A Diner at the End of Time

Advent and Christmas must have been created for the sake of the artists. Poets, painters, writers, composers, sculptors and every other artist has seemingly been moved to create art in order to capture the beauty of the story of the birth of Jesus. Running beneath the ground of the artist’s creative impulse is a river of joy. That river of joy is the heart’s response to what the soul recognizes as the work of God in the world moving through the birth of a baby
the salvation of the world.

The river of joy is found in the psalms as the psalmist beckons the worshiper to express what’s in the heart. That joy is the basis for songs of praise and gratitude for what God is doing in the world.

I

The psalms are not the first texts that come to mind when we think of Christmas, but neither is it a bad place to explore the poetry and the beauty of God entering human history in the form of a baby as promised by the prophets in the days of old. The psalms give our songs an expansive mood of joy and celebration. It’s an exclamation of praise that’s perfect for Christmas Day.

Scholars have argued whether these psalms were originally used as enthronement songs for ancient Judean kings, or as others think, they were used as a part of the celebration of the Ark of the Covenant. No matter. It takes a big song to mark a big moment and so it’s perfect for this day when we can sing with absolute clarity of how God has moved in history in bringing this child to the day of his birth.

Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises, Sing praises to the LORD with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody. With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the LORD. Psalm 98:4-6, NRSV

Besides that, any psalm that inspired Joy to the World, that great hymn of Christmas, can’t be all bad. Joy to the World was Isaac Watts’ attempt to put Scripture to music and the hymn is thus based on Psalm 98. It was this psalm that inspired him to call us to rejoice in the Savior’s birth. Neither can we miss the connection between this psalm to the Magnificat, the song of praise offered by Mary upon meeting her cousin Elizabeth when arriving at the home of Zechariah and Elizabeth.

II

At every birthday celebration I’ve ever attended there was music and singing and today is no different. This is a holy season with its own sound track. Read Luke’s gospel closely and pay attention to the music. Luke’s gospel is a Christmas pageant with arias that proclaim beautifully about the God who was acting in history in bringing forward the long-awaited Messiah.

This past week a K-State music professor was interviewed on NPR to reflect upon how music affects the brain. She described how researchers have utilized the popularity of Christmas music to measure the effects on brain activity noting that Christmas music has been the focus of a great deal of research on the effects of music on the brain. Christmas music is a body of music universally understood and enjoyed and so it is an adequate research tool for scientists to study how the brain works as it hears music.

In summarizing their findings, the professor noted that music is the most highly stimulating discipline for setting the brain in motion and she noted that when the researchers utilized Christmas music for these brain studies, they remarked that brain activity lit up like … yes, you guessed it … like a Christmas tree!

The brain is stimulated by the combined and powerful forces of tradition & sentimentality, emotion & memory, when it hears Christmas music. All of us have memories that are attached to these songs we’ve been singing since before we can remember. Those memories are likely ways to emotionally describe our homes
of origin and our families. Our Christmas memories carry with them powerful emotional forces and the brain can’t help itself by being highly stimulated in multiple areas of the brain.

III

But the Psalms are clear in tying our gratitude through song to God’s Shalom, God’s peace and it’s hard to read the psalm and wonder why there is no peace. The irony is obvious because we’re celebrating today the birth of the Prince of Peace and yet we’re inexplicably mired in our lust for conquest and control. We’ve
spent the last two decades at war in Iraq and have finally begun to extract our troops from that land. We’re also approaching a decade of fighting in Afghanistan and some of presidential candidates have even bounced around the idea of bombing Iran. We may be leaving Iraq but we’re still consumed with the urge for war.

My writer friend, novelist Robert Flynn posted on his blog this past Friday a cryptic reminder of just how mixed up we are in our attempt to follow the One who calls us to work for peace:  “Jesus
is the Prince of Peace. And we are his warriors.”

The words of the hymn, I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day, admit honestly there is no peace on earth. Certainly, these words were true as Christmas Eve 1914 turned to Christmas Day. “The Guns of August” that ignited the World War I spread death and ruin across Western Europe. A snaking band of trenches that varied from 200 to 1200 yards apart extended across Central Europe from the North Sea to the Swiss Border and defined the Western Front. Along this line the wreck and rubble of war was everywhere.

The idealism of late summer had turned to the despair of winter spent in the trenches. It would become the first of four winters experienced by the armies as the bleak misery of war. It would be hard to imagine a time when there was less peace on earth or more
despair in the hearts of men. The six infantry divisions of the British Expeditionary Force suffered a 90% casualty rate in the first five months of World War I. Between August and Christmas of that first year of war, over a million men lost their lives in the fighting engendered by the outbreak of hostilities.

As Christmas morning dawned, a strange stillness fell across the British sector of the Western Front. Spontaneously and certainly without any governmental approval a Christmas truce developed. The author Winston Groom described this event as “one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of warfare.” Christmas trees were variously posted atop the front line trenches. Quietly the troops began singing Christmas songs they had learned as children. But the songs of Christmas bridge from one culture and language to another and so when the Germans sang “Stille Nacht, Heilige
Nacht,” the Brits responded and sang “Silent Night, Holy Night.”

That’s how it began because soldiers from both the German and British armies emerged from their trenches to exchange food, trinkets, and uniform items. Joint burial parties were formed and many of the dead of No Man’s Land were buried. Music drifted across the battlefield as Christmas carols were sung and the 23rd Psalm was read by troops from both sides of the line. Somehow for just those few hours peace reigned. It was a strange spectacle for these bitter enemies, those that one writer described as “death’s men,” to fraternize and celebrate Christmas together.

