Fully Human

August 14, 2011

A sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho

Aug 14, 2011

Matt 15:1-28

A few chapters ago in Matthew’s gospel, if you’ll recall, Jesus had found out that his cousin John the Baptist had been murdered. And so he tried to get away to a quiet place. But the crowd followed him. And they needed to be fed. So he fed them, abundantly, with baskets and baskets left over. And he still needed his quiet time, so he went off by himself and his disciples took a boat to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. There was a storm, Jesus walked across the water to them, and last week you heard about Peter walking on water. The storm calms, they make it to the other side of the lake, and they find crowds there again, this time with religious leaders waiting to test Jesus.
And this is where our text begins.

It has been three weeks, in preaching time at least, and Jesus and the disciples have still not had a day off. He’s done some pretty important things with his time. Healed people. Fed people. Taught people. Walked on water.

You know, the usual.

And the religious leaders pick the wrong Jesus to mess with. They might have done better had they let him get a night’s sleep before they bothered him with their questions.

“Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.”

Really? That’s the question they ask Jesus?

And Jesus is done. D.U.N.

“Why do YOU break commandments just to uphold your tradition?? HYPOCRITES! You make VOID the WORD of God!”

And he storms off.

I love this next part.
One of the disciples comes up to Jesus and says, “umm…do you know that you just offended the Pharisees?”

It isn’t easy being a disciple.

And Jesus says, “it isn’t how you eat, or even what you eat, that defiles you. It is what comes out of your mouth. How you speak to each other. How you treat each other. If you honor God only with your words, but not in the actions that come out with those words—then you’ve defiled yourself. If your heart is full of hatred and mean spiritedness, it doesn’t matter how many times you wash your hands before you eat, you will still be hateful and mean spirited“.
Remember this. Because it is connected to what happens next.

Because no sooner has Jesus said that it is what comes OUT of your mouth that gets you in trouble, he meets a woman. At this point, they have moved to Tyre and Sidon, or as we would say today, Lebanon. And he meets a Canaanite woman who asks him for mercy for her daughter.

First he ignores her altogether.

She’s running alongside them, yelling, “have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon!”

And he pretends he doesn’t hear her.

But the disciples do. “Send her away! She’s yelling at us.”

Did I mention it isn’t easy being a disciple?

And then Jesus says to her, “Sorry. I didn’t come here to save you.”

Remember the guy who just said, who just said, “it is what comes out of your mouth that defiles you”??
Yeah, that same guy just told her she wasn’t part of the chosen people.

She knew this, of course. She’s a Canaanite woman, so she would have been under no illusions about this.
But still. He just said that.

Some people want to make this story nicer than it is. They want to say that Jesus is testing her with his replies.

Maybe so.

But I think Jesus is at the end of his rope, in need of a nap, and feels like he has nothing left to offer to anyone.
I think this is one of the glimpses we get in the gospels to remind us that Jesus was Fully Human.

Let’s think about that for a minute.

We claim that Jesus is fully human, fully divine.  But then, when he does something fully human, like turning over tables at the temple, or losing it with the Pharisees earlier, or making snarky comments to poor Canaanite woman who is just seeking some help for her kid for goodness sake, we run screaming from the text and pull out our pictures of Jesus with the Halo, the nicely bleached robe, and the perfect smile and we say, “fully divine. fully divine. fully divine.”
Why is that? Why is the idea of Jesus behaving like you and I so troubling to us?
I tried to find a good picture of Jesus looking like us, and it was hard to find, quite frankly. Apparently artists don’t like Jesus looking like a regular human either. The closest one I found was a picture I saw this summer at the middle school conference.

We called it the “Robert Downey Jesus”, because he looks like the actor.

In any case, whatever he looks like, we don’t want Jesus to say what he says to this woman. “I didn’t come here to save you.”
“Lord, help me”.
“Why should I take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs?”
Oh. No. He. Didn’t.

Oh. Yes. He. Did.

Luckily, our Canaanite Woman isn’t going to let the fact that Jesus is fully human and is having a no good very bad day get in her way. She knows what she needs. And she’s not leaving until she gets it. He can tell her that salvation is for someone else. He can call her a dog. Doesn’t matter.

“Even the dogs eat the crumbs under the table, Jesus.”

And with that, he snaps out of it.

Crumbs, he realizes. That’s all she needs. Crumbs. Just enough to heal her daughter. She isn’t asking for boatloads or buckets of anything. Just crumbs. And I wonder if he remembers the loaves and the fishes and how many crumbs were left over after that meal on the hillside. And he thinks, “it is going to be okay. I can get through this day AND I can help this one woman”. And he turns away from the scarcity of not enough energy, not enough salvation to go around and he remembers abundance.

“Great is your faith,” he tells her. Abundant is your faith.

Even when his faith and good manners were in short supply, her faith was abundant.

And maybe this is where his fully divine part kicks in.

Because he recognizes when he’s wrong.

When I show my fully human side like that, saying the wrong thing to someone, snapping at the person who is in front of me rather than the person who actually upset me—when I have those moments, I want to crawl under the table and pretend I’m not there. And that’s if I even recognize when I’m wrong.

So I’m thankful that this moment is recorded in scripture.

Because, even if we’d rather think of Jesus as only divine, this reminder that he’s also fully human ought to help us be more fully human ourselves.

Because look around at our culture. Women color their hair when it turns grey. There’s a multi-billion dollar plastic surgery industry out there trying to convince us that we’ll be happier after that tummy tuck, nose job, or whatever. We fight and deny our human bodies, our frailty, our finite life span.

We also fight and deny our human mistakes. We want our leaders to be perfect, to not make mistakes. We force them to resign when they do make mistakes, or when they, in other words, act like humans.

We human beings are conflicted about being human beings.

And so, when we see Jesus being human, we don’t like it.

As many of you know, last week up at All Church Camp, I was dealing with a muscle spasm in my neck and back. I wish I had a good story for how I got the injury. Let’s say I set an Olympic record for pole vaulting. In truth, I just woke up one morning with a pain in my neck. By the time I got to McCall, I couldn’t turn my head. But look at me now. (The congregation oohs and aahs as Marci successfully turns her head side to side…)

Sometimes a pain in the neck is just a pain in the neck. And maybe that’s all this one was. But it stopped me. Flat in my tracks.

I had to stop. I had to actually use sick days this week. You know how the psalmist says “God makes me lie down beside still waters”. Usually we hear that and think, “oh, what a nice peaceful scene.” But this past week, I heard that as “he MAKES me lie down.”

A temporary pain in the neck is a minor illustration of what it means to be fully human. I know that plenty of people, many of whom are in this room, could share stories of how our limited human-ness creates real suffering, pain and trouble.

But it is the story that I lived this week. I wanted to be something other than fully human. I wanted to tell my trapezius muscle to just get over itself already and let me get back to doing what I wanted to do. But I couldn’t. Because I’m fully human.

And however that manifests itself in your life, you are fully human too. And it is okay.

When we read these stories of Jesus, where he seems so familiar somehow, I hope we’ll remember he’s fully human. And so are we. And so are our friends and family and fellow journeyers on the road.

I also hope we’ll remember that being fully human isn’t a bad thing. Yes, we’re limited physically sometimes. Yes, we say things and do things that hurt people.

But being human has advantages too.

Look at our Canaanite woman. If this story illustrates Jesus’ bad day, I think it also illustrates one of her better ones. She’s a foreign woman with a demon possessed daughter. In other words, not a lot going on for her.

But she knows what she needs. She uses her human brain to realize that only God can heal her daughter. And so when he walks down the road, she doesn’t hesitate. She uses her voice and calls out for what she needs. And she doesn’t quit. One of the gifts of our humanity is perseverance. She doesn’t quit when he ignores her, when the disciples whine, or even when he insults her.

I read an article this week by the author of the Help. It is a great book if you haven’t read it. They just made a movie of the book, and it is a great movie. But the author of that book sent it off to publishers many times before she got a “yes”. Any guesses as to how many times she submitted her manuscript?

She received 60 rejection letters before she received a “yes”. six zero.

Friends and family were saying to her, “I’m sure it will be better with your next book”. And she kept thinking to herself, “next book?! I have to get this story told first!”

And so she kept at it. And I am thankful that she did.

Another illustration of the Canaanite woman’s humanness is her faith. If faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” as it says in Hebrews, then only humans can have faith. If we were divine, if we were perfect, all seeing, and all knowing, then faith would not be our experience. Because faith is only for those things beyond our human grasp. And I believe that faith in God, faith in each other, faith in a better world are all qualities that can bring us together to do things that we could never do alone.

