Change is Hard

 I've had a week. So has the world. 

Wars in Gaza and Ukraine drag on and our Congress is of no help to anyone with the Republicans preferring to kowtow to a disgraced presidential candidate than to actually work on the issues facing our country and the rest of the world. 

The Alabama Supreme Court...under the control of a Dominionist Chief Justice...has decided that frozen embryos in an IVF clinic are "children." 

And a non-binary high school sophomore in Oklahoma...Nex Benedict...died a day after a brutal beating in the girl's bathroom at their high school. Oklahoma is one of the many states that has been making the transgender community the target of hateful legislation. 

Meanwhile...I've had to deal with putting out many metaphorical fires in my own sphere. 

As I read the Gospel, I thought about all that's swirling around me. I reached the conclusion that in every case, what is tripping us up is the fear of things that are changing...and the people who are hell-bent on trying to keep the status quo alive...even if it's futile.

With that set up....here is my sermon. See what you think.

Text: Mark 8:31-38

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Our Gospel reading this morning should give us pause.

Because what Jesus is proposing is something that many of us try to avoid at all cost: change.

Real change.

A real shift in how we are to live and move and have our being.

A movement out of our comfort zones.

And his imagery…that “taking up your cross”…is one that Mark’s initial audience…Jews living with the aftermath of a brutal and destructive war that left them like a rudderless boat in the middle of the ocean…would have put a lump in their throats.

They know what the cross represented.

The cross was an instrument of torture.

As commentators like Ched Myers note…it was to keep the lower classes…and anyone who challenged the law and order of the Roman Empire…in line.

It was used as a means of letting the powerless know who was in charge.

And now Jesus…ever the relentless rebellious upstart in Mark’s Gospel...is saying to his followers….saying to us…be ready to challenge the status quo…and die.

But the death we are called to is not a death on a cross.

And even in this speech…there is a metaphorical message that is the one we must heed.

So let’s first back up and figure out how we got to this point of Jesus making this statement.

In the verses before our Gospel…Jesus is with his disciples.

They are “on the way” through Caesarea Philippi.

Whenever Jesus and the disciples are “on the way”…that’s about this journey toward a showdown coming in Jerusalem.

That they are in this particular region…means that they are in a largely Gentile region.

In fact…this whole scene…according to Biblical scholars…happened outside a cave with a shrine to the pagan God Pan.

Pan is a nature God…associated with shepherds…and goats and sheep.

His name also has given us the word “panic” as one story says he helped a friend escape a vicious battle by letting out a terrible screeching sound that sent the enemy fleeing.

This seems a perfect spot then for the conversation that takes place.

This is where Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”

And after a few rounds of lots of different ideas…Jesus says, “But who do you say that I am?”

And Peter…the Rock…announces, “You are the Messiah!”

You gotta love Peter!

As we talked about as the cast when we were preparing for the staged reading of this Gospel, Peter represents us…all humans.

He nails this one…naming Jesus the Messiah…the Christ…the anointed one of God.

But Peter and all the disciples had a particular understanding about what it meant to have a Messiah.

Their vision of the Messiah was like a knight in shining armor who was going to ride in and be a warrior king…with sword and a head full of steam…leading an army in a glorious if bloody battle to drive out the Roman Empire once and for all.

Instead…Jesus tells Peter to keep quiet about this Messiah business.

Jesus switches the title from Messiah…this warrior…to Son of Man…or in other translations “the Human One.”

The Messiah that Jesus depicts is not fearsome warrior.

He is one of the dissidents.

He is part of the disinherited.

He is one with those who are suffering.

He will not come on a war horse and lead an army against Rome.

He’s plotting to ride into town on a donkey.

And as we heard…Peter doesn’t like any of this.

He really doesn’t like Jesus talking about getting killed. That’s not the script that Peter knows…nor the one that any of us would want to believe if we were Peter.

When we think of a leader…we often look for someone strong.

A person who will kick butt and take names.

And Jesus calls Peter “Satan.”

Not because he thinks Peter is a bad guy.

But just as Satan tested Jesus out in the wilderness…and at least in Matthew and Luke’s accounts kept trying to get him to give into egocentric desires for power… Jesus sees Peter’s rebuke as focusing on the wrong thing.

This is where Peter, the disciples, the crowd…and us…face the uncomfortable…difficult challenge from Jesus: we must change.

We must put away our ideas and identities built on the conventional wisdom of what “Messiah” means…what “strength” looks like.

We must lose our old ideas of what it means to be powerful.

And probably the toughest thing Jesus says in this Gospel: he tells the crowd…and us…we must die to self…die to our ego-driven ways… in order to gain our lives.

