“Thank You Notes”

Philippians 4: 10-23

May 6, 2012

R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

The Bible contains many literary forms. There are song lyrics, proverbs, love poems, histories, a novella (Jonah), gospels, sermons, letters, and so on. Paul’s letter to the Philippians might best be described as a thank-you note. He wrote the letter after receiving a gift from the Philippians—perhaps money or food—something that would sustain him. So the letter begins and ends with thanks. In between, of course, Paul is Paul, offering a bit of theology and exhortation. Overall, however, the book glows with a sense of gratitude for the congregation, for their faith, for their ongoing care for him.

This morning I want to reflect a bit with you about the dynamics of gratitude, and then I want to come back to the notion of thank-you notes. Margaret Visser, in her book, The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude, observes how much is at stake in teaching children to give thanks. It is about so much more than manners. It is about determining what kind of people they will be. “Gratitude,” she writes, “is always a matter of paying attention, of deliberately beholding and appreciating the other.”

Obviously, that kind of attentiveness is not a simple matter. Fundamentally, gratitude is not an emotion; it is a worldview and a way of being in the world. Visser writes, “Gratitude arises from specific circumstances—being given a gift or done a favor—but depends less upon that than on the receiver’s whole life, her character, upbringing, maturity, experience, relationships with others, and also on her ideals, including her idea of the sort of person she is or would like to be.” 

That is why, according to Visser, for a child, “the first unprompted ‘thank you’ is momentous enough to count as a kind of initiation into a new level of being human.” Of course, no one is born thankful. Thankfulness does not come naturally to us and sometimes it does not come at all. Rather, thankfulness is a quality that must be fostered and nurtured. 

But how? By “giving thanks in all circumstances,” Paul says. That is, by continually offering thanks. The Psalmist enjoins the people to give thanks: O give thanks to God for God’s steadfast love endures forever. Here we are not told to feel a certain way, but rather we are enjoined to act in a certain manner. After all, feelings, unlike actions, cannot be governed by simple will. 

I think we have some understanding of this. We say to our children—who, like their parents, were not born thankful—“Say ‘thank you’ to the gentleman.” “What do you say to the nice lady?” We continually prompt, coax, urge, demand that thanks be offered. Do we put our children, and ourselves, through all of that just so they will behave in a polite manner? Perhaps. But I think we do this also because we have some understanding that continually offering thanks, day in and day out, in and out of season, whether we feel like it our not, eventually helps engender a spirit of thankfulness. It shapes our entire lives. 

It is by continually expressing thanks that we can come to be thankful. Day in and day out, in and out of season, offer thanks, perhaps at first to get the feel of it and then, only in time, because you feel it. Sometimes words of thanks need to be on our lips before, they can take up residence in our hearts. 

Have you read the book 365 Thank Yous? John Kralik, the author, writes about his experience of writing a thank-you note a day for an entire year. He did not resolve to write all those thank-you notes at a time when he was feeling particularly grateful. No, it was at a low time in his life. His law firm was losing money, he was going through a divorce, and he lived in a small, stuffy apartment. He was in middle age and at the end of his rope. 

Then, one day, on a hike on a mountain trail, he got lost and didn’t know how to get home. It was beginning to get dark. While Kralik doesn’t make the comparison, his account of his experience reminded me of the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had strayed from the straight pathway to this tangled ground.  Kralik goes on to write: “Then I heard a voice: ‘Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have, you will never receive the things you want.’ I do not know who spoke to me. I could not explain this voice, or the words it said, which seemed to have no logical relation to the other thoughts in my head.”

By the time he found his way down the mountain, he had a plan. He would write a thank-you note each day for a year. But even as he made that resolution, he had his doubts. He writes, “My only problem: Did I have anything to be grateful for? The way my life was going, I hardly thought so.” Still, he got started, writing notes to the people close to him—family and friends. But then it got harder. He writes, “One day I just couldn’t think of anybody to thank.” Then, on his way to work, he stopped at his regular coffee shop, where the barista greeted him by name—“John, your usual venti?—and with a smile. Kralik reflected, “I thought, this is really a great gift in this day of impersonal relationships, that someone cared enough to learn my name and what coffee I drank.”

That night he wrote the barista a note: Scott, Thank you for taking the time to greet me in a friendly way. It is wonderful to me that you took the trouble to remember my name. In this day, few people make this effort, and fewer still do it in a way that feels sincere. You do both. It really makes a difference to me every day. Best, John.

Kralik said that when he gave the note to Scott the next morning, he didn’t smile and simply put the note aside. It was only the following morning that he learned why from Scott. Scott said he was downcast when he was handed the note because he assumed it was a letter of complaint. After all, who writes a thank-you not to the person who serves you coffee? 

The most interesting part of the book is Kralik’s reflections on how the experience of expressing thanks day in and day out changed the way he approached life. It even got him to church. He writes: “I had considered myself something of an atheist, but I started going…and the dominant message was that grace was still available. To everyone. Even to me. I can deal with that, I thought. Through the process of writing thank-you notes, I had developed a notion of being blessed with grace.” 

As I began packing my office, I took the time to count the number of thank-you notes and cards sent to me over the past eleven years. I counted 264 remembrances, not including the personal emails. Some of you are great thank-you note writers. They seem to flow from your pen. You lingered over your thankfulness. I will pack the notes in a safe place and bring them out from time to time to brighten my heart. 

Yes, you are a gracious giver of gifts; you are also an equally gracious receiver of gifts. The word “thanks” in the Greek is also translated as “grace.” The word may define an act of giving or an act of receiving—if giving, the word means “gift or unearned favor”; if receiving, the word is best translated as “gratitude.” I have seen this dynamic in this church in which there is an easy flow between giving and thanks, grace and gratitude. Neither gift nor thanks is prompted by expectations, but freely offered here. Both gift and thanks respond freely to one another in an endless echo of grace. 

Let’s close with some of Visser’s words. Listen carefully. “Gratitude involves an admission of dependence on the goodwill of others and a temporary acceptance, as receiver, of the lower place, including the free concession of “first place” to the giver. But the humility required by gratitude is itself joyful…Deeply felt gratefulness…requires humility. It implies a sense of one’s littleness before the wonder of the universe…Awe, like gratitude, is the opposite of what we call “taking things for granted,” which is receiving and not seeing why one should be grateful; it pays intense attention to something beyond oneself and one’s immediate self-interest.”

Gratitude manifest as joy, humility, awe, “intense attention to something beyond oneself and one’s immediate self-interest.” Have you ever known people whose lives are marked by that kind of gratitude? I have. Thanks, dear friends. Amen. 

Shaping Your Assumptions

Mark 1: 24-26; Genesis 3: 1-7

April 29, 2012

R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

When I was about ten years old, a deacon in my home church was indicted on the charge of embezzling a large sum of public money. The story was emblazoned on the front page of the local paper; therefore, it was not surprising that the scandal was the topic of conversation at church on Sunday. As I listened to the “big people” talk, I heard two very different reactions to this single event. Some people said, “I simply don’t believe it. I’ve known that man for forty years and he is not a crook.”  However, other people said, “I wasn’t surprised at all when I read the story in the paper. I never have trusted that man.”

I remember being confused by these differing reactions, for I did not yet realize just how complex the human decision making process can be. Obviously, in this case, more was involved that just an objective response to bare facts. Before the man was ever accused of anything, people had evidently formed certain impressions of him. These prior assumptions explain why one person could look at the situation and say, “I don’t believe it; there must be some mistake,” while another person could look at the same set of facts and say, “I’m not surprised at all. I never trusted that man.”

Our assumptions are all important when it comes to how we deal with the facts in the world around us. We are not purely rational, objective creatures. Our conclusions are colored by our beginning assumptions. This correlation is especially true when we examine our relationships with God. If I were to ask you to choose between trust or mistrust as your beginning assumption about God, which would you choose? Your beginning assumption makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

 I experienced this truth firsthand many years ago when I went to the hospital to see about a man who had just undergone surgery. I met his wife and sister in the surgical recovery waiting room. They had just been told he was filled with cancer and probably had only a few weeks to live. This terrible news was made all the more painful by the fact that the man had just retired from a distinguished career and had been making all kinds of plans with his wife for this new phase of their life. 

All three of us were overcome by the tragic news, but then his wife said quietly, “I’m not going to pass judgment on this until God gets through with it. It’s too soon to tell just now. The goodness and mercy of God have followed us all the days of our lives, and God will not forsake us now.” 

