Sermon May 20, 2012

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

Psalm 1

1 John 5:9-13

John 17:6-19

“On Your Behalf”

There is a powerful thread of call woven though each of this week’s texts. The call to be faithful to the roots of Judaism, to be courageous in following Jesus, to be grounded in the love and presence of God, and to live truth-telling lives. Which of the calls in this week’s texts most resonates with you at this point in your life of faith?¹

We have a good time together as a congregation and today we celebrate the happiness we have in being a church together in this place. I know, too, that there have been times that felt more fulfilling, more successful because of friends and family who were here participating. I also know that those times can sometimes seem more joyful because we often remember the past with rose-tinting.

Today, I want us to remember something more, that this congregation was planted in this community for some particular reason—and it is still here for a particular reason. We must believe that if we are to continue here and if we don't believe we have a purpose and mission then we will die. We are called to be here for a particular reason, I believe this, and it is our job—as a congregation, as a community of faith, as a church who follows Jesus Christ—to figure out what that is.

The thread of call that is woven throughout the scriptures today hold onto past, present and future—honoring the past without sentimentality, but holding onto traditions for the purpose of carrying out God's purpose. Though they were just coming to understand how their lives would be changing with Jesus no longer among them, they did understand that they were to be carrying on Jesus' ministry on his behalf and on the behalf of God who had sent him.

They were in the midst of a strange time, grieving his loss and celebrating his resurrection. And had been given the commission to continue on without his physical presence among them on a daily basis. They now had to rely on the message they had been given. Instead of relying on Jesus to teach, they had to teach the people themselves. And they're teaching was a testimony to what Jesus had taught them, how they had heard it, what they had received and how they saw the people around Jesus were affected by his teaching. They also had to testify as eyewitnesses to the resurrection. That's why it was important to choose another eyewitness to replace Judas. Plus they wanted twelve to hold onto the tradition of Israel—twelve tribes, twelve apostles. They were forming an organization—a church, an assembly of believers to work toward the purpose of testifying to Jesus Christ in their lives. And how did they show that Jesus was in their lives? They spoke of Jesus' love. They healed the sick who came to them. They found ways to care for the widow and the orphan—by pooling their money and sharing it as all had need. They sold property to make this possible. They risked their lives to tell how Jesus' teaching went beyond old boundaries of religions, including Gentiles in their churches and baptizing people who didn't conform to the law of Moses. They also honored the traditions of the Jewish faith in some ways, carrying with them the laws of hospitality and welcoming the stranger. They recognized that Abraham's faith was honored by God, forever, and that all of God's covenants stood forever. Their purpose? To carry out the ministry that Jesus Christ had begun in their lives and do it with the love and grace that he also showed them and all the people to whom he ministered.

And it is in Jesus' prayer from the gospel lesson this morning that we hear Jesus' desire for the disciples—his apostles, sent out into the world to glorify God. They sat with Jesus after dinner in the evening after a meal and Jesus began to pray for them. Just as Peter spoke during a time of transition after the resurrection, Jesus prayed for his followers, the church, before his death. Jesus had already turned the disciples' lives upside down, and they were never going to be the same. But during that quiet after-dinner conversation, they must have felt that everything was about to change once again, and we all know what change brings: anxiety.

So he prayed on behalf of the church, these apostles, so that they would hold onto the words and ways that he had taught them in his time among them. He prayed that they would seek out ways of living in the truth while they lived and worked in the world that God gave us all to live in. And he prays on our behalf, this day as well, to protect us and claim us as friends and co-workers in this kingdom forming all around us.

Because we are called to a purpose this day—to be guided toward the work of God around us. Each of us is called in different ways and in different degrees of responsibility and we are called to respond together. We have focused on a vision that gives us direction—we need to find the particular concrete steps that will take us there.

And that's where I stand this day. I stand in front of you asking us to seek our purpose as a congregation in this day and time. I urge us to actively seek a missional direction in this community, as a congregation. I ask you—where do you see a need that we can meet? Where do you see people hurting? Can we meet people in their illness, not to heal, but to bring Christ's presence through our presence? Can we share our life-skills in some way that will make another person's life easier?

I know we have ministry to offer—and I know that some of us share what we have generously—I believe that we can also come together in some way to share Jesus with others through compassionate, merciful, nonjudgmental, justice-filled and peace-promoting ways.

What I don't know is how we can use who we are and what God has given us to respond to the needs of this community. I need you and you need one another to figure that out. We aren't likely to be able to meet every need that comes along, but we can certainly serve Christ in some particular ways here and now. We can also reach beyond the bounds of the community and I think we need to do both.

Part of my urgency this morning is that I know that mission will make or break us in the future that God has for us. Mission is the direction and motivation for carrying on as a congregation. We are called upon—as God's people have always been called upon—to do God's work in this and as Christians we are called to do the work of Christ in this world.

