Pop-up Praise!

Eph. 1:7-14; Psalm 148

            I read a good amount of Bible commentary.   The folks who write them are my weekly conversation partners as the Holy Spirit inspires thoughts for me to weave together for our weekly worship.    When I began in ordained ministry, I relied heavily on books and magazines.   I still do, but not as much as my finding fresh voices from all over the country and the world through internet research.  

            One voice that chatted with me this week shared something I totally wasn’t expecting to hear.    The Rev. Dr. Shauna Hannon shared what happened when she encountered Psalm 148 through the ancient practice of lectio divina.   The phrase is Latin for “Sacred Reading.”   This is a very prayerful, slow, gentle way of reading the Bible that I’ve always found a powerful experience.  Through several phases, you freely open yourself up to whatever Word and world associations the Holy Spirit stirs up.  It’s commonly experienced in a group setting.  And, as Dr. Hannon remarked in the commentary, this practice “encourages participants not to judge what comes to mind.”[i]

            And so what came to her well-educated, faithful mind when she one day read Psalm 148 in this way?    “Whack-A-Mole.”   Yes, as in the arcade game invented in 1976 where the head of a mole pops up and you take a large, soft black mallet to try and bop it back down.   This, of all things, is what the Holy Spirit spoke!   Based on this experience, I’m thinking it would be great fun it we all practiced lectio divina this week and reported back here next Sunday to share what happened!    I actually would love to get a group together for this, so do let me know if you’re interested.

            Here’s the professor’s understanding of why “Wack-A-Mole” and Psalm 148 met up in her mind and heart.   She said it had to do with how the word “praise” pops-up repeatedly and in fast succession.    Let’s give the first couple verses a re-read – “Praise the Lord!  Praise the Lord from the heavens; praise Him in the heights! Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his host!”  Yes, we can appreciate that Whack-A-Mole came to mind!

             This Psalm makes it clear that “all of creation, simply by existing, is a chorus of praise to its Maker.”[ii]   It names angels, shining stars, all sorts of weather, all sorts of creatures, all sorts of natural landscapes and includes absolutely all kinds of people.    All have been set within sacred bounds, and so it is the dignity of all to be found at any time and in any place praising the Lord.   Psalm 148 exists to remind us of “the abundant and random nature of reasons to praise the Lord that arise in any given day.”[iii]     

            Yet do we?   Reasons to glorify our Lord surely do keep popping up, but do we take notice?   And if we do, what’s our response?    Do we give a joyful shout out loud no matter where we are or what we are doing?  Hey, listen up everyone, my pharmacy discount card just saved me $5, praise the Lord!   Or do we say a more polite, silent word of gratitude within ourselves?   Praise the Lord this discount saves me money needed for other important things.   Or do we do what Dr. Hannon confessed to herself later in the day of that particular lectio divina?   She confessed that there are times when she inadvertently whacks “these abundant and seemingly random invitations to praise.”  

 

          Thinking about this confession takes me back to this past Thursday night.   The sunshine was really energizing around suppertime.   It probably had been all day, but that’s when I most had opportunity to notice it.    Feeling a deep need to let it saturate me, I moved our hammock and its stand off the front porch and out into the yard.     I lowered myself into the supporting weave and, after quite a few minutes of decompression from the day’s busyness, I began to just look up and all around.    I started to more or less not notice what the rest of my wonderful family was up to.   I even managed to somehow not hear our dog, Dinah, beg-barking for my attention while attached to her lead in another part of the yard.   I just absorbed the sun, my eyelids alternating between open and shut.   When open, I found myself noticing more than usual.   Not coincidentally, I also found myself intentionally praising God in my heart and mind more than usual.  I couldn’t help it because reasons kept popping up.   

            I praised God for the way the sun lit-up and made new, beautiful art of the branches on a nearby tree.   I praised God for the broad blue space above me and all that air provided to me so I can keep breathing.    I praised God for the gift of relaxation after various tensions felt during the week.    I praised God for human creativity and engineering as I marveled at just how high up a certain airplane was traveling.     I praised God for my gifts in ministry as I reflected on a recent and really powerful, positive pastoral visit.   

            Before long, however, I realized I had begun to do something else.  I’d grabbed several large, soft, black mallets.   The ones within me.  The ones I inadvertently bop down praises with.    There’s was the mallet I pulled out the moment I thought to check my phone for email replies I was waiting on.  There’s was the mallet I pulled out when worry began to creep in about the well-being of my loved ones.   There was the mallet of suddenly remembering something I forgot to do and then the mallet of subsequent stress.   

