Gospel

Easter 4, Year B, 2006

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

While I am normally a mature–and let’s be honest, sophisticated person–every time I hear Handel’s Messiah, I giggle hysterically when the choristers belt out, “We like sheep. . .”  Sure I know Handel uses the word “like” in order to make a simile, but for a brief moment it feels as if Handel has taken a break from telling us the glorious story of the birth of Christ and is just expressing affection for. . .well. . .sheep.

Maybe my giggles are just a way of disguising my discomfort.  After all, Handel goes on to compare US to sheep who are easily led astray.  US!  We are independent, free thinking, over educated human beings, not sheep!  Sure, we have a tendency to go astray or follow the crowd occassionally.  Baaaa. Once in a while some of us go out and buy something because someone else made it look really cool.  Baaa.  And, sometimes we fudge ethically to make a little more money so we can keep up with the Joneses.   Baaa.  And every so often we go into the voting booth, having done no research on the positions of the candidate.  Baaaa.

Okay.  Fine.  Humans may have a few sheeplike qualities. But still, we can trust our families, our friends, our culture, our government to guide us wisely, right?    If we decided to structure our life around the principles that we found on television, we’d turn out okay. 

And if trusting the television felt shaky, we could certainly trust the government to help us make right choices. 

And if trusting the government did not work out for us, we could certainly trust the Church, right? 

Well, not necessarily.  In today’s reading from the Gospel of John, Jesus warns us about the dangers of shepherds who are only hired hands.   Jesus is speaking to a group of Pharisees.  A few days back, Jesus cured a blind man.  Instead of congratulating the blind man, maybe buying him a round at the local watering hole, the Pharisees immediately start accusing the no-longer-blind man of lying and then pump him for details about Jesus.  When he does not give the Pharisees the answers they are looking for, they kick the formerly blind man out of town! 

Jesus hears about this event comes back into town, finds the blind man and the Pharisees, and begins telling the Pharisees this long parable about the Good Shepherd.  We tend to think of the parable of the Good Shepherd as a sweet one.  Gentle Jesus carefully leading us. . . but Jesus uses this story to ream out the Pharisees for being such jerks and bad caretakers of their flocks. 

Jesus’ mention of shepherds would remind the Pharisees of Ezekiel 34-in which the Lord berates the Kings of Israel for taking advantage of their people, while benefiting themselves.  The Lord says through the prophet Ezekiel, “Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep.”  Jesus updates the image and portrays the Pharisees as false shepherds who do not protect the sheep.  You can imagine their outrage. 

They had been hard at work, crossing their doctrinal Ts and dotting their theologial “I”s.  Who is Jesus to tell them they have been careless?  They did not think they had done anything wrong at all.  In fact, they had been upholding traditions and truth, while Jesus burst in from nowhere to disrupt all their hard work. 

The Pharisees miss the point-Jesus is interested in the welfare of the sheep, not the details of how the sheep fold is constructed.

But Jesus, in the parable of the Good Shepherd, is doing much more than criticizing the Pharisees.  He lays himself out as the counterpoint to the image of the hired hand.  The hired hand, by the very nature of his job, is not terribly interested in the welfare of the sheep.  He will do a good job protecting the sheep as long as there are not difficult challenges, but the hired hand does not love the sheep like the Good Shepherd does.  The hired hand is ultimately most interested in the hired hand’s welfare. 

But the Good Shepherd’s eye is always on the sheep.  The Good Shepherd cultivates intimacy with the sheep.  He will guide the sheep, find the sheep when they are lost, and ultimately lay his life down for the sheep, rather than have them be attacked by the wolf. 

Who do we choose as our shepherds?  We appoint husbands, wives, lovers, parents, children, employers, best friends, movie stars, politicians, priests, writers, teachers, and philosophers as our shepherds, but even the best of these is only human, and subject to all of human weakness.  At their best a devoted spouse carries only the shadow of the love that the Good Shepherd has for you, the best philosopher carries only a shadow of the wisdom of the Good Shepherd, the best friend has only the shadow of the loyalty of the Good Shepherd. 

Of course we are called to be in relationship and to love and learn from the people in our lives, but we must be careful under whose leadership we place ourselves.  Recently I watched Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room.  This documentary traced the many steps that led to the Enron scandal.  What struck me most is the culture of ethical murkiness that Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skillings created.  Traders who came into the company with no illegal background, quickly assimilated into a culture that rewarded illegal transactions as long as they made the company money.   And, as we all know, the average person who worked for Enron walked away penniless, while the corporate leaders made hundreds of millions of dollars.  These shepherds did not care about their sheep.

Enron is a dramatic example, but every day we have choices to make about whom we follow.  Whether it is choosing an employer, a spouse, a friend, a social club, a political party or a church, we put ourselves in a position of trusting.  We trust that others will look out for our best interest, but that is not always the case. 

The good news is that The Good Shepherd does always look out for our best interest.  Following the Good Shepherd may not lead to instant gratification, wealth or conventional success.  Following the Good Shepherd may not even always feel good.  But we can trust that the Good Shepherd knows us, loves us, and will guide us with care.  We can trust that the Good Shepherd will be with us in pleasant pastures, beside still waters and through the dark and dangerous places in our journeys.  

You cannot get so lost that the Good Shepherd will not find you, put you over his shoulders and bring you back to the fold.  You cannot be so threatened that the Good Shepherd will not stand between you and the threat; and help you absorb the pain.  Most of all, you can trust the Good Shepherd to lead you into a life of integrity and meaning. 

The Good Shepherd is a shepherd who will not abuse you, not manipulate you, not take advantage of you.  He will use you, but he will use you for good, both good in the world and good for your own development as a Christian. 

To follow the Good Shepherd, we must know the Good Shepherd.  Earlier in this passage from John, Jesus explains that the sheep follow the Good Shepherd because they know his voice.  We must learn the Good Shepherd’s voice in order to be his followers.  If we don’t know his voice, we have no way to sort out what which is the Good Shepherd’s way and which is merely the way of hired hands. 

There is no magic trick to learning the Good Shepherd’s voice-the easiest way is to learn about the Good Shepherd by reading the Bible.  A lot of people in America have a lot to say about Jesus these days.  Instead of relying on them, or even on your priests, by reading the Gospels and Epistles you can start learning Jesus’ voice for yourself.  And if you create some silence in your life, and if you listen carefully, you might even hear the Good Shepherd call you by name.

Easter 2, Year B, 2006

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

You’re working hard alongside your twin brother, minding your own business, when this incredibly dynamic man, Jesus, persuades you to leave your steady job to become a homeless wanderer.  You’re a practical person, so this bold decision is at once thrilling and terrifying.  You are also a grown man, and frankly, not entirely comfortable with your new role as a follower.