Jesus prayed in behalf of his disciples—and we number among them—to be protected as we enter into the world where Jesus' message must be taken.

We can hear Jesus' prayer, wanting them to be prayed for us in our lives and work. As one preacher said, “I was left there on the chancel steps so aware that I wanted that Rabbi we call Jesus to think of me when he prayed these words ... what did he say?

"While I was with them, I protected them ... I guarded them ... and (now) I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete."

Jesus' joy is made complete as we live out the purpose he had—compassion, grace, forgiveness, hope, healing, understanding, life—and our joy is made complete as we do the work, realizing that Jesus has prayed that this gift be given to us, has prayed on our behalf.

To God be the glory. Amen.

1Seasons of the Spirit Spirit Fusion, Background, Lent/Easter 2012 p. 178.

Sermon May 13, 2012

Acts 10:44-48

Psalm 98

1 John 5:1-6

John 15:9-17

“The Great Dance”

Some of you, I know because I see you there, have connected to friends and family on Facebook. According to one source, in 2010, 200 million people signed up for Facebook, presumably each one of those people has at least one Facebook friend. Friendship on Facebook means lots of things, but I would guess we wouldn't characterize it as love. But if we do not love those who are just Facebook friends, then what is our relationship? But friendship is truly about love—love that can be shared among many people connected to one another as individuals and to everyone in a community through purpose and within the church, we are friends as we connect, interact and move outward from the church in our collective relationship with Jesus Christ. So we enter into a dance of love, a dance designed by the creator, sung by our savior and played by the spirit.

Our praise hymn this morning was based on the writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg a Christian woman who lived and wrote between 1210 and 1284. She lived with other religious of her time, eventually becoming a member of an order of sisters. She wrote of her vision--the ways in which she experienced the Godhead in her prayers and in her meditations. She wrote this:

I cannot dance, Lord, unless you lead me.
If you want me to leap with abandon,
You must intone the song.
Then I shall leap into love,
From love into knowledge,
From knowledge into enjoyment,
And from enjoyment beyond all human sensations.
There I want to remain, yet want also to circle higher still.¹

I admit, Jesus doesn't talk about dance in this passage from John's gospel and 1 John doesn't talk about dancing either. But it seems to me, as you listen to Jesus' description of love—it sounds like a dance of words.

God loves me, so I love you, live in that love.

Love one another, as I have loved you.

Lay down your lives for those that you love.

You didn't choose me, but I chose you.

I am sending you out, to go and bear fruit.

I give you commands so that you love one another.

I can see a circle dance, one where many people stand together, listening to the caller or singing the actions. (Like the hokey-pokey) Love is in the middle—So we step toward God because God has stepped toward us. Then we step toward one another and grow even closer to God. Then as we step away from the circle, never losing its shape, we invite others to join us as we continue the dance and spread the circle wider, never getting farther from love, just making it bigger.

Jesus says that friendship is obedience; and he says that his disciples are no longer servants, but friends. So obedience within friendship is different that obedience within the slave and master relationship. The language and the logic are a little circular—thus we are calling it a dance, today. This is the dance of love. Jesus calls them to dance: to love each other as Jesus has loved them and Jesus has loved them as God has loved him and God so loved the world that God sent them Jesus to love them. It's a circle round, a circular dance of love. Keeping to the way of Jesus—keeping Jesus' commandments—keeps us dancing together; but it is an obedience based on loving each other and living within the love of Jesus who lives within the love of God.

The dance we dance with Christ—it seems to me—is done as we dance the dance of love with one another—and the love we receive from God is the love we have to share with one another. We have to love one another—to dance this dance with one another—because through the dance, through the way of love, we acknowledge that we are all children of God, as we read in 1 John.

Dancing, as a metaphor of the love we live, give and receive, can help us understand that love is an active word, a verb that means motion, activity and one that can't be done alone.

Throughout John's gospel, we can pickup the aspects of how God loves Jesus—and according to this passage, according to the dance, how it is that Jesus' disciples (who we are) are loved by him. And, continuing the dance, how we dance with others, how we invite others in.

Throughout the gospel of John there are some clues about God’s love for Jesus. God gives Jesus all the world (The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands. 3:35); therefore love is about generosity. God shares everything with Jesus, bringing Jesus into God’s confidence (The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished. 5:20); therefore love is about trust. God gives Jesus a role to play (But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 1:12); therefore love is about responsibility and meaning. All of these things Jesus modelled for his disciples. He calls them not servants or employees who take instruction and do as they are told, but friends – confidants and intimates. Their relationship is built not with contracts but with the strong bonds of friendship. And, like Jesus himself, they are chosen and called. The disciples have seen Jesus and John the Baptizer chosen by God (John 1:6). Now the disciples themselves are the chosen. Not just as individuals but as a community of sisters and brothers.²

So the great dance, the universal action of love, and our part in that dance reflects God's generosity to Jesus Christ, God's trust of Jesus and the responsibility of nurturing God's and the purpose and meaning of that responsibility.

