The Places We Cannot Reach

         On Monday, I arrived home from a wonderful trip to Austin, TX (where I took part in my brother Tim’s wedding).  Judith officiated and I was the best man.  I’ve heard literally hundreds of best man toasts (the good, the bad, and the ugly), but never had a chance to deliver one, so that was fun.   I have to say that it is also good to know that my brother has found his soul-mate in Wendy.

That’s me, singing “Desperado” as part of the best man toast.

            My brother shared with us the night before the wedding that he has a favorite sculpture at Brookgreen Gardens near Myrtle Beach, SC.   Fashioned by Hermon A. MacNeil, it depicts “the sculptor” as a female angel, sheltered under the sweep of her wings, with her face turned into the block, holding a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other, carving herself out of the stone.  “Into the Unknown,” as the sculpture is titled, is about the mystery of artistic creation.  But my brother helped me see that it is about something more.

“Into the Unknown”

            There are places, Tim told us, that the angel sculpting herself cannot reach.  Those places require the assistance of someone else to help complete.  Marriage to the right partner can be like that.   It can help reveal who we were meant to be.  It can bring out the best in us.  Our partner can help us get to the places we cannot reach.

             Of course, good Reformed theology would posit that none of us is self-made, that God is the creator, and that God is continuing to work on us.  At the same time, we do play a role, through the hammer and chisel of the choices we make, in shaping our own lives.  And yet, there are spots that need the hand of another.

             It occurs to me that my brother’s insight applies not just to marriage, but to the idea of Christian community (and community, period, for that matter).  Our identities as disciples (more universally,  as human beings) get shaped in community, not in isolation.  The conversations we have in person and on-line, the experiences and insights we share together, the comfort and challenge we provide to one another in congregations (and in a presbytery, and elsewhere) help us get to the places we, by ourselves, cannot reach.

             That’s why I’m so glad to be a part of a number of small groups, including my Sabbath Renewal group.  That’s why I’m glad to be connected to a number of you on Facebook and elsewhere; to be an active participant in the life of a congregation; to have a spiritual director; and yes, to be married to a partner, in Judith, who is my soul-mate and colleague in ministry.  You help me get to the places I cannot reach on my own.  And for that, I am grateful.

             May it be so for you, too.

Sermon: Sunday, April 28, 2013, “Narrative, Dreams, and Visions”

“Narrative, Dreams, and Visions”

Sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt

Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA

April 28, 2013

 Click here to listen to an MP3 of this sermon

Acts 11:1-18, Revelation 21:1-5

             Our first passage for this morning is from the book of Acts of the Apostles, which is also regarded as the second volume of Luke’s Gospel.  Just as Luke’s gospel is the story of Jesus’ life and mission, so Acts is the story or stories of how the ministry Jesus began is carried out through those who followed him being led by his Spirit. That Spirit led them, and leads us into deeper understandings of how we are to relate to others.  It also gave them the power to move forward into this new territory.  Acts 11 is a story of Peter retelling a story of a vision he had that led him to reach out to and eat with Gentiles (literally, people not like us), which up to that point, had been considered taboo. 

 

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God. So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’ Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ‘I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners; and it came close to me. As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. I also heard a voice saying to me, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But I replied, “By no means, Lord; for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.” But a second time the voice answered from heaven, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house. He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, “Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.” And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning. And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’ When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’

 

                Our second passage is from Revelation, the last book in the Bible.  Revelation is filled with the outlandish and often difficult to interpret visions of a man named John, on the isle of Patmos, where he was in exile.  Presbyterians don’t tend to spend a lot of time in the book of Revelation, but we do read this passage at funerals and memorial services because it speaks a comforting and unambiguous word about God dwelling with mortals.  God is with them–Immanuel.   It’s a passage about the redemption of creation and how all flesh will see it together.  You could say it’s a passage about how our story comes to an end.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
‘See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’

 And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’

                 I think the novelist and essayist Barry Lopez is right. We are held together by stories.  Stories and compassion, that’s what holds us together.[1] The stories we tell ourselves and each other, the narratives we construct to describe human experience, these are the things that hold us together as individuals and as communities. A big part of what it means to be human is to tell and listen to stories.

                Last night Judith and I went out to dinner with our daughter, Martha.  She spent much of the time regaling us with stories from the McLean High School band trip to Orlando last weekend. We had not yet heard the stories. She went on and on, telling us about what they’d experienced together. How she had the butter beer at Harry Potter World, and how she went on some rides but didn’t want to go on others. So she was glad she was with the wimpy group so she didn’t have to ride them.  We listened intently.

                We are a storied and story-telling people. You get together with old friends at a high school or college reunion, you say goodbye to a loved one at a memorial service or a leave-taking, and what comes to mind? Stories.  Stories of the times you shared together, the things those experiences taught you.   

                It’s not that concepts, ideas, and principles aren’t important.  They are.  But the way we come to understand what they mean is often, most often, through stories: narratives we tell ourselves or others tell us to illustrate the point, to connect it to the real world in which we live.  Jesus knew this.  That’s why he did so much of his teaching, particularly in Luke’s gospel by telling parables.  What are parables, but stories told to illustrate a point?

                I’ll never forget preaching one Sunday five or six years ago. I can’t recall what I was preaching about, I don’t know what the text was, I have no idea what I said, but I do remember that the children were still in the service. They were singing that day. There was no morning hour.  And so there they were, all lined up on that front pew.

                As my sermon droned on, (I’m sure it was electrifying for everybody else, ha!), the kids became increasingly preoccupied.  It didn’t take long:  looking down at their bulletins, doodling, poking each other, looking around in space, but near the end when I launched into a story, I’ll never forget what happened.  Every one of their heads swiveled toward me. I had their attention. They were mine. Eyes fixed on me, leaning forward to hear a story.  Stories.

                What is the last story you shared with somebody? It might have been telling somebody about a particularly helpful salesperson.  It could have been a story that poked fun at yourself, or, hopefully not, but possibly, painted someone else in a destructive light. It might have been a story about some joyous occasion, something that happened here at Immanuel, or at your work, or at home, or on a trip.  That’s why trips are so important, by the way, they create shared stories.  Those of you who went to Peru with me have stories you can tell.  They create shared stories.  So those of you who went to Peru with me on two different occasions, we have stories we still can share.  Trips create shared stories.

                Next weekend, I’ll be in Austin, Texas for my brother’s wedding.  He’s finally tying the knot.  And he’s asked Judith to officiate so that I can be the best man. I’ve never been a best man before.  As I prepare for my duties, you can bet I’m going armed with plenty of stories, not all of which I will tell.  And, you know me, I’ll come back with stories, too.  Probably not all of which I will tell.

                It is important to pay attention to the kinds of stories we tell ourselves and each other, the kinds of stories we tell our children.  The kinds of stories we listen to day in and day out because stories shape us and they shape them too.

                William Bennett, who was the Secretary of Education during Ronald Reagan’s second term, was known among other things for compiling and publishing The Book of Virtues – a Treasury of Great Moral Stories. [2] I listened to those stories on tape going back and forth from my first church.   It is a great collection of stories.

                Bill Bennett knew the importance of funding our imaginations with good stories. The stories we tell about ourselves and each other and life are important – and I think there is some value in the old adage – “garbage in, garbage out.” So what you want to do is put good stories into your brain, heart, and soul.  Stories that will nurture and shape you for the better. The thing you want to do is tell and hear good stories.