Such directives can cause panic.

We don’t want to die…even if the thing we’re killing off is something that needs to go.

When I read through this… I thought about what happens to so many of us when we go through a major event in our lives…some life-altering moment that forces us to face ourselves and our image of ourselves.

It’s what happens to people when they retire…or resign…or otherwise lose a job.

In our society….so much of who we are is tied up in our jobs and what we do for a living.

The most common questions we ask each other when we first meet: What’s your name and what do you do…meaning what do you do for a living?

Or if it’s a younger person…where do you go to school? What grade are you in?

I’ll never forget the night that I woke up sweating and in a panic.

It was about three weeks before the date that I had planned to quit working for Florida Public Rado.

I knew what I was doing was the right thing.

But I also had the fear…the panic…that if I was no longer a public radio reporter…if I no longer was identified with that role…then who was I?

Jesus asked the question: Who do you say that I am…and then answered Peter’s identity with a redefinition of what it means to be the Messiah.

And in Jesus’s words…there is a sense that even though he will undergo suffering…a new identity…a new thing… a new way will come.

Something better…something stronger…something that will not die.

That thing is Love.

The invitation before us then is:

what do we have to let go of?

What must die in order for us to fully live?

What in ourselves are we afraid to give up because it might mean we have to radically rethink who we are…and how we relate to one another?

What privileged status must we let go of?

What righteous anger keeps us from being able to live into and receive the Love of God that is around us?

What words of resentment spoken in whispers have caused more harm?

We’re living in a time when there is so much bitterness.

Our political leaders are stoking fires of tribalism.

They’re behavior is trickling down into the way we see and interact with each other.  

We need the grace of God to get us to turn away from the powerful pull of pettiness…hatred and hardness of heart and embrace the life of mercy, forgiveness, and love.

Jesus is challenging us to not let our egos separate us from the reconciling love of God.

I recently heard a prayer offered by the late Rev. Jean Dalby Clift…an Episcopal priest and psychologist...that I think gives us something to consider as we guard against those things that draw us away from God and each other:

O God of grace, give us your grace that we may not savor the evil in others in order to disguise the evil in ourselves.   

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

Covenant of Love

 

Well, it finally happened. 

I spent several hours on Friday struggling to get some kind of a coherent thought down on paper for my sermon. I managed to finish some time just before 9pm. I got it formatted as I like it. And then put it and me to bed. 

When the cat started yowling at 4am as he often does, I was awake enough to run through my head the start of my sermon. 

And I hated it. It just felt so forced and pulling at anything to get into talking about the story of Noah. 

I stayed in bed for another couple of hours, running things through my head. Finally, at about 6:30am, I got up, fed the cat, and went to the back room and opened a new document to start my sermon over. 

I've heard from other preachers that this does happen. And at least I'm not pitching it because of a tragedy that forces me to go in another direction. 

And I ended up touching in some ways on all the readings except for the Psalm! 

See what you think.

Texts: Genesis 9: 8-17; 1 Peter 3: 18-22; Mark 1: 9-15

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“God so loved the world that he put his bow in the sky and promised that no matter how much we did to deserve it…God would never wipe us out with a flood again.”

I know that’s not what the text says…but that is the basic promise God made to all of creation at the end of the story of the Great Flood.

I made ya.

I love ya.

You aggravate me.

But I’m never gonna lose my temper like this again.

The ancient people believed that the gods controlled the weather. They hadn’t learned anything of carbon footprints or jet streams.

Insurance companies still seem to think that tornadoes and floods are somehow “acts of God” as if God wants to wreck mobile home parks and swaths of cities and towns.

To be clear…like so many of the stories in Genesis…these are morality tales and human projections…not so much actual historical events.

But they do serve a purpose of helping us to gain an understanding about God and God’s relationship to us and each other.

Our early biblical ancestors must have felt as though God was some kind of vicious warrior.

An angry hunter coming after humanity with torrential rains.

But then God the warrior concludes the hunt by hanging up the bow…the bow and arrow…and declaring, “That’s enough.”

And what a way to end such a turbulent struggle!

What a beautiful symbol of God’s enduring and lasting covenant of love than to put that bow in the sky.

Don’t we all get excited when we see a rainbow?

It doesn’t matter how young or old we are…that gorgeous spectrum of light…from the radiant reds to sometimes the palest purple…when we see a rainbow… we all gaze in awe and wonder.

It fills us with a sense of hope that after a thunderstorm…the sun will come back and dry up the puddles and warm our skin again.

