Savior, Like a Shepherd, Lead Us

Scripture Lessons: John 10: 11-18 and 1 John 3: 16-24 Sermon Title: Savior, Like a Shepherd Lead Us Preached on April 25, 2021 The great religions of the world have so much in common, but there are differences of course, which, along with the many similarities, are also important to pay attention to. For example, last Wednesday morning I was honored to attend a breakfast meeting of local religious leaders hosted by Roswell Street Baptist Church. A new friend of mine, Rabbi Larry Sernovitz of Temple Kol Emeth was there, and as the two of us were talking about the incredible pair of shoes he had on, a woman handed him his breakfast: hash brown casserole and bacon. This was a moment of difference, which was addressed, politely resolved, and would have been foolish to ignore. For in order for us to eat together, we can’t ignore the reality that not all foods are Kosher and so we don’t all eat the same things. That’s important to think about. That’s how it is. We can’t allow what’s different to divide us, we can’t be ignorant of what might offend our friends and neighbors, and there are also moments when what makes us unique is worth celebrating. Think about what all makes us unique and different from Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Muslims. One unique Christian attribute among many is the image of the shepherd. It is an image of God, a metaphor for understanding the divine which we share with our Jewish brothers and sisters. The image of the Shepherd runs throughout today’s worship service from the Call to Worship, the Prayer of Confession, First and Second Scripture Lessons, and all the music that we’ve heard. This image is most associated with the 23rd Psalm which belonged to the Jewish faith long before Hobby Lobby ever put it on a wall hanging or a beach towel. You think I’m kidding about that, but you can get Psalm 23 on a beach towel, though where it really belongs is in our hearts and captured by our minds so that we can recall it when we need it most, for when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death it is imperative that we remember who is with us. Whenever a Christian thinks about what it means to know who God is, it is a comfort to go back to those most worderful words which Cheryl, Chohee, Will, and Jeffrey put to music so beautifully: The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me. I could go on reading this psalm. It is a sermon in and of itself, but I want to stop right there to point out this defining characteristic of our religion which is there in the last phrase I read. Namely, that in our faith, to survive, to have salvation, to live, is to be not alone. Think about it: What is it that comforts the sheep? It is the presence of the shepherd. And what does the shepherd do, especially for those who wander from the fold, who find themselves lost and alone? The shepherd finds them. The shepherd walks with them. The shepherd brings them back into community. The shepherd restores the isolated into the family of faith. The shepherd seeks out those who are alone so that they won’t be alone any longer. That’s different from some other religions. Being restored into the community is a different goal from what many are steadily working towards, for some are working towards the peace and quiet of solitude rather than the noise and bickering of the Father’s House. I’m thinking now of the enlightened mystic who has discovered the secrets to the universe by quieting the mind. I have this image of a hermit guru who sits on top of a mountain, resentful of those who climb up to ask him the meaning of life. In fact, this image was in a political cartoon just this morning in the AJC. These figures which we see from time to time in the movies or elsewhere are based on real people, like Vijay Gopala who recently spent 17 years living in meditative silence in an Indian forest, or the Buddha who sat under a bodhi tree for 49 days straight. They are the great adherents of Hindu and Buddhist ascetism. We know that such a strain exists in Christianity, and even Christ himself went out to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, but salvation for us looks a little bit less like the mountain top guru’s enlightenment, because for us, we receive the answers we seek once we’ve made it back to the flock, not when we’ve removed ourselves from them. We see this in Scripture. It’s there in both of today’s Scripture readings as well as so many others. In the Bible there are so many accounts of God’s people finding their way back to community, and so there is a son who wanders off, spends his inheritance, and once he’s broke all his fair-weather friends leave him to make a living sloping the hogs. This is a version of hell in our religion. To be lost, alone, and far from home, is the opposite of where God thinks we ought to be, and so to be saved by God is something like what we see in this