There is wonder and mystery in this story as there is always wonder and mystery at Christmas.  God is incarnated. The least of us are chosen to witness God’s miracle of love and grace. If only for a little while, hate and despair are put away.  In spite of all that men can do God’s peace breaks into the valley of the shadow of death to
divert us from our worldly and deadly ways. As we approach the manger again on Christmas Day 2011 we would do well to remember the mysterious Peace of God that was manifested long ago amid the horror, squalor, and death of Christmas 1914. God was at work then and God is at work now in the most unlikely of
places when we seek this Prince of Peace and seek to follow Him. The work of salvation was birthed in Bethlehem but the work of salvation goes on all around us and in us as we seek the transforming power of peace.

Nothing captured the spirit of this so-called parable better than what a church in California did ten years ago as an experiment in faith. Somehow the pastor talked the church elders into freeing up $10,000 in cash to give away to their fellow church members. At the end of his sermon, he explained that the church would participate in an experiment together. He asked for 100 volunteers to step forward. When they came forward, he handed out 100 crisp one hundred dollar bills, one to each volunteer.

They were told the money was not theirs to spend on themselves, but it was God’s money and should be spent in whatever manner they believed would further God’s kingdom in the world. At the end of ninety days, they were to report back to the church what took place. Sure enough, at the end of the three-month experiment, the church gathered and heard the many exciting stories of all that had transpired. No small thing, the ten thousand dollars had miraculously grown to five hundred thousand dollars making the feeding of the 5,000 using a little boy’s lunch cause us to wonder, “What’s the big deal?”

What seems truthful about the parable of the talents is that the parable seems to deal with the issue of our willingness to risk for God rather than being about the gifts we offer back to God out of our own resources. Look at the story, what part of themselves do the three servants offer to God? It was not their own money they were dealing with. The money came from the master. They simply accepted it and the instructions he gave them. Then they were forced to deal with their willingness to accept and act on the risk of the master’s assignment.

This parable of the talents is about a master who both rewards and punishes those who work for him according to what they do with the money he entrusted to them for safekeeping. A little housekeeping is in order when hearing this story…

First, the word talent is a misleading word in its translation from Greek to English. Today, we think of a talent in terms of some special ability or aptitude, such as a musical talent, or a talent in some athletic activity. But the English word derives its meaning from this story and the use of the Greek word, talanton. Admittedly, it’s not a terrible misuse of the concept to think that this story includes the offering of our abilities or aptitudes as gifts to God, but that’s not the central meaning of this parable. This story is about money … cold, hard cash. It’s about what the servants do with the money given to them by their master. And it’s also about the master’s response when he hears what they did with what he placed in their charge.

Secondly, most readers of this story vastly underestimate the sums that are given to these servants. When Jesus tells the story of a master and the distribution of “a talent” to his servants for safekeeping, it was a word that was a unit of measurement of wages weighed out for work done by a common laborer for something like 6,000 days of work, equivalent to some 15-20 years of labor. Let’s crunch the numbers so we understand exactly what kind of numbers we’re talking about. Using the minimum wage and the workweek of a common laborer with long days and no time off, it only amounts to a poverty level of income in our culture, but multiply that meager figure by 15-20 years and you get an amount conservatively in the neighborhood of $300,000. So with those calculations, the master gives to the first man five talents. That’s $1.5 million. Think that changes the way we hear this story?

These three trusted servants understood the rules … the master expected them to be wise with the money and to do everything within their power to see that the value of the money was not diminished. Today we would call the servants financial managers.

The first financial manager invested it all and over the course of time that the master was away, he was able to invest profitably, doubled the money, and returned to his master $3 million dollars, the equivalent of ten talents. Obviously the master was thrilled with his financial manager and rewarded him generously.

Wouldn’t you think, however, most folks see themselves more like the second servant? You’ve attained a modest place in life through education and hard work and through your God-given abilities. You’ve tried your best to make the most with the hand that has been dealt to you. Admittedly it’s true that you’ve benefited from living in the most prosperous years in the history of humankind. But you’ve also worked hard to get where you are.

The difficulty of being middle class is the upward pull we feel about the lifestyles of those who make more than us. We’re lured into thinking that through a little credit debt here or there, we can create the illusion that we have more by stretching our buying power. And before you know it, we’re spending regularly more money than we actually make. We’re maxed to the point of frantic anxiety that makes us do some dumb things financially. We’d love to be more involved in the work of God, but we can’t. We’ve become slaves to our debt.

The financial manager given the $600,000 was still able to return another $600,000 to his master. Because of his faithfulness and his willingness to take the risk of his assignment, he was rewarded generously and praised by his master.

Between this trinity of investors and their responses to the master who entrusted his great wealth into their care, we have a glimpse into the element of risk we assume whenever we become followers of Jesus. The first two financial managers see the master’s assignment as something that needed to be done.  They were strong in their faith and immediately set out to invest the funds wisely and to see that the funds were effective in accomplishing those things the master would have done had he not left town.

Lastly we come to the tragedy of the one-talent manager. Given less, but still given a significant amount of money, he was overcome by his fear and did what so many of us do … he dug a hole in the ground and buried the money. The problem was not that he was given less than the other two. The problem was that inside, he was a hole-digger, a fear-driven man afraid to explore the investment of the gift for the sake of his master.

