Why judgment is a gift..........

Right!  Standing in judgment, hearing how we have failed or how we have wounded another rarely feels like a gift.

It usually feels more like a ton of bricks falling on our head.  Or, possibly like that bright, hot light of interrogation that all the police used in the old movies.  Or maybe it just feels like standing naked with nowhere to hide.  But it doesn't feel like a gift.

If you go looking in the Bible there are lots of examples of judgment being pronounced.  The prophets specialized in judgment, although they would then almost always add a word of restoration. Two stories of judgment stand out in the Old Testament:  God's judgment on Eli and his family and the judgment pronounced on King David after the Bathsheba incident.

Eli was the chief priest and had allowed his sons to steal from the offerings and other assorted unacceptable behavior and the young prophet Samuel had to tell him God's judgment on the whole affair:  the family would be erased, all would die, no exceptions.

The Bathsheba incident is awful in another way.  David decided to use his power and perogative as king to bring Bathsheba, a married woman, to his bed.  Once he learned that she was pregnant, David arranged for her husband to be killed in combat.  Nice, huh.  The prophet Nathan was sent by God to show David the error of his ways.

Not a lot of fun, right?  Then how can we possibly see judgment as a gift to us?

Well, consider this.  Without judgment, who would know that they have offended God?  Or one another?  Without a word of judgment, who would stop and consider their behavior or their moral obligations?  Without a word of judgment, who would right any wrongs?

Who could be forgiven?

Without judgment, forgiveness is no more than a cheap perfume over pervasive stench.  It accomplishes nothing but lulling us into a false sense of contentment.  It certainly doesn't give us back our lives.

So we stand in judgment before God, in the spotlight of God's call to live in love with and for each other, and we see all that is truly wrong.  It is not fun, but it is a gift.

But it is the first step towards forgiveness.  It makes forgiveness powerful and life changing.  It deepens our relationship with the Lord of All, and the great lover known as Jesus.

What do we do the moment after we realize we are wrong?  Confess...........

Talitha Cum: get up and live

Perhaps she felt a little like Humpty Dumpty from the children's rhyme:  she was broken in pieces and all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put  again.  Hopeless is the word I'd use to describe her state of mind.  All her money gone to physicians who did her no good and left her worse than before.  She saw no options after 12 years of watching her very life bleeding away. Hopelessness was on the horizon.

She was the anonymous (at least to us) woman in the crowd who had heard about Jesus, and I think that she just wanted some respite,some relief from the relentless flow of blood.  She wanted the isolation, the rejection, even her own resentment to stop.  She wanted to dream dreams again.  She wanted to taste hope.

Around our nation this day, many are feeling this same desire, a desire for relief from the constant gun violence, from the fear that leads people to equate different with dangerous and to judge people based on their skin color or dress or religion.  Around our nation there are thousands who want it to stop so we can again dream dreams, so we can again taste hope. There are thousands who say there is no more time for waiting.

She had reached that point.  She was willing to try this one more thing, sure that all it would take for her to be healed was to touch the hem of his garment.  Just one touch.  She was sure.  She had heard about Jesus, the one who could heal.  She had heard about Jesus, the one who accepted all kinds of folks.  She had heard about Jesus, and she dared to hope that he truly was different and he truly could give her back her life, give her a future and heal her from the inside out.

She did not  each  out to Jesus looking for a quick fix or pie crust promises.  She did not expect to become wealthy or powerful.  She came to find life in the only one who could grant it to her. He was her last hope.

So she blended into the crowd and bent low to touch his garment.  In that moment, all those things that had been only possibilities before now became reality.  She knew in her body that she had been cured of whatever it was that was killing her.  When Jesus insisted on knowing who it was who had connected with him, she came before him and knelt one more time, this time to honor the healer, this time to show her gratitude.  This time she would tell him the whole truth.

Now the whole truth is a dangerous piece of work.  It is not the cleaned up version or the edited version, it is the truth in all its nakedness.  She laid it out before the one who is the source of all life.

We will do just about anything to avoid telling the whole truth.  We will pretend that in our nation all are considered brothers and sisters.  We will assert that all are treated equally even when all the evidence points us elsewhere.  We will go so far  as to build communities where only our kind live.  We will hear the news about a young white boy who after an hour of Bible study with folks who welcomed him decided that shooting these people was a right and proper thing to do...and we will call it an isolated incident, a case of mental illness, a sad story... when we know that hatred of others born out of fear is neither isolated, nor illness or sad.  It is taught and learned and allowed by the society from which it was born and it is a particular sin that lies between us and our black neighbors.