son’s father, who embraces him and restores him into a community. The same is true of Jonah, who tries to run away but keeps being brought back to people, even people who he doesn’t like very much. Likewise, Moses leaves Egypt but must return to his tribe because that’s just how it is. Again, and again, this is the story. Ruth and Naomi find their way to a new homeland and a new community. The lost coin is found, the lost sheep gets back to the flock, the lost son finds his way home. Our God is a shepherd who tries to get us back into groups where we’ll finally be happy. Only think about this for a minute: how many of us think that we’ll only really be happy once we’ve gotten away from everybody? I have a friend who once told me that he went to visit his father in his new home out west. His dad is retired, divorced, and wealthy, so he left everything and everyone to live on top of a mountain in a cabin overlooking a valley. Apparently, it is the most picturesque prison you’ve ever seen. My friends, in which direction is your life headed? Are you moving towards community or away from it? After 14 months of pandemic functioning, do you even remember how to be around people? That’s OK if you don’t because all of us are a little awkward right now but remember this: when it comes to our faith moving towards others is moving towards salvation while moving away is like walking towards hell. So, I worry about our culture all the time. I worry about which religion has really taken our nation over. The social fabric of our society strains under the weight of deferred maintenance on basic human relationships. The institutions which once held us together are neglected. The poor live out of sight from the rich. The imprisoned are locked behind doors and punished with solitary confinement. Add on top of that the fear of a virus, which still keeps many of us home. Plus, our response to that same virus divides us between those who wear masks and those who don’t. In the midst of all of that I can’t help but think that we have forgotten how to get along, but not only that, we have forgotten what it means to be Christian. Some people, maybe many people, believe that being a Christian can be reduced down to a few simple standards of belief, and so they’ll say that we’re no longer a Christian country because we no longer believe all the same things that we used to. However, let us not forget what lies at the core of who we are and who we know God to be: from the 23rd Psalms to the story of the Prodigal Son, we know that our God is a God of relationship, and that the divine is present whenever two or more are gathered together. We must never think that being solid in our convictions but isolated and alone is the picture of one who follows Jesus. For to be Christian means to be restored in community, and to work for the restoration of all God’s children. We cannot be Christians all by ourselves. It says it right there in our Second Scripture Lesson: “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses to help?” That’s a good question, and we must not make it to complicated, because we don’t have to look very far these days to find people who are in need. I imagine you can think of someone who needs what you have to offer just right across the street. Just think about it. There is now a ministry of loneliness in the United Kingdom. The government has organized to do something about what some consider to be a loneliness crisis believing that being lonely for a day is as bad for your body as smoking 15 cigarettes. Have you ever thought about that? How some of your neighbors only leave the house to go to the grocery store. How some folks on your street walk outside to get the mail and just pray that someone will walk by who can call them by name. That’s true for far too many people, in our county and even in our church, but this has always been true because there have always been those who find their way into isolation and don’t know how to break out of it. There was once a priest who decided that he’d go visit the entire congregation, so house by house he went, until finally he reached a place way out on the outskirts of town. The man who lived there hadn’t been to the church in years. In ages. He didn’t have any use for it he said, but the priest asked if he might just warm up by the man’s fire. There the priest moved one coal with the poker away from the rest and began asking the man questions about his wife, who had died, and his children, who had moved away. They went on talking for a while, and then the priest drew the man’s attention to the coal, which had gone out having been moved away from the others, and he said, “the fire within us burns brighter when we join with the family of faith from time to time.” Reach out to someone today before the light goes out from within them, and when you do, feel the light burn a little brighter within you. Amen.

Why Are You Frightened?