                I know of more than one therapist who will tell you that as young children, we create a story about ourselves and we spend the rest of our days gathering data that supports that narrative, and rejecting, ignoring, discounting, or not even seeing evidence that runs counter to it.

                So if I begin to believe early on that I am loved, cherished, and capable no matter what challenges life throws my way, then I live that narrative, and treat as an aberration anything that runs counter to it. But If I begin to believe early on that my worth and security are tied to making other people happy, that I must have approval in order to survive, then I will see things that bear that out too and discount things that don’t bear it out.   If I am told early on and begin to believe that I am worthless, that I can’t accomplish anything worthwhile in life, that’s part of the story I begin to tell myself.  Then I’ll see things that bear that out, and discount things that don’t. 

                We have to pay attention to the stories we tell ourselves and our children because often these things can become self-fulfilling prophecies. That doesn’t mean we are locked into the narrative that we’ve told ourselves.  We can adopt a new one and not be held captive to the old one.   I love the way one person summarized the gospel in less than seven words.  It was part of a project for The Christian Century in which prominent pastors and scholars were asked to sum up the good news in seven words or less. This person wrote:  “Everybody gets to grow and change.”[3]   So, we are not locked into old narratives, but we need to be intentional about changing them.

                Over time we don’t just create a story about ourselves, but we create a story about the way the world works and how we view those who are different from ourselves. We operate out of certain narratives, assumptions which often go unexamined and unchecked. They become biases,  prejudices and stereotypes.  We tend to be more critical of the narratives others operate out of than our own.  And we tend to not be attentive to what runs counter to our narrative.  We see what confirms it, and ignore what challenges it.

                Let’s engage in a little exercise for a moment, shall we? I want you, in your mind, to complete some of the following sentences. America is always… Conservatives are. .. Liberals are…  Asian Americans are…  Homeless people are….  Muslims are…  Christians are…  African-Americans are… 

                I’m not sure how you completed those sentences—we could go on and on with sentences like those (people who vote one way are… people that vote the other way are…)—but let me suggest that the way you completed those sentences has something to do with a deeper inner narrative that you carry around with you.  And that narrative may be supported by stories that fit the narrative, but you may have missed or ignored other things that run counter to it.  And if you paid attention to them, your biases might change.

                The Apostle Peter had a narrative. He understood who he was.  He knew that he was Jewish and that Jewish people ate certain things and there were certain things they didn’t eat. And he knew that Jewish people ate with certain people, namely other Jews, and that there were certain people with whom they didn’t eat.  He knew that God was primarily concerned with a certain group of people and there was another group of people that God really didn’t have a lot of concern for.

                Peter learned that narrative. And he spent three years with Jesus.  But narratives are hard to examine and to change. Sometimes it takes something big to bump us out of a particular narrative.  Sometimes it takes a dream or a vision.

                What happens with Peter is that he is on the rooftop in Joppa. The last time I preached on this, I asked this question.  But does anybody know who else went to Joppa in scripture?  Jonah.  Jonah, arguably the only successful prophet in all of scripture because when he goes to deliver God’s message – to Assyria, to Nineveh, the heart of Assyria – and preaches, they all repent.  Even the cattle put on sackcloth and ashes! But before he goes there, he decides he’s going to go as far away from Nineveh as he possibly can because he has a narrative about Assyrians, and he has a narrative about God, and he has a narrative about himself, so he goes to Joppa to get on a boat to Tarshish. 

                So Peter’s in Joppa, which Jonah showed us is where people go to escape from God’s call to love people not like them.  While he’s in Joppa he stays in the home of Simon the Tanner. I was talking to Nadine Van Orsdel last week and she was relating to me her experience in Morocco.  She went to Morocco on a photography trip and while she was there she visited a leather factory.  She learned something about how leather is made.

                There are people who work in that leather factory who anybody knows will only live thirty or forty years at best, because they are dealing with smelly, nasty, animal carcasses and awful chemicals that are used to treat the skins to turn them into leather.  It is a nasty job to be a tanner.   Simon Peter went to be with Simon the Tanner, and what tanners were was unclean, because they dealt with death all the time.

                So Peter is there with Simon the Tanner in Joppa and he has this vision of a tablecloth being lowered and on that tablecloth there is all sorts of stuff that a good Jewish person wouldn’t eat.  There is a ham sandwich.  There is shrimp cocktail.  There is clams casino.  Anything that you could imagine that a good observant Jew of that day and time would not want to eat, it is on that sheet.  And God said, “Eat up, Peter!” 

                Peter says, “No, no, no!”  I know what the book says.  The book, our story, is very clear on this.  We don’t eat things like that.  And God three times, always three times with Peter, never just once, three times says, “Eat it.”  And when he finally does, he gets the message, “What I have called clean, you must not call unclean.”

                Of course, that’s not just about food. There at the home of Simon the Tanner, another Simon, Peter, the one who denied Jesus, learns something about people not like him and God’s love for them.  Maybe he comes to understand that If he, himself can be regarded as clean, then who is to say the Gentiles can’t?  So when some Gentiles show up at the door, he can understand that God wants him to love and reach out to them as well.

When the apostles back in Jerusalem ask him, “Peter, why are you doing that? Why are eating with people not like us? Why are you reaching out to people who are not like us?  Why are you doing something that the book says not to do?”  Peter says this, “Let me tell you a story…”

                                                                                                                                Amen.  

                                                                                                                             

---

[1] This is a paraphrase of Barry Lopez’s quote on the front of this morning’s bulletin:  “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”  You can read more about and from Lopez at his website:  http://www.barrylopez.com/

[2] William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993).

[3] Lillian J. Daniel, “Everybody Gets to Grow and Change: The Gospel in Seven Words or Less” The Christian Century (November 11, 2011).

Sermon: Sunday, April 14, 2013, “Close Encounters of the Holy Kind”

 “Close Encounters of the Holy Kind”

A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt

At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA

On April 14^th, 2013

Click here to listen to an MP3 of this sermon.

Acts 9:1-7, John 21:1-19

Our two scripture passages for today feature, in turn, the two most significant figures—aside from Jesus—in the New Testament, Paul and Peter.  The first story, from the 9^th chapter of Acts, recounts the Apostle  Paul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus, but as Chris pointed out in the Moment for Young Disciples, he was not the Apostle Paul when he met Jesus on the road.  He was simply Saul, a Pharisee from Tarsus who was invested in persecuting Christians.  Try to imagine what this encounter might have been like for him.

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.  Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.  He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’  He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’  The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.  But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.’  The men who were traveling with him stood speechless, because they heard the voice but saw no one.

Our second passage, from the 21^st chapter of John’s Gospel, details a post-resurrection encounter that the Apostle Peter has with Jesus.  Bear in mind as you hear it that not long before this, Simon Peter has denied knowing Jesus three times.  In the intervening time, Peter and the disciples- if you take John’s chronology seriously-have already had a couple of visits from Jesus as they gathered in the upper room.  Now, apparently, they were ready to go back to the way things were before, back to when they were just fishermen, not fishers of people.  Listen now for how God might be speaking to you and me through these words.

After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. Simon Peter said to them, ‘I am going fishing.’ They said to him, ‘We will go with you.’ They went out and got into the boat, but that night they caught nothing.