That is one part of the whole truth we bring before the throne of God.  We kneel before Jesus and say it all out loud:  all our unjust works and unholy desires.  We speak of the brokenness that lies deep within us; we bring our greed, lust, envy, petty grievances and irrational fears and resentments.  We pull out everything that is hiding in the darkness and poisoning us and everyone around us.

Like our brothers and sisters at Emanuel AME Church, we bring all this to Jesus.  We kneel before the one we call Savior and we tell it like it is because it is only through Jesus that wholeness can be found.  The powers of this world cannot heal this festering wound.  The powers of this world cannot turn hatred into love nor rejection into invitation.  Only the love of God in Jesus is large enough to do that.  Only the holiness of Christ can change us, heal us and make us whole.  Only the touch of this one called Jesus can we begin to live again, whether we are some young girl on her death bed or an old woman whose life is draining out. Or a nation crippled by racism.

We have tried fixing it ourselves.  We have sought every remedy known to humankind.  We have worked hard, striving to perfect our lives and in the end we too are bleeding out our very life.  We are raising a generation of hearts crippled with hatred and neighbors whose fear of violence against them is both real and random.  Finally, we come and kneel before the Lord of the Universe in truth and humility and offer our truth and our self. As individuals. As communities.  As a nation.

We come to Jesus not because we like Jesus.  We come to Jesus so we might become like Jesus, filled with the love of the Creator which overflows to all.  We come to Jesus to be made whole once again and for the first time.  Whatever we bring, we lay it down before the only one whose mercy exceeds our capacity for brokenness.  There is our hope; there is our future.

It begins with the whole truth.  Unvarnished.  Unedited.  The whole, painful truth.

Then with one touch by the one who calls all life into being we hear the great invitation:
Talitha Cum: my daughter, my son.  Get up and live.

Amen

Our response to Charleston.......and too many others

June 18, 2015

 It has been a long season of disquiet in our country. From Ferguson to Baltimore, simmering racial tensions have boiled over into violence. But this … the fatal shooting of nine African Americans in a church is a stark, raw manifestation of the sin that is racism. The church was desecrated. The people of that congregation were desecrated. The aspiration voiced in the Pledge of Allegiance that we are “one nation under God” was desecrated. 

 Mother Emanuel AME’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, was a graduate of the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary, as was the Rev. Daniel Simmons, associate pastor at Mother Emanuel. The suspected shooter is a member of an ELCA congregation. All of a sudden and for all of us, this is an intensely personal tragedy. One of our own is alleged to have shot and killed two who adopted us as their own.

 We might say that this was an isolated act by a deeply disturbed man. But we know that is not the whole truth. It is not an isolated event. And even if the shooter was unstable, the framework upon which he built his vision of race is not. Racism is a fact in American culture. Denial and avoidance of this fact are deadly. The Rev. Mr. Pinckney leaves a wife and children. The other eight victims leave grieving families. The family of the suspected killer and two congregations are broken. When will this end? 

 The nine dead in Charleston are not the first innocent victims killed by violence. Our only hope rests in the innocent One, who was violently executed on Good Friday. Emmanuel, God with us, carried our grief and sorrow – the grief and sorrow of Mother Emanuel AME church – and he was wounded for our transgressions – the deadly sin of racism. 

 I urge all of us to spend a day in repentance and mourning. And then we need to get to work. Each of us and all of us need to examine ourselves, our church and our communities. We need to be honest about the reality of racism within us and around us. We need to talk and we need to listen, but we also need to act. No stereotype or racial slur is justified. Speak out against inequity. Look with newly opened eyes at the many subtle and overt ways that we and our communities see people of color as being of less worth. Above all pray – for insight, for forgiveness, for courage. 

Kyrie Eleison. 

The Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton 

Presiding Bishop 

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 

They told us stories.....

The 6th annual On the Road with Jesus is now in the books and it was uniquely its own.  A new team leader stepped up at the last minute with a project.  She is passionate about this organization and wanted to help them and it was so easy and lots of folks helped out....and wow!  4000 cookies were baked and boxed beautifully and plated like professionals and delivered all over greater Syracuse.  I finally did the math.  4000 = 333.3 dozen, and of course that is an estimate.  I'm not sure if they counted the one or two I ate before worship began.