John Ortberg suggests the one-talent servant may have assumed his responsibility was not worth that much in comparison to the other two who was given more to oversee.  While his money was less, he squandered the opportunities that existed for him and he returned only the principle amount. No interest, no growth. This was the man who saw a different side of his master. No praise. The master turned on him and took away his reward and gave it instead to his two colleagues. To live in fear, Matthew tells us, is to misunderstand who God is and what God wants.

One of my preacher buddies in San Antonio invites us to imagine that we’re sitting at home watching our favorite television show when a news announcer interrupts our show with breaking news.

Looking into the camera, the reporter said, “We have just learned of an extraordinary occurrence. An individual known simply as ‘The Master’ has returned from an extended business trip. Prior to leaving, he had handed over to his three most trusted managers large sums of money. In fact, it is alleged that he handed over all his money to his employees with absolutely no instructions as to what to do with it. Two of his managers are now very rich, we understand. Let’s speak with them now.”

The camera widened to include the Master’s employees. Two of them are beaming with grins that stretch from ear to ear.

The news reporter said, “I understand the Master has given one of you 1.5 million dollars and the other six hundred thousand. Are you surprised?”

“Well, not really,” one of them said. “You see, we know The Master. He’s the most generous guy on the face of the earth.”

“Yeah,” said the other manager. “He was always giving us extra days off, unexpected bonuses, tickets to join him in his luxury suite at the Chiefs games, and a pat on the back whenever he would see us. Heck, just being around the guy made you want to be as generous and as trusting as he was.”

The reporter then thrust her microphone in front of the third guy who had the wide-eyed look of a deer caught in the headlights of an approaching Mac truck. “And what about you, sir?”
 
“Well,” said the sheepish little man. “I know the Master too. He gave me those bonuses and Chiefs tickets as well. But you know, you never can trust the boss. Deep down inside they’re all the same. They’re just out for themselves and woe be unto anyone who stands in their way. Can’t you see what I mean? The Master’s taken my quarter million dollars and given it to these two guys. It just goes to prove that I’ve been right all along about The Master.”

The story Jesus tells invites us to answer the question, “Are we hole diggers or risk takers?”

A spoken word misspoken
A false rumor
Ugly words spoken in anger
The written word followed by hitting, “send”
The breaking of a window
The shooting of a bird
Wrecking the family car
Slipping on ice
Oversleeping an important appointment
Toothpaste squeezed out of the tube
Using an ink pen on a crossword puzzle
Singing one beat earlier than everyone around you
Your first (whatever) … after that, nothing else can be your first
The backseat of a car or the morning after
Saying “I do”
Forgetting your anniversary
Losing your wedding ring
Telling a lie
Having an affair
Hurtful words
Lost trust
Identity theft
A missed putt
Dropping a pop fly
Discovering your fly is open
Forgetting the baking soda in a recipe
The smell of burnt popcorn
Scalded soup
Breaking wind on a crowded elevator
A prank that goes wrong
An act of meanness
A tattoo
A personal confession on Facebook
Photos on the Internet

To be a person of faith, to have an adequate basis for our awe and worship, we’ve got to think BIG when we think of God. Our God is beyond what our brains can hold or hope to handle. Our God is a God of really big numbers! Think big, not small! Our God is a BIG God and we need a big faith to even begin to think of God in appreciable proportions. But there have always been some who want to contain God within a smaller, more confined space and time.

To put God’s grandeur in context, let’s consider how big the universe as God’s handiwork, is that’s been made by our Creator God. The Psalmist says God laid out the universe by the span of God’s fingers. Before our telescopic view of the universe was widened through the Hubble telescope, it was generally understood that based on the estimates of the world’s population, there were two galaxies for everyone alive. That may sound simplistic but toss alongside that number that in round numbers each galaxy harbors at least 100 billion suns.

But since the Hubble was unleashed in 1990 with its all-knowing eye, we’ve had to revise those numbers. It appears from all this research there are nine galaxies for every person – the result of calculating there are 80 billion galaxies (each on the average holding 100 billion suns).

But that’s not all. In the information gathered by Hubble we’ve also had to tinker with the age of the universe estimating the stars are not 12 but 13 billion years old and that the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago with life appearing at least 2.5 billion years ago. In our galaxy alone, the one we affectionately call the Milky Way, there are estimates that range between 200 and 400 billion suns and the width of the Milky Way is estimated to be 100,000 light years across. For a sense of depth, understand the Milky Way’s an orbiting disc, and as such it’s about 3,000 light years in depth.

To unpack what that means, remember that a light-year is the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year’s time. To measure this distance we take the speed of light and calculate how far it would travel in a year’s time. From that calculation if we figure it right, light pops across the universe 6 trillion miles in a year. Now, you do the math as to how big the Milky Way really is to be 100,000 light years across. Then consider the Milky Way is merely one galaxy out of 80 billion galaxies even if it’s considered twice as big as the average galaxy. Annie Dillard’s tongue-in-cheek observation about such immense numbers is to think “these astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.”

This becomes the language and mathematics of the stargazers who look up into the night sky and wonder in awe, “When I look into the heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established: What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:3-4 NRSV).

We must push the boundaries of faith to see that the God of creation cannot be contained in a small-minded faith that can be contained in small numbers. Such parsing of the numbers diminishes God. God is no magician waving a magic wand of the moment creating an ancient world instantaneously. God has been at the universe’s beginning and has been involved in the tiniest of details throughout time that is nearly immeasurable. It takes a deep-rooted faith to see God working slowly, imperceptibly, creating and recreating the world over long spans of time.

