It Seems Good...

Acts 15:22-29

I spoke with a colleague about something recently, something I was thinking of doing. "It seems good to the Holy Spirit and me that you do that," he said.
"You're kidding," I replied.
"No. Isn't that a great phrase? It's in the book of Acts. I just read it the other day."

It's from our story today, Acts 15. This point is early in the church's development and they had a lot of issues to sort out. There was a big question of whether you had to become a Jew before you could become a Christian; lots of Gentiles were starting to convert. The problem was to be a Jew the men had to be circumcised. It was kind of a problem for church growth.

So the disciples had a meeting and decided on the things they would require of new Christians: don't eat meat sacrificed to idols, don't eat/drink blood, don't fornicate. Good enough. They said, "It seems good to the Holy Spirit and us that we do this."

There is a preview of this sort of thing in John 14. Before Jesus died he said to his disciples he would send the spirit to help them interpret his words after he was gone.

My favorite part of Covenant Discipleship group is the spiritual promptings. We go through sharing our acts of compassion, justice, worship and devotion, and then share our spiritual promptings or warnings. We share how God has been working in our lives, how we feel led by God. We can all share guidance about our promptings also.

Spiritual promptings or warnings are what the rest of the world might call premonitions, intuition, coincidence, dreams. It's when you think of someone you haven't seen in years and then they call. It's sending a card and finding out someone really needed it. It's going this way instead of that way and running into someone you needed to talk to.

The other part of learning to listen to God's promptimgs is having a community to check them out with. We need to check out what we think God is saying to us with some trusted people.

I've been on the phone a lot this week with Ian's pastor getting ready for his memorial service. I called his cell phone Tuesday night -- he was in a meeting with my Dad. We talked about what we needed to and then he said, "Your Dad has an idea for the service. Would you talk to him?" He then handed Dad the cell phone. "Here Rusty; it's your daughter."

I said, "Hi Dad. How are you?"
"Well, I've been thinking about the service."
"Yes?"
"Well, you know Ian was a carpenter."
"Yes?"
"I think we should have a 21 nail-gun salute." Dad giggled.
"Uh...Dad, that's a really funny idea, but you know they usually shoot blanks at those salutes. I don't know how we'd do that with nailguns."
"Oh well. I thought it was funny."
I think Dad had been alone a bit too much that day. This is what it means to check things out with your community.

I had a conversation with someone after the service, a guy from my youth group. Our families used to camp together and we spent a lot of time together, and he hardly ever said more than ten words at a time to me. But yesterday he talked my ear off; it was wonderful.

He talked about waht it felt like to walk into the sanctuary again -- with the very tall blonde wood backlit cross up front. He spoke of what it was like to be with all the people from our youth group again, to be with the families we knew then, the Sunday School teachers coming up to say hello, all these people who cared about us and went to all our graduations and weddings. He said all these people were so important to him.

You see, we make promises here in church. We promise in baptism and in membership to listen to one another, to guide one another, to hlep hold one another's spiritual path and to hold one another accountable.

It seems good to the Holy Spirit and I...but check it out with your friends at church too. Amen.

God's Splendor, or Lew's Birds

Job 38
20th Sunday after Pentecost

(I preached this sermon on our contemporary Fourth Sunday service, and had a file of photos looping on the screen throughout the scripture reading and sermon. All the photos were taken by folks connected to our church and were of the theme, "God's Splendor."

(One other note: I asked Lew's family permission to use his story.)

I've been thinking of Lew. A few months after I came to Hope he came into my office to talk to me about his funeral plans. He was on his second or third round of cancer by that point, and he wanted to have some plans in place. So I got my notepad and pen and got ready to take notes. But instead of discussing Bible readings and hymns he wanted to talk about his birds. "I've got pictures of birds. I'd like to have them projected during my funeral."

