Heart of Power

This was my message for Pentecost Sunday. The text was Acts 2:1-21:

I have to say that I think Peter’s response in the Pentecost story that the disciples are not drunk as some suppose, because it’s only 9 am is one of my favorite lines of scripture. The way he says it, means we could possibly see him saying, “now if it was three or four, maybe” and thank goodness no one had yet come up with the phrase “it’s five o’clock somewhere.” And the reason why people believe they might be drunk is that many pagan groups, especially mystery cults, used alcohol or other drugs in order to bring about ecstatic or altered states, and so the disciples could certainly be mistaken for that. But what I want to focus on today, at least to start, is the line that begins today’s passage: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” It’s not quite clear if this is just the disciples, including Matthias who was just added to the 12, along with some of the women with them, or the 120 who were followers at the time, although since they are in a house together, it’s probably the smaller number. But there they are all together, and of course this year at Pentecost we are not altogether. We’re not seeing people in wearing red, or singing together the songs of the Spirit. But, like the disciples we sit and wait.

At Easter I talked about living in a liminal time or a liminal space, the in between between what was and what has not yet been. That’s where the disciples found themselves after the crucifixion, in the in-between, and even after they had encountered the risen Christ they were still really in that liminal space because they didn’t know what was going to happen, where the movement was going, what they were going to become. Instead they were still receiving instructions from Jesus and he tells them to stay in Jerusalem, and tells them that soon they will receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which originally had been promised by John the Baptist, at that when the Spirit came upon them they would receive power, and it’s a lot more fun to do that when you can shout power back at me, and they would take that baptism of the Spirit and the power they had received, they would be Jesus’ “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And so they remain in Jerusalem and are there for the festival of weeks, which was a spring harvest festival that took place 50 days after Passover, and thus was also called Pentecost, pente being 50. But here’s where things changed for them, and ended their in-between time.

Heart of Worship

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Ephesians 1:15-23 and Luke 24:44-53:

There is a church in Albuquerque, and on their marque it says “church like it used to be,” and I have a guess what that mean by that, but I’m not quite positive that I understand what that means. Several years ago, I took a month off in order to study worship, and in that time I went to 12 different churches in the Albuquerque area. One of the 12 was the Greek Orthodox Church. As I was listening to the divine liturgy, which, except for being primarily in English now, has been the basically the same for the last 1500 years or so. Is that what they mean by church like it used to be? Probably not. But I do think much, or even all, that church like it used to be has to do with worship. Indeed, when someone says they are going to church, what they nearly always mean is “I am going to worship”, the immediate circumstances being an exception. I heard last week that 90% of churches have gone to some type of alternative worship, with the vast majority being online. I don’t know about the other 10%, perhaps some of them never stopped worshipping in person, or more likely they stopped worshipping at all. Can you be church and not have worship? I think the two are inherently linked together, and worship is at the heart of the matter for who we are as a people.

What we hear in the passage from Luke for today is that after the disciples watch Jesus ascend, which Luke doesn’t really describe, that they then worship him. This has been a common theme of the post resurrection Christ, and then they return to Jerusalem with great joy and end up in the temple blessing, or worshipping God. Luke’s gospel both begins and ends in the Temple, but there is a distinct difference between the beginning and the ending, of course because of Jesus. In the first temple, or under the old covenant, sacrifice is made at the temple with animals, but under the new covenant, under the covenant of Christ, in which we are called to make sacrifices of praise of adoration to God in acknowledgment for what God has done for us. Joy in celebration of love and forgiveness. Jesus has already given a preview of this change when he encounters a Samaritan woman in the gospel of John, also sometimes called the story of the woman at the well. She says to Jesus that her people have worshipped God on their mountain, but that he says that people should worship on the mountain in Jerusalem, meaning the Temple. But Jesus says, the time is coming when people will no longer worship on either mountain, but they will worship the Father in Spirit and truth, and that’s where we are, no longer in the temple, but worshipping in spirit in truth, making worship the heart of the matter. But what does that look like?

Heart of Righteousness

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 14:15-21  and 1 Peter 3:13-22:

In our series looking at the heart of the matter, so far we have looked at having a heart of peace, based on Jesus’ post resurrection greeting of Peace be with you, and the heart of love, with the example of the travelers on the road to Emmaus offering hospitality to the stranger, who turns out to be the risen Christ. And we looked at a heart of generosity, with the early church sharing things in common so that those who were in need would be provided for, and the heart of comfort, where God comforts us like a mother comforts her child, and we are to do the same, and today we turn to a heart of righteousness. 

