Can you go back home?

Preached on 3/27/16 – Easter Sunday Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 25: 6-9 and John 20: 1-18, NT pages 114-115 Sermon Title: Can you go back home? Have you ever felt like you just aren’t ready to go back home yet? Sometimes you want to go home, you need to go home, but other times you just can’t go back home. You just aren’t ready to go back home yet. I can think about instances in the Bible when going back home was hard, like with the Prodigal Son, who for shame didn’t want to go back home, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. What I’m thinking about is when you can’t go back home because something has changed, like when Abraham is called by God to the Promised Land and so he can’t go back to the land of Ur because he’s had a vision of a land flowing with milk and honey, a land where his descendants will outnumber the stars in the sky, and so he can’t go back home. I’m thinking about how there are times when your team loses, and they lose by a lot, and you can’t get out of that stadium quick enough, but then there are other times when your team wins, and it’s a big win, and then you leave the stadium but aren’t ready to go back home so you take the celebration out to the streets. Have you ever felt like that? Like you just aren’t ready to go back home yet? Like when she said, “I do.” Maybe you couldn’t wait to go home because you wanted to tell your mother or maybe you weren’t ready to go back home yet because you wanted to climb to the top of a mountain and howl at the moon. Or the first time you got the keys to the car. Do you remember that? I had a friend growing up named Dave Elliot and he was so proud of his used truck that he could now legally drive that he drove and drove going nowhere in particular on the day he got his license so that he had burned an entire tank of fuel just because he wasn’t ready to go back home yet. Think about it – sometimes you can’t wait to get home so you can hide under the blankets or eat a pint of ice cream in your P.J.’s – that’s one thing. But other times, you just aren’t ready to go back home yet because something has happened. Something has changed. Did you notice that when the two disciples – Simon Peter and the other disciple who reached the tomb first, when they bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself, we read in verse 10 that “Then the disciples returned to their homes.” It says that after seeing the empty tomb that the other disciple who reached the tomb first “saw and believed” but what could he have believed if he saw that empty tomb and just went right back home? To go right back home – is that the response the Risen Lord desires? Now, part of me can’t wait to get back home because Sara made a ham, but here’s the thing that we all need to remember – this is Easter – and something is different. We can’t just go back home, but some of us do. This past week we had noontime community worship services. Pastor Dennis Lawson of St. Paul AME preached from this pulpit on Tuesday and he talked about giving up something for Lent, and he asked if our Lenten discipline of giving up something for the 40 days of Lent is truly worshipful if after going without chocolate or cream or sugar for 40 days we pick it right back up on Easter morning. Is it right to return to normal today? To just go back home? Something has happened – and we don’t understand it completely if we can hear this good news and then get right back to life as usual. The Gospel of John explains it this way in verse 9: “For as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes. But Mary – Mary stood weeping outside the tomb... “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” said a voice from a man she assumed was a gardener, but then Jesus said to her, “Mary!” And “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” Now which is it for you? Will you leave here today to go out into the world, knowing in your heart that you have seen the Lord who has risen from the grave to conquer sin and death, or will you just go on back home? Will you leave here today to get back in that car, pull out into the road and resume the stressful commute that makes your shoulders ache with tension – or will you be mindful of the gift of this day? Will you go back home, rush to get the food ready, eat as fast as you can with the mother-in-law that you resent and the cousins who chew with their mouths open – or, will you look around at the dinner table and see the brothers and sisters who the Lord looked upon and called beloved? Will you stay in the shadow of anger and resentment or will you rise to praise the Lord? Will you keep holding on to frustration or will you open your eyes to blessings? Will you look into the tomb and see death and destruction, hopelessness and heartache and long to crawl back under the covers – or will you join the choirs of angels who sing “He is risen! He is Risen indeed!”? There he was right before Mary. At first she thought he was the gardener; did you notice that? Some Bible scholars believe that this case of mistaken identity is to remind us of a garden from long ago – the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were given the opportunity to live in joyful obedience but chose instead to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God punished them as they fell and exiled them from the Garden, but the author of the Gospel of John bids us to return there because we don’t need to leave this tomb to go back to punishment, exile, or even life as usual. Instead, the Lord calls us from this place to someplace altogether new, altogether beautiful, altogether different. Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” and because of him and what he has done, you will go there too. Hear again these words from the prophet Isaiah: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on his mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth.” You see, you can’t just return home, because Christ has made you a citizen of the kingdom of Heaven. You can’t return to sin, because Christ has freed you by his grace. You can’t return to the past, because Christ has opened the door to the future. Instead of just going back home, let us be glad and rejoice in our salvation. Amen.

