leave here just exactly the same as when we came in. Worship is supposed to change us. Rather than asking if a worship experience was able to generate a certain emotion or response, I think we would do a lot better to ask ourselves if we are now better equipped to live as Christ’s disciples in the world.

Well – are we? Have our songs and prayers changed us? Have we been transformed a little bit more into the image of the One whom we profess? When it’s all been said and done, have our activities in an hour in this place equipped us to live as Christ’s disciples in the world? That, I believe, is the real test for good worship.

And I think you will find – as you focus more and more on Christ, as you allow yourself to be molded ever more into his image – I think you will find that transformation isn’t so bad. In fact, you will find that living as a Christian is, in the words of my good friend Bill Roy, “such a joyful thing.” I think you will find there is really no hiding the joy that wells up from deep within you when your heart rests in the One for whom you were created, when you glorify God and enjoy God forever. It is a joy that will light up your face for the rest of the world to see.

The text tells us this morning quite simply: “Praise the Lord!” Praise the Lord with everything you’ve got. Join with all creation, people from all walks of life, people from across the centuries, people greatly similar and greatly dissimilar to yourself. But there is a promise behind these instructions; God says when you praise, I will transform you. I will transform you from selfish to generous, from a solitary individual to a member of a community, from a life of despair to one filled with hope, from death into life.

And when it all comes down to it, that’s the business God is in. Though we gather here, on a “low” Sunday, the fanfare from the week before gone and all but forgotten, we find that we have much to praise God for. Yes, it is still Easter, and every encounter with a living Savior transforms hearts. And being transformed, we have all the more reason to praise!

Biggest Loser - Philippians 3:4b-14

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
Yet whatever gains I had, these have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own, but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Jesus Christ.

Last week, my brother asked me to look over his resume. David is 20 years old, will graduate from college in May. He’s finishing a degree in Computer Science in a mere 3 years. I looked over what is an excellent resume from a fine young man who hopes to land a job in programming or network security. I realized that his starting salary will be about twice what his older brother makes, and can only hope that he’ll remember me favorably for all the support I’ve provided through the years, including tweaking the resume that will hopefully get him that job!

We have all heard the old saying: there are lies, “darn” lies, and statistics, but I wish to add one more level: resumes. Granted, at 20, David doesn’t have too much room to “embellish” his resume yet, but give him a few years. Think about what your resume is – it is one sheet upon which you inform a potential employer about all your good qualities. You’re trying to put your best foot forward and distinguish your work and experience from the other hundreds of resumes who are all trying to do the exact thing you are. A resume is your way of introducing yourself, and giving that potential employer a chance to determine if they want to get to know you any better.

Paul opens our text for this morning with his religious resume. I’ll admit: I’m impressed. Paul wins. He’s got bragging rights. If it’s ethnicity, family background, education, denominational affiliation, or accomplishments – I don’t care what criteria you wish to judge by – Paul’s got it. In other words, when it came to being a Jew, Paul was all that and a bag of Doritos. He had every right to rest in comfort, and know that he had arrived in the choicest of positions.

Yet, Paul looks over his religious resume – his bloodline, his knowledge of Hebrew, his scholarship, his enthusiasm, his adherence to every jot and tittle of the Law – he looks over all that, and says that compared to life in Jesus Christ, all of those things, are rubbish. The Biblical translators have actually softened the language here; Paul actually says that all of those things, compared to life in Jesus Christ, are human excrement. Paul looks over his religious resume, and turns it into toilet paper.

Many in Paul’s day had come to confuse their religious resume with faith in God. It all hinged on an individual’s accomplishments rather than on what God had done in, through, and for them.
I wonder how many of us have done the same thing. People ask us about our faith, and we rattle off a list of affiliations and accomplishments rather than talking about how it is between God and us. While I was in seminary, I interviewed with a church for a staff position which I did not get. During my interview with the senior pastor, he asked me to tell him about my faith. I began to explain what it was like growing up in a parsonage family, my involvement throughout high school and college, things I had done, places I had connected and served. And he just stopped me short, pounded on his desk, and said, “But tell me about your faith! What about your faith?”

