Pop Quiz

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 12:32-48:

I want everyone to put everything away, all you need is a piece of paper and a pen or pencil, everything else should be put away under your chairs, because we’re going to have a pop quiz on what I have preached on so far.  Did that make you nervous? Maybe a little scared?  I’m sure it brought back some unpleasant memories regardless of how long it’s been since we’ve been in school, because I don’t know anyone who likes surprise tests.  And if that didn’t make you scared, try this. When Jesus fed the five thousand, Matthew took five times as many fish as Luke, and Peter had one fish less than Luke.  The total number of fish between them is 20.  How many fish does each disciple have?  (x equals Luke’s fish, 5x equals Matthew’s fish, and x-1 equals Peter’s fish, so X plus 5x plus X-1=20 so x equals 3)  That certainly left some of you with chills, because very few people like word problems, and I’m guessing none of you have every faced a word problem in worship before either.  But none of us really like these situations.

We don’t like being put on the spot, we don’t like being surprised, and we don’t like having to do things we don’t like, like word problems.  And yet this is a reality of life, and there is really only one way to prepare for situations like that, and that is to be prepared for them.  Rather than waiting until the last minute to study for tests, cramming and spending all nighters, if we are working at it every single day, then we don’t have to cram at the end because we are already prepared, and we don’t have to worry about the pop quiz that comes up, that gets thrown at us, we don’t have to worry about the last minute project that the boss puts on our desks, because we are preparing every single day, bit by bit, we are doing what we are called to do so that we are ready for these surprises.  And that’s not just good advice for school or for work; it’s also good advice for living a Christian life.

This passage is about being prepared for the second coming of Christ at a time that is yet unknown.  Normally when we think about the second coming, we also talk about the end of time, and typically this is referred to as the apocalypse, but that is actually incorrect.  Apocalypse means unveiling or revealing, thus the apocalypse of John is called Revelation, because it reveals something to us.  But there were lots of apocalypses that didn’t have anything to do with what Revelations is about.  One of the most popular apocalypses in the early church, and one that was included on many lists of books that might become part of the Bible, is known as the Apocalypse of Peter, although Peter didn’t write it, and it is a guided tour of heaven and hell, sort of like Dante’s Divine Comedy.  So although we think of end of time issues being apocalyptic, that is actually incorrect use of that term.  Instead, stories that deal with the end of time are eschatological, or dealing with eschatology, which means something like study of the last things.  It also deals with the parousia, which is the second coming.  And I know some of you are thinking, “there he goes again with the big words,” but this time it’s about more than justifying my education, because it’s important to understand these issues, especially in consideration of how some portions of the church view and talk about these subjects.  In addition, the church really likes big, technical words, and in fact the longest real word in the English language, antidisestablishmentarianism, is a church word.  Next pop quiz, does anyone know what antidisestablishmentarianism means?

Going Shopping

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Colossians 3:1-11:

This weekend is a big one for back to school shopping, as parents and students rush to stores in order to get ready for school to begin in just a few weeks.  Many of us parents are caught off guard because we didn’t realize that school started in August this year, and we didn’t plan on having to spend that money this month, and didn’t budget for it, and that is a topic we will come back to, and just as a reminder Christmas is scheduled for December 25 this year, so that one doesn’t take you by surprise either.  But the back to school shopping involves not just the buying of paper and pencils, but new clothes as well because there is no way our children would be caught dead wearing the clothes they wear every single day that first week of school, maybe the second week, but certainly not the first week.

There is something about clothes and what they say about us.  After all we say that the clothes make the man, or woman.  When I was in high school, which is getting to be much further away then I would like, you could often tell what social group people belonged to simply by the clothes they wore, and it’s really still true in society.  When I put on my collar people instantly know who and what I am, both for good and for ill.  Our clothes can say something about who we are, they can be our identity, and they can also mask who we are, we can put them on simply as a costume.  And the writer of Colossians says that for us as Christians, it’s about the clothes we wear.

24-7-365

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 10:38-42.  I was in the hospital recuperating from emergency surgery, so I am grateful to my wife who delivered this sermon for me.