As he came near

Sermon for 3/20/16 – Palm Sunday Scripture Lessons: Luke 19: 28-40 and 41-44, NT page 83 Title: As he came near I’ve been enjoying poetry lately, which I haven’t always done, but for the past couple months I’ve really gotten a lot out of the poetry of Jeff Hardin, a local guy who teaches at Columbia State. In a poem I read last week I think he captured something about life these days. It’s titled “Reliable Citizen of the Times”: I wrote this poem while talking on my cell. And did I mention I was driving too while leafing pages of a magazine and scarfing down a clutch of curly fries? Authorities are watching me on screens that track my round-the-city whereabouts, reliable citizen of the times, preoccupied and fleet, an Orpheus regaling my pursuits through GPS. And somewhere databases keeping dibs have stored my mocha latte purchases. I’m dazzled, truly, that so much is known of me – I’m texting my acceptance speech here in the turning lane now turning green. I like this poem for a lot of reasons, but mostly I like the poem because it says something concisely that I know to be true – that these are strange times we are living in. The 21st Century so far has been a place where we are often too busy to really pay attention to much of anything, even the fellow motorists who are driving around us, and it seems like everyone is suffering from some degree of attention deficit disorder as we try to drive while also talking on our cell phones, leafing through pages of a magazine, and eating the curly fries we picked up in the drive-through because we don’t have time enough to sit down and eat at a table. And not only that, our lives, regardless of how boring or exciting, are documented to a new degree so much so that we no longer think twice upon realizing that we are on camera, we don’t hesitate to plug our coordinates into a GPS that tracks our location through satellites, and aren’t surprised that some file somewhere has accounted for and is keeping track of our recent debit or credit card purchases. This might strike you as strange if you compare life today to how things were just 25 or 50 years ago, but it doesn’t always strike me as strange. These days it mostly strikes me as normal, and so I laughed when Ron Swanson, fictional character portrayed on the NBC show “Parks and Recreation,” threw his computer into the dumpster and started using only a typewriter when he learned that the internet was tracking his on-line purchases. We are either complacent in the changes of our society or we resist them, and there have always been those who resist. Back in 2007 there was a man in Sydney, Australia who got in his own armored tank and with it tore down six cell phone towers in protest before being arrested while on his way to the seventh. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t use computers because they don’t know how to use them, or they aren’t on Facebook because it’s too confusing, but maybe there is a better reason to second guess recent advances in technology. My favorite line of Jeff Hardin’s poem is this: I’m dazzled, truly, that so much is known of me – I’m texting my acceptance speech here in the turning lane now turning green. Journalist Leonard Pitts made the case years ago that social media gives us a false sense of celebrity, making us feel like people are paying attention to what we are saying, that we are being paid attention to by people who we don’t even know, that hundreds of people like our pictures and hundreds more on Facebook are really our friends, so why not begin working on our acceptance speeches if we are so important? I imagine that we don’t because we know that those who are on social media are as fickle as people are in real life, and that our friends on Facebook, our followers on Instagram, are not really either, because popularity on the internet is a lot like popularity in High School – it’s there one minute but it could be gone the next. I think you can imagine from this morning’s scripture lessons, that Jesus would not have bought into any of this, that he would have seen through it, just as he could see right though the crowds’ cries of Hosanna the closer he got to Jerusalem. From the Gospel of Luke, we read: “As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!” But, “As he came near and saw the city, he wept over it” saying “you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.” There’s no acceptance speech given. There’s no triumph in his voice. In fact, there are tears in his eyes for just the second time in the Gospel of Luke, because he’s not excited by all this celebration and attention but knows the human heart well enough to say to himself, “Just because they are celebrating me today, they will be shouting for my crucifixion in just a matter of time.” Here’s the thing that hasn’t changed. The advances of 21st century technology, advanced techniques for political polling, news reported at a moment’s notice, social media that enables people to connect in new and varied ways – these things also illustrate clearly that people haven’t really changed in the last 2,000 years. We are as fickle now as we have always been – popularity comes and goes – as does the human heart so one day we are like Mary, pouring out $10,000 worth of perfume onto the Lord’s feet, but the very next we may well be like Judas, orchestrating the betrayal that leads to his death. It’s true that on Palm Sunday they all shouted and they were all by his side, but during his trial they hid and in the end, even Peter betrayed him three times. Where is loyalty? we ask. Or, if the human heart is prone to be so fickle, why is Jesus so faithful? And – if Jesus, knew the human heart, knew that this crowd who is with him today will be against him later, remains true to us despite our swaying loyalty, why would we be loyal to anyone or anything else? Considering the issues of today, it’s important to see that the politician who pleases you one day is likely to disappoint you the next. The sports team will change course and lose not just the game but also the moral high ground. And while the 21st Century has made heroes out of humans. Celebrities out of housewives. And saviors out of the fallible, why would you put your faith in anyone or anything besides this holy man, this Son of God, who knows the human heart, the depravity of human kind, the prodigal son and the woman caught in adultery, but still he rides on. With tears in his eyes he rides toward that cross and towards his death because he is more for you than anyone else will ever be. He did not ride on because he was misguided or confused. He did not ride towards his death because he was prone to tragedy. He rode on for love, because even the fickle heart that beats within our chest is beloved by God. For me and for you, he rode onward towards the cross. Amen.

Do you perceive it?