We live in a society where success is based on one’s accomplishments, and the church is merely a reflection of that. This senior pastor wanted to know about the deep places of my faith journey, and I showed him accomplishments, awards, and affiliations. Instead of having a heart-to-heart discussion with him about the trials and joys of my relationship with God, I simply pulled out my religious resume.

We’re told to be productive, to make a name for ourselves, to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We’re told to harness the power of positive thinking, to tap the secret deep inside ourselves, to be self-made people. Fundamentally, this is the bedrock upon which liberal democratic societies like ours are built. We are self-made, on our own, and completely self-sufficient. We carry the same language into our religious discourse.

The problem with one’s religious resume is where it focuses. What is a resume, if not a brag sheet that is all about me? As it turns out, “me” is one of my favorite subjects. I can talk on and on for hours and hours about me. Where I grew up, my family, my schools, my likes, my dislikes, my hobbies, my passions. At the end of the movie, The Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino leans into the camera, grins, and says, “Vanity: my favorite sin.” I’ll confess that vanity is also my favorite sin, and if you’re looking for a favorite, may I suggest vanity. Vanity is a great one, because it focuses on my favorite subject: me. The problem with focusing on me and my accomplishments is that, after awhile, I actually begin to believe my own hype, and I begin to think that I matter a whole lot more than I do.

Then, along comes Paul in this morning’s text and reminds us of where our priorities are. You think you’re something? You think your accomplishments are something to be proud of? You think it’s all about you? Turns out it’s about being connected to Christ. It’s bigger than me. It’s about my values, and my attitudes, and my behaviors being shaped by the mind of Christ. It really has nothing to do with what people think of us, or if we’re keeping up the right religious appearances. At the end of the day, none of it matters. My accomplishments and affiliations are nothing more than rubbish, than human excrement, the text tells us.

I cannot tell you what wonderfully good news this is. I don’t have to prove myself to anyone. I don’t have to appear as the character made famous in one of Andy Harkins’ children’s messages a few months ago; I don’t have to show up as Super Christian. I can be a real person, someone with the same doubts and fears and shortcomings as anyone else in the room. I realize that everything does not rise and fall on my own personal accomplishments, because I am part of something greater than myself. I am part of Christ, I am connected to his body, and this is now the greatest and most important thing going on in my life.

Do you know what this means? It means I’m not alone. It means that the sun does not rise and set on my accomplishments alone. It means that you are vitally important to me, because we are intimately connected. It means we’re in this together.

Who among us is a self-made person, standing completely free of a web of relationships? If so, I feel very sorry for you. One, you must be very lonely. Two, it means you’ve deceived yourself for a long time. The intimacy that happens in a community is not possible in a world of isolated, self-made people. When we all believe ourselves to be self-made, every other person is a stranger, a competitor, someone who may at any time try to take my share of the pie, evict me from my land, or shine in my limelight. What a miserable way to live.

A society full of self-made people has no room for those who are dependent. There is no room for the mentally and physically handicapped, for the emotionally disturbed, or for the elderly, because such people are dependent: the rules of a self-made society would view them as “unproductive.” Perhaps what is most disturbing about this viewpoint is that it reduces all of us to cogs in a great machine of productivity. The moment one of the pieces in the equipment becomes unproductive, it becomes expendable.

This is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. In the dark night of the soul, when we are least productive, least self-sufficient, is when we need the love and concern of others the most. As Christians, we believe that we have been charged by God to love and care for every human life, especially the most vulnerable ones. Our society is most likely to dispose of people such as these, which is precisely why they need our care the most. Our society hates them because they are truthful reminders of who we really are, and we can’t handle the truth. Independent and self-made, we fear dependency even more than death itself.

One of those dependent people would be my friend, Sarah. Born with down syndrome, Sarah would be considered, according to the laws of self-sufficiency, an “unproductive” member of society. But Sarah has impressed many virtues upon me that might have otherwise been lost. She has taught me more about unconditional love than any other person I know. The seriously incapacitated and ill have taught me about courage and patience, and shown the joy in the little things of life. And a young man born with life-threatening medical conditions has taught me about perseverance and overcoming adversity, and I can’t tell you how proud I was to look over his resume last week. We need each other – we all have much to learn and much to share. I have no desire to be a self-made man, and would gladly lose my religious resume – I would gladly be the biggest loser – in order to be closer to God, in order to bring others closer to God, and in order to be closer to the rest of Christ’s precious body.