I was awed by this magnificent statement of faith, and I was reaching out my hand to commend the woman when the man’s sister literally exploded in rage at both of us. She screamed, “How can you talk like that? I think God’s a sadist, and this world is nothing but a torture chamber, one big cruel joke. Henry worked all his life, looked forward to retirement, and now what happens? Four weeks to the day and he gets cancer. And all of this from this God of yours who gives us tornadoes and hurricanes and epidemics! I’m not at all surprised that this has happened. It’s just like God to get your hopes up and then dash them to pieces.”

The contrast between the women was stark. The same thing was happening that had taken place in my home church years ago. A single event had led to diametrically opposite responses. Why? Because the assumptions with which each of the women began had drastically colored their conclusions. Across the years, one had come to think trustingly of the Almighty, so that she said, “I’ll wait to pass judgment until God is finished with all this.” The other woman had somehow come to distrust God, and her reaction was: “It’s just like God, the sadistic killjoy.”

Assumptions are important. How we form our assumptions is crucial.  By what process do we build up these assumptions that become so influential in shaping our decisions? According to the Scripture, this is the place where trouble often begins. We do not take the task of assumption building seriously enough. We tend to be sloppy, irrational and arbitrary in this area of our lives. The result? Our decision-making mechanism is thrown out of kilter. Jesus said, “Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness” (Luke 11: 33-35). Jesus was talking about assumption building and about the care with which we go about that process. Do we base our assumptions on solid evidence or arbitrary hearsay?

The book of Genesis describes how the first mistrust of God came to exist. It is a classic example of careless assumption building. Out of the joy of God’s goodness, God decided to create the world. God had no ulterior motives. God simply widened the circle of joy. Having set this experiment into motion, God proceeded to show the woman and the man how things were meant to work. They were free to eat from all the trees of the Garden, except one—the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit of this tree was poisonous to their systems, God said, and had been placed there to serve a religious rather than a nutritional purpose. God was obviously excited about what was accomplished. The whole enterprise looked good—in fact “very good”—to God’s generous eyes. 

Then, out of nowhere, a snake moved into the picture and began to ask questions. He said to the woman, “Did God put you in this beautiful place and then prohibit you from eating all this fruit?” She corrected him quickly, for that was a gross overstatement. She replied, “Oh now, we can eat of everything in the garden except that tree in the center, which God said would be poisonous to us.”

At that point the serpent began to shake his head and said, “The old scoundrel. You threaten God, you know. God realized that if you eat that fruit you will be just like God, and that couldn’t happen. You were created to bolster God’s ego. Holding you down builds God up. If you stupid slaves knew what was good for you, you would call God’s bluff. You’d eat that fruit and take over this place and be done with all this over-under stuff.”

Such talk must have startled the wits out of the first humans, for it put the drama of creation in a wholly different light. There is no indication that suspicion of this sort had ever entered their minds before. More important, there was not one shred of evidence for such an attitude of distrust. Nothing God had ever done would have given the humans reason to believe the serpent’s accusations. And this is the tragedy of it all. Without really checking things out or going to the Source and trying to get to the bottom of the situation, the first man and woman carelessly bought into that unfounded suspicion. For no good reason, they embraced rumor and began to act as if it contained the truth about God. What incredible carelessness, and what devastating results. 

What would you think of me if I got sick and tried to medicate myself for a while, until my illness grew so bad that finally I had to call my trusted family doctor? Suppose, when she came out to examine me, I showed her the medicine I had been taking and she said, “That is the worst possible stuff for your problem. Put it away and start taking this prescription I will give you, in a matter of hours, I promise, you will start feeling better.” Then when the doctor left, suppose a plumber who was unstopping the doctor’s sink came out and said, “I overheard that conversation, did that doctor tell you to quit taking your old medicine and start taking some of this new stuff?…Those mercenary doctors! The problem is your old medicine was paid for there was no profit in it for her. The only reason she is giving you this new prescription is to make some more money. You can’t trust an M.D. these days. If you know what is good for you, you will stick to the medicine you have already paid for and forget all about the new prescription.”

Now I ask you, what would you think if I bought into that kind of mistrust? Would you not say I was crazy to take the word of a plumber over that of a trusted physician when it comes to medicine? Yet, according to Genesis, this is exactly what our forbears did back in the beginning. They took the word of a snake over the word of their Creator when it came to interpreting life. They uncritically accepted a negative image of God that had no basis in fact, and look what has resulted from that one erroneous assumption! Thinking the world was a conspiracy rather than a creation and God a foe rather than parent, the humans proceeded to take life apart and put it together in ways that did not work. They drank the poison and got sick, just as they had been warned, and all of creation proceeded to degenerate into chaos. 

This is how God’s bad reputation got started—with a flimsy accusation by a snake and some careless assumption work—and it’s been a problem ever since. Jesus ran into the problem when he went into the synagogue and the man with the unclean spirit cried out, “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God” (Mark 1:24). Here was the ancient suspicion of the serpent, accepted and acted upon. I ran into the same thing that day in the hospital as the sick man’s sister railed against the cruelty of a sadistic God. I myself am no stranger to such feelings. My earliest impressions of God were tinged with negativism. I thought when one said, “Thy will by done,” one was asking for suffering and agony, to obey God was to say goodbye to joy and pleasure. In fact, I think this is the assumption most people have accepted deep down in their beings. Since the beginning of time, God has suffered from a bad press. 

And how do you suppose God responded to this slipshod reporting? Blow up in rage? No. Become defensive and strike back in anger? No, according to Scripture, God’s response was the most creative thing ever done: God showed us another way in the person of Jesus.

As John Killinger once put it, “Jesus is God’s way of getting rid of a bad reputation.” Who is this Jesus? To use a western Kentucky phrase, Jesus is the “spittin’ image” of God. And Jesus became what we are—a flesh and blood human being—so we could understand what he is. Over against all the confusion and suspicion that had been generated by the ages, God sent Jesus so that people could see what God looked like in history, walking the streets of a city in wide-open daylight. And the question becomes: Can you trust a God like that? Is the God this Jesus portrays really a sadist, trying to hold people down and dehumanize them, or is God the joyful Creator who all along had nothing but good in mind?

Jesus was God’s attempt to set right what had really gone wrong—our basic assumptions about God. Jesus was God’s way of reaching all the way down to our assumption level and showing us that, from the Garden on, we have been mistaken about whom God is and what God wants to do with us.

But the question this morning is this, Are you willing to take this action of God seriously enough to let it do its work? If you will allow the way of Jesus to penetrate down to the level of your assumptions, your outlook can be changed. And I ask you, if you can’t trust a Christ-like God, who can you trust? Imagine what would happen if you were to faint away in the presence of Jesus of Nazareth and become totally vulnerable and defenseless. On the basis of what you see of Jesus in the New Testament, what do you think would happen to you? Would Jesus steal your money, exploit your body, take advantage of your helplessness? Of course not! Of all the people in the world, who could you trust more to help and not hurt you? And the Good News is that this one is the visible image of the invisible God! 

Therefore, when it comes to making your assumptions about the Holy One, for God’s sake and for yours, do it carefully and realistically. As the old saying goes, “When you’re sick, see a doctor, not a plumber.”  And when it comes to understanding God, listen to God’s Son, not some dumb snake. Killinger is right; “Jesus is God’s way of getting rid of a bad reputation.” Amen.

“Just …in Time”

John 11:1-21

April 22, 2012

R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

Martha had a point. “Lord, if you had been here, our brother would not have died.” But he wasn’t there. He didn’t come. We can understand Martha’s sense of betrayal. Some of us can really understand. While in seminary, the wife of a good friend was diagnosed with cancer and died within a few months. I said to myself, “I need to see Tim, but I’ll wait until the family leaves.” A few days later after the family had left, I said to myself, “I need to go see Tim, but I won’t go now. This is the first quiet moment he has had to get his life back together.” I never went. The truth is I was afraid to go. I had never had to face a friend who was my age who was now alone. His wife’s death made me think of my own mortality and that I was running out of time. About a week later I spoke with a mutual friend after class. He said, “I saw Tim yesterday.” “How’s he doing?” “As well as can be expected. He asked about you.” “He asked about me?” “Yes,” he said, “I think he would have liked to have seen you.”

