A Diner at the End of Time

This year perhaps more than any I’ve seen before, Easter has taken on a goofiness I’ve not noticed in the past. Just how many churches made the news this year by pastors who dressed themselves in bunny outfits and dropped plastic eggs from the passenger seat of a two-seater helicopter while hovering over a sea of children? Maybe it’s just me, but this thought kept flashing through my brain: “What were they thinking?” Don’t they realize just how dangerous that stunt is? Hovering helicopters are notorious for falling out of the sky. What if a falling egg hit a kid and hurt them? Worse, what if the helicopter hit an unexpected down draft and the pastor fell out of the sky to his or her death in front of all those sweet children? I hear some of you thinking, “Well now, that wouldn’t be so bad …”

The day of resurrection begins and ends in a tomb. It begins early at dawn with the emergence of Jesus from the Sabbath sleep of death. What dawned with his appearance was the resolution of all that was ugly and tragic about his betrayal and suffering and about how he hung on the cross until he was dead on Friday. Just before dusk, they laid his lifeless body in a borrowed tomb and rolled a huge stone over its entrance to seal it. He laid there three days in the cold musty darkness of the tomb until resurrection dawned on Easter morning. Then, by the power of God’s victory over death itself, the stone was rolled away and he stepped out of the tomb into the first light of day!

But that’s not the only tomb opened on resurrection day. Besides the tomb where Jesus’ body was placed, there was also the tomb where the disciples hid themselves. The disciples locked themselves in a safe room because they were frightened and confused and even Jesus’ resurrection power had not given them the courage to come out. They were paralyzed in their inactivity and hopelessness and they had no plans for their own resurrection. Perhaps they had shut the door and turned the key locking them in so they could buy time in trying to understand what had happened to them.

Nevertheless, that’s where Jesus found them the evening of that first day alive from the dead. John’s gospel tells us that they were gathered together (all but Thomas) when all of a sudden there Jesus was standing in their midst. Imagine that … Jesus had to break out of one tomb and into another to get his message out into the world!

The unfolding of this story is the telling of what the disciples went through as the news of Jesus’ resurrection dawned slowly in their thoughts. It’s an honest telling of their emotions and how Jesus moved among them in the days that followed his resurrection. It may have been Easter morning, but the disciples weren’t Easter people yet. They needed more than just an empty tomb.

I suppose they huddled together in that closed-off room out of fear. There was the general feeling that Jesus had deserted them …that he was no longer with them to lead them and guide them. The party was over! No more great times together, no more excitement from the crowds following them everywhere they went and especially no more notoriety from being one of Jesus’ select group of disciples. The glory of that time following Jesus had vanished. It was over and a sense of emptiness fell over them.

Perhaps they were also huddled together out of guilt. They weren’t there for him when he needed them most. Jesus had warned them that one of them would betray him. Only they didn’t realize that individually, each would betray him in their own small way. Jesus was gone and they weren’t there through the worst of it.

Then, suddenly, there he stood in their midst! Jesus appeared before them and the first words out of his mouth were not words of condemnation or rebuke, but words of healing … “Peace to you.” He couldn’t have said anything more welcomed to their brokenness and pain than that. It was almost like old times! Jesus was there with them again and the energy from his appearing electrified them. Suddenly the dark gloom of his death had given way to the untold joy of his resurrection.

It was if Jesus understood what they needed most. He knew of their despondency. He knew what they had gone through and how they felt that they had let him down. And so, he said it to them again: “Peace be with you; as the father has sent me, so I also send you.”

And then he did a strange and wonderful thing … He breathed on them and said: “Receive the Holy Spirit … if you forgive the sins of any other, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.” And by this Jesus wanted them to know that they were now the carriers of the great and wonderful message of God’s love and grace. The disciples were now the messengers in the same way that Jesus had brought the message to men and women.