Friends, hear the good news on this fifth Sunday in Lent: God loves you, not because of what you have accomplished, not because of how hard you have worked, not because of your stellar resume. You are valuable to God, not because you’re productive, or because it’s in God’s best interest, or for any other good reason. God cares for you, as do your brothers and sisters in the Faith, simply because that’s the way God is. God is with you in those dark times, when your own efforts and abilities have left you woefully short, and he reminds us that it is your connection to him – not your own accomplishments – that really matters. It’s called grace, so stop trying to earn it.

And when I am able to sacrifice my ego on the altar, I find that I, one who has worked, one who once bought into the notion of being a self-made Christian by beefing up my religious resume, I find that I have much to lose. And in losing, I find that I have much to gain.

Remember Satan? - Luke 4:1-12

Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”
Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”
Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

I suspect that many of you drove by the church sign this week or came in this morning and looked at the sermon title in your bulletin and couldn’t believe what you were seeing. For those of you who are not worshiping with us here in the sanctuary, the title of today’s sermon is “Remember Satan?” I received an email from Brad Farrington, campus minister at the Wesley Foundation, jokingly letting me know that good United Methodist pastors don’t preach sermons about Satan. I replied back that the jury was still out as to whether or not I qualify as a “good” United Methodist pastor.

As I studied and prepared the sermon this week, I kept thinking of “Church Lady” – Dana Carvey’s character from Saturday Night Live. You all remember her response to anything she didn’t particularly agree with – “Could it be Satan?”

Think of the way Satan has come to be portrayed in our culture. He’s that little guy with a pitchfork in red pajamas who sits on your left shoulder. He always tells you the exact opposite of the character who sits on your right shoulder, the one with white pajamas and a halo. He’s the one to whom you sell your soul for fame or fortune, or power and prestige; the one who always leads us willfully into bad and evil things.

We see these caricatures, and most of us know they’re not accurate. We’re thinking, rational people, and these understandings of evil don’t line up with our experience or anyone else’s. We now have reasonable explanations for what people used to give Satan credit for. What used to be demonic possession can now be described as acute schizophrenia. What used to be sin is now unrealized potential. What used to be evil is now simply the absence of good. And because we’ve been able to deconstruct the roles that Satan used to fill, it’s easy for us to deconstruct Satan as well.

At this point, roughly half of you are rolling your eyes, thinking I can’t be serious, and am about to launch into some hyper-conservative rant that will put the fear of God into you and have you constantly looking over your shoulder to see if the devil is sneaking up on you. But, roughly another half of you are afraid I’m about to launch into some hyper-liberal rant that will completely deconstruct any notion of personified evil and tell you the devil is nothing more than a projection of our imagination, a name for our deepest fears, or perhaps a bit of undigested meat.

However, most of you who know me well know that I don’t tend to gravitate toward one pole or the other. Indeed, I find both of these extremes to miss the point, and will attempt to articulate a new way for us to look at Satan, evil, and temptation that is faithful to the text, the Christian experience, and our God-given faculties. May we pray.

Our text this morning tells us Jesus was led into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. It doesn’t say he struggled with psychological issues, deep-seeded fears, or social projections. But, nor does it say the devil was wearing red pajamas, carrying a pitch fork, and walked up to Jesus and said, “Hi, my name’s Beelzebub. I’ve scheduled a 2:30 temptation, and if it’s all right, I’d like to proceed with that now.”

Granted, it would certainly be easier if temptation were readily identifiable. If the guy in red pajamas and the pitchfork shows up, we could simply say, “Oh, that’s Satan, and I’d better not listen to him.” If temptation always came wrapped in tape that said, “WARNING – TEMPTATION INSIDE” we’d know not to follow it.

However, as none of us has ever seen such a character or opened such a package, we can too easily begin to believe that there is no Satan. But I believe one of the greatest lies the devil ever told us was that he doesn’t exist. The idea of personified evil was really nothing more than psychological projection, we convince ourselves. The modern world has a long history of reducing religious faith to nothing more than psychological or social projection, and we in the church have done just that. If Satan is only a projection of our evil tendencies then why is not God only a projection of our good tendencies?