While you love Jesus and the other disciples, you have also been driven crazy by this itinerant life you are living.  Also, and you would never admit this to anyone, you’re a little jealous that you’re not one of Jesus’ favorites.  He’s always taking Peter and James and John aside and having some deep conversation.  And Jesus never laughs as hard as when Peter says something completely impetuous and borderline inappropriate. 

Whenever you have spoken up, Jesus has always used it as a “teachable moment”, which made you feel like an idiot.  For instance, this one time, after days of being yanked around from one town to the next, and listening to Jesus’s words of wisdom, which frankly, didn’t always make sense, this one time you ask Jesus HOW we’re supposed to follow you if you don’t even know where you’re going and Jesus turns your question around and starts talking about how he is the way and the truth and the life, but never actually answers your question.

So, in short, you’re tired and a little irritated, but you love Jesus and you can tell there is something really special about him.  You’re waiting to see what happens.  You follow him to Jerusalem and before you know it, he has been arrested and killed. 

So much for this great leader, this man so close to the Lord he called God “my father”.  You’re so sick of listening to Peter and the other disciples process this tragedy that you head out on your own for awhile.  You need quiet.  You need to get your head together.  What are you going to do now?  Can you get your old job back?  What is your mother-in-law going to say?

When you get back to the room where the disciples have been camped out, it is in total chaos.  The women are chirping away, the men are laughing and talking a mile a minute.  For a brief moment you wonder if they have gotten into the wine left over from Thursday night, but the glow about them isn’t one of drunkenness.  When you finally get one of them quieted down enough to talk with you, he starts babbling on about having seen Jesus right here in this room.  Today!  Three days after his death.

Your stomach clenches.  The last few days, heck the last few years have been so weird, so intense, and this latest twist makes your head spin.  Your friends must be so upset they are having mass hallucinations.  That’s the only logical explanation, right? 

You figure they just need a good dose of reality.  So you say those famous words, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”  All you want is a little confirmation.  It is crazy to go around talking about some resurrected man if you don’t have any proof!  But still, there is something about the way Mary Magdalene clenches her jaw.  She just seems so sure.

Frankly, by about the third day of waiting around for this apparition of Jesus, the other disciples are starting to look at you nervously, as if perhaps they DID have some mass vision caused by wish fulfillment.  By the sixth day, your clenched stomach has softened into the dull ache of resignation.

On the seventh day, you are back in the house.  Frankly, you are considering whether to cut your losses and head home.  All of a sudden you feel a chill from the bottom of your spine to the back of your neck.  When you turn around, there he is.  In the flesh.  Well, kind of in the flesh.  There isn’t anything spectral about him, but he isn’t quite normal either.  He seems to be completely solid, but also. . .and you know this sounds crazy.  . .but it is as if the laws of nature do not apply to him.  When he comes in the house, for instance, he doesn’t open the door, he just. . .walks through it.  It is not as if he is making some kind of big showy statement, it is as if he just didn’t think about it.  Like those kind of human details are just minutiae.

And this time, Jesus does not turn to Peter, or John, or James, he turns right to YOU.  He looks at you with this mix of compassion and challenge and says, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 

But at this moment, you know you don’t need to touch his wounds, to verify your experience. 

At this moment every experience you have ever had with Jesus starts whirling around your mind.  You have to sit down because all those opaque words start becoming crystal clear.  Jesus isn’t just a way, Jesus is THE way, THE life, THE truth.  Jesus isn’t just a holy man, he is Holiness itself.  Jesus wasn’t being cute when he referred to the Lord as his Father, the Lord really is. . .his Father. 

You start to shake as you realize that you have spent the last couple of years in the presence of God, but suddenly you feel a hand on your shoulder.  When you look up, you are looking into Jesus’ eyes.  And yes, they are vast and hold all the mysteries of the universe, but they are also utterly tender and full of compassion and affection.  And when you realize the enormity of Jesus’ love for you, God’s love for you, Jesus seems to nod a little bit.  He pats you on the shoulder and goes on to greet Mary Magdalene and the other disciples. 

Suddenly you realize, this experience with Jesus was not just a three year gig.  You somehow understand that the rest of your life will be devoted to telling people about Jesus, explaining this extraordinary experience of meeting God face to face.  And the even more extraordinary fact of God’s utter love for the human race.

Lent 5, Year B, 2006

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

You promise to pay a certain amount of money every month, and you get a house in return. 

You vow to stay in relationship with a person for the rest of your life, and she does, too. 

You sign a piece of paper saying that you’ll stay with a job three years, and you are promised salary and benefit in return. 

And you never, never, never date your best friend’s exes.

What do these situations have in common?  They are all examples of contracts, either official or implied.  In a contract, two parties exchange promises and the contract can be broken the minute one party does not live up to his or her promise. 

Humans have used contracts for thousands of years.  A contract assumes that both parties have equal responsibilities to fulfill the promises they make.  What happens historically if one party has much more power than the other?

3500 years ago in the Hittite kingdom, there were king like figures called Suzereins, who had money and armies and a great deal of power.  Because they had so much power, instead of making a contract, the Suzereins made covenants with the peasants.  If the peasants gave them a certain percentage of the crops they grew and cattle they raised then the suzerains gave them protection from invading armies.  However, if an invading army was going to come through, the suzerein was not going to check each peasant’s records-he was going to defend his territory.  So, the peasant, to some degree, could still receive the suzerein’s protection, even if he failed to deliver his end of the bargain.

So, why am I telling you all of this?   An understanding of covenant is important because God has related to human beings, throughout history, through covenants.  Suzerien covenants were happening roughly about the time when Genesis and Exodus were written and the covenants written in the Bible have the same structure as these Suzerein covenants.

Depending on how you count, there are anywhere from five to eight covenants between God and people in the Bible.  In our Old Testament reading for today, Jeremiah talks about the concept of God making a new Covenant, but before we can understand the New Covenant, we have to understand the old covenants.

And, because this sermon threatens to make all of you fall asleep, you’re going to have to help me list these first five covenants.  I’ll give you a few clues, and you tell me which biblical character I am describing.

The first covenant was made with the man who was the only righteous man left on the planet. Any takers?  Okay, another clue. . .there was a boat involved. ..

Right!  Noah.  Now, can anyone remember WHAT God promised Noah?  (Not to wipe out humanity)  What did Noah have to do in return?  What was the symbol of this covenant?  (rainbow)

Excellent work.  Now, on to the second covenant.  This one was made with a man who was married to a woman named Sarai?  Any ideas?  Another clue-this man had a child when he was very, very, very old.  Abraham!  Right, what did God promise to do for Abraham?  And what did Abraham need to do in return?  What was the symbol of this covenant?  Circumcision.

