SERMON:

“When we don’t like what we wished for” or “Searching for God in all the Wrong Places”

First Sunday of Advent 11/29/09

The message and meaning of “Advent” is associated with the most important values of Christian faith; Peace, Hope, Joy, Salvation, and Charity - Advent is a time of reflection. It is a contemplative waiting for the coming and eventual arrival of something good, but the unfolding of this new thing is hidden in the details. As the story goes - that thing we so greatly anticipate is something different than our expectations, but far more than anything we could have we imagined. It is the story of Immanuel – “God with us.”

The story of Jesus’ birth is told in a simple, but dramatic and captivating way. It unfolds in mystery, amid spectacular claims about the significance of this coming birth. The advent story is, in my opinion, a text for all times, a story that is at once beautiful and strange – and most of all honest.

The story of Jesus’ birth is in two of the four Gospels, Matthew and Luke. They both tell a story that is partially about anticipation, mystery, hope, joy, peace and life - but it is also a story of rejection, disappointment, tragedy, and loss. It is in the details of these two Gospel stories where we find profound and powerful Advent lessons for today.

TWO STORIES – TWO TESTIMONIES

There are two different birth stories of Jesus, found in Luke and Matthew. There are few stories unique to Matthew or Luke, but the birth stories as told by each of them stand as unique narratives not found in any of the other gospels. In Matthew Chapter 2 one of the first things we learn in the Advent story is that the approaching appearance of God, the coming of the hope from heaven – was not without its costs. The unexpected element of the story we often overlook is not just that the King is an infant. No the “unexpected” element is far more than the birth itself. The Advent story is filled with anticipations but is also filled with details we wish didn’t have to be there.

It was an unlikely path from the beginning – according to the Gospel of Matthew: How would such an outrageous proclamation be validated? God is coming? Really? Who believes such a claim, and more importantly who can be believed about such a claim? Who among us, has the reputation that can confirm this miraculous story of God’s appearance with credibility? One would think it must come from someone we trust, someone or some place I am used to getting reliable information, because this story is hard to believe.

But Matthew sends the Magi from the east! Who are these “Magi” from the east, these three men who followed a star according to Matthew. Non-biblical sources lead most historians to conclude that Matthew’s reference to the Magi form the East was likely a reference to Persian astrologers or philosophers, or perhaps persons espousing Persian religious views, such as the Zoroastrians, one of the oldest surviving religions in the world.

In other words Matthew claims that the announcement of God’s coming into the world was made not by whom we might expect at the time. He does not day it is Jewish Priests, it is not Greeks relying upon Oracles, nor is wise Philosophers. It is people outside the Jewish tradition, from the Persian East who recognize the coming of God’s mystery. It was people from another land, another tradition, from another ethnic heritage.

Meanwhile, near Jerusalem, Herod, the Greek ruler over Judea, a Governor of sorts serving under the Roman Government, or Caesar, sought to protect his power. According to Matthew, no sooner is Jesus born than Herod, fearful of his future influence, seeks to kill him as an infant.
The result, told to us only by Matthew, is that Jesus was whisked off to Egypt where he would be raised for his first years. Matthew says, “When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: 
 18"A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more."[g]

This is the immediate result of the coming of Jesus? The death of countless infants?! Where is God in this? Where is redemption, hope and peace is this? Is the coming of God what we expected, or something that we really want? And couldn’t this have been prevented? Did this have to occur? Why couldn’t Jesus have been born in Egypt in the first place? Or why did anyone even have t know about Jesus until his adult years? The Gospel of Mark says nothing about Jesus’ birth. Why was it so important? There are so many more questions when tragedy abounds.

Is there a lesson here for our personal, contemporary lives....? Many already know, unfortunately by experience, that there are things, horrific tragedies that discourage us and prevent us from recognizing God’s existence or presence. Sometimes the most rewarding and illuminating paths are at first fraught with the most risk, the most uncertainty, the most danger, and the most mystery. As a result, sometimes, sometimes, the decisions and choices we make may not be the most obvious, but our intuition may tell us to go down the path that appears least inviting to others. It makes the least sense. But sometimes we are compelled to go, or prompted to explore. But we can’t predict the outcome and the outcome may not be as we expected. Am I suggesting that God teaches through tragedy and suffering? No, but strangely, we learn from it at the same time we may try to forget get for personal survival purposes. Regardless, we learn and we are different after tragedies.

When it come to getting to God we cannot makes claims to having special insight or knowledge just because we read or study the Bible, just because we call ourselves Christians, or just because we go to any particular church – no this will not automate wisdom and insight for anyone.

No, the Persian Magi from the East have a message for us in this. It is not just a message that God has arrived in the life of an infant, but that Good news and the spirit of God moves through Persian seekers of God just as willingly as the spirit moves through the faith we are most familiar with. God is truly found in unexpected places, unexpected events, and most of all in unexpected people. But we will find God if we are willing to let God be truly appear where God and how God wants to appear. Are we ready? Are we open? Are we true seekers or are we hangers on to narrow and comfortable expectations of who God is supposed to be?

