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HOPE UCC Sermon_2-26-12 from Hope United Church of Christ on Vimeo.

When I was five years old, my family went on a summer vacation to Miami Florida.

We stayed in a motel with a pool - you can't be in Miami in summer without a pool - and I paddled around in it wearing a life jacket.

One day I ran in and found the water a bit higher on me than I expected. I realized I didn't have the life jacket and started paddling to turn around and get out of there. As I came up the steps, my mom beamed: "You were swimming!"

I said "I was drowning!"

I was afraid to go back into the water.

Water.

Swimming.

Floods.

Baptism.

Why are we talking about this in Lent, and what does it have to do with caterpillars and butterflies?

We've been in this new space for a month. How do you feel about being here? Does it feel like home?

We're probably going to have to establish some rules about this space. We may need a wedding policy. We may need a policy on outside groups using the space. But I'm going to suggest we keep the rules simple and flexible. There's a place for some sort of continuity and direction. But we sometimes complicate things so much that the original purpose becomes obscured or lost.

In Adult Quest, we've been seeing how Christian teaching has become more complex over time. It seems every question the church has had needed an answer, and every answer raised at least one more question. The rejected answers became heresies (which means choices) and the accepted answers became orthodoxy (which means right teaching). After a while, the accepted answers became required belief to be considered "Christian". And being a follower of Jesus became more complicated.

The author Isaac Asimov - the guy who wrote I, Robot - wrote a lot of other books. Among them is - I am not making this up - Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor, in which he categorizes hundreds of jokes.

Joke number 465 goes something like this:

A seminarian dies and appears before the judgment seat of God.

God asks "what did you do in life?"

The seminarian says "Holy One, I studied theology."

The Creator smiles and says "Well done! Expound on a point of theology for me!"

Unfortunately, as is often the case in times of great stress, the seminarian's mind goes completely blank. For what seems like an eternity, the student struggles to remember a point worth making. Finally, the seminarian says "I can think of no point of theology sufficient for Your hearing, but if You will state a point, I will tell You how to refute it."

It has been said that to dissect a joke is to kill it. In this case, I am less interested in keeping the humor alive than to see what's happening here.

The seminarian has reached the ultimate seat of wisdom. Having nothing positive to say to the Creator about theology, this student could have been humble enough to receive whatever wisdom God might provide. Instead, this person chooses to find ways to complicate the simple truth of the Almighty.

In the Gospel lesson, we can see a similar thing happening. Jesus calls out those who rejected John the Baptist - a man who fasted and abstained from alcohol - by saying "He has a demon!", and rejected Jesus - who feasted and drank - by saying "he's a glutton and a drunkard!" These people had found excuses to not repent. To them, it wasn't as simple as "The Messiah has come, and offers grace and healing to all!" No, to them, it had to be a bit more... complicated.

Two thousand years later, we're still doing it.

A UCC pastor told a story about her arrival at a congregation in the Illinois South Conference. Among the things left by the prior pastor was a thick binder of instructions for worship. Two pages, front and back, were devoted to the proper way for the acolytes to light the candles on the chancel - that's the space at the front of the church. One day after worship, she heard sobbing in the narthex - that's the room outside the sanctuary. She investigated and found one of the acolytes crying. When asked why she was crying, the girl said "I ruined worship!"

The pastor could have just denied what the acolyte said: "no, honey, you didn't ruin worship", but instead asked, "Why do you think you ruined worship?" The girl replied "I snuffed out the wrong candle first!"

The pastor replied "I don't think anyone noticed - I certainly didn't".

This pastor might have just said "those rules don't matter", but that would not have been true. Those rules - put in place by the prior pastor, typed up and published in a binder, practiced to the letter for years, with admonishment for those who violated them - did matter. They mattered to the acolyte, who was driven to tears by forgetting which candle to snuff out first. They mattered to others who had been conditioned to believe that this complex set of rules were required for worship to happen correctly.

Rules can hurt.

There were two things the pastor had to do:

First, she had to offer grace to the acolyte. Whether justified or not, the acolyte's experience was one of sin, of falling short, of ruining things for everyone. That experience could only be addressed with grace.

Second, the pastor had to dismantle the complicated structure that had created the situation. She moved the congregation to more simplicity and versatility.

I had a friend named Mike who came up with the term "the complicators". Complicators were people who could take any problem and complicate it so it was harder to solve. They could take any solution and complicate it to make it harder to implement. And they could take any implementation and complicate it until people just

gave

up.

I like Mike's word. I think, at one time or another, most people are complicators. Why do we - and I include myself here - complicate things?