Somewhere deep in our DNA we must know that a rainbow means the end of trouble…and a covenant of God’s abiding love.

Is it any wonder then that the rainbow has become a symbol for everything from peace and unity to LGBTQ pride and the celebration of the diversity of love.

It’s even the emblem of those engaged in the Kairos prison ministry program.

There’s such hope embedded in that colorful visual image.

This is God making good on the covenantal promise to be with us through every turbulent storm we encounter.

The word “covenant” suggests a stronger bond than just a simple agreement.

And in this case with Noah…it’s God acting as the more powerful one in the relationship to make a commitment to us and all of creation that I will not let my anger spill over into a murderous rage.

Even as much as God might have lost it with humanity in these early chapters of the Book of Genesis…there was still hope for humankind in saving Noah and Noah’s family…as well as many species and plants that God told Noah to take with him into the ark.

There was also much loss.

But out of those waters of the great flood….God made room for new life….a fresh start or something like a do-over for creation.

We could think of baptism in that same vein.

As it says in our Epistle reading from First Peter….baptism isn’t about washing away dirt from our skin.

It’s about bringing us into closer relationship with God…and the powerful force of Love that will not be kept down.

Bringing us into a new life.

When we have a baptism…the candidate or their parents and Godparents…make pledges to turn away from the things that reject God and destroy creation…and lean into the love of God…and making that the center point of our lives.

Through those waters of baptism…we are made one with the whole Body of Christ…. becoming joined to Jesus as our brother and friend.

Baptism brings us into a relationship with God where we…like Jesus…hear that we are God’s children…God’s beloveds…with whom God is well pleased.

It’s interesting to note that immediately after Jesus’s baptism…the Spirit takes him out into the wilderness.

I think that’s true of us as well.

It seems that once we’re blessed and marked as Christ’s own forever…. we get signed up for also contending with all the things Jesus contended with in his earthly ministry.

We get tested and tempted to seek things for selfish gain…rather than seeing ourselves as part of community.

We fail to see how the way we live and move and have our being affects all those around us…including our planet.

We become consumed with our individual rights that we are unwilling to make sacrifices that protect the individual rights of others.

We always hear the story of Jesus’s time in the wilderness on the First Sunday of Lent…and there’s a reason for that.

Lent is a time of wilderness testing.

This is the time for us to face those things…. those wild beasts in our lives…that have kept us occupied with trivial matters or in a cycle of self-reliance and shutting ourselves off from the power of God’s love.

The good news is that we are not left helpless and hopeless. Just as Jesus had angels waiting on him in his time in the wilderness…there are those around us who are sharing this same space…this same trip…heading down that path which leads us to the cross and ultimately to resurrected life.

All of us are in the same boat…the same ark….getting tossed about by whatever storms are coming our way.

Each of us has our own beasts that we are contending with in our lives.

But ultimately…we also all have the same God…the one savior Jesus…who has promised not to leave us abandoned.

Look to that one hope…that one beautiful rainbow of love.

Dare to open your heart enough to receive that love.

See it in the eyes of that neighbor…that friend…that companion on this journey through Lent.

And remember that you are not alone.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.

 

 

 

 

Ash Valentine's Wednesday

Happy Birthday to me! The last time Ash Wednesday coincidied with Valentine's Day was on my 50th birthday.

And that same day...a 17 year-old entered Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida with an AR-15, and killed a bunch of students and teachers. 

And on this day...there was another shooting at the Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City. 

No. I didn't mention it in my sermon. At this point, I am feeling as though anything I say on that topic of gun violence directly is met with rolled eyes and furrowed brows. 

And I have other fish to fry at the moment. Starting with getting people to stop looking only at their flaws and failures...and the trouble with "other people" and begin to see that they are truly loved by God.

Text: Matthew 6:1-6; 16-21

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There’s something awkward about having Ash Wednesday land on the same day as Valentine’s Day.

As the rest of the culture is exchanging cards, flowers, and chocolates…as they’re going out for an outrageously overpriced dinner for two at a restaurant…we’re here.

In the church sanctuary.

Getting marked with an ashen cross on our foreheads…

being reminded of our mortality.

Wow! Such romance, right?

But…y’know…this isn’t the only time we’re asked to stand at a 90 or even 180-degree angle from popular culture.

Stores put up Christmas ornaments…setting up those huge light-up reindeers at the end of the store aisles…while still hawking smiling jack o’lanterns and black and orange Halloween decorations….and paper turkeys for Thanksgiving.

While HalloThanksMas is happening around us in every marketplace…we come into our churches on Sunday and remember our loved ones on All Saints’ Day…then wait patiently through Advent to celebrate the inbreaking of God through Jesus at Christmas.