Scripture Lessons: 1 John 3: 1-7 and Luke 24: 36b-48 Sermon Title: Why Are You Frightened? Preached on 4/18/2021 I’ve always been scared of ghosts. Seriously. Since I was little I’ve been scared of ghosts, more than snakes or heights or anything else. I remember being young, like six or seven, in my grandmother’s basement with my older cousins who thought it would be fun to play with an old Ouija board we found. You know those things, with the “mystical planchette” that you use to communicate with the dead? It probably was fun playing with that thing for the first few minutes as my cousins summoned the spirits of our dead relatives, until I screamed so loud that my grandmother heard me, ran downstairs, and they all got in big trouble. I’m not sure exactly what it is with ghosts, but there is something about them that unsettles me, which is true for a lot of people. Many people are scared of ghosts. If they weren’t no one would scream in scary movies, and they do scream in scary movies. I’ve been one of them. What we know from every horror film that has ever been made is that ghosts rarely come visit people to tell funny jokes or make them feel better. Ghosts appear to scare people in the movies, sometimes to warn them like they did Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, or to let the living know that their souls will never be at rest unless they are avenged like they do in so many Shakespeare plays, so if a ghost shows up, movies, literature, movies, and experience has taught us to be afraid. The disciples were too. What’s clear from our Second Scripture Lesson is that they thought he was a ghost. That sounds strange to our ears. Just the idea that they would have been scared of our gentle savior sounds very strange, but they were. They were “terrified” Luke’s Gospel tells us. Why? Why did they scream like little kids or a grown pastor in a horror movie? Why weren’t they excited? Why weren’t they relieved? Think about it with me this way: had Shakespeare been the one to write the Gospel of Luke, I imagine he might have made Jesus something like the ghost king of Denmark in Hamlet. Maybe Jesus would have showed up as a ghost to tell the disciples who is to blame for his death just as the ghost king tells his son Hamlet to avenge his murder by killing the new king, Hamlet’s uncle. Only worse, if this were the case, then the ghost after revenge showed up to haunt the very ones who were partly guilty for his death. Certainly, if Jesus were a ghost than he showed up to haunt the ones who felt guilty for his death. Surely, they had spent their time hiding in that locked room feeling shame. Thinking about how only the women were with him in the end. How they were the ones he called brothers, yet they abandoned, betrayed, or denied him, and maybe they were thinking that now his soul will never rest until justice is paid in full. That’s what ghosts show up to do in the popular imagination, dredge up the past, and so the Gospel of Luke tells us that “Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” [Despite this peaceful greeting] they were startled and terrified,” because they thought they were seeing a ghost. Jesus then said to them, “Why are you frightened,” and I can pretty easily answer that question and I bet you can too. Had it been me standing there, I would have assumed that Jesus’ ghost had returned to let me know how disappointed he was in me for failing him in that crucial moment. He would have spoken of that moment that led to an innocent man’s death, and how I wasn’t brave enough to do anything about it or to at least die up there with him. Isn’t that what we all assume ghosts are all about? Can you think of a single ghost who comes back from the dead to let his friends and family know how proud he is of all of them? Think about the ghosts you’ve heard about. The Headless Horseman wants a new head. The creepy twins in the Shining want someone to come and play, which is a mundane invitation that only a ghost can make sound terrifying. Little Cole Sear “sees dead people” in the Sixth Sense, and why? Why do the dead appear to him? From McBeth, Shakespeare gives us his answer: And oftentimes, to win us to our harm The instruments of darkness tell us truth Win us with honest trifles and betrayals Of deepest consequence. What do the disciples assume Jesus wants? Judas was dead already, but Peter still lived. Had Jesus returned to hold him to account for what he’d done or failed to do? When we think of ghosts, that’s something of what we think of. Even Casper wants help making peace with his past, so if the disciples are afraid, we might assume they thought he was a ghost who had come back to haunt them. Like how my grandmother once threatened my mom: “Cathy, when I die and you clean out my house, if you pull all my things out front for a yard sale, I’ll haunt you for the rest of your life.” That’s how we think. We imagine that souls will return to earth to let us know how we’ve failed them. We have nightmares of our beloved whispering one last word, one last message. We long for their words to be loving or affirming but we fear they’re disappointed in us. We return to the tomb of fathers and grandfathers worried that we haven’t lived up to the calling. Some even imagine that one day they will have to stand before Almighty God and when their deeds are weighed, he will either be pleased or disappointed. My friends, if you imagine that Christ would show up like a ghost who is disappointed in you than you have forgotten who he is. Just as Christ asked the disciples, we must ask ourselves, “Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?” for Christ is not a ghost and vengeance is not what he’s looking for. Christ comes to them alive and he comes now just as he lived: full of love and forgiveness, consistent with who he always said he would be. Not like the Headless Horseman searching to do more harm in death as he’d done in life, but like the Father who welcomes the Prodigal Son home. Not like any of the figures of horror movies who terrorize