            All these sorts of mallets are different, but they all come from the same collection.   It’s a collection labeled “Distraction.”   They are all legitimate life responsibilities that I must keep in mind, but the daily fact is that when I swing them, I get distracted from offering the simple, spontaneous kind of constant praise that builds up gratitude and greater trust in God.      

            Getting distracted isn’t the only problematic response to pop-up praises.  We also might not be expecting them, and therefore not notice them at all.    Another conversation partner this week (this one teaches in Australia) noted that this happens because we are accustomed to seeing praise only in terms of a special offering, such as a prayer or a song.   We therefore also tend to relegate praise to a particular time and place, such as the same time and place we relegate our worship.[iv]    So do you find that you mostly praise God only when you are here in this sanctuary?  During the hymns or prayers of the people?   How about all the other time you spend in the sanctuary of God’s vast, wondrous, interconnected Creation?

            Beyond failing to notice or noticing but then bopping down praises, we also just might have to confess that praising the Lord feels like no big deal.  This, suggests yet another conversation partner, is partly because “in our media culture, everything gets praised: cars, a bar of soap, a smartphone.”     I do tend to hear a lot more praise for the latest iPhone than I do for how God loves us in Jesus Christ!   When so much gets invested in glorifying things humankind has made, what room is left for genuinely glorifying God?    

            This same Bible commentator then dug down to a deeper root problem, saying our ability to praise also gets “burdened by a false image of a machine-God who exists to do our bidding, a functional deity whose sole purpose is to give us a boost if asked.”[v]  When we understand God primarily in terms of personal supply and demand, we only offer praise when we get what we want, right?    

            So, faithful friends, there are quite a few pitfalls to our living a life of pop-up praise to the Lord.    I hope my conversation partners and I have helped you become more aware of them.   We all need to more consistently tune into and join the great chorus all around us that Psalm 148 identifies so well.   We should be able to hear and see God alive in all things.   Even more significantly, we need to offer up ongoing praise because of all the gracious forgiveness, wisdom, and hope God never ceases to lavish on us in Christ.   What a positive difference this would make in our daily lives!  In the lives of our loved ones and all the neighbors we are called to love!   In this beautiful world we are called to care for!  

            Practice right now.    Look around.   Look within.   Listen the sounds within and beyond this sanctuary.    Listen to sounds of the sanctuary that is your heart and soul.    What praise is popping up?   Amen. 

 

 

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[i] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1650

[ii] ibid.

[iii]  http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1650

[iv] http://hwallace.unitingchurch.org.au/WebOTcomments/EasterC/Easter5.html

[v][v]  http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1519

Devoted Living in Delay

1 Kings 17:1-24, Acts 9:36-42

 

                This scene from the Book of Acts is faithfully familiar yet also a bit frustrating.    Both aspects of it are because of the specific details Luke, the writer of both his Gospel and the Book of Acts, chooses to tell us.

            He tells us about a woman known by two names, someone comfortable being herself in two cultures.    She is Tabitha, a Jewish convert to Christ.    She is also Dorcas, a citizen of the wider Greco-Roman world.   Both names have the same meaning – she is a “gazelle.”    Such a gracious, gentle name reflects the details shared about her character.  Luke insists we know she is faithful to her Lord, a good and truly charitable person, a maker of clothing for economically and socially vulnerable widows and other marginalized neighbors.    We like her.  We admire her.   We immediately appreciate how she is a gift to her faith community and beyond.   We therefore also feel the heavy weight of the news about her falling ill and dying.    When her friends display examples of her charitable handiwork while standing, weeping in the room where her body rested from its life labors … it has a familiar feeling to our own way of grieving and honoring the deceased.

            And even more than this funeral home-like scene, we are also quite familiar with how her friends pleaded for help, desperate to have the reality of death somehow reversed so their gazelle could leap back to living and giving and loving them and others.    We can hear their soft, sobbing laments over why such a kind soul and gifted spiritual leader had to suffer and die.   