 Just after daybreak, Jesus stood on the beach; but the disciples did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to them, ‘Children, you have no fish, have you?’ They answered him, ‘No.’ He said to them, ‘Cast the net to the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’ So they cast it, and now they were not able to haul it in because there were so many fish. That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the lake. But the other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish, for they were not far from the land, only about a hundred yards off.

 When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.’ So Simon Peter went aboard and hauled the net ashore, full of large fish, a hundred and fifty-three of them; and though there were so many, the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’ Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them, and did the same with the fish. This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’ A second time he said to him, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Tend my sheep.’ He said to him the third time, ‘Simon son of John, do you love me?’ Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’ And he said to him, ‘Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, ‘Follow me.’

If I asked you to talk about a time in the past six months when you felt you had encountered God, experienced the holy, how might you respond?  Just think about that for a few moments.

Some of you might have a fairly ready answer.  A feeling of assurance that washed over you in the midst of a crisis… A sense that you were being empowered to take on some new challenge… called to address a need… or led through a difficult decision.

You might speak of an awareness of the power of community in sorrow or laughter or service.  You might talk about an intuition of God’s presence in prayer, a hard won insight, reconciliation.  You might talk about a time of communal worship or study that really seemed to almost crackle.  You might talk about a healing that was nothing short of miraculous.  You might even talk about last night’s Auction.

Others might have to think a little, or a lot, longer.

And still others might be reticent to speak, afraid to name the doubt or the sense of distance that nags at you in the night—or that you’ve perhaps grown so accustomed to that it no longer really bothers you all that much.  The issue is settled.  The hypocrisy of others, the inhumanity in the world, the illogical nature of believing that there’s something more out there than we can pin down, the unanswered prayers, the personal disappointments… they just add up to too much. And yet, you’re here.  God or no God, experience or no experience.

Which brings us to the two stories I just read; I daresay they are two of the most well-known and oft-rehearsed encounters with the holy in the New Testament.  Saul being knocked off of his…donkey on the road to Damascus and Peter having a real-live “come to Jesus” moment on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.  Both of them pretty direct and dramatic…

If those stories represent the standard by which we assess whether or not we or someone else have had an experience of the God Jesus came to embody, then, at first glance, membership in that club might be fairly exclusive.  Those who haven’t been knocked flat by a bright light and heard an audible voice from on high, or had a sit-down conversation with a first century Jew named Jesus need not apply.  Anything short of that sort of absolute certainty—a certainty which Paul and Peter would presumably claim—would leave a lot of people out, and most of us much of the time.

The late Mother Teresa had an experience of absolute certainty.

On Sept. 10, 1946, after 17 years as a teacher in Calcutta with the Loreto Sisters (an uncloistered, education-oriented community based in Ireland), Mother Mary Teresa, who was then 36, took a 400-mile train trip to Darjeeling. She had been working herself sick, and her superiors ordered her to relax during her annual retreat in the Himalayan foothills.  

On the ride out, Teresa reported, Christ spoke to her in a vision.  He called her to abandon teaching and work instead in “the slums” of the city, dealing directly with “the poorest of the poor” — the sick, the dying, beggars and street children.  ”Come, come, carry Me into the holes of the poor,” Christ told her. “Come be My light.”

The goal was “to help them live their lives with dignity [and so] encounter God’s infinite love, and having come to know Him, to love and serve Him in return.” [i]

             So when she came back to Calcutta, having been filled with a dramatic sense of God’s light and presence and call, that’s what she set her mind and heart to do—she set her mind and heart to serve the poor.

But she apparently never again had that same sort of dramatic experience of God.  According to Come Be My Light[ii], the book fashioned from her letters and diary entries, within a few months her diaries record frustration and longing and a sense not of God’s presence, but of God’s distance.

Meanwhile she tended to the basic needs of the poor and sick and lame of India’s worst slums, all in the name of the one who said, “When you do it unto the least of these my brothers and sisters, you do it unto me.”

She had a dramatic experience, but much of her life she felt distance, even an uncertainty—even while she was ministering to Christ himself. 

             In 1979, in a letter to a confessor of hers, Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, Teresa wrote, “Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”[iii]

So much for dramatic experiences being our benchmark.

If the lesson in the stories we read of Paul and Peter is that the way to assess our experiences of God is by how dramatic they are, then I don’t think their stories are as helpful to us as they might be.   Because in a congregation like this, sure, some of our stories might be dramatic: a miraculous healing, a crisis averted, a vision of sorts, a provision arriving in some unexplained way.  But more often than not, God’s presence is mediated in a nudge, a leading.  The experience of community and the joy of service, a prayer shawl, a visit made, a helping hand extended, the whelms of love and compassion, the well chosen word, the inspiration of a song or a worship service, forgiveness human and divine.

If the way to judge whether something qualifies as an experience of God is how dramatic it is, then we may not have many experiences to talk about.

If, however, the stories of Paul and Peter point us in the direction of what encounter and relationship with God might do to us or lead us to do, dramatic or not, then there’s more than a little utility in them.

On the day before Palm Sunday, twenty Immanuel members and friends went down to the National Gallery of Art for a tour of artwork related to Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection led by our own Carol Cochran, who is a docent there.  One of the paintings she showed us was by the Renaissance artist Tintoretto—his Christ by the Sea of Galilee.  You see a reproduction of it on the cover of your bulletin.  It is a dramatic painting.

One of the noteworthy things about the painting is that it depicts the water between Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and the disciples out in the boat being choppy, and not at all still.  Beyond the boat, deeper into what is also known as Lake Tiberias, the waters are calm.  But between Jesus and the boat, the waters are choppy.  And you see Peter, with the halo, having gotten clothed and getting ready to jump into the sea to swim to Jesus.

If you ask the experts, the water between the boat and Jesus is turbulent to represent the magnetic force, the draw, bringing Peter to Jesus, the claim Jesus has on Peter.  It crackles.  That makes sense of me.  But it also strikes me that the choppiness of the water can be a metaphor for more than simply divine attraction.  It’s a metaphor for the truth, and it is the truth, that living a life in response to God is not always smooth sailing or smooth swimming.

As Peter will find out when he gets to shore, loving God means loving God’s people, particularly the needy ones.  The mark of loving Jesus is tending to and caring for the ones whom Jesus calls his sheep—the ones in need.  It’s not always dramatic or glorious.  It is simply something that you are called to do.

One of the best things we’ve started here in the past few years, and I thank Dan Thomas and Janet Tysse for making this happen, is our Real World, Real Faith program.  Once a month after our morning service, we hear from a member of the congregation who tells us about his or her faith walk and how it is played out in his or her vocation.  So last week we heard from John Nields who talked about his work as a lawyer and how his faith has impacted that—and how his lawyering has led him to serve people in need—the homeless and those who have made mistakes.  We’ve heard from Irena Lum, Greg Stanton, Bev Merson, Beth Simms; we’ve heard from a lot of people in this congregation.  And what all of their stories bear out—every single one of them—is something that the stories of Peter and Paul also share: that the experience of God, however you name it, is something that leads you out of yourself into service to others.   And that is not always an easy road.  It’s not always smooth sailing.  It can involve heartache.  It means that from time to time you have to get out of the boat, leave some things behind, and take on some new challenges.

Later today we will be saying goodbye—which is a contraction, by the way, for “God be with you”—to Mike Orend.  Mike is not someone who brings attention to himself, he is not someone who will stand up and share his faith.  He is someone who simply lives it.  Simply lives it.  Not in a dramatic way, just in a day in and day out way.