Martin Luther, the 16th Century German theologian summed up our condition this way:
“Be a sinner and sin boldly, but more boldly have faith and rejoice in Christ.”

Yes, to be fully human, we are bold sinners who make mistakes. But to be fully human also means we fight for the ones we love, we stand up to injustice, and we believe.

So, sin boldly! But even more boldly, have faith!

Amen.

Leave a Comment » | Fully Divine, Massanetta Middle School Conference, Matthew 15, Robert Downey Jesus, The Help | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Nothing? Really? You sure about that?

July 31, 2011

A Sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian in Boise, Idaho

July 31, 2011

Matt 14:13-21

This is the only story about Jesus that is told in all 4 of the gospel accounts. There is more agreement about this story than there is about his birth or his death and resurrection. In Mark and Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has his disciples feed large crowds 2 different times.

 

But it is a story we want to ignore. Because we don’t get it. Why didn’t the crowd pack their own lunch? What kind of people head off into the wilderness, into a deserted place, without food or water? And how does the miracle work, anyway? What does this even mean? Everyone knows you can’t feed 5,000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish.

Or can you?

Because apparently Jesus did it.

More specifically, Jesus told his disciples to do it.

I think that’s why I wanted to pass over this text in favor of something light and fluffy, like Leviticus maybe.

Because this miracle starts out in the disciples hands.

Jesus has just found out that John the Baptizer, his cousin, is dead. Beheaded at the hands of Roman authorities. So Jesus decides he’s going to take a break. Get away from the crowds. And he gets in a boat and goes to a deserted place. By himself. He is worn out. We can suspect he’s a little sad and needing some time to mourn.

But the crowd follows him on foot around the Sea of Galilee. He pulls ashore and finds them waiting for him, more of them perhaps than he had just left on the other side.

But he doesn’t get back in his boat and look for an even more deserted place. He has compassion on the crowds. He puts on a smile and greets his fans, healing the sick, having his picture taken with babies, and doing whatever else it is the people need for him to do.

The disciples come to him, possibly out of their own exhaustion, or perhaps with compassion of their own for the hungry crowd or maybe even compassion for Jesus, who must be exhausted. “It is evening now, Jesus. You’ve healed a lot of people today. You need a break. Send the people away because there are no Applebees out here. They need to go home so they can eat because they can’t eat out here.”

We applaud that plan, I think. We hear that and think, “finally the disciples are showing some sense.” Because we know we don’t have enough. We don’t have enough food, enough money, enough Sunday school teachers, enough of whatever it is we think we need.

But Jesus tells them, “you feed them.”

What would it be like if the disciples had said, “okay. You’re right, Jesus. We’ve got this. Go lie down. You look exhausted”?

What if they would have rolled up their sleeves and said to each other, “alright, what’s the best way to go about this? Jesus told us to do it, which means we can. What’s the best idea you’ve got?”

Because this story was on pace to be the first miracle done by the disciples.

How cool would that have been?

They would have realized they had the same 5 loaves and 2 fish. They would have figured out that “not enough” in human terms was nothing to God and they would have remembered the extravagant abundance with which God provides for us. They would have remembered that all of the gifts we have came from God in the first place. And then they would have blessed the food, passed it out, and then signed autographs all night for their awesomeness.

But that’s not what they did. They said to Jesus, “we’ve got nothing.”

They didn’t think their gifts were even worth mentioning.

They didn’t even consider their God given talents to be worth mentioning.

“We’ve got nothing….other than these 5 loaves and 2 fish. Nothing to mention really.”

But here’s the thing. 5 loaves and 2 fish is something. It was enough that night on the hillside.

But the disciples didn’t count it when they were thinking about how best to reply to Jesus.

How often do we do that? 
“I’d love to help people in Somalia. But it is so far away.”

“I’d love to help people rebuild in Joplin after the tornado, but the need is so great. I don’t know where to begin.”

“I’d love to help feed 5,000 hungry people here in Boise, but I barely have enough to get by myself.”

The fact that we can’t solve all of the world’s problems, I fear, leads us to believe we can’t do anything at all.
I can’t help but think about the debt ceiling crisis as I read this text. And I am not a master of economic policy, but I do think this crisis is serious enough that we shouldn’t sit back and think, “it is ‘their’ job. They’ll fix it.”

It is our job to make sure that as our federal spending patterns are set for the future that the budget is not balanced on the backs of the poor, the voiceless, the elderly, and the vulnerable.

We need to contact our elected officials and let them know that we, as followers of Jesus Christ, expect them to find a compromise that moves toward the common good.

But in today’s story, when Jesus is sad, exhausted, and plum tuckered on that hillside, the disciples don’t help him out. They trust that someone else will solve the problems around them.

And Jesus, who set aside his grief and exhaustion to heal the crowds, sets it aside again to show the disciples, one more time, how to do what he has called them to do. He takes the loaves and fishes, he prays a blessing, and then they pass it out.

That’s what we have to do. We don’t have to magically multiply anything. We don’t need to wait until we think we have more than enough. We, right now, are called to take what we have, say thanks to God, and pass it around and share. It is enough. It is more than enough. There will be baskets left over.

What would that look like for you?

If Jesus asked you to have compassion on the crowd that was hungry and had nothing to eat, how would you take your loaves and fishes and do as he asked?

I think this story is, on one level, very literal. When we see people who are hungry, who have nothing to eat, we are supposed to actually feed them.

And there are clearly metaphorical ways to consider sharing your loaves and fishes too. There are lots of ways we are being called to realize that what we have is enough.

Because Jesus doesn’t think a hillside of hungry people requires a divine miracle. He tells his disciples to feed people. He tells us to feed people. We should pay attention to this. He thinks we’re qualified to feed the crowds. This isn’t a situation where we should sit around and hope for divine intervention.

We can do this.

Jesus was convinced the disciples could feed the crowd.
I think too often we are like the disciples. We doubt our own giftedness, just like the disciples did. We doubt that we have the skills and talents we need to do what Jesus has asked us to do.

We want to send the crowds away so we can just be with Jesus. We want Jesus to do it all. To heal the sick, to feed the crowd, to solve our problems.

But Jesus tries to show his disciples that isn’t the way it is going to work.

Jesus expects his disciples to trust him when he tells them to feed the crowd. He wouldn’t ask them to do something that was beyond their abilities. He did, I think, ask them to do something that was beyond their acknowledged abilities.

Much like a parent teaches a child to ride a bike. At first you run along side them, keeping them steady. But then you let go, and they realize they are riding a bike.

Part of our call as disciples is to believe in ourselves as God believes in us.

This fall, we will be starting up a new way of being church and doing mission, house churches. This new way, actually, goes back to a very old way of being church, when people would gather in homes to worship. In 2 weeks, we will have an info meeting after worship about what this is all about. I hope you’ll join us. Because I think it is a great way to learn to feed the crowd that has gathered around Jesus with nothing to eat.

In addition to our regular worship, education, and other church programs, the house churches will be smaller groups of people who will gather regularly outside of Sunday morning worship, around a particular mission emphasis. House churches will worship, study, serve, and have fellowship together. They will invite the rest of the congregation to come along side them in support of their mission project.

The Session, at the request of the Mission Committee, believes that this will give us new ways to be in relationship with each other and with our community. We hope that you will stay for the conversation on Aug 14 so you can find out more about it and can pray about whether you are being called to be a part of a house church. This isn’t, of course, the only way to serve, but we think it is a good way.

So, friends, there is a crowd of people in our world. Jesus has told us to feed them.

We can do this. We have to do this. Amen.

2 Comments | Christian response to Debt Ceiling, Loaves and Fishes, Matt 14 | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Wife Swap–Genesis Style!

July 24, 2011

A sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho July 24, 2011

Gen 29:15-28

When I read this story, I feel like I’ve just read someone’s diary and exposed the hidden secrets of a family. It just doesn’t seem right. Surely Rachel and Leah deserve some privacy so that they can deal with the consequences of their father’s shady business practices without witnesses? How humiliating it must have been for both of them.

Presumably, Rachel had been preparing to be a bride as she’d watched Jacob work those 7 years to earn her hand, perhaps even reminding Leah that nobody had come forward to marry her.

And even if Leah had a momentary victory at the last minute switch on the wedding night, surely there was humiliation for her too the morning after, when Jacob ran from the tent, outraged at the deception. Had she perhaps hoped that in one night together, he would have reconsidered and changed his mind?

Even Jacob, the trickster who had lied and fooled his father, claiming his older brother Esau’s birthright—even Jacob might not want this story read in every pulpit in the land. Because here, the trickster meets his match.