Jesus generously gives us the power of his continuing ministry—as he gave it to the disciples, his friends. So we are to continue that ministry, revealing his love within us as individuals and as a part of the body of Christ. We do that by treating all as God's children—because they are God's children, even if they are unaware of it yet. Sometimes that means loving ourselves more generously, sometimes that means treating others with less judgment and most of the time it means both.

Jesus also has trusted us, as he trusted his disciples, his friends with power, the power to speak for him and to share the teachings he has given. We are entrusted with the word he spoke, not to corrupt it with rules and hatred, but to carry it with love and hospitality into our lives.

Jesus has given us responsibilities, too, which is a gift because it gives us purpose and meaning in our lives. Because we are God's children, we do as God teaches—we love God and we love our neighbors who are God's children, too. Who is not our neighbor? Who is not a child of God?

So we dance this dance of love—this love that permeates God's creation because love in action is the origin and purpose of creation—moving us closer to Jesus' way of life for us, moving us closer to God and one another.

In love, in action, in hope and in exceeding joy, we bring glory to God. Amen.

1From: The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Vliessende lieht miner gotheit) (Translation by Frank Tobin, amended) http://home.infionline.net/~ddisse/mechthil.html (accessed 12/11/2010)

2Seasons of the Spirit SeasonsFUSION Lent• EasterBiblical Background, 166.

 

This is likely to be this week's bulletin cover--sideways.

Sermon May 6, 2012

Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:25-31
1 John 4:7-21

 John 15:1-8

  “Reaching Out”

There have been folks over the years that I have been preaching that have said that I talk about love too much—or that complain that we don't focus enough on what people are doing that is immoral or unethical or just plain evil. And we do--I do--talk about love, grace, forgiveness, welcome and acceptance a lot.

Most of the time when I've heard complaints about too much love I believe many of those folks see evil in diversity. And that concern comes out of a need for clarity in the choices that they themselves make. If I have a problem, a situation, or a question to answer, then one answer is right and the other answer or solution is wrong. In the context of love—I love what is right, good, safe and familiar. I don't love what is wrong, bad, dangerous and strange. And more significantly, I love the person who is right, good, safe and familiar. I don't love the person who is wrong, bad, dangerous and strange.

Yet is that truly what the gospel is about? Did Jesus promote following along with the expectations of religious traditionalist or those who had authority? Did Jesus say that love was an emotional bond? Or did Jesus reveal in himself that love meant sharing life with one another through care, communication, contact, intimacy and interaction with others and with God in Jesus himself?

The scripture from Acts 8 is one of those texts that can be used for teaching lots of things. In some of my baptism and membership curriculum, it us used to describe the need for education and some knowledge before one makes a commitment through baptism. It can be seen to express the need to understand scriptures introducing Jesus as suffering servant and messiah—as wisdom about Jesus' suffering, crucifixion, death and resurrection. And those are integral to the story, absolutely key to what happens, but that's not all that happens.

Philip, who had been chosen as a deacon—a servant to be in daily contact with the needs of the widows and others in need—was whisked off, in some way to this road between Jerusalem and Gaza. Once he found himself there, he saw the chariot of a eunuch from Ethiopia, who had been to the Jerusalem to worship. It seems that he probably wasn't a convert to Judaism, but someone who did connect with God through the rituals and scriptures of the faith. When Philip saw the chariot, he heard the eunuch reading and recognized that he was reading from Isaiah, so he was urged again to approach the man in the chariot and help him understand Isaiah's prophecy. So Philip to told the eunuch about Jesus—how he had been killed by crucifixion and how he had been resurrected on the third day. And Philip must have told him that he could be a part of The Way that Jesus taught by baptism. When the eunuch saw water, he asked to be baptized and Philip baptized him. Then he was whisked away, once again.

Philip, in this story, has a unexpected kind of openness to the eunuch. The eunuch was a powerful figure in the court of a foreign monarch, the Candace of Ethiopia, so he was foreign. He was strange because he was also a eunuch. According to laws in the first testament of the scriptures, he would have been prohibited from serving as a priest and wouldn't have been terribly welcome with the men as they worshiped at the temple. Some of the laws in the first testament are often suspect of people or objects or ideas that are not purely one thing or another—and many didn't know how to treat with a man who had had part or all of his reproductive organs removed. In that day, a person was a man or a woman—and without the particular physical signs of one or the other, then what?