If you want to ask about Mike’s faith talk to the Dreamers for whom he showed up in the middle of night.  If you want to ask about Mike’s faith, talk to Jermaine Hailes, who is now in prison, and wrote about how much Mike’s care for him meant.  If you want to ask about Mike’s faith, look to the fact that we have a Dreamer Program at all.

Time and again, what Mike said to us, in not so many words, was, “If you love God, what are you doing to love God’s people?”

I love how the story of Peter’s encounter with Jesus ends.  It comes after the “If you love me, feed my sheep,” part—that threefold repetition calling Peter to care for the needy.  (Peter always needs to hear things three times).   After that threefold repetition, Jesus says to Peter, “You know, when you are old, they are going to bind you up and they are going to take you where you do not want to go.”

That’s the thing about life.  That’s the thing about serving the God whose love is embodied in Jesus and us.  Sometimes it takes us places we would not on our own choose to go.

But there’s one more thing.  We may get led where we do not choose to go, but we don’t go there alone.  We don’t go there alone.

At staff meeting this week I read a piece from Frederick Buechner’s book Telling Secrets.  As I was reading I got just a little choked up.  I didn’t expect it to happen.  I got choked up on the word anorexia.

Here’s how this section of his book ends:

I REMEMBER SITTING parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God? I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both, but for me it was an epiphany. The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and one afternoon brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen. [iv]

Thank you, Mike, for the way God has used you.  Amen.

---

[i] David Van Biema, “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith” Time Magazine, August 23^rd, 2007.  You can read the whole article here:  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720-2,00.html

[ii]Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light—The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, ed. by Brian Kolodiejchuk (New York: Doubleday, 2007).

[iii] David Van Biema, “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith.”

[iv] Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Memoir (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp.49-50…

Sermon: Easter Sunday, March 31, 2013: “More Than an Idle Tale”

 “More Than an Idle Tale”   

Sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt

Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA

March 31, 2013

 Easter Sunday

Luke 24:1-12

          Each of the four canonical gospels takes a slightly different approach to the story of the women going to the tomb on that first Easter, what they find there and how they respond to it. The Gospel of Luke’s version is the assigned reading for this Easter. As I read the text, pay particular attention to what happens when the women go into the tomb, what the two men in dazzling clothes say to them, and how the eleven remaining disciples respond to the news they bring back. Listen for God’s word to you in Luke’s gospel:

 But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

         The Gospel of Luke does us a favor by letting us see how the eleven disciples responded to the word of hope the women brought back from the tomb. The women, breathless with excitement over their encounter, came back to let the rest of the group learn of the good news.

          I can hear the women now. (Speaking very fast) “We went to the tomb and the body wasn’t there! And there were two men in dazzling clothes, I think they were angels, and they told us, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Don’t you remember all that he told you while he was with you in Galilee, about how he was going to be crucified and rise again?”

          And I can see somebody in the group, maybe Peter or James or John, telling the women to slow down, to think clearly, to get their heads on straight.  I can see the others in the group raising their eyebrows, shaking their heads in disbelief, dismissing the women’s firsthand report from the tomb as nothing more than what the New Revised Standard Version calls an “idle tale.”

          Actually, the Greek word translated as “idle tale” is leros.  Leros is the root from which we get the modern word delirious. In other words they were saying to the women, “You’re out of your minds. You must have a fever. You’re crazy to believe that. And we are not going to.” And the eleven didn’t believe. Not at first anyway. It was just as hard to believe that a man could rise from the dead then as it would be to believe it today.

         The Gospel of Luke does us a favor by giving us the eleven disciples’ reaction to the news because it is, well, so natural. It is so natural to disbelieve something so unnatural.  It’s the kind of response you or I might have – or maybe do have – to such news. When you think about it, resurrection breaks all the rules of what we think is possible in life.  If the dead don’t stay dead, what can you count on?[1] Things we thought were settled and certain may no longer apply.  Resurrection, in other words, throws off the balance, upsets the apple cart and generally turns our neat and orderly lives out of whack, which is why I think if you don’t find the resurrection at least a little hard to believe, then you’re probably not taking it very seriously.

         A colleague of mine, Rachel Held Evans, wrote recently about the doubt and disbelief that some people bring to Easter morning. “It may nag at you, like at pebble in your shoe…or worse it may feel like it is pushing your head under the water.”[2]

She writes:

It may be triggered by an image, a question, something the pastor said, something that doesn’t add up, the unlikelihood of it all, the too-good-to-be-trueness of it, the way the lady in the thick perfume behind you sings “Up from the grave he arose!” with more confidence in the single line of a song than you’ve managed to muster in the past two years.

And you’ll be sitting there in the dress you pulled out from the back of your closet, swallowing down the bread and the wine, not believing a word of it.

Not. A. Word.

So you’ll fumble through those back pocket prayers – “help me in my unbelief!” – while everyone around you moves on to verse two, verse three, verse four without you.

You’ll feel their eyes on you, and you will recognize the concern behind their cheery greetings:  “We haven’t seen you in a while!  So good to have you back.”

And you’ll know they are thinking exactly what you used to think about what you called Easter Sunday Christians.

Nominal.  Lukewarm.  Indifferent.

But you won’t know how to explain to them that there is nothing nominal or lukewarm or indifferent about standing in this hurricane of questions every day and staring each one down until you’ve mustered all the bravery and fortitude and trust it takes to whisper just one of them out loud on the car ride home:

“What if we made this up because we’re afraid of death?”[3]

(In other words what if it is all leros?)

Evans ends her piece by writing,

There are other people singing words to hymns they’re not sure they believe today, other people digging out dresses from the backs of their closets today, other people ruining Easter Sunday brunch with their questions today, other people just showing up today.

And sometimes, just showing up – burial spices in hand – is all it takes to witness a miracle.”[4]

         I think the real miracle of Easter is not summed up in the mental gymnastics it takes some people to believe in their heads that a first century Jew named Jesus literally rose from the dead.  So many people get tripped up there. Don’t! The real miracle of Easter is trusting with your heart in the power of God to ensure that sin, death, and evil don’t get the last word, but love does.  When you trust that, you show up – burial spices in hand – and sometimes you see things that are even more amazing, in their way, than a man rising from the dead.  You see things that are so amazing that you can believe that God can raise the dead after all. That it’s not just an idle tale. Easter is about the power of God to bring life out of death, to bring hope out of despair and discouragement, to bring love and compassion where fear and hatred would be the natural responses.

         The theologian Philip Yancey, who wrote the book Where is God When It Hurts? was asked by the pastor of Walnut Hill Church, a large congregation just outside of Newtown, Connecticut, to come and speak to that community just two short weeks after the tragedy there this past December.[5] In preparation for his talk, Yancey read about Desmond Tutu’s experience as head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It was an experience which Bishop Tutu knew would test his theology, because the hearings were laced with real life stories of brutal assaults and terrible crimes often carried out by people who considered themselves good Christians. After two years of hearing horrific stories of human inhumanity to other human beings, Tutu nonetheless came away with his faith strengthened, because he had also witnessed accountability, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

On the heels of that, Tutu wrote:

“For those of us who are Christians, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is proof positive that love is stronger than hate, that life is stronger than death, that light is stronger than darkness, that laughter and joy, and compassion and goodness and truth, all these are much stronger than their ghastly counterparts.”[6]

         As a counterpoint to Tutu, Yancey also read some of the writings of the New Atheists and evolutionary biologists, people who would reject Tutu’s religious perspective.  Richard Dawkins, for instance, believes that “the universe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”[7]  According to Dawkins and some evolutionary biologists, we are no more than “complex organisms compelled by selfish genes to act out of self interest.”

