The Sabbath

Here is my message for Sunday. The text was Mark 2:23-3:6Mark 2:23-3:6:

On Monday as we celebrated, or observed is probably a better word, Memorial Day, I read an article by someone who was arguing that we should stop celebrating Memorial Day. His reasoning was that because we don’t really do what the holiday was set aside for, which was to go to cemeteries to honor those who had died in service to their various countries, and so because we are much more separated from those who paid the ultimate sacrifice, we should therefore stop celebrating Memorial Day. Now I will state for fairness that the author argued it should instead be combined with Veteran’s Day, since most people don’t know the difference anyways, and that we should reconsider and rethink all holidays, which could include removing others and possibly adding some new ones. But what struck me, especially in thinking of this message for today, was that he believed that because we didn’t celebrate the right way then we shouldn’t celebrate it at all. That if we just used it for barbequing and watching baseball then we’re doing it wrong and therefore shouldn’t get the day off at all.

And so maybe it’s a stretch to try and connect it to laws that get worked up about the sabbath, but it seemed very similar to me about all the rules that get made up around celebrating, or recognizing, the sabbath. And let’s be honest that all the sabbath rules we tend to think about at the time of Jesus, and how we think they’re a little crazy, and yet we can still do the same thing these days. Most of us remember when there were blue laws to keep us from doing things on Sunday. Even today you may have seen in the news that a stretch of beach in Ocean Grove, New Jersey has just been ordered to be open to public usage on Sunday mornings, which it hasn’t since the mid-19th century. And in one of the irony things, you could use the beach after noon, it was just forbidden in the morning as we’re not going to go overboard on sabbath laws because that would be crazy, right? You can have fun in the afternoon, but don’t you dare try and do it in the morning when you should be in church, although we’ll also conveniently ignore the fact that Sunday is not the sabbath. That’s still Saturday, as we worship on the first day of the week, so even at that we are violating the rules of the sabbath, and we should take that in and of itself as the ability to move beyond the rules in order to make a rest that works for us.

Dance with Life

Here is my message for Sunday. The text was Ezekiel 37:1-14 and Acts 2:1-21:

If you remember the first Sunday after Easter we began with the story that is recommended for that Sunday every year, which is the story of Doubting Thomas, although as I said then it really should be called the story of the doubting disciples, because they all doubt. But Jesus finds them on the evening of the first Easter holed up in a room, which is locked because they are in fear. And it appears that there are just 10 people there, because Thomas is absent and Judas is dead. There are women somewhere, although we don’t know where, or exactly how many since the accounts differ. But that is the remnant of the followers, or, to put it another way, that is the beginning of what we become first known as the group who are followers of the way, and only later will be called Christians. And while we’ve sort of jumped around in stories over the past six weeks, in Acts we are told that after Jesus’ ascension which traditionally is celebrated 40 days after Easter, we are told that Peter gathers a group together that is about 120 people. Then ten days later, which is the Jewish holiday of Pentecost, which celebrates the giving of the Torah to Moses on Mount Sinai, as well as the summer grain harvest and takes place 50 days after Passover, the disciples are still gathered together when the Holy Spirit comes upon them and they begin speaking in various languages to those in Jerusalem for the celebration. And so, we as Christians celebrate this day, the fifty days of Easter, which starts on day one with Easter, and then runs for seven weeks, or a week of weeks, concluding with the celebration of today which represents not just the gift of the Holy Spirit but also is seen to be the birth of the church, or at the very least it is the recognition that the good news is going to continue to spread and grow at a rapid rate. So, they go from a handful, to around 120 to 3000 converts on Pentecost, all in 50 days. And so, a movement that everyone thought was obliterated on the day of Christ’s crucifixion, is suddenly found to have new life, new breath, new opportunities and is being spread, as Jesus had said, in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and even to the ends of the earth.

And with that we are completing our series dancing with God, by looking at, or thinking about, what it means to dance with life, or to dance with the breath with which God has breathed into us. But before we dig in a little deeper, just a quick aside. I was at an estate sale this week and looking through the albums and they not only had an album from the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, to help you learn to dance at home, but, it also came with the footprints to put on the floor to help you learn the steps, and they were still in mint condition still attached to the full sheet. Probably still be there if you want to stop by after worship. But, the main story of today is about finding hope out of despair, life out of death, new possibilities out of endings and new challenges out of conclusions, and both the story of Pentecost found and Acts, and in Ezekiel’s vision, usually referred to as the valley of the dry bones give us this witness and the example of how we participate and dance with God in this journey, that we are co-creators in the dance of faith.

