Heart of Comfort

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10 and John 14:1-14.

Mother’s Day is always a difficult service to plan and prepare for, because there are so many pieces that have to be remembered and taken into account. Of course we celebrate our mothers, but there are those whose mothers are gone, and they mourn, and there are those who never had a mother, or lost their mother early, or those whose mothers were unable to be a mother or to love as we expect mothers to. And then there are those who desperately wanted to be mothers, but who were unable to, and others who feel judged and thought of as less than a woman because they didn’t have children, and there are the mothers who have known the pain of a child dying, or that have lost a child in other ways. Although worship attendance tends to be higher on Mother’s Day, because mom’s say “I want you to come to church with me today”, and the family does, I also know many women who choose not to come to church because it’s just easier not to try and be in church an deal with some or all of the emotions and feelings that come with just some of the situations I just named. And so wherever you are today, as we’ve been saying, whether you are experiencing joy and celebration on this day, or sadness and pain, or something in between, it’s okay, and it fits into our next issue of getting to the heart of the matter, and that is the heart of comfort.

Each Sunday, we’ve begun by holding our worry stones, or perhaps our pocket crosses, and rubbing them as a reminder of the steadfastness of God, and that God is with us always. We hear that is the Psalm that was read, in the Psalmist’s plea for deliverance from whatever it is that they are facing, that they are seeking refuge in God. Twice the Psalmist talks about God being their rock and fortress, first in asking for God to be that, and then in recognizing that God is their rock and their fortress. That God’s faithful and steadfast love will redeem them and protect them. In that imagery, in that call, and in that assurance and knowledge of God’s steadfast love, the Psalmist finds comfort. That God is rocksolid in God’s promises and in not going anywhere, and all the other things that the idea of God as rock means for us. And yet when we say that God is our rock, or even God is our fortress, we of course don’t literally mean that God is a rock. We understand that this is a metaphor that’s being used to give some attributed about what God is like. It’s to say that God is like this, but also to know that God is not like this. And there is certainly some comfort in understanding God to be our rock, solid, true, holding us and protecting us. But as we think of God’s comfort there are other metaphors that also need to come into play, especially as we celebrate our mothers and other significant women in our lives.

Spiritual Milk

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was 1 Peter 2:2-10:

According to futurists, the first person to ever live to be 1000 has already been born. That seems really hard to believe, but we really have no idea of what medicine will be able to do in 50 years, or how the things that are likely to kill us now will be fixable in the not too distant future, and so I have to at least give those who postulate these things some benefit of the doubt. Or at least admit that while they might not be born yet, they will be born in the near future. Just to give you a perspective, if you had an ancestor born a thousand years ago, and they were still alive, you would be roughly the 50^th generation, and when they were born, the emperor Charlemagne’s death would be as recent as Thomas Jefferson’s death is for us. They would have been alive when the Chinese perfected gun powder, Macbeth was becoming king of Scotland, and in 1066 they would be alive to hear about, or participate in, the Battle of Hastings, one of the most  important events in Western history. They would have celebrated their 500^th birthday at the time of the Protestant Reformation, and been 600 when Shakespeare actually wrote about Macbeth. That type of life span will radically change how we live, perhaps how we love, and definitely how we relate as family, or perhaps even how we have families.

Rabbi Harold Kushner has written about what might happen if we became immortal, and questioned whether people might stop having children, if for no other reason than a form of population control. But, he says, that means that not only would humanity stop having the joy of having children around, but that they would also stop having the joy of being a parent, and if that happened we would lose the concept of what it meant not only to have the love of a parent, but also of what it meant to dedicate your life, and be prepared to give your life for another person. We would also lose the understanding of the needs of infants, and of milk as life giving force, as we hear in the passage from 1 Peter.