Jacob worked 7 years for Rachel and then discovered in the morning that he had married Leah. Yet, when Jacob complains about the wife swap, Laban said, “this is not done in our country—giving the younger before the firstborn”. Can’t you just hear the rest of the sentence? “You thought you were so clever fooling your father for your brother’s inheritance with just a pot of beans and the hair of a goat wrapped around your hand, but I just showed you how it’s done! You didn’t even know you’d married the wrong daughter until the morning! We do things the right way around here! Oldest wins.”

Yes, you can see why Jacob probably wasn’t thrilled when these pictures were put in the family album.

But here they are.

Why is that?

Genesis, which tells the stories of our ancestors, from the creation of the world to the foundation of the Hebrew people, is full of these stories.

From Adam, Eve, and the talking serpent at the beginning, all the way through the dysfunction of Jacob’s sons at the end, Genesis is full of family stories that we might like to shove under the proverbial rug.

Do any of you face that in your own families? My grandparents all died when I was a child, and so I remember my grandparents as saints. But then my dad will tell me a story about his childhood and I catch myself wondering “where were grandma and grandpa while this was happening?”  And then I realize, “ohhh…that was grandpa who ….” Apparently there was another side of my grandparents than I experienced myself.

But we want to tell the heroic stories of our ancestors. We highlight the ancestor who invented barbed wire and forget to mention the one whose drinking caused the loss of the family business.

We tell the stories we think others want to hear, dressing ourselves, and our families, up as people who have it all together, hoping that people won’t see the pain and brokenness that is just under the surface.

Thankfully, the author of Genesis doesn’t whitewash the story of Israel. We don’t only get the story of Jacob’s hard work and creativity. We also get the story of heartbreak, deception, family dysfunction, and intrigue.

And God is working right through the midst of it.

From Leah’s tears that come from being the unwanted wife, the first of the tribes of Israel will be born—sons Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and daughter Dina. Her delight and joy will come despite the circumstances around her marriage.

And Rachel, too, is a part of God’s story, waiting those years to be married to Jacob, enduring years of infertility, and giving birth to Joseph and Benjamin.

Of course, we know that childbearing is not the only way women participate in God’s story, but the book of Genesis doesn’t tell us of those experiences.

And Jacob lives into his role as patriarch, claiming the birthright, working for his uncle, creating a family, becoming Israel, carrying the story forward where we meet up with it. God creates the people of God from this most human and flawed man.

We know this to be true—that God works through highly flawed people and families. We have it in Scripture, even. And yet, we continue to argue that only perfect people should lead us. Or we say that God doesn’t need this person or that person to serve the church because we have decided that they sin more than the rest of us. Or we decide we will go back to church once we’ve gotten things figured out.

But if God seems perfectly content to work through people like Jacob and Laban, why do we pretend we’re not?

What grace do we need to accept in our lives so that we can offer our true selves as God’s servants? What do we need to do so that we can then share that grace with others?

Think about it. If Jacob showed up today and wanted to pastor our church, what would we say? Setting aside the 2 wives and the children he had with the slaves of his two wives. I can imagine the conversation.

“Well, he did cheat his brother out of his inheritance.”
“Yes, and to do that he lied to his father and then took the first train out of town.”

There is often dissonance at work in our faith life. We claim that we’ve accepted God’s grace, offered through Jesus Christ. But then we act as if only perfect people, seemingly not in need of grace, need apply.

We need to let that go. We need to come to church as our whole selves. Broken. Sometimes deceitful. Manipulative and tricky. Heartbroken. Infertile.

And we need to be clear that we welcome real people in our doors. If God’s own story is told through the lives of Jacob, Laban, Leah, and Rachel, then surely we need our churches to be places where those people would be welcome to worship.

None of our stories– our beautiful, heartbreaking, and complicated stories—is beyond the presence or the ability of God to redeem. So bring yourself and your story here to this place, where, together, we can seek where God is moving amongst us.

The apostle Paul also knew what it was to serve God from a place of brokenness. He was the least likely candidate to evangelize the world. He persecuted Christians. He was also short and not very charismatic. Yet God chose him. And in his flawed humanity, Paul responded to God’s call and then wrote these words, now found in the 8th chapter of the Letter to the church in Rome:

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.
What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?  Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed    intercedes for us.
Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or  peril, or sword?

No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor    powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Paul reminds us that all of our story is within the care of God. Even the parts, especially the parts, of the story we don’t want to write about in our Christmas letters.

And so we come here as ourselves. Our true selves.

When I look back on the first 40 years of my story, and I think about what made me who I am today, I realize that it was the moments I wouldn’t have chosen
—the big, painful mistakes;
—the times of hurt and loss;
—the moments of doubt and despair;
those were the moments that helped me become the person I am, the person I seek to be, today. I am thankful for each of those moments and for God’s presence in the midst of them, turning my pain into something new and beautiful.

And so we should be thankful that our stories are more like Jacob, Leah and Rachel’s and less like a Norman Rockwell painting. Because I bet that pretty Rachel learned compassion for her sister and others the world deems unwanted. I bet Leah, with her many children, felt compassion for her infertile sister. I bet Jacob had compassion for the brother he had tricked after he, himself, became the victim. Surely, they became better people for the difficulties they endured.

Friends, the story of the people of God is filled with people like you and me—Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Laban, and Paul. And thank God for that. If God can work through them, God will surely work through us.  If God can redeem their story, God can surely turn our broken stories into lives of beauty, truth, and love. Let us truly live into the grace we have received so that we may live lives of truth and so the world may know of God’s love in the midst of their own pain.

Leave a Comment » | Genesis 29, Rachel | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Other Side of the Storm

July 23, 2011

A sermon preached at the Massanetta Middle School Conference, July 2011

Luke 8:26-39

(The theme of the conference was “I of the Storm” and we looked at the Matthew 14 account of a storm where Peter walked on water.)

Luke’s text picks up right after Jesus has calmed a storm and rebuked the wind on the Sea of Galilee. You might recall hearing a similar story from Matthew this week. As Jesus and his disciples get out of the boat, freshly delivered from nearly perishing on the water, Jesus encounters a man, perishing in his own ways.
Now, our friend Jesus is known for hanging out with unsavory characters, but this one might just take the cake.  He is outcast among outcasts.

First off, Jesus is on the wrong side of the Sea of Galilee.

The west side is the Israeli side. The east side is the gentile side. the foreign side. The opposite side. The disciples were probably wondering why they got in the boat in the first place. Had they known where Jesus was going, they might not have gone.
This man lives in a place where they raise pigs, for goodness sake. And we know that no good Hebrew will have anything to do with pork or pork products.

And this man is naked.

awkward

And he lives in tombs, which makes him unclean, because you shouldn’t have anything to do with dead bodies, as you know. And, as if all of those things weren’t bad enough—and they are, bad enough—he is demon possessed. Not just by one demon. But by a legion, which was a Roman military unit of 4 to 5 thousand men. In a world of “us” and “them”, he is as “them” as you can be.

But even the people on the wrong side of the Sea of Galilee don’t have anything to do with this man. They put him in chains and leave him at the tombs.

So this man, who was lowest of the low, sees Jesus, falls at his feet, and shouts out for all to hear: “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?!”

He may have his troubles, but he has no trouble recognizing who Jesus is. The Disciples, Jesus own followers, just wondered if he was a ghost. But the naked demon possessed guy, sees Jesus pretty clearly.

This story may seem hard for us to imagine, because we don’t approach the world in quite the same way as those first century believers would have. We don’t talk about demon possession nearly as much as we talk about germs, psychiatry, or malignant diseases. But don’t let that get in your way. We can’t answer a 21st century question about his disease. And we may or may not have “demons” in our vocabulary. But we do know people like this man.

People who are so far on the outside of society that they are alone, living among tombs.

Who is that in your life?

Whomever it may be for you, we all know people whose lives are so messed up that fixing their own problems is way beyond their capabilities.

And Jesus, for his part, doesn’t ask the man, “what did you do wrong so that the consequences landed you in this mess?”

Maybe the man deserved every moment of his demon possession. I don’t know. But Jesus doesn’t seem to care WHY he’s in this situation. But Jesus does seem to care enough about this man, this foreign, pig eating, tomb dwelling, demon possessed man to heal him.

The word for “heal” in Greek is the same as the word for “save”.

Here’s what it looks like in Greek.

The word is pronounced “sotzoh”. Repeat after me. Sot-zoh. There, now you know Greek.
Remember that word whenever you read about Jesus’ stories of healing.