Okay, now we’re onto the third covenant.  This covenant was made with a man who discovered as a baby in a basket by the Phaoroah’s daughter.  He went on to experience God by a burning bush. . .Right, Moses!  God made a covenant with Israel through Moses.  He called Moses up on Mount Sianai-what did he give him there-right the Ten Commandments! 

In this covenant, God speaks directly to the people.  He calls Moses to Mt Sianai to warn the people that God’s coming to speak to them directly.  When God does speak to them, he reminds the Israelites that he is the God who delivered them from Egypt and gives the law, which will govern their life.  If they keep the law, God will remain with them.  This period also codifies the sacrificial system-if the people sin, they are required to make a blood sacrifice-either a bird or a sheep or cow depending on the offense and their financial state.

Well, soon enough, the Israelites, who are tired of wandering around in the desert, forget they’ve had this incredible experience of God and start worshiping false idols, complaining, and certainly not following the law. 

God, however, does not give up.  In Deutoromy 30, we read about the next covenant, the land covenant.  In this covenant, God says that if the Israelites come back to him and start behaving faithfully, he will gather them together and give them a spot of land to call their own.  And yes, this is the covenant that is still causing part of the problem in the Middle East!  But that’s a whole other sermon. . .

So, after Moses’ generation dies, the Israelites finally get their parcel of land, but again, they are unable to keep their end of the deal.  They live in the land of Canaan for awhile, but eventually the tribes start bickering with each other and the threat of invaders becomes very serious.

However, all is not lost.  In the book of Samuel, we read about how  the people of Israel start whining because they don’t have a king and everyone else has a king, so God decides to give them one.  The first king, Saul does not work out, so God chooses a second king.  Can anyone remember this second king’s name?  Here’s a hint:  as a kid, he killed a giant with a slingshot.  Yes, David!  It is under David’s leadership that Israel and Judah briefly reunite again and under his leadership that Israel captures Jerusalem. David’s 30something year reign is the Golden Age of Israel.  God loves David so much that he makes an unconditional covenant with him.  God promises that the Israelites will be a rooted people with land of their own and that God will establish an eternal kingdom from David’s line.

All this sounds well and good, but a theological problem developed when the Israelites were NOT able to stay in Jerusalem and the line of kings from David turned out to be kind of terrible and eventually died out. . .where does this leave us in terms of God’s faithfulness?  Our reading from Jeremiah today gives us a clue.  God decides to form a new covenant, a sixth covenant with us.  As you can see, historically, humans have not been great at living up to their ends of covenantal agreements.  Any wise businessperson would have written us off long ago.  Not only are we terrible at following god’s law, we’re not even that great about faithfully worshipping one God!  Any chance we got, we worshiped a golden calf, another God, a credit card. . .

Luckily for us, God is not a businessperson.  God is so interested in maintaining a relationship with us that he cooks up a new covenant, in which he does ALL the work.  In this covenant, he will write his law, the law of love, on our hearts.  While he required blood sacrifices in the past, all along what he really wanted was the sacrifice of our lives-for us to give up our selfishness and love God with our whole hearts. 

So, in order to make things right, God becomes human, lives a life in which he grows into perfection, and then is offered as a blood sacrifice on our behalf.  And while this seems barbaric and a little weird to our modern minds, we have to understand the context in which this happened.  All the sacrifices we offered, all our best efforts, were never enough.  And instead of raising the stakes, or wiping out humanity again, God decides to shoulder the responsibility, to continue the kingship of David through Christ and to offer us a new kind of covenant with him.  A covenant of love and trust and understanding-a covenant of the heart.

Next Sunday, Palm Sunday, begins Holy Week.  Holy Week you will have the opportunity to attend church Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  I encourage you to attend these services as we reflect on and remember this miraculous and overwhelming, sad and glorious New Covenant that God has made with us.  We take God for granted, we take Easter for granted, but we are so lucky-God does not demand our money or our sacrifices. God just wants us-our hearts, our minds, our souls-he wants to know us and be known to us. 

All of the Covenants have been pointing to this-God’s desire to be in relationship with us and his desire to help us be worthy of that honor.  God has stuck with us the whole way-through all of our missteps, all of our false worship, all of our betrayals and he waits for us now, to turn our hearts to him and worship him with all of our mind, our heart, our soul and our body.

Good Friday, Year B, 2006

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

In the Gospel of John, Jesus is the Cosmic Word.  From the very beginning he is clear about his transcendent nature and his close relationship with his Father in heaven. 

How painful then, for his friends and family, to see Jesus in the most degrading of human positions-hung on a cross.  He has been betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter and hangs before the Marys and his beloved disciple, slowly dying.  O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded, a hymn we sing today, expresses this grief:

Thy beauty, long-desirèd,
hath vanished from our sight;
thy power is all expirèd,
and quenched the light of light.

Jesus was light and life and hope.  Jesus dying must have felt like the most gut wrenching, mind spinning incongruity.  I know I would have wanted to run.  Run somewhere safe, somewhere far away. 

The Marys and the beloved disciple challenge us.  They do not run from the agony.  They do not turn away from Jesus’s pained body.  They do not try to get Jesus off the cross.  They have the courage to sit with Jesus, to commune with him, to be present to him, as he experiences his final suffering.

In the news lately, there has been a lot of talk about the recently discovered Gospel of Judas.  In this text, written about 150 years after our four Gospels, Judas doesn’t betray Jesus, Jesus asks Judas to turn him in.  There’s something comforting about this image-It presents a Jesus fully in control.  But none of the Gospels in our canon presents this convenient story.

Jesus was betrayed.  Jesus did die. Jesus willingly let go of control over his own life for our benefit.  And through all of that, the Marys and the beloved disciple never left his side. 

Last week, I had the opportunity of hearing Charles LaFond, the former assistant at Church of Our Savior, lead a retreat about Holy Week.  He told the story of the experiences of the chaplains to the morticians in New Orleans.  After the waters in New Orleans receded, the city was left with the horrifying task of dealing with tens of thousands of dead bodies.  400 morticians from around the country were brought in and a temporary tent city was built. 

Trucks brought in 40 bodies at a time, and they were distributed among the morticians.  While there were many drownings, there were also as many as 85 murder victims disguised as hurricane victims. After the autopsies, bodies were tagged and stored in refrigerated units. 

The job of the chaplains was to bless the truck with the bodies, to bless the bodies again as they were taken to the refrigerators after the autopsies, and to be with the morticians when they wept between autopsies.  Like the Marys and the beloved disciple’s ministry of presence to Jesus, the chaplains’ jobs were not to free the morticians from their horrific duties, but to stay close with them, to love them and pray for them, to be alongside them as they did their work.