So…in other words…being out of step with the culture is kind of old hat for Christianity.

It’s easy to fall into thinking that such a solemn day as Ash Wednesday is a time for us to be sober…and sad.

One of my priest friends pointed out how we…the church leaders…pile it on when we pray an opening collect that talks about “acknowledging our wretchedness” as if we need to make THAT the focus for Lent.

For some of us…we spend so much time in our everyday lives seeing our “wretchedness” or hearing about how awful we are…that we fail to hear that first part of the same collect.

God “hates nothing” that God has made and forgives the sins…whatever they may be…of those who have turned to God.

Honestly…if you’re here today…those of you in person and any of you watching online…then take THAT in:

God doesn’t hate you or me.

God forgives you and me of any of shortcomings.

Because God is Love…and wants to Love you and me.

That’s the Valentine from God to us…that we are and always will be God’s beloved children.

Our biblical ancestor…the prophet Joel…has the line about “rending our hearts and not our clothing.”

The rending of clothing in biblical times was about a person expressing intense sorrow and grief.

But rather than ripping our clothes…Joel tells us…and the psalmist confirms for us….that what God seeks is for us to open our hearts…pour out whatever grievances we have…and allow God to do the work of loving us.

Through our grief.

Through our feelings of inadequacy.

Through our embarrassments.

And through whatever wounds we carry that keep us from being able to give and receive love.

This is the God who is “full of compassion and mercy, slow to anger and of great kindness.” (Ps.103:8)

God says, “Come to me you who are weary and I will give you rest. Please let me love you.”

That’s what Ash Wednesday should be about.

A time for us to recognize that God showed us God’s love by meeting us on the ground… in our own circumstances… through the life and ministry and mission of Jesus…who we call Christ.

And what we hear from Jesus’s words in our Gospel is to take this time to get right within ourselves…as opposed to making a show of how righteous we are to others.

Think about some of what he says in our Gospel…particularly about prayer.

He talks about not making a public display of prayer…but rather going into your room and shut the door to pray.

This is again an invitation to go into our hearts…our own rooms…and make that prayer to God….

Your kingdom come

Your will be done

 On earth as it is in heaven.

It was once the custom of the church that those who were catechumens…people who were preparing to be baptized…would spend the time from Ash Wednesday to the Easter Vigil…separated from their church community to study…fast…and pray.

They were…in a sense…forced to live in the wilderness for forty days.

But what God is looking for from us is not so extreme…or adding one more thing to do to our plates.

What God is seeking is our heart….our open hearts….to allow God’s love to meet us in that place….so that God can help us to be the best versions of ourselves for a world that blithely ignores those seeking to know that they matter.

As you hear the prayer of an invitation to a Holy Lent…remember: God hates nothing…

God forgives our shortcomings…

and in the tracing of that cross on our foreheads…we are reminded that we are God’s dust…

God’s children…

God’s beloved.

In the name of God…F/S/HS

 

"Epiphany" A Sermon for the Last Sunday After Epiphany, Year B

It was Friday morning. I knew I had to get my sermon for Sunday finished because we were into the final rehearsal and performance of a massive project: putting on a staged reading of the Gospel of Mark for the larger Valdosta community. I made myself settle down and lock in on what I wanted to say. I typed and typed...and finally got a completed draft finished. 

"I'll get back to looking this over first thing Saturday," I thought. "For now, I have to get the map insert done for the programs so people will be able to see the regions of the Middle East we're talking about in the Gospel." I opened the other file, made a few tweaks, downloaded it onto a flash drive, and closed my laptop.

When I got to my office in Valdosta, I opened up my laptop. 

Somewhere in that whole process of working with the map file...I lost the sermon. 

All of it. 

It wasn't even in the bowels of the laptop where one finds previously unsaved documents. It was gone.

After saying a few choice words, I sighed and resigned myself to the reality that I would have to start over. And I would not be able to put my mind to it until AFTER the Saturday afternoon performance, which went very well, by the way.

And so what you have here...and what my congregation heard...is a remix of what I had originally planned to preach...typed out at lightening fast speed between 9-11pm on a Saturday night. I actually think it's better than what I had planned to say. See what you think.

Text: Mark 9:2-9

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There’s a quote I heard recently from that great 20^th Century theologian…Dolly Parton:

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose!”

I think the sage of Nashville has hit on the perfect theme for this time as we finish the season of Epiphany and look to begin the season of Lent.

Because Epiphany is about discovery….and Lent is the chance to take that discovery…and go a little deeper into ourselves and find those ways to live more fully into our call to be the beloved children of God.