When Peter called out from the waves, do you remember what he cried? “Lord save me!”  What Peter asked for is the same thing Jesus offered the demon man.  Healing and saving are the same word.

Healing, Salvation, are offered to this man on the wrong side of the Galilee just because that is how Jesus operates. The man is the least likely candidate to receive salvation. He doesn’t follow the rules. He makes everyone uncomfortable. He’s not an Elder in his church. He should stand as a reminder to us as disciples that we can’t limit the recipients of God’s grace.

But not everyone in the story sees this encounter as Good News. We aren’t told what the disciples thought, but I can imagine that more than one of them, who had moments before been so thankful to be out of the boat and on dry land were wondering if, perhaps, perishing at sea was a better alternative to welcoming an unclean, naked, tomb dwelling demoniac to the club.

And the gerasene pig herders weren’t so thrilled either. Because their income had just run into the sea. There were some real economic consequences to this healing. Their loss of income would not have been seen as good news.

The pig herders run into town and tell everyone what has happened and the crowd comes running to the scene. But it isn’t what they expect. Instead of their friendly neighborhood demoniac, they find a man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.

And they were afraid.

The legion of demons recognize the Son of God when they meet him, but the townspeople aren’t so sure.

They ask Jesus to leave.

And I confess that this story leaves me with that uncomfortable little voice in my head, asking me, “would you ask Jesus to leave if he healed a demoniac here today?”

Of course the right answer is “no, of course not.”

But I wonder.

Certainly the townspeople, before Jesus came across the Galilee, would have argued that they wanted their government to fix the demon problem out by the tombs. Take care of these people! It isn’t safe! What if one of them moves in to our neighborhood?! They must be healed!


But when faced with the fact of a healed man, clothed and in his right mind, they ask Jesus to leave because they are afraid.
Afraid of what?

Maybe they are afraid of what healing might be coming for them—“If Jesus can do that for that guy, then just think what he would ask me to do to change.”

The thought of change scares us.

But when Jesus heals us, when Jesus saves us, we have to change. We can’t continue to be the naked demoniac living in the tombs. Certainly, being clothed and in our right minds, sitting next to Jesus is the preferred way to be.

And yet, how often do we choose NOT to change?

I hope we’ll look at this text and see that even though healing and salvation require change and disruption of the status quo, the end result is worth it.

There is no indication that the healed man sees the crowd and thinks, “hey they’re right! I wish I were naked and living in the tombs again!” The Good News is certainly good news for him and is change he’s willing to believe in. He doesn’t want to go back to his old way of living. He begs Jesus to let him come along with Jesus, back to the other side of Galilee, and into new life and a new future.

I suppose a small part of him might have wanted to go with Jesus also to get away from the people who chained him up and made him live in a tomb.

In any case, Jesus sends him back to the Gerasenes—“return to your home and declare how much God has done for you.”

And the man does.

Salvation and healing for our friend the man formerly known as the demoniac is free but is not easy. There are things he must do as well. He must go live amongst people who don’t want to see signs of change—being a constant reminder of what they wish to forget. He must declare what God has done for him.
Now, to my knowledge, nobody here is a formerly naked demon possessed person from the wrong side of Galilee.

But we, too, have met Jesus this week here at Massanetta. We, too, have been offered salvation and healing from Jesus. And we want the great experiences we have had here with Jesus to go on forever. But Jesus tells us to go back to our homes too. Because we have good news to share.  We need to tell the world, by how we live our lives, that we know of a God who saves, who loves, who welcomes all. We need to share the stories of our storms with others so they will know they are not alone in their storms. We have work to do on our journey of discipleship.

What are some things in your life that might need to change as you step out of your boat and put your trust in Jesus Christ?

Is there someone at school who needs your friendship? Because if you are going to claim to be a follower of Jesus, then you need to be the person who stands up for people, who speaks for the voiceless and who works for justice for alls.

Are there things you could be doing, like prayer and bible study, that could help you build your relationship with God?

Is there a gift you have to develop? Perhaps you can be brave and try something new, challenging and different, like taking up guitar, or learning to make pottery.

Who are the people who can help you through those changes? Are some of your friends the kind of people who bring out your best? I would suggest to you that most all of your friends should be those kind of people. Talk with your parents. Or are there people from your church or youth group who can be your support?

I keep thinking about the disciples, who are largely silent in this story. If it weren’t for the first sentence “then THEY arrived at the country of the Gerasenes”—you wouldn’t know they were with Jesus at all.

But they had just been saved too. Like the naked demoniac at the tombs, they were perishing in a storm at sea immediately before today’s story begins. Jesus saved them too.

I wonder if they saw similarities between their deliverance and the saving of the man by the tombs.

I wonder if, before they met the man on the shore, they thought, “sure is great to be one of Jesus’ friends. Glad we knew someone who liked us enough to save us!”

I wonder how that reaction would have changed when they realized he also saved a complete stranger, who happened to be naked, demon possessed, and living with dead bodies.

I wonder if this encounter encouraged them to see similarities with people when others saw difference. Maybe stepping out of the boat for them meant becoming people who welcome the people that everyone else chains up by the tombs.

I wonder if later on, when Jesus tells them to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, they thought of this man by the tombs and thought—“if Jesus gave healing and salvation to that guy, then we can take the good news every where and to every one.”

Whether you see yourself as one of the disciples or as the man formerly known as naked, tomb dwelling demoniac, know that the salvation and healing offered by Jesus is for you, it is for us, it is for all.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

3 Comments | Massanetta Middle School Conference | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Disciples R Us

July 23, 2011

A sermon preached July 3, 2011 at Southminster Presbyterian Church in Boise, Idaho.

Luke 5:1-11

When did you decide to follow Jesus?
Some of you have a clear answer to that question and could tell me the minute, hour, day, month, and year that Jesus told you to leave your nets and follow him.

It isn’t as clear for all of us. I couldn’t tell you the day I followed Jesus. I grew up going to church. I actually spent the first couple of months of my life in a church office, where my mom was a secretary. My family adopted me on short notice, so mom had to take me with her until they hired and trained her replacement.

So I don’t remember the moment.

But I remember a lot of moments.

–My Sunday school teachers who taught me that Jesus loved us, even when one of us was a young boy who liked to cut my hair during the bible lesson.

–I remember being wiseman number 2 in the Christmas pageant one year, and having to say wiseman number 1’s lines as well when he got sick in the middle of the pageant.

–I remember being allowed to come to the adult Sunday school class when I was in high school because listening to Dale Bruner teach and talk about Greek was more interesting to me than being ignored by whatever boys were in my Sunday school class.

–I remember my pastor in college who spoke the very word of God to me at the moment I most needed to hear it.

–I remember being welcomed by a church in Albuquerque when Justin and I were first married and moved to a new city. Our best friends today are still the people we met there, who met with us weekly in Bible Study and fellowship.

So I can look back at a lot of moments on my road to discipleship. And I am thankful for all of those people who played a role—for my family, my Sunday school teachers, youth group leaders, pastors—the list is long.

And even if you can remember the moment, I am sure you might also have moments that led up to the one moment.

I wonder about the disciples. Their moment is written in Scripture.
In Luke’s account,  Jesus is walking along and a huge crowd is following him, wanting to hear what he has to say. He walks by the shore, where some fishermen have just come in from their days work and are putting away the motor, cleaning the nets, stacking up the life jackets, etc. So, for these fishermen, you wonder if Jesus and the crowd that is following him are just a nuisance. “Excuse me, lady. I know you want to see Jesus, but could you please not stand on my nets???”

Or, you wonder if they, too, wanted to see Jesus, and put down their nets to listen to him, thankful that he had come so close. “I wanted to see Jesus today. I heard he was speaking at the Civic Center, but I had to work. My family would have gone hungry if I would have abandoned my boat for the day.” So maybe this was more of a gift than an intrusion.

But Jesus doesn’t stop to ask them what they think about it. He climbs in Simon Peter’s boat and says, “put out from shore a little way.” If Peter thinks, “excuse me, mister-just-who-do-you-think-you-are”, the text doesn’t reflect it. Peter obeys. And Jesus teaches.

But when he’s done teaching, he turns to Simon and says, “take the boat to deeper water and set out your nets for a catch.”

Jesus the rabbi, the Palestinian equivalent of college professor/nerd pastor, starts telling the professional fishermen how to fish.

You might be able to guess that this story is reason 567 why Jesus didn’t pick me to be his favorite disciple. I would have said, “yeah. Thanks sir. Listen, I enjoyed your sermon, you seem to be good at THAT, but I’ll take you back to shore now and then I’ll go home because I already fished all night and I caught nothing!”

And I might have rolled my eyes out loud.

