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Today during my sermon I mentioned a fabulous film that came out in 1996, “The Spitfire Grill.”  It didn’t get much play time in local theaters, but it won the Audience Award from the Sundance Film Festival that year.  Set in a small-town in Maine, it follows Percy Talbott as she leaves prison and comes to Gilead, ME to begin with a fresh start.  It’s a story about the letter of the law verses the spirit of the law, and about finding redemption.  It’s a character film to be sure (if action’s your thing, pass on this one), and well worth the time to see it.

So, put it on your Netflix queue.  You won’t be disappointed.

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If you love to read and you’re looking for something to get you through the winter, I strongly recommend Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand.  It’s a true story on the life of Louie Zamperini, an Olympic athlete who was shot down over the Pacific.

I listened to the audio version of this great book on my drive across the country (shout out to Daniel for hooking me up with this), and was blown away by this incredible story.  I couldn’t believe how fast Nebraska went by!

You can get it anywhere right now (it’s a NY Times bestseller), including online at Amazon or at the local library.  I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.

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More snow this morning.  And the desire to climb back into bed or curl up with a mystery novel by the fire with a cup of tea.

But when it snows, I can’t help but think of a great and fun hymn from the hymnal, number 412 “Earth and All Stars.”  It has a great line in there about “loud blowing snowstorms” and lots of other things making noise in praise to God.  It’s a gentle reminder of Jesus’ statement that the rocks will cry out in praise  if people don’t, and that even when it seems bleak God is there.

The words are below.  Sometime we’ll need to sing them on a Sunday at St. Mark’s.  My favorite stanza is 5….


 1. Earth and all stars, loud rushing planets, sing to the Lord a new song! O victory, loud shouting army, sing to the Lord a new song!

Refrain: He has done marvelous things. I, too, will praise him with a new song!

2. Hail, wind, and rain, loud blowing snowstorms, sing to the Lord a new song! Flowers and trees, loud rustling leaves, sing to the Lord a new song! Refrain

3. Trumpet and pipes, loud clashing cymbals, sing to the Lord a new song! Harp, lute, and lyre, loud humming cellos, sing to the Lord a new song! Refrain

4. Engines and steel, loud pounding hammers, sing to the Lord a new song! Limestone and beams, loud building workers, sing to the Lord a new song! Refrain

5. Classrooms and labs, loud boiling test tubes, sing to the Lord a new song! Athlete and band, loud cheering people, sing to the Lord a new song! Refrain

6. Knowledge and truth, loud sounding wisdom, sing to the Lord a new song! Daughter and son, loud praying members, sing to the Lord a new song! Refrain

Words: Herbert F. Brokering (b. 1926) Music: Earth and All Stars, David N. Johnson (b. 1922)

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This Sunday’s lesson was from the Sermon on the Mount, with Jesus telling the disciples that they are salt and light. (See Matthew 5:13-20).

Great stuff to be sure, and great things to think about. And it gave me the chance to use those magic relighting candles while singing “This Little Light of Mine” for the family service. (There was a gasp the first time I blew it out during the line “Don’t let Satan [poof] it out” and the candle relit!)

Here it is, the sermon of the day.

Salt and Light — Matthew 5:13-20

One of the things I’ve discovered along the way, both as a Christian and as a priest, is that most of us as followers of Christ want to be seen as normal people. We don’t want to draw out too many distinctions with others who don’t follow Christ, and we go to great lengths to separate ourselves from those “other” Christians out there who are either too outspoken, too fanatical, too liberal, too conservative or whatnot for our tastes. “Oh, I’m not like those Christians over there,” we’ll say, “I’m just like you. I like the same things as you, and do the same things. There really is no difference between you and me except that on Sunday morning you drink your coffee and read the Globe, and I do the same and then head to church.”

To lay it all out there, we don’t want to be seen as weird.