“Lord,” said Martha, “if you had been here…but you weren’t.” Jesus didn’t go. And it’s not as if the problem was Jesus’ packed schedule. It’s not as if he could look at Martha and say, “Martha, I’m sorry. I would have been there, but I was feeding the 5,000. Nothing would have pleased me more than to be at Lazarus’ side, but I had a previous engagement with the multitudes.” John makes it absolutely clear that the reason he did not go was because he never intended to go. He waited two more days. He waited until time had run out, and Lazarus was dead. 

“Lord, if you had been here; but you weren’t, and we ran out of time.” It’s a theological sign to a broken and suffering world that we are running out of time—all of us. We are running out of time. At the end of every corridor crouches death, clutching a smart phone, counting down 3…2…1, saying, “I own time. Time belongs to me, and you are running out of time.”

The X-ray revealed the bad news. A biopsy followed, then exploratory surgery. When her pastor got to the hospital she said, “The news isn’t good. It’s all through me. I told the doctor I just want five more years. Get me five more years. I want to see John graduate from high school.” “What did the doctor say?” the pastor asked. “She said he would do the best she could, but she couldn’t make any promises. I just need five years; but I’m running out of time.”

Recently one of our sister denominations issued two particularly pernicious and graceless rulings. The first one removed from ministry a young woman with many spiritual gifts because she is in a committed lesbian relationship. “We don’t need your ministry.” At the same time they restored to his ministry and his pulpit a man who has in his choir a gay man who sings every Sunday and who wanted to deepen his relationship to Christ and the body of Christ by becoming a member of the congregation. And this minister said, “No. We don’t need your unrepentant kind in the body of Christ.” And the governing body put him back in his pulpit: “Bless you! Job well done.” Another ranking official in the denomination offered this critique of the ruling, “It’s so sad to see our seminary students so early in their careers running up against injustice in the church that is so intransigent they will never be able to take it out. They are so young, and the church is already taking away their future.” We are running out of time.

“Lord, if you had been here, our brother would not have died; but we ran out of time.” And it was right then, when the world felt it had run out of time, that Jesus said, “It’s time to go in. This is not about death. This is about the glory of God.” It’s not Lazarus who has run out of time; it is death that has run out of time. Children of God, throw away your watches, Droids and Smart Phones, because Jesus will not participate in the alienated, atheistic, anxiety-ridden world that does not have God and believes that hope and life and justice are running out of time.

Karl Barth once said, “If I give you money, then I give you money. But if I give you my time, I give you me. If I give you my time, I give you all that I am.” God created time, and in the Christ, “God makes time for you, has time for you, takes time for you, is time for you.” Standing at the end of the corridor is not death wagging an alarm clock saying “I own time.” It is rather the Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. 

Isn’t that what baptism really means? It is moving from a world that is running out of time into a new world in which God gives us time and takes time. Fifth-century bishop Theodore of Mopsuestia (Teddy the Mop), told new converts,  “Kneel on the floor, face the West, the region of evil and darkness, point your finger at the accuser, and say, ‘Satan, I renounce you and all your vanities.” In other words, “Evil, I don’t have any more time for you.” “Then face the East, a symbol of the new world you are entering. The world will be graceful and delightful because you will be graceful and delightful.” In other words, baptism is not simply joining the church or even changing identities. It is changing time zones! We are moving from a world that is running out of time to one where hope and justice will never die. 

Some of the world’s most beautiful music was composed on a cold January night in 1941 in an unheated barracks in a German death camp. It was composed by a prisoner in the camp, Oliver Messien. He was a devout Christian, and he wanted to compose some music that would say, even in a death camp, that the forces of oppression and evil do not control time. So he composed a “Quartet for the End of Time,” based on that word of the angel in the Book of Revelation, “There will be no more time.” All fragmented and broken and hopeless time has been gathered into the time of God. On the score, where most composers would have written, “Play slowly, play rapidly,” Messien wrote, “Play tenderly, play with ecstasy, play with love.” And they played it in the middle of a death camp. It is not life that is running out of time. It is death that is running out of time.

A couple of years ago I visited David and Beth Long-Higgins at their church in Canal Winchester. When I arrived, the secretary said David was responding to an emergency and would be delayed about an hour. I decided to drive around, maybe get a haircut. When I got in the chair, the stylist said, “I don’t recognize you. Have you ever been in here before?”  I told her I was early for a meeting. “What do you do?” she said. I told her I was a minister in Mount Vernon. She said, “Oh, I’m a Christian, too, you know.” I said, “Really!” She said, “Yes, I’m a member of World Harvest Church. Rod Parsley is our minister.” “Yes, I know.”  I had just read a message he wrote about gospel prosperity and how “God Wants Us to be Rich.” As the woman spoke, I thought to myself, “I’m already getting a bad haircut, now I’m going to get bad theology as well.” But to be hospitable I played along—she was holding scissors, after all. I said, “Well, have you got your blessing yet?” She said, “Oh, yes, I’ve gotten my blessing all right!” “Well, tell me about it,” I said, expecting her to say something about the Lexus in the parking lot or diamond earring in the scissors drawer. Instead, she aid, “Two nights a week I get to volunteer in a shelter for battered women. I was one myself, you know, and they trust me. They need me. They know I love them.”

I sat there in shock. “My God, Jesus is loose in Rod Parsley’s church!” It’s amazing the way Jesus does it. He hangs around in the parking lot refusing to go in, letting them gorge themselves on greed and selfishness until the witness to the gospel is dead, absolutely dead! And when it is dead, then Jesus says, “It’s time for me to go in.” We say to Jesus, “Don’t go in that church, Jesus! That one is dead. It’s been dead four days! Can’t you smell it? It stinks!”

And if Jesus is loose in Rod Parsley’s church, Jesus is loose in First Congregational, too. Jesus is coming into First Congregational right at the point where you are worrying about your future saying, “I am setting a banquet where people will come from the East and the West and North and South, and if anybody wants to block people from coming to that banquet, they are running out of time. But you already know that. Jesus sees that in this place the Holy Spirit falls on the young and old, male and female, rich and poor, single, married and divorced, black and white, gay and straight; and if anybody in the church says, “We don’t need those gifts of the Spirit,” well, they are running out of time, because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. 

That is why you are called to continue to be prophetic. Prophecy is, after all, a word spoken from one time zone to another. Now, I know they killed the prophets. Sounds like bad news, but it’s not. Everybody in this world has to die. You get to die in prophecy instead of cowardice. You get to die with the word of hope on your lips instead of despair. And as for death, it is highly overrated, because it is running out of time. 

Dr. Joyce Wilkins could have made a lot of money practicing on Riverside Drive in New York City. Instead, she practiced out of the back of a Ford Econoline van cruising midtown Manhattan looking for prostitutes. She would strike up a relationship and win their trust, and then she would take them into the clinic and do blood tests, give them medical care and a word of hope. A reporter once asked, “Even though you give medical care, many of them die. AIDS is an epidemic. It must be very discouraging.”

She said, “Well, that’s one way to look at it, but that’s not the way I look at it. My mother taught me to look at it another way. My mother was for all her life a teacher of brain-damaged children, and she taught me when you look at people you don’t look at the damage. You look at the image. You don’t look at the damage; you look at the image of God in them. I learned that most forcefully,” she said, “one night when my mother had parents’ night. Her class did a performance of My Fair Lady. It never occurred to my mother not to let a brain-damaged girl in a wheelchair roll across the stage singing, “I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night.”

And you, dear friends, you are all going to dance. For any number of reasons but especially you know death is running out of time. Amen.

The Killing of Time

John 11: 25-26

April 15, 2012

R. Keith Stuart, Minister, Ph.D.

We all suffer to some degree from deafness. It is hard for us to hear what others are really saying to us. The truth is that if we really listen to another person, whether on the surface he/she is talking about the weather or predicting the outcome of the World Series, if we really listen, we begin to realize that what the person is really talking about is himself/herself. In one way or another, she is saying, “Listen to me. Know me.” Most of the time we are deaf to this. We hear only the surface words. We hear what is most comfortable to hear. But, once in a while, by God’s grace, we hear scraps of what people are actually saying.