But Peter, who does mention the facts—we fished all night and caught nothing thank you very much—goes on to say, “but if you say so, we’ll do it.”

And what a good decision that was! So many fish their nets start to break. So they call the other boat to come out and their nets are full up. And then they are concerned the boats will sink under the weight of the harvest.

Peter drops to his knees and tells Jesus that he is a sinful man and so Jesus ought to just leave him. Isn’t that cute? As if Jesus doesn’t already know this!

Already in this story, Peter has had some moments. Peter recognized something in Jesus—from what he had said when he was teaching, to the authority with which he commanded them, to the way he out-fished the professional fishermen—Peter recognized that Jesus was not like us. Peter recognized his own broken, sinful humanity and realized if this Rabbi is looking for people to become like him, for someone to teach all he knows, then Jesus better look somewhere else because we’re not worthy.

And have you ever had an experience where you were selected for something you thought you weren’t qualified for? Ever been picked for a sports team—I mean not picked LAST for a team—and wondered, “why’d they pick me when so and so hasn’t been chosen yet?” Ever had someone befriend you who you thought was way too cool to ever talk with you, and then think, “I guess they aren’t as cool as I thought if they want to be friends with me?” Sometimes when you have those moments, where people pick YOU, instead of picking the people you would have chosen, do you ever hear that voice in your head saying, “if they chose me then I guess they aren’t quite as smart as I thought they were?”

We laugh, but that happened to me a few weeks back. I’d been working on a chapter for a book, which is a first for me. A big, scary deal for which I feel completely unqualified. And I submitted my first chapter to the editor and then hoped she’d lose it before she could read it and get back to me with “this is the worst thing I’ve ever read and what in the world were you thinking when you sent this to me???”

But she read it. And she replied that she loved it. And my first reaction— even before I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to re-write the entire thing— before that I thought to myself, “if she liked that, she must not be a very good editor.”

Seriously. That was the first thing through my head.

What is wrong with me?

I totally get Peter dropping to his knees and telling Jesus he picked the wrong boat. “It is very nice that you stopped by, and I really appreciate this big haul of fish, but I think these are not the disciples you’re looking for.” It makes more sense to us that Jesus would call disciples who aren’t like we are. People who don’t screw up 5 times before breakfast. People who have it all together.

Jesus calling disciples like Peter and the gang, disciples like us, makes no sense at all. Not today. Not 2,000 years ago.

I don’t know what you know about how rabbis selected their disciples in Jesus’ day, so let’s consider that for a moment. There were lots of rabbis traveling around, and they took the knowledge they had and they passed it on to the next generation. They couldn’t just look everything up on Wikipedia like you do. And so there was a process for them to find their disciples. Students whose parents could afford to have them learn, would go to schools and learn. They’d memorize entire books of the Bible. They studied and studied and studied. And if they were great students, they went on to a better school and studied some more. If they weren’t great students—the best of the best—they didn’t go on with their learning. They became farmers, tradesmen, or fishermen.

And Simon Peter knew this. Because, at some point, he had been booted out of the rabbi school and apprenticed himself to learn about fishing. He knew that a rabbi would not be asking him and his friends to be disciples, especially not a rabbi like Jesus, who was drawing big crowds and could have chosen ANYONE.

Imagine if this story were taking place today. Picture any famous leader in the news. Let’s say they were looking for some summer interns. Do you think the President of a Fortune 500 company is going to hire an intern he or she finds sitting on a beach somewhere?
No. They are going to hire the best students from Stanford or Harvard. Because they can.

So what does it mean for us that Jesus didn’t do this?

After Peter points out to Jesus that he is hanging out with the wrong people—namely Peter and his friends—Jesus says, “Have no fear, Peter. From now on, you will be fishing for people.”

Jesus tells them to leave behind their nets, their boats, the giant haul of fish they just caught, and to also leave behind their fears of their own inadequacy, their fears that they have nothing to offer to God because they are just fishermen, and their fears that Jesus has made a bad decision that he will regret in a few days.

So that is good news for all of us. Because if Jesus chose Peter and the boys, young men who had not made it in Rabbi school, then Jesus might just choose us too.

If Jesus wants disciples like Peter, then maybe there is room for us. If Jesus didn’t go to career day at the Temple to pick out his disciples, then we should take note. If he called disciples who were just minding their own business, fixing their nets, going to soccer practice, updating their facebook profiles, whatever, then perhaps we should expect him to call us as well. Perhaps all of the excuses we use to NOT be disciples—not educated, not old enough, too old, not smart enough, too busy, whatever—perhaps all of those excuses aren’t going to work.

So, do not be afraid. Have no fear. From now on, you will be fishing for people. Leave your nets, leave your boats, leave your distractions, leave your fears, and get ready to follow Jesus. There may have been lots of moments that led to this day. But the moment is now. Jesus is calling you. Yes, you.

1 Comment | Luke 5 | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Throw Open The Doors

June 26, 2011

A sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church, Boise, ID

June 26, 2011

Isaiah 56:1-8

Thus says the LORD:
Maintain justice, and do what is right,
for soon my salvation will come,
and my deliverance be revealed.

Happy is the mortal who does this,
the one who holds it fast,
who keeps the sabbath, not profaning it,
and refrains from doing any evil.

Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say,
“The LORD will surely separate me from his people”;
and do not let the eunuch say,
“I am just a dry tree.”
For thus says the LORD:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
who choose the things that please me
and hold fast my covenant,
I will give, in my house and within my walls,
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off.

And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
and hold fast my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain,
and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord GOD,
who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
besides those already gathered.

This is one of those texts that surprises me each time I come across it. While scriptures talk about welcoming foreigners and providing hospitality for foreigners, there also seem to be many verses in the Hebrew Bible instructing people not to marry foreigners, not to mix with them. Compare these two passages, for example.

Exodus 23:9 states: “You shall not oppress a resident alien (foreigner); you know the heart of an alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” 


But Deuteronomy 7:1-6 says:
When the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous than you— and when the LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.
Do not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your sons, for that would turn away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly.  But this is how you must deal with them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. For you are a people holy to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

Yes, it is a complicated message. Be hospitable. Treat people well because you should remember what it is like to be a resident alien. But there is a line between “welcoming” and “accepting”.
And once you cross that line, you’re headed for a heartache. Because, before you know it, they will have corrupted your children and led you to forget just who your God is.

Scripture’s instructions about eunuchs makes this passage from Isaiah even more startling.

There’s no real delicate way of saying this, but since I’m quoting the Bible, I’ll just go ahead and tell you the instructionfrom Deuteronomy 23:1.  “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.”
I know. You didn’t want to hear it anymore than I wanted to say it out loud. But it is pretty clear for the author of Deuteronomy that men who are eunuchs are not really men and shouldn’t be a part of the faith community.

So listen again to the radical claims being made in Isaiah. Eunuchs who love and serve God:

  “I will give, in my house and within my walls,
        a monument and a name
        better than sons and daughters;
        I will give them an everlasting name
        that shall not be cut off.”

And foreigners who join themselves to God:
“these I will bring to my holy mountain,
        and make them joyful in my house of prayer;”
        Thus says the Lord GOD,
        who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
        I will gather others to them
        besides those already gathered.

At first glance, it seems God’s prophecy to Isaiah represents a policy change. But I wonder if it was less that the policy needed revision and more that the situation on the ground changed. Because it appears that the problem being addressed in Isaiah is that foreigners are wanting to abandon their gods and follow the One God. The foreigners aren’t trying to convert the Israelites—they want to join them.
How strange would that be, to change your paradigm as Isaiah is asking them to do? To be told—all of your life—to be wary of foreigners would certainly work its way into your understanding of the world. “Sure, honey, you should be nice to that boy down the street, and I guess we could invite him to your birthday party, but you cannot go to youth group at his church and your sister will most definitely NEVER marry him.”

So you wonder how well received Isaiah’s message of welcome, inclusion, and of gathering the outcasts was to a community who had long been told that welcome only went so far. Did it take them a while to adjust? Did they embrace it immediately? Had there been people lobbying and campaigning for inclusion of foreigners for many years before this?

And no matter what they thought of welcoming foreigners as brothers and sisters, I’m hard pressed to imagine anyone in the ancient Middle East being excited about the idea of welcoming eunuchs. They at least had a tradition of hospitality to foreigners. The Hebrew people did not practice castration, so any eunuchs living among them were already foreign.