Here’s the thing: Satan, the devil, evil – whatever name you use – doesn’t look like we expect it to. We’d like to see the world in completely black and white terms, but there are more shades of gray than I care to count. Evil is so hard to identify because it looks an awful lot like the good it’s mixed in with. The Bible says that Satan often “masquerades as an angel of light.” Evil likes to hide itself in with the good. So Scott Peck, in his book about evil (People of the Lie) says that one good place to look for evil is at church, not because church is inherently evil, it’s just that church is where evil attempts to hide itself among the good.

Not too long ago, there was a woman who did not care for the pastor who had been appointed to her church. She ran into him in the grocery store, and after idle chit-chat about the weather, he mentioned that he’d missed seeing her in worship lately. She said she just hadn’t really felt like going lately. The pastor simply said, “That’s the devil getting to you.” The woman looked up, and said, “You know, you’re right. And he walks down the center aisle of that church every Sunday morning in a black robe.”

I know she meant this comment as an insult, and I know her pastor took it as one, but I believe this woman has also unknowingly articulated a profound understanding of evil. Evil is most at home when it hides among the good. It is easy for us to say that evil has no face, has no name, has no personality if we have never been able to see it. But the truth is, we probably come face-to-face with it every day, and are so accustomed to it we don’t even see it.

It is easy for most of us – people who have never encountered real injustice or cruelty, people who are reasonably well-fed, and in good health and comfortable – to dismiss the idea of Satan as outmoded, naïve and unnecessary.

But I am unwilling to completely deconstruct Satan, or the devil, or evil, or whatever name you choose to use. It is no kindness, to tell someone who has been encountered by real evil, that evil is only some warped projection of our human psyche, a result of improper education or poor childrearing practices. The pain and anguish suffered by the victims of injustice, sin, and evil are real, but we only add to that pain when we tell those victims to buck up, snap out of it, or take their medication. When we treat the problem of evil as some sort of internal, personal problem, we’re telling people that whatever suffering they endure is their own fault.

Here’s the thing: if Satan is nothing more than a projection of the evil within us, then God is nothing more than a projection of the good within us. The reason this breaks down is because we have all experienced forces outside of ourselves and outside of our control. If evil and good are nothing more than psychological projections, then how on earth does a projection of our imaginations have such power over us?

When Luke says that Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, he wants us to know that evil, even when it encounters the Son of God, has a face, a personality. It is organized, it is subtle, and it even quotes Scripture just as well as Jesus does. In resisting temptation, Jesus refuses to grant evil sovereignty over the will of God. Satan knew who Jesus was, and he knew what God was capable of doing. But he was interested in turning the power of God into a sideshow that he could turn on and off at whim. He wanted God to display power simply for his own entertainment, and at his command. And the moment that were to happen, God is no longer God. He becomes a charlatan and a magician performing party tricks, and Satan is the one who calls the shots as to when those tricks happen.

That’s the temptation many of us face, as well. The devil doesn’t tempt us to abandon our belief in God – that’s too easy – we’re not going to fall for that. The word for devil in Greek – diabolos – literally means “one who throws things around,” or “stirs things up,” of confuses things.” He doesn’t want us to abandon our belief in God, he just wants us to believe the wrong things about God. He tempts us to believe that God is a magician who performs at our party, or a genie who pops out of our bottle, and who does any number of tricks at the time we designate. One of the greatest temptations in life is to want God to prove himself to us on our command. But, according to Will Willimon in a lecture he delivered on Monday, “God seldom behaves according to our desires, our wishes, our wants.” Try as we do to squeeze God into a box of our own making, God is not an errand boy to be summoned at our whim.

But even more, as Jesus resisted temptation, he overcame a genuine threat. He was not overcoming his own natural inclinations; Jesus was confronting and defeating the principalities and powers: the evil not just within the human heart, but the evil within the whole universe, an evil that is even greater than our own creation.

We all come today, facing a variety of temptations, and perhaps find ourselves stuck in patterns of sin we’d rather not face. Many of us are struggling with these things alone, having bought into the lie that there is no devil, and so the source of our difficulty must be down somewhere within us. What is that thing? What is it that weighs you down so heavily? What prevents you from experiencing the new life and freedom promised in Jesus Christ? What baggage are you carrying around with you – that thing that has plagued you for years, that thing you’d be ashamed if anyone ever found out about. You don’t have to carry it anymore, for as Jesus stood against his own temptations, he also wishes to stand against your temptation and lift your burden. As big as evil can be, Jesus is still bigger and more powerful.

