Sermons

For a few years after Jesus died, there were people alive who had heard Jesus preach and teach and heal people.  For a little while, there were people who could tell stories about Jesus, first-hand:  This is what I saw and heard and what I grew to believe.  For a brief period of time, there were even people who had experienced the presence of the risen Christ—just a handfull of people, but eyewitnesses, nevertheless.  Eventually, those people died off.

The 24/7 news cycle distorts our world.  How many times a day does this ticker land on the bottom of the screen:  “Breaking news!”  I remember days when that ticker was justified:  the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle; planes crashing into the World Trade Centers; the events of January 6th.  However, that ticker is up all the time, every day.  The truth is that earth-shattering news doesn’t happen constantly.  However, if the networks keep telling us it is then, for a while, it feels like it might.  You’ve got our attention, which of course is the goal for the network.  Eventually, though, after stressing every time we see that ticker—“Oh no! What now?”—we end up jaded:  “Ya, right…”

Scripture has been used throughout history to justify terrible things:  slavery, prejudice, misogyny, vengeance, homophobia. Choose a hateful action.  Find a verse that supports it.  Take that verse out of context.  Make those few words your foundation.  Christian preachers have preached hate this way for centuries.

Here are the seven names that I want to say out loud this morning:  Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha; Lalsawmi (Zomi) Frankcom; Damian Sobol; Jacob Flickinger; John Chapman; James (Jim) Hendersen; and James Kirby.  These people were parents and had parents.  They were beloved friends and had beloved friends.  They came from all over the world but where they were together on April 1st was Gaza, working to bring food to the people who lived there who are starving.

March has been a month of memorial services, three weeks in a row.  One of those memorial services was for a friend, Mary Beth.  I didn’t know her long but I knew her deeply.  The first time that I met her was to help her plan her wedding.  Immediately, there was a profound sense of how open-hearted and caring and present she was.  She was deeply spiritual. It’s that spiritual part of her that I tried to address at her memorial service.  Here is where I started…

So, to a certain degree, we paved the way for this week’s sermon last week when we opened up the notion that, sooner or later, following Jesus means actually having to do what he calls us to do.  Our job isn’t to think something.  Our job is to do something.  The something that we have to do always occurs in a particular time and place.  We have to do something in the particular time and place in which we find ourselves and the time to do it is now.

This year, I’ve spent less time than any other Lent on who Jesus healed and what words he preached.  All those things matter.  We can come back and talk about them during the rest of the year.  We’ve got time to think about things. The question that I’ve felt compelled to ask is this: “What are we supposed to do? What would it really mean for us to follow Jesus of Nazareth in our own lives?”

As I write this sermon, hundreds of thousands of people—men, women, elderly and young—are on the brink of starvation in Gaza.  Nearly thirty thousand have died in bombings since October, ten thousand of them children.  On October 7th, over a thousand people—men and women, elderly and young—died in a wave of terror attacks.  All these people—Gazans and Israelis—are victims of violence that comes from the heart of human darkness.  The attackers on each side justified their actions based on the attrocities that preceded them.  Debate such things all you will, thousands upon thousands of people have been sacrificed in the name of vengeance. 

Worship, to me, is all about practicing making choices.  The first choice is to show up at all.  There are a lot of other things to do on a Sunday morning:  sports practices, a round of golf, a nice long brunch, sleeping in, to name just a few.  You don’t have to be here—you really don’t. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad you are!  However, I refuse to try to leverage that choice by invoking guilt or shame or fear.  In fact, for all of us, there are Sunday mornings where the most worshipful place we can be is somewhere else.  I respect you and your freedom to choose.  So, worship begins with a word of welcome and a thank you—as well as a chance to greet the folks who made the same choice that day.

  I spend a lot of time thinking about God but very little time thinking about a personified God.  You know the God I mean—the guy with the beard who sits on a throne and judges people, controlling the world, deciding who has been “naughty” or “nice.” This is the God that people tell you about…just before they tell you they don’t believe in that God. (Me, either!) Then, they tell you what they would do if they were God:  “I’d even the score!  Bad things would happen to bad people and good things would happen to the good. Life would be fair!” At that point the only thing left to say is, “Wow, it’s too bad you’re not God!” 

Every now and then, I hear a song that I had totally forgotten…and I smile.  Not long ago, it happened with a song from when I was a kid:  “I was in the right place but it must have been wrong time.  I’d have said the right thing but I must have used the wrong line.”  Do you remember it?  “Right Place, Wrong Time,” by…Dr. John.  Haven’t we all been in the right place at the wrong time?  Haven’t we all had something to say but we said it all wrong?  That’s what makes the song memorable.  We’ve all been there and done that, right?

Last week, I tried to make the case that Jesus wasn’t just “biding his time” for his first thirty years.  I think he was experiencing the things that make life meaninful, that make life worth living, that make the world worth loving.  I suspect he knew the joy like we did of having playmates as a child.  He had loving parents.  He had brothers and sisters, who no doubt fought with one another and teased each other and loved each other.  He learned what it meant to be a person of faith because being a part of a community of faith was a built in part of his life.  He knew the joy of being creative and feeling competent and accomplishing things in his work.  For the first thirty years, Jesus was immersed in the world in which and for which he would die.