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 43: 16-21 and John 12: 1-8, NT page 106 Sermon Title: Do you perceive it? I’ve heard a lot of Jim Jones stories lately. Stories seem like a place to find comfort in the time of death, and there are plenty of great Jim Jones stories, but my favorite one took place before he was a Navy Captain, before he was the Commodore of the Pensacola Naval Base. My favorite story about Jim Jones is from back in the days when he was just a young boy wadding up and down Snow Creek hunting for mink or whatever else. One morning on his way to school Jim came across a skunk with a fur so pretty he couldn’t pass it up, so he took it with him to the Santa Fe school and skinned it in the boy’s bathroom. They had to evacuate the school that day, and I can understand why. The smell of a skunk assaults the senses, you can’t concentrate on math problems or literature, and I wonder how long school had to be cancelled – did it take days or weeks before the smell of Jim’s skunk finally dissipated? If we say it took days before the smell of that one skunk finally left the halls of the Santa Fe School, how long did it take until the smell of Mary’s perfume was gone? Smells, whether bad ones or good ones, they stick around, and if the smell of one skunk caused the evacuation of an entire school, what effect did a pound of pure nard have on the house of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha? And what is nard exactly anyway? Nard is a perfume made from a plant called spikenard or musk-root that grows in the Himalayas of China, India, and Nepal. Because of its distant origins, even a little of this oil would have been expensive. A small vile might have cost a week’s wages, but we know from Judas’ observation that Mary poured three hundred denarii’s worth, a full year’s salary for a low wager worker in that region and some Bible scholars say that those 300 denarii would be worth as much as $10,000 today. $10,000. Can you imagine what $10,000 worth of perfume all poured out at once must have smelled like? How it must have filled the room? How it much have filled the house? How it much have filled the neighborhood? Nard is a thick oil, resinous, not something that you’d get sprayed on you when walking through Macy’s, but like an essential oil and fully strong enough to cover the odor of an unbathed human body, worthy of anointing the heads of kings, but only used on the feet of the dead to cover the smell of decomposition. $10,000 dollars of the oil poured out on the feet of a living man. “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” Judas asks, and while the Bible tells us that he “said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief” I think he raises a good point. Why was this perfume not sold? Why was it, all of it, poured out on the feet of one man who wasn’t even dead? There’s a bottle of cologne that’s been sitting on the counter of my father-in-law’s bathroom for all the years that I’ve known him. It must have been full once, maybe 20 years ago, but even now there’s plenty left in that bottle because we use what is precious sparingly, we don’t just pour it out. Or, maybe we do, if we know that we don’t have 20 years. Our Scripture passage begins, “Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany.” Six days before the Passover. Six days before he sat at the table with his disciples. Six days before one of them betrayed him. Six days before his arrest, trial, and crucifixion. He had six days left – and when time gets short you have to do everything you can to make sure that the ones you love know how much you love them. That the ones you love know you understand them, and that was a struggle that Jesus faced from the beginning of the Gospel of John – in chapter 1 the Lord is described as the light shining in the darkness, and while the darkness did not overcome the light, neither did the darkness comprehend it. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” reads verse 11 of the same chapter in the King James Version, but while so many did not receive him and did not understand him Mary knew. Mary knew exactly who he was, and to say goodbye, to express those feelings that words cannot express, she poured out $10,000 worth of perfume onto his feet and wiped them with her hair. “The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume,” and the smell must have lingered there. And if it did, then that is the advantage of this gift over so many others. You give a young child a present, no matter how much thought you put into it, how much time you spent picking or out, or how much money it cost, he loses interest in a matter of time and starts playing with the paper the present was wrapped in. Or the church choir “labors to prepare an intricate anthem, and three minutes later it is gone,” not permanent but temporary, passing, here and then gone, but the smell of Mary’s gift, it lingered there, for weeks if not months, and just days later as he suffered on the cross, rejected and tried as a criminal, did the smell linger still? Did a gust of wind catch the sweet smell that remained on his feet to remind him even as he breathed his last that he was loved, that he was understood, that despite humanity’s cruelty and betrayal there is also alive in us the potential to love so deeply, to pour out everything that we have? At the church I served outside of Atlanta there was the funeral for a young woman, wife and mother who died of cancer. Her husband asked to speak at the end of the funeral service, so before the congregation he stood and he said that some people wondered how he was able to be by her side for all those hours just watching her suffer. The trips to the hospital, the tubes and the drugs. The rattle of her lungs in those last hours, he was there through it all and people would ask him, “how did you do it?” “I loved her, and I would have given her more even, simply because I loved her so much.” I’ve seen love like that more than once. And I wonder how is it that we are capable of such love on the one hand and capable of evil on the other. How that could be I do not know, but both are there in the Cross of Jesus. Both the inhumanity of mankind to nail the Son of God onto those boards, but also there is love – the extravagant love of one who did not hold anything back but poured out everything he had that you might know how much he loved you. It’s true that by so many he was misunderstood, but do not let this be the case with you. Every time you look to this cross, may the love of God linger. May the love of God in our Lord Jesus Christ live in your heart today as it lived in Mary’s heart. Unto him she poured out everything she had, and so truly, unto us, he poured out even his blood that our sins might be forgiven, that we might know our worth in the sight of God. This is a gift. It is an extravagant gift, given to you. Amen.