One reason might be fear of the unknown. We have to think of everything that could happen, and address each one. I don't think it's a bad thing to think in terms of "what if?" But not every "what if?" needs a solution.

For example: "What if the Pope is visiting our church - how should the acolytes address him?" The unlikeliness of a Papal visit to Hope UCC in Naperville means we don't need to solve this in advance. Should it happen, we can invest the time and energy at that moment.

Another example might be "what happens if the wrong candle is put out first?" Unless there's an issue of safety - for example, a need to reach over one candle to snuff the other - it really doesn't make a lot of difference which is put out first.

Another reason may be to protect ourselves. I do not know the motives of the pastor who created the big binder. But if worship did not go exactly as planned, one might defend one's self by pointing out that the rules were in place, and it was the responsibility of others to follow the rules.

Yet another reason may be avoidance. I have been on committees charged with putting together events. In some cases, one or more people kept finding issues that complicated how the event would go. Eventually, it became so complicated that those same individuals declared the event impossible. The complication became an excuse for inaction.

Returning to our Gospel lesson, who was following Jesus? Mostly the poor, powerless, and those who were not the most learned about the law. Jesus' followers included women, who - at that time - were not taught the law.

This is not to say there were no religious leaders who followed Jesus. The Gospel according to John (different John than the one in the reading today) mentions Nicodemus as one who supported Jesus. But more often, these leaders were challenging Jesus with complicated riddles, such as "If a woman's husband dies, and his brother takes her as his wife, and he dies, and this repeats through a dozen brothers, and she dies childless, who is her husband in heaven?" Jesus' simple answer? Heaven's not like that - she would not belong to anyone.

Jesus had simple, flexible solutions to problems. Someone is blind? Heal the blindness. Someone has leprosy? Heal the leprosy. Imagine if we had a health care system like that.

We have a crowd of hungry people? Feed them. No complication of "what if some of them are not needy enough to be fed?" Jesus feeds the crowd without doing validation of need. Imagine if we had an emergency food program like that.

Of course, we need rules and laws to function as a community and as a society. But when we're making these rules, we ought to make sure they are working toward our goal rather than running from fear, shifting blame, or finding a reason to give up.

Above all, let us not make our rules burdensome - not on our leaders, not on our volunteers, and especially not on the ones we serve.

So I'm asking us all to use this next week to notice the rules we encounter: those of the USA, Illinois, and our local counties, townships, cities and villages; of Christianity; of the national setting of the United Church of Christ, Illinois Conference, Fox Valley Association, and Hope Community UCC; and of our workplaces, families, and our selves. Examine these rules and see whether they are focused on addressing an issue or based in fear. We may find ways to reduce the complication in our lives.

And while we're at it, let's not complicate the requirements to be in community with each other.

Jesus said "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Let us not make it more complicated than that.

Another group of believers were sincerely convinced they knew the date and time of Jesus' return and that they would all be raptured from the Earth to escape the coming tribulation. And another group was wrong.

Harold Camping of Family Radio was certain he was right. The people who listened to his radio show found his arguments convincing. And here's something to consider: if someone you trust tells you to choose between financial solvency with a future eternity in Hell and bankruptcy with a future eternity in Heaven, it's a pretty easy choice. If you're not sure which is going to come true, it gets a bit more complicated, but you're still gambling your temporary comfort against your eternal comfort.

I completely understand the kind of fear this argument instills. I grew up in the Evangelical Free church, and we were taught about the rapture. Sometimes I even worried that the rapture had happened and I was left behind.

So with one's immortal soul at stake, it makes a certain amount of sense to prove one's faith by selling everything, cashing in IRA's, pensions and 401(k) funds, and pouring all that money into billboards, vans, and RV's. These people are not crazy; they're frightened.

And now, of course, many of them are broke, unemployed, and homeless.

So first we need compassion for people who did what they thought God was calling them to do. They stepped out in faith to a degree most of us are too afraid to. Where we can, we ought to help them. They are our sisters and brothers.

Second, maybe we can start taking apart the idea of the pre-tribulation rapture so this sort of thing is less likely to occur in the future.

The modern concept of a pre-tribulation rapture came about in the nineteenth century. There have been many people who have proclaimed the date of the rapture: William Miller (see The Great Disappointment), Charles Taze Russell (whose Studies in the Scriptures were the basis of the beliefs of the Bible Students, a sect with which I was involved for a while) and others. Needless to say, none of these have come to pass.