So, the eunuch was, well, a eunuch; he was foreign and he wasn't even a Jewish convert. Circumcision was a complicated question and the blessing of eternal life through reproduction, which was seen as an integral gift of God was null and void. He was also a powerful member of another culture's government. But Philip, at the urging of the Holy Spirit teaches and baptizes him anyway—and the baptism is seen as a sign and success because of the very clear witness and action of the Holy Spirit within the whole strange story.

This story even occurs before Peter was given the vision from God that allowed and encouraged him to take the gospel to the Gentiles. In this case, it is about the power of the Holy Spirit in Philip and how that Spirit moves us to reach beyond normal expectations because normal isn't where we live anymore.

Without the urging of the Holy Spirit to get him over the hump, so to speak, can you imagine what Philip's assumptions about the eunuch might have been? Okay, he's foreign, that might be the first thing he notices and that he's likely traveling in style—so he lives in wealth, too. And he has a copy of the prophet Isaiah, that indicates wealth in that day, too.

Do you make assumptions based on those things? He's foreign and he's rich? There's a strangeness here, what will he expect of me? What language will he understand? Will he be rude or will I seem rude if I do something wrong? How will I share the gospel with him if he is so different than me? Differences sometimes intimidate us. Are they too young to talk to or too old? Are they different looking or just seem strange? What makes us hesitate to talk to others? Is it just me?

Okay, so those differences might have been the most obvious ones. He was also a eunuch, which probably was obvious to some in that day. If he had been a eunuch from a young age, there were physical difference that might have been obvious. He would have had less hair, a higher and softer voice and a less muscular body type than the typical man. As a servant of a female ruler, a eunuch would have been an expected choice, so yes, Philip probably saw that a mile away, too.

Gender, in Judaism and in many religious traditions, is a very clear indicator of how people treat one another, then and now. So did Philip think, is this a man? I treat him like other men? At the command of the Holy Spirit, he did. He ran to the chariot. He spoke to him as an equal and he listened to his questions with respect. Then he made this man—a foreign, influential, perhaps wealthy, questionably gendered (in his day) stranger—a part of the body of Christ through baptism. Then he was whisked on to take part in the rest of his life as a servant, a deacon within the way of Jesus Christ.

Reading this text in relationship to the others in today's lectionary may seem a stretch, but I think they all speak of love in different ways. Philip showed love to this stranger. He didn't embrace him or speak sentimentally to him, but loved him by giving him the gift of baptism and including him in the immature body of Christ—a body still seeking to define who and what and where and how were they to live and survive in this world. He broke down some pretty significant barriers to love and community in this one act, by bringing this man into the early church.

The letter of 1 John speaks of love as one thing—you can't love God if you hate a brother or sister and if you do say that you love God and hate another person, then you are lying, probably to yourself. Suddenly the qualifications that make us acceptable to God are less about right and wrong and more about loving and not loving. That doesn't mean we have to hug everyone, so relax, but love does mean connection—to Christ and to one another, perhaps like a vine. I can't reject the other branches without reject the true vine—the main vine and the vine-grower. So as one who believes that God is love, I have to know that God loves everyone that God loves, so it's not my decision who to leave out, not now not ever.

Love is difficult for that reason. Love makes our decisions more objective. Living in Christ means loving others because love bears fruit and love bears fruit because it is one of Jesus very clear commands, “Love one another as I have loved you.” The letter 1 John takes up that command and expands upon it, but clearly still holds up that command, “Love one another because God is love.”

Again, I say, that doesn't mean that we have to hug each other—but we do have to know that we are intimately involved in each other's lives, no matter how weird or difficult that might be. We are all annoying sometimes and we all insult one another intentionally and unintentionally. We say things and do things that are misunderstood and some that are clearly meant to annoy or otherwise bother someone else, though we may not mean to actually hurt someone.

We are difficult people and guess what? So is everyone else in their own particular, unique ways, but I don't know one person who doesn't or hasn't annoyed someone else, at least a little bit. So we get annoyed and don't like someone. But that being said, that's not love. Love is being what someone needs when someone needs it. Philip was the interpreter of scripture and instrument of the baptism of Christ, when the eunuch was in need of it. Jesus is the vine for us, connecting us, not only to him, but to one another and to the branches of the vine in all times and in all places. Love is knowing that we are connected and one with one another in a complicated mess that only vines can produce.

Love is sacrificing our wants and desires for the needs and survival of others—not to be rewarded, but to be witnesses to the gospel of Christ and all that it has meant to us. So we reach out with Philip, to the unexpected person who needs to be shown who Jesus is, in us. We reach out as a branch on the vine, holding onto the Christ to be the vessel for love in this world. We reach out to one another in love, because to know God is to know love. And to love God is to love everyone, with God's help because we can't do it any other way.

Let us love one another, to the glory of God. Amen.