Everything old has passed away

Scripture Lessons: 2nd Corinthians 5: 16-21 and Luke 15: 1-3, 11b-32 Sermon Title: Everything old has passed away It is a particular feeling to walk into a waiting room and to notice that there is only one other person in there with you. I walked into a waiting room last week with a book. I was on time for my appointment, but sometimes doctors run late, so I was looking forward to reading a few pages of this thick Bible commentary on the Gospel of Luke, and I was averting my eyes from the smiling man who was also waiting to be called back, because I didn’t really want to small talk, I wanted to read, but, as I was signing in, determined not to start a conversation I hear, “Now that looks like a serious book.” I was caught. It’s not really that I’m antisocial. But don’t you sometimes just want to read and be quiet? However, I was raised not to be rude. If someone speaks to you, you speak to them, and I turned my head and he told me that he never reads much besides the Bible, and then I thought, “now I’ve really been caught.” When you’re a preacher caught by a smiling Christian man who is eager to share the Gospel with you, it’s not always clear to me exactly what I should do. How do you say, “Thank you for being courageous enough to share your faith, but I don’t really want to hear about it right now because I’m a preacher and faith is all I ever get to talk about”? You can’t say that, because you have to listen even if you don’t want to, and this is especially true for us because Presbyterians aren’t much for talking about our faith and we have much to learn from our brothers and sisters who do, so I listened to the man – of course, I didn’t really have any other choice – but I’m glad I listened because he said the most beautiful thing about the Bible: “Every day I wake up eager to read Scripture because every day it tells me what God is like, and how we should be.” I hate to get caught, but sometimes I love it once I am, because rather than just read what the Bible scholars have said about our Second Scripture Lesson from the Gospel of Luke, this smiling man provided me with a new framework to understand this tried and true story, this story of the Prodigal Son and his father that the great reformer Martin Luther called, “The Gospel Encapsulated,” because this story so truly tells us “What God is like, and how we should be.” First – what God is like. According to the parable, God is like a father, and just two weeks ago Jesus compared himself to a “mother hen who longs to gather her chicks under her wing” which offers us a metaphor to understand God, just as this parable about a father offers us a slightly different metaphor to understand what God is like. God is like a father, but a very particular kind of father. God is not like the father who comes in late for dinner, sits down at the head of the table, and promptly flies into a rage because the food is cold. God is not like the father who was never around. God is not like the father who loved you if your grades were good but disowned you when your grades were bad. I played baseball for years and years, and I saw so many different versions of fathers out on the little league baseball field. Some were reliving past glories through their sons, others never had time to show up, and one evening game when I was 8 or 9 and playing left field, I remember this one dad who yelled to his son as he stepped up to the batter’s box and while pointing to me he said – “hit it to that kid, it looks like he’s asleep out there!” If God is like a father, what kind of father is God like? To answer that question, we have to really get to the heart of what this son did. To start, when the son goes to his father asking for his inheritance, the son is basically saying, “Dad, I wish you were dead. If you were I could receive land and money, so would you just give me all that I stand to inherit now?” The father obliges, and I think the father shouldn’t have. Have you ever heard of a father who did anything like that? And then, what does the son do with the father’s kindness? He liquidates his assets – the property is sold and those who lived on the land for who knows how many generations, where do they go? Then, to make it worse, what does this son do – he takes the money and squanders it. He wastes it. All that money. All the work that the father put into earning and maintaining his legacy – where does it go but up in a puff of smoke that the Bible calls “dissolute living.” If ever there was a way to squander money it is dissolute living. This chain of unfortunate events leads us to the other part of our framework for understanding this Scripture Lesson: How should we be. If we are like a son who inherited wealth and property only to sell it and waste it away, we have two options: stay in the pig slop, just sleep in the bed that we’ve made for ourselves where no one knows us and no one will make us pay for what we’ve done, or, return to the father and be caught in our sin. You see the two options – and you see the danger in both. On the one hand there is the pig slop with the pods that the pigs were eating. Those can look good enough if you are choosing between living there in the pen and eating slop and returning home and owning up to what you’ve done. That’s not always an attractive option, and sometimes it’s not an option at all. This other option is to return home where everyone knows what you did. Where they’ll probably hate you and your father will probably disown you. To be caught is to be caught in your wrong doing, your sin, your pathetic mistake. So badly what I want when I find myself in this kind of situation is to hit a re-set button and start the whole thing over – if only I had never asked my father for my inheritance, if only I had never left my father’s house, but I have – so now there are only two options, stay in the misery that I have created for myself or return and face the music. How should we be? We should return home. Now that’s not how the world sees it, but the ways of God and the ways of the world are not the same. According to the world, the one who has been caught in wrong doing is most often dismissed, never seen from again, and never has to return home to try and make a new life out of the wreckage of his mistakes so they just go someplace else where no one knows who they are or what they’ve done. Even the church sometimes mimics the world in this regard, and maybe that’s how it sometimes has to be, but that is not how it should ever be with God, because God is like a particular kind of father. Let me tell you what I mean. I was young, 6 or 7, but somehow I was strong enough to climb up on our next-door-neighbor’s garage, and while up there I got the stupid idea to pull off the shingles of this garage threw them down into the neighbor’s yard. It was one of those things that was really fun to do, because if you’ve ever thrown a shingle you know that they spin kind of like Frisbees, so once you start it’s hard to stop, but once you do stop you realize what you’ve done and you worry about getting caught. Not only are you destroying property, you’re up on a garage roof! So after doing this I was consumed by guilt and the fear of getting caught. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want anyone to see. I imagined that we’d have to move away or something because in my mind, once you’ve been caught there is no way back to where you used to be. But hear the Scripture Lesson again and ask the question: what is God like? When the son returns, the father rushed out to this prodigal son, and wrapped him in his arms. So what if getting caught is something like jumping down from your neighbor’s garage until you are wrapped in the arms of the Father? What if when we are finally caught, we are caught by the grace of God? Oh to be caught. How we fear it, but how wonderful it can be. Everything old has passed away, and only love remains. Do you believe it? Is this good news too good? It was for the Prodigal Son’s brother as we all well know, but if the Father can forgive, then why can’t we? Why not accept the abundant grace of God and share such grace with your neighbor? Amen.