When it was time to tell our stories, it was the children who wanted the microphone.  We went to nursing homes.  We helped to paint.  We sang.  The adults might hesitate to talk in front of the group but the children know that they are loved and accepted and they had stories to tell.

It was beautiful.  We are growing spiritually every year that we step out in this project.  We are living out our faith and helping to shape the faith of our children.  Thanks be to God.

And yet, all that we celebrated was surrounded by yet another horrific loss of life rooted in the sin of racism.  Brothers and sisters in Christ, gathered for Bible study, welcoming a stranger were gunned down where they sat.  The shooter sat and studied with them for an hour before pulling out his automatic pistol.  When arrested he said he almost didn't do it because they were so nice.  Yet he did.  Nine dead and more wounded.

When we go on the road with Jesus, this is the world into which we travel.  It is a culture that gives privilege to white folk and puts our African-American brothers and sisters at risk.  It is a culture that is so underground, so ingrained, so assumed that most of us don't recognize it and believe we are not a part of it.

On the Road with Jesus 2015.  The songs were lovely, the flowers in bloom and the cookies delicious.  Yet at the same time, the sin of racism - the sin we do not recognize in ourselves and disown whenever possible - continues to flourish.  If we are to grow spiritually, perhaps it is exactly the place we need to start because it is eating our society alive.

We continue to remember. Lord, help us take that remembrance into our confessional and start seeking the change in ourselves that is necessary.

Lord have mercy.

Strangers we are about to meet.....

Now that we have the What will We Do?  question under control, it's time to ask, Who will We Meet?

LM is On the Road with Jesus this Sunday and all the planning is focused on the work we are planning for that day.  Everyone is searching for their bright yellow T shirts that announce "God's Word  Our Hands"  and team leaders are getting supplies organized.

We spend so much time on these things because these are the only things we have any control over.  After our planning comes the Spirit, and no one has control over the Spirit.  Each group will step out next Sunday and get to work and then the Spirit moments will begin.

New people will be met.  New stories will be told.  New invitations will be offered.  New faces will join the team.  The Spirit will be busy moving with and among us to make God's great love for this world absolutely obvious to anyone who looks our way.  The Spirit will guide at least one person to share a story from their faith.  The Spirit will lead at least one person to connect with this outpouring of talents, and not so talented work, for the sake of the neighbor.  The Spirit will challenge at least one of us to think more deeply and  grow in our relationship with the Divine.

It might look like painting and baking and planting and singing to the world, but it will really be Spirit work....opening our hearts in greater generosity, helping us recognize the breadth of the gifts we have and our ability to share those with others, leading us to connect with someone who is searching for just that connection, teaching us how to tell our Jesus story simply to another.

It's no wonder that we all get a bit excited about OTRWJ Sunday....we never know exactly what is going to happen.  But it will be to the glory of God, and for that we give thanks.

We're doing what?

We're On the Road this Sunday and even as we count down the days, new ideas are bubbling up?

For the committee, the planning is all about  What needs doing?  What are people interested in doing?  What haven't we done before?  That's how committees think, and thank God that these faithful organizing folk get us organized.  A list of projects is generated and leaders sought and team members recruited.  But then.....

Stuff that was never planned starts happening.  We have discovered that it is really the Spirit who is leading us since the most enthusiastic efforts have grown out of the passion of a member or two who then recruit others to join their cause.  People have begun to recognize their talents as gifts from God which they are eager to offer to God's work and God's people.  The Spirit at work, Stewardship in action, compassion for the Stranger.  Amazing!

Over the years we have watched a young man whose stepfather was deployed gather donations for the military respite room at the airport.  His idea.  Great response.  We have watched as the baking queens of LM have gone from a baking marathon (in our not particularly helpful kitchen) to a massive outpouring of home baked cookies from bakers of all ages.  A free car wash which effectively employed our youngest members (who, at the very least, came out clean from the experience) has morphed into family groups visiting with shut ins and nursing home patients so these same children can learn those skills.

Then there is painting the local gym equipment or all those gardeners who have found places that could use their labor for an afternoon.

Every year the announcement is made:  you can do whatever you want!  You can form your own team!  Recruit both members and friends to be a part of your project.  Every year someone new hears this invitation and takes us up on it.

We tend to think of On the Road with Jesus (OTRWJ for short) of a day of service, but I think it is really a day of stewardship - when the light bulb goes off and we recognize the abundant gifts we have received and put them to work for God.  And every year I give thanks.