All of us at one time or another have faced the question, “Who am I?” and that question naturally opens up the question that naturally follows it, “Why am I here?” It’s the question we ask of ourselves as creatures with consciousness about whom we are, why we exist, and can distinguish ourselves from the rest of the created order.

When in doubt (as most of us are on occasion), we should go to the doctor … Dr. Seuss, that is:

If you’d never been born, then what would you be?
You might be a fish or a toad in a tree.
You might be a doorknob or three baked potatoes.
Worse than all that, you might be a wasn’t.
A wasn’t just isn’t. He (or she) just isn’t present.
But you – you are you, and it’s truer than true
That there’s no one alive who is you-er than you.

When I was a child, I learned what a surprise it was to my parents that I was conceived. Never did I hear them call me an “oops” baby, but since I was born 50 weeks after my older brother, who was born nine months after their wedding, I was the surprise that arrived before they could celebrate their second anniversary.

Why are you here? The Bible tells us we are here because God wanted us to be here. While we all have unique birth stories, in the deepest of truths behind those birth stories we learn God created us and as God’s children we are meant to have fellowship with God, to be God’s girl or boy, God’s man or woman, here in this place and in this life, right now and throughout our lives.

Hear the blessing from the creation story in Genesis:  Then God said, “‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’” … God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.”

Our faith offers us a simple yet meaningful answer to the question of existence. We are a special creation of God. We are more than a fish or a toad or a clam; we are the very image of God. Woman or man, fresh-faced and freckly, or bent over and wrinkled, we are here because God wants us here. We are here because God put us here.

We cannot help ask the question of existence at various stages of life. We first ask, “Who am I and why am I here?” when we’re young. Often the answer comes in the form as borrowed identity from our parents or an older sibling who loans us a transferable part of their identity.

First I was Delbert and Libby’s surprise second boy. Then I was Donnie’s little brother. But eventually I learned I had my own identity, earned mostly or wholly on my own merits based on those things I did well and those things I did poorly. I had to rise or fall on my own according to my sense of self and my willingness to live a truthful life.

I didn’t know it then, but in the contract of life I accepted by being born, I was made a steward of my life. I was given charge of this body and all my relationships and the work I did and all the love I shared as a responsibility to the One who made me and launched me in the world. I may have been Delbert and Libby’s surprise little boy, but I learned I was also my own self, made by God and given responsibilities to do something hopeful with the life I found myself in charge of.

But the question is one we face at all the important stages of life and again after childhood I pondered the meaning. I revised and updated my self-image based on my decision to marry and again when I became a father to two children who looked to me for the needs of their lives not to mention guiding them toward answering the questions of existence for themselves. I worked my way through several layers of education and experience as a minister and the nature of the question deepened as I lived an existential life, meaning I could not be a minister without living with a deep knowing of my own identity.

A 24-year old young woman in Biloxi Mississippi was so despondent about her life she jumped from a wharf in an attempt to end her life. As she later said, she was simply “tired of living.” But it also happened that a man saw her jump and thrashed about in the water and he knew in a flash what she was doing. Forgetting that he didn’t know how to swim, he stripped off his coat in dived in after her. When he came up, he thrashed in the water and was in serious danger of drowning himself. The woman saw this in amazement and paddled over to him. He gulped water down with his open mouth as he bobbed up and down in the water so she grabbed him and pulled him from the water. Instead of taking her own life, she saved the man from drowning.

In that crucial moment, when she saw this young man struggling for his own life, her own life suddenly had meaning. She suddenly had something that had been missing before. What drowned beneath the wharf was not her spirit but her despair.

Most of us face the question of purpose with a sense of dread or anxiety because we’re afraid the answer to the question will just be another opportunity to feel shame or guilt over how our lives have been underwhelmingly lived.

But many know the question continues persistently to the later stages of life. Older adults sometimes ask, “Why am I here?” But that question comes more honestly, “Why am I still here?” Often the question is voiced in the shadow of some dark illness or the loss of one’s partner in life. The question is typically wearying and often asked out of some sense of despair.

A woman, who eventually lived to see her 101st birthday, found the courage to answer the question of “Why?” this way: She determined that as long as she had life and breath, she would pray. No longer was she able to do the things that had defined her life. So she faithfully prayed for her church and her pastor. She prayed for her friends who might be experiencing sickness or loneliness. She gave herself to a new purpose after her body no longer gave her strength to work. She adopted a new self-identity for the last stage of life reflecting her acceptance of her contract with her existence.

In truth, we are stewards of this life and it’s ours to live, but it’s not ours to live for us alone. It’s a gift from God meant to guide us toward service and sacrifice.

Life looks big. That’s the first thing we learn as children and some carry that perception with them through every significant stage of life. Our point of view in childhood is mostly at knees and ankles. We look up craning our necks to look into eyes that are mostly focused our direction. Eventually we look all grown up, but inside us there’s a child that keeps asking, “Am I big enough to do this?”

There are scary and demanding things out there that keep us from being all we can be. There are challenges that look at first glance to be impossible. Yet there’s also a hope that keeps us going and there’s a sense in which first steps form the beginnings of paths taken that go down the hard roads and yet lead us on a journey that’s celebrated with a deep sense of accomplishment.