Listen, so that you may live

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 55: 1-9 and Luke 13: 1-9 Sermon Title: “Listen, so that you may live” Last Wednesday Night I was very excited to hear about the renovation currently under way at Central High School. The principal there, Mr. Roger White, was the speaker last Wednesday, and based on what I heard he seems to be a man who loves his job, who prays for his students, and who is making sure that the classrooms of this new high school will inspire students to maximize their potential. I think it’s a gift to the students to have this kind of a principal, and more than anything else I heard in Roger White’s presentation a desire to better educate all the students of Maury County because he seems to believe that if any student works hard enough and is given the opportunity to learn, then regardless of background or home-life, he or she can go out into the world as a productive citizen. In other words, Principal Roger White can see potential. He hopes that such potential will be harnessed in the brand new science lab, which is to be state of the art, and his description of this science lab reminded me of how important science is, although it’s a subject not always appreciated by the student. Molly Grace DeMoss, a member of our youth group, is always quick to smile and laugh, but as she was telling Marcy Lay and me about the dogfish that she’s been dissecting at Columbia Academy where she goes to school, she was less than enthusiastic. I remember not loving science class a whole lot either. We dissected a frog and a lamb’s eye, and every year we had to participate in the science fair, which I didn’t see too much of a point in. I had no interest in becoming a scientist myself, but what I value now is that regardless of my ambitions, I had to learn the scientific method. Now that’s the part that I know is valuable for everyone. Using the scientific method, you start by forming a hypothesis. And this hypothesis is a conjecture, an assumption, that is then tested through an experiment in which you either prove or disprove the hypothesis. This is a very good tool, not just for scientists but for everyone, and I say so because I have become convinced that too many people are in our world with a hypothesis that has never really been put to the test. The untested hypothesis is a problem, and I see evidence of the problem all over the place. I watch the news, I go to Facebook, I listen to yourself talk, and I notice that there are so many assumptions in my head and out in the world, so many untested hypotheses that I put in use without first putting my assumption to the test. And I am not alone – a lot of people are doing this. For example – watching news coverage of recent events, especially coverage of the Black Lives Matter campaign, you get the impression that many have formed the hypothesis that all police officers are racist. Certainly our Chief of Police here in Columbia, Tennessee deals with this assumption every day and it offends him to no end, because a person only needs to interact with the members of his force to find that this hypothesis is far from fact. But it appears that there are others who live as though all young black men are criminals. And there are plenty who talk and act as though all Democrats are heartless baby killers. Other who form the hypothesis that all Republicans brainless fear mongers. Are these assumptions true? Absolutely not, but go to Facebook or read the opinion page of the newspaper, and you’ll see it right there plain as day – that there are far too many people who need to go back to High School biology so they can learn again that you can’t just go around and expect to make very many friends if you are all the time making assumptions that have no basis in reality. I’m guilty here. I say things all the time that I wish I could take back, and sometimes I’m afraid to take them back. Sometimes I hold onto these assumptions and I think that’s because human nature makes me afraid of having my hypothesis disproven. Let me tell you what I mean: back in 10th grade I started on my science fair project. My hypothesis was that exposing a plant to crude oil would kill the plant, which was a fashionable thing to do at that time because it wasn’t so long after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and I wanted to prove that the spilled oil would hurt the plants, but after 4 or 5 days of watering one set of plants with water, the other with motor oil, oddly enough there was no difference in plant growth, so I just pulled the leaves off the plants that I had been watering with motor oil. I took these pictures and included them on a poster board to add some substance to my presentation, but unfortunately, one of the ripped off leaves was in one of the pictures, and when my teacher (who noticed the evidence of my manipulation of the scientific method), she handed me my report back with a very low grade, and what’s worse is that she wrote across the top, “Now this is just plain tacky.” How much better it would have been for me to just let the research disprove my hypothesis. If the hypothesis is never really put to the test, either by those who manipulate the findings or others who don’t even bother with an experiment, all these assumptions go around our world as though they were facts. This is a problem today and it was a problem 2,000 years ago as well, so you’ll see that in our 2nd Scripture Lesson there is also a hypothesis. When faced with two tragic events – first when a group of Galilean pilgrims were murdered on their way to make a sacrifice at the Temple and then when a tower fell and killed 18 people, the survivors needed answers so they formed their hypothesis: the ones who died were sinners. Another way to say it is, “What goes around comes around.” Or to quote Scripture: “You reap what you sow.” This is not a bad hypothesis because it’s sometimes true. Sometimes the ones who died met their end because of their own misdeeds, but just because it is sometimes true doesn’t mean it is always true, so a hypothesis like this one requires an experiment, investigation, more facts, and thankfully, this group goes to Jesus with their hypothesis. “Here's our assumption Jesus,” they seem to have said, “our hypothesis is that those who died tragically had it coming, what do you think?” I don’t have to tell you how crucial this quest for more information is. All in the news this week has been Coach Butch Jones of the University of Tennessee football team. Is he guilty of covering up a horrible case of abuse? Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, but I have a bad feeling that he is going to lose his job over this thing regardless because too many people don’t care about the facts, they’ve already decided. There is danger in not going any deeper than our assumptions, so we must be thankful that this group probably went to Jesus saying, “the ones who died, they were sinners, right?” And Jesus said: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.” And then he tells them a story: “Let me tell you what is really going on here. You are like a fig tree who failed to bear fruit. Today you were spared, but you will be cut down if you fail to produce fruit again. If you fail to produce fruit again, if you fail to repent, then you, every one of you will be cut down.” By answering their questions this way, he challenged, not just the hypothesis but the whole premise of the project. They thought they were dissecting a dead frog, they thought they were investigating for the cause of death, and Jesus tells them to start investigating the cause of their life. “You want to know why they died, but I say, how lucky you are to be alive.” That’s what he told them, but what would he tell us? In some ways we are different: we don’t go around today blaming people for dying so often but how many of us subscribe to the Daily Herald just for the obituaries. So we all ask who died and why, which is one question but is not the question that Jesus believes is worth your time, for Jesus asks, “which one of you will bear fruit, which one of you deserves to live?” There’s a man who had a fig tree and he came looking for fruit on it but there was none there, so he said to the gardener (who is Jesus by the way), ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” But the gardener responds, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ We started with a hypothesis that attempted to answer the question, “Why did they die?” But now Jesus has turned the tables to ask a very different question, “For what were you spared?” And having been spared, having been saved, will you bear fruit? The point he’s making is significant. He’s saying that there’s more to living than not dying. There’s more to being innocent than not getting caught. And there’s more to today than the fact that you woke up on this side of the grave because today we have a chance to change. I was moved by the funeral for Mrs. Evans which was here yesterday morning. The man who preached was a long-time friend of hers – they met when she was in her 80’s so that means they had 20 years to solidify their relationship. She gave this man instructions for what to say, and so she told him not to make his part in the funeral a eulogy, “don’t talk about me,” she says, “because if they don’t know me by now than they’ve missed their chance. Talk instead about Jesus, because they haven’t missed their chance to get to know him.” If we are all fig trees, fruitless fig trees, we have been spared by the Gardener who can change us. Who sees in us the potential to bear fruit, and desires to fertilize and work our soil so that we might do just that. Now this charge is a gift isn’t it? Why was that science teacher so disgusted in my presentation back in 10th grade? Possibly because she knew I could do better. Why is it a gift that Roger White sees in his students’ potential? Because not everyone does. This week I heard the story of a young man who was arrested some years ago for stealing a sweat shirt. The officer happened to call Chris Poynter of the Boys and Girls Club to come and speak with him, and when the officer asked this young man why he would do something so foolish as to steal, the young man asked, “Why should I care? Why should I care what happens to me? Why should I care if I get arrested? No one ever expected anything out of me. My father left, my mother abuses me, no one cares so why should I?” If ever there was a hypothesis that needed to be put to the test, then this was it. If Jesus were there, he would have looked on that bare fig tree of a young man and told him, “all you need is some nourishment, all you need is a chance, and I am the gardener who can provide it.” Yes, he is and yes you can, and today is the day. Today you have to opportunity to do just that if you will just accept the gardener’s gift of grace. Amen.

