Setting a Vision

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Habakkuk 2:1a, 2-4:

The church where I did my internship was in Wellesley, Massachusetts, which also happens to be the half way point of the Boston Marathon, and the church itself was just off the race route. Each year we would post a banner outside the church, quoting the prophet Isaiah, which said “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Now to be honest, the runners never saw this as they went by, because there were spectators between them and it, but we did make the letters big enough so that if they could see it they would be able to read it, or more practically so that people driving by could read it as well. That sign always made me think of that passage we heard from the prophet Habakkuk today, and I’m guessing that few if any of you have ever heard anything from him before, and even today you’re not going to hear much, because I chose it not because of the prophesies that Habakkuk received from God, or what he delivered to Judea, but instead those first words from God. Write these words big enough so that people who are running by will be able to read them. That means the letters have to be big, in a legible font and clear, and perhaps the vision has to be somewhat short as well. It has to be concise.

But what God also tells Habakkuk is first is that there is a vision for the appointed time. When I hear that, what it means is that visions change, and have to change. That what is appropriate then will not work now, and what works now probably won’t work later. There is a vision for the appointed time. Secondly Habakkuk is told that visions don’t happen immediately, that sometimes you have to wait for things to occur, and waiting can be hard, especially if what we envision, or need or want, needs to happen right away. We have a vision of streets without potholes in them, right, but if the county was to try and fix them right now during the winter what would happen? That work would quickly be destroyed because they would face the same conditions that caused them in the first place. So sometimes we cast visions and then we have to wait, or it takes a while to get them implemented, and even when they get moving in the right direction, sometimes they start to fall backwards because change is hard. But, having the vision clearly articulated and large enough for everyone to see, even those who are running, keeps that vision front and center for everyone. So, if the vision is slow in coming, wait for it, and perhaps we should add, work for it even harder. And then is added what is probably the most famous line from Habakkuk, and it’s famous because Paul quotes it in the letter to the Romans and to the Galatians, “the righteous live by their faith.”

It's About the Journey, Not the Destination

This was my message for Ash Wednesday. The text was 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10:

I remember hearing about someone who came to Maya Angelou, or at least that’s whom I remember it being about, although I couldn’t find the proper attribution, and so it could be someone else, and if it is you’ll have to forgive me, but the story is too appropriate for this message to ignore. But, any ways they came and told her they were a Christian, to which she responded, “already? I thought becoming a Christian took a lifetime.” And while I may not remember who said it exactly, what I do remember in reading that the first time was how succinctly that little response put what could be a complicated thought about the journey of faith. “You’re already a Christian? I thought it took a lifetime.” It’s the difference between an event and a journey, as Seth Godin recently said. A journey can have events in them, including things that change the substance of the journey, but it’s still about the journey, not the event. So, for example, a wedding is an event that changes the relationship from dating, or fiancées, to  being married,  but it’s just one even in the journey of the relationship. And if someone were to say that they were done doing any of the work that a relationship requires simply because they had gotten married, I think we would tell them that they were missing the entire point. Indeed, as I usually tell the couples I marry, it is after the wedding that the hard work of being married begins. That’s not the end of the journey, it’s merely the beginning. The event is over, now the journey begins.

Forgiving God

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was the 91st psalm:

What I am about to say is probably going to get me in some trouble, or at the very least it will cause some controversy, and I’m not saying it for its shock value, but if you are upset I ask for you to stay with me so I can explain more on the other side of it. Sometimes the Bible is just wrong. I don’t mean that there are there are contradictions or mistakes, because there are and I’m not refencing that. But I mean that it’s just wrong and that Psalm we heard this morning is one of those times. I even had someone who was doing their prep work for today, for lack of a better term, say to me “are you going to talk about the fact that the Psalm doesn’t match reality?” and that’s exactly what I’m going to talk about. It’s a beautiful Psalm and wonderful imagery and a pleasant ideal, but it’s not true. What we are told is that those who “live in the shelter of the most high”, those who abide in God, will be delivered from “the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.” That “no evil shall befall you [and] no scourge come near your tent.” God will command angels on our behalf so that “you will not dash your foot against a stone” and a “long life” will come to us. And yet we know that’s not true. Because we are not delivered from deadly pestilence, we do fear the night, sometimes the serpent does rise up to strike us. This week was the 9th anniversary of the death of my nephew Wyatt who died at 9, and so he did not receive a long life, and we certainly know others for whom that is true as well. And we know that we are not always rescued from trouble. And since that is what our lives are really like, that leaves us with two possibilities. One of them is that we don’t actually love God or live in the shelter of God, that we don’t God’s name and don’t trust in God to deliver, and therefore we get whatever happens to us in life because we deserve it. Or, the second option, is that this Psalm isn’t true, that while God may love us and we love God that we are not guaranteed eternal protection from anything bad ever happening to us simply because of our faith. And of the two, I’m going to go with the second option.