A few years ago there was a story in the Boston Globe, and I’m sure it was covered here in the Journal as well, but it was about a study conducted by a group of researchers from England that found that we are walking on average 10% faster now than we did ten years ago.  I happened to see this particular copy of the Globe because my neighbor got up late that day (some of you will get that on the way home).  What the study also found was that those areas of the world that have the fastest growing economies also have the greatest increases in the speed at which people walk.   So people in cities in China are walking 20 percent faster than ten years ago, and people in Singapore are walking 30 percent faster.  In other words as other areas of the world try to catch up with the west economically they are also trying to catch up with us in the speed at which we lead our lives.

We live in a culture which operates on a 24-7-365 schedule.  It is a world where everything seems to happen as quickly as it possibly can and in which if you slow down for even a second it seems as if you are liable to lose everything.  We live in a time when you can have a conversation with someone half way around the world about a document that you just sent to them a few minutes.  In fact, that same document would take just a couple days to reach London via the post office, and yet we call that snail mail, because it just isn’t fast enough.  Have you ever noticed if someone hasn’t answered an email within ten minutes from the time which we sent it we begin to wonder what’s going on, why are they being so slow?

What Are The Other Half Doing?

There was a news story that came out today from the United Methodist News Service from a survey done of UMC that found that half of the clergy reported significant stress from their jobs.  And that made me wonder what the other half of the clergy are doing, or not doing, that they are not feeling stress?  Stress just seems to come with the territory, sometimes less and sometimes more, but can you really be in the ministry and not feel stress?  Doesn't seem likely to me.

I haven't posted in a long time as we have been moving and changing churches so have been preoccupied with other things, with a lot of stress, but now that we are in and getting settled I hope to begin posting regularly again, as well as posting all the sermons that didn't get put up in the interim.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 10:1-11, 16-20:

In 1906 Vilfredo Pareto, who was an Italian economist, noticed that 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people.  He then later observed that 80% of the peas in a garden were contained in only 20% of the pea pods.  This led him to postulate a theory now known as the Pareto Distribution.  This theory was later applied to the business world by business consultant Joseph Juran who stipulated the rule as we know it, which is commonly referred to as the 80-20 rule. While the 80% has no mathematical significance, it has been found that in systems of distribution that the imbalance point will be right around 80%.  80% of your profits will come from 20% of your customers, 80% of your complaints will come from 20% of your customers, although not the same 20% who are spending the most money,  80% of sales come from 20% of the products.  Computer programmers have found that 20% of the bugs cause 80% of the software crashes, and safety personnel have found that 20% of hazards cause 80% of the accidents.  The question for us is whether it’s really true, although it certainly feels that way, but even more importantly is that the way it has to be?

The passage we just heard from Luke is a pretty famous one with the claim that there is much work in the harvest, but few workers.  This is usually taken as sort of a truism, yet another confirmation of the 80/20 rule, that even in the church there is too much work to be done, and too few workers to do it all, or too few who do all the work.  And if the Bible says it then it must be true right? But is that what this passage actually says?  Is Jesus simply telling us that it is the lot of the church for 80% of the work to be done by 20% of the people, and 80% of the money to be given by 20% of the people, about 80% of the complaints to be done by 20% of the people?  In my experience on the complaint front it’s actually smaller, it’s probably 5% who do 95%, although please don’t try and prove me wrong by having more people begin doing more complaining.

The Prophet Margin

Here is my sermon from Sunday, my first at Mesa View United Methodist Church.  The text was 2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14:

Swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home, swing low, sweet chariot, coming for to carry me home.  That famous song comes from the passage that we just heard from 2 Kings, in which the prophet Elijah is taken up into heaven in a flaming chariot.  And with Elijah’s departure, Elisha becomes the leading prophetic voice in Israel.  This story representations a transitional point in the life of Israel and in God’s proclamation to God’s people, just as today also represents a transitional point in the life of this congregation with the ending of one pastorate last week and the beginning of another one today.  It has been said that every minister is guaranteed to make everyone in the congregation happy at least once, some when they come and some when they go.  Or as Casey Stengle, the Hall of Fame manager of the New York Yankees, my team by the way said, the secret to being a good leader is to keep those who don’t like you away from those who are undecided.  The simple truth though is that no minister is as ever as good as some people think they are, nor as they as bad as others think they are, and we can certainly see this represented in scripture as well.