Hear the good news this first Sunday in Lent: whatever you’re up against, you don’t have to stand against it alone. This community of faith – this extension of the body of Christ – stands with you. Whatever you face, whatever wilderness you find yourself in this morning. Jesus, who knows what its like to look evil squarely in the eye, stands with you. Though temptation is real, Satan does not have the last word, and through Jesus Christ, we are more than conquerors, thanks be to God.

Rejoice! - Luke 3:7-18, Philippians 4:4-7

John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
And the crowds asked him, “What then should we do?” In reply he said to them, “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized, and they asked him, “Teacher, what should we do?” He said to them, “Collect no more than the amount prescribed for you.” Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what should we do?” He said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.”
As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to unite the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Dale Carnegie wrote the book on how to win friends and influence people. Really, he did: that’s the title of his book! He developed what he referred to as golden principles to assist people achieve the full potential of their professional and personal development. Today, the Dale Carnegie Training Institute resources people in all 50 states and 75 countries around the world, and graduates claim to have sharpened their skills and improved their performance in order to build positive, steady, and profitable results.

Suffice it to say, John the Baptist was not a Carnegie man. Anyone who opens a sermon to the religious establishment with the words “You brood of vipers!” does not seem to be someone interested in winning friends and influencing people. Can you imagine those words going over well in a comfortable mainline Protestant church today? I know what you would say to a preacher who painted his congregation with a brush such as this. “You can’t talk to us like that – we’re good Methodists! We’re good Presbyterians! We’re good Lutherans! We’re good Episcopalians! Take that sermon down to the Missionary Baptist congregation where it might play a little better.” May we pray.

Thus, the modern-day Baptists claim John as one of their own, and with sermons like these, most of us in the mainline are happy to let them have him. Preaching like this does not happen in our pulpits. It is not taught in our seminaries. What is taught is that good sermons happen in 15 minutes or less, because if you spend longer than that, you don’t really have anything to say anyway. While I appreciate the need for brevity and have heard many good 15-minute sermons given in 45, I also wonder if this isn’t also some commentary on the state of preaching in our churches. I wonder if preaching professors might have been doing damage control for the last 30 years or so, recognizing that if their students didn’t have anything worthwhile to say, at least they could minimize the damage they’d inflict upon their congregations by preaching only 15 minutes. As one of my seminary professors characterized the majority of contemporary Protestant preaching, it is “nothing more than a string of nursery rhymes tied together with baby ribbon.”

While John the Baptist doesn’t have much tact, is pretty low on style, and we might disagree with his methods, we do have to grant him one thing: the boy could preach. If one of the aims in preaching is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, John the Baptist has done it.
Were that the full extent of the preacher’s task, John could stop right there. But, an effective preacher knows there is more to be done. Entertaining as John’s sermon may be, he realizes that he is not the star of the show. His job, and the job of all preachers, including your preacher this morning, is to point to something and someone beyond himself. This is not John’s field. He is simply tending the earth, breaking up the ground, so that when the owner of the field comes, it will be ready to be planted, nurtured, and harvested.

Perhaps the analogy here is over-simplistic, but I see John as something of a babysitter. He’s keeping an eye on God’s people and trying to guide them as best as possible until God is able to arrive. Many of you know that I grew up as one of four kids, and I’m third in the order. My oldest sister is eight years older than I am, and as paying a babysitter was out of the question, was often put in charge of things when my parents went out. Shocked though you may be by this news, I had a bit of a stubborn streak growing up and liked to test the limits of the authority granted to my sister in my parents’ absence. I always knew I had crossed the line when she said, “Wait ‘til Mom and Dad get home.” In that threat, reality came crashing down.

But you can hear the same warning in John the Baptist’s words this morning. “Oh you brood of vipers, wait ‘til the Messiah gets home.” The day of reckoning is coming! The kingdom of God is at hand, and you’ve got to change your evil ways, baby! He gives them some pretty good advice, too – share what you have, don’t rob and steal, be satisfied with what you have. John sent the crowds away, a bit fearful for when the Messiah gets home, carefully conducting their lives so as not to incur his wrath.