That kind of commitment and presence takes enormous courage.  Facing Jesus’ death takes courage, too.  We worship a God who, while ultimately triumphant, was willing to be completely weak and mortal for our behalf.  While we are Easter people, we are also called to remember the shocking vulnerability of our Lord.  We are called to abide with him in prayer, as many of you did during the prayer vigil last night. 

In the same way, when our loved ones are experiencing crisis that makes us uncomfortable:  when they are losing their memory, dying, getting a divorce, losing a child, we are called to be with them.  We cannot solve their problems.  We cannot always make them feel better, but like the Marys and the beloved disciple, we can show up, we can pray for them, we can love them.

Good Friday invites us to grow into people who can abide in pain.  For we know that it is through Jesus’ pain, through his death that we must enter to experience the joy that follows.  In the meantime, we are asked to wait with Jesus still on the Cross.  Again from our hymn:

In thy most bitter passion
my heart to share doth cry,
with thee for my salvation
upon the cross to die.
Ah, keep my heart thus moved
to stand thy cross beneath,
to mourn thee, well-beloved,
yet thank thee for thy death.

Epiphany 7, Year B, 2006

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

I am about to do a new thing.

God declares this through Isaiah’s words and in Jesus’ actions in our lessons this morning.

Jesus had only been in active, public ministry for a few weeks, but word about him had spread throughout the region.  Jesus was teaching all sorts of incredible new ideas about God.  And not only that, Jesus was also doing incredible things.  He was sending demons flying and healing little old ladies.  Even though he wanted to maintain a low profile and asked those he healed not to tell others about him, those who had received his healings could not help but go on and on about Jesus to their friends and family. 

When friends of a paralytic heard about Jesus, they knew their friend needed to meet him.  We don’t get the whole story about this paralytic, but we do get a sense of the energy around him.  His friends were so committed to having him healed, they traveled to Capernaum, to the house where Jesus was staying.  Unfortunately, once they got there they could not get in the door, because so many people were crowding around Jesus, wanting healings. 

The paralytic’s friends were not to be denied.  They somehow climbed onto the roof, hauled the paralytic onto the roof, and began digging.  Rooves in towns like Capernaum were made of slats of wood, filled in with mud, rocks, and big flat leaves.  These friends tore through the outer layer, began shoveling mud and rocks out with their hands or small tools, and eventually broke through. 

I wonder if the people in side the house could hear the commotion they made.  Was it so crowded that Jesus could not hear what was going on?  Or, was Jesus amused by their efforts and simply waiting patiently for the paralytic’s arrival.

All we know is, when the friends finally broke through the roof and lowered their friend down in front of Jesus, everything stopped.  Whatever teaching or healing was going on was halted by this abrupt arrival of a man being lowered down on a pallet. 

Jesus took this opportunity, the faith of this man and his friends, to teach the crowd around him something new. 

The crowd had heard about Jesus’s ability to exorcise demons and to heal, but Jesus wanted to show them that he wasn’t just a miracle worker, he wasn’t just a showman, he was God. 

God says, I am doing a new thing.

Little did the friends of the paralytic know that their grit, their determination would be the background God would use to announce his presence on earth, and his intention to heal humanity, not just from physical infirmity, but from sin.

Now, after two thousand years hearing about how Jesus forgives us our sins, we start to take this information for granted and forgiveness loses some of the emotional power it once had. 

However, we must remember that when God came to earth in and through Jesus, the Jewish powers of the day were deeply into legalism -being a good Jew meant following all the rules, crossing all the Ts and dotting all the I’s.  Though in the past, God had tried to communicate that he was less interested in ritual sacrifice and ritual prayer than authentic worship and service to the poor and needy, the message had not gotten through to the people. 

The idea that a human being would claim to be able to forgive sins, was completely absurd-blasphemous even!  No human being could forgive sins.  Yet, here sits Jesus, calmly telling the paralytic that his sins are forgiven-and, by the way, that he can walk again. 

But really, when you think about it, the healing of the body and the forgiving of sin are more connected than one might think.  What is sin, but a kind of brokenness?  It makes perfect sense that the God who wants to heal us physically, also wants to heal our spirits.  Forgiveness is not just about divine, eternal consequences for our behavior.  Forgiveness is about restoring a right relationship with our creator and with our neighbor.

While humans are made in God’s image and have wonderful capacity to be creative and loving individuals, we also are fundamentally broken.  None of us loves perfectly, none of us is perfectly honest or good.  Despite the Jews of Jesus’ time having a list of 600 very specific rules to follow, no one seemed to be able to follow them all perfectly, no matter how hard they tried. 

In our culture today, we don’t’ have 600 religious laws, but we do have an image of perfection we try to follow subconsciously. Being competent, having the appearance of being “together” is incredibly important. 

But, what if God is doing a new thing?

This week, Chuck and I had the interesting experience of meeting with a local therapist who has a vision.  Over the years of his ministry, he has encountered individuals and couples who can admit their brokenness to him and to each other, but these same people continue to pretend to their friends and to their churches that everything about their life is together and perfect. 

This therapist believes that true healing occurs in community.  Therapy is a wonderful tool that can help people deepen relationships with each other, but this therapist would love his counseling sessions to be simply a beginning for his clients.  That like Henri Nouwen’s wounded healer, his clients could use their painful experiences and their experiences of forgiveness to propel them into community and into ministry.  This therapist envisions a ministry in which he counsels people in their church buildings, and that the community life of church and the private work of therapy ultimately partner together.

I think the image of the paralytic’s friend’s lowering him onto the mat is a wonderful example of this kind of community.  The paralytic was in a situation where his problem could not be hidden.  He obviously could not walk.  His friends did not hold back, ignoring his problem in order not to embarrass him.  No, they were engaged with him, and committed to his healing.  They were so committed they tore through a roof so he could see Jesus.

Now, I don’t know if this therapist’s ministry will be successful, but I know from personal experience that the combination of therapy and intentional community can be a powerful vehicle for the work of God.

From 1999 until 2002 I was part of a small group Bible study in Richmond.  About seven of us met weekly to study the bible and pray together.  In that way, we looked like any other bible study.  The difference was that four of us were in therapy, two were getting degrees in counseling and one was married to one of the counselors!  It was while I was in this group that I left the evangelical church to become an Episcopalian, experienced the death of my mother, and discerned a call to the priesthood.  Words cannot express the powerful ways God used this group as we each faced the brokenness in our lives and came together to support, challenge and pray for each other. This community held my brokenness tenderly, protecting and loving me, so I could grow into the person God wanted me to be.  We also had a ridiculous amount of fun together and became a true community, even outside of the Bible Study. 