God told the patriarch Abraham, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then God said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” (Genesis 15:5) The Hebrew people had taken that command very seriously. Creating future generations that would be more numerous than the stars in the sky was a big job, especially for a people constantly at war, being carted off to exile, and dealing with famines. It required everyone to do their part.
You can imagine the pain for barren women to be reminded of the “stars in the sky” each month when pregnancy eluded them, yet again. And even if you consider that foreigners could help Israel in their quest to match the stars in the sky, eunuchs would have no place in that plan.
More than their inability to reproduce, to contribute to producing future generations, eunuchs also face that scriptural prohibition from being a part of the assembly of the people of God. And yet, Isaiah says that they, too, have a place in the family of God.
Eunuchs aren’t in the news so much these days. But you can fill in the blank for the group in our community and our culture today that would be least likely to be invited into the assembly of God. And it seems to me that God is saying that whoever you just decided was outside of God’s love, God’s family, and God’s mercy—you better reconsider your position.
“For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Even for foreigners.

Even for eunuchs.

Even for the people you’ve been fearing and avoiding your whole life. If they want to follow in the ways of God and join the family, the prophecy in Isaiah makes it clear that there is room for them too.

The great irony in all of this, of course, is that most of us are probably not eunuchs, but as far as the Hebrew people were concerned, we are all foreigners.

This expansion of the family of God in Isaiah’s prophecy is being lived out in this sanctuary. Today.
And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
        to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
        and to be his servants,
        all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
        and hold fast my covenant—
        these I will bring to my holy mountain,
        and make them joyful in my house of prayer….
        for my house shall be called a house of prayer
        for all peoples.
         Thus says the Lord GOD,
        who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
        I will gather others to them
        besides those already gathered.

Isn’t it odd? We have gotten so accustomed to being on the “inside” of God’s family after 2,000 years of the church, that we forget we were once outsiders too. Perhaps so many years of Christendom, of being a dominant voice in the world has made us forget that we didn’t get our “insider” status through our own merits.
We look at the people on the outside, and somehow manage to forget that it used to be us out there.  We wave at them on the outside and think, “those poor saps. Thank God I’m not like them.”

But Isaiah won’t let us forget about the Grace of God.

Thus says the LORD:
        Maintain justice, and do what is right,
        for soon my salvation will come,
        and my deliverance be revealed.

Isaiah reminds us that salvation is coming for us. God’s plan to redeem and deliver creation includes us. But we have to see that category of “us” as ever expanding. God’s family never gets smaller. It only gets bigger. This prophecy reminds us that God wants a large family.
And so we should look around the room and see our brothers and sisters.
But we should also look around the room and see which of our brothers and sisters are missing.

Who is still sitting outside the doors, waiting to be invited in?

Who is still outside because they think they wouldn’t be welcome?

Who is still outside because they’ve been told God doesn’t love them?

Who is still outside because they’ve been told Scripture is quite clear on the subject?

Who is still outside because we’re afraid of them?

Who is still outside only because they’ve never heard that God loves them and that they are welcome here?
Friends, the good news is that this story is for us. God has gathered us here. Friends the other good news is that this story is not only for us. God is calling us to open the doors and make this a house of prayer for ALL peoples.

Thanks be to God.  Amen

Leave a Comment » | inclusion of GLBT in the Presbyterian Church, Isaiah 56:1-8 | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Myth of the Individual

June 19, 2011

A sermon preached on Trinity Sunday at Southminster Presbyterian, Boise, Idaho

Gen 1:1-4

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.
And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.

John 1:1-5

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the day that pastors try to explain our doctrine, or church teaching, of the Trinity—God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is a day that pastors across the country, if they are wise, take vacation.

Because it is hard to understand the Trinity. It is hard to explain the Trinity. God is THREE and God is ONE.
One Trinitarian claim is that God is ONE, as scripture tells us in Deut. 6:4:

Hear, O Israel: The LORD is God, the LORD is one.

This is Israel’s claim and has been for thousands of years. There is ONE God. Not the pantheon of gods and goddesses that other neighboring cultures worshipped. Just ONE.

We join with Israel and the other monotheistic world religion, Islam, in claiming that there is just ONE God.

But then we have the minor detail of Jesus Christ. The Son of God. For Jesus to claim to be one with God was scandalous to his Jewish neighbors. If there’s one God, there can’t be two. It was that simple.

But we are people who claim that Jesus was both human and divine. We believe that through the life, teachings, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, we have a clearer picture of the Divine than we did before him.

Here’s how the Confession of 1967 describes it:

“The one sufficient revelation of God is Jesus Christ, the Word of God
incarnate, to whom the Holy Spirit bears unique and authoritative witness through the Holy Scriptures, which are received and obeyed as the word of God written.” (9.27)

And further complicating our understanding of God is the presence of the Holy Spirit. Our passage from Genesis this morning speaks of the spirit, the breath, the wind of God, moving across the face of the water at creation. So in the very beginning of the beginning, the Spirit is a way we know about who God is, what God does, and how God cares for us.

The passage from the beginning of John’s Gospel evokes the passage from Genesis. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

The prologue to John’s gospel is beautiful, if slightly mysterious, in English. It is even more beautiful in the original Greek, and reminds us of what we lose when poetic language is translated. We don’t, commonly, refer to a person as “the Word”. Yet, that is one of the ways we refer to Jesus.

There are lots of passages in scripture, like these, that suggested to the early church leaders the understanding that God is ONE and God is THREE.  But, sadly, Paul never wrote the Book of Trinity as a textbook on how to make it all clear and easy to understand.

And if my favorite apostle Paul didn’t feel a need to over analyze it, I’ll fight the urge too.

Because, in truth, God is a mystery. We can’t explain God. We can experience God. We can feel sheltered under the shadow of God’s wings. We can feel God’s presence when the Spirit blows through our lives. We can know more of God in the person of Jesus. We can see something of God in the vast and marvelous beauty of creation.

But we cannot, this side of Heaven, have a complete picture of God.

I would like us to consider one implication of being people who claim to follow a triune God. By claiming that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we claim that God exists, always, in community. From the beginning, God has chosen to exist as community, Father, Son, and Spirit.

It means that there is never a time when one person of the Trinity takes a vacation and leaves the other two in charge.

It means that there is never a time when one person of the Trinity starts thinking, “I think I could do just fine on my own—this community business is too much work.”

It means that there is never a time when one person of the Trinity puts the interests or concerns of self over the concerns and needs of the three.

Looking around at our world today, it seems that we have some Trinitarian problems. There seem to be many voices out there saying some version of “I just need to take care of myself and you need to take care of your own self.”

And if that is how you want to live, that’s fine, I guess. But it isn’t Trinitarian. At the very heart of God is the idea that life is better when we are connected. Or, perhaps even a stronger claim than that. At the very heart of God is the idea that life IS when we are connected.

We were not intended to be solitary beings, separated from others.

And I know this is somewhat at odds with American mythology.

–The Lone Ranger or The Marlboro man—each of them riding alone across the empty plains

–Superman, perhaps, with his ice fortress castle,

–Indiana Jones, who always thinks he can tackle his problems on his own

–Frank Sinatra singing “I did it my way”
Or think of these phrases:

–“one man band”
–“pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”

–“what’s in it for me?”

–“look out for number one”

–“it’s all about me”

–”it’s my way or the highway”

If you think I’m exaggerating about American individuality, let me give you an illustration. Different cultures see community and individuality different than we do.

If you and I hear news of a person doing something bad—Timothy McVeigh bombing the courthouse in Oklahoma City, Jeffrey Dahmer murdering people, or Ted Kascinski sending bombs through the mail—how is that connected to you, personally?
I hear those stories and think, “those people were disturbed individuals” but I don’t think it has much bearing on me personally.

But when I was in seminary, a student at Virginia Tech opened fire on campus and murdered 32 people. The shooter was a Korean American. There is a large population of Korean students at Columbia Theological Seminary and they sent out an apology letter to the seminary community. These students apologized for his actions just because he was also Korean.

I remember reading that email and being completely baffled.

Why, on earth, were they apologizing for the act of a man in another state, who they did not know?

Because he was from their community.

How would we live differently if we believed that the actions of individuals were connected to us?

What would it be like for us to apologize to people when someone in our community killed their child? The Robert Manwill trial is under way right now, but regardless of what the jury decides, this child did not have the protections he deserved. If we are Trinitarian, then it is clear that the community, that we, failed this child. Just as we have failed every other child killed in domestic violence.

We can’t just point our fingers somewhere else and say, “those horrible people did that to him.” Even though that maybe true.

We have to also say, “what are we doing to make sure this never happens again?”

How is our community supporting families? How are we supporting children? How are we advocating for children? When we baptize children, we make vows to care for them, to look out for them. And those vows extend beyond these walls. When one child dies, all of us suffer.