The reasons we do this are varied: some don’t want to lose face in their work environments, others don’t want Christianity to come in between their friendships. Some don’t want to have people judge them based on their actions—be they seen as sanctimonious or hypocritical. More than anything, we don’t want to be perceived as judgmental of others. So we push our label as “Disciple of Jesus Christ” to the background and pull out a host of others. “Red Sox Fan” or “Dedicated Mom” or “Marketing Guru” or “Numbers Guy” or “(fill in the blank here).”

In church leadership circles, we imagine ways to make church more inviting to outsiders. We “talk about the need to create a safe, non-threatening, low threshold of belonging in order to draw people in.” We do this with good intentions, but you know the old saying about good intentions and their ultimate destination. Yet we don’t want to offend anyone, so we go at it this way regardless. We think it will grow the church, and for many it comes down to numbers, even in parishes. If I can get the average Sunday attendance up, then I must be “successful” as a priest. So we water the message down to some magical point where we think it will be palatable to the masses, while also being acceptable to the people we already have in the pews.

We’ve become, as I heard a priest put it once, the bland leading the bland.

“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus says to his disciples, “but if it’s lost its taste it’s not good for anything and should be tossed into the trash.” And there’s the rub.

If we are to be salt and light—and notice Jesus doesn’t say, “You will be” or “You should be” but “You are…”—then we need to be proactive about that calling. We need to be intentional in the way we live, and in what we do with our time.

Living as a Christian is tough in our society. Ask any teenager what happens when a situation arises where acting in accordance with their faith means serious consequences at school with their friends—if, for example, they felt sorry for the person being bullied during lunch, but recognized the cost if they did something about it. Or ask any business professional who has witnessed shady practices by their manager, but sees only immense difficulty in their work life if they speak up to the CEO. Or ask any priest sitting on a plane who is hoping they can make it to cruising altitude and turn oo their iPod and avoid the typical “So what do you do?” question because there is no certainty where the conversation will go.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why we are this way, I’d say that it is because we have lowered expectations to a miniscule level. What does it mean to be a good Christian, these days? For many it means coming to church every so often, and maybe throwing a couple of bucks into the plate. And this isn’t their fault, by the way, nor am I trying to disparage any who might think this way. The unofficial word from many leaders in our denomination is that a person is in good standing as a member if they show up 3 times a year and are known to the treasurer (I don’t even want to begin to tell you how many times I’ve heard this in serious conversations with other clergy). Our official Episcopal Church documents go further, stating that a member is in good standing if they’ve “been faithful in corporate worship…, and faithful in working, praying and giving for the spread of the Kingdom of God.” That’s a bit better, but it is still pretty non-committal about specifics.

A good friend of mine, a church consultant, writes, “I believe the low-commitment church is a primary reason why traditional religion has lost its influence and moral authority in America today. We might refer to [this] as the optional church; one that isn’t too inconvenient, doesn’t ask too much of us, doesn’t cost too much, and is certainly subservient to the consumer-driven society and the decidedly secular lives that people live today.”

Interesting thing about salt is that it doesn’t lose its saltiness through some chemical reaction or even over time. It loses its seasoning if it becomes too diluted.

We’ve become too used to a faith that asks relatively little of us, I’m sorry to admit. We aren’t light and salt in our dark and hurting world simply because we don’t know how to do this. It’s much easier to say someone else will do these things—other Christians, the government, NGOs, charities, good-natured people—and go on with our busy lives.

So what does this look like then? First, much to the consternation of many church leaders both lay and ordained, it is not to be found in inventing new programs. Creating new projects or new classes or whatnot will not help us in the long term to develop into salt and light. It’ll keep us busy, and maybe even tickle our fancies for a bit. But like everything else in this life of ours for which we are consumers, we’ll tire of it or burn out.