At times the intimacy we achieved felt very risky, especially as my theological ideas were changing, but despite our theological differences, or perhaps because of them, we were able to each deepen our faith and learn about God.  For me, these six friends were my pallet carriers.  They brought me to Jesus, reminding me of his love and forgiveness for me over and over again.

Obviously therapy and small groups are not the only ways to live in deep community with one another.  However, we ARE called to be in deep community. Throughout history, God has called communities of faith, rather than individuals.  We gather together as a church every Sunday, because it is impossible for us to discern God’s call as individuals.  We need each other to fully realize our faith.  We need each other to carry each other when we cannot walk.  We need each other to express God’s forgiveness when we feel only guilt. 

So, maybe it’s God who needs US to do a new thing-to trust him and trust each other to live authentic lives in community.

Holy Name Day, Year B, 2006

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Pretty good, huh?  That’s the one piece of literature I was asked to memorize in high school and the girl’s still got it!  Most of us recognize this piece as part of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  Juliet is lamenting that she cannot be with her true love because his name happens to be that of a family her father hates.

A name is a powerful thing.  A name can separate two lovers, prevent a person from getting a job, give a person access to family wealth and prestige. 

When a parent chooses a name for their child, they choose it with care.  Some of you have wonderful names, loaded with meaning.  Blake and Corin Hunter were named after literary figures-William Blake and the character Corin from Chronicles of Narnia.  Chuck and Leith’s names were chosen because they were family names.  Janice was supposed to be named Elaine, but her mother took one look at her and knew she was a Janice.  My sister and my names were carefully chosen from a baby book with the sole criteria that they could not be reduced to stupid or embarrassing nicknames. 

Do me a favor.  Take a moment and tell the person next to you how you got your name.  If you’re in the Witness Protection Program and some government agent gave you your new name, just invent a story. . .

(Pause)

Today we celebrate Holy Name day, the day when Mary obeyed the Angel Gabriel and named her son Jesus.  No one names anyone in the bible by accident, so we can learn a lot about a person by what he is named.  The word for Jesus can also be translated as Joshua.  If you were here Christmas morning, you heard Chuck talk about the connection between Jesus and the Old Testament figure of Joshua.  After the Israelites were liberated from the Pharaoh through Moses’ intervention, they wandered around the desert for forty years.  Joshua, who was a generation younger than Moses, ended up leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, the Land of Canaan.  So, when the Angel Gabriel tells Mary to name the baby Jesus, which literally means God Saves, you start to have a clue that big things are in store for this baby. 

The significance of names in the Bible did not begin with Jesus.  Adam was called on to name every animal and when Adam first sees his wife, he spontaneously names her in awe and wonder.  From that time on, the names people choose for their children, or even for themselves, in the Bible are careful, rich expressions of their circumstances.  For example, barren women in the Bible who end up becoming pregnant, often name their children in thanksgiving to God.  Hannah names her son Samuel, which means “name of God”, because she had prayed for his conception.

With this legacy behind us, we have the privilege of naming each other and using each other’s names. 

With that privilege comes power.  One of the most powerful ways you can demean a person, remove his humanity, is to alter or remove his name.  This begins in the playground, when kids will taunt one another with unpleasant variations of each other’s names. 

As adults we can do this insidiously.  I have an acquaintance who has some co workers who drive her crazy.  Instead of referring to them by name, she calls them “that black accountant” or “that Mexican girl in human resources”.  She manages to both negate their identity and demean their entire race in one fell swoop with just a handful of careless words.

Unnaming’s most terrible manifestation comes when people’s names are removed altogether, such as in concentration camps during world war II, when people’s names were replaced by a number.  Dehumanizing prisoners in this way, enabled the guards to treat them as people who were far less than fully human, worse even than a normal person would treat an animal

Names are precious.  They are a symbol of all we are and who we hope to become.  Just as Adam carefully chose the first names, and God chose Jesus’ name, we are called to be careful with the names of those around us, to use them tenderly, with respect.

How you speak a person’s name reveals so much about how much you value the person to whom you are speaking.  Listen to these differences:

Hello Chuck! (Say once with enthusiasm, once with boredom, once with disdain, etc.)

Depending on how I used his name, Chuck would immediately know whether I valued him as a person that particular day. 

We hold this power of naming and unnaming, not only over others, but also over ourself.  When I first moved to town, two thirteen year old girls came to my door selling magazines for a school fundraiser.  As I filled out the paperwork the girls started to bicker with each other, saying things like, “You are so stupid.  No you’re stupid!”  They stared at me blankly as I preached to them about the importance of self respect and using positive language.  One of them said to me, “Oh, no, you don’t understand.  It’s okay.  We’re best friends!” 

What these girls didn’t realize is that we become what we name ourselves.  If we allow others to call us stupid, we begin to call ourselves stupid.  If we begin to call ourselves stupid, then eventually we won’t see much need to respect ourselves and will begin limiting our opportunities or even putting ourselves in danger.

In contrast, if we call ourselves nice names, we’ll eventually live into them.  Working at Emmanuel has been disorienting for me, because I have never in my life been called the nice things that I have been since I’ve moved here.  Chuck in particular has a remarkable gift of naming.  If you’ve spent five minutes with him, all of a sudden you feel like you are a fabulous person who was solely responsible for hanging the moon.  My poor sister has the exhausting job of reminding me that I’m the same-old-Sarah and to not get too big of a head. Despite her best efforts, though, I actually find myself being nicer, doing better, because you all treat me like that is who I am. 

When you think of yourselves, what names to do use?  Despite all the lofty events of the last few weeks, I do not think of myself as Sarah-the-Priest nearly as often as I think of myself as “Sarah-who-has-gained-five-pounds-since-she-moved-here.”

Take another moment, this time silently, to think of the names that you use for yourself.

(Pause)

Hopefully, many of those names are positive, but if they aren’t I want to offer you hope. 

First, remember that the maker of the universe created you.  He calls you by name and sees who you truly are.  When the Father speaks your name, he speaks it with the greatest tenderness and affection. 

Jesus, whose name we celebrate today, also has some names for you.  Remember, this is the same Jesus who called the impulsive, flailing Simon, Peter, which means Rock.  He not only called Simon by name, but he added a new name full of hope and pride. 

If your head is full of names that are demeaning, think for a moment about Jesus’ primary names for you:  Friend, brother, and sister.  Jesus, who is all of God, sees you as a partner.  He knows who you are now and he sees who you can become.  He believes in your potential and is eager for you to believe in yourself.

And if your name is not enough for you to believe in, and it probably shouldn’t be, remember that you can cling to the name of the Lord and the name of Jesus-for by revealing these names to us, God declares his desire for intimacy with us and his determination to be in relationship with us forever.