the living, but like Esau who offers his brother Jacob the kind of forgiveness that he did not deserve. Not like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come who showed Scrooge his grave by pointing towards it with a shrouded bone of a finger, but like the Lamb of God Most Holy who invites us through the gates of heaven by opening his arms wide to embrace us fully. We all forget, even disciples forget, what God is like sometimes. And we think that he blames us for getting lost, when all he really wants is to find us again. I recently read a sermon by the great Howard Thurman. Thurman is now considered the brilliant theological mind of the Civil Rights movement. He was from Florida and wrote and preached all over, teaching religion at Morehouse and Howard, traveling to India to meet with Gandhi, and when thinking about the parable of the lost coin and the lost sheep he imagines what it might be like to find yourself as a lost sheep: A sheep was enjoying his grass and the other things that sheep enjoy as he went along, and then when he started feeling chilly, he didn’t recall, but the only thing that he remembers is that suddenly he became aware that he was cold, and there was a throwback in his mind, and he realized that he had been cold for some time. But the grass was good. Then he looked around and he discovered that he was alone. That everybody had gone. That is, that all the sheep had gone. And he began crying aloud. And then the shepherd, who had many sheep, missed him when he got back to the fold, and he left his ninety and nine – or whatever the number was – and he went out to try to find this sheep that was lost. And Jesus said, “God is like that.” Well of course he is, but when we find ourselves all alone, for some reason it becomes easier to believe in ghosts than in the loving, merciful shepherd. So, hear this: imagining that Peter and the others are afraid, he does what Jesus always does. Jesus, seeking out what is precious and lost, finds them and rejoices. He greets them not with anger, but with joy. Not with blame, but thanksgiving. He’s not mad at Peter, he just wants his friend to come back to the fold. That is what we must remember today. As Rev. Cassie Waits so beautifully put it in her sermon last Sunday, for a year now we’ve been like these disciples, locked behind closed doors, and now we must get back out again. The problem is that, to leave, we first must conquer our fear of ghosts. Because lockdown started, and then it lasted. No one has had dinner together. No one has seen you. So, how do you start again after not speaking for a year? There are likely all kinds of thoughts in your mind. The kind of thoughts that wake us up at night: what if they don’t like me anymore. What if there disappointed. What if they’re mad at me. These are the kinds of thoughts that lurk in our imagination and keep us confined to self-imposed prisons, so the Savior walks right in and shows us how it’s done. It all starts just by him asking, “Have you anything here to eat?” There is the traditional way to explain this request: ghosts don’t eat. By asking for food Jesus shows the disciples that he’s a living man resurrected from the dead, but there’s something else to this request, for in making it Jesus shows us that reconciliation is only as complicated as we let it be. A chasm can be bridged over a simple meal. The difference between a ghost and a real person is that ghosts aren’t real, so don’t let your fear of them keep you from living abundantly. All you have to do is show up on a doorstep trusting that death never has the final word when the Risen Lord is on our side. Our First Scripture Lesson put it this way: “See what love the father has given us… Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed,” so don’t assume that you know how the story ends. You still have the chance to come back home to community and fellowship, for Christ welcomes us all and we must be bold to welcome home each other. This is the reality of the Father’s Love. How he could have remained in the tomb and allowed our rejection of him to have the final word, but instead he sought us out again, not as a ghost. As a loving father who wants nothing more than to love his children and to bring them back home. Thanks be to God for his wonderous love. Now, let us share it with the world, for we are witnesses to these things. Amen.

Let Us Be Glad and Rejoice in His Salvation

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 25: 6-9 and John 20: 1-18 Sermon Title: Let Us Be Glad and Rejoice in His Salvation Preached on April 4, 2021 Sometimes people ask me about my Easter Sunday sermon. In the last week or so, a few friends have asked, “Joe, big Sunday coming up. What are you going to preach on?” “Well, I’ve been thinking about a sermon on the resurrection.” In a lot of ways, it’s easy to preach on Easter Sunday. It’s all right here. Today is the day. There’s not much left for the preacher to explain or illustrate. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God. What more need be said? But this is what I want to emphasize today: that what happened on Easter Sunday so long ago when Mary went looking for a corpse to bury and instead encountered the Lord, risen from the dead, changes everything. And it doesn’t just change the way we look at death, no longer with fear but hope for our own life eternal, but it must change the way we look at the everyday, from the moment we rise up in the morning to when we put our head down on our pillow at night. From the moment we sit down at our desk, bored already, or walk through the front door, not at all enthused about getting to another baseball practice. The resurrection must change our perspective on all the good plans that fall apart and all the crushing blows that have us reeling, because the truth of the resurrection colors how we understand the world around us and changes the way we understand what happens to us from our greatest successes to our deepest disappointments. Faith changes things. Faith in the resurrection