            Along with the entire Book of Acts, it’s widely believed Luke wrote his account of this sorrowful scene that took place in the coastal town of Joppa (some 30 miles northwest of Jerusalem) about sixty to seventy years after Jesus was born.    It is therefore part of Luke’s continued witness to the amazing resurrection of Jesus after he was crucified, dead and buried around the age of 33.   Doing a little math, we can conclude that this scene from chapter 9 thus happened within the first thirty or so years of the church.    Why is this detail important to understand?     Because it means Jesus and his resurrection and all of his holy words and miraculous deeds wern’t all just some ancient, curiously compelling, future-hope oriented story.    To that small but swiftly growing early church community it was all very fresh and relevant and absolutely relied upon.   It all lived on through the Holy Spirit empowered ministry of Jesus’ first disciples, particularly exhibited in the person of Peter, whom Jesus had chosen to be the rock upon which to build the church (Matthew 16:18).

            So when Tabitha’s women’s circle from church called for Peter to “Please come to us without delay” they did so with tremendously real hope that he would quickly bring God’s resurrection power.   And this is exactly what he did, traveling straightaway from nearby Lydda to the upper room where Tabitha’s body had been washed and laid to rest.    Then, after asking the widows to step outside, he knelt down to pray.    In sanctuary-like solitude, a pathway was opened up for the Holy Spirit to bring resurrection power into the room.     This woke Tabitha from the sleep of death.  Peter next gives her his hand and helps her up (Luke’s details are really quite lovely).    From that moment on, she showed herself to her faithful friends and went on to bear witness and help build up the body of Christ believers.

            When I read all this, I realize something that frustrates my faith.    Perhaps it causes the same for you.   It’s the realization of how desperately I want to be able to be an agent of resurrection power in this world.   If called upon like Peter, and like Elijah long before him, any one of us would respond without delay.   We’d be humble and prayerful as the Holy Spirit worked through us to bring back from death any child of God from any circumstance.  

            But I’ve never had this direct experience of helping God resurrect someone here on earth.    I don’t know of anyone who truly has.    And yet every day there is at least one human story when I desperately want to help make this happen.   I especially want to help bring back to life precious lives viciously cut short by people who execute violent evils.    I’d leave town immediately and be in Boston, in Newtown, and in so many places around the world painfully etched in my heart and mind.   I trust you’d do the same.

            Rather than just sit around feeling frustrated, I instead choose to ask questions that help shift my faithful perception and invite me to accept what God would have me do to help those in shock and sorrow.   Is the holy resurrection power that flowed immediately through Elijah and Jesus and Peter and Paul still at work today on earth as it is in heaven, but in a different way?    A way that may seem less miraculous but nonetheless demonstrates God’s redeeming love?

            To this question I offer a faithfully emphatic “Yes.”   One reason I come to this conclusion is summed up well through a colleague in ministry who has preached these words about resurrection – “We do not know what resurrection will mean for us in the end.  We cannot know how it will feel or work or look.   But we do have evidence it is so.  God has woven resurrection into our daily lives so that we can learn the shape of it and perhaps learn to trust the strength of it when our own times come.” (Barbara Brown Taylor)

            Easter friends, where are we seeing and helping to weave God’s resurrection power?   How are we learning the shape of it?  To trust in its strength so as not to be overcome by death and evil while devoutly waiting for ourselves and others to experience it?  

            I’ve found the shaping and strengthening of it is always amazingly and inspirationally present when individuals and communities of all sizes respond to death … especially when it’s a sudden and great tragedy.    I’m thanking God that I’ve been finding abundant evidence of it well at work in so many responses to last week’s bombing in Boston. 

            One particular response points to the absolute breadth and potency of its strength.    It happened three days after that killing and maiming horror struck down the innocent.   Does three days later sound symbolically familiar?   I’m speaking of the resurrection weaving, shaping and strengthening that happened at an interfaith prayer gathering at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.   This served as a focal point for Bostonians … and by extension all of us … struggling to find comfort, renew their spirits, and express their care for one another.[i]    Genuine prayers and other words of much needed comfort and encouragement were shared by various clergy and civil leaders.    I felt especially empowered by these faithful words offered by President Obama -- “You’ve shown us, Boston, that in the face of evil, Americans will lift up what’s good.  In the face of cruelty, we will choose compassion.  In the face of those who would visit death upon innocents, we will choose to save and to comfort and to heal.  We’ll choose friendship.  We’ll choose love.”

            Beyond the eloquent words and big gatherings that get a lot of press, resurrection power has also been spread through all kinds of direct care to victims as well as through all kinds of acts of kindness.     If you look for them, you’ll find story upon story upon story.   