Dancing in Relationship

This is my message from Sunday. The text was John 17:6-13:

I want you to close your eyes and be still for a moment…. Now I want you to think about a time, or times, in which you were truly seen. Not in someone actually seeing you in order to walk around you, or avoid you, but when someone saw into the depths of your soul, for lack of a better term. Perhaps they saw something in you that you didn’t see in yourself, some gift or talent. Or they pushed you beyond what you ever thought possible yourself to help you achieve something. Or they were they for you when it mattered the most, doing something for you that few other people could or would do. Have you thought about that moment? Now, how did it make you feel? Not intellectually but emotionally. I’m guessing that some of those feelings might be about belonging, or valued or appreciated, perhaps honored or respected, and perhaps you felt happy or flattered or even cherished and treasured. And all of those things have some connection with love, not as the feeling per se, but as the sense of someone wanting the best for you. And all of those are connected to the sense of relationship, which is what we are tackling today. And since today is Mother’s Day, I would also be willing to bet that for a significant number of us, the people who have truly seen us have tended to be women, perhaps our mothers, but perhaps not, but maybe an aunt, grandmother, neighbor, teacher or someone at church, someone whose eyes bore into us in a special way and with whom we therefore had a deeper relationship than normal.

Now every relationship does not mean that we are seen in that sense, but when we are seen it makes a difference and connects us in a different way, and it changes us and it can even change the world. (SLIDE 2)  In his national book award winning novel, The Invisible Man, widely considered one of the best and most important novels of the last Century, Ralph Ellison begins his tale of a black man in American society by saying “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality…. you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds…. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you.” And that sense of invisibility, and striking out, also plays a significant role of what is happening in the world as we think about relationship.

Dancing in Praise

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Psalm 98:

During the 2019 special called general conference, which is the world-wide gathering of the United Methodist Church, where the official decisions for the church are made, when they passed the traditionalist plan by a very narrow margin, which is a terrible way to make decisions, and they made the church’s position on homosexuality even tighter, I started crying. The vote happened just before I was going to see my counselor for my regular appointment and I started crying in his office over it because I didn’t know what was going to happen, and the push at that time was that centrists and progressives would be pushed out of the denomination. How things have changed in the past five years. This past week in the final days of General Conference, which is actually the 2020 postponed conference, not only are many of the conservative churches gone but they also overwhelmingly removed what has been known as the restrictive language around homosexuality and the ban on clergy being ordained if they were members of the LGBTQ community. And I cried again for a very different reason, and I praised God that we had finally overcome. 

And I say that not only as clergy, who have seen what this has done to the church and to clergy, and I can guarantee there are lots of gay clergy, and I know them, and now they can be who they are. And I also celebrate as the father of a gay daughter, although that was not what changed my opinion on this. And I celebrate for the future of the church and what this represents for our future. And I also recognize that this does not make everyone happy, and there are many reasons for that. But I can say with some pride that when my last church became the first openly welcoming and affirming congregation in this conference around this issue that those who voted against that decision were still members when I was appointed here because as you’ve heard me say that we are better when we are at the table together. And the truth is that for this congregation nothing different will happen; we get to keep on being who we are, and loving as we do, and living into our value that we are inclusive and we love Christ. And so today I come before you in praise for the Lord has done marvelous things, as we just heard in the 98th Psalm, and that is appropriate as we think about what it means to dance with God in praise.

Dancing with Guidance

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Acts 8:26-40:

Just by a show of hands, who has ever taken dance lessons, and not or like ballet, but like dancing with a partner? And did anyone try to take lessons by themselves, that is not with an instructor there with you, but maybe with like the footprints you put on the floor to try and do it yourself? I’m guessing that the second way probably wasn’t very effective. Linda and I took dance lessons in preparation for our wedding and our wedding dance, which was to Frank Sinatra’s It Had to Be you, and included a dip at the end. And we did it at an Arthur Miller Dance Studio, which has you in private lessons and then in group lessons because it’s one thing to dance by yourself, but it’s entirely different to do it with lots of other people dancing too, that’s a whole other level of dancing of trying to pay attention and watch others and move as needed in order to keep going. And I can tell you that that requires instruction, as well as a partner to help you to learn how to do it, and to do it well. And what it also takes is learning how to let go to be in sync and make changes as they come, and that’s for everyone. And so, when you are dancing, it is not about submission, for either party, the one leading or the one following, but about learning to partner together in the movements, to be in tune with each other, to know what the other is doing, and as you get better, to begin to anticipate what might happen to be ready for it, to be prepared for it in order to respond properly. 

I began this series on dancing with God by telling a story about a colleague who was learning to dance being called out by her instructor for not being able to follow guidance, and wanting to be in control, and being told he thought she wouldn’t have any problems with this since she was clergy and was used to following God’s lead. And that’s why I think this metaphor of dancing with God is a good one because it’s not just about God saying do this, and us doing it, but about working together, moving together with God, in order to do the work, to do the dance that we are called to do. And so that leads us to today’s dance, which is dancing with guidance, although I might have also called it dancing with the Spirit, which certainly sounds better, but might not be direct enough. I got that idea of guidance from that passage that we just heard from Acts involving Philip, an Ethiopian eunuch and the Spirit.