changes things. Now, if you asked me to define a word like “faith,” I’d say something like what I just said, that faith is a way of looking at the world and understanding our lives so that we never fall victim to despair and avoid getting lost in temptation or heartache. Faith is like a lot of the words Christians like us use, but then, when we are asked to define them, we struggle to do so simply. When I’m searching for a good way to define one of our Christian code-words I often look them up in a short dictionary written by one of my favorite preachers, Frederick Buechner. When he defines the word faith, he quotes the book of Hebrews, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Then, referring to Sarah, who God told would have a child in her old age, Buechner says that “faith is laughter at the promise of a child… and “faith [even] dies, as it lives, laughing.” “Faith is not a noun, but a verb, more a process than a possession.” “Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway.” It’s like friendship, which, should you put it to the test you’d ruin it. Ask someone to prove that she’s really your friend and watch how it hurts her. Likewise, faith can’t be proven but that hardly means it isn’t true. A life of faith is one lived expecting something good to happen, because you know good things have happened before, and it enables us, not just to look in one empty tomb but every empty tomb with the hope of people who are willing to be surprised by God despite a mountain of disappointment. What I’m trying to say here isn’t something simple, but of course it is. Simply put, faith is just a way of looking at the world and filling in what you don’t know, and so while we Christians often strictly define faith in positive terms, it also takes faith to look out on the unformed future with pessimism, because no one knows that they’ll be disappointed, but people often walk around with the faith that they will be. You see, people who are always pessimistic don’t know it all. They don’t expect surprises, though surprises come. Have you ever met someone who said, “I’m not a pessimist, I’m just realistic?” That’s not entirely true, for it’s not realistic to never expect anything good to ever happen. Good things happen all the time. For example: Mary was being pessimistic and realistic when she looked into the tomb, but it was empty. The Prophet Ezekiel went to a valley of dry bones and they all came back to life. The Hebrew people were saved from slavery in Egypt. David slayed a giant with a rock and a sling and the pessimist would have bet against him in that fight and would have lost it all because the giant fell. Christian faith calls us to take surprises into account, and real life often surprises us just as often as do the old Bible stories. Think about it. You can imagine how many people told Orval and Wilburn Wright that they’re plane would never get off the ground? Likewise, I once told my daughter that she could keep the old dryer I put on the side of the road if she pushed it up a hill. I told her that with pessimistic faith that she’d never be able to do it, and yet she did. I was even more surprised by her than I was at a ball I once attended in Columbia, Tennessee wearing just most of a tuxedo. No one even made fun of me for my lack of cummerbund though I expected someone to. I tell you that because only a fool is always pessimistic. A fool goes through life imagining everything is going to turn out bad. A fool confuses pessimism with realism. Murphy’s Law discounts the hand of God. And lacking imagination is sorry way to go through life, for miracles spring up all around us and I don’t want you to miss them. Consider faith then, the kind of faith which the resurrection inspires, which is nothing more than taking what you know God has done and daring to believe that God might do it again. Faith is seeing a church, wounded by division and decline and imagining that it might be named the Best Place to Worship in Cobb County three years in a row. Faith is planting seeds in the ground and expecting them to grow. Faith is sending kids to school and trusting that they’ll learn. Faith is driving your car into a roundabout and daring to believe that you’ll survive. Faith is taking the truth of an empty tomb and allowing it to color your vision of every relationship that feels like it’s hit a brick wall. For how many times has reconciliation happened? How many times have you said, “I’ll be she’ll never call,” and then the phone rang? How many days have you been sure that nothing would ever change and yet it did? How many mornings felt like Groundhog Day and yet a new day dawned. I tell you it’s happened plenty of times. It’s happened far too often for you or me to have the outlook of a pessimist. Easter Sunday calls on us to take the truth of the resurrection and allow it to change the way we see the world around us. It is a day for celebrating every seed that bloomed into flower though it seemed to be nothing more than a seed. Every child sent off to college who came back educated and purpose filled. Today is the day for giving thanks to God that even this season of pandemic is ending, and now we have the chance to do things differently than we did before, because it did not end us or close the book on our story. My friends, we can write a new story staring now. And we can write it with greater kindness. Greater unity. More respect and common decency. Having seen poverty and felt disease this last year, we may now dare to believe that something might be done to ensure a brighter future. Having heard the people shout for justice, we might listen and reimagine rather than get stuck in the cycle of the way things are. On this Resurrection Day, dare to believe that new life is jumping up from the ground and leaping from every tomb, for there is no power in death other than the power that we give it. Christ has concurred it, and it is not the end. Today is the beginning. For he has risen. He has risen indeed. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. Amen.