It seems to me it’s the little threads of life that make our lives meaningful and that have more to do with how well we do than the big things that threaten us into a lifeless submission. I think there are little threads of hope and optimism that can lead us in new directions but where do we go to identify those strands?

What do you collect? Some collect matchbooks from all over the world. Some collect musical instruments or paintings or books or CD’s. Others collect rare glassware or thimbles. My next-door neighbor in San Antonio had a collection of antique clocks. Both his living room and dining room were covered up with loudly ticking clocks. The tick-tock, tick-tock was bad enough, but every fifteen minutes, some of the clocks would intrude upon the ticking silence with their noisy clatter marking the quarter-hour. Half hours were worse and the top of the hour was utter chaos! They were unique and priceless because no one makes clocks like this any more. “Enough to raise the dead, preacher!” my neighbor said to me in a voice that rose above the racket of his expensive collection of rare clocks.

There is a book of the Bible that showcases a “little threads” collection gathered and attributed to King Solomon but it’s unlike my neighbor’s clock collection as there aren’t any objects saved or stored other than words and sayings. The book of Proverbs is a reminder that there was once a time when wisdom was so valued, it was saved and turned into a collection that was instructive for life. Proverbs has something to say that deals with the whole spectrum of life’s great needs.

“Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.” Proverbs 27:1) Jesus took this one a step further in Luke 12 and James added a nice image to bring it to life, “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away,” (James 4:14). We all live as though there’s no end in sight until we begin to explore life’s losses and realize the vapor is us. Life forces us to come to grips with the reality that we have limits placed upon us and can’t bank on tomorrow with any certainty. I’ve come to appreciate the mystery of not knowing. It adds a spicy understanding to the gifts of the day and my ability to enjoy them as the good gifts from God given as a sign of God’s love and blessing. Tomorrow may have more blessings but I should take care to enjoy today’s gifts while they’re here and let tomorrow take care of itself as God gives us breath.

Or, how about this one?

“Go to the ant, o sluggard … observe her ways and be wise” (Proverbs 6:6) I love this one, don’t you? What would happen if we went out in the flowerbed and lay on our stomachs and watched an ant mound with all its activity and paid attention to them? Besides being stung mercilessly, what else would you learn? There is not an ounce of laziness among them. Everyone seems to have a task they’re busy doing. In all the chaos, there seems to individual purpose and a larger goal they all seem to be working towards. Other lessons might help us understand the need to stay at it, or to work towards the building of a unified whole.

Here’s one someone from my home church gave me to guide me when I left home launched myself in college … “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths.” (Proverbs 3:5-6)  That was helpful to me when I was asking all the questions of who was I and where was I going. It continues to be helpful because we all get to the edges of what we know and need to draw upon the wisdom of God who wants to be an active participant in our lives. Need direction? Go to God and expect God to answer.

The last little thread is problematic for those of us who cling to our need to dole out retribution to our enemies.

“If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap burning coals of fire on their heads, and the LORD will reward you.” (Proverbs 25:21-22)  There is power in reversing the order of things. When we break free from the need to protect our own interests that are defensive in nature and turn hate into love, we are swimming upstream. This is what Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. used in combating the hatred of the dominant against the hopefulness of those who were controlled by it to break free.

The little threads are actually powerful agents of change. They breathe life into the mundane. The lead rather than follow towards life that has purpose and meaning. Something to ponder…

Robert Fulghum (pronounced full-jum – even with two vowels, read it as if it was only one syllable) leapt upon the national scene two decades ago with his wildly popular collection of our generation’s wisdom literature, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things. I think the book paved the way for other similar writings some might call “bathroom books” because they can be read in short sessions.

Fulghum’s gift has been to drink in the world as it comes to us … day-to-day observances and events to see goodness and mystery and marvel in them. If there’s a brilliance in being able to open one’s eyes and see clearly, Fulghum’s vision is twenty-twenty. Over the years I’ve come to love and respect his wholesome approach to life and faith and what I would call “a holy reverence and observation” about life.

Fulghum grew up in Waco and escaped by his own wits in avoiding becoming a Baptist. That’s a modern day miracle don’t you think? Waco’s surely the most Baptist city in America with more Baptist churches there per capita than any place on the face of the earth. Not only that, but Fulghum served time before he became rich through his books as a Unitarian minister. I like what he has to say and value his ability to capture life and faith in his quirky view of the world.

One of the best things he’s written in my estimation is From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives. This book is near-holy in its savoring of the rituals that define our lives from birth to death. It would make for a smart discussion book for a group that’s wanting a stimulating read to help the group members tell their stories to one another as an act of communion over their shared lives.

But I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew with Fulghum’s latest publication, Third Wish. It’s a 5-volume book in two bindings held together in a hard cover box set. I lifted the first book, volumes 1&2, and discovered I could do arm curls with it, as it was heavy and taxing. Marcel Proust would smile in envy at the audacity and ambition of it!

But on the backside of the box I ran across a quote worth passing along from Alexandros Evangelou Xenopouloudakis (names I can write but cannot pronounce). It’s titled, Instructions for Wayfarers. For accuracy, I looked up the word “wayfarer” and half-expected to see a small photo of Tom Cruise in his Ray-Bans and boxers; instead, here’s what the dictionary says it means: “One who travels, esp. on foot”

Wayfarers aren’t all that common these days. We drive our car across the parking lot to get closer to the next store on the same block. The loss of our car to the repair shop for even one day is like an amputation, for goodness sakes!

Back to Alexandros … here’s the quote that reads like ancient wisdom itself:

They will declare: Every journey has been taken.
You shall respond: I have not been to see myself.