And speaking of Beloved…we have that recognition conferred on Jesus for a second time in Mark’s Gospel.

At the beginning of this season…we heard that Jesus went to John the Baptizer at the Jordan River. And as Jesus was coming up from the waters….he saw the heavens torn apart…the Holy Spirit descending as a dove… and there was voice that whispered into his ears:

“You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

This was not a public testimony.

This was Jesus’ own private moment…something only he heard. An identity that he now had to wrestle with and try to understand for himself…about himself…what does it mean to be God’s Beloved Son?

I imagine that each one of us at different stages of our lives have had a time when we’ve had to consider who we are….and even whose we are.

I think that’s a lot of what happens in those angsty years called “teenager” which can spill over into our young adulthood.

We go through difficult growing pains in our attempt to figure out who we are as distinctly different people from our parents.

This is a normal and natural process of becoming independent adults. Sometimes we have to rush into that process earlier than we might like as a necessary for our survival.

Jesus hears this voice…and what we read in Mark’s Gospel is that he is then immediately driven out into the wilderness.

For those who originally heard this Gospel…the Markan community of the First Century…they know what “wilderness” means.

They understand that their ancestors…upon escaping the oppression and tyranny of Pharaoh…had to make a hasty run for their lives through the Red Sea. They couldn’t even take the time to let their bread rise.

It was go.

Or perish.

So they went.

And then they spent forty years….aka a really long time…wandering around in search of the place they could call “home.”

Jesus is in the wilderness.

Mark doesn’t give us a lot of details about what happened out there…but he gives us some clues…and we can imagine and fill in the details.

Satan is tempting him.

Christians like to depict….Satan as a demonic character.

In Jewish rabbinical traditions…Satan is an accuser….a bulldog prosecuting attorney…who tests the faith of the righteous.

Think of the story of Job…a righteous man who had done nothing wrong…and Satan who attacks all the things that Job values in an effort to get him to deny God.

Whether as a demon…or a vicious bully….however we want to think of what’s happening to Jesus out there in the wilderness…he’s up against the wall… in a manner of speaking….with the wild beasts circling him….and the angels hovering above…maybe giving him the strength and courage to make it through this ring of fire.

I’m sure many of us in this room can understand what that feels like.

I don’t think one can make it through life without having some moments of feeling like we’re being put through hell.

And yet Jesus makes it out of the wilderness.

And…upon learning of the arrest of John the Baptizer…has a complete understanding of what is at stake and what he must do:

The time is now.

God is with us.

Get yourselves ready and trust that goodness and love will prevail.

Jesus has had his epiphany. He knows who he is…what his purpose is…and who he belongs to.

And in today’s Gospel….Peter, James, and John are bearing witness and discovering the true identity of this man they have been following around the Galilean countryside.

Jesus brought along three witnesses to this transformative moment…the same three he would bring along to some of his healings. It was as if he was fulfilling the Jewish law as laid out in Deuteronomy that one witness was not enough to bring charges against someone. There need to be two or three.

But this isn’t a transgression; this is a transformation. A big reveal. And having seen it…these three are also changed.

Or are they?

At the end of yesterday’s reading of the Gospel of Mark…as we were taking questions…it was noted that the disciples were….well….pretty dense. A bless their hearts is in order here.

Even though these three have had repeated exposures to seeing glimpses of Jesus….they can’t help but to keep thinking that Jesus is going to the warrior Messiah they have always imagined.

Or they become obsessed with their privileged place of being around this great man….and they want to be his number one and number 2 guys…sitting on his right and left.

Again…these are things we likely can understand…and have possibly yearned to have for ourselves.

There’s something attractive to having prestige and power. We have been trained and conditioned to expect that those who are the greatest get gold stars on their papers.

They get the special parking space in the employee parking lot.

They win big prizes and get the admiration of many.

That’s how things work in the economy of our society.

That’s not how it is in God’s economy.

In God’s economy…there is no number one….because we are all one.

Think about that voice from the cloud in our Gospel:

“This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!”

If we listen to Jesus….if we pay attention to what he is teaching us….if we pledge to follow him…we will be taught to rethink that desire to be number one.

We will need to let go of some beliefs…self-images…that perhaps are keeping us from truly living into our call to be Beloved children of God.

We may have to give up our need to have things…or be in control….in the way that we have been shaped and formed by our culture which calls dominance and having all the toys: success.

Jesus wrestled with doubt and survived the wilderness with its wild beasts.

He placed his faith in God to walk with him through death into life.

We are given this story as the message to us to do the same.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.