         “Is that what you’ve seen here?” Yancey asked the nearly one thousand people who gathered at Walnut Hill church on a snowy night just two weeks after the shootings. “I don’t think that’s what you’ve seen,” he said. “I have felt an outpouring of grief, compassion, and generosity – not blind, pitiless indifference. I’ve seen acts of selflessness, not selfishness: in the school staff who sacrificed their lives to save children, in the sympathetic response of a community and a nation.  I’ve seen a deep belief that the people who died mattered, that something of inestimable worth was snuffed out on December 14^th.”[8]

         What Yancey was talking about in that church was the power of God to ensure that sin, death, and evil didn’t get the last word. That didn’t mean that those who were killed at Newtown would miraculously come back to life in the here and now, be restored to their families’ and friends’ living rooms and kitchen tables.  It did, however, mean that God wasn’t going to let that be the end.

         In Newtown, Yancey says, he asked a familiar question with a slight change. He asked, “Where is no-God when it hurts? The answer: if we are all just cosmic accidents, we live meaningless lives in a universe of random events and detached indifference. The parents who lost a child at Sandy Hook recoil from such a conclusion. Following the apostle Paul, most of them hold tightly to the hope that the existence of their son or daughter did not end on December 14^th, 2012; rather, a loving God will fulfill the promise to make all things new.” [9] That’s what the resurrection is about, finally. God’s promise not just to raise a first century Jew from the dead, but to make all things new.

         There’s a clever video I ran across this week that starts by treating the testimony of the women as if it were just an idle tale, after all. Words scroll across the screen as you read:

Easter has come, but for many of us this is not the ultimate reality. There is too much pain and suffering in the world today. Death has the last word.  It would therefore be foolish to say that the life and death of a first century Jew named Jesus makes a difference. Why? Might makes right. Power is superior to compassion and despair is stronger than hope. So I refuse to believe a man can come back from the dead. Sometimes the most important facts are the hardest to accept. Resurrection is a false hope. How can you say an empty tomb changes everything? Don’t you see? God loves the world is a lie.  Money is god and the one who dies with the most toys wins. I will tell you what I tell my children. There is no more to this world than what you can see hold and buy. There is no mystery in everyday life. And there is nothing sacred about ordinary things and people. And many of us simply do not believe that God can give life to the dead, bring light to the darkness, and create something out of nothing.[10]

         And after those words scroll out, and you see them all, the words, “But what if the testimony of the women at the tomb was true?” come up.  Then you read backwards, and this is what it says.

But what if the testimony of the women at the tomb was true?

Then God can give life to the dead, bring light to the darkness, and create something out of nothing.  Many of us simply do not believe that there is nothing sacred about ordinary things and people, there is no mystery in everyday life and there is no more to this world than you can see and hold and buy. I will tell tell you what I tell my children. The one who dies with the most toys wins and money is god is a lie. God loves the world. Don’t you see? An empty tomb changes everything. How can you say resurrection is a false hope? Sometimes the most important facts are the hardest to accept. A man can come back from the dead. So I refuse to believe that despair is stronger than hope, power is superior to compassion and might makes right. Why?  The life and death of a first century Jew makes a difference.  It would therefore be foolish to say that death has the last word. There IS too much pain and suffering in the world today. But for many of us this is not the ultimate reality.  Easter has come.[11]

         Do you see how changing the perspective, reading it backwards, understanding that the “idle tale” might just be true, changes everything?

         On Monday of this past week, Holy Monday, a man in my former congregation, eighty-eight years old, went to pick up some rent from a past due renter.  He was taken at gunpoint, told that his grandchild was in peril, brought to a bank, and told that if there were any funny moves when he went in, that would be the end.  He went in, withdrew money from the bank, came back out to the truck, and the man took him to a field and shot him dead.  This criminal left an innocent good man, whom I care about enormously, dead in a field where they didn’t find his body until late Wednesday night.

         The people of my former congregation need Easter this week more than they’ve ever needed it before. And guess what? They have it. His wife, Ruth, with whom he would have celebrated seventy years of marriage in May, is bravely holding her head up because she knows that Lindsey is with God. And that congregation and that family know the Easter truth that death does not get the last word, life does. And that hatred doesn’t get the last word, love does.  And that despair doesn’t get the last word, hope does.

         They need Easter more than they’ve ever needed it before. And guess what? They have it.  And so do we…  So do we.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

Aaron D. Fulp-Eickstaedt

[1] Anna Carter Florence, who teaches preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, GA, where Judith and I went to school, said this in an interview at WorkingPreacher.org. You can see the whole interview here:  http://www.workingpreacher.org/preachingmoments.aspx?video_id=10:

 [2] Rachel Held Evans, “Holy Week for Doubters” in her blog at rachelheldevans.com. You can read the post here: http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/holy-week-for-doubters

 [3] Ibid.

 [4] Ibid.

 [5] Philip Yancey, “National Tragedy and the Empty Tomb” Christianity Today March 28, 2013.  You can read the full article, from which I paraphrase, here:  http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/april/national-tragedy-and-empty-tomb.html?start=3

[6] This piece from Desmond Tutu, referenced without attribution by Yancey, probably came from No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999).

[7] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1996).

 [8] Yancey, “National Tragedy and the Empty Tomb”

 [9] Ibid.

 [10] David Lose is responsible for creating the video, “Easter is Coming.” You can see it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c2inXKD6PI

 [11] The story behind the creation of the video can be found here:  http://www.davidlose.net/2013/03/the-story-behind-easter-is-coming/

Beyond the Pushed Button

“Beyond the Pushed Button”

A sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt

At Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA

On February 3^rd, 2013

I Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

             Our first passage for today is perhaps the Apostle Paul’s most famous writing—from the his first letter to the church in Corinth, the 13^th chapter.   Known as the love chapter, this passage, our assigned lectionary reading for today, is often and appropriately read at weddings.  But it was originally written for a community—a community filled with people who, to put it mildly, didn’t always agree and whose actions toward each other weren’t always marked by love.   Every time I read about the Corinthian church, I give thanks for every church I’ve ever served—and particularly for this one.  Regardless, this is Paul’s word of correction to their unloving behavior.

 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

            Our Gospel lesson is a continuation of the passage I read last week from Jesus’ first sermon at the synagogue in Nazareth, the one where he read the passage from Isaiah 61 (The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor).  When he finished reading that, he sat down and said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Our passage picks up with the people’s reaction to his words.  Listen now for how God might be speaking to you and me.

Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

             What is it that pushes your buttons?  What makes you see red, react without thinking, stop listening to anything else the person who is conversing with you is saying?  What irritates you?  What gets under your skin?  Think about that for a moment.  Did you come up with some things?  I did.

We all have a few things like that.  Usually the people who know us best know exactly what those things are.  In an ideal world they would use that power for good, and not for evil. Which means that they basically avoid using it.   Like the Apostle Paul said, love is patient, love is kind….

But that’s in an ideal world, and we don’t live in that world.  We live in a world where people, even people who care deeply for each other, at least occasionally push each other’s buttons.  So it’s good, too, to be aware of what sets us off and to breathe deeply before we react.