They will insist: Everything has been spoken.
You shall reply: I have not had my say.

They will tell you: Everything has been done.
You shall reply: My way is not complete.

You are warned: Any way is long, any way is hard.
Fear not, You are the gate – you, the gatekeeper.
And you shall go through and on …

Thanks Brother Fulghum for stirring the pot of ideas and keeping us on our toes to the liveliness of the world at hand!

As in the well-loved PBS series by Bill Moyers on Genesis, we begin a journey through the marvelously rich stories of the Bible’s first book of stories. What was fascinating about Moyer’s creative roundtable conversation was bringing together artists and poets, novelists and theologians to acknowledge we could sit down together and have a deep conversation about what we find in Genesis. Since Muslims, Jews and Christians all lay claim to these same stories, they become the meeting ground to explore as a way for the stories to stir within us and among us about how we can know ourselves and our faith stories better.

It’s in this intriguing book we see God the Creator walking in the Garden in the cool of the evening. The serpent and its wily logic mesmerize us and we watch in horror at the jealous rage of Cain who violently killed his brother. We encounter Jacob as the bold liar and there is the unbearable drama of the near-sacrifice of Isaac under the raised knife of Father Abraham. These are the stories that continue to speak and there is the distinct possibility we might share a conversation about them that speaks to us at a very deep, personal level. Welcome this morning to the first story of the first book of the Bible.

I

In Genesis we’re told God created the entirety of the universe in six days. God took the chaos of what already existed and organized it into the immensity and complexity of the world. Beginning with near-nothingness, God had a blank canvas upon which to paint and what a masterpiece God spoke into existence! “Out of nothing, something,” we say. All those creative impulses were joined with God’s mysterious purposes and joined together into a sweeping creative flurry that words could not contain.

Before the questions of beginnings ever had voice to raise them, before there were mystics who pondered the world’s beginnings, the proclamation of Genesis spoke forth answers. Pastor and Professor Margaret Guenther wisely confessed that, “The sight of the night sky makes mystics of us all.” Anytime we pause long enough to turn our eyes to the heavens to pay attention to the wonder of the creation, we involuntarily call out God’s name. We cannot help doing so.

But modernity has not always been our friend in making sense of this account of how creation occurred. It’s now been centuries since the development of modern science and biblical interpreters have set up their opposing arguments to explain how and when the poetry of creation took place. Do we read the story of creation as a literal rendering of particular stages on a six-day schedule followed by a single day of rest built on a 24-hour day (a day that could not have even existed until the fourth day according to Genesis 1)? Or is making meaning more complicated than that? In light of the magnificence of creation, literalness seems like such a feeble language to describe what we sense God is doing.

Writer Annie Dillard reports that it was on a dry plain in northern Tanzania, that anthropologist Mary Leakey found a set of hominid footprints left on a trail 3.6 million years ago. They were a barefoot threesome, likely a primitive man, woman and child walking closely together along a trail. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. Thus, we have a physical record of a few moments of existence before hominids even chipped stone tools. More volcanic ash fell and covered their hardened footprints for all this time until they were uncovered in our time. Even the raindrops were left as evidence of a moment in time before time was even measured. Leakey uncovered nearly 90 feet of the ancient trio’s footprints. We do not know where they were going or why.

We do not know why the woman paused and turned to the left, briefly, before continuing with the other two. “Perhaps,” Leakey thinks, “(this) remote ancestor experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched in horror at the explosion of the nearby Sadiman volcano as it erupted spewing ash and fire. Perhaps they took one last look before they fled for their lives. What seems certain is that none of us will leave a residue so permanent as those three nameless ancestors walking barefoot across the African plain. Nothing we might ever do will last a second on the clock that measures this story.

II

Could Genesis be telling such a story? Is it possible to see the connection between this story of creation that was not observed by any human witnesses but still accepted as a part of our rich faith tradition that claims God as the Creator and any attempt to tell this story pales in comparison to the act of creation itself? As creations of God, imaged to mirror the divine image, we live somewhere between the anonymity of a sea of nameless faces in a universe that cannot be measured and yet with the realization that God knows each one of us in minute detail. The problem with holding to a literal interpretation is that there’s not just one story of creation to describe what God did; there are two. Not surprising to the ever-whimsical nature of God, the Bible doesn’t flinch about laying them alongside one another, even with all their differences.

The first story is an experience of hearing God speak the world into being. God’s words shoot off into the darkness and the nothingness and the nothing becomes something. The second story isn’t auditory; there are no verbal commands making the world. Instead, the story is more like a drama. God is less a preacher and more a sculptor, bending down to scoop up a lump of clay to shape a new being into creation. God is in God’s studio doing whatever and however God wishes according to the mystery of God’s creativity. And then God picked up the sculpture and “breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.”

Sojourner Truth was born in 1797 as Isabella Baumfree, a 19th century freed slave who explained her adopted name: “The Spirit calls me, and I must go,” making her the poster child exemplifying the spirit of Pentecost in the church. Although Sojourner had been freed from slavery, at one point decided to return to her former owner because her slave life had been easier than her free life. She “looked back to Egypt” as she described it. Most of us would probably agree that freedom is usually harder than slavery. Responsibility is more demanding than dependency. But just as she was about to go back to her old life, she had a vision from God. In her vision she saw that God “was all over, and that there was no place that God was not.”