I recognize that taking claims of Trinitarian theology to this degree can be depressing because there is so much to do. There are so many people needing our help. Yes, that’s true.

But a Trinitarian understanding of how we order our lives and culture should give us hope. Because we are not alone.

If we model our living on the Trinitarian relationship of God, we’ll pay more attention to others. I just heard a story from a friend about a little girl who came home from school and told her mother that a little boy in her class never got what he wanted when he went through the lunch line. Kids could select chicken nuggets, or spaghetti, or whatever. But whenever this particular child went through the line, he always got a peanut butter sandwich, even if he asked for pizza.

So the mom looked into it and realized that the boy couldn’t pay for lunch and his parents hadn’t applied for free or reduced lunch, for whatever reason. So this family quietly paid for this boy to have lunch for the rest of the year. The daughter came home from school one day, not long after, and said, “mom! My friend got to pick his lunch today! He didn’t have to eat peanut butter!”

That little girl and her parents are living a trinitarian life.

When you volunteer at Grace Jordan, helping out in the classrooms, you live a Trinitarian life.

When you send money to Haiti, or Joplin, or Japan—to benefit people you don’t now—you are living a Trinitarian life.

When you go to the PRIDE Festival, as so many of you did yesterday, telling people who have been hurt by the church that God loves them, you live a Trinitarian life.

Here’s another illustration of our connectedness from the news this week. There’s a town named Phil Campbell, Alabama. The town was named after a railroad crew supervisor in 1911 and is the only town in Alabama with both a first and a last name. A guy named Phil Campbell heard about this town and went to visit years ago. And he has reached out to other Phil Campbells around the world to create a Phil Campbell convention to be held this summer in Phil Campbell, Alabama.

But then a twister went through the town in April, killing 24 and injuring many more.

So the Phil Campbells decided to turn their convention into a relief effort. This weekend, they have arrived from all over the globe to clean up, to rebuild, to raise money for a town they’ve never visited before.

That is Trinitarian living.

I also want to address the myth of non-trinitarian living. The Lone Ranger may have been called the Lone Ranger, but where would he have been without Tonto? Nowhere.

Superman may have had super powers, but if the Kent family wouldn’t have taken him in when his spaceship crashed on their farm, what would have happened to him?


And Indiana Jones always tried to go it alone, but even he had to be rescued at times. In one movie, he even needed his dad to help!

So, you will see people in our culture who are trying to tell us that we don’t need anyone else. You will hear comments about individuals and how we each need to take care of our own___________________ (fill in the blank). And I do agree that personal responsibility matters. But it isn’t everything.

None of us are where we are today only because of our own bootstrap pulling.

None.

The myth of the individual is powerful, but it is a myth. “No one is an island, entire of itself”, as poet John Donne wrote. We are not a group of self-concerned individuals. We are connected, each to the other.

So each time you hear yourself or someone else start talking about the self-reliance of an individual, remember the Trinity. Remember that not even God chooses to go it alone. Thanks be to God.

3 Comments | community, Genesis 1:1-5, inclusion of GLBT in the Presbyterian Church, individual, John 1, Trinity Sunday | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Done Waiting

June 12, 2011

A Pentecost sermon preached June 12, 2011 at Southminster Presbyterian Church, Boise, ID

Acts 2:1-21

If you recall, last week we left our disciples standing there, jaws agape, staring into Heaven as Jesus ascended up to God. But before Jesus ascended, he told them to go and wait for the Holy Spirit to come upon them.

Now, I don’t know about you, but patience is not my favorite virtue. And I wonder what that waiting was like for the followers of Jesus.

For some of them, they were probably like kids before Christmas. “Is Santa coming tonight, Mommy????!!!”  Come Holy Spirit, Come! I’m sure some of the Disciples were ready to be Spirit filled and Spirit led!

But for some of them, I wonder if the waiting was more like the way you wait for “the call” from the doctor’s office with test results. It might be good news, it might be bad news, but you both dread the call and wish it would happen sooner at the same time. Because for some of them, perhaps they were wondering if they really wanted God’s Spirit to come upon them. It sounds great and all, but the Spirit can’t really be contained or controlled. So perhaps there was some trepidation about the unknown and the uncontrollable. Maybe the Spirit will be a great thing. But maybe it will push me way beyond my comfort level.

So they wait. Some with excitement and anticipation. Some with fear.

But while they wait, they keep living their lives. The text tells us they are celebrating Pentecost. While Pentecost for the church is about this passage in Acts, Pentecost for the Jewish community was a different celebration. It marked the day Moses received the 10 Commandments on Mt Sinai, 50 days after the Passover flight from Egypt. The word “Pentecost” translates as “fifty”.

Talk about another time when the waiting didn’t go so well….

Remember what the Hebrew people did while they waited for Moses when he was on Mt Sinai, receiving those commandments? They melted down their jewelry and made a golden calf to worship.

Luckily, there’s no indication that the disciples got into that kind of trouble as they waited for the Spirit.

But you know how it is while you wait for something? It can sometimes take on a life of its own. “As soon as the Spirit comes….it is going to be awesome! I’ll have all kinds of faith and I’ll be able to heal everyone and people will like me and I’ll get that promotion at work and….”

But, often, the reality doesn’t match our dreams.

We don’t know what the disciples felt as they waited for this new thing, but we can bet that they weren’t expecting it to be like this.

And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Jews from all over the world, every nation under heaven, were gathered together, and suddenly, they were able to understand what was being said. The Spirit came and brought communication and understanding.

Today we might think, “there’s an app for that” and some way to use technology to translate all of those languages. At the UN, they have those headsets that everyone wears so they can hear what is being said in their own languages. Maybe we aren’t as impressed at this story today because our world seems smaller.

But I think we still need to pray for the Holy Spirit to return as she did that day. I still think there are plenty of conversations in our world that need Divine clarity. Perhaps it is parents and children who need translation. What if the Spirit came and Republicans and Democrats were able to understand each other?  What if we could truly hear what the other person is saying? How different would our political landscape be if that were the case?

But this clarity and understanding brought by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost is not universally appreciated.

All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

You wonder if some people wanted the Holy Spirit to come upon a more impressive group of people, rather than a bunch of fishermen from Galilee.

Because if you’re still hoping that maybe God might just somehow over throw the Romans, even though Jesus didn’t really encourage that idea, but if you’re still hoping for that, then you need the Spirit to do something that would be more impressive to the Roman leaders. I’m thinking plagues of Egypt kind of impressive—Let my people go!

But the Spirit brings understanding and clarity of language, not locusts and frogs.

And this story marks the beginning of the church. Peter hears the grumblings and the complaining and delivers a sermon that connects the work of the Spirit with the prophecies of Joel.

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

And the church, empowered by the Spirit, goes out and witnesses—to the ends of the earth. From a gathering of people from all over the world on Pentecost, they are sent out to take that glimpse of God’s kingdom to everyone else. A glimpse of a world where we understand each other. A glimpse of a world where we come together despite our differences and worship together.

The prayer of the church is  “come, Holy Spirit, come.”

But we need to remember that on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit showed up as a rush of violent wind. She didn’t follow our script. We can’t harness the Holy Spirit on a holy wind farm. When we pray for the Holy Spirit to come, we need to expect the rush of a violent wind.

We need to expect the Holy Spirit to land on people we wouldn’t necessarily endorse.

And even with our reservations, and our control issues, we still pray for the Holy Spirit to show up, to blow through our lives and our work here together.

Because even if we are a little leery about things we can’t control, the truth is, we can’t do it by ourselves. No matter how many wonderful committees we have, we have to pray for the Spirit to work through us. No matter how much money we give to the budget, we have to pray that the Spirit will use our gifts. No matter how super awesome we are, we need to pray that the Spirit will focus our gifts and combine our strengths with another’s weakness. We need to pray the Spirit will take our weaknesses and combine them with another’s strength.  Because without the Holy Spirit, we are just a group of people gathered in a room. Waiting.

And so we pray, come Holy Spirit. Because we’re done waiting. We want a rush of violent wind to blow through us, because we need a glimpse of God’s kingdom in our own lives. And we know that we have work to do so that people outside of these walls will also know how much God loves them.

So, come Holy Spirit. Help us to become the dreamers mentioned in Joel’s prophecy—people able to dream that God’s kingdom might happen here. Now. People who are able to dream that understanding is possible. People who are able to dream that God’s radical message of Love is exactly what the world needs to hear today. I’m thrilled to be here, dreaming, with you. So let’s put on our seatbelts, because it might be a bumpy ride. But come, Holy Spirit, with all of your violent wind, and with all of the life you bring to the church.