Once while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, I succumbed to the temptation and picked up a Hershey’s candy bar with almonds—my favorite. Cynthia knows that I love sweets and, God bless her, she rarely says anything. She just rolls her eyes. But this time she said, “I thought you were trying to lose some weight?” “Well,” I said sniffing the chocolate through the wrapper, “you only live once.” Then it happened, a word broke through my deafness. The woman at the checkout counter, looking flushed and tired, broke into the conversation and said, “Don’t you think once is enough?” 

I laughed mildly, but she didn’t look amused. I had the feeling that what by some rare chance I had happened to hear was a woman saying something like this: “People come and people go, most of them strangers. I’m sick of them, and I’m sick of myself too. One day’s very much like another.” What I thought I heard was a human being saying, “I’ll live my life out to the last, and I expect to have good days and bad days. But when the end comes, I won’t complain. One life will do me very nicely.” 

Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he dies, yet shall he live.” Jesus was talking about life and death. It was life and death that the woman was talking about too, her own life and her own death. “Don’t you think once is enough?” the woman said.

Well, whether one life is enough or not enough, one life is all we get, only one life in this gorgeous and hair-raising world, only one life with lots of possibilities. William Hazlitt wrote that no young person believes he/she will die, and the truth of the matter, I think, is that in some measure that is true of all people. Intellectually we all know that we will die, but we do not know it in the sense that the knowledge becomes part of us. We do not know it in the sense of living as though it were true. On the contrary, we tend to live as though our lives will go on forever.

When we drive any distance, what do we do with ourselves? Some turn on the radio, pop in CD’s or audiotapes, listen to an IPod. Others take naps or read billboards. Whatever we do we are, in effect, trying to “kill time.” What a grim saying because the time we are killing is our own. One life on earth is all we get, whether it is enough or not enough. The obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.

 I do not believe the woman at the checkout counter was any rarity. The world is full of people who are merely “getting through” their lives, who are “killing their time,” who live only on the surface and are so bad at hearing and seeing that it is little wonder that one life is enough, more than enough.

How do you see time? Something to be lived, loved and filled full? Or is time like a way station on the road to somewhere else? In three years I will get promoted. In eleven months and fourteen days I get another vacation. My question this morning is this: What do we do with the interim time? That time that looms like a mountain that has to be climbed. If there were a little button somewhere that we could push to make it all disappear at once, how many of us would have the strength not to push it?

But there is no button and so we look for other ways to make “the years go fast” (another terrible phrase). You often hear the advice that if you stay busy, it will be over before you know it, and the tragedy of it is that it is true. Life is busy. If you get the kids to school, get to work on time, supper ready, bills paid, you have accomplished much—you haven’t drowned. Life is busy, and in many ways that is a fine and proper thing, but there are other things about life that are also proper and fitting. 

Many of the seminars at the seminary were offered late in the day. Just as our class on “Theodicy” was about to begin, the professor entered, turned off the lights, and asked the class to look out the window and observe the beautiful sunset. For fifteen minutes, no one said a word. Nobody did anything. We just sat there in the near-dark and watched one day of our lives come to an end. What was great was not only the sunset. What was great was the unbusyness of it. It was unallotted time just to look, to really see, with nothing in our hands to “kill the time” it took. 

 We are afraid of silence. Afraid to be in the room filled with silence, we begin to babble about anything just to keep the silence at bay. But, if we can bear it, silence can be communion at a very deep level. That may have been the greatest part of that wintry afternoon.

I said, “You only live once,” and the woman said, “Don’t you think once is enough?” And in a way she was right. In our semi-blindness and semi-deafness, in our killing of time, our thirst for the dream of tomorrow and our neglect of the miracle of today, to the degree that this or something like this is our life, once is certainly enough.

But in another way, a thousand lives do not seem enough, not when we are really alive. And when are we really alive? I suspect that we are really alive when, instead of “killing the time,” we “take time.” Take time for the joy of thanksgiving that we are together this morning, but also reflect on the ache caused by the absence of one not in the pew. Take time for your spirit, as well as your flesh. There are dreams to listen to, games to play, as well as work to be done.

We are really alive when we listen to each other, to the silences as well as the words and what lies behind the words. “Looks like we might get some rain,” somebody says. Maybe what they are really saying is “speak to me for Christ’s sake. Know me. I’m bored. Give me a cup of water.” We are really alive when we are together as human beings; when the walls between us crumble a little.

What I try to avoid because the word has become so threadbare in our time is that we are truly alive, of course, when we manage somehow to love—when we love the mystery and beauty and terror that loom just beneath the air we move through; when we begin to hear the Spirit of God not just in the setting sun but in the earthquake, in the silence, in the agonies of people as well as in their gladness. We are really alive when we love each other, when we look at each other and think, “Grace and peace be with you, sister, brother and friend.” When life is like this, once is not nearly enough.

Yet it is all that we get—with all these chances to be truly alive. Then there is death, the final deafness, the final blindness, and the final separation from each other. Unlike the great oriental religions, Christianity takes death very seriously, which is of course why it also takes life very seriously, why there is such urgency about living it right and living it now. In the New Testament there is no doctrine of endless rebirths on the great wheel of life, no doctrine of a soul which, by its nature, cannot die. On the contrary, by our nature we do die, as Christianity sees it, with our bodies and souls inextricably one in death as they are in life. 

But if death is the end in Christianity, it is not the final end; it is the end of an act only, not the end of the drama. Once before out of the abyss of the unborn, the uncreated, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing became something. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life. Not because by our nature there is a part of us that does not die, but because by God’s nature God will not let even death separate us from God finally. In love God made us; in love will mend us. In love God will have us as true daughters and sons before God is through. And, in order to do that, one life is not enough. Amen.  

“Is It Too Soon to Celebrate?”

Matthew 2: 16-18; Luke 15: 25-32

Easter Sunday

April 8, 2012

R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

As far as I know, nowhere today are Christians meeting after Easter to tell jokes as a way of celebrating the resurrection. There were times and there were places in which Christians gathered to celebrate the joke God played on the devil by raising Jesus from the dead. “God who sits in heaven laughs,” they said, and so they joined in the laughter. I do not know why the custom died out. It probably was killed by someone who thought that levity and laughter hardly were appropriate for the sober business of the kingdom of God. And a weightier argument against the practice cannot be conceived than that the practice be regarded as lacking in propriety. 

Now I must confess this idea regarding propriety is a rather recent conviction for me. It was not so in my camel’s hair and leather girdle days. In that youthful era when crudeness and awkwardness were labeled “prophetic,” I asked with some air of superiority, “What has propriety to do with the kingdom of God?” Propriety rhymes with society, and the immediate image is that of a faint child trying to keep both feet on the floor, elbows off the table, using the right fork, holding the cup just so, and in general minding my manners on the good ship Lollipop. But what has all that to do with the Word of God? The Gospel is made of sterner stuff. Therefore, those of us concerned with the Kingdom ought to speak of taller things such as right and wrong, good and evil, true and false. Our time is consumed with weighty matters; none remains for “proper” things.

However, more mature reflection has caused me to see the devastation of a word or comment or an act that was improper, inappropriate, out of place. A marvelous evening can be totally soured by a statement that is not false, not wrong, but just out of place. When my father, an irregular church attender, started to light up a cigarette just as the Easter worship service was about to begin, my mother shrieked loud enough to call forth the dead. She knocked it out of his hand, sending the cigarette across the aisle toward Mrs. Johnson’s flowered pillbox hat. I don’t recall my mother saying that what my father did was evil or that it was false, but she was no less angered by an act that she considered as being out of place. Out of place; isn’t that what junk is? You can take a doormat, a lampshade, one shoe, one glove, a key, and a wastebasket and pile them in a heap in an alley, and someone will come along and remove the “junk.” But take each of those items and put it back in its proper place, and it is functional and it is valuable. Out of place, isn’t that what evil is? Over the counter in the battle against pain and disease, it is called medicine. On a dark street, in a quick exchange between strangers, it is called drugs. The difference is a difference is appropriateness. Such was the wisdom of the ancient image of Satan as a fallen angel, an angel out of place.

On the other hand, who has not felt the beauty and the power of that which is proper, that which is fitting, that which is appropriate? The appropriate card, the appropriate word, or gift, or act are irreplaceably meaningful. A fundamental difference between an effective and an ineffective ministry is precisely this quality of being appropriate in word and act. A bereaved family is helped immensely at a difficult time not just because the minister spoke beautifully or even truly, but because he/she spoke fittingly. At a wedding the bride and groom know theirs is not just another wedding ceremony because the words were appropriate for them. And from the pulpit, whatever else you may say of the Word of God, essential to its definition is not simply that it is true; many empty and powerless things can be said that are true. What makes it the Word of God is that it is the proper word, the appropriate word, the word that fits. 