See, your house is left to you

Scripture Lessons: Genesis 15: 1-12, 17-18 and Luke 13: 31-35, p. 77 Sermon Title: See, your house is left to you I suppose that the one of the greatest challenges in preaching is maintaining the congregation’s attention. This is a big challenge for me, and sometimes I feel like I’ve succeeded, but at other times I know I’ve failed completely. I try hard at keeping your attention however, and my favorite preaching advice is said to come from the great comedian Groucho Marks, “That every sermon should begin with a joke and have a really good ending, and those two parts should be as close together as possible.” As I said before, certainly there are many times when I realize I’ve failed in the task of keep your attention, and sometimes I realize that I’ve failed in this task about midway in my sermon, in which case I’m tempted to stop talking right then and just call it a day. What will sometimes happen is that I’ll finish a paragraph only to realize that I’ve just made you suffer through sentences that should have been left out during editing, or even worse, I go on too long about some subject only to look out and recognize that I’ve droned and droned so much that I’ve put someone to sleep or inspired someone else to start working on their grocery list. The greatest sign of failure in this regard is to find a bulletin on Monday morning, left in the hymnal covered in tick-tack-toe games. But this is the challenge every preacher I suppose. We’ve all been called to speak a valuable message, to proclaim the Gospel, but to proclaim it in such a way that people actually hear it, which isn’t as easy as I once thought it would be. I’ve found that jokes help sometimes, and I’m probably guilty of trying to tell too many jokes in a sermon in the hopes of maintaining everyone’s attention, but better yet – the foolproof way to get just about any congregation’s attention, is to use feminine pronouns when referring to God. This is an interesting reality since we all know that God is not a man or a woman, but what we are used to is using the pronoun “He” when referring to the divine, so when the preacher employees the feminine, all at once everyone is listening, all at once the one who was sleeping is now awake and asking his wife, “Did he just say what I think he said?” Maybe his wife is thinking, “Well yes he did, and it’s about time.” Maybe, or maybe not, but regardless, what seems true to me is that while most often Scripture employees the masculine pronoun in reference to the divine, “He, him, king, or father” to mention just a few, there are examples right there in Scripture for anyone to see when God is described as like a mother bear who defends her cubs (Hosea 13: 8), like a nesting mother eagle who stirs up her nest and hovers over her young (Deuteronomy 32: 11), or better yet, here in the Gospel of Luke chapter 13, the Lord describes himself as a mother hen, who longs to gather her brood under her wings. We humans tend to speak of God using metaphors, and God as Father is the one that we hear of most, but thinking of God as a mother hen brings something new and describes something significant that I know many people might embrace. We think of God as a Father for many reasons, but maybe especially because traditionally this metaphor of Father speaks to the truth that we stand to inherit much – eternal life especially, but just as valid and just as true is to think of God as a Mother, and if we think of God as a mother hen we have a valuable and true metaphor that brings both a lesson on the nature of God and the realities of the world because according to this metaphor, on the one hand is God who, like a mother hen longs to gather us under her wings where we’ll be safe, but on the other hand, if the mother hen longs to gather us and protect us, implicit is the truth that there is much in this life that she longs to protect us from. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” I wonder if that sounds like your mother. In some ways it sounds like mine, very much like mine, because there were and still are so many things that she wants to protect me from. I remembered this past week how years ago she wanted to protect me from cigarettes, and not only was she on my case, but I am confident that she enlisted the help of my doctor who told me during an appointment when I was 13 or 14 years old that my asthma was so bad that if I ever so much as tried a puff of a cigarette I might just die there on the spot. Regardless of whether or not that was true, I don’t know because I’m still too scared to try. That’s not entirely true actually, I have tested the water, but she was successful overall. She kept me under those wings and away from smoking, but she couldn’t keep me completely away from my friends who did. The mother hen has her work cut out for her, because there comes a time when the chicks want to go out into the world and need the approval, not of their mother so much as their peers, so while Willie Nelson sings, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,” what Willie doesn’t get at is the reality that Mama can try to “make them be doctors and lawyers and such” but they may not be willing. My mom couldn’t keep me from wanting the approval of my peers, and when it came to a number of other temptations I was unwilling to be gathered under her wings because I wanted not her protection but their acceptance. That’s