It would be silly for a progressive theologian to say new ideas are inherently useless. There are plenty of new theological ideas, and some of them are very interesting. So I'm not going to say that a pre-tribulation rapture can't be true because it's a relatively young idea.

What I will say, however, is that I find a pre-tribulation rapture a little odd for Christianity. Here's why:

Jesus (however you understand Jesus - human, divine, both, neither?) could have avoided torturous death, but didn't. And Jesus not only suffered a sacrificial death, he lived a sacrificial life.

So I find it a little odd that people who claim to follow Jesus, the one who said "take up your cross and follow me" (Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23), should be looking for a way to escape the trouble and leave others to suffer.

One possible problem with such a theology is neglect of the environment. There have been people who argued against ecological concern because they expected an imminent rapture. To me, that's a bit like trashing the apartment when you move out.

Another problematic symptom can be smug superiority. "In case of rapture, this car will be unmanned" is one bumper sticker. I've seen comments like "I'll be laughing in heaven while you suffer on Earth". Imagine Jesus taunting a prisoner this way - is that the Jesus of the Gospels?

One could also not care to help the suffering in this world, because it will all be over soon (at least for the righteous). Forget "blessed are the poor", and never mind the oppressed.

Of course, not all believers in a pre-tribulation rapture act these ways. The primary problem I have with the pre-tribulation rapture is that it suggests that some set of us with the right faith, the right knowledge, a kind of Gnosis... can escape trouble.

But we're Jesus' people,

and if we are to follow Jesus' way,

and serve like Jesus,

and take up our own crosses,

and be faithful unto death...

I don't think we get a pass on the struggles of life. Rather, I think we ought to be in the midst of them, struggling with our sisters and brothers.

However we believe our lives - and our world - will end, if we are followers of Jesus, we will love our neighbors as ourselves.

If we see how Jesus came as a servant, we will also be servants.

If we have been blessed by God, we will pour those blessings out on others.

We may not die a sacrificial death as Jesus did, but we can live a sacrificial life. Perhaps we can't do so to the degree that Jesus did, but as best as we are able, our call is to stay here to help those who struggle, to love the unloved, to care for the suffering.

Today, I will offer this prayer:

God, I pray that I will not be raptured,
and that you will help me to show my faith
not by impoverishing myself to prove my trust,
but by using the ways you have blessed me
to bless others.
Do not let me escape the trouble that comes to my neighbor
But let me be a help to her and to him
As you have been a help to me.
Amen.

Year C, Third Sunday after Pentecost.
Scripture: 1 Kings 21:1-21a, 2 Samuel 11:26-12:15

Those of you who are liturgically inclined may know that we're in "the season after Pentecost". This, and the season after Epiphany, are considered "ordinary time". "Ordinary time" just means we're not in a special fast or feast time like Advent, Christmas, Lent, or Easter.

The lectionary is a set of readings on a three year cycle. Many churches use the lectionary to determine what scripture will be read each week; some, like Hope, don't always follow the lectionary.

In ordinary time, the lectionary ordinarily provides two sets of old testament readings: one that follows the scripture in the order it appears in the Bible, and another that chooses readings based on harmony with the new testament theme.

Ordinarily, only one old testament reading is used.

Ordinarily, the two old testament choices do not line up.

But this is no ordinary church, we are no ordinary people, and this is no ordinary set of readings.

It's Easter Sunday, and churches across the world proclaim "He is risen! He is risen indeed!"

We can talk about the empty tomb as proof of the resurrection of Jesus, and then argue about whether it is a physical, spiritual, or metaphorical resurrection. We can talk about whether the resurrection means Jesus' triumph over death, over evil, over Satan, or an illustration of the promise of our own resurrection.

I think thousands of other preachers have "He is risen" covered. And so, my contrarian nature leads me to talk instead about the now available tomb.

Most tombs are single-use. You put someone in, and the tomb remains occupied. In some cases, there may be a crypt or plot where the remains of various family members will reside. But - unless the body is exhumed and moved elsewhere - graves usually stay occupied.

But here we have the unusual case of a tomb left vacant. What are we to do with a used tomb?

The practical thing is to put the remains of someone else in it. (You don't really want to make a former tomb into a restaurant.) So who will we bury in the tomb?

I have a suggestion.

We can bury ourselves.

Progressive and Liberal Christians don't often use the phrase "born again", but it is based in scripture: the Gospel according to John has Jesus telling Nicodemus that he must be born again, and I Peter 1:22-25 says:

Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart.For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. For,
   "All men are like grass,
      and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;
   the grass withers and the flowers fall,
    but the word of the Lord stands forever." And this is the word that was preached to you

So what, in a progressive, liberal context, does it mean to be born again?