            I saw one particularly moving image of it online.  It is two young boys in Iraq standing close together while holding a sign that says in English and in Arabic, “We mourn with Boston.”   I wonder if they are brothers.   Whether they are or not, I will choose to hold this hope-filled, unifying image of them in my heart as I pray to understand why two other brothers chose to terrorize us.  

            Praise God, such restorative responses of peaceful, loving solidarity are familiar.   They are also frustrating because it so often seems it takes great tragedy for us to offer and to take notice of them.     Yet there is never a time when one child and many children of God aren’t in need of it.    I think we need to strive toward more consistently believing in and calling for and becoming agents of God’s resurrection power.    We need to more intimately and immediately trust that Jesus and his resurrection and all of his holy words and miraculous deeds aren’t all just some ancient, curiously compelling, future-hope oriented story.    For every Christian and every church community, I pray it will stay very fresh and relevant and absolutely relied upon.     Christ is Risen … by God’s grace may we with deep faith keep seeing where He’s gone and keeps going.   Amen.  

           

 

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[i] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0418/Boston-bombings-City-finds-healing-in-small-deeds-and-interfaith-gathering?cmpid=addthis_email#.UXFm46pLgSw.email

Rejoice, Be Patient, Persevere

Psalm 16, Romans 12:9-21

I’ve been wondering why this beautifully poetic and positive passage from Romans also features the ominous sounding words, “leave room for the wrath of God” and “vengeance is mine, says the Lord.”    How do these words grab you?   Comforting?  Unsettling? Confusing?

         
They are words that can summon certain assumptions and a variety of images.   After all, our world is full of global, local and personal examples of wrath and vengeance.   So we need to be careful not to interpret them or ever quote them unless we faithfully understand the apostle Paul’s fuller message to us.    To guide us in this direction, let me introduce you to Pierce O’Farrill.   
        
I “met” him last Wednesday through an article in the current issue of Psychology Today magazine.   I like to read this particular publication because I’m personally and professionally rooted in an approach to human well-being that integrates science and spirit.     Still, I didn’t expect to find such a faithful testimony there.     
         
Pierce is twenty-eight years old.     He can be “overcome with joy” and “moved to tears” just by “looking at the Colorado mountains.”    I believe most of us can relate to this kind of deeply spiritual moment, to being enlightened by the beauty of God’s majestic handiwork in Creation.   For Pierce, it’s also fused to intense gratitude to God for being alive.    And not just in a general, feeling blessed kind of way.   His is overwhelming thankfulness for having survived one specific day in his life journey.   
          
Pierce was present and pierced with bullets on July 20, 2012 at the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.   When the full armored, gas masked gunman starting firing his assault rifle from in front of the screen, Pierce ducked down in the third row.   Someone was dead next to him and another dead in front of him.  He hid behind the seats, counting on them to shield him.   Fully realizing he may be breathing his last breaths, he also counted on Christ.   As we might expect, however, he did not pray for his life to be spared.    He recounts that he instead prayed by faithfully professing that be it his time to die, he was ready.   He was shot twice in the left foot and once in the arm, but following that intense confession of security in the Lord and the inches-close gunman walking away, he survived.   Later, he spoke to many reporters about how he “felt nothing but gratitude from the moment he woke up from surgery.”

We can easily understand this absolute appreciation for living another day.   Perhaps harder to understand and accept for many of us, however, are these later words of his -- “I never felt anger at the shooter.”   There was absolutely nothing in this article to indicate that he’d become hostage to feelings of hatred and revenge.    Nothing of this sinful but totally understandable sort seems to have been triggered after what had been done to him, to the 57 others who were injured, and the twelve people killed by James Holmes.    

         
Quite to the contrary, Pierce lived out the hope of Jesus Christ in his heart.  He was patient through suffering and persevered in prayer.    He came to have radical empathy.  “What would it be like,” he asked, “to be so consumed with hatred that you only think about hurting people?”  And his witness to forgiveness grew stronger, saying, “I believe every single person has a chance at redemption.”   
         