             Like the Apostle Paul said, love is not irritable or resentful.  In other words, it isn’t touchy.  It doesn’t fly off the handle or hold a grudge.

I believe I’ve said this from this pulpit before, but it bears repeating, that one of my Mom’s favorite sayings is HALT.  H for hungry, a for angry, l for lonely, t for tired.  Whenever you are hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, you do well to halt.  Pause.  Stop.  Stop before you say something you regret.

Ann Lamott has a twist on that for Mothers in Law, she calls it WAIT. Why Am I Talking?[i]  But it’s not always easy to wait or to halt, right?

Brothers, sisters, spouses, parents and children, friends:  we know just what to say that can make the other person go off.   I was really good at doing that to my brother when we were younger. One time I got him so mad he threw a Rubik’s cube at me.  It hit the brick wall in our living room and exploded—into more than 27 pieces.

Then again sometimes a person can go off without warning.  You don’t even realize you’ve pushed a button until after they’ve reacted.

Buttons can get pushed in conversations among friends or on social media, too. Especially around certain issues—maybe that’s why they call them hot button issues.  You know what they are.  They provoke strong reactions.  People feel deeply about them.  We do get touchy.  In a charged environment it can be so easy to take things the wrong way.

It struck me this week in looking at our Gospel story from Luke that it is a pretty good example of buttons being pushed.  All the way around….

I’d contend that it starts with Jesus himself getting his buttons pushed, perhaps taking something the wrong way.  He’s just finished reading the scripture from Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth.   He’s just told the people that the scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing.  And then Luke writes that they all spoke well of him—his listeners were amazed at the gracious words that come out of his mouth.  That’s a good thing, right? Who wouldn’t want to get a little praise, a little affirmation?  That always feels good.

But when the people start to say, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” the tone of the interaction shifts dramatically.  It’s as if they’ve zinged Jesus somehow.

Of course, you can take, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” more than one way.  Just like reading an email or a Facebook post, we have no sense of the tone, the inflection, so we can only make assumptions.  It could be, “Hey, how about that!  Isn’t that Joseph’s boy!  Good for him.”   Or it could have sounded more like, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”  Regardless, either could have felt like a bit of a put down:  like they weren’t taking him seriously enough.

I have a pastoral colleague who says that when she came back to her home church after she was ordained and delivered a sermon there, some people told her afterwards, “That was a nice little talk.”  Hmmm.

Perhaps the human Jesus was a little raw around the edges about that.  “What can we learn from the son of a carpenter?” he might have heard them saying.  (“Don’t they know whose son I really am?  And what’s wrong with being Joseph’s son?”)   “Who does he think he is?” he might have heard them saying….(“Oh yeah? I’ll show them.”)

Maybe all the people in Nazareth want is for the hometown boy to show them what he can do.  Work a little of that “Spirit of the Lord is upon me” stuff in their midst.  You know, help some blind people see, free some of the captives, that sort of thing…   But Jesus is not going to oblige them.  In fact, he assumes what they are going to say.   He puts words right in their mouths.

By the way, this happens in families all the time, right?  “Oh, you’re going to bring that up again, huh?”  We project what the other person is going to say.  The tapes play, and the various actors in the drama fall into their roles, and it’s the same old, same old.  Even in relatively non-dysfunctional families the pattern plays itself out again and again.

Anyway, for whatever reason, I think somebody or something pushed Jesus’ buttons.  So he went off. “No doubt you’re going to quote me the proverb that says physician heal thyself.  And you’re going to say, do here what you did in Capernaum.”

Well, our tradition says Jesus is the Son of God, so he was no doubt a better mind reader than the rest of us. But, it’s worth noting that they never actually had a chance to say what he said they no doubt were going to say.   When he tells them, “No prophet is accepted in his hometown.”  That’s when things start to get ugly. That’s when he pushes their buttons.

He does a little Bible study with them. He alludes to two stories about prophets who, even though there were plenty of needy people in their own country of Israel reached out and helped foreigners.  There were lots of poor widows in Israel, but Elijah helped a poor widow in Zarephath,  Jesus reminded them. There were lots of lepers in Israel, but Elisha healed the leper Naaman, who, if you know your Bible, was a Syrian general.  The implication was that the prophet’s mission was to the outsider as well as the insider, or to the outsider even more than the insider—because many insiders went unhealed in the days of Elijah and Elisha.

Luke puts this story near the beginning of his gospel—his take on Jesus’ life and its meaning—because the picture he paints of Jesus and his mission is centered in showing how he reaches out to the least, the last, and the lost—the Gentile, the outsider, the Samaritan, the foreigner, the Roman soldier, the Syrian general.

You need to understand that talking about God helping a Syrian general would have gone over about as well among the Israelites of Jesus day as it would among the Israelis of today.  It would be like telling a congregation of Christians, a minority in Lebanon, that they are called to be kind and gracious to their Muslim neighbors.  It would be like telling people who get their news analysis from MSNBC that they might have something to learn from FOX news and the people who listen to it.  Or vice versa.  Or, that if you can’t learn something from them, at least that you shouldn’t demonize those with whom you disagree.

If you want to be heard, you don’t talk positively about Syrian generals. If I were Jesus’ P.R. person, his campaign director, or his therapist, if I were his advisor, I would have told him to strike that particular example.  “Uh, that part about Naaman?  Jesus,  I was thinking you might want to leave that out.  I can guarantee you that won’t end well.”

But here’s the thing.  Although I get confused about this from time to time (as we all do) I am not supposed to be Jesus’ advisor.  He’s supposed to be mine, and yours, too.

And Jesus pushes my buttons, and maybe yours, too, because he stands there in Nazareth telling me that the people I think are beyond the pale are also recipients of God’s love and healing   And he hangs there in Jerusalem asking God to forgive those who demonized him.

Jesus pushes my buttons, and maybe yours, too, because we all know how tempting it is in this highly partisan environment to simply write people off because they disagree with us.

The great thing about the history of Immanuel is that, at our best, this has been a place where there has been room for dialogue on the Vietnam War and other wars, on economic and foreign policy, on social issues.  We have not always agreed, but when we haven’t, we have by and large agreed to disagree at least somewhat agreeably, because there is something bigger that unites us.  That something is the idea, as Ronald Reagan said, that, “We are people who believe love can triumph over hate, creativity over destruction, and hope over despair, and that’s why so many millions hunger for God’s good news.”[ii]

Sometimes we need to have our buttons pushed.  Sometimes they are, whether we need them to be or not.  The question is what happens next?   Do we halt, wait, and even listen?  Contemplate what it is that we might learn from the other?   Engage in respectful dialogue, which means not impugning the character of those with whom we disagree?          Or do we follow the example of the good people of Nazareth, who, when their buttons were pushed, took Jesus to a cliff outside of town and tried to throw him over.  Of course, that didn’t stop Jesus, who somehow passed through the midst of them, continuing on his button pushing way all the way to the cross.

If he’d just had a better P.R. person, he might have avoided that fate.

I have a friend who is reading a biography of Mahatma Gandhi right now.  Yesterday he passed along a quote from the book that makes me think about Jesus and not just Gandhi,

“By doing at all moments what he thought right and not what he thought expedient, or comfortable, or profitable, or popular, or safe, or impressive, Gandhi eliminated the conflicts in his personality and thereby acquired the power to engage in patient, peaceful conflicts with those whom he regarded as doing wrong. He took words and ideas seriously and felt that having accepted a moral precept he had to live it. Then he could preach it. He preached what he practiced.