Christmas Eve, Year B, 2005

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And Mary pondered these things in her heart. 

Mary had a lot to ponder that night long ago.  The child that had grown within her so miraculously and then been carried so precariously through the long journey to Bethlehem had finally been born.  Instead of a quiet moment with her new baby in a safe and warm bed, she is surrounded by livestock and strangers. 

The word translated as “pondered” literally means, “thrown together”.  This pondering is not a quiet, meditative one, but a frantic scrambling to understand what is happening, to absorb all the new information and feelings Mary is experiencing. 

Mary experienced affirmation that her baby was from God throughout her pregnancy.  An angel spoke to her and then, thankfully, to her cousins Zechariah and Elizabeth. Her husband Joseph believed her, but the news of this incredible incarnation was still quiet and contained to a few family members.

This holy secret ends when a flock of shepherds bursts into Mary’s makeshift birthing room, still illuminated from the vision they have seen, talking over each other to tell the story of the angels and how they had visited what felt like every barn in Bethlehem until finally they found this one, with the baby wrapped in strips of cloth.

At this moment, as she holds the baby a little closer to her chest, Mary realizes, this is not “her” baby, not entirely.  In this moment of joy at his birth, there is also a little grief, as Mary realizes her child is a child she will have to share.  Not just with these eager shepherds, but with all people.

Usually in painted icons of Mary and the baby Jesus, Mary holds Jesus on her lap, close to her body.  However, there is one icon in which Mary faces the onlooker and holds Jesus away from her body, towards whoever is looking at the icon. 

This is the Mary who realizes her sacrifice will be to lose her son, not only to death, but also in life.  This baby will grow up to create a new family of misfits and criminals.  This baby will grow up to live a life of a wanderer, traveling from town to town.  He will never settle down or provide her with grandchildren. In this icon, Mary not only accepts this reality, but offers Jesus to us.

This baby who was born, was born of Mary, but was born for the world.  After all, we must remember that this tiny baby contains all of God.  All the powers that created the universe, pushed the stars into their rotations, created green grass and human flesh out of dust. 

One of our acolytes was helping to green the church last Sunday and observed that the baby Jesus in our nativity scene is about half the size of Mary.  He looks at least six years old.  I wonder if that was an intentional decision on the part of the artist.  Perhaps the artist got carried away as she meditated on the huge implications of the incarnation, of God choosing to limit himself in human flesh.  Maybe she thought no small baby could handle the enormity of God, so she made the baby a little bigger, to give God more room to wiggle around.

I wonder what it was like for God to suddenly also be completely human, to have his infiniteness constrained by skin, to suddenly have to turn his head to look behind him, to suffer the indignity of having to learn to walk?  Was there a part of being a baby Jesus really loved?  Did he love his own tiny fingers and toes the way we love the toes of our favorite babies? 

From the very start, just by being born, God began to redeem what it is to be human.  If Jesus can learn to walk, and read, and eat, then walking and reading and eating have the potential to be holy activities, not just human ones. 

If God chooses to be born in a dingy stable in the midst of chaos, then God redeems all those who suffer the indignities of poverty and chaotic lives.  God choose to came, not to a family that had it all together, but to an exhausted traveling couple who were just trying to find a dry place to lay their heads.  Mary and Joseph did not have the time or resources to prepare for a “proper” arrival for their son, so he came in the most awkward and uncomfortable of situations.

Yes, Mary’s sweet baby was no ordinary child. 

God came to earth as the Christ so we could know him in a deeper and more intimate way. He came embodied, in actual human flesh, not some divine ephemeral cloud.  He could taste and touch and feel.  He could get headaches and feel hunger pangs.  He came to face all our temptations and sorrows.  He came to know what it is to love and lose. He came not only to save us from our sins, but to redeem the very lives we live.

Know that whether you sorrow or feel deep joy at this moment, that Christ has compassion for you, knows what those emotions feel like, and loves you.  He offers you hope for redemption and continued joy. . .not just in the next life, but in this life.  There is no experience you can have that is outside the scope of Christ’s forgiveness, nothing you can do that, if repented, will prevent Christ’s embrace.

I’ll close with a poem by Madeleine L’Engle about Christ’ birth from Mary’s perspective.

O ORIENS, by Madeleine L’Engle

O come, O come Emmanuel

Within this fragile vessel here to dwell.
O Child conceived by heaven’s power
Give me thy strength: it is the hour.

O come, thou Wisdom from on high;

Like any babe at life you cry;

For me, like any mother, birth

Was hard, O light of earth.

O come, O come, thou Lord of might,

Whose birth came hastily at night,

Born in a stable, in blood and pain
Is this the king who comes to reign?

O come, thou Rod of Jesse’s stem,

The stars will be thy diadem.
How can the infinite finite be?

Why choose, child, to be born of me?

O come, thou key of David, come,

Open the door to my heart-home.
I cannot love thee as a king-

So fragile and so small a thing.

O come, thou Day-spring from on high:
I saw the signs that marked the sky.
I heard the beat of angels’ wings

I saw the shepherds and the kings.

O come, Desire of nations, be

Simply a human child to me.
Let me not weep that you are born.

The night is gone. Now gleams the morn.

Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel,

God’s Son, God’s Self, with us to dwell.

Advent 4, Year B, 2005

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

King David was a manly man.  He slayed giants. He slept with other men’s wives and killed their husbands.  He led the armies that secured Jerusalem.  He established a kingdom.  (He also danced through the streets naked, but that is another sermon.)

Sweet Mary, on the other hand, was by all accounts a nice girl from a good family.  She was open, receptive, non-confrontational.  She was even a virgin.

Somewhere, Gloria Steinem is pulling out her hair.  These descriptions are a feminist’s nightmare, right?  Manly men and wimpy women.  Women of my generation were told we could grow up to do anything, be anyone we want to be.  Women before me had fought for their rights to work alongside men in every field you could imagine, and I certainly reaped the benefits of their hard work.  After all, I was born the year after the first women priests were ordained. What women are not supposed to be is passive, waiting around for some man (or God) to fulfill our destiny.

So, what do we do with these images of David and Mary?  These contrasting images of aggressive and passive behavior.

The good news is, we don’t have to choose just one.  (Though I’d be careful which attributes of David you emulate.)  God uses both David and Mary in Jesus’ conception.  In the Lukan geneaology of Jesus, Joseph, Jesus’ father, was descended from the line of David.  We’ll never know how the genetics of the assumption work, whether Jesus inherited any of Joseph’s traits, but for all legal purposes, Jesus could trace his heritage back to David.  