See, on a trip to Texas years before, he fell in love with the Sandhill Cranes. He had always loved fishing and camping, but on that trip he fell in love with the Sandhill Cranes migrating across the street from his camper.

Around this time he retired and his wife's alzheimers progressed so she couldn't live at home anymore. Cancer started coming for Lew, and things might have seemed bleak. But he bought a digital camera and took pictures of birds, Sandhill Cranes, Green Jays, and lots and lots of hawks. He had thousands of digital pictures of birds.

Last fall we started talking about the birds again. He hadn't put together a folder of his best pictures yet, and we talked about getting together to get it ready. But the cancer progressed and we didn't get it done. I promised him I would take care of it, and project the birds during his service.

He died the first day of this year. It was a dreary week, no sun at all. I sat in my office for hours with the lights off looking at his bird photos: birds I knew, birds I had heard of, birds I didn't know existed. I began to understand about Lew's birds.

Job also was a guy who had a hard time. He'd lost everything except some insensitive friends and a crabby wife. He kept asking God why this happened to him. God finally showed up and responded with a several chapter-long tirade, a tour through creation.

When we have tough times we can respond in many ways. We can work to shore up ourselves -- therapy, healing work, surrounding ourselves with better friends than Job did. We can put a post-it note on the mirror that says, "You're okay."

Or we can reach out to others: work at the foodshelf, visit someone in the hospital or nursing home. It makes us feel better, not just because of the "they've got it worse than me" thing but because it pulls us out of ourselves.

But we can also just go outside. If we've had a bad night we can look at the stars and things feel different. We can go sit by the lake*, that gorgeous, icy cold, dangerous lake that could kill us as easy as anything, and we feel better. We can try to climb a mountain. We can carry our canoe into the silence of the Boundary Waters. And we feel better, not because we realize how important we are, but because we realize how small we are. We realize how insignificant we really are. And it comforts us.

I think Lew was comforted by his birds because he got lost in their beauty. We can only dream of flying like the hawk. No fashion house in France can compete with the beauty of a simple bird.

Job found comfort too, as he saw the grandeur of creation. It changed things for him.

This is what is so horrifying about nuclear war and global warming. We have our place in creation and we have moved into a situation where we can destroy creation and our idea of our place in it. The grandeur, the distance, the immensity comforts us, but we are messing with all that.

But I have some hope. I think our comfort in creation isn't just about ourselves. It's about how we encounter God there.

I think for Lew he encountered God in the birds. He said they gave him hope, but I think they connected him to God as well. If I had any doubt about that, a bald eagle perched in a tree near his window the day he died. Lew came to God through the birds, and God came to Lew through the birds.

Job found God in his tour of creation too. He said, afterwards, "I had heard of you, but now my eye sees you."

And after that, there just isn't anything to say at all.
Amen.

*Lake Superior

Only One Thing

Luke 10:37-42

Right around age twelve I started wondering fervently how to follow Jesus. I wondered how I should live as a Christian. I wondered if I should go to Africa or Russia or China to become a missionary. I wondered if I should live in the woods and pray all the time. Then I was exposed to political issues like the nuclear arms race and wondered if I should become an activist. Then I met children who grew up in the poverty of Minneapolis and wondered if I should do inner-city work.

What does it mean to follow Jesus? What is the one thing we are supposed to do as Christians?

Parker Palmer asks some of these questions in his book, The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity, and Caring. He is a Quaker, teacher, and activist in Wisconsin, and I think a wise man. He starts the book by saying, “I am not a monk.” No surprise to his friends, but he spent three years in an ecumenical monastic community trying to live a quieter life. He finally left and acknowledged he is not a monk but an activist, and the book is his way of talking about thoughtful action.

How do we follow Jesus? What one thing are we to do? This struggle goes back as far as to those who walked with Jesus. Today we hear about Mary and Martha, that familiar story which pits two sisters against each other, two sides of the Christian life - action and devotion.