Leave a Comment » | Acts 2:1-21, Holy Spirit, Pentecost | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Change Will Do You Good

June 5, 2011

A sermon preached June 5, 2011 at Southminster Presbyterian. Boise, Idaho

Luke 24:44-53

Acts 1:1-11

The texts we heard this morning are the ending of Luke’s Gospel and the beginning of his sequel, the Book of Acts. Both stories describe the same event, but in the gospel, it is used as a conclusion. And in the Book of Acts, it marks the beginning of the story.
And we understand that. There are events in our lives that seem like endings. Clearly nothing could ever happen after a death, or loss, or tragedy, or after watching your savior ascend into the clouds. The End. That’s all she wrote. End scene.

But the story goes on.
Luke says they returned to Jerusalem and worshipped with great joy. Which is great and all.
But I think they also returned to Jerusalem wondering what had just happened.
And feeling a little unsettled.
40 days of Jesus’ resurrected presence must have upset their equilibriums after all. At first, you wonder, “what in the heck is going on?” but then, after a while, perhaps you get used to Jesus just showing up at your gatherings, eating fish with you, teaching you scripture, and then disappearing again.

But now he’s instructed them to be witnesses, he’s blessed them, and then he ascended into the clouds. This has a finality about it.

As they walk back to Jerusalem, where they worship in the Temple with great joy, you wonder if some of the joy is from the fact that it is over. As much as they loved Jesus and didn’t want him to leave, perhaps there is also relief. He has gone back to the Father where he belongs. And they are left where they belong, full of his recent teaching and instruction, ready to be the witnesses he’s called them to be. Ready to move on.

Endings are like that. We don’t want them to come. We would rather stay in the places and situations we are, and perhaps have been for a long while. But change happens. Loved ones die. Jobs and relationships come to an end. Jesus ascends up to heaven. And in the midst of the sadness of those endings, we also find joy, when we gather together, worshipping in the Temple.
And as Luke’s audience would have known, even the Temple would change, would come to an end. By the time his people are reading his book, the Temple is in ruins, never to be rebuilt. The very house of God is destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 AD. 
Surely that must have seemed like an ending from which they would never recover.  Where do you go to find God when the pipe organ is burned to the ground and things are different and you don’t even recognize the people in the rubble?

Who are all of these people and what have they done with my church????

Yes, change is hard. And I don’t say that glibly. Change is hard. We are creatures of habit and comfort and doing things the way they have always been done. It is what builds stability into our lives. It is a marker of what makes us human. When my son Elliott was a toddler, (and he gave me permission to tell this story), he especially didn’t like change. If he was playing with trains, he wanted to play with trains forever. We’d say,”time for a bath!”, and he’d cry and scream and be sad that he wouldn’t get to play with his trains. And so we’d throw the crying kid in the tub and all of a sudden, he realized that being in the bath was exactly where he wanted to be. forever. And he’d stay in the bathtub until he turned into a prune and the water grew cold. And then he’d cry when we took him out of the water to dry him off and get him ready for the next favorite activity of the day.

He’s gotten better.

But we’re reminded, as we think about Jesus’ ascension, that change happens and we have to help each other through it. We don’t stop it. We can’t stop it.

At no point in the text do the disciples leap up and grab Jesus by the ankles and say, “wait a minute, mister. Where do you think you’re going?”

Change is hard, but change happens.

And before Jesus rises on the clouds as he returns to God, he helps them prepare for the transition. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”

So when Jesus heads up to the clouds, it is because things are fulfilled, things are complete, things are finished. Not all of our endings seem to have fulfillment in them, but upon reflection, sometimes our understanding of that changes.

He didn’t leave them until it was time, until things were fulfilled.

He also didn’t leave them abandoned and say, “adios muchachos! I’m outta here!”

No, he doesn’t do that.

He says, “I am sending upon you what my Father promised”. He reminds them that the Holy Spirit will come to them and surround them, encourage them, and uplift them. They are not alone. And he blesses them and ascends to God.

 

But what is an ending to the earthly story of Jesus is only the beginning of the story of the church.

And so when Luke tells the story of the ascension to begin the Book of Acts, it is the same story, but it looks a little different. First of all, the Disciples don’t just listen and learn, as they do at the end of Luke’s gospel. Here they start asking questions. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

They’re embracing change alright. Change all the way back to the way things used to be. “Lord, is this the time when you’ll return us to the Glory Days?”

Did I mention change is hard?

This encounter reminds us that we can be selective about what we want to change. “Sure, Jesus. You can ascend to Heaven, but only if you’ll take care of this mess we’re in and return us back to the way things used to be.”

But change isn’t like that and Jesus doesn’t try to pretend it is. “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” Perhaps we need that reminder every so often. God is in control. We are not.
But he again reminds them that they are not alone. The Spirit will be with them. And they need to be witnesses of what they have seen in Jesus of Nazareth. Witnesses of where they have seen God in the midst of change they never wanted to experience. Witnesses of the grace and love from God that was visible in the person of Jesus in ways that the world had never seen before. Witnesses of life and resurrection where they only expected to find death.

And then the white robed men show up, as the crowd is staring, dumbstruck at the sky, watching the bottoms of Jesus’ feet as he disappears into the cloud. “Men of Galilee, why are you looking at the sky? Who do you expect to see there? Didn’t Jesus tell you to go and do something?“

 

And there it is. The community is reminded to go and to be the church, to witness to in Jerusalem, in Boise, in Meridian, in Ada and Canyon Counties, and to the ends of the earth. And the story spreads. What starts out as a small band of terrified disciples becomes the church that has nurtured us and brought us here today. Talk about a change!
And so we witness still.

Because change happens. And people need to know they aren’t alone in the midst of it. They need to hear from you that there is another story yet to be told, even if all they can see at the moment is an ending. So we go from this place, surrounded by the very spirit of God, and we witness to what we have seen and learned from Jesus. And we go confidently into the future, and all of the change it brings, trusting that what is now unknown will turn out to be loving, and good, and the future that God is even now dreaming for us. We don’t need to look to the sky or return to the past.

Our story is beginning again today.

Thank be to God.  Amen.

Leave a Comment » | Acts 1:1-11, Ascension, Luke 24:44-53 | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

Marci’s 2 Bits on the Rapture

May 22, 2011

These are the comments I shared with our congregation this morning in worship.

As you may have seen on the news, a radio evangelist with no formal religious training determined by a careful reading of the King James Bible that he could determine, without a doubt, that the world will end.

Yesterday.

Never mind that Jesus, himself said, “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Mark 13:32)

This man joined a long line of people and religious groups claiming to know something that is unknowable.

Since we are all gathered here this morning, we can either assume that he was again incorrect.

Or else you can look around and see who else wasn’t on Jesus’ “most popular list”. I am thankful to be in such good company.

And while it is easy to dismiss this man and his followers as loony, to use a technical term, in fact we should all be on guard against trying to use “God’s will” to promote our own agendas or causes.

The truth is, this side of heaven, we don’t know what God is thinking or how God would answer our questions.

While we do have scripture, it doesn’t always address issues of modern life. And we pray for discernment, but the truth is, “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

People who predict the end of times are often listened to more closely during times of uncertainty and turmoil. People seek comfort from the divine when there is no comfort here. Here is how theologian Paul Raushenbush put it yesterday in an article:

“The end of the world seems like a positive and real option when you are at rock bottom and don’t know how to rise up. Or maybe they are people who are simply looking for a reason to make their lives matter in the face of the alienation of our modern world, or the day-to-day tedium and challenges. Seeing a clear end date on the horizon makes every day count.”

And here is the one truth I’ve seen in the whole “end of the world” hoopla.

There are times when the end is near.

We should live each day as if it mattered, because each day does. We don’t know when disease will strike, or when a heart attack will happen in the night. We live healthy and whole lives, hoping that some day, way down the road, we will die in our sleep. But it doesn’t work out that way for everyone.

And so we tell the people we love that we love them. Today.

We enjoy time spent laughing with friends and loved ones. Today.

We get out there and enjoy life. Today.

Because “about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father”.

So don’t worry about the rapture. It is a pointless exercise that gets us away from the work God has called us to do.

And don’t worry about whatever might or might not happen in the future. But do enjoy today. Do live your life fully today. Do treat the people you meet on the journey with compassion and care. Do share the love of a gracious and merciful God with those people who are susceptible to end of the world scares, because they might need to hear of it more than anyone.

Leave a Comment » | Paul Raushenbush, Rapture | Permalink
Posted by marciglass

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