what the metaphor employed by the Lord really says to me now – that while our God is like a mother hen who longs to protect us from danger, we are too often unwilling to go to her because the mother hen’s approval is not the only approval that we want or need. Do you remember how much it mattered to have the right clothes in high school? At my mom’s high school, the thing to have were these knee high plaid socks, and her parents weren’t the kind of people who put much stock in being trendy so she only had one pair, which she washed every night so she could wear them again the next day. And last Thursday in the comic strips you might have seen Blondie. The little neighbor kid comes by, Elmo is his name, and he pulls up to Blondie and Dagwood’s house on a hover board and reports, “I like my skateboard better, but I had to have one of these new hover boards.” “Why” Dagwood asks. “Cuz everybody else has one,” little Elmo Tuttle responds. In Europe, did you hear that those things were catching on fire? Something about the charger that you’d plug into the wall. You’d plug it in to charge the thing’s batteries and would end up setting your carpet on fire. And maybe you wonder why a parent would buy a child something that might set the carpet on fire, but then you’d be underestimating a child’s determination to fit in no matter how dangerous fitting in might be. You know that every 16-year-old wants a car that will go as fast as it possibly can. Not one of them wants the old beat up minivan, but it’s the muscle cars that they race down the interstate, and the mother hen longs to gather them under her wings, put those kids in a nice safe Volvo so that she can drive them all to the prom, but they will be unwilling. And of course they are – because what the chick knows is that he wants to fit in, but the what the mother hen knows is the danger that is out there. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem…How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you.” And how it was left. Many Bible scholars believe that here in Luke chapter 13, Jesus is speaking prophetically, alluding to the destruction of Jerusalem that would come at the hands of the Romans just a few years after his death. Here he is already mourning because he knows the tragedy that is coming, and like a mother, her knows the pain of watching the ones he loves keep on down the path to destruction rather than listen and be gathered under the wings of the Mother Hen. Rather than be gathered, they will keep to the ways that they know: the ways that gain them the acceptance of their peers the ways that made them respectable in the eyes of the powerful the ways that empowered the wealthy and dehumanized the poor the ways that made the Temple a den of money changers rather than a house of the Lord the ways that would stone the woman caught in adultery while calling the hypocrite a priest the ways that oppress the foreigner and silence the prophet the ways that will lead to death – and the Mother Hen calls to her children still, because destruction will come again and again and again, and the foolish will choose to huddle on the bandwagon that leads to doom. There are all kinds of things to do, and while everyone wants a little religion when the end comes, like every teenager of all time, we seem to be thinking that the end isn’t coming any time soon, so we don’t invest our time as we should, we so rarely stop and think about what truly matters. We wake up, go to work, come home, turn on the TV, eat some dinner, go to bed, and wake up the next day and do the same thing, which works out OK so long as nothing bad happens, but the mother hen knows that something bad will happen and she keeps telling us that we need to be getting ready for it now. Mr. Herold Lucas, he came to church here, ran Lucas Chevrolet and he told his children that when they moved to a new place they right away needed to find a doctor, a lawyer, a car salesman, and a church, because you never know when you’re going to need them, and it’s true. Dr. Henry Strock came here as a guest preacher and told us that roots are for the wind, so put them down because the winds are coming. Danger is on the way, so go to the Mother Hen, but how unwilling we all are – imagining that we have all the time in the world. You know already that this Thursday we’ll host an important meeting, to hear the history of the 1946 Columbia Race Riot. There have been meetings leading up to the event and Dr. Christa Martin, your vice-mayor, she says during one of those meetings: “we are getting together now, we are developing these friendships now, because we know that we are going to need them later.” I believe that she’s right about that, and after the racially motivated shooting in Charleston, South Carolina so many of the pastors of your community, so many of your elected officials – the city mayor, the county mayor, the sheriff – we’ve all been talking, getting to know each other, because of what the Mother Hen knows is true – that what happened 70 years ago here is happening again today – but Columbia, TN doesn’t have to be Ferguson, MS. To create a new future, we must listen and learn from the one who calls us out of our homes and our normal routines to challenge the life that we’ve all accepted as normal. He is like a Mother Hen, calling on you to take comfort under his wings, but to get there you have to leave so much behind. Amen.