We talked about this story last spring at a women's brunch, discussing the two roles in the story and the ways we live them out as women and men in the church. I heard some interesting insights that morning. One woman said, "if everyone just moved into the kitchen then Martha could hear what was going on and participate." Another woman said, “If Mary would help then they could be done sooner and then both could sit at Jesus’ feet!”

What are we supposed to do? How do we follow Jesus? What one thing are we supposed to do?

Martha in the story becomes quite agitated. You can just imagine her frustration -- here I am doing all the cooking and that no-good sister of mine is plopped at Jesus' feet and does she think I don't want to listen to but someone has to cook" and so on. We all know what that feels like.

But Jesus responds to her: “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

There. We have our answer. Only one thing. Mary has chosen the one thing, which is to sit at Jesus’ feet, to pray, to worship, to seek his presence. That is what it means to follow Jesus. That is why the footprints lead to the altar in here. This is where we are to be.

I’ve been talking about Covenant Discipleship this month, really about the heart of the United Methodist Church. Covenant Discipleship helps the people in the group focus on the basics of being a Christian, on the day to day task of following Jesus. I spoke of Justice with the story of Esther two weeks ago, and last week about compassion. Today we come to the other two parts of the model - devotion and worship. They both involve our relationship with God but break into public and private aspects of it. We pray, read, and have practices that nurture our spirit alone - devotion. We meet together for worship regularly as well, because something different happens when we are together, something we need as well as the private time with God.

But in the United Methodist model all these things have equal weight. They are all interconnected, all depend on one another. There is a balance to the whole thing. That “method” is in there for a reason. They work together. So what’s going on?

According to this story prayer and worship must be the most important, right? They certainly anchor anything we do in the world. Holy men and women say that action and working in the world to help others burns you out and goes wrong if it isn’t rooted in prayer and worship. It’s like trying to run a marathon with no food or water. We need it, regularly, if we are going to walk along with Jesus.

Only one thing, Jesus said. Maybe I should get that cabin in the woods and find a way to stay there. Except…except…

With the Gospels we have to pay attention to the context of our stories. Mary and Martha are having a tussle here, and Jesus tells Martha to relax and leave her alone. But look at where this story is in the book of Luke. Following this story, right in the next verse, the disciples ask Jesus how to pray, and he gives them the Lord’s Prayer. But right before this story, remember the story from last week? The Good Samaritan. That story is immediately before this one. Immediately. So we need to hear this struggle between the sisters in light of those two other stories.

Only one thing. How do we follow Jesus? Let’s look a little earlier in this chapter of Luke - the lawyer comes to ask Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus said, What is written in the law? What do you read there?

The answer - You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. And Jesus said, “You have given the right answer. Do this, and you shall live.”

How do we follow Jesus? What one thing is required of us?

Everything. All of it. All we are, all we have, everything about us. That has its own balance, really. Nothing is left out. That’s how we follow Jesus, with everything we are and everything we do, all the time, every minute of the day.
There is need of only one thing. Our whole being.

Acts Of...

Luke 10:25-37

This last week nine men showed up to paint the house. One of them was appointed to come in to take off windows so they could be painted, and so I was running around, putting the dog in the crate, keeping the cat inside, keeping Theo from helping too much, trying to finish getting ready to leave for the day, and unlocking all the windows in the house. In the midst of all this the window guy was chatting with me.
"So this is a parsonage?"
"Yes."
"What church?"
"Hope UMC."
"So you’re the pastor’s wife?"
"No, I ‘m the pastor."
"You’re the youth pastor?"
"No, I ‘m the pastor."
"You’re one of the pastors?"
"No, I’m the pastor. The only pastor. The whole pastor."
"Wow." Just then the window frame he was working on completely disintegrated and came apart in the hands of the man standing on the ladder outside.
"So what about the Methodists?" he said.