Now righteousness is almost exclusively a church word. Besides for Crush in the movie Finding Nemo and 80’s surfer dudes who wanted you to know about righteous waves, it’s not really a word that gets used in normal conversation. We do talk about people being self-righteous, which is thinking themselves morally superior over others, but that doesn’t really match what righteousness is about. And it turns out that we don’t really even talk all that much about righteousness in church, even though it’s an incredibly important theme in scripture, both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. The word righteous, or righteousness, appears in the Bible 630 times, and to give you a comparison, love appears 872 times, so it’s there a lot. And those are the times in which the Greek and Hebrew words are translated as righteous, rather than something else. So, at the cross, after Jesus dies, the Roman Centurion, played by John Wayne in the Greatest Story Ever Told, says “surely this man was innocent.” The Greek word translated as innocent, could also be translated, and perhaps might be better translated, as righteous. That is someone who followed the law, or did the right thing, someone who lived a righteous life.

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.

Heart of Generosity

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Acts 2:42-47 and John 10:1-10

Normally when people hear this passage from Acts, or some later ones dealing with the same thing of the disciples and new converts sharing everything in common, they are sort of shocked. Some question whether that really happened, and if it did how it really worked. Some wonder why they stopped and why the church doesn’t call for the same thing today. And on the opposite of that, some wonder why they were promoting communism when clearly we need to value and support private property. And perhaps all of those questions are the right and the wrong questions to be asking. The fact is that we don’t know for sure that the early church practiced this in the form that Luke reports, or if he was embellishing a little. But, we do know that there were communities that lived communally. All indications are that the Qumran community, from which we get the Dead Sea scrolls, live communally.

So it’s still there, and yet this practice does not seem to have lasted for very long in the church, and maybe not outside of Jerusalem, as there is no indication in Paul’s letters of converts being called to this behavior. In fact, he chastises the Corinthian community for not sharing their food and drink when they gather together, which may have led to communion becoming separate from a communal meal. But, the fact that Luke, who is the writer of Acts, tells us several times that they were doing this, indicates that it was a fairly important practice, because in chapter 5 we are told the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who sell some property they own, but lie about how much they sell it for, keeping some of the money for themselves. And when they both lie about it, they both drop dead, pretty harsh penalty, but Peter says that in doing what they have done, they did not lie to them, but they lied to God. And so there you go.<

Heart of Love

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was 1 Peter 1:17-23 and Luke 24:13-35:

They say that hindsight is always what? 20/20. And of course we say that, or we get accused of that, because it’s about wrong decisions we might have made, or if we had known all the information at the time we might have done something different. It’s one of those phrases that helps us remember that we gain wisdom because of bad decisions and we make bad decisions because we lack wisdom. And yet, what the phrase also reminds us, although used less often this way, is the way we only see things once we have looked back at them, the things we missed noticing along the way. Or it’s the way we change the story and reevaluate everything based on what something led to it. And so we have to understand that that is what the early disciples and the early church did. The gospels are not autobiographies of Jesus, and they were not written at the time, but are stories look backing through the cross, and more importantly through Easter. They look back to the things that had taken place, things they had missed all along, and saw it in a new light, the things that they didn’t realize, the things they had overlooked and didn’t understand and but do now, because of Easter. It reveals how God had been involved, but they didn’t know. Their hindsight made all the difference in understanding and telling the story of Christ.

We see the same thing is true in the story from Luke. Cleopas, who seems to be associated with the disciples in some way, although we don’t know how, because he is never mentioned before, and never mentioned again, and another unnamed man are walking to Emmaus. We’re told that Emmaus is about 7 miles away from Jerusalem, although it actually says its 60 stadia away, but I’m sure none of you know how long a stadia is, and I had to look it up; it’s 600 roman feet, although I have no idea how long a roman foot is. But that’s what our best manuscripts say, but other manuscripts read 160 stadia, which is about 19.5 miles. Now, since they walk both there and back in one day, most scholars are in agreement that the 7 miles is probably the better number, but they are still guessing, because we don’t actually know where Emmaus is, as there was no town of that name in 1st century Palestine. So, we have two ordinary men, going to an ordinary town, of which we know nothing about. My interpretation is that this vagueness for details is so that it is much easier to put ourselves into the story. We could be the unnamed traveler, and the unknown town we are going to could be our own home.