Pierce O’Farrill talks honestly from his heart for anyone with ears to hear and eyes to read.  He speaks not as victim, but as one who knows a victorious way of living in Jesus Christ.   In doing so, he boldly affirms exactly what our passage from Romans today concludes with – “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” 

Good versus evil.    This is a timeless theme of the human story.   We are people of Easter faith.   We profess that the human story has been, continues to be, and will ultimately be fully delivered from evil through the conquering love of God in Jesus Christ.    In every bad and outright evil situation, we are called upon by to speak to and act like our Lord.  In doing so, we make room for Him.   This is what it means to make room for God’s wrath and vengeance.    It means to make room for justice, peace and reconciliation as revealed in Jesus.  
         

Evil absolutely angers God.   But God does not respond retributively.  God instead responds by stretching out the all-encompassing and amazingly restorative love of our Lord in order to reach us, defend us, heal us, empower us.    Every time we deeply and truly trust in this by actively making room for it in this wounding and wounded world, we are able to rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer. 

In Romans 12, you may be surprised to learn that the word we translate into English as “evil” does not refer to some dark external cosmic force bearing down on us.   Paul did not choose a word that points to a power beyond ourselves, making us victims of its chaos.    He instead chose a word that involves choices we make every day of our lives.     Each of us is being “evil,” he teaches, when we are in the wrong mode of thinking, feeling and acting … when we are not being what we ought to be as God’s beloved in Jesus Christ.    We ought to be ardently, actively, always choosing the way of Christ … the way of holding fast to what it good with harmonious mutual affection instead of haughty one-upmanship; the way of offering radically compassionate hospitality to all instead of ignoring and cursing them; the way of forgiving enemies instead of repaying evil for evil. 

The March/April 2006 issue of a Weavings, a journal of Christian spirituality, is dedicated to the theme of Enemies.    Among many good articles, it features an open letter to enemies by a former Princeton University professor named Marilyn Chandler McEntyre.   She admits that while her life is comfortable and safe, she indeed has enemies.    These are any and all that set her at war within herself, that seek to hurt the people she loves as well as has been commanded and taught to care about, that attack the Body of Christ from within and without, that “poison the air, the soil, the water, the spirit,” that lure, lie, and threaten, and that live in Washington, the Middle East, in Hollywood, in middle America, in her household and in her heart.    How and why shall I love you?  she directly asks this conglomerated character of evil.     Her reply makes room for a faithful answer within us all, and is worth quoting a little bit of length –
         
“I believe that I must love you because we have been given one another for that purpose.  In some dark and mysterious way, we are gifts to one another.   We have been given the historical moment, the circumstances, and the call to encounter in each other the very powers of darkness and light that afflict and heal this fallen world.  And our assignment – yours and mine – lies in that encounter.    We are here to learn how to love, how to exercise the power of love, even unto death, even toward those who violate what we hold dear.   I believe I must love you because my life depends on it.  Not only the life of my body, but the life of my soul … until I learn to love you, I am likely to remain in the squalor of my own self-righteous judgments, protecting my own point of view, condemning and cutting off some who may be the very strangers sent to give me a chance to offer the cup of cold water.”
         
Powerful voices like this and like Pierce O’Farrill encourage and inspire us to be absolutely genuine in our faith journeys.   They boldly invite us to gladly make the ever-expanding, concentric circles of God’s love in Jesus Christ our daily priority.    They precisely echo Paul’s call to us in today’s passage from Romans.  
           
At its ancient Greek root, the word “genuine” in Romans 12:9 means “undisguised, not pretending, sincere.”    A different Bible translation of this same verse captures this well by saying, “Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it.” (The Message).     This should be our faithful response to every circumstance of life we find ourselves in -- most especially when bad things happen in this world that deeply horrify us.   
        
Committing to live this way, “is no empty commitment,” preaches another voice I heard in print this past week.   It means, where we can, we can choose not to make ourselves victims.   We can instead choose to accept the stance Paul learned from Jesus, a stance “which will hold us up even in situations of adversity.” This is the stance that soberly recognizes that “violence has a way of sucking its victims into cycles of violence and making its own disciples.”[i]    But we who are disciples of Jesus Christ can break these cycles by rejoicing in hope, being patient in suffering, and persevering in prayer.     We break these cycles, as the Psalm of security and trust that is Psalm 16 teaches, when we refuse to worship what multiplies our sorrows and instead take glad, secure refuge in the Lord and our Lord’s instruction.

In God’s grace and by our faith, may we indeed “not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”  Amen.

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[i] http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/AEpPentecost11.htm

 

What's Your Restoration Story?