What about the Methodists? I didn’t get to answer his question -- it was a little hectic just then -- but I should have told him to come to church this month. I’m preaching a series of sermons about Covenant Discipleship, but really I’m sharing the heart of of what it means to be a United Methodist. Because Covenant Discipleship is about practicing what it means to be a United Methodist.

There are several parts to Covenant Discipleship: two parts are mercy and devotion, and the two ways you do them are public and private. You end up with four areas: justice, compassion, worship, devotion. They conveniently make a cross. Each week the Covenant group meets to discuss how they are doing in each of these areas in their Christian life.

It's very United Methodist. But the phrase in front of each phrase is the most United Methodist: Acts of.

We do acts of these things. It’s not whether you wrote a dissertation on the proper role of the bread in the communion ceremony, its whether you worship with other people regularly. It’s not whether you memorized the Gospel of Mark, its whether you pray regularly in some way. It’s not whether you read a book about justice issues, it’s whether that book inspired you to write to your senator. It’s not whether you feel compassion for people, it’s whether you DO anything about it.

Take the story of the Good Samaritan. We are supposed to know that he is the mortal enemy of the man lying beaten on the ground. We are supposed to know that the three men who walked on by were community leaders who would be expected to do the right thing. We hear that the Samaritan man “had compassion” for the wounded man. That’s the end of hearing about his interior thoughts. There is no discussion of, “he reminds me of my brother.” “Even though he is my enemy I know I should do this.” “I would want someone to help my son, or brother, or me, if we were lying there.” No, “well, I don’t like this guy but here I go anyway.” Just verbs: he tended the wounds, put the man on his donkey took him to the inn, took care of him, paid the bill.

At Covenant Discipleship the actions are smaller, so far, but they are more about what we do in our daily life than what we feel. If the postal service was worried that email would take over their business the CD group is doing their part - they send cards all the time to people they feel need a touch of compassion. They act compassionately to people at work they are struggling with. They think about how to treat the hassled mother in the grocery line. They hold doors open. They work at behaving compassionately to family even if they are tired.

The feeling part plays a part, of course. I saw Huston Smith a few weeks ago in a room full of Unitarian Universalists, 1 other UM pastor, and he was asked, “What is true and what is false?” He said, “That which enlarges your heart is true. That which leads to love is true.”

The feeling compassionate is important, but action doesn’t have to depend upon it. The feeling should move to enlarge our hearts, but the action also works to move us to love. Studies have shown that marriages that behave in loving ways retain the feeling better than those who don’t practice the daily art of kisses and affection. Acting changes the heart.

My vet remembered I was a minister this week and then he said, “What about those poor Amish children? It makes me so sad.” He expressed the sadness, the compassion we all feel for this horrific situation. Yet how do we ask the next question: what can we do? Maybe nothing, but is that true? Can we send cards and letters? Can we send flowers? Can we pray? That is action.

United Methodists by no means have the corner on compassionate action. This week we should just sit down and watch what the Amish have done and take notes. They have displayed amazing compassion. When Carl Roberts killed several of the girls in the schoolhouse in Lancaster County, the Amish community went to his family and said, “We forgive you.” Many people would say it is too soon to forgive, but this forgiveness is not cheap. It comes from living in a culture that practices non-violence, compassion, and is steeped in God’s love

And then we hear what the girls themselves did. The oldest girl, a 13 year old, Marian Fisher, saw what was happening and asked Roberts to shoot her first, hoping this would save the younger girls somehow. Then her younger sister, 11 year old Barbie, said, “Shoot me next.” Barbie was shot but survived. Marian did not.
That is compassion. Marian and Barbie had hearts large enough to hold all those girls in that room. Their hearts were large enough to care for the others and put themselves aside in the most complete and horrible way possible. The newspaper said, “God really had to be present in that schoolhouse.” I imagine these girls came from generations of practicing what it means to be compassionate.

Our hearts break when we hear these stories. We want to cry. But may our broken hearts lead to enlarged hearts so we can hold more of God’s people in them. May our tears pave a way for a response. And may God give us the wisdom to know what we might do.