The issue of propriety lay back of the disagreement between a father and his son in a story recorded in Luke 15. The father had two sons; the younger one had returned home, smelling of pigs and cheap perfume of whores, wearing rags. And the father rushed out to meet him, saying, “Bring the rings, bring the robe, bring the shoes, kill the fatted calf, hire the musicians, bring in the dancers, there will be a party tonight, because my son is home.”

Now his older son was in the field, and as he came near the house he heard music and dancing. And he called one of his servants and asked what it meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come and your father has killed the fatted calf because he has come back safe and sound.” But the older brother was ticked off and refused to go in. His father came out and begged him to join in, but he answered him, “How long these many years I have served you, and never once have I disobeyed you. And yet, you never gave me so much as a goat that I might party with my friends. But when this son of yours comes crawling back, this one who ran through your money with whores, you throw a huge bash.” And the father said to him, “Son, have always been with me, and all that I have is yours. But it is fitting, it is proper to celebrate and rejoice, for your brother was dead and is now alive; he was lost but now he is found.”

The older son’s anger and hesitancy to join the celebration is understandable. Is it fitting and proper to give a party for a prodigal? It hardly seems congenial to our historic faith; it hardly seems appropriate in our religion that issues the constant call to repentance and reform. It hardly seems the proper thing to do when our faith is so filled with the moral earnestness of the teachings of Jesus himself. Do not misunderstand: neither Judaism nor Christianity in sternest form has denied room for a returning prodigal. There was and is forgiveness, but it has been customary to wrap forgiveness of sin in sackcloth not a bright robe, ashes not jewelry, tears not wine, bread and water not fatted calves, kneeling not dancing. Even the most liberated and modern among us may have trouble fitting into one frame the picture of a sinner recovered from the error of his/her ways and balloons, musicians and dancing. Honest feelings prompt the question of the propriety of the whole event. 

Of course, there are some people who think a party is never appropriate, regardless of the circumstances. In certain cases, I think it is a personality problem. Some folk have personalities that give you the impression that they are always having to clean up after a party to which they had not been invited. There are some others who have no room for the party because they think it is not practical. They are willing to sell all the violins and buy hammers and hoes, pull up the roses and plant onions. For these, a meadow is grass, a forest is wood, and a sunrise is the time to get up and go to work. Everything can be recorded under “Profit” or “Loss.” They want to do that which counts, that which is practical. A party is a waste.

There are some who think favorably of a party, when it’s appropriate, when it fits, but not now. This is not the time, it would not be proper now. You see, all parties are premature. They have a point, you know; all parties are a little too soon, aren’t they? How do you know that the prodigal is not going to get a clean shirt and leave again tomorrow? Don’t you think you’re having this party too soon? A wedding should not be celebrated immediately; how do you know that the marriage will last? A graduation party? Isn’t it a little early to be celebrating, you, without a job yet, without any secure future? So the doctor’s report is in, and you are in good health? You had best wait to celebrate good health; there are so many germs, there is so much disease. A birth in the family, you say? Your party is a bit premature. How do you know how this child will turn out? You know some girls get into trouble when they are older. How do you know this girl will be what you want her to be? Or this boy? Some youngsters grow up to be totally worthless. Don’t you think this child is a little young to be the occasion for a party? Oh, there are some folks who say we’ll have a party at the right time. But this is not the right time.

There are some, however, who find parties inappropriate for deeper reasons. They feel that the laughter, the music, the dancing are so insensitive. How can you be having this party and eating the fatted calf and singing and dancing with so much misery in the world? How can you celebrate the warmth of your fireplace when there are so many who are cold? How can you celebrate the warmth of your clothing when there are so many naked? How can you celebrate the company of your friends where there are so many lonely people? How can you celebrate all this good food with so much hunger in the world? Only the most insensitive could have a party now. The Christian thing to do is to be miserable. You do not have to be so radical as to share your food or clothing or house; just don’t enjoy them. Think of all the starving in Somalia as you clean your plate. And certainly it is not fitting you celebrate.

A boy hears a parade. At least he thinks it is a parade going down the street. He begins to yell to his mother, “A parade, a parade, a parade!” He grabs his drum and sticks and goes banging his drum out the door, marching down the walk to the curb. He doesn’t really notice the parade, how slowly it moves. He doesn’t notice that the beautiful black horse is without a rider, and the boots are turned backwards in the stirrups. He doesn’t notice that flag-draped caisson, moving slowly past his house. “A parade, a parade, a parade!” and he beats his drum in grand excitement. His mother rushes from the house and grabs the drum, bursts the head of the drum, and breaks the sticks. “It is not fitting and proper for you to be playing that drum today,” and she yanks him into the house.

Mary sits in Bethlehem and sings lullabies to her beautiful baby, Jesus. It is normal for a happy young mother but how can she do it? Violent Herod is on the loose. Five miles away, in Ramah, I heard a voice. It was the voice of Rachel crying for her children, and she would not be consoled. Who has not heard that wail, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, all over the world, Rachel weeping for her children, innocent victims of violence and privation? So I rushed to Bethlehem and I said to Mary, “Hush, Mary, it isn’t proper for you to be singing to your baby. Don’t you know about Rachel?”

When is it going to be proper for the boy to play his drum? Surely some day, but he has been waiting a long time. I checked the newspaper this morning, and today hardly seems to be the proper day. Maybe tomorrow. When will it be appropriate for Mary to sing to her baby? Some day, but not today; Herod is still alive. Maybe tomorrow.

And so the father said, “Son, your brother was dead, and he is here with us now alive. Your brother was lost, and he is now home safe and sound. It is fitting and proper for us to have a party. 

Suppose you live next door to that family. You see through your window friends and neighbors gathering. The father calls over the hedge to you: “Our younger son came home last night and we’re throwing a big party. I’d like you to come over and join us.” Would you go?

Three women slowly walk to the tomb that first Easter morning. When they arrive, they discover the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. They rush back to tell the others huddled in secrecy their incredible story. As they run they dodge Roman crosses, sidestep beggars and leap diseased bodies. Now, suppose when they got to the door, they stop suddenly, turn around and say to you, “Won’t you join us in celebrating our good news?” Would you go in? 

“Shall We Dance?”
Philippians 2: 5, 6-8
April 1, 2012
R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

“Some days the world is a tuxedo and you are a pair of brown shoes.” Is there anything worse than being out of step, out of rhythm? A campus minister met with students early in the fall semester. He thought it would be cool to engage in some silly game where everyone was to keep in rhythm with the leader. If you fell out of rhythm, you had to tell the group your name, your hometown, and your favorite food or something, just to get acquainted.

The next week, when he was making calls to those who had visited, encouraging them to come again, two of the students, football players, told the minister. “We’re never coming back to your group. We didn’t come to church to be made to look like fools. We got enough people trying to make us look stupid without coming to church and being made fun of just because we can’t keep in step with your dumb music.”

I can see their point. How my anxiety level would rise, in elementary school, in music class, or “square dancing class,” when we were asked to keep in step to a dance I did not know, or to tap your feet, move your arms, and swivel your hips to the music.

Since joining the choir I have learned how much I enjoy music, singing, and the laughter of the group. I am not a musician, however, and I have a hard time keeping the beat. It might help if I wasn’t obsessed with hitting the right note and followed Jean’s lead. She rarely gives anyone the evil eye. But those notes, those sixteenth notes, get in the way. And it doesn’t help that I get creative commentary from the alto section.
 
At the end of the service you will be asked to dance your way from this place and into the community. My job is to get you ready, to get you into the beat, ready to move to the rhythm of life.

Elie Weisel, in his little book, Night, tells in horrifying terms how his father was one who never learned to march. When they were taken to various ‘holding tanks’ for Jews in Germany in the 1940s the Nazis made them march everywhere they went. He tried in vain to teach his father to keep in step to prevent the poking and jabbing of the rifle butt by the guards. What a sad sight, an old man, being urged by his son, to keep in step, under the hateful Nazi eye.

In the old Saturday morning Westerns, there was invariably that humiliating scene when the bad guy, picking on some little fellow, would pull out his pistol and start shooting at the little guy’s feet, saying, “Dance! Dance, I tell you!” And the little guy would jump up and down for all his life was worth.