There was always one possible consolation when I had misbehaved and was waiting for my parents to come home. I could always hope that my other sister or my younger brother had done something even worse than I had, and THAT would be reported instead of whatever infraction I had committed.

The crowds in John’s day walked away with a similar consolation: as bad as they had been, surely there had to be someone else out there who had screwed up even worse. While those members of the religious establishment were a bit fearful, they rested in the uneasy knowledge that they would squeak by, because the Messiah would focus on greater offenders than themselves – Gentiles – people like you and me. People who were not God’s chosen ones and never could be. People who, like the chaff, would be swept away, or gathered together and thrown into the fire and be burned into nothingness.

You can see clearly this is the type of Messiah the people were expecting. They were waiting for a militant king, who would free the Jews from corrupt leadership, but would also sweep through the world and destroy the Gentiles, leaving the world to the purified Jews to rule.

This is the Messiah John is proclaiming, and warning people to shape up and fly right before he gets home. Punishment is coming for all of us; just make sure you’re not in the group who will receive the worst punishment!

The Messiah is coming all right. He shows up in this Gospel only a few verses later. And to be sure, this Jesus is the long-expected one. There will be an earthquake, the mighty ones will be topped from their thrones, and the least will be lifted up.

But, his approach isn’t quite what we were expecting. When the parents arrive home, we are expecting yelling and punishment. Instead, Jesus walks over to each of us – to you, to me – he puts his arm around us and says “Things aren’t going so well, are they? Let’s take a walk and talk about things. Let’s stop over here and get something to eat.” This Messiah, this Jesus, is going to do an awful lot of walking and talking in this Gospel. He’s going to do an awful lot of eating, too – inviting people to join him at the table and talk awhile. He’s even going to do this with people we thought were complete losers. He’s going to invite them to sit at table, and talk and learn. This is a teacher who is going to teach not through threats and fear and fire, but around a table, as friends and enemies gather together to listen, and to learn, and to be changed.
The change he brings is what allows us to live a life filled with rejoicing, as Paul encourages us to in today’s lesson from Philippians. “Rejoice in the Lord always,” he says. “In case you missed it the first time, I’ll say it again: Rejoice!” Don’t place your security in material things, or the accumulation of stuff, or in securing for yourself a slightly better place at the expense of someone else’s well-being. Don’t worry about those things; rather, focus on Christ and the fact that he will return. And when you think about Christ’s return, rejoice!

John the Baptist has already told us; the Messiah is coming. As he told the crowds, so I tell you, he is also coming again. How will you greet him? With dread, and fear, and trembling? Or, will you rejoice at his return?

Remember the analogy of the child waiting for the parent’s return? When I had done something wrong, I dreaded their return. But, what if a child has done something extraordinarily right? What if the child has done something remarkable they want to share with their parents?
Perhaps they’ve built a city out of LEGOS in the living room. Perhaps they’ve mastered a new piece on the piano. Perhaps they have a good report card to share. Perhaps they finished a long book, or helped in some household task, or have some new work of art to be hung prominently on the refrigerator. Parents, don’t you love coming home when your kids are so excited to show you what they’ve been up to?

How much moreso, then, will Christ look forward to returning and seeing what we’ve been up to! I hope that we rejoice at his return, and can’t wait to show him just what we’ve been up to. “Look – we’ve done what John the Baptist told us to! We’ve shared what we had. We’ve treated people fairly. We’ve been exceedingly generous.” Look, Jesus! Look what we’ve done! Look at the people whose lives have been transformed because we did what you told us to!

In the sorts of lives we are called to live, we begin to experience the freedom and fullness of life promised in Jesus. We find that we are free from ourselves, and from always living to satisfy our own desires. We have been freed from selfishness to generosity, from individualism to community, from despair to hope. We have been freed from thinking of ourselves as the exact center of the universe, and realize that our role may have to do with something larger than ourselves. We find that we’ve been blessed in order to be a blessing, and that the good news really is transmitted through us.

When we realize that, we have a sermon worth preaching, whether we preach it aloud for 20 minutes from this pulpit, or in our daily lives as Christ’s disciples. We have a sermon that points beyond ourselves, as John the Baptist did, and find that maybe we have a little more in common with him than we first thought. But, as we announce that Christ is coming, it is good news rather than a pronouncement of doom. The kingdom of God is at hand, but thanks be to God, we are learning how to live like kingdom people already.