Dancing with Joy

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Luke 24:36b-48:

When my 9-year-old nephew died ten years ago from a blood clotting disorder, his parents made the decision to donate his organs, which also included taking skin grafts to be used for burn victims. As it turned out, another member of our church had a close family friend living on the Navajo Nation whose grandson received critical burns on the same weekend and who was flown to UNM hospital where he ended up receiving skin grafts in treatment. Now we don’t think that he received any grafts from Wyatt, but for her it brought some potential joy, and I don’t use that word advisedly, out of a terrible situation for both families. That in the midst of tragedy and trauma, perhaps a little good could come out of. That there could be a little glimmer of light, hope and yes, even joy, in the midst of darkness. And that’s the thing about joy, that perhaps it might not be what we tend to think of it at all, and that is what we deal with today as we think about learning to dance with God in joy.

Now last week, after we talked about dancing in peace, and I said that we were doing joy today, someone asked if we were going to do all of the themes for Advent, which are hope, peace, joy and love. I responded that we weren’t because we weren’t going to do hope, although we might have been able to do so, but that it didn’t really come up in the lectionary readings for the Sunday’s after Easter, which is what I was using to find the themes. And I hadn’t really even thought about them being related to the themes of Advent, but there are, but I hadn’t really thought about them also being fruit of the Spirit, which they also are. So, I can’t say if it’s just coincidence, or the movement of the Spirit, or simply the thoughts swirling in my head, that led me to them. But they are connected, and they also connect with hope, joy especially, but joy itself stands out from those advent themes in particular. If you remember the candles that we light at Advent, there are four of them. Three are purple and one is pink. It is the pink candle that represents joy. And that stands out against the purple candles, a color which represents royalty, and also repentance. It gets those traditions from the much older traditions of the season of Lent, which ends with the celebration of Easter. Lent too is a time of preparation and repentance, although Advent has lost many of those characteristics, but the fourth Sunday in Lent is known as Laetare Sunday, which comes from the traditional Latin introduction to the mass from Isaiah which says Rejoice, O Jerusalem! The word rejoice is an imperative, a command, so comes with an exclamation point. And so, the temperament of Lent, changes in that service, and the color changes from purple to pink, or more technically, rose, which is why it is also sometimes called rose Sunday.

Dancing with Peace

 Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 20:19-31. 

Some of you I think have heard this story before, but my best friend from seminary, in her first appointment she was contacted to ask if she would like to participate in a sort of dancing with the stars as a fundraiser for several non-profits in the town. They were asking community leaders to participate who would be partners to professional dancers. She said yes, thinking she’d just show up do her thing to be supportive and be known in town, and then move on. So, she was a little surprised a few weeks later when she was contacted by a dance studio asking when she wanted to start her lessons in preparation. Obviously, this was going to be more serious than she thought, and so she made her appointment and went for her first dance lesson. Now what you have to know about Katherine was that before the ministry she was a counselor working with people who were having mental health crisis, and so she was used to be in charge, or taking charge of situations, because her life literally depended upon it at times. And so, she started up and let’s just say that the lesson wasn’t going great, and so they stopped and her instructed said, “You have to let go and let me lead if this is going to be effective and helpful,” and so Katherine responded that he obviously didn’t know who she was, that she is used to being in charge.” To which he responded, “You’re a minister. I thought this would be easy for you because I thought you would be used to turning your life and direction over to someone else to guide.” As you might guess, that left her a little aback, and changed not just her approach to dancing, but also as a refocusing of ministry.

And so that story is sort of around which this series, Dancing with God, will be based, although also taken from an idea by Marcia McFee of dancing after darkness, because while we often talk about having to follow God, or to put it in scriptural terms, to be a servant or slave to God, in fact a better way of understanding our journey with God is as a dance. Of turning our lives over to God as the lead, which requires us to follow that, to learn new things, occasionally to improvise in our steps, and when we get lost or confused to remember that sometimes we have to stop to return to the old familiar steps. And the dance we look at today is the dance of peace.

Easter: Life and Death; Death and Life

This was my Easter message. The text was Mark 16:1-8:

It was five years ago now that Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris caught fire and nearly burned to the ground on the Monday of Holy Week. You may have seen in the news recently that they have just reinstalled the spiral that collapsed and also finished framing out the roof, using 800-year-old construction techniques, with the plan of reopening the cathedral later this year. But, after it burned there were many commentators who said that there couldn’t have been a worse time for the cathedral to burn since they had just celebrated Palm Sunday the day before and had been planning to celebrate Easter the following week, but now wouldn’t be able to. But, I thought that while there is never a good time for one of the architectural wonders, and one of the most famous buildings in the world, to catch on fire and nearly be entirely destroyed. But, if it is going to happen, Holy Week might actually be the best time for it to happen, because it’s sort of a reminder, a symbol, of this time. It’s after the celebration of Palm Sunday which then leads into the darkness of the week, of betrayal and denial and abandonment, and then the cross and the tomb; the reality of death and suffering and pain and grief and all the other things that get brought up this week, which then leads to the story of the resurrection.