Think of this Sunday, and the story we are enacting, as a kind of dance. This day his path, on which he has been making his way through Galilee, turns toward Jerusalem. When he says to his disciples, “I’m going to Jerusalem,” he means that he is not only going up to the big city; he is dancing toward his death.

“You can’t go there,” his disciples say, “they are waiting to kill you.” And in that moment, the music changes tempo. Peter urges Jesus not to go, begs him. “Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus told Peter, hardly missing a beat. The music for Jesus has changed from Deon’s “The Wanderer,” to a funeral dirge. And we, tripping along behind Jesus, find ourselves moving to a different beat. It’s a beat which begins fast, then goes slow. Downward mobility is the direction of this Palm Sunday parade. To go up to Jerusalem is to risk going down to death.

Jesus enters a city full of raucous excitement. Passover, Israel’s Fourth of July, is in full swing and Jesus rides in on…a donkey! Bobbing along. Out of step. His disciples expected him to enter on a war horse like a conquering hero. He bounces in on a donkey. Children shout, palm branches are waved, there is joy. But soon, very soon, the music shifts to a minor key. Jesus is more noticeably out of step with the celebration around him. And his disciples must also be out of step, if they are to waltz with him. Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God…emptied himself…he humbled himself and became obedient to the path of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:5, 7-8)

Do you appreciate how this beat, this self-emptying downward mobility goes against just about everything we learn and practice in the world? But watch where he walks.

I have shared with young people, “When I was your age, church was something your mother wanted you to do—pick up your socks, be careful on dates, and, oh yes, go to church, just to keep in step.” I have also told them, “By the time I got to college, church was a way to get back at my mother! Church was one way of saying to your elders, ‘I don’t want your life; I want something better. I don’t want your marriage; I want more.”

But let us be clear. The call of Jesus is not to march to your own beat, your own subjective, inner drum, to devise your own rhythm and stick to that. To be a follower of the way is to march to a different drummer, to pick up a different beat.  He walks down a narrow path toward a cross. Furthermore, he bids us to walk that way as well. Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus.

He was talking about someone who had risen high in his organization, a man with great ambition whose ambitions had been mostly realized. “In a way, I’ve always been grateful to that man,” the young man said. “Grateful? Why?”  “He helped me curb my own ambition; he showed me the limits of success and the goals I at one time thought I wanted. To watch him, to observe the price he has had to pay for what he has gotten, the way he has had to compromise, and flatter, and step on others on the way up has helped me to decide that I didn’t need what at one time I thought I had to have.”

Watching the compromises and machinations of another had led this man to march to the beat of a different drum. “At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow,” we sing. Today, Jesus is enticing us to try a new kind of dance; he is inviting us to move our feet to a different beat.

It all begins well enough, this Palm Sunday of ours. It starts with a rather pleasant tune lilting in the air. But then the organ grows louder, the beat becomes heavier, the dancing beat is transformed into a discordant, dissonant sound that smothers the earlier Hosanna tune. And we move toward the cross.

Most of us want to keep moving up. And there will be that day (you can bank on it) when somebody will look across a big table and wink. They will speak of “the way we do things in the company.” Or it will be over drinks and she will sigh about what ought to be but then firmly assert, “Of course, you’ve got to face facts, go along to get along, right?”
 
And then maybe, because you belong to Christ and not the company, the HMO or IBM or GM or whatever, you’ll say, “Sorry.” Amen.

“To Remember and To Share”
Matthew 14:13-21
March 11, 2012
R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

One of my favorite stories about the feeding of the five thousand comes from Parker Palmer, Quaker theologian and author. The story takes place in that time, long ago, fast receding in memory, when there were no security lines at airports, no electronic screening, and you could carry pretty much whatever you wanted in your luggage onto the plane.

He was on a flight to Denver. The plane pulled away from the gate, taxied and taxied for a long time and eventually ended up at a remote corner of the airport. The engines suddenly started to wind down. Everyone groaned. The pilot came on the intercom. “I have some bad news. There is a storm out west, exactly where we are headed. Denver is socked in and shut down. So we will be staying here for a few hours. That’s the bad news. The really bad news is that we have no food on board.” (Remember this is story from that blessed time long ago when there was real food on board.)

Some passengers became angry. But then, one of the flight attendants stood up and announced. “We’re really sorry folks. We didn’t plan it this way, and we can’t do anything about it. We know that for some of you this is a big deal. You’re hungry and were looking forward to a nice lunch. Some of you have a medical condition and really need to eat. So I have an idea. We have a couple of empty bread baskets up here, and we’re going to pass them around. Everybody put something in the basket. I know some of you have brought a little snack along, just in case—peanut butter crackers, candy bars. Some of you have Rolaids, Life Savers, and chewing gum. If you don’t have anything edible, you have a business card or a picture of your kids or a bookmark. The thing is, I hope everybody puts something in the basket. Then we’ll reverse the process. We’ll pick the baskets up at the back and pass them around again and everybody can take out what he or she needs.”

“Well,” Palmer said, “what happened next was amazing. The complaining stopped. People started to root around in pockets and handbags. Some stood up and retrieved luggage from the overhead and got out boxes of candy, a salami, Italian sausage, cheese, crackers, a bottle of wine (it was in the day you could actually do that). Now people were laughing and talking. The flight attendant had transformed a group of anxious people focused on their need, deprivation and scarcity into a gracious community, sharing and in the process creating an abundance of sorts.”

The flight eventually took off and landed. As he prepared to leave the plane, Palmer found the flight attendant and said, “You know there’s a story in the Bible about what you did.” She said, “I know that story. That’s why I did it.”

The story of the feeding miracle begins, “Now when Jesus heard this he withdrew in a boat to a deserted place.” What was the “this” that prompted his withdrawal? Jesus’ cousin, John, had been arrested for publically insulting and harassing the puppet king, Herod. In a terrible sequence of events, Herod becomes so entranced with a young dancing girl that he promises her whatever she wishes. Inspired by her mother who, in fact, is the king’s girlfriend, she asks King Herod for the head of John the Baptist. And that’s what happened, on the spot.

John’s followers bury him and go find Jesus, tell him what happened. It’s brutal, appalling, and terrifying. It must have stunned Jesus and broken his heart. John was family, a childhood playmate, an adolescent companion. And no, in a bizarre instant, John is gone, murdered by a cruel tyrant to fulfill a drunken promise he made to an attractive teenager.

Matthew reports, “Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew to be by himself.” Of course he did. That’s what we do when we receive devastating news. In addition to his personal grief, there was surely a new sense of his own vulnerability. This is what happens when you offend real power.

But the crowd, the collection of souls listening to him teach, the people bringing their sick and lame—does not know what happened, so they keep following. “Send them away, Jesus,” his friends advise. “It’s time to take care of yourself. If ever anyone needed to be left alone for a while, it’s you. Besides, it’s late in the day. They’re all hungry. They need food. We’ll tell them to go away, go into town and buy some food and come back in the morning.”

But Jesus, heartbroken, has compassion. “They need not go away,” he says. “You give them something to eat.” I wish I had been there to hear that, to see how they looked at each other. “What do you mean we should give them something to eat? All we have between us is five loaves of bread and two salted fish, which is hardly a snack for twelve men, never mind five thousand. No disrespect intended, but have you lost your mind?”
They were operating out of a sense of scarcity. They looked at the crowd, assessed the need and their own meager resources, and came to the very sensible conclusion: there is not enough.

Jesus didn’t feed the multitudes, the disciples did. “You give them something to eat.” I suppose we’ve all wondered about that story. What exactly happened that day? How did he do that? Let’s simply go with what the text says. The disciples gave what they had and it was enough. It became abundance. Maybe it was something like what happened on that airplane. Maybe Jesus’ compassion and the disciples’ trust and generosity were so humbling and inspiring that people began to dig in their pockets and share the scraps of bread they had brought along. Maybe they put money in and the disciples took turns running into town to buy bread. However it happened there was enough for all.

Walter Brueggemann said, “When you are with Jesus you are inescapably in the bread business.” And so it has always seemed to me that the church, whatever else it is, is in the bread business. Meals for the homeless, sack lunches for the hungry, will not resolve or even begin to address the enormous problem of world hunger. Be that as it may, it has always seemed to me that one of the reasons the church is here is to be a place where hungry people are fed.