And the devil said

Scripture Lessons: Deuteronomy 26: 1-11 and Luke 4: 1-13, NT page61 Sermon: “And the devil said” Today is Valentine’s Day, and I hope that me saying so reminds any husbands who might have forgotten. This is a good day to show someone how much you love them by saying so or by buying them something. I suppose that the most traditional things to buy for the ones we love on Valentine’s Day are flowers or chocolates, but there are non-traditional gifts as well. For example, I know of one man who received nose hair trimmers from his valentine, which is a gift that says “I love you” but this gift says “I love you” in a very particular way. Unlike flowers and chocolates which both say, “I love you,” nose hair trimmers say, “I love you so much that I’m going to help you fix this problem that you have that no one else is willing to talk with you about.” Today is the first Sunday of Lent. And if the season of Lent is a gift, if observing Lent is a gift to Christians, it’s that kind of a gift. It’s the kind of gift from God that says, “I love you so much that I’m going to help you fix this problem that no one else is willing to talk with you about.” So during these 40 Days we are given the gift of penitence – a time to examine our lives, our habits, our thoughts, our relationships, especially the broken parts of ourselves that we don’t want to look at and that only those who truly love us are ever willing to talk with us about. God loves us enough to call our brokenness to our attention, and because we believe that our God is slow to anger and abiding in steadfast love we are invited to practice self-examination without fear of punishment, for God is not interested in our punishment nearly so much as our God is interested in leading us towards a more abundant life. We are invited then, to go with Jesus into the desert – to join him for 40 days in this quiet place without the distractions that keep us from dealing with whatever ails us. We are invited to go without, to give up something that we love, just as our Lord went without food. And we are invited to face our own demons, just as Jesus faced the devil himself. That’s the goal of all of this – we are leaving the world that we know and are joining our Lord in the desert, and it’s a feat of time travel to go meet Jesus in the desert 2,000 years ago, but the Bible is full of instances where the past is made present again for the redemption of God’s people and it is no different with us now. Deuteronomy 26, our first Scripture lesson is a good example of just such an instance in Scripture where time is irrelevant because this liturgy employs the present tense when remembering a time long ago. That’s why is says, “A wandering Aramean was MY ancestor.” It’s not because he literally was, but because in joining with the faithful of generations long past “they” becomes “we”, “their” becomes “our” and so we say, “He went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated US harshly and afflicted US, by imposing hard labor on US, WE cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard OUR voice and saw OUR affliction, OUR toil, and OUR oppression. The Lord brought US out of Egypt. He brought US into this place and gave us this land flowing with milk and honey.” Us, us, us we, we, we – you can see that this lesson from the Old Testament, this ancient liturgy uses personal and present tense pronouns even though all that happened so very long ago to a group of people who we are not, because so much about our faith is rooted in going one step beyond remembering to making the past present once more. It’s like when I take the yellow straw for my daughters’ juice box and I can feel the presence of my grandmother. I can see her taking the yellow straw for my Capri Sun. It’s a ritual that washes the present in the past and we’re reminded once more that the words of Faulkner are true: the past isn’t gone; it isn’t even past. So at Communion later in the service, we’ll sit before the table and do more than remember the One who sacrificed his life for our sake, in this liturgy we call on him to be present to us again, not confined to ancient history but right here and now. The Bible’s not ancient history than. It’s not dates and people to remember. Instead Scripture is the Living Word that will come alive right in front of you if you know how to use it. That’s what hit one of our own church members this Christmas. Jessica Sweeney was in the minivan, kids in the back, the news of the day was that of Syrian refugees forced out of their homeland and seeking refuge somewhere else, and there right in front of her is the Craft Memorial Church’s living Nativity telling the story of Joseph, Mary, and baby Jesus escaping to Egypt because King Herod forced them out of their homeland. “This is happening right now” she says out loud from the driver’s seat to no one in particular, and her kid’s don’t know what she’s talking about, so the next day she runs up to me on the sidewalk right outside our church – and when she told me the story I couldn’t have been more excited because that’s the point – it is happening right now! Right now we are in the desert with Jesus. Right now we are fasting beside him. And especially - right now Satan is there whispering temptation – not just in his ear but in ours. First: “Command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Second: “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I will give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” And third: “Throw yourself down from here,” and to make matters worse, from the Psalms he says, “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.” These are three great temptations of our age – not of some ancient history – but right now we are tempted to be mindful only of the need of our belly, to live is to be satiated. To float through the ocean on some great cruise ship – in the middle of the sea and yet comatose from crab legs while baking in the sun like beached whales. Command this stone to become bread - eat drink and be merry – but is there not more to life than this? Some would say that there is, that better than being full is being powerful, and so the politicians promise that they have all the answers, that they can fix all the problems and return this nation to greatness, but to give all power to any one man or woman, to place on him all your hopes and dreams absolutely is to face the reality that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Still some seek it, and still the powerful reduce their subjects to pawns or consumers without thought to their minds or their bodies and so the children of Flint, Michigan are poisoned by their water because some humans were given more power and authority than they deserved. You see, the devil is with us still. Right here with us now, tempting us to worry not for the state of our souls but only the state of our stomachs; tempting us to pursue power without thought to kindness or decency; and worse yet the devil is with us still tempting us to save ourselves. To preserve ourselves and our way of life. And I say this is worse yet because some of the greatest tragedies of human history were motivated not by hatred but self-preservation. It’s not that Pharaoh hated the Hebrew people, but it was because we were a great nation, mighty and populous. Pharaoh didn’t hate us – he feared us, and so out of self-preservation the Egyptians treated US harshly and afflicted US, by imposing hard labor on us in the hopes of accomplishing the same goal that every oppressor who feared for his life has tried since. More than anything else, it’s this temptation that would not be confined to ancient history, so as a child we’d drive through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina on our way to tour Fort Sumter, but to get to the ferry that would take us there we had to pass by those beautiful old mansions, tall and white. They were as they are still, breathtaking, yet even today they are protected by the most sinister rod iron fences. Spikes sharpened to protect the families who lived inside from the slave revolt they all feared. It was self-preservation that justified the harsh treatment of those slaves in both Egypt and South Carolina, and out of fear for our own lives 70 years ago, white children hid under beds, white fathers watched the streets, and a white mob assembled at our court house because once again the oppressed were rising and the powerful wanted to preserve a way of life that needed to die. “Save yourself,” the devil says, but you must listen instead to the one who says, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” Lent is a gift we’ve been given. And we’ve been given it because we are all the time living these unexamined lives, falling into patterns of waking up and getting by without ever thinking about what we should be leaving behind. Just because we were raised this way – that doesn’t mean we should be living this way still. He’s calling you to join him in the desert so you can face your demon and leave your brokenness behind; to walk beside him toward a brighter future. Amen.