This is the time to reconsider- reconsider the manner in which we entrap God to be one kind of God and one kind of God only. Matthew chapter 3 tells those who think they have God’s favor just because they are descendants of Abraham, to think again. Matthew says that means little. Religion is more than heritage and right belief. Religion is right human action no matter Jew, Christian, Muslim, or Magi from the Persian East – the path less ventured down may have outcomes of insight and enlightenment that surpass our expectations, if we are willing to explore where most people would not – if we are willing to contemplate unsuspecting possibilities, or even an unfamiliar God – at first.

"Lessons from the Ancient Storytellers"

November 1, 2009

SERMON: “Lessons from the Ancient Storytellers”

TEXTS:

New Testament Reading: Luke 1:1-4

Old Testament Reading: Ezekiel 2:8 – 3:3

This is the first of four sermons following a theme of “Lessons from the Past,” where I will attempt to draw some basic, but important lessons from our Christian history. While the span of thousands of years is too vast a time to span in a few short sermons, I’ll do my best to identify some valuable lessons from reflecting upon our past, from the ancient period, through the middle ages and into the modern period finally ending up here at Lime Rock Baptist Church.

When we think of our Christian past, the ancient history of the church, we are understandably inclined to think of the scriptures as carrying, this rich history of the origins of Christianity. There is no question that what is contained in the New Testament are words that capture for us a most critical time in the development and growth of the earliest Christians, struggling to proclaim and preserve the message of Jesus. For this reason alone, regardless of our differing views of the sacred text, the New Testament remains an indispensable record for the church.

But the Church did not begin with these New Testament Scriptures. The Church began with story telling and storytellers. For decades the story of Jesus life and ministry were made known through an oral tradition, the process of telling and re-telling the many stories and teachings that make up the gospel story of Jesus. Nearly 40 years or more will elapse after Jesus death, before his story is recorded in a written form.

But this is the way it has always been – the storytellers have had an important role in most cultures. It’s easy, living in a highly literate culture such as ours, to forget the importance and value of story telling, passing on stories by word of mouth – not in a book, not even in an email, but in our common, everyday stories

In a world where more than 100 nations have literacy rates of 95% or higher. It can mistakenly lead us to associate all forms of knowledge with the written form. Many people today often associate reading ability with intelligence, but this is an oversight, as important as reading skills are, and as important as literacy is for social success. It still can cause us to fail to appreciate the importance of things that are known through the telling and hearing of stories.

Most of human history is marked by oral cultures, not literate cultures. The Homeric tales are themselves the products of once circulated oral stories of the Greek gods. Some of these stories could have been passed on for a hundred years or longer before becoming part of a literary collection of sacred texts.

The power of “the story” is still with us and it happens when we tell our own stories, each of us. One of the first important tasks of a parent is the telling of stories to their children, whenever those traditional parent-child opportunities for story telling arise.

I can’t help but imagine that Paul must have been a great storyteller. He takes time to tell us in some places that he is not a person who makes a great impression on his speech or appearance, but his language and artistry with the language tell me that there is a good chance that Paul gained adherents partly because his story was impassioned and his story telling perhaps charismatic. The story of Jesus would be passed along for several decades by a compelling oral story.

As simple as this sermon lesson is, it is nevertheless, easy to underestimate the value of oral stories of our lives that will never be written, but when shared and re-told in different context to different people, our personal life stories serve as a means of strength, support and inspiration. We are all storytellers; we have family stories, friendship stories, stories of struggle, stories of triumph.

The lesson from those voices of the ancient past – is not to forget our story, and not to forget the simple but profound power that lies in our story telling.

**Next week’s sermon, the third in a series of five, will talk about “The Lesson of the “Middle Ages,” the stuff in between that we would like to forget”
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"Finding our Past in the Present"

October 25, 2009

SERMON: “Finding our Past in the Present”

TEXTS:

New Testament Reading: John 21:25

Old Testament Reading: Psalm 142

This sermon is dedicated to an old friend from 20 years ago, when I was in seminary. This friend was Lumen Marsh, known by most people only as Swampy Marsh. Swampy passed about five years ago at the age of 99. He was a Baptist minister and missionary to India for more than half a century, preaching at the Seminary chapel well into his eighties when I was a seminary student there in my late twenties, in Berkeley, CA.

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I met Swampy Marsh in Seminary and we became close friends one summer in particular, in 1991. I spent many summer days with Swampy, helping him a little around his house for pay, and also getting to know him as a friend. We would take a walk almost everyday to a small local bank, which always held a copy of the Wall Street Journal for him. During these walks Swampy would talk of his many experiences and lessons in life. I heard a lot about his stretching and breathing exercises that he learned in the Navy, and the impact he claimed these exercise had on his ability to preach with a strong preaching voice. And it was apparently true, even into his late 80’s many a young preacher would have benefited from the clear, strong preaching voice of Swampy Marsh. Swampy told me many stories of ministry and life, including one of his most memorable moments when he had the opportunity to have dinner with Gandhi while serving as a missionary in India. Swampy could tell a story, and he had many of them – many important and meaningful stories.


As we get older life changes – for many reasons and many of these are good reasons. Life is suppose to change as we get older.