Additionally, there is also a moral imperative for you and me to trust God enough to begin to live not out of a sense of scarcity—that there isn’t enough, so we have to save and preserve and hoard; that in order to be happy and secure we all need about 25 percent more than we currently have. The personal imperative is to listen to the Jesus Way, to be transformed and converted by the grace of God to begin to live abundantly, opening our hands, sharing what we have, confident that our meager resources, in God’s hands, will always be transformed into abundance.

And there is more still to this story. There is good news for all the people who hunger—and who among us is not, in some very real way, hungry? “Thou hast made our hearts restless,” St. Augustine wrote centuries ago, “until they rest in thee.” Who doesn’t know what that means? Hungry—for bread of heaven; thirsty for living water. That is why five thousand people followed him into the evening, past dinnertime, with gnawing hunger reminding them of their emptiness. And that is why I come each Sunday morning, and I suspect, if you thought about it, that is why you come each Sunday—on the outside chance that you might find bread for your deepest hunger. 

Johnny Dunlop was captured during World War II and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Poland. It was dreadful: cold, wet, filthy, and worst of all, there was almost no food, just a bowl of thin soup and a scrap of bread once a day. As the war drew to a close, the conditions worsened. Prisoners lost weight, contracted diseases and began to die. One easy way to end it all was to throw oneself against the barbed wire fence as if trying to escape and be shot instantly by the guards. Dunlop said that one night, deeply discouraged, depressed, and sick with hunger, he slipped out of the barracks and walked toward the fence, not quite sure whether he ought simply to end it all. He sat down on the ground thinking. He sensed movement in the dark on the other side of the barbed wire. It was a Polish farmer. He had a half a potato in his hand. He thrust the potato through the barbed wire. As Dunlop took it, the man said, in heavily accented English, “The Body of Christ.”

“And all ate and were filled and they took what was left over—twelve baskets full.” Later he would take bread and bless it and break it and give it to them and say: “This is my body broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” Amen. 

“Following the Lenten Path: Faith—Discovery or Invention?”

Mark 8:31-38; Romans 4: 13-25

March 4, 2012

R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

 A young woman, home from college, dropped by my office. I was excited to see her and looked forward to hearing about her college adventure. When I saw her face, however, I could tell it was not going to be a pleasant visit. Her body language suggested tension. It only took a few moments for her to get to the reason for her visit. She said, “I’ve come to ask you formally to remove my name from the church roll because I can no longer in good conscience consider myself to be a Christian.” 

When I asked her to explain, she said, “Well, it’s very simple. I grew up believing what my parents and what the church taught me, and that is that God created human beings. I now have more information, and I’ve concluded it’s the other way around. It’s human beings who have created God. I think people believe what they want to believe, not necessarily what is true. I think people dig down into their needs and desires, make up their beliefs, and project them on the screen of religious belief. I don’t think there is anything objectively real when a person says, ‘I believe,’ and I can’t be a part of that anymore.”

To this day I still do not know how she expected me to respond. I don’t know if she thought I would faint away at such heresy or whether I would get angry. What I did do, because this was not my first time dealing with doubt, was acknowledge that what she was saying was something I had worked with for a long time. Then I said, “Where did you encounter this charge against the truth of religious experience?” She said, “It’s everywhere.” 

She continued, “Look at psychology. Freud said that people are lonely and frightened in this empty world and, therefore, they make up this idea of God as a comfort against the emptiness of nothingness. There is nothing objectively real to it. It’s a figment of their imagination. I read about it in political science. Marx said that religion was the opiate of the people, the way the upper class keeps the underclass under thumb. There is nothing objectively real about it. As a drama major, I read playwrights like Eugene O’Neill who said, ‘Religion is the chloroform mask into which the weak and fearful stick their faces.’ I have to have the truth, and I don’t believe it exists in any real form in religion.”

I said to her, “I wish that I could say without equivocation that there is nothing to your charge, and that people have never made up what they want and then dressed it as what they believe. I’ve seen it. But having conceded what you have said has happened many times, I want you to do three things before you come to a final judgment.”

She looked at me strangely, but reluctantly agreed. “What do you want me to do?” she asked. “First, I want you to read the Gospel of Mark at one setting. It won’t take you long, maybe forty-five minutes. As you read, I want you to ask this simple question: Is the figure that this Gospel describes a weak and fearful person who is making up his ideas of God in order to escape trouble, or is he in touch with something outside himself, the one he called Abba? Was he in touch with something outside himself that got him into trouble rather than delivering him out of trouble?”

“Specifically, I want you to look at what happened on the last night of his life. He knelt in the garden and there agonized over the prospect that lay ahead of him. And he begged God, All thing are possible, take, if you will, this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will but your will be done. Whatever else you say about that experience, that is not religion as wish fulfillment. That is not somebody making up a faith simply to deliver them out of some kind of trouble. Rather it’s like any faithful scientist who is committed to truth above all things. It strikes me that what we have here is a person who is in touch with something beyond himself and is willing to let that reality be more important than all of his wishes. I want you to ask the question as you read: Is this Jesus a weak coward making up something, or is he in touch with something that made extraordinary demands of him?”

“The second thing I’d like you to do,” I said, “is go to the book of Acts and look at the life of Saul. He was a devout Jew; he was a Pharisee. He couldn’t believe it when he heard people saying a crucified carpenter was the Messiah whom God had sent to save the world. Saul expected something different, a Messiah with a sword in his hand who would wipe out all the enemies of Israel and establish Jerusalem as the new Rome. While on his way to wipe out this heresy, he had a strange experience—a blinding light knocked him to the ground and something beyond him broke into his experience.”

“What do you think Saul discovered on the road to Damascus? Does it represent wishful thinking? Was it what he most wanted to be true…was he making it up out of his needfulness? Or is it closer to the truth to say that he suddenly encountered something outside himself that cut right across everything that he wanted and needed? That doesn’t sound like religion as wish fulfillment to me.”

“The last thing I want you to do is sit down and write out in your own words the kind of religious vision you hope mostly to be true. I want you to make up a religion that suits you exactly and precisely. As an example, I would say that my ideal religion would have nothing about loving my enemies, or forgiving 70 times seven. I would not mention anything about taking up a cross and denying myself, and I certainly wouldn’t mention anything about judgment or the possibility of hell. My point is there is much in Christianity that is not easy for selfish people to embrace. There is much that challenges us, much more than our neediness projected on the screen outside ourselves.”

I shared that story to simply make the point that authentic religious truth comes to us exactly like every other truth comes to us, that is, something beyond ourselves breaks in, and we perceive it, and we shape our conclusion according to the evidence. We don’t twist the evidence in order to correspond to what we may be wanting.

I think one of our big problems is that we don’t understand the nature of faith. As a child I thought faith was the opposite of knowing, that it was like the little boy C.S. Lewis talks about who said, “Faith is having to believe something that you know ain’t so.” That is, it’s embracing something that’s contrary to all of the ways that we encounter reality. But faith is not an alternative to knowing. Faith, rightly understood, is yet another avenue to knowing. Look at creation. We have been given so many ways of interacting with the outside world. We are, as someone said, wonderfully porous creatures. 

Children, early in life, learn about their senses. One second grade teacher said, “I want to teach you about the different ways that you have of seeing the world. You have an eye gate through which all the wonder of color and shape enters your experience. You have the ear gate through which comes the wonder of sound, the nose gate through which odor comes, the tongue gate which is where taste comes into your experience, and the skin gate that helps you feel.”

I would add that what the eye is to color, what the ear is to sound, faith is to the divine dimension of reality. Faith is the capacity given by God to perceive that which is essentially spiritual, which is sacred and holy by nature. We reach religious conclusions the same way the scientists reach conclusions in the laboratory. The difference between the knowing of science and the knowing of faith is that the object that we are perceiving is spiritual in nature and not physical.  

Faith is yet another avenue to knowledge; it is not an alternative to knowledge. In making up your mind about ultimate questions, I invite you to a kind of openness that believes that truth is more important than anything else, and that God is the source of all truth. 