Curiously, and perhaps out of a sense of fate, Thomas was not there. We’re not told why Thomas wasn’t with them when Jesus appeared to the disciples on that first Easter day. The other disciples tried to tell Thomas about seeing Jesus and that he was alive but Thomas was not one to accept things without testing them. He told them plainly: “I won’t believe it for myself unless I can touch the places where the nails pierced his hands and can put my hand in the wound in his side. Then and only then will I believe.”

In this season, it’s Thomas who helps guide us from Easter back to the world where we live and work and love and struggle. “Thomas the doubter” we’ve labeled him and it’s his vulnerability with truth that gives us a place to participate in God’s kingdom. Not everyone can rise before the crowds and preach a sermon. Not everyone can travel the world preaching about Jesus of Nazareth as Paul and Barnabas did. Not everyone can even serve the tables of the needy as the first servants of the church did; those men and women we later called “deacons.” Thomas spoke for the skeptics among us by standing his ground on reason, seeking proof on which he might believe.

In the world of faith and believing, unfaith and unbelief are quite challenging. Where does unfaith go for expression? Sadly, the church may condemn unfaith as an enemy to faith without recognizing that it’s necessary for real faith to emerge. For this reason alone, the story of Thomas is told in a minor key for the good of the church. Maybe for this reason, Thomas is one of our hidden heroes in the Bible.

One of our problems in the world of faith and belief are the small categories we allow for faith to operate. In the reality of life, faith and doubt are really friends to one another. We are often guilty of setting these two over against each other as if they were polar opposites instead of welcoming the tension that exists whenever we lay them alongside each other as partners that need one another in order to fully exist.

This kind of “reflective faith” as boldly modeled by Thomas, is a gift to the church through the centuries for all who simply cannot move submissively through the issues of faith without wanting more, without wanting the dark shadows illuminated as a matter of conscience.

Ecclesiastes 7:25 says: “I directed my mind to know, to investigate, and to seek wisdom and an explanation.” This kind of reflective person is usually a stone-turner, one who looks for answers in order to assuage the deepest questions of the soul. Reflective believers are naturally attracted to the complexity of things and are open to the complicated nuances of life.

Thomas’ faith was honest. It was every bit as real as Peter’s “action” faith, but different. It was first and foremost an honest kind of faith. Doubt, for the Reflective Believer, is a guardian that helps to see that the things that go into the making of our faith pass the “sniff test.” By that, it is the test of common sense where one is allowed to question the integrity of an issue in order to preserve and protect that very same integrity.

The gift to the church of reflective belief is the dogged approach that Reflective Believers bring to our community of faith. They are committed to truth and honest and integrity and they will go to all means to help the church confront hypocrisy and false-faith. That helps the church‘s faith to be clean and pure. The church needs that kind of belief. Some among us are too quick to look for the good in people and issues and we don’t want to jump to false conclusions and hope that the best in people will rise to the surface.

Thomas helps us realize that the door to faith is open wide and all of us enter it in our own unique fashion. If you wonder whether God welcomes the question askers and stone-turners, take a second look at this story in John. Jesus gave Thomas every opportunity to ask any question he wanted and even allowed him to approach him to touch him in the wounded places. And Thomas’ response? “My Lord and My God.” When confronted with the evidence of Jesus’ resurrection, he committed himself to believing faith.

William Barclay reminds us that when Thomas “came to the point of belief, he committed himself completely to it. He was not airing his doubts just for the sake of mental acrobatics; he doubted in order to become sure; and when he did, his surrender to certainty was complete.” In other words, when one works him or herself through the issues of doubt, a certainty exists that is never true of the one who accepts without dealing with the truth. For in the end, it’s in the crucible of doubt that faith grows.

To be sure, at the bottom of all truth, there is God. We can understand that God is there and is neither disturbed nor angry by our questions. Rather than condemnation, God opens God’s self to our discovery and experience of truth by blessing the diligent search for truth. In the end, the struggle for faith is not so much about the answers but about the struggle we give to facing the deep questions. Jesus said it suggestively and generously: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed …” (Matthew 13:31, NRSV). So small, so pregnant with possibilities far beyond our imaginations.

In Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies, she explains why she makes her son go to church:  The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want – which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy – are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians – people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful. Then she adds, When I was at the end of my rope, the people of St. Andrew tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on. The church became my home in the old meaning of home, – that it’s where, when you show up, they have to let you in. They let me in. They even said, “You come back now.”

We can thank God this morning for Thomas’ refreshing desire to make sense of the great mysteries he had encountered. We can thank God for his willingness to want to make sense of the deep mysteries he faced. With that model in mind, perhaps we can have the courage to face our own mysteries.

Printed on the side of a bag of peanuts given out on an airline were these words:  “Instructions – Open Packet, Eat Nuts.” Take a moment and let that settle in. I think all of us understand those warnings aren’t meant to protect us, they’re meant to protect the company from all the stupid things we might do with their product. But they’re not alone. Lest you think I’m picking on this one snack company, their competitor had on their packaging, “Warning: Contains Nuts.” Now you know where the saying, “It takes one to know one” comes from.

These dull warnings are more common than we think. Nytol, the sleeping aid has on its box, “Warning: May Cause Drowsiness.” The plastic wrapper on a hotel shower cap reads, “Fits One Head.” Sears advises this about its hair dryers: “Do Not Use While Sleeping.” The tag on a new iron reminds us, “Do Not Iron Clothes on Body.”1

These are all mysteries, of course. You’re likely too normal to consider them seriously despite the dire warnings they offer. Life is full of mysteries and sometimes we struggle with our chief task in life to make sense out of those mysteries. So it seems the temptation of the church is to reduce the large mysteries of faith by dismissing them or ignoring them or pretending they don’t matter. Journalist Anneli Rufus once wrote, “discussing the mystical deflates it like air escaping a balloon.”

Today is a day dedicated to one of the most profound mysteries of faith: The resurrection of Jesus from the tomb. I suppose we’re not just a little intimidated by death because we’re in denial of it. We don’t like to even think about our mortality, much less the end of life. Maybe you would prefer we simplify the mysteries by mindlessly skipping over the big questions, dancing around them like crazy Christians celebrating Jesus’ resurrection without letting its meaning sink in where we live and where we try to keep the big questions quiet. The meaning of Easter and our hopefulness about the empty tomb are with us strongly today.

Reuel Howe helped shape the field of pastoral psychology for several generations, shaping the thinking and practice of pastoral counseling as it was growing up and being accepted as necessary in the preparation of ministers. Howe tells of visiting with an old friend who was nearing death.  Howe’s old friend was fully aware of his condition and said calmly to Reuel, “You know, I am amazed at how all this is working out. I had always wondered what it was going to be like to die, but lo and behold, it is not all that unusual. Death has turned out to be an old acquaintance in different garb.”2

He went on to add, “For years now, I have undergone experiences like this. From my earliest days, I learned to let go of some things I had in order to get the things I did not have. This is what I did the day I started out on a new career. It turns out I have died a thousand deaths across the years, and in all of this, I have learned something:  Every exit is also an entrance! You never leave one place without being given another. There is always new life on the other side of the door, and this is my faith as far as death is concerned. I have walked this way before. Death is an exit, to be sure, but at the same time, it is also an entrance.”

Friends, if you’re looking for the big theme of today’s Easter message, it is this:  There’s life beyond the door of death. We can’t see it, but if we pay attention to Jesus as he leads us to Jerusalem where he faced a trial, and endured the injustice of suffering. Jesus walked with resolve (some would say with confidence) to face all this with a sense of knowing what we’re fearful of facing. If we’re paying attention to Jesus, we can move through life with a confidence tempered by God’s promises that all our exits are entrances to larger things.

I look over you the members of this good church and recognize how many times we’ve stood together around the graves of those of our members who’ve died or perhaps it’s been one of your close family members, a mother or a father, or a grandfather or grandmother. We’ve stood there side-by-side and loved one another in our moments of grief. We’ve stood together in the shadowed valley saying the words of faith to help us get through the moment.