On the road...........

What's happening this Sunday?   Luther Memorial is going On the Road....with Jesus!  It's our 6th annual day of service.  One would think we'd be well organized by now but what we've found if that the folks simply organize themselves in spite of our efforts and new and amazing things happen.

We thought a car wash was a great idea, and we had several other possible happenings for the parking lot too.  Nope.  All gone.  Not happening.

Instead the lead family is visiting nursing homes with plants for the folks.  They wanted their children to have the experience of hands on, one- on-one ministry.  Who can argue with that kind of faith formation?

Then one of our newer families, ready to join someone else's team, discovered that LM really was interested in what was needed in our own community, and she just happened to be connected with a non-profit school who could use help.  Permission wasn't needed, just enthusiastic 'you go for it' and now we have a whole team (which she recruited) ready to paint outdoor gym equipment for a neighbor just down the street.  And she has a couple more ideas for the future!  That's building a relationship with our neighbors.

Can I bake cookies?  A teenager asked that.  She thought that maybe she could contribute to the Baker Babes homebaked cookies which are distributed to feeding centers in Syracuse.  Looks like she might recruit some of her friends and make a day of it.  That's how the faith is shared with others.

LM is going On the Road and in the process good work will be done and others will be served but from where I sit it is the growing discipleship that makes me smile.

God bless our efforts this coming weekend, for the sake of our neighbor and to the glory of God.

Nothing can separate us.........

It was the Spirit.  Now certainly it didn't hurt that the Romans 8 passage is a particular favorite of mine and that I have heard countless sermons on the text.  It just needed to be said. Nothing.  Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing.  Nothing.  Can I have an AMEN to that?

The sermon I had prepared faded away as I listened to this powerful statement of God's continuing and constant presence in this passage from Paul.  It was Confirmation Sunday and these 3 young people are searching for themselves, a future, a calling and a faith.  They certainly weren't alone.  Family and friends showed their support by being present for the worship service, even though many of them had not been in a church in a long time.  They too were searching - even if it was unconsciously - for some message that would ring true in their lives , provide comfort or strength, and at the very least, just not lie about the truth that they lived each day.

They were not all that different from lots of our friends and neighbors who are exposed to hell fire and brimstone preaching, fundamentalist anti-science silliness, hateful speech about any number of people, and ridiculous claims about  everything from healing to wealth.  In the meantime they are working hard and watching as life takes its toll on them and those around them: finances, jobs, health, accidents, evil.  What word did God have for them on this day?

Nothing.  It was a word about the constancy, power, persistence of God's love - a love so strong that nothing can separate us from it.  The world can bring it all:  peril, famine, violence, financial ruin....none of that will make God let us go.  We can bring  it all:  nastiness, hurt, evil, rejection....and none of that will make God let us go.  God's love is there and is always: neither height nor depth or angels or principalities nor things present nor things to come nor anything else in all creation .....can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  Nothing.  Nothing.

This amazing promise does not negate the toughness of our lives.  It doesn't promise us rose gardens (which BTW have thorns!) nor does it promise smooth sailing.  It promises that in all situations and circumstances we are and we shall ever be loved and held by the Creator of the Universe.

I expect there will be a day when that is the only thing we have left to cling to.  That promise.  That God.  That Jesus.

So I preached that sermon.  Because someone out there needed to here it, and it just might have been me.

Hear Me Quickly, Lord, the end.

Hear me quickly, Lord....

Words will not do, Lord......

Listen to my humming,
     for sometimes I catch all unaware
         the rhythms of creation
     and then music without words
         rises in me to meet it,
              and there is the joy of romping children
                   and dancing angels.
Listen to my blinking eyes,
     for at certain moments
         when sunlight strikes just right,
         or stars pierce the darkness just enough,
         or clouds roll around just so,
         or snow kisses the earth into quietness,
     everything is suddenly transparent,
         and crows announce the presence of another world,
         and dogs bark at it,
     and something in me is pure enough
         for an instant
     to see your kingdom in a glance,
     and so to praise you is a gasp -
          quick,
                then gone,
                     but it is enough.
Listen to me quickly, Lord.


Amen, and Amen.

We are indebted to the visionary gift of poetry that Ted Loder gives to us in this and many other pieces.  Seek out his work and pray with him.

Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace: Prayers for the Battle, Hear Me Quickly, Lord, p. 24