“O God,” she cried, “I did not know you were so big!” She felt overwhelmed and terrified and in her vision she thought she was in danger of annihilation by the all-consuming God and couldn’t even bring herself to speak. But just as quickly as she was swallowed up by the bigness of God she felt a mysterious presence between her and the Almighty. At first she didn’t recognize him because until now Jesus had been a just another famous person to her along the lines of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. She had not known Jesus as a personal presence. Suddenly she sensed someone with her who was there for her so she might bear the immensity of God’s nearness. She felt a sense of trust with Christ’s presence and later learned his name.

In her testimony, we have a description of an experience of both the transcendence and the immanence of God. Like all mind-expanding moments, words were inadequate to describe what she experienced. But surprisingly, it was the immanence of God that helped her understand God’s transcendence buffering her from feeling she might be swallowed up. It was in God’s immanence that she perceived God’s character to be loving and kind.

III

Abraham Heschel, the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher once said: “(Humankind) is ‘a little lower than the angels,’ and (yet) a little higher than the beasts. Like a pendulum they swing to and fro under the combined action of gravity and momentum, of the gravitation of selfishness and the momentum of the divine.”

Thus while Genesis 1 and 2 tell two vivid stories of creation, the mischief doesn’t take long to begin. Like a pendulum swinging to and fro, we marvel at the exaltation of God and the mystery of creation and we humbly accept the divine gift of the imprint of God’s image on our souls. We accept both the dignity and the dust and hear God whispering in our ears, “It is good … It is very good.”

How is it then that we read the first few chapters of Genesis and come away overtaken in domination language? Even with the affirmation of God echoing in our ears, we take our freedom as an excuse to hold others in bondage. We’re just a singular part of God’s creation; we’re not the one who brought it all into being.

But over the ages since, these words have been used to endorse the notion that men are dominant over women. Worse yet, humans are dominant over creation. We’ve spun the stories of beginnings into convenient truths that have suppressed women as beings who are “less than.” We’ve built a whole way of living and thinking that suppresses women from finding their true voices blocking them in living out their gifts in the image of the One who made them. Likewise, we’ve lived as though the creation was meant to be used, spoiled and abused, exploited until it’s used up and tossed aside. The work of God in creation as told in Genesis is that God created out of nothingness, then took the materials and began shaping the world according to God’s great mystery of meaning.

It’s likely you don’t know this, but Holmeswood helped shape the theological and spiritual world of John Buehrens, a teen who grew up to become one of the leading Unitarian ministers in America. After serving as the President of the Unitarian Universalists, John now serves a parish in the Boston area where he continues to lecture and lead in that tradition.

In his book, Understanding the Bible, John tells of the man at a cocktail party, a known rationalist, who approached a woman at the party who was both a poet and a theologian. In his inebriated state, the man thundered loudly, “Why did God make so much of everything? There’s just too much! Too many stars, too many species, too many people, too many languages and religions! Wouldn’t just one language and one religion have been enough?”

“Perhaps God was a little drunk,” the woman calmly replied.

“Drunk?” said the rationalist. “What could get the creator of the universe inebriated?”

“Perhaps it was love,” she wondered curiously.

And thus we have our clue as to what the story of Beginnings may be trying to tell us: Why the world came into being and why we were created. To stir us even further, we are left to ponder it all and the happy assurance that God added the word of divine blessing that, “it was good.” Admittedly, the story of the creation is beyond the words that describe it. Even in the indescribable, we cannot help ourselves in trying to paint on an enormous canvas using mere words. The Psalmist struggled to find words and images in describing what was observed about the created world:

O Lord, our Sovereign,
How majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory in the heavens …
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
The moon and the stars that you have established;
What are human beings that you are mindful of them?
Mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
And crowned them with glory and honor.
(Psalm 8:1, 3-5, NRSV)

If you read John’s gospel from beginning to end, somewhere around 14th chapter the story slows to a crawl. The last supper is over. Judas has left the room to go do the things that only he can conceive doing, for reasons none of us fully understand. Everyone’s feet are clean and Jesus’ hands are pickled from the foot washing when he begins talking. And Jesus talks and talks and talks; it’s the longest collection of the teachings of Jesus in all four gospels.

Here’s a brief sample of what Jesus says:  “Love one another, do not be afraid; believe in God, believe also in me. Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but I will not leave you orphaned. I go to prepare a place for you, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am, you may be also.”

It goes on like this for four chapters telling the disciples everything they need to know before he leaves them. We can’t help wondering:  Where is he going? (He is going to die.) Only that’s not how he describes it. The way he tells it, he’s heading off to a family reunion with his father and he’s leaving them in charge while he is gone. He’ll be back, but meanwhile his list is so long that it raises some anxiety in them about how long he will be away. It all seems so normal the way he tells it. “A little while,” he assures them, “and you will see me.”

They did see him again (later on) but before they could blink he was gone again. A little while became a long while; and a long while became a lifetime. Ten years turned into a hundred years, then five hundred years, and then a thousand years until now a third millennia has been launched.

Every generation since the days of Jesus’ has had its false prophets, mostly made false for their promises of knowing when Jesus would return only to end up in unrepentant embarrassment by their miscalculations.

From where we sit, the promise has hung out there so long, it’s no surprise some of us wonder if we haven’t been orphaned. Is he gone or isn’t he? If he’s gone, where has he gone? In the meantime, what in the world will we do without him? If he is not gone, where is he, and why doesn’t he show himself?