And so today we conclude our series on forgiveness by looking at an area in which many people may also take some issue and that is forgiving God. While some struggle with the issue of forgiving God, others will say that it’s not even on the table, that we don’t need to forgive God because God has nothing to be forgiven for. I’ve done a lot of reading and study on the subject of forgiveness, and have only encountered the idea of forgiving God in two of them. One of them was sort of a new-age book, and the other was a book on forgiveness that one of our adult faith development classes read in the fall entitled Forgiving What You Can’t Forget, and the author there says sorta kinda that you don’t need to forgive God because God is not responsible for the bad things in our lives while also simultaneously saying that God is in total control and is responsible for everything, we just don’t understand it all and we should pray that God will help us to understand it. Not an uncommon articulation of what is known as theodicy, or if God is good then why do bad things happen. These thoughts are also sometimes accompanied by statements like “everything happens for a reason,” or “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle” or, thinking of the death of a child, “God needed another angel,” and if you have any of those statements in your repertoire I beg you, for the love of God, literally in this case, to stop saying them. We say them with the best of intentions, but in the midst of despair they are less than helpful, and they can also damage because what these things do is say that God is responsible. And if God is responsible then forgiveness has to play a role, and even if God is not responsible, which is what I am going to argue, then it still can be redemptive because of the thoughts that lead us in that direction.

Forigiving Yourself

 Here is my message from Sunday. The passage was the parable of the Prodigal Son

Some of you have heard this story before, but when I was in elementary school, which went through 8th grade where we lived, there was another boy in our class that we tormented mercilessly. His name was Paul, although we called him Pauline because he was, to put it bluntly, a little effeminate, and definitely not good at sports, and in a school system that prioritized athletics that was a big problem. Just as a quick reference to what that meant. I had two people from my graduating class of a little over 300 who played in the NFL. And so, we bullied him, and I went right along with it, and to be honest the teachers sort of tacitly approved of it as well as they never stopped us. He never cried at school about how he was treated, because I think he knew that would make it worse. But I assume that there were days that he went home after school and cried simply wondering why he was being tormented and what he could do to stop it. I don’t know why I went along with bullying him, because you might be surprised by remarkable athletic physique but I was not a lot higher on the social hierarchy than Paul was. But I was higher, and perhaps I did it to make sure that he would stay there and someone else would be the target rather than me.

Now I don’t know if Paul was gay, although I suspect that he was, and knowing the much higher rate at which members of the gay and lesbian community take their lives as teenagers than other teens I really wonder if he made it. He went to another high school, but I assume that the bullying continued, and one of my great fears is that he didn’t make it, and that I played a role in that. And that I should have known better, I shouldn’t have done it, because I was on the receiving end enough of it myself, but I didn’t. That is one of those things that I carry around with me that I have not yet been able to forgive myself for, because I should have been better and done more. And even 40 years later it is still there, and so today we move onto the idea of learning to forgive ourselves, which probably has been the most requested issue as have made our way through thinking and talking about how to forgive. So how do we forgive ourselves?

Reconciliation

Here is my message from Sunday. The passage was on reconciliation from 2 Corinthians.

I have a clergy colleague who was sexually abused by her father when she was a child. As often happens, to help cover the pain, she turned to drugs and alcohol as a teen and in her young adult years. She also cut off all relationship with her father and had no intention of ever seeing or talking to him again. Although she and I have not discussed this part, I also imagine that she wanted really bad things to happen to him, and who could blame her? After she got clean, and as part of the 12 step program she was in started making amends to others that she had hurt, seeking their forgiveness, she also came to the realization that she had hurt her parents too, maybe not as much as she had been hurt, but that she needed to reach out to them, and she did. What she also did was to set parameters around that and tell her father that what he did was wrong, and how it had hurt her, and the levels of mistrust and pain it had inflicted in her life. He in turn made a confession of guilt and was ready to do whatever was necessary to help them have a relationship again, and also knew that that might not be possible and that he was responsible for that. But she was willing to forgive and they have reconciled their relationship. That is sort of the best case scenario of the forgiveness process, and it is not one that is possible for everyone. She does not have any children and I often wonder if she did if that would have changed that outcome.

In talking about forgiveness, Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, said “we can never say, ‘I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.’ Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.” Now I don’t want to be one to disagree with Rev. King, but here I’m going to disagree with Dr. King. As I said in the first message on forgiveness one of the myths or untruths of forgiveness is that it has to lead to reconciliation, but I don’t think that’s the case because sometimes it’s just not safe to be reconciled, and sometimes it’s not safe for either party to be reconciled. And so how do we make that distinction? Some of that comes from what we hope to accomplish in a reconciliation process and that is something that can begin with us as part of our process of giving forgiveness, and it can also begin with a person seeking forgiveness, and that former is the way it has often been done.