She Didn't Have To

The Book of Esther
17th Sunday of Pentecost B

She didn’t have to.

Esther was relatively safe. She was the queen, and very few people knew she was a Jew. She lived in Persia when the Jewish people were taken from their homeland and enslaved in Persia - hundreds of years after their captivity in Egypt. She was a beautiful young woman and became queen after Ahasuerus dismissed his first wife for being insubordinate. Actually, Esther spent a year having a cosmetic makeover with hundreds of other young women preparing to meet the king and be considered for queen. Esther, who was beautiful and savvy, was chosen. (This is the PG version of the story. Read the book -- it's quite interesting.)

But trouble came when her cousin, who had raised her, Mordecai, offended the wrong Persian official. He refused to bow to Haman, who thought rather a lot of himself, so Haman plotted to hang Mordecai and kill all the Jews for good measure. He got the king, Ahasuerus, to agree to this edict, and a signed statement went out to all the provinces that the Jews would be killed on the 13th day of Adar, a date that was chosen by lots (pur).

Mordecai appealed to Esther, who could speak to the king directly. But she was afraid. If someone entered into the king’s presence without being called, the king could kill them. If the king held out the golden scepter, then they could live. She told Mordecai, through her servant, that she could not do this.

Mordecai responded: perhaps you came to the court for just such a time as this.

Then have everyone, all the Jews, fast for three days, she said.

She didn’t have to. But on the third day she put on her royal robes and went in to the king. When he saw her he held out his scepter to her. “What is your request?” he asked. “Even unto half of my kingdom.”

“Come to a banquet I will hold in your honor,” she said, “with Haman.”

Haman was quite pleased with himself for this invitation. He thought he was very special. And so the king and Haman came to the banquet. And after drinking much wine, the king said, “What is your request? Even up to half my kingdom I will grant it.”

“Come again tomorrow night to another banquet, both of you.” And so they did.

That night, after much drinking, the king again asked Esther her request. She replied, “If I have won your favor, give me my life and the lives of my people. We are going to be destroyed, and no one can compensate such damage to the king.”

The king was outraged! Who would do such a thing? Esther responded, “Haman!”

For some reason the king stepped out of the room for a moment at this point, and Haman was terrified and threw himself on Esther, pleading mercy. When the king walked in again he thought Haman was attacking Esther, so he ordered him killed, hung on the very gallows Haman had built for Mordecai.

And after some difficult legal complications, a decree went out to save the Jews. And to celebrate this event the Jews hold a feast day called Purim.

She didn’t have to. She might have been safe, being quiet. She didn’t have to, but she did. Esther said something.

You know, there is a lot of question about why Esther is in the Bible at all. There is fasting, but no praying. There are Jews, but no God. It doesn’t seem to have a purpose except to explain the feast of Purim.

But the entire Bible holds statements of justice. The entire Bible, Hebrew scripture and New Testament, all tell stories and have words calling us to speak and act out for the lost and forsaken. “Justice” occurs 163 times in the Bible, fifteen times less than the word “hope.” Esther is about justice for a people being destroyed. Esther didn’t have to say anything, but she did.

In our Covenant Discipleship group we talk every week about how to do works of justice. Compassion is so much easier - it can be gentle, quiet, and personal. But justice seems to require more effort. It seems to involve more risk. If we speak up - we aren’t likely to be killed, but it feels a little dicey. People might have ideas about us. We might be written up on some list. It might require some time and money from us. People might argue with us.
We don’t have to.

We don’t have to. We don’t have to speak out against the annihilation of the people of Darfur, we don’t have to talk about the violence against the civilians of Colombia, we don’t have to ask why there are so many homeless children in Minnesota. We don’t have to.

We don’t have to. But perhaps, just perhaps, we have been put in the place we are, the very spot we are, for just such a time as this.