Throughout Jesus’ life, his incredible faithfulness to his heavenly Father will be a powerful combination of both David’s aggression and Mary’s ability to yield to God.  We see David in Jesus when he stands up to the powers of the day, when Jesus throws over the tables in the Temple.  We see Mary’s quiet faithfulness when Jesus yields to God in prayer over and over again, especially when he must choose to follow the path that he knows will lead to his death.  And in this struggle, we learn that yielding to God, as Mary and Jesus do, can be the most courageous and frightening way of faithfulness possible.  Yielding to God is not wimpy.

Mary was a woman who knew where her life was going.  She was marrying a carpenter, and would have a lovely quiet married life in which she’d take care of her husband and raise their children.  All this is interrupted when the Angel Gabriel comes to her and tells her that she is the favored one of God.

When Mary accepts God’s unexpected plan for her life, she yields to a future she cannot predict.  She does not know whether Joseph will accept or reject her, whether her family will shun her.  She certainly cannot know that she will one day have to watch her son be brutally murdered. 

When Mary yields to God, she surrenders her very understanding of how the world operates.  She surrenders her understanding of how God intervenes in the world.  Mary is open to God behaving in a completely new and unanticipated manner. 

Yielding to God is no small thing.  When we acknowledge that we do not control our destinies, we face the terror that we cannot predict our future.  There is no way to ensure that we or our loved ones will be safe, secure, or happy. 

Still, the Angel Gabriel refers to Mary as “favored one”. This Greek word translated as favored-charitoo– means, “endowed with grace”.  God chooses Mary, not because she is perfect, but because he chooses to endow her with his grace, just as he chooses to endow humanity with grace through the life and death of Jesus.

So, where is the grace in this yielding to God? 

I’d like to think that the grace, for Mary, came from her relationship with her Son.  She had the privilege of watching this incredible man grow from the baby and young boy she had nurtured to the powerful, wise and self-giving man he would become.  She experienced the grace of knowing God first hand, for a longer period of time then anyone before her.  She lived with this incarnate God 24 hours a day for years.  I’d like to think somewhere inside of her was a Jewish mother who got a chuckle out of the thought of disciplining the Lord of the Universe.  Potty training God?

In the same way, the grace when we yield to God, is that we get to learn more about God, we get to sit in his presence for a bit, and get a tiny sense of who he really is.  Yielding to God is not always about doing the will of God, it can also be a emotional or psychological transaction.  For instance, if you have a hard time trusting the father figure in your life, that distrust probably plays out in your prayer life with God.  If your dad abandoned you, why shouldn’t God?  In that case, yielding to God might be a moment of epiphany when you realize that God loves you, that God is not going to abandon you.  In that moment, you feel your body relax, your defenses lower.  That is yielding to God. 

You might believe you don’t need God.  In that case, yielding to God may happen when you get hit with a major crisis.  In a moment, in a flash, you realize that you are finite, that you don’t have all the answers. 

When we yield to God, we become God’s favored ones.  Not because we earn the distinction, but because God longs to bestow his grace upon us. 

And it is only when we yield to God, that it becomes appropriate to have a more confrontational, aggressive faith like David.  When we have yielded in prayer to God and have a sense of God’s call in our lives, we can then live out the “masculine” side of our faith.

Some of us might be called to fight for justice-writing letters to legislators, or organizing protests.  Others of us might be called to bring bible studies into local prisons or to work with the Bread Fund. 

The Christian life is a dance of yielding and responding to call.  The Christian Life is a dance of prayer and action. 

We are called to be both Mary and David.

As Jesus came into life through David and Mary, we are called to bring Jesus to life in this world.

Amen.

Advent 2, Year B, 2005

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

It is time to come home!

This is the good news the prophet is speaking in the passage from Isaiah we hear today.  You see, Jerusalem was the symbolic and physical home of the Israelites.  They had journeyed for hundreds of years, and finally secured Jerusalem under King David’s leadership.  The Israelites believed their wandering, their suffering was finally over.  Unfortunately, years later, the Babylonians swooped in and took over Jerusalem, exiling all the Jews. 

The Israelites understood this defeat as not only a political and military defeat, but a spiritual defeat as well.  They believed that their sins had caused the loss of Jerusalem.

When the Lord says, “She has served her time and her penalty is paid” in this triumphant passage from Isaiah, he is telling the Israelites the good news that they will no longer be punished by exile, but will be allowed to return home.

It is time to come home!

John the Baptist repeats some of these words from Isaiah when he proclaims the coming of Jesus Christ. 

See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way;
the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
`Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight,

Why echo this message of homecoming?  Jesus was not going to come in and drive out the Roman occupiers of Jerusalem. 

What is a home, anyway?   I’ve been traveling for a couple weeks, a little vacation, then some continuing education, and each time I drove back to Crozet, and sunk into my big comfy bed at the end of a long day, I could feel myself relaxing into being home.  Some of you have lived in this area since you were tiny and some are as new as I am, but somehow we have all come to associate this place with home.  Home is more than a physical place.  Home is an emotional and spiritual idea, too. 

When John announced Jesus’ coming, he was announcing a whole new idea of a religious home.  No longer would home be a physical place like Jerusalem.  Home would now rest in a person-the person of Jesus. 

It’s time to come home.

To come home to Jerusalem, the exiled Jews would need to a do a lot of work.  They would pack all their tents, hitch their belongings to their donkeys or camels, and begin the long walk back home. 

Coming home to Jesus takes work, too. 

John the Baptist preached a baptism of repentance.  He knew that in order to encounter Jesus, the very embodiment of love, the people around him would need to cleanse themselves of their sins.  He knew a life of sin would prevent a homecoming with Jesus.

I read a wonderful book over vacation called A Song I Knew by Heart by Brett Lott.  This novel is a retelling of the Ruth and Naomi story, but with a big twist.  In this story, after years of dealing with the painful issue of infertility, Naomi and her husband have grown distant from each other.  In a fit of anguish, Naomi throws herself at her husband’s best friend and they are intimate together one time.  Naomi goes immediately home where she sits in a cold bath, trying frantically to feel clean and finds herself unable to move, but shivers uncontrollably in her cold and guilt.  Her husband comes home, finds her, lifts her out of the tub, then takes her to their family bed, where he covers her in quilts and lies next to her until she warms again.  Throughout the rest of her life, she is tormented by her guilt and thinks of her sin as a separation from love. . . a separation from love.   Instead of turning toward her husband, who loved her so, she separated herself from that love and clung to another.

Sin as separation from love. . .a powerful image isn’t it?  When we sin, we separate ourselves from love, we separate ourselves from home.  When we repent and are forgiven, we bridge that separation, we experience a profound homecoming.

Naomi feels the weight of her guilt for the rest of her life.  She never tells her husband what happened, and they stay married and eventually have children.  At the end the book, at the end of her life, she finds out that her husband’s best friend told him what happened immediately after the indiscretion. 