How we become salt and light is in recognizing that as Christians we are, as it has been put for centuries, “a new people, an alternative community with a new citizenship.” We are shaped as Christians through regular reading of Scripture and prayer, in allowing the Spirit to shape how we respond in the circumstances of our daily life, in building community with one another, in taking part in what have been termed the ancient spiritual practices . While we have a tendency to put spirituality in a neat little area of our lives that we can pull out as needed and is certainly separate from our “practical” lives, the early Christians and many since then recognized that through the life of Jesus we can see that God has come into every arena of life. Things can’t be labeled as spiritual and secular or public and private lives, rather everything is interconnected as shown in the life of Jesus, and this “not only changes everything, but should become the center” of how we live our lives.

To be salt and light means that we live into the reality that we are in fact different from our friends who don’t follow Christ. It means that we are to open ourselves up to being formed in the life of Christ, and recognizing that such formation doesn’t happen in a matter of hours or even a few days. We are salt and light when the center of our lives isn’t focused on us, but on God and others. What if St. Mark’s became a place that strongly encouraged its parishioners to enter in to this type of life? Those would be great expectations, to be sure, but isn’t that the life Jesus wants us to live into? What if this parish—what if we—became people who brought light into a dark world, including allowing the light of Christ into the dark places of our interior lives? What if we brought seasoning to every situation of our lives? If we did, I don’t think we’d recognize this place. We might not even recognize ourselves. But I can assure you that we’d change the world, and that would be worth it no matter the cost.

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I read once that preachers are called at times to comfort the afflicted and at times called to afflict the comfortable.  A daunting task to be sure.

In addition, I firmly believe that all good preachers preach first to themselves and invite the congregation to listen in.  We get a string of prophetic readings during the season of Epiphany, and they are dang uncomfortable.  Hard texts to hear, and hard texts to preach.

I don’t think, however, that I am being faithful if I just ignore these texts.  If I merely preach what I think my congregation wants to hear, I’m a pretty lousy priest in the end.  We all need to be reminded about the world we live in, even when we are uncomfortable, because it remnds us what God sees in the world.

So to that end, my sermon from last Sunday.

 

What the Lord Requires — Micah 6:1-8

I’ve always loved court-room dramas, especially ones like To Kill a Mockingbird.  The trustworthy defense lawyer who mounts a great case so no jury in their right mind would convict.  I cherish the clues along the way that help build the case.  I love the suspense of waiting for the jury to come back from its deliberations.  And I am always disappointed when the jury comes back with a conviction when, like in the case of Tom Robinson the African American man convicted in Mockingbird, it is so painfully obvious that the person is innocent.

It’s a court-room drama we get this morning in our lesson from Micah, the YHWH is bringing a case against the Israelites.  “Hear what the Lord says: Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and the let the hills hear your voice.”  In this drama, the mountains and hills make up the jury pool, and once they’re seated the Lord begins.   God starts by asking what was done to make the Israelites pay no attention either to God or the covenant they made on Mt. Sinai.  The Lord reminds the Israelites that he was the one behind their release from slavery in Egypt—the great Exodus—and God brought them to the Promised Land when they passed from Shittim into Gigal, places on either side of the Jordan River.  God reminds them of all the acts of salvation done on their behalf in years past; God wants them to remember because it is painfully obvious to God that Israel has forgotten.  They were there on the mountain to agree to the covenant when they utterly depended on God, but now that things were good, God and the covenant didn’t seem nearly as important.

“What have I done to you?” God implores.  “In what way have I wearied you?”

Israel emerges in this courtroom play as the kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar.  Instead of answering the questions asked by the Almighty, Israel responds, “With what shall I come before the Lord?  Shall I come before with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?”  Now that I’ve been caught red handed, how do I make amends, God?  Is it bringing you the offerings you want?  Do you somehow want more?

The offerings quickly escalate from burnt offerings and calves a year old—both pretty routine—to thousands of rams, vats of oil and the giving of a firstborn child.  Israel is wanting to make things right with God at this point in the trial, wanting to be reconciled, but doesn’t see how this is possible in a religious sort of way.  Israel asks if anything can be given to wipe away the sin, if God would be pleased by any offering.