Psalm 23; 1 Corinthians 3:1-11

 

            Several years ago I came across a news article underneath the headline, “African Violet Queen Dies at Age 76.”   Curious, I read on.   What I discovered was not lament for a life lost to this world, but an inspiring witness to a woman who meant a whole lot to her church community.  It was made clear that her Christian witness very much lived on in every home she had gifted with one of her meticulously cared for African Violets.   I suspect she knew well that this common purple indoor household plant has the rather apostolic sounding genus name of “Saintpaulia.”

            How she came to be associated with these potted natives of Tanzania and Kenya is a moving story of God’s amazing, restorative grace.  It begins sadly, in her earlier years, when she had made several attempts to end her life.  But blessedly, through the intervention of her niece, God then connected her to the care of a renowned psychotherapist.

            Rather than the conventional first appointment in an unfamiliar office, the psychotherapist had decided to make a surprise visit to her home.  As soon as he was welcomed in, he asked for a tour.   It was then, while standing in a sunroom, that he noticed the row of pots containing the purple, pink, blue and white petaled plant life.   He inquired about them and she replied by affirming that growing the African Violets was the one thing she believed she had a positive touch for in life.   As their conversation continued, he also learned that her only occasional social connection with others was to a nearby church.     He quickly put two and two together and offered her a prescription.   Not a hastily scribbled order for some anti-depressant, but a verbal prescription in the form of these words –

            “Madame, I want you to send someone to the nursery to purchase may more pots and every strain of African violets they carry.     Furthermore, whenever a child is born to a member of your congregation, I want you to give a pot of African violets to the parents at the baptism.   And whenever a wedding is celebrated, I want you to give a pot of these flowers to the bride.” 

            She faithfully followed his prescription.   As a result, the life of this woman was essentially repotted – all that was bound up within her was given fresh air and more room, her faithful roots were given an opportunity to grow and go deeper.   

             The psychotherapist, Milton H. Erikson, who is most known for his work in medical hypnosis and family therapy, later remarked that he never did come up with a clinical diagnosis for this woman.   He simply never cared to.  The evidence of her personal restoration was quite enough.    

             The story of the African Violent Queen is an Easter story.  It' example of how God’s restorative power is planted in an individual at birth, tended to and helped to grow with the help of people who care, and then finally and fully celebrated in a community of faith.

            At heart, every one of us is a restoration story.   I’ve gladly given my personal witness to this through my years here as your pastor.  I’ve shared how I’ve gone through difficult and desperate life circumstances, starting back with my family roots that suffered the blight of alcoholism.    I’ve shared so I could then profess with great joy the very many ways I believe I’ve been blessedly repotted!     Restored!    Each time my God-created, Christ resurrected, Holy Spirit pruned roots have been granted new room to grow, something blossoms -- not African violets, but certainly songs, sermons, care and companioning.  

            We follow the One who could not be constrained by the entombing sin of this world.    God does personally restore us.   What new blooms have there been in your life?          

            God also restores communities during dire times.    We’ve witnessed this happening through countless good words and deeds, on both small and grand scales, following all sorts of world conflict and tragedy.    As we remember such events, we people of Easter faith should always seek to find and support the signs of God’s restorative grace.  

            There are many wonderful examples I could lift up from our life together here at FPC.   But I’m intrigued to remember and share a word about a time in history when this congregation really needed to be repotted.    

            According to our church history book, it happened in the middle of the 19^th century.    This was a span in our history when there were official church investigations and even trials concerning certain character offenses committed by church members.  Rev. William Otis Ruston, preaching some twenty-five years later, declared that “the people’s attention was turned from the subject of their own individual piety and they were sent up and down, hunting out all the evil the neighborhood.”    Instead of “being eager to advance the kingdom of Christ,” Ruston further preached, “they became simply rooters in the mire and dirt of scandal.”    Can you imagine having orthodox watchdogs arrive here in our community to observe your behavior, and if deemed unfaithful, bring charges like heresy against you?    This is not soil I’d want to anything to do with! 

            And yet even within this sad state of affairs, God was graciously working restorative measures, on a beautiful repotting for FPC’s future.   Evidence of this is right before us today, for there were enough scandal-free church members at that time to see to the construction of this sanctuary you are seated in.   