At some point it eventually becomes clear that most of our life is behind us (Unless I live to be 95 – most of my life is behind me now… I understand). It makes sense that we/I would think about or even long for the past on some days, or just become nostalgic more often than before. Nostalgia comes from two Greek words that can essentially mean “returning home” & “pain” – a homesickness of sorts but not always a pain for home per se, but also a pain for something in the past. And though we’re often advised, by trusted friends “don’t live in the past” – as good as this advise is in some circumstances, everyone is subject to the temptation to long occasionally long for a time in the past – the good ‘ol days, the days when I was younger, or the Golden Age that captures the imagination of many people.

The manner in which we remember this past is obviously important. The things we remember and the things we choose to forget are both equally a part of who we are. There is today a lot of attention given to questions about memory, whether it be historical questions about telling the past or medical questions about enhancing one’s ability to remember. Many millions of dollars are spent on research about remembering and memory loss.

And while that research is very important and will benefit many people, in one very general sense, not remembering is not a mystery at all, it is part of what humans do over time – we forget.

We forget and we deal with our capacity to forget different from other species. We are not ants for instance. That’s right, Ants – we are not Ants. With many species of ants, there is a dramatic life expectancy difference between queen ants, workers ants, and the run of the mill ant-ant. The difference in life expectancy can be a mater of 30 years vs. a few weeks or days. Can you imagine living in a society where certain classes of persons loved thousands of times longer than the rest of the population? How strange would it be if some people among us had been alive for tens of thousands of years!? While the rest of us lived to be about 90 or a 100 even. Well, that is the experience of ants. Can you imagine how that would change how a society related to the past? Certain persons would be the sole interpreters of that past, because only they were there! It would be very, very different. We are not ants and we carry our past through a different process.

I know the scientists who conduct research are very concerned with the question “why do we forget?” ever since Freud we have heard that there is a forgetting process, that much of our forgetting is subconsciously intentional so as to repress things not desirable to recall. No doubt, an element of this is true for all of us. There are things we would rather not remember and so we forget.

But a different question than “why do we forget?” might be “why do we remember?” That is the question I’m talking about here. I’m not a neurologist or a social biologist, and they have some great responses to these questions, but from a point of view of the spiritual journey of life there is something to be said for becoming aware of two very important parts of life that sustain our pasts. One is that literature is not the end all of preserving the past – the life of the past needs story telling, the stories of aunts and uncles, grandmas and grandpas, parents and children, friends and strangers – and these stories are recalled and re-told through the simplest vehicles of life – the actions we do everyday and every week are actions that we have repeated with the generations before us. It is the life of the human community in which we all participate and find our meaning. Whether through moments of struggle or times of celebration, stories are told. That’s what we do.

Memory is not just in remembering, not just a process of the head, it is in the things we DO. Memory or remembering is not necessarily a motionless act of concentration or contemplation, but it is bound up in our story of living acts. I remember that one particular story from Swampy Marsh….as we were eating a bowl of soup. The memory is in the living of it.

In more than just a metaphorical sense, our past is carried around in our bodies and played out in our sometimes unconscious, repetitive actions. Religious ritual is another important example – baptism and communion are actions Christians have performed as they have recalled a 2,000-year history. History has been carried forward through the ritual performances of Christians. We are always living “with” the past. One could say we carry it in the “DNA of our souls.”
Memory is powerful. Reinvigorating this memory can happen in part through our living. Our actions tie us to multiple pasts – Personal – Familial – National – Ethnic – and even our most basic Human past. Prophets, Gurus and Sages from multiple traditions have told us many times that an important part of spirituality lies in the simple things we do every day. The beauty in life is in some of the most simple daily habits that make up “living” – a cup of coffee, a walk, watering plants, feeding a pet, making a meal, getting ready for bed, waking up, driving to work. I call these Living Rituals – things that have great repetition, things that create rhythm in life – from the heartbeat in the womb to the drumbeat of meaningful music. There is a rhythm in daily life and in the annual calendar of life as well. Interspersed within this rhythm are those other markers of memory – the community and national Memorials, former homes, hymns, old friends, an old book, a neighborhood tree, and yes, old stories once conveyed to us in a meaningful way – stories we cherish and pass on, stories that will never be in a book.

The most basic, shared human activities tie us together, activities that engage simple objects and simple actions

A wheel, fire, a sewing needle, a pounding Tool, a dish & cup – these are the things of life that keep the past present, and facilitate the simple stories we tell… when we were by a fire with a cup of cocoa.

We live in the past and present simultaneously. Our memory is in our hands as much as it is in our heads. The events of our lives are connected in what we do, just as the things that ties us to one another. Whoever we are today, regardless of what we remember or have forgotten, we are inextricably linked to our past. We might forget the past, we might repress the past, or we might choose to not talk about the past – but we will always carry the past about - in our speech, in our hands, in our bodies, and in our souls.

It is sometimes nostalgia that takes us back and sometimes an activity that jogs our memory. Everyday we can look forward without the fear that the past is gone. There is no present without the past, and the past lives in everyday of our present.

**Next weeks Sermon, the second in a series of four sermons on “Lessons from our Pasts” will talk about the art of storytelling.