At the root of innumerable wrongs in our civilization is the discrepancy between word, creed, and deed. It is the weakness of churches, states, parties, and persons. It gives men and institutions split personalities. Gandhi attempted to heal the split by establishing harmony in place of discrepancy, and as he progressively attained it he became happy, relaxed, and gay.

Gandhi had mental health because in him word, creed, and deed were one: he was integrated. That is the meaning of integrity. ‘The truth shall make you free’–and well. Through truth, Gandhi set himself free in order to go to jail.”[iii]

Have your buttons been pushed?  Mine have.  So what are you and I going to do about it?

In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

[i] I heard Ann say this at a book signing at Politics and Prose about a year ago.  I don’t think it’s actually in her book,  Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son (New York: Riverhead, 2012), but it would certainly fit.

[ii] This is from one of his speeches, and was played as part of a video tribute to him at his memorial service at Bel Air Presbyterian Church.  You can see the entire tribute here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvN1jTkzXbY

[iii] Louis Fischer,  Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (New York: Signet, 1982, first published in 1950), p. 40.

When the Ordinary Becomes Sacred

When the Ordinary Becomes Sacred.

When the Ordinary Becomes Sacred

“When the Ordinary Becomes Sacred”

Sermon by Rev. Aaron Fulp-Eickstaedt

 Immanuel Presbyterian Church, McLean VA

January 20, 2013

John 2:1-11

Our assigned lectionary Gospel text for today is the familiar story of what is known at Jesus’ first miracle:  the changing of water into wine at a wedding in the small Galilean town of Cana.  As you hear it this morning, I simply ask you to listen to it carefully as if you were hearing it for the first time.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, ‘Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.’ So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.’ Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

It was just an ordinary wedding. No more or less special than any other wedding at the start.  Just two people from a small village in Galilee, (we still don’t even know their names), tying the knot before a large group of their family, friends, and neighbors. It would have been quite a crowd.  The ceremony and subsequent celebration would have lasted several days. For a celebration like that, in a culture like that, you needed lots of wine. I suppose in a culture like ours you might need a lot of wine, too. But they needed it as part of the ceremony as well as for the celebration. Not only did it function to bring joy and gladness, but it was necessary for the ritual observance. And it was the groom’s responsibility to make sure the wine didn’t run out.

Running out of wine would have been an unmitigated disaster.  From that moment on, a couple would have been looked at askance. It would have been the talk of the town. People would have pointed at them, whispered behind their backs. “See those two?  The wine ran out at their wedding!  They’ll never make it. They’re doomed from the start. The wine gave out at their wedding!”

The second chapter of John’s Gospel puts us right in the middle of just such a crisis. A real disaster in the middle of an ordinary wedding.  The wine has given out. Mary is there, and so are Jesus and his disciples, and she calls him over. “They have no wine,” she tells him. “Woman, what have you do with me? My hour has not yet come,” he responds. But she forges ahead anyway, telling the servants to do whatever he asks, not taking his “No” for an answer.

And you know the rest of the story. He tells the servants to fill the six stone jars with water, ordinary water. They do. He tells them to dip it out and take it to the chief steward. They do. The chief steward tastes it and is amazed but he’s got a perfectly reasonable explanation – he doesn’t know what has happened behind the scenes. He goes to the bridegroom and says, essentially, “Hey buddy, why have you been holding back all the good stuff until after the guests are drunk?”

“This was the first of Jesus’ signs,” John’s gospel goes on to say. And, “his disciples believed in him.” His disciples believed in him? Believed what exactly?  That he had just performed a fabulous party trick? That he would have made an awesome caterer? That he was a pretty special guy? Of course, it was not so much what they believed about him, as it was that they believed in him. It is good to have someone believe in you, believe that there is possibility in you, even if you’re not Jesus.  Just ask some of our Dreamers.

One of my colleagues, when asked to sum up the gospel in seven words or less, wrote, “We are who God says we are.”[i] It’s good to have someone believe in you.  God believes in you.

John’s Gospel calls this miracle a sign. Sign of what? Well, it’s a sign that God’s presence somehow dwells in Jesus. It’s a sign that God can break into the ordinary world of human beings; that God can take an unmitigated disaster and transform it from the last word into something better than before. Scholars say that it’s meant to show how Jesus takes the old wine of Jewish ritual purification and transforms it into the new wine of grace and abundance that is big enough for the whole world. Others talk about how this story is a foreshadowing of the cross – the ultimate disaster.  How could anything be worse than seeing your leader die on a cross of shame?  The wine must have seemed like it had run out indeed that day.

Gail O’Day says this in her commentary on John:

“This passage poses hard questions for the interpreter because the miracle challenges conventional assumptions about order and control. About what is possible. About where God is found and how God is known.  The interpretive task is not to put the miracle in a framework which makes sense like the attempts of the steward in the story, but to free the faith community to receive the extraordinary gifts this miracle offers.”[ii]

The Wall Street Journal had an article about weddings this week[iii]: specifically about the growing trend of couples having more than one wedding: the American wedding and the Indian wedding – the West coast wedding and the East coast wedding so that family and friends on both coasts can be included.  The state-recognized civil wedding and the religious one. The question that gets raised for these couples by their family and friends is, “Which wedding is the real one?”

Well, we are on the cutting edge here at Immanuel.  Seven years ago, Al Jurkin and Kim Stansberry had not one wedding, but three. (Really more like two weddings and one massive Canadian reception!”)  The first was a small ceremony, just about twelve of us, right here in this sanctuary. That was for legality’s sake, to get the paperwork done, to ease the immigration hassles.  But then we had the bigger one with the wedding gown, the cake, the reception and the whole nine yards.

Kim and Al’s First Wedding

The question is, which of the two weddings was the real one?  Which one was sacred?  Well, you might say that both were, because they both took place in the sanctuary and because we invested deep meaning in both of them.  Heck, I wrote a sermon for both of them. The Canadian celebration was in its own way sacred because it too was a celebration of love, surrounded by family and friends who couldn’t be here. It was in its way a recognition of God’s marvelous grace – a grace which challenges conventional assumptions about what is possible – bringing together Kim and Al, just as it brought together Bizzy and Michael, Lauren and Ben, Kennedy and Megan, and the names go on and on, and Brian and Christian.

There are a number of ways to define what it means to be sacred. But I like this definition:  what makes something sacred is whether or not we attend to God in the midst of it.

So this sanctuary is sacred space, our labyrinth is meant to be sacred space, and the Assembly Hall where we have worship each Sunday evening is sacred space, too. Baptism is a sacred ritual, as is communion.  But so, potentially, are all sorts of ordinary things, events and interactions in life. The time you take to really listen to another person, over a cup of coffee or on a car ride or sitting beside his or her hospital bed… The time you take to hear another’s pain, to share in his or her celebration, this is sacred, too.  It’s God breaking into the ordinary.

There is the album of photos your mom made for you, chronicling the week she spent with your children when they were little. They’re grown and she’s dead now and every time you pull it out and look through it, it makes you cry.  The tears are your indication that it’s a sacred thing.