            This morning’s full-on flower metaphor is firmly rooted in the New Testament.    So we say that the faithful folks who literally built the new container for the Easter story that is this cherished sanctuary did so inspired to plant like Paul and water like Apollos.    They trusted God would do the growing, just as God had done for the ancient sister church in Corinth.   They rightly understood how all are God’s servants and are called to work together.   They too saw the church as God’s field – not for battles, but for beautiful restorations.

            As we continue to celebrate Easter, it’s so important and so inspiring hear and to share stories of personal and communal restoration.    Christ is alive!  

            Can you think about times when you’ve felt hopelessly bound up with no room to grow?  When the constraining soil of sin left you unable to see your place in the household of God and share what life-affirming gifts you have?   Can you recall times when God’s love has sprouted in you and brought you back to life?   

            As a faithful people in Christ, in what news ways is God calling us to help one another blossom and grow so we can spread seeds of God’s restorative goodness in the lives of others?      

            Regarding this last question, we have a wonderful opportunity to help witness one another’s life-affirming gifts this coming Friday evening.   We’ll be able to discover what we have a positive touch for in life.   It’s our first ever Hobby Night, meeting in the Community House from 5-7 p.m.   This is going to be a great way to spend time getting to know one another better across different generations.   A hobby really isn’t just something else to do – it’s something that we have an innate passion for and that is done to relax and restore something within us.    And beautiful things can happen when we then share this with others.    I know, for example, how much I really enjoy it when someone feels inspired by a digital photo I’ve taken and gladly shared.   

             Trust in God’s leading.  Trust in God’s planting.  Trust in God’s watering.    In God’s grace through Jesus Christ, we are restored.   We are tended to and helped to grow with the help of people who care.  We fully celebrate with and through and out from our community of faith.   What Good News!   Amen!

 

 

The Grand Reopening!

EASTER 2013

Friends in faith, welcome to the Grand Reopening!  The Grand Reopening of the whole world on this Easter day!   The Grand Reopening celebrated every day and in every way we live out our Easter faith!

I trust you’ve seen and been to stores that have put up a Grand Reopening banner … perhaps along with some bright balloons, a string of colorful flags and maybe one of those weird but whimsical giant inflatable wiggly waving figures.    Such stores have solid reasons for reintroducing themselves to their surrounding community – the business was at risk of going under, it needed major interior or exterior renovation, its stock or service was out of synch with the competition and cultural shifts.     All in all, it’s always about getting more and more people in the doors to experience what is being offered.  

At the beginning of Creation, at the Grand Opening of all, God had an endless bounty of beautiful, beneficial, priceless things in store for our world.   In the economy of God’s grace, these were freely offered holy things like pure goodness, perfect health, true harmony, total peace, unbounded love and eternal life.   God’s plan for sustaining and expanding divine business was built upon a community model that created and called together trusted partnerships. 

The very first managers of all the good stuff God had in store were vital to this being a successful endeavor.   Created in God’s image, they are known to us by the names Adam and Eve.   At first, they freely chose and enjoyed the benefits of complete loyalty to all of God’s business. They took care of and enjoyed what was given as their charge, such as giving names to help identify the vast array of items in the holy inventory.   

Tragically, other investment schemes slowly slithered into view.  This tempted Adam and Eve to back out of their partnership with God.   And not only back out, but to actually try and take over God’s world as theirs.   Ever since they took the tiniest taste of this, there has been devastating disloyalty in the great company God created.  The disastrous enterprise of sin became established, which humankind kept investing heavily in.  This had a costly impact to God’s bottom line of holy love. 

In very many ways across time, God tried to gain back loyalty and trust so as to save, preserve and expand the original divine plan.   God did so time and time again by proving to be absolutely trustworthy of this investment.  This was done through signs and wonders and covenants with select partners who helped make many re-openings possible.  The re-openings happened in such awe-inspiring locations as the Red Sea, Mt. Sinai, Canaan, and especially Jerusalem.   Each time, God lovingly expected people to have such an incredible experience that they would stay and support the management rules for enjoying, serving, and promoting all the good things God had in store.    But time and time again, God was betrayed and heartbroken.

Over 2,000 years ago, God decided that there would only be one more rescue, one more renovation of the failing human enterprise, one more world reopening.    Unlike all previous efforts, God decided this final time had to be fully handled in person.   The sin-struck middle management in charge of training and casting vision for the holy company was dismissed so that God could take charge in a new and more authoritative way. God did so directly by becoming the flesh and blood of the person known as Jesus of Nazareth.    In this case, counting on the family company’s future success by giving it to the leadership of the Father’s Son was absolutely guaranteed to work our well!