So, when Naomi’s husband picked her up out of the frigid tub, and warmed her with blankets and his own flesh, he KNEW what had happened.   He was forgiving her, loving her, despite her betrayal.

For forty years, Naomi carried around a guilt that separated her from her husband, her children.  If she had only spoken of her guilt to her husband, she could have experienced the depth of her husband’s forgiveness, God’s forgiveness, much sooner.  Perhaps she could have even forgiven herself.

Like Naomi’s husband, God is eager to forgive us, eager to wrap us in the blanket of his love, his acceptance.  God is eager to welcome us home. 

As we wait for Jesus’s arrival this Christmas, we can prepare for his arrival by coming clean, coming clean before ourselves, our loved ones, God.  We can examine ourselves for the ways in which we have separated ourselves from love, and turn to welcome love back in our lives. 

(Pause)

It is time to come home.

Proper 28, Year A, 2005

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Investing is serious business.

I learned this at a finance workshop that Karin Bonding ran several weeks ago.  A few women got together over a bottle of wine and some chocolate truffles and faced the cold hard truths of our financial situations. 

If you were watching us, you would know exactly where our financial weaknesses were by when we gulped a sip of wine. 

I gulped when I realized how long I would need to save money for a downpayment on a house. 

Another woman gulped when she realized how much she needed to save for her children’s college education. 

There was a collective gulp when we talked about the money we would need for retirement.

Karin was fantastic at helping us calm down and figure out how we could meet our financial goals.  Apparently stuffing your money in a mattress and panicking is not a valid financial plan.

The slave in today’s gospel lesson could have used Karin’s advice.  His master entrusts him with one talent, which was a huge amount of money at the time.  A talent was a very large coin that could weight as much as 60 to 75 pounds!  Imagine if your boss asked you to invest several million of his dollars.  I can sympathize with the slave’s nervousness. 

The slave wanted to make sure he protected that talent, so he buried it deep within the earth so nothing could happen to the coin. 

Imagine his anxiety each day of his master’s trip, visiting the mound of dirt that protected the coin to make sure no enthusiastic canine had dug the coin out from it’s protected spot.  What relief he must have felt to return the talent safely to his master! 

Unfortunately for the slave, the master was not as interested in the protection of the talent as he was in the investment of the talent.  The master rewards the two slaves who have taken the risk of investing the money and takes away the talent from the man who dug the hole after calling him lazy and wicked!

We do not often think of God as a savvy investor—After all, when you can create a universe just by thinking about that universe, you probably don’t have a serious need for cash.

We’ll be helped if we remember this story is a parable.  Imagine Jesus as the master.  He is going away for a time, but will be back soon.  Jesus wants to make sure that believers don’t waste the gifts of the Church by hiding them.  He wants us to invest ourselves to the best of our ability, so that when Jesus returns, he’ll be able to see the returns on our investments. The question is:  how do we know what gifts Jesus wants us to invest?

I was, for three years, the world’s worst secretary.  I hate working in an office all day.  I hate filing.  I don’t like being interrupted by an authority figure.  I’m not crazy about answering the phone.  I’m also not fantastic with details.  So, you can imagine the disaster that awaited my poor boss anytime he needed anything.  My gifts did not match up to my responsibilities.

I think sometimes in the church, we get so panicked about getting programming together, that we cajole, beg, or manipulate parishioners to step up to do jobs that need to be done, regardless of whether their gifts match the responsibilities.  While I’m not going to stop recruiting for Sunday School teachers, my dream would be that everyone in this parish would be doing the work that best suits you, that brings you pleasure. 

Each of you has incredible gifts.  I’ve been saddened to hear some of you, particularly women, focus on the tasks in life you believe you do not do well. 

Humility is one thing, but when we deny the gifts God gives us we’re wasting a chance to really invest those gifts.  Remember, the God of the universe created you.  This is the same God who made mountains, and diamonds, and fireflies and rainbows—God makes really good stuff.  You are no exception. 

So, if you are not sure what your gifts are or if you think you know, but want to explore some more, or if you are convinced you are giftless, I have a wonderful book to recommend to you.

The book is called Living Your Strengths, and the authors and publishers can be found in your bulletin.

Living Your Strengths was written based on a study conducted by the Gallup Organization.  Some researches from the Gallup Organization interviewed people who were the best in their fields—the best CEO, the best teacher, the best cleaning woman, the best actress—and so on.  When they compiled the results of their interviews, they found that people have thirty five areas of strength and each of us excels at four or five of these. 

Living Your Strengths addresses how to use these gifts in a church setting.  However, the information you learn will help you use your strengths in the rest of your life, as well.

Here is a quote from the book, “In Gallup’s research into human potential over the past 30 years—including interviews with more than 2 million people—the evidence is overwhelming:  You will be most successful in whatever you do by building your life around your greatest natural abilities rather than your weaknesses.  Your talents should be your primary focus. . .Your calling is what God wants you to do with your life; your talents and strengths determine how you will get it done.  When you discover your talents, you begin to discover your calling.”  (p. x)

The CATCH to this book, is that you need to buy the book to take the online quiz to find out what your strengths are—so clearly whoever marketed this book had the gift of fleecing his market audience. 

I think this book can be a helpful tool for us, because it re-frames our thinking about gifts.  Instead of wishing for someone else’s creativity or ability to cook or financial savvy, or worrying about our weaknesses, it helps us take an honest look at our own gifts. 

You might not have had any idea you had the gift of consistency or individualization, for instance.  If you do, you might do well visiting with some of our housebound parishioners.  If you have the gifts of analysis and being a learner, the adult forum committee might be the place for you.

If I had read this book before taking on my job as a secretary, I might have realized that my gifts of empathy, arranging, adaptability, connectedness and individualization, did NOT a good secretary make.  However, they do make a decent minister.  I could have, like many people, focused on my weaknesses and tried to better them.  That is a fine goal.  However, if I had spent the last three years improving my filing skills rather than going to seminary, I would still be one unhappy girl.  If we really want to maximize our role on this planet, and in this church, a more effective approach will be to focus on our strengths and do ministry out of that part of ourselves, rather than focusing on our areas of weakness.

At 11:00 [Today we celebrate the baptism of Clancy Beights.  We’re not sure what his strengths will be—He recently learned how to put his foot in his mouth, but his growth probably won’t stop there.  We do know that he will be an important part of the church, as we all are.]

The wonderful thing about the investment God has made in us, is that God invested in US, not in you or me.  God invested in the church—millions of people all over this planet.  We are all incredibly different, but we can work together to really make a difference.  We do not have to be responsible for every committee, every job, every mission.  God will show us what our, individual callings are and how we can best use our strengths to serve him.