Our job as disciples, as kingdom of God people, is to free the captives and then to begin to equip those who have been freed to hear the Spirit speaking in their lives and in our midst. Because none of us here will always be around to tell others what to do. But God, in his Word, by his Spirit, will be.

Friends, when we say, “Come Lord Jesus,” it is a reminder that God will always be there to guide us into what we can joyfully do, having been saved from ourselves, to set others free and to help them begin to live. Jesus is coming. Rejoice!

Grace Re-born - Luke 1:39-45

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by her Lord.”

By noon tomorrow, I’ll have landed at the Buffalo airport and arrived at my parents’ home in Niagara Falls. When I arrive, my three nephews and one niece will already be celebrating, and at this point in my life, I can’t imagine a Christmas celebration without them. You have often heard people express the notion that Christmas is best celebrated with children around. This is usually the point when some religious zealot says “Humbug,” and tells us that this association with children is nothing more than sugar-coated sentimentality.

While I agree that Jesus is the reason for the season, and that we need to put the Christ back in Christmas, I also think our celebrations are most complete when we celebrate with children. Children teach us something about expectation and hope, and they are a living reminder of the wonder with which we too might greet the coming king. May we pray.

The imagination of children
I spend more time shopping for my niece and nephews than anyone else on my list. For one thing, I only see them a few times a year, and I don’t want their only reminder of me to be a pair of socks or some boring educational game. However, I am also aware that my careful selection may be less interesting than the box my gift comes in. Don’t you long for a return to the days of innocent imaginative power? When whatever you imagined became your reality? A box on the floor looks an awful lot like a Formula-One racer, and for the child who sees it as one, it is. Last year, my niece Valerie, who is the very definition of girly-girl, received a beautiful frilly dress. She put it on, looked in the mirror, and said, “Oh, I a princess!” And she was.

We bring children to our holiday celebrations because they are able to tap into the world of imagination so easily. In fact, we need children, we need imagination, in order to even read this story. Take this morning’s biblical text – it is a text pregnant – no pun intended – with imagination. Mary and Elizabeth imagine something beyond the rational – beyond biology, beyond common sense, beyond the limited notions of what most of us take to be realistic – but the very things they imagine turn out to be their reality. Not only theirs, but ours as well.

How many of us have looked for a rational explanation to this text? How many of us have grown up and matured beyond our imagination, and tested this text against our notion of factuality? It makes perfect sense that these two women could imagine the events of this story. Mary, after all, was a teenager – fourteen or fifteen at best. She was poor, uneducated, and otherwise oblivious to the collective wisdom of the world. And Elizabeth – she was an old woman by this time – very well could have been senile or in the beginning stages of dementia.

The rationalist among us, or, perhaps within us, looks at these two women, and can easily dismiss them as naïve. They were living in their imaginations. They didn’t have an accurate grasp on the facts.

However, I wonder if we have too narrow a definition of facts. Thinking, rationalistic people like us, products of the modern age that we are, have allowed facts to be determined and tested by provable, repeatable, experimentation. Only those things that can be proved are real. Only those things that can be tested are true. Give us facts – raw, unadorned, uninterpreted, provable facts.

Neil Postman, in his book, Technopology, accuses us of being people with no imagination. Our fascination with computers – fact-churning, data-collecting machines that they are – is evidence of this. We have fooled ourselves into thinking there is a shortage of data in the world, and if we can just wrangle all the facts together, figure out how to sort them out, and line them up correctly, we’ll arrive at the answers to all of life’s problems. The UN sends envoys on fact-finding missions. Our government tells us they can’t decide anything until all the information comes in. Meanwhile, we have so many facts we’re crushed under their collective weight and drowning in a sea of ones and zeros. Postman says it flat out: “We don’t need more data. We have more facts than we can possibly consume. What we are dying of is lack of courage, lack of dreams, a failure of nerve.”

The imagination of Mary and Elizabeth
And yet, those things were exactly what Mary and Elizabeth had. They dared to believe that God would accomplish what He said He was going to do. They dared to dream their dreams into reality. They dared to believe in the irrational and the unreasonable, and lo, the mysteries of God were born within them.