Heart of Peace

Here is my sermon frm Sunday, The texts were  Acts 2:14a, 22-32 and John 20:19-31:

Today is a sort of unusual worship service as I said, Easter is a time of celebration, and when at least in my planning of worship, the season of Easter is full of the sense of celebration that Easter brings. What it also normally brings is me being on vacation the week after Easter, but we are not fully to that sense of celebration, and we’re not gathered together, and I am here, and the person who was supposed to be preaching is still in Albuquerque with his daughters and I even changed what I was planning on preaching on after Easter in order to better reflect our time and space. And so we start with a worship series, entitled the heart of the matter, and I’m thankful to Marcia McFee for creating the idea in a fairly short period of time, and it begins with what is the traditional reading for this Sunday, which is the passage from John and the story of doubting Thomas. And although this message is not about Thomas, let me say that Thomas has gotten an extremely bad rap over the millennia with this particular moniker being given to him. I mean we don’t say denying peter or even betraying Judas, but we always talk about doubting Thomas even though the story does not justify that reality.

First, Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb, and she eventually sees Jesus and it is in John’s account that she reaches out to touch him, and Jesus doesn’t allow her to I think in order to keep social distancing. But then she says to the disciples “I have seen the Lord.” But do they believe her, it certainly doesn’t appear to be the case, because we then told that that night, where our scripture started this morning, the disciples are locked up in a house full of fear. If they had believed in Mary’s testimony it doesn’t seem that would have been the case, as we’ll see shortly. And the story says they were fearful of the Jews, and in that we have to hear fearful of some leaders, because what were all the disciples? They were Jews, and so we need to be reminded how quickly these things can lead to anti-Semitism that was not intended by the writer. But back to the story, Jesus then appears to the disciples and gives his greeting, “Peace be with you.” And then I think there should be an ellipsis because it appears as if something is missing, as the passage says “After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.” But why would Jesus do this, unless the disciples had asked for it in order to prove that he was really Jesus, not just some random guy walking through a locked door. And I think that because it says after Jesus had done this, “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” That is they hadn’t believed the testimony of Mary, and they didn’t believe it was the Lord until they had seen the wounds.

Earthquakes and Resurrections

Here is my message for Easter Sunday. The text was Matthew 28:1-10:

Have you ever had a resurrection take place in your life?  Maybe it was that houseplant that you thought you had killed, but somehow it came back stronger and greener, or maybe it was an appliance you thought for sure was a goner, but somehow it was able to be fixed and kept running.  Maybe it was a relationship or a job that you thought were over, but was somehow renewed and given new life and vitality.  Or maybe, like author and commentator David Sedaris, you’ve seen a more dramatic resurrection in your life.  He recounts the time when the family dog Duchess gave birth to a litter of puppies.  After all the puppies were born, one of them appeared to have died but Sedaris’ mother took the puppy arranged it in a casserole dish and popped it into the oven.  When Sedaris and his sisters reacted with horror, their mother responded “Oh, keep your shirts on.  I’m not baking anyone, this is just to keep him warm. The heat revived the sick puppy,” Sedaris said, “and left us believing that our mother was capable of resurrecting the dead.”

What stories of resurrection remind us is that resurrection is only needed; indeed resurrection is only possible when things appear to be at an end.  You cannot resurrect something that is going well. Only relationships on the rocks can be resurrected.  Only careers and jobs that are lapsing can be resurrected.  Only failing health can be resurrected.  Only when the baseball season appears to be over before it has started can it be resurrected.  Only lives that have ended can be resurrected.  I say all this because while it might be obvious that death and resurrection go together, I think that sometimes we forget it, and so especially in this time of quarantines and shelter at home orders we need to remember, in this time in which we so desperately want and hunger for a return to normal, we have to remember that resurrection comes out of the darkness and despair of Good Friday, it only comes from the death and the tomb, and it means so much because of those things. Indeed this Holy Week and this Easter have a different meaning for most people, I think because of what we are experiencing as a town, a state, a nation and a world. And we have much in common in our situation with the women and the disciples this day.