A third party—probably the prophet Micah himself—answers with what has been called the Golden verse of the Old Testament.  “He has told you, O mortal, what is good: and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God.”  In other words, if you show up and make all kinds of the right offerings to God, it still won’t matter if you continue doing what you are doing.  If you continue to ignore the widows, to take advantage of the poor, to cheat folks out of their money—all things denounced earlier in Micah’s prophecy—it won’t matter what you do.  What God requires is a change in heart shown by your actions to others and in your relationship to God.  It isn’t more time spent in the temple; it’s about conversion.

I can’t help but wonder if we aren’t a lot like Israel in our day and age.  While we’ve been dealing with a great recession—and I don’t want to downplay the hardships faced by some of our sisters and brothers during the last few years of economic difficulty and uncertainty—most of us still have been blessed with a great deal.  Sometimes we have a tendency, like the Israelites, to make our faith solely about our worship attendance: if we make it to church for communion on any given Sunday then we’re in the clear with God and can go on with our lives without a second thought for the rest of the week.

But God wants so much more.  God desires a relationship.  The Lord wants us, like the people of Israel, to see the world from God’s vantage point.  Because God does see the ones impacted by the recession, and the ones who don’t have enough food, or who can’t get clean water.  God cares and wants his followers to care as well.

I want to strongly recommend a book to you, it’s written by Rob Bell and called Jesus Wants to Save Christians.  On the back cover he writes, “There is a church in our area that recently added an addition to their building which cost more that $20 million.  Our local newspaper [in Grand Rapids] ran a front-page story not too long ago revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.  This is a book about those two numbers.”

Here’s an excerpt for you:

One billion people in the word do not have access to clean water, while the average American uses four hundred to six hundred liters of water a day.   Every seven seconds, somewhere in the world a child under age 5 dies of hunger, while Americans throw away 14% of the food we purchase.

Nearly one billion people in the world live on less than one American dollar a day.  Another 2.5 billion people in the world live on less than two American dollars a day.  More than half the world lives on less than two dollars a day, while the average American teenage spends nearly $150 a week.

Forty percent of people in the world lack basic sanitation, while forty-nine million diapers are used and thrown away in America every day.  1.6 billion people in the world have no electricity.

Nearly 1 billion people in the world cannot read or sign their name.  Nearly one hundred million children are denied basic education. …  Four out of five American adults are high school graduates.

Americans spend more annually on trash bags than nearly half the world does on all goods.[1]

In addition to these unbelievable truths, Bell give us these tidbits to chew on a few pages later:  “The US accounts for 48% of global military spending.  Less than 5% of the world’s population purchases nearly half of the world’s weapons.  In 2008, the US spent more on defense than the next forty-five countries combined.  The US spends more on defense than on all other discretionary parts of the federal budget combined.”[2]

If God were laying out a case against us, there’d unfortunately be a lot of evidence.   And sometimes when a case like this is mounted against us we want to respond like Israel, we feel so guilty that we don’t know how to dig ourselves out of the hole.  “How can I stand up before God, and show proper respect to the high God?  Should I bring an armload of offerings?  Would God be moved if I sacrificed my firstborn child, my precious baby, to cancel my sin?”[3] Like Israel, our focus goes to how we make it up to God when faced with our failings.  We think maybe if we do more, we can somehow make amends.

And yet that’s not the response God is looking for.  Listen to the words from Micah again from the Message Bible, “But [the Lord] has already made plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It’s quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, and don’t take yourself too seriously—take God seriously.”

That’s our call, as followers of the living God.  In the weeks ahead we’ll be talking more about how to put these three requirements from God in to place in our lives, but  in the meantime, I think it means this: We are called to be the Body of Christ.  To be, as Rob Bell puts it, people who have committed themselves to being a certain way in the world.  “Our destiny, our future, and our joy” he writes, “are in the Eucharist, using whatever blessing we’ve received, whatever resources, talents, skills and passions God has given us, to make the world a better place.”[4]

How is God calling us to share our gifts with the world and to deepen our connection with God?  Will we open ourselves both to God’s evidence of our failings and also to God’s deep mercy and desire for us to be so much more?  I hope that we will, and trust that, if we do, God will have the case against us thrown out.