I’m sure there were plenty of people who were quite thrilled to see Elijah go away, in particular Ahab and his wife Jezebel who were the subject of Elijah’s proclamations, and they looked forward to seeing what Elisha could do, and there were others who mourned Elijah going and did not look forward to Elisha’s leadership and never found him as good as what had come before.  I have no pretensions that I will make everyone here happy.  There are going to be times when we get along, and there are going to be times in which we are at loggerheads with each other, and that’s okay.  You don’t have to agree with everything I have to say, nor do I have to agree with everything you have to say, and to be honest if there is not a time at least once a year in which I don’t push you beyond your comfort zone, and leave you thinking about different things, which may lead you to being mad with me, then I am not doing my job.  There are plenty of churches which will tell you that you have to agree and subscribe to everything that the minister has to say, and if you don’t then you are welcome to go somewhere else.  That is not who the United Methodist Church is, nor is it who I am.

Sin With A Dash of Salt

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Genesis 18:20-26, 32-33; 19:1-13, 24-29:

There is a famous cartoon in which a minister is standing before the congregation and he’s saying “There are some things I need to say to you,” and outside the church window you can see a moving truck being pulled up.  I was thinking of that carton this week as I prepared this sermon, and found it widely appropriate for what I am going to say, and maybe what I have to say today will make sure that I get lots of people to help show up to pack up the moving truck so you can make sure that I am actually gone, and at the very least it will give the town something else to gossip about besides for the fact that you are getting a female preacher.  But there are some caveats that I have to make at the start here.  The first is that this is going to be a PG message, because in order to deal with this passage we are going to have to deal with some sticky subjects.  The second caveat is that Sodom and Gomorrah is not about homosexuality.  I know that will come as a shock to many of you because it’s so often interpreted in that manner, but the story doesn’t present it as such, nor do the other references to this story in the rest of the scripture deal with it in that sense, and this is the most referenced story from the Book of Genesis in the rest of scripture.  The final caveat is that even though this story is not about homosexuality, at the end I am going to talk about how I this issue, and I do so for the very simple reason that when I asked a year ago last fall for questions people had that they wanted addressed, one of those questions was “How should we as Christians think about homosexuality?”

A year ago I couldn’t have answered that question, not because I didn’t have the answer, but because we didn’t have the relationship that I believed was necessary in order to cover this very controversial subject.  I hope that now after two years you know and trust me, or like me enough, to be open to what I have to say, or perhaps you’ve learned to ignore what I have to say and so it won’t matter.  Hopefully you also know that I love you enough to be saying this out of love, and we also know that we don’t have to agree with each other in order to be in relation with each other.  What I have to say might make you furious with me, you might want to argue with me afterwards, and that’s okay, but it’s because of those feelings that I also approach today’s sermon with great fear and trepidation, and all I can do is to tell you where I am, how I got here, and how I read scripture to allow me to think what I do about my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters

The Handmaid's Tale

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Genesis 16:1-16; 17:9-14, 24-27; 21:9-21:

These stories from Genesis just don’t get any easier to deal with, in some ways maybe they in fact become harder to comprehend and to understand, and I certainly think that is the case with the passages we just encountered between Hagar and Sarah and Abraham.  In fact these particular stories are so troubling that in the original version of the lectionary, which is the recommended readings for each Sunday, the story of Sarah expelling Hagar and her son were not included.  When the readings were revised in the early 90s that story was added back in, but denominations could choose whether to use it or another reading.  The United Methodist Church is the only one that uses this passage, and no one has the passage in which Hagar is given by Sarah to Abraham in order to bear him a child, with hopes and prayers it would be a son.

Even in the reference materials I have been using in preparation for these sermons, both Christian and Jewish, completely ignored these stories because let’s be honest they are difficult to deal with.  Just by a quick show of hands, how many people have ever heard a sermon preached on either of these passages? That’s about what I would expect because we hear these passages and we wonder what we are supposed to take from them, how could these be lifted up as the word of God, how could someone we revere like Abraham have done such a thing and how could God have allowed or even have endorsed such a thing to take place?  These are all troubling questions, but I would suggest that we ignore this passage, and others like it, at our own loss because the message that it conveys is vital for our life as Christians in the church and in the greater world.