The success of any Grand Reopening depends on a core group of people doing a lot of careful preparation for the big day.   Knowing this, Jesus led a small team through intensive training and preparation for about three years, starting when he was called upon to do so at about thirty years old.  He did so very personally, very powerfully, with overwhelming love and radical commitment, and at great personal cost to himself.   His long holy work days were spent communicating all the good that God had always had in store for the world and showing how to rightly help manage it.

To do this effectively, he simultaneously had to call people to turn away, to repent, from the sinful status-quo that had caused the dire need for the Grand Reopening …   

He took on administrators with long-established rules designed to exclude some people in the human company from receiving divine benefits.   

He made sure comprehensive health care policies and practices were put in place to bring about immediate and long-term restoration.   

He tackled aggressive, cut-throat power and expansion strategies that did not reflect God’s original intentions of a peaceful, unified world.  

Jesus didn’t do all this just for those who placed stock in his leadership, who had indeed expected him, the Son, to one day come along and show the world the true and right Way of God being in charge.    He did everything so that absolutely all of humanity would be invited to come and see, to follow, to become part of God’s gracious enterprise, especially following the day of the Grand Reopening.  

After hours and days and weeks and years of painstaking preparation, Jesus knew the old way of showing what God had in store for the world had to be completely shut-down.     And even though he was absolutely the greatest asset to God’s work in this world … the complex closing strategy called for his voluntarily stepping down from his power and authority.    This wasn’t easy, for the plan unfolded in a way that caused his entire leadership team to turn against him. Further, it included having hostile forces seemingly take over God’s company.    And most of all, it meant his not merely taking a mysterious leave of absence, but a total one.    He sacrificed His very life.  

Even though Jesus had clearly explained how all this was to happen, and how it had to in order for there to be a Grand Reopening, the majority of people took his gruesome, untimely death as a tragic sign that God was somehow really going out of holy business.    What more, really, was there to invest in after a giant tombstone put in place by insider scandals and the arm of an evil empire shut the door on their leader?   The Son of the Father?

So what a surprising, amazing, glorious morning it was on the day of the Grand Reopening!  According to all God had and still has in store, Jesus came back to life, to take charge, three days after the world tried to kill his holy business forever!

This all wasn’t some slick marketing stunt.    That tombstone hadn’t been a paper mache display model.  It had been very real, very heavy, and very definitely removed by the power of God so Jesus could step out.  In stepping out, Jesus embodied a whole and holy truth -- no human would ever again have to fear being forever closed down by their failure to properly help manage God’s world.   The horrible mismanagement of our first managers, Adam and Eve, was totally forgiven and reversed.   And, for the record, this resurrected Jesus was most definitely not anything like one of those weird but whimsical giant inflatable wiggly waving figures! 

Unfortunately, the initial reactions to the Grand Reopening of the world among Jesus’ closest, most trusted associates weren’t all that great.  Utter shock and confusion surrounded it all.   Quite naturally, it took some time to accept that it had really happened just as He said.   Glory be to God, however, once they did accept it and began to follow the new way Jesus would be leading them and sharing his power, they rejoiced greatly and started building upon the foundation of that rolled away stone.   This is what and why you and I are here today to celebrate!

The Grand Reopening spotlight still shines upon Jesus, and through Him, upon all of us.    He alone empowers and equips us to keep accepting, keep exploring, keep sharing and keep building upon the good and holy stuff that God has in store for us, our loved ones, our neighbors, this vast world very much in need of it all.   

Corporate meetings are held here weekly so we don’t lose our ability and accountability for faithfully checking in on the holy inventory every single day.   There are endless aisles before us, open to all.  First and foremost is the aisle for taking stock of the forgiveness of sin bought personally by Jesus Himself.   From there we check such amazing aisles as the ones where restorative hope instead of deathly despair are found, where holy seeds are available to plant wherever our gardens have gone to rack and ruin, where there are faithful furnishings for homes and churches and all sorts of spaces, and where spiritual nourishment that strengthens and fills the world with justice, peace, and above all the full bounty of God’s love, is always in stock.     

Friends in faith, once again, welcome to the Grand Reopening!  The Grand Reopening of the whole world on this Easter day!   The Grand Reopening celebrated every day and in every way we live out our Easter faith!   Amen.