[1] Rob Bell and Don Golden.  Jesus Wants to Save Christians. Zondervan, 2008.  122-23.

[2] Rob Bell, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, pgs. 127-8.

[3] Language from the Message Bible (Micah 6:6-7).

[4] Bell, 163.

 

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I mentioned a book by Rob Bell this past week in my sermon, Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile.  It’s actually by Rob and Don Golden.  Both these guys are tremendous pastors and also have a real heart for the life God is calling us into.  It’s a tremendous and thought provoking and very challenging book.  Where Rob and Don end up is on how we, as the Body of Christ, can be a Eucharist for the world.  I won’t say much more than that, except that it is well worth the read (and you can get it through the Central Mass Libraries if you want to check it out).

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My first Sunday at St. Mark’s was on Sunday, January 16.  It was a truly wonderful day!  Here is the text for my sermon on that day.

 

“Come and See” — John 1:29-42

Our reading this morning from the Gospel of John takes place sometime after Jesus has been baptized, and presumably after Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.  We’re simply told that John the Baptizer saw Jesus walking near the Jordan River one day.  John had previously encountered the religious authorities who wanted to know if he was the Messiah or not.  John tells them that he wasn’t even worthy to untie the Messiah’s sandals.  So when John spots Jesus nearby he proclaims: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!”  John tells any who would hear how the Messiah was coming into the world: not as the “All-Powerful… Deliverer” but as the “sacrificial… lamb.”[1] Jesus comes not in a display of might but with an unassuming nature to bring about transformation in all who would follow him.

We’re told that it takes another day for this to really sink in with those standing nearby, because John has to say it again.  When he does, two of his disciples really hear his words and decide to go and follow Jesus.

Jesus hears these two walking behind him, so he stops and turns to speak with them.  “What are you looking for?” he asks.  “Rabbi, where are you staying?” they say.   Teacher, where do you teach?  Where do you live?  The Gospel writer himself has already tipped us off to this answer in his prologue a couple of verses earlier. “The Word became flesh and lived among us,” or as the Message Bible puts it: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”

Jesus looks at these two men eager to follow him.  “Come and see,” he replies.  And they do.  They spend the rest of the afternoon with him.  They end up spending their lives with him.

Thirteen years ago this week Melissa and I were sitting almost exactly where you are sitting today, coming to see the new rector.  In our case, we had endured a long and difficult interim period with two different priests, both not-so-gifted preachers, if you catch my drift.  We were somewhat new to the Episcopal Church and had be hired as the part-time youth ministers for our parish during the interim, but we weren’t sure if we would continue.  We came that Sunday morning somewhat tentatively; we decided to take a wait and see approach with the new guy.  We wanted to be sure he could preach, if he was an authentic follower of Christ, if we could be guided by his leadership.  And if not, if he wasn’t, we’d finish our commitment with the youth through the school year and then leave.

In our case it turned out very well.  For you all, well, I for one have been praying that it will be likewise.

The invitation Christ makes is to come and see, yet how often in life—and especially how often in our spiritual lives—do we take a wait and see approach?  How often do we stand back unwilling to commit or engage because we’re uncertain of what lies ahead?  How many times do we waver because we need to think things through more fully or check things out or test our hypotheses about Lord knows what, instead of hearing the proclamation of the Baptizer and following Jesus?

How many times do we hesitate when faced with Jesus’ invitation to come and see?