But before we dive into the heart of the matter, since it’s been a few weeks since we talked about Abraham, let’s do a quick review of what’s come before for those of us who don’t remember the story.  Abraham is called by God to leave his family, and he is promised that his descendents would be given a new land, and through him all the families of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 12:1-7).  But, as he and Sarah travel around, Sarah never has a child.  So, Sarah offers Abraham her Egyptian slave Hagar.  You may have heard her referred to as the handmaiden, but let’s be honest and refer to her as she was, a slave.  It's important to name Hagar as a slave because it means that Hagar has no control over her life.  She has no say in what is taking place with her.  She had no say in coming into Abraham’s household, as she was more than likely given to him as a present by the Pharaoh of Egypt.  She has no say in whether she wants to marry Abraham or not.  She has no say in whether she wants to have sex with Abraham or not, let alone to have his child.  Today we would call this a situation of rape.  That might seem harsh, but if you can think of another term please let me know, because that’s what it appears like to me.  This is a situation with extreme power dynamics, and Hagar is on the losing end.

All is Babel

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The scripture was Genesis 11:1-9:

Just like the other stories we have been covering in Genesis, maybe with the exception of last week’s passage about Sarah, this is another one of those iconic stories.  Perhaps not as well known as some of the others, the story of the Tower of Babel still has seeped into our consciousness.   We’re actually dealing with this story a little out of order, since what happens after this passage is that Abraham is called by God, but we covered that last week in looking at Sarah because of Mother’s Day and because this is one of the readings for Pentecost which we celebrate today. So I had to switch them up just a little bit.

The Tower of Babel serves as the last of the ancient histories in Genesis, before moving onto the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs.  In some ways this story  sets itself up as a grand from the first lines, in which we are told that “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” which I always wonder how that’s possible as I remember George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”  This set-up also differentiates this story from those that have come before, and even to a degree from those that will come after with one notable exception, in that this is not about one individual but instead about everyone.  There is no one person singled out, like Adam or Eve or Cain or Abraham or Sarah, this is a story of communal sin or societal sin

Like the other stories of the ancient histories this passage serves as an etiology, that is it is a story that seeks to explain why things are, and so it seeks to tell us why if we all came from the same place, people are found in different areas of the world and why they speak different languages.  But just like with the other stories, this is of course much more than just a story of origins.  If that’s all it was we wouldn’t be talking about it all these millennia later, so what is it that makes this story important and what can we learn from it, and the story of Pentecost that we can apply to our lives today?

The Laughter of Sarah

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Genesis 17:15-19; 18:1-2, 9-15; 20:1-7; 21:1-7

A couple had two little boys, ages 8 and 10, who were excessively mischievous. They were always getting into trouble and their parents knew that, if any mischief occurred in their town, their sons were probably involved.

The boys' mother heard that a clergyman in town had been successful in disciplining children, so she asked if he would speak with her boys. The clergyman agreed, but asked to see them individually. So the mother sent her 8-year-old first, in the morning, with the older boy to see the clergyman in the afternoon.

The clergyman, a huge man with a booming voice, sat the younger boy down and asked him sternly, "Where is God?”  They boy's mouth dropped open, but he made no response, sitting there with his mouth hanging open, wide-eyed. So the clergyman repeated the question in an even sterner tone, "Where is God!!?" Again the boy made no attempt to answer. So the clergyman raised his voice even more and shook his finger in the boy's face and bellowed, "WHERE IS GOD!?"

The boy screamed and bolted from the room, ran directly home and dove into his closet, slamming the door behind him. When his older brother found him in the closet, he asked, "What happened?"  The youngest brother gasped for breath and replied, "We are in BIG trouble this time dude. God is missing and they think WE did it!"

Last week my lovely wife said, “You like to begin your sermons with jokes,” and I said that I did because it was the only way I could guarantee that people would laugh during my message, and laughing is important.  Aristotle actually said that he believed that what separated humans from the rest of the animals was our ability to laugh.  He said that when a baby first laughed, that we went from simply being humans to becoming human beings.  That laughter made us different that it made us who we are.  In Navajo culture, the moment when a baby first laughs is so important that whoever is the first one to make the baby laugh is required to throw a party for the child in celebration, and they hold a special place in that child’s life for the rest of their lives.  And babies and children laugh a lot, especially in comparison to adults, and there’s something special about a child’s laugh.