There’s a point in any consideration about death and what is beyond the doorway of death we must concede is speculation, opinion, or simply a matter of one’s faith. Life, or rather death, doesn’t give us much to work with to say much more than that, does it?

Humorist Garrison Keillor believes we don’t go to church to hear lectures on ethical behavior; instead, we go to look at mysteries. It’s the mysteries of our existence that keep us up at night. It’s what we marvel about but don’t know whether we can put the weight of our lives on those same mysteries. Even as believers in God whether we admit it or not, we’re afraid to let the great mysteries come too close to how we think or believe. Maybe that’s the great irony of all persons of faith that in our hearts we’re all little existentialists.

Keillor tells of the time he went to a funeral for someone he had known very well and an extraordinary thing happened at the cemetery. The priest stood at the customary position at the head of the casket, containing the mortal remains of the deceased as it stood resting on the frame just over the hole in the ground it would fill for all time. The priest said prayers over the coffin meant to comfort the family … prayers meant to add meaning to the moment. Then the priest turned to those present and said to the people gathered there in the cold, “Whoever in our group may be next – it may be the youngest, the oldest, the most infirm, or it may be the one who is strongest in health – we do not know how it will be, but whoever’s time is next, may God grant you a happy and peaceful death.” What struck Keillor was that some people were offended by those remarks (as some may be this morning) but he thought it was an example of the church in a rare moment of truth telling.

But this theme may be the centralizing idea that permeates the whole of Scripture and once you see it, you’ll see it everywhere. There is a truth larger than death and mortality and the Bible speaks right into the heart of that idea in historical events, in sermons and prayers, in confession, metaphors and analogies from Genesis to Revelation. We stand this morning in faithful expectation that while we do not fully understand this mystery we are here to testify to an idea that gives our lives meaning.

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychiatrist that mapped the processes we go through in grief was not known as a particularly religious woman. But on this topic of our innate fear of the mystery of what’s beyond the door of death, she said, “Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.”3

Easter is a bittersweet celebration … it’s a sorrow to be sure, but it’s a sorrow swallowed up by a greater joy. Both are necessary in order for faith to be honest and real. There is still the mystery that must be faced whenever we stand in front of the tomb and allow the moment to sink in that death is real and the weight of sorrow lingers in all of us. The mystery still stands and some of us tremble in the face of it no matter how strong our faith.

Some of us take heart in the wisdom of Paul who claimed, “we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just I also have been fully known” (I Corinthians 13:12).

Easter faith is to wonder what it means for Christ to have conquered death and for us to stand in solidarity with the Jesus who came forth Lazarus-like. In the end, maybe a simple word of hope is all that’s needed on this day. Maybe a parable about life beyond the doorway of life and death will help us understand what I mean …

A blessed event occurred that twin brothers were conceived. As the weeks passed, the brothers grew. The more they became aware of themselves and their surroundings, the more their joy increased. “Tell me now, isn’t it great that we were conceived?” Isn’t it wonderful to be alive?” they shared with one another. The twins explored their world and when they found the cord that connected them to their mother and nourished them, they sang for joy:  “How great is the love of our mother, who shares her own life with us!”

As the weeks went by and weeks turned into months, they suddenly noticed one day how much they had changed. “What’s this supposed to mean?” asked the one.

“This means,” answered the other, “that our stay in this world is going to come to an end.”

“But I don’t want to go,” the first responded. “I would like to stay here forever.”

“We have no other choice,” the other answered, “but perhaps there is a life after birth.”

“How could that be?” responded the first in a dubious tone. “Our umbilical cord is going to be cut, and how can we live without it? Besides, others have left the womb before us, and none of them has ever returned and told us of a life after birth. No, birth is the end.”

So one of the boys began to be deeply worried, and said, “If conception ends with birth, then what’s the meaning of life in the womb? Life has no meaning. Maybe there’s not a Mother behind all this.”

“But she must exist,” protested the other. “Otherwise how would we have gotten here in the first place? And how could we have remained alive?”

“Have you seen our Mother?” asked the first. “Maybe she only lives in our imagination. We have created her in order to make some sense of our own lives.”