Fearfully, I make a suggestion that condemns me: we become dead to our own self-interest and seek to carry out Christ's command of love for others - especially the hungry, thirsty, strangers (homeless), naked (vulnerable) and imprisoned. For me, it means caring less about where I am going to eat and more about how I am helping to feed others. It means caring less about the declining value of my home and more about the homeless. It means caring less about my job security and more about people who are abused by family members, teachers, clergy, and others. It means caring less about my freedom to write a blog entry and more about those who - rightly or wrongly - are imprisoned and how to restore them to community.

I have to put my own selfish person into the tomb.

All is not lost, however, for from this death, a new person (with God's help) will rise: one who is more concerned with fellow human beings, one who takes risks, one who has faith that God will guide her along the way.

I pray for the courage to put my frightened, anxious self into the tomb.

So Glenn Beck says that Social Justice is the equivalent of Nazism and Socialism. Of course, Nazism and Socialism are about as alike as drought and rain, but we'll leave that alone. And Beck tells his viewers to leave their churches if they say anything about Social Justice.

So what's a church to do? Charity only, without calling for change in the system?

On the surface, that seems ok. We'll give to the poor to help them out, but we don't want any changes to our financial and social systems. Yet it is our systems that create and maintain poverty. Charity does not erase poverty, it merely treats the symptom.

Imagine a person who could not walk to where the food was. You could bring food to the person, but that person would have to eat again. The person becomes reliant on charity for survival.

What would Jesus do?

Sure, we have the parable of the sheep and the goats, where Jesus speaks about visiting the sick and imprisoned, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked, but is that all Jesus calls us to?

Did Jesus bring the man crippled from birth a loaf of bread and a fish? Did Jesus hand the paralytic a meal?

Of course not. Jesus healed people and restored them to community. Jesus made people whole in body and social status.

And was Jesus content with treating prostitutes, tax collectors, Samaritans, and others as unclean sinners to stay on the outside of society?

Of course not. Jesus ate with them and even said they would be getting into heaven before the (self) righteous.

Charity without change is a formula for continued dependence and subjugation. That is unethical, unjust, and unChristian. (It's also economically foolish, because it means keeping a class of people dependent on you.)

So I say:

If you belong to a church that offers charity but does not work for change, run as fast as you can and leave that church. It is not a church of Jesus Christ.

Chris Rice's "Cartoons" is a funny song about cartoons becoming saved and singing "Hallelujah". Of course, each cartoon sings a variation, except for two: "How 'bout Beavis and that other guy? Nah!"  

But I was thinking the other day...
What if Beavis and Butthead got saved?

And why not?

Sure, it's amusing to mention these two MTV cartoons and leave them out of salvation - but only if you're not Beavis and Butthead. If you've lived a life similar to theirs and have just come into a church in the hope of turning your life around, that sort of rejection isn't funny at all.

The Jesus of Record - the one we find in the four canonical Gospels, a few apocryphal Gospels and referenced in the Epistles - reached out to people that others thought were beyond redemption. He spoke to, and forgave, those who the religious leaders shunned.

True, it's just a funny song about cartoons, but we ought to be careful about the messages we send about how great God's grace really is. If hunters, cavemen, bears, moose, squirrels, frogs, and smurfs can be saved, we have to believe that a couple of contemporary teens can be saved as well.

How bout
Beavis and that other guy?

Cool.

Some very well-meaning hearing people believe that people, especially children, who can't hear should have surgery to help them hear - if such surgery is available. After all, Jesus healed the deaf too.

I know some Deaf people. The capital-D Deaf people I know aren't interested in cochlear implants; they don't want to be fixed because they don't feel broken.

So who is right? The hearing people I mentioned in the first paragraph are with Jesus: we should make the deaf to hear.

The Deaf people in the second paragraph have their own language and culture, and bring up their Deaf children to communicate through sign. They don't see the need to change who they are.


I was thinking about my Deaf friends this morning when reading the Discussing Homosexuality thread. True, there are arguments about whether people are born gay or not. But the parallels are interesting: people who are not [deaf, homosexual] want to fix the people who are [deaf, homosexual] so they won't be [deaf, homosexual] anymore - they will be healed and normal.

One might argue that deafness is not called a sin in the Bible - but indeed some see staying in deafness to be sinful ([url=http://pilgrimandastranger.blogspot.com/2006/10/you-shall-not-curse-deaf-or-put.html]read here[/url]). And while Jesus didn't heal the homosexuals (or indeed say anything about them that was recorded), He did make the deaf to hear.