Barbara Brown Taylor tells of being the eldest of three daughters and because of her birth order, she was the designated babysitter in the family.  From the time she turned twelve, she was the one her parents left in charge when they went out at night. The routine was always the same. First her father would sit her down and remind her how much he and her mother trusted her not only because she was the oldest but because she was the most responsible. And being the diligent oldest of the three daughters, she would not let the house burn down. She would not open the door to strangers. Nor would she let her little sisters fall down the basement steps and kill themselves.

In the meantime, before leaving, her mother would leave her the telephone number of where they would be for the evening and tell her when they would be coming home. The three sisters would walk their parents to the front door and kiss them goodbye. Then the front door would lock from the outside as her parents left and a new regime would begin. She was in charge! She whirled around to face her new responsibilities and there were her two sisters looking back at her with something between fear and hope. And they would have a ball! They would play games together and read books out loud, acting out the parts if they wished. They made pimento and cheese sandwiches on white bread with the crusts cut off. But inevitably, as the night wore on, they grew more and more anxious and asked: Where’s Mommy and Daddy? Where did they go? When will they ever be back?

Older sister did her best to remind the two younger ones they were just fine and to not worry. She was there to take care of them until their parents returned home again. She promised them if they would go to sleep she would make sure that Mommy and Daddy would kiss them goodnight as soon as they came in.

The only problem came when the questions began to creep into her fearful thoughts. What if their parents had had a terrible accident? They might never come home again and then the three sisters would be split apart, each of them sent to a different foster home so they would never see each other again. When anxiety takes over our thoughts, we are fully capable of creating the most dire circumstances of fear, roiling them over and over in our thoughts until we’re sick with them.

Plenty of you know about that tension as well, not only because you have been a babysitter but because you are a Christian. As Christ’s followers, every one of us has been put in charge as Christ’s elder children in the world. We are the responsible ones, the ones trusted to carry on in his name, and everywhere we go, we see the faces of those whom he has given into our care. Some are hungry to see him and some are not. Some are still open to his return and some have closed their hearts. Some are still waiting and some have clearly given up hope and gone to bed.

In the meantime, tired of waiting, perhaps you’ve asked: Where is he? Where did he go? And when will he come back? It’s hard, being the ones in charge, because we are potential orphans too, only he said we would not be. He said he was “going away,” but he also said he was coming back again, and not only at the end of time.

“Those who love me will keep my word,” he said before he left, “and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23, NRSV). He didn’t say he would stop by every now and then to check on us. He didn’t say he would call every hour or so to see how things are going. He promised he would come in the form of an advocate, or a helper.

This is the first of five passages in John 14-16 that speak of the coming of the Holy Spirit. We’re nearly to the end of the 50-days between Easter and Pentecost and all of these words make it clear that the coming of the Holy Spirit is linked with the resurrection of Jesus. The seven-week season of Easter is bookended by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the promise that the Spirit will come.

Included in this passage is the promise of the Parousia, or the coming of the Lord again. John does not highly differentiate the meaning about the coming of the Spirit. “God with us,” “Christ with us,” or “the Spirit with us” are all promises of power, guidance, and comfort without which the church cannot exist.

While the particulars of just what he means when he speaks about the promise of his return are not fully clear, there is one thing that stands out distinctly in this passage:  He fully intends for us to be faithful about our task. When he stepped out the door, he let us know that we would never be alone. We would never be without the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. In the meantime, we have work to do. We are to be sure to our word that we will be obedient to his word. Everything is wrapped up in loving as Christ loved.

Dorotheos of Gaza, a sixth-century teacher, once preached a sermon for the monks in his monastery who were grumbling they were unable to love God properly because they had to put up with one another’s ordinary, irritating presence. No, Dorotheos told them, they were wrong. He asked them to visualize the world as a great circle whose center is God, and upon whose circumference lie every person we ever have encountered or ever will encounter. “Imagine now,” he asked them, “that there are straight lines connecting from the outside of the circle all these lives to God at the center. Can’t you see that there is no way to move toward God without drawing closer to other people, and no way to approach other people without coming near to God?” 

The days between the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and his ascension into heaven were days of preparation. In those days he did almost no miracles and made very few public appearances. The days of teaching and healing and works of power were over and instead he put 50 days into preparing his followers, the elder children, to be in charge. All the work of the Kingdom was now in their hands. They were the ones given the authority to take the message to everyone on earth. And from their hearts they handed it off to the next generation.

And those believers kept the words of Christ just as if they had known him personally themselves and perhaps they did because they had the gift of the Spirit of God to lead them and guide them. And when they were finished, they carefully handed it off to the next generation of believers who had no more of an idea of what to do next than we. But the Spirit of God was there once again just as Jesus said and they were faithful. And so it goes, each generation hearing the words of Jesus and finding ways to relate to God through the forgiveness offered through Christ. Each generation is given the gift of the Spirit for power and leadership. Each generation must find his or her own way to be obedient to Christ’s Law of Love.

In the meantime the faith is ours to hold. This gift of the Spirit has been placed in our midst (right here among us) so we might be faithful to God. It is ours to keep and ours to share and all of us are accountable. Christ has left for the moment and has put all of us in charge! But we aren’t left as orphans. We have the Spirit of Christ right here in all of our hearts. We stand on the threshold of the next generation the new millennia.

Don’t forget to keep the tradition alive. Don’t forget to whisper into the hearts of those who come behind us, reminding them: “He’s coming back; he’s with you; be obedient; be faithful!”