But you can’t get to that part, you can’t get to the Easter story without the dark parts. We don’t have Easter because everything is hunky dory, we have Easter, we need Easter, because of the reality of death and pain and suffering and sorrow, we need Easter because of the tomb. You can’t just skip from Palm Sunday to Easter, from celebration to celebration, and have that make any sense. You have to have the other parts in between because you can’t have resurrection unless there I something to be resurrected, something that had withered, or something that has died, to be resurrected. And so, when the parishioners gathered outside Notre Dame, with the ashes still smoldering and the smell of burned wood still in the air, that call to resurrection and desire and hope for resurrection it was the perfect time to celebrate Easter, and I’m guessing that message, that reality, rang even more true, more meaningfully in that moment then maybe it ever had before. The same as this congregation hosting the memorial service yesterday for a longtime member of this congregation, also had a meaning and significance that was more alive because of today.

Maundy Thursday: Hope Springs Eternal

 This was my message for Maundy Thursday:

Today, in addition to being Maundy Thursday, is also opening day for Major League Baseball. Normally I take the day off to watch baseball, which I could only do partially today. And I normally go to opening day for the Albuquerque Isotopes, but that’s tomorrow, and so that’s not happening either. I know your hearts cry out for me. I’ve always thought that opening day should be a national holiday, for many reasons besides just my fandom. And one of those reasons is that it represents the sort of official beginning of spring, they even call the preparation for opening day, spring training. Training for spring, or maybe waiting for spring. Now it doesn’t mean that spring will necessarily be here for those first games. Just as the last few weeks have shown us with continual snow storms, we may be done with winter, but it is not done with us. And there have been plenty of opening day games played in the snow. I even remember one Easter when I was in college getting up to go to church and looking out the window to see blizzard like conditions, and so I went back to sleep, but that was in Minnesota, so not totally unexpected. 

And yet we know that spring is right around the corner; the promise is there. And so, it is with opening day, it is the day that hope springs eternal because on this day every team is currently tied for first place. Every team has a winning record, or at least they don’t have a losing record. Every team, and every fan base, can say “this is our year,” even if they know it’s not true. For many, they know that their seasons will end more in ignominy than in victory, and perhaps its too many fanbases for which that is true, although that’s a different message for a different space. But regardless, hope spring eternal on this day; and the promise of spring springs eternal as well. New life, new possibilities, new realities, not being cooped up in the house, being able to open the windows, being able to take those long hikes without freezing, doing all those things that make where we live so spectacular, and I can say all of that as someone whose favorite season is winter. But even with that, the change to spring is still a lovely and wonderful surprise and time. And yet, perhaps none of those ideas really match the reality of today.

Baptism: Will You Accept the Grace God Gives You....

Here is my message from yesterday. The text was Ephesians 4:1-6 and John 15:1-17:

As part of programming night, which is our Sunday evening classes and meal, we have temporarily combined our adult and youth classes as part of our confirmation class in teaching everyone, or reminding everyone, about the basics of the faith. Last week I was teaching on the sacraments, which in the Protestant tradition are two, baptism and communion, because they are the two in which Jesus not only participated but also commanded the church to participate in. But only one of those is repeatable, which is communion. And so, someone wisely asked why we don’t baptize people more than once, or why we don’t practice rebaptism, especially since it seems like many churches do. And that’s a great question, and the reason is faithfulness. Baptism is a covenantal agreement, as we say in the communion liturgy that Jesus created a new covenant by water and the spirit. Another word for covenant is agreement, or contract. A contract is something entered into be two parties, and it calls for things for both parties to uphold, and to do for each other. And it can also be broken by either party, either through agreement or because one party violates it. 

But, when it comes to the baptismal covenant one of those parties is God, and the other party is us. And so, the question is, does God violate God’s side of the agreement. No, because God is forever faithful; God is ever loving. And so, while we can go astray, we can wander away, we can violate the covenant. While we can be like the prodigal son, God is always faithful, and God is always waiting for us to return, to come back home, to come back to abide in God’s love as God’s love always abides in us. And so, we don’t rebaptize because God is always there, but we can reaffirm our baptismal vows, to make whole the relationship, to heal what has been broken, by coming back from our part, but because one side has always been faithful. And so that leads us then into the final question we ask in preparation for baptism and that is “According to the grace given to you, will you remain faithful members of Christ's holy Church and serve as Christ's representatives in the world?”