Traveling the Prayer Paths: At the Cross

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 23:26-34:

Today we conclude our path in looking at the prayer’s that Jesus prayed, and how he prayed and what he prayed, by looking at Jesus’ prayer from the cross of offering forgiveness. Now it could probably argued that Jesus actually offers three prayers from the cross. One is “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” and we could look at that as a prayer of learning to turn our lives over to God, except in this case it is literally his life that is being turned over. That’s an important prayer, and perhaps one we could place with the prayers of going to a quiet place to pray, but one which we are not going to discuss, at least not today. The second is “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” a quote from psalm 22, and one of my favorite scripture passages, which is a cry of despair, which for simple classification of prayers I am going to put with Jesus’ prayer asking God to take the cup from him, which we discussed last week. And so, although it’s a really important passage, we are not going to discuss it, although I was supposed to give a short message on this passage for the community Good Friday service, but which probably won’t happen this year. I would encourage you to go read the 22nd Psalm which moves from a cry of despair to one of God’s triumph, which I think is attached to Jesus’ cry. But again, another message for another day. And so today, for prayers, we are going to be looking at the prayer of forgiveness, “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

But before we do that, a quick recap of the other things we learn from Jesus’ prayers. The first is that just as Jesus often went and spent time by himself in prayer, that we are to do the same thing, whether it’s just a few moments, or a few hours, or even a few days, or maybe even 40 days, but we need that time to talk with God, but even more importantly to listen to God. Second was to be in prayer throughout the day in everything that we do, most especially to be in prayer for others, a great thing always, but especially now, and also to pray for God’s help with those things that seem impossible, that we need God’s help to accomplish. Third is to make sure to give prayers of thanksgiving, not just in good times, but also in troubling times, most especially in troubling times so that we can be reminded of the blessings we receive and the fact that God is always with us. Then the prayer for last week was Jesus lamentation, or cry of asking the cup to be taken from him, which had us talking about embodied prayer, that is our bodies being engaged with the words that we are saying, about, again, going to a quiet place, about listening to God when we pray, and also about asking God for things, like help in times of despair. But also knowing that merely because what we ask for doesn’t happen, doesn’t mean it is the will of God, or that God isn’t there for us or doesn’t care, because every time we go to God in prayer we receive the Holy Spirit and God’s assurance that we are not alone. And so that then leads us into the last prayer.

Traveling the Prayer Paths: In the Garden

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Mark 14:32-42:

It’s been said that the most fervent prayers are those that are prayed at the bedside, especially at the beside of those who are dying. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate, because often the bedside prayers for those who are dying, at least in my ministry, are about being okay to let go, and praying for a peaceful transition, and praying into the unknown. They are often more praying for God’s peace, not necessarily for a changed situation. I certainly know of some that do, but more fervent are those with an accident or sudden illness or terrible diagnosis. Prayers when things are totally unknown, or when the outcome might be known, but dreaded. Or simply about our greatest fears. As I said before, at another church one woman whose son was deployed in the bomb squad in Afghanistan told me she now knew what Paul meant when he said to pray without ceasing. Those are prayers of fervency. An impassioned prayer to God, for answers or for a change of potential outcome, a prayer of deep intensity, of profound emotion, or zealousness. These are prayers that are markedly different than the normal prayers we offer, and so as we look at traveling the prayer path of Jesus, of learning to pray like Jesus, we have a fervent prayer being offered in the Garden of Gethsemane.

But, before we look at that prayer, we should notice that Jesus goes off by himself to offer this prayer. First he leaves most of the disciples behind, taking only Peter, James and John and then leaves even them behind and pray by himself. And so this is a reminder that the first way we follow Jesus’ prayer paths is to go off in quiet to be in prayer by ourselves. In Luke’s version of this story, he says that Jesus went out to the Mount of Olives, “as was his custom.” And so to be engaged in reconnecting with God through prayer, we need to take time to be by ourselves in prayer. One of the other instructions that Jesus gives to the disciples in the passage is that they are to pray, although it doesn’t appear that they do. And, if you remember, they had the same problem in the story of the healing of the boy with epilepsy, that they tried to heal him, but weren’t able to, but Jesus des, and when they ask what the difference was, Jesus says that it could only be done through prayer. And so our second step was to engage in prayer throughout our day, especially in praying for others, and then in praying for God’s help in accomplishing the things that we think are impossible. And we’ll come back to that story in a little bit, so keep it in mind. And then last week we looked at what comes immediately before Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, which is the last supper, and the fact that even in the midst of what was going on, of Jesus’ proclamation that Judas would betray him and Peter would deny him, that he stops and gives thanks to God. And so it was a reminder to us to always be practicing prayers of thanksgiving, even in the worst circumstances in our lives, and to give thanks not for the situation, but in the situation, but also recognizing how difficult that can be. But in giving thanks, it reminds us that we are never alone, never abandoned, never lost, for God is always with us and God’s love and blessings are forever with us.