Friends, this is what we mean when we talk about grace. In us, and through us, and on our behalf, God does what we thought was impossible. God is working in ways we cannot explain or understand. He invites us to imagine a reality based upon his extravagant promises, and we find his promises pregnant with possibility. You have to read this text with an active imagination! How else do you explain babies who leap for joy in their mother’s womb? How else do you look your poor, pregnant, unwed, teenage relative in the face and tell her she is blessed among women? This is a world where truth resides beyond what we have come to define as facts, where we will believe that God can do whatever God wills to do.

I thank God for the witness of these two distant relatives. I am thankful for a world of hope and promise beyond the stark reality we have become so comfortable with. These women point to a world of possibility. At the conclusion of this Advent season, as we wait on these last few hours before Christmas bursts in upon us, the door to that world stands cracked open. We peek inside, and even if for only the briefest of moments, we see that world. Not only do we see it, we see ourselves in it. Mary and Elizabeth dared to imagine that world, and they dared to see themselves in it.

Re-birth of imagination as a means of grace
“Faith,” says theologian James Whitehead, “is the enduring ability to imagine life in a certain way” (“The Religious Imagination,” Liturgy 5, 1985, pp. 54-59). Peter Gomes, minister at Harvard’s Memorial Church, refers to the Bible as “A book of the imagination.”

I have to agree with these two and with Neil Postman that we don’t need more data. We already have more information that we could ever process. What we need is a re-birth of imagination. We need to see the world once again through innocent eyes. We need grace to be re-born in our midst.

If you turn to the Winston-Salem Journal, you won’t find this way of seeing the world. You’ll find more facts, lined up in neat columns, telling you what happened, and to whom, and when, and possibly how or why. CNN is no help; only more data there. Perhaps you’re like me, and you’re thinking there’s GOT to be more out there than this. Perhaps you’re like me, and are looking for hope. Perhaps you’re like me, and longing to imagine a different sort of world.

What richer ground is there for our imaginations than this Advent and Christmas season? While the world is obsessed with statistics, we appreciate the value of symbols. Come to the church in December, and we’ll load you down with metaphors, stir up the poet within you, and teach you to sing once again. We’ll shatter your preconceived notions of reality, and greatly expand your definition of what can and can’t be.

The children already get it; in fact, they’re the ones we need to teach us. Jesus taught us to have the faith of children, and we thought he was just being cute and offering us a ready-made text for Children’s Sunday. But he invites us to be born out of our proud sophistication, with our ideas about reality, and glimpse God’s reality. We see it is a reality full of grace, but we are invited to not only glimpse it, but to live into it.

As I say these things, I realize that many of us gather with the weight of the “real” world on our shoulders. You wonder if the fight with your spouse last night was the final straw. You wonder if you’ll ever get out from under your crushing consumer debt. You wonder if a donor will be found before it’s too late. You wonder if your grandmother will ever remember your name again. I wonder, now that my Mom’s cancer has returned, just how bad it’s going to be. What decision, what pain, what hurt have you put on the shelf to deal with after the holidays? You may recognize that a change needs to happen, but making that change is so risky you find yourself paralyzed by fear. This world, this real world dominated by facts and figures and statistics, comes to a place where it has nothing left to offer, and we find ourselves banging our heads against its wall. We are a people desperately in need of hope, and sooner or later, we all come to realize that this world simply can’t manufacture what we need.

So let’s face facts, but let’s operate in the possibility of God’s reality. We gather here in December, with stories of expectant virgins, and angelic choirs, and babies who leap in their mother’s wombs. We gather and listen to these stories, not because we’ve forgotten them, but because we need that hope to be born in us yet again. And sure enough, every time we open ourselves up to these new possibilities, grace is re-born. Will you, with Mary and Elizabeth, imagine for a moment that God is able to fulfill his promises? Imagine yourself open to the subtle incursions of God’s presence among us. Imagine a God who is not safely aloof from the world. Imagine a world of transformation: from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the natural to the supernatural, from the expected to a world filled with surprise. Look upon that world, enter into it, and find yourself caught up in something bigger than you. Imagine that world, pregnant with the promise of God’s future. Imagine the possibilities.