The 50^th wedding anniversary celebration my family had for my mom and dad this past Thanksgiving – that was sacred. Any moments you take to be “present to” and grateful for the gift of life are sacred moments.  Setting apart time for rest, to disconnect from the hustle and bustle, this too can be sacred.

Frederick Buechner is so good at writing about the sacredness of life – and how it is all tied up in stories, our stories and the stories of others. It is in the hearing and telling of these stories that we sense how God is at work in the world.  He wrote,

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness, touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”[iv]

It’s not just the big days that are sacred, but every day can be if we keep our eyes open and our ears pricked.  Every encounter has the possibility of revealing God’s glory, especially if it strengthens us to take on the challenge of risking, living and caring for others.

The word sacred is tied to the word sacrament.  I’m fond of telling couples I marry that, even though the Reformed tradition tells us there are only two, I think we should regard marriage as a sacrament because like baptism and communion, marriage can be a visible sign and seal of God’s invisible grace.

What makes marriage sacramental is not so much the wedding day, however, but how it is lived out.  Oh, not every marriage works, and there is abuse and infidelity, incompatibility and all of that, and there are times when being together is worse than being apart. I know that. But I also know that way too many marriages go by the wayside way too easily.

What makes marriage sacred is what happens when the wine has run out. It’s what happens when you’ve been together long enough to get really disappointed in each other. When you’ve been together long enough to get on each other’s last nerve, and the nerve after that. To know exactly which buttons to push.  To be aware of the other person’s worst personality flaws, and yet you somehow have the grace to hang in there with each other, anyway. That’s what makes marriage sacred.

Perhaps my favorite Garrison Keillor story from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon is the one about Pastor Inqvist and the 5 Day Rural Lutheran Clergy Conference in Orlando Florida.  I won’t share the story in its entirety – but I commend it to your listening someday.[v]

 The story goes that Pastor Inqvist was all set to go to the 5 day Rural Lutheran Clergy Conference in Orlando, Florida – and he and his wife Judy were really looking forward to it.

It was a close vote in the Deacons’ meeting on whether or not to approve it, opposed mostly by those who weren’t too sure about Pastor Inqvist when he came on 13 years ago, and after 13 years they were sure they weren’t sure about him. They thought he was too liberal, they thought that he was soft on Catholicism, that there was too much of “on the one hand this, on the other hand that.” in his preaching.

Val Tollefson was the one who led the opposition, but the trip was approved. All through a cold Minnesota December parishioners kept telling Pastor Inqvist, “It’s a cold one today, yah, but you, you got that trip to Orlando to look forward to.” It bothered Pastor Inqvist to think that this was on their minds, that anybody could begrudge him this.

So when Val Tollefson spoke up on a Monday night at the board meeting in which they were dealing with the church budget (the night before Pastor Inqvist and his wife were to leave for Orlando) and he said, “When I see those pictures of starving people, I wish we could do more for world relief, you know, trim some of the non-essentials out of our budget, travel and this sort of thing,” Pastor Inqvist replied, I suppose we could cancel my trip to Orlando, starting tomorrow.”  He did that hoping that somebody would object.  But no one said anything, until Val said, “Okay then, if that’s how you feel.”

It wasn’t how he felt, but it was what he said. He felt miserable, sick, and so did his wife Judy when he told her later that night about what he’d done.  She was not happy. The next morning they spoke in clipped tones to one another until she finally let him have it. “I guess what interests me,” she said, “is your tendency to make noble sacrifices on behalf of both of us without checking with me about it. It’s wonderful to turn the other cheek, but you don’t have to turn mine too.  If you want to be a martyr that’s fine, but the great martyrs went off to the martyrdom alone. They didn’t invite their wives along. I wish you would have asked me,” she said.  And then she began to weep, cry, like a song of womanly grief and love. He sat and listened to her, this woman who had borne and helped raise his children, this beautiful woman with whom he had been looking forward to this trip for so long.

He went up to bed, sick with the flu.  The rest of the day:  silence.

Later that night, Father Emil came over with a bottle of French cognac,” to pay a call on the sick,” he said.  And when Pastor Inqvist asked him how he was doing, the priest said, “I’m fine, but you!  I hear you got snookered out of a trip to Orlando!”

Wednesday morning, Val Tollefson called and said, “I feel kind of bad about the other night.  I suppose if you got on a flight tonight you could make it for the Thursday meetings and come back on Friday.”  And Pastor Inqvist said, “No, no that’s all right, Val but I appreciate it.”

Now here is where I want to get Keillor’s words just right, because they are so beautiful.

“He looked across the table at his wife who was smiling at him.   She said “I love you, you know.”   He said, “I love you too.”  He said “I’ll make it up to you somehow.” She said, “I really do love you.” And she put her hands on his head. And stood behind him. And he felt tears come to his eyes.  It’s an amazing thing to be loved by someone,” Keillor concludes. “It’s almost just about enough, to be loved by someone. Almost just about enough.”

What does it mean to be loved by someone?  What does it mean to love someone?  Well what that might cause you to do is all tied up with what is sacred as well.  It is a sacred thing to try to match how we behave with what we believe and to do it in the name of love.

Frederick Buechner is right that we do well to pay attention to when tears come to our eyes.  Sometimes a place becomes sacred because it is the scene of a tragedy, a terrible disaster, something that has caused us to weep.  And how we respond to that disaster can be sacred, too.  Such is the case with what happened in Newtown, Connecticut back in December.  In the aftermath of the massacre in Newtown, a lot of people have sought ways to respond.  Not all of them agree on the best way.

One of the great things about Immanuel, about this community of faith, is that we don’t all see eye to eye on every political issue.  We have a diverse congregation.  We don’t always agree nor do we have to. The people who disagree with us on a particular issue are not crazy, moronic wing nuts, they are good, Christian people who have different points of view on the role of government for instance.

I know a lot of people who are advocating for a ban on assault weapons – and those who think that’s not a good idea.  Some are writing letters pushing for the ban, and for sensible gun legislation and doing so because they feel it is their sacred duty.  Others won’t.

My own daughter, who is a member of my wife’s church, Trinity in Arlington, was so moved in the aftermath of the violence in Newtown that she went to their Session and asked them to approve a letter writing campaign to legislators, a letter writing campaign pushing for an assault weapons ban. They’ll be holding it in the church. Martha is organizing that campaign, preparing a slide show on violence, and readying materials, and she’s doing that because she is hearing a sacred call to make a difference.

I’m proud of her for the way she in her own understanding is responding to what she understands as a sacred call.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

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[i] Nadia Bolz-Weber  “We Are Who God Says We Are: The Gospel in Seven Words” in The Christian Century blog, March 2, 2012.    You can find the post here:  http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2012-03/we-are-who-god-says-we-are

[ii] Gail O’Day, “The Gospel of John: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections,” The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Vol. IX (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995), p. 540.

[iii] “Two Weddings, One Happy Couple,” Wall Street Journal.com, January 16^th, 2013.  You can read the article here:  http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887323468604578245782119353410-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwNzExNDcyWj.html?mod

[iv] Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation, (New York: Harper Collins, 1983).

[v] What follows is largely paraphrased from Garrison Keillor’s “Pastor Ingqvist’s Trip To Orlando” reproduced on compact disc by Dan Rowles. The original material is copyright by Garrison Keillor and Minnesota Public Radio and was shared on his show A Prairie Home Companion in 1985.  You can listen to it on the CD Gospel Birds and other stories of Lake Wobegon.