Best selling author Donald Miller describes this dilemma in what has become one of my favorite books of the past year titled A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.  Don wrote a deeply personal spiritual memoir a few years ago that did very well, and he begins this new book by recounting a phone call he received from a couple of guys wanting to make a film of his memoir.  He learns pretty quickly, though that while his pensive internal wrestling makes for good writing, it doesn’t make for a good movie, unless, as he states, you have James Earl Jones narrating your inner dialogue.  So he sets out on discovering what makes a good film, how to create a story people really care about.  He attends a three-day story-writing workshop in Los Angeles, and learns that “A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.”[2]

When he gets back home, Don sees his friend Jason, who has a thirteen-year old daughter.  Jason’s daughter has been dating a guy “who smelled like smoke and only answered questions with single words: “Yeah,” “No,” “Whatever,” and “Why?”[3] And to top it off, Jason and his wife recently found pot in their daughter’s room.  They aren’t sure what to do: grounding hasn’t worked, instead pushing her further away.  They were running out of answers, and it was getting worse.

Then Don said something that surprised even himself.  He told Jason that his daughter was living a terrible story. Jason asked what he meant, and Don went on to describe what he learned in LA.  He told Jason a good story involves a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it, although he wasn’t quite sure how this applied to Jason’s daughter.  So Don said, “I don’t know, exactly, but she’s just not living a very good story.  She’s caught up in a bad one.” Jason had a ton of questions, and Don, thinking maybe Jason was interested in movie-making, spent an hour talking about all that he had learned.[4]

A few months later Don saw Jason again, and he asked how things were going with his daughter.  “She’s better,” Jason said, and when Don asked why, he replied that his family was living a better story.[5] He went on to tell Don that as he reflected on what they had spoken about, he realized that he hadn’t invited his daughter in to a better story.  Instead she had latched on to the most exciting story she could find, the one with the rebel teen.  So Jason went online to do some research and found out that there was an organization building orphanages around the world.  He called the organization and found out it took $25,000 to build one of their building.  The family had just taken out a second mortgage and didn’t have that kind of money, but it had the makings of a good story.

So he called a family meeting.  Jason recounts it this way, “I didn’t tell my wife first, which turns out was a mistake.  But I told them about this village and about the orphanage and all these terrible things that could happen if these kids don’t get an orphanage.  Then I told them I agreed to build it.”

“You’re kidding me,” Don replied.[6]

He wasn’t.  And it didn’t take long for his wife to forgive him for not talking with her first and to say as well how proud she was of him.  It wasn’t much longer after that that his daughter, Annie, climbed into bed with them one morning—like she used to when she was a kid.  She told them that they all needed to travel to the village in Mexico to take photos of the kids to help them raise the money.  A few weeks later she dumped the monosyllabic boyfriend.  Jason summarized it this way, “No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her.  She knows who she is.  She just forgot for a little while.”[7]

“Teacher, where are you staying?” we ask.   “Come and see.”

Jesus is inviting us into a better story.  He wants us to follow him and live a life that is so much more than the ones we live by ourselves.  He encourages us to come and see now, not to stand on the sidelines waiting for some elusive future moment.   When we engage fully in the things of God, we not only live a better story, we also work with God as co-participants in transforming the world.

What kind of life is Christ inviting us into as a parish in the days ahead?  What role will you take?  There will be challenges to be sure—those first followers have no idea of either the great joys or great sorrows in store for them—but it takes those things to make a good story.

I am tremendously hopeful and confident about the future of St. Mark’s and the work and life we will engage in together as we seek to authentically serve Christ.  Jesus has come into this neighborhood too, and invites us to follow him.  The journey before us is about to begin, and I hope you will join with me as a disciple of Jesus Christ, as we come and see where he will lead us.  Amen.

[1] Greg Garrett, “John 1:29-42: Homiletical Perspective.”  Feasting on the Word: Year A, Volume 1. David Bartlett & Barbara Brown Taylor, eds. 263.

[2] Donald Miller.  A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.  2009.  Pg. 48.

[3] Miller, 49.

[4] Miller, 50.

[5] Miller, 50.

[6] Miller, 52.

[7] Miller, 54.

 

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