Why is it that we (and I include myself here, because I often find myself thinking this way) "normal" people want to make decisions for others to make them more like us? Should we make the little people grow? Should we have stunted the growth of tall people? Should we make the picky eaters eat more things? Where does our intervention in the lives of others end?

Perhaps the example is in the story of Jesus and the paralytic. Jesus is in a house that is so crammed with people looking for healing that the door is blocked. One man's friends are so bent on getting him healed that they lower him through the roof. Jesus responds by saying "your sins are forgiven".

We can think of sin as a lot of things, but in a large way sin is the difference between being in relationship and being out of relationship. When we sin against God, we damage our end of that relationship. Likewise, when we sin against our fellow human beings, we damage or break our ties with them.

Jesus's first response to the paralytic was not "your body is fixed". His first response was "your sin is forgiven". Jesus restored the man to society. Of course, the local religious leaders didn't like the idea of this human going around forgiving sin, and Jesus responds by healing the man's paralysis.

But it wasn't the ability to walk that the paralytic man most needed; it was being restored to society. He needed to be a part of the human family again. Without that, the ability to walk would have only made him a walking outcast.


I know that sometimes I want so badly to fix the thing I see wrong with a person. I need to remember that what I most need to fix are the relationships between me and others. I could say "love the Deaf, hate the deafness". But if I really love my Deaf friends, I will embrace them as they are, and not with an asterisk to a footnote about one aspect of their lives. I might not want to lose my hearing, but it's not for me to say that hearing is the best way for them.


He who has ears, let him hear.

We know how it is - everyone ends up in Heaven or Hell for eternity. Heaven is beautiful, safe, everything good and right. Hell is eternal punishment - pain and burning and freezing and loneliness.

The trouble is, our visions of Heaven and Hell are substantially drawn from The Divine Comedy by Dante. Jesus actually offered life versus death. There is no eternal suffering in Jesus's ministry - the references to "unquenchable fire" are just that - a consuming fire that can't be stopped, not a fire in which things are burned but not consumed.

Jesus talks about those parts of humanity which are not desirable fruit being consumed in the fire. Whether those are individuals or aspects of individuals is less clear. However, I prefer to think of it as aspects.

In the parable of the wheat and the chaff, Jesus talks about the harvest and how the wheat will be threshed and the chaff is separated and burned. Chaff is the outside casing of wheat - the part that's not used.

So are we like wheat? Do we have good inside of us that would remain if the useless part is stripped away? I'd like to believe so. And I'd like to believe that what Jesus taught was how to maximize the grain - the seed of that which will live on after the useless chaff is gone.

Honestly, if the useless, undesirable parts of me are damned to the trashpile, or dungheap, or the unquenchable fire, that's fine with me. I'll be working on the seed to which Jesus promises eternal life.

If you prefer to believe in a God who punishes people with eternal suffering, that is your choice. I prefer to believe in a God who created us, loves us, and will help us to achieve  the best.  

When the day began to wear away, the twelve came and said to Him, "Send the multitude away, that they may go into the surrounding towns and country, and lodge and get provisions; for we are in a deserted place here." But He said to them, "You give them something to eat."

And they said, "We have no more than five loaves and two fish, unless we go and buy food for all these people." For there were about five thousand men.

And He said to His disciples, "Make them sit down in groups of fifty."  And they did so, and made them all sit down. Then He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the multitude. So they all ate and were filled, and twelve baskets of the leftover fragments were taken up by them. - Luke 9:12-17

This miracle is the only one reported in all of the gospels. It's too bad that, with all the hungry people in the world today, that we can't repeat it now.

Or can we?

At 8:30AM today, I'll be rehearsing with my church's praise band. At 10:30, we'll be part of the service at the Harvest Festival in Forrest Illinois.

Three churches will come together to celebrate the harvest to which we all contributed. Two urban churches - * Grace Lutheran Church & School of Forest Park, IL and Plainfield Congregational United Church of Christ - sponsored acres of land tilled by members of St. Paul's Lutheran Church of Forrest Illinois. The harvest of corn will be sold at market rate, and the money raised will be used in a growing project in Africa. The United States Agency for International Development will match the money raised. So from the modest contributions of two churches and the labor of a third, sustainable agriculture will be developed so that people can feed themselves.

This is the work of Foods Resource Bank. 15 Mainline Christian denominations participate in reproducing this miracle of feeding the multitude.

I'd go on, but I have a celebration to prepare for.

Jesus said to them:

"You give them something to eat."