When C.S. Lewis was ten years old, his mother died of cancer. As a little boy brought up in the church, he had prayed earnestly to God that she would be healed. When she died, it was unbearable. Lewis concluded that his prayer was not answered because there was no "answerer," there was no such thing as a God who cared for people. There was nothing behind it all but random emptiness

When he got to Oxford and became a brilliant student of philosophy and medieval English, he began to encounter individuals who were believers. He was amazed to find out that they were careful in their scholarship, that they were truth-seeking people just like him. He began to question that what he had decided at ten years of age was not the deepest truth. Lewis said that as he began to entertain the idea there might be something behind all that corresponds to God, his honest feeling was not—I hope Christianity is true, but I’m afraid it’s not. He said his real feeling was—I’m afraid it’s true, and I hope it’s not.

Alone in his room, Lewis wrote, God broke into his experience. He could not in the name of truth deny the reality of this power that was breaking in from beyond. And so, Lewis wrote, “I became the most reluctant convert in all the isle, in all of England.” Religion for him became discovery and not invention.

 Religious truth is event. It is the mystery breaking in from beyond and authenticating that there is, beyond it all, this incredible and wondrous and mysterious reality. Therefore, as you ask this season, “Why do I believe what I do?” I invite you to realize that authentic truth is of the same cloth no matter where you find it. It breaks from beyond. It is something that exists apart from our desires and apart from our neediness. Do you want to know the truth and know it in whatever shape it takes? If that is your spirit, I have every confidence that in God’s good time and in God’s inexplicable way, God will have God’s hour with you. 

I wish each of you a brave and honest and hopeful journey . Amen.   

“What Does It Mean to Be Christian?” Part II
Matthew 16:13-20
February 26, 2012
R. Keith Stuart, Ph.D., Minister

To be a Christian. How? What exactly does that look like? What do you have to sign, and where do you have to go? Greg Garrett, novelist, professor of English at Baylor, and lay preacher in the Episcopal church, invited Maya Angelou to speak to the students at Baylor. After the lecture, Garrett remembers trying to thank her and, with a little condescension said, “And to think, you’re a Christian.” He said she took his hand, smiled, and shook her head. “Oh, honey,” she said with that deep rich resonant voice, “I’m not a Christian. I’m trying to be a Christian.”

To be a Christian begins with Jesus, who he was and is, what he intended, what he taught, and what he wants. The late Joseph Sittler, professor of theology at the University of Chicago, wrote this personal note about Jesus: “My whole life has been haunted by the reality of Jesus. I find that despite all the scholarship that has taken place in my life…there is no abatement in the power of the haunting allure of the figure of Jesus.” I keep that paragraph on my desk. What he said about Jesus is true for me as well.

Krister Stendahl, world-renowned New Testament scholar, was asked during a question-and-answer period, “Professor Stendahl, how did you get hooked on this stuff?” Everyone leaned forward, expecting some long-haired description of the philosophical path by which people might find faith. Stendahl simply said, “My family and I were not church people at all and the only way I could rebel against the mores of my family was to go to church, and when I got to church within six months I fell in love with Jesus.”

There is a widespread phenomenon, nearly universal, of admiration for Jesus but antipathy toward the Christian religion and the Christian church. Martin Marty says, “There is a great company of nonbelievers, secular humanists, atheists, who admire Jesus…Their patriarch is Thomas Jefferson,” who didn’t believe Jesus was divine but greatly admired him.” I just finished a book about the emerging generation entitled,  They Like Jesus but Not the Church. Students all across college campuses are interested in Jesus but repelled by what they see of Christianity and the church in the media. They think Christians are narrow, fundamentalist, self-righteous, and judgmental.

A recent Pew Public Religion Poll revealed that one of the major reasons people are leaving the church is that the most visible form of Christianity is described as homophobic, anti-science, prejudiced and mean-spirited. And right on cue comes the news of how efforts to stop the bullying of gay students in Minneapolis is being opposed by the Minnesota Family Council, a group identified as Christian. That makes me cringe when I read that. And Jesus would be embarrassed by that.

Jesus and his friends are walking along a dirt road, and pretty much out of the blue, he asks, “By the way, what are people saying about me?” “Funny you should ask,” they say. “We’ve talked to some people who think you are John the Baptist, others think you are one of the old prophets.” “But what do you think?” I always have imagined a long pause, the disciples looking at the ground, shuffling their feet, afraid to look up because the teacher might call on one of them. Slowly Peter says, “You are the Messiah, the promised one, the one we have been waiting for, for centuries—our parents, their parents, all the way back. You are the one we’ve been waiting for, the Son of the Living God.”

The first sermon I preached at my home church after I enrolled at seminary was on this passage. It was a colossal failure, but I was too full of myself to know how bad it really was. I wasn’t overly nervous; I was prepared. I had studied the passage from all angles. I could read it in Greek. I knew what every authority in history had said about it. I had footnotes, lots of footnotes. My family was there, well, most of them. My father wasn’t there. He still had not come to grips with the idea that a son of his would turn out to be a damn preacher! I didn’t say anything embarrassing. I laid on the congregation my scholarly insights, quoting from antiquity and using lots of big words like existential and hermeneutic and epistemological. Somehow we survived. The people were gracious, said all the right things, except for Vickie Hinton, a high school classmate with whom I had some unpleasantries, who said, “You weren’t always going to be a preacher, were you  ?”

Afterward, when all the people left, Charles Midkiff, my pastor, said, “You told us what everybody in history thinks. The next time you preach a sermon like that, leave a little time at the end for what you think.” That’s the issue. “What do you think? Who do you say that I am?”

I have now preached from this text ten times in my ministry career. I have concluded that it is a mistake to stop with Peter’s confession. It’s only the first part of a larger narrative. Who Jesus is is the first part, but it doesn’t stop there. I think they are still standing around when Jesus says something like, “If what Peter just said about me is true, there will be difficult times ahead: trouble, conflict, suffering.” Then comes the second part: If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

You see, if the incident ends with Peter’s confession—“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”—then you might conclude that to be a Christian is to be able to say what Peter said. To be a Christian means to be able to understand ideas about Jesus, to have your personal theology all neatly nailed down. And that is what has happened over the centuries to Christianity. It has come to mean believing certain ideas about Jesus to be true, that he is the only begotten Son of God, that he was born of a virgin, that he is the eternal Christ. Christianity has come to mean a set of ideas or propositions.

Hans Kung, one of the most influential Christian thinkers of our generation, wrote that the church has invested itself totally in establishing and maintaining theological orthodoxy, holding right beliefs and rooting out wrong beliefs, heresy. So important was that project that the church became convinced that it was all right to torture and burn people for expressing wrong ideas and expressing heretical thoughts. Kung offers a different point of view:  “Jesus never questioned anyone about the true faith, nor asked anyone to profess his or her orthodoxy. He expects no theoretical reflection, but an urgent practical decision.” For saying things like that Kung has been declared persona non grata by the Catholic church and not allowed to teach as a “Catholic theologian.”

So can you be a Christian if you don’t know exactly what you believe? Is it alright to join the church if you don’t have your personal theology worked out? Of course. Every person sitting here this morning is uncertain about some of the finer points of Christian theology. Jesus himself, I believe, invites it. He did not say, “Believe these five things about me to be true.” He did say, “If you would be my follower, if you would be a Christian, follow me, listen to me, do what I do. Pick up a challenge, a mission, a project that needs doing, open your heart and give it away and you will be fully alive.

You see, friends, understanding does not come before the decision to follow, but after. Your personal theology is not just an intellectual journey, although that is certainly a part of it, a part that I’ve enjoyed, but understanding comes in the midst of following: serving, loving, sacrificing, laying blocks for Habitat, rehabbing homes in Biloxi, tutoring a child, helping with retraining—simply loving those God has given you care for.

Leave some time at the end for what you think, Charles said. Here is what I think: Jesus was and is a revolutionary. What could be more radical than love for enemies rather than their annihilation? What could be more courageous than forgiveness rather than retaliation? What could be stronger and more helpful and life-giving than the blessedness of the peacemakers?

He is as compelling to me as ever: more so, in fact, as I have experienced and witnessed how powerfully transforming he is. His inclusive love, his welcome to outcasts, breaking bread with anyone who would sit with him, touching the untouchables, challenges my own sometimes cautious fastidious religion. His radical love challenges my conventionalism. His siding with the oppressed judges my timidity. His humility, his willingness to suffer, to lay down his life every day, challenges my comfortable complacency. His radical reversal—if you want to find your life, lose it—continues to challenge and lift my spirit. And his promise “I will be with you always until the end of the age” is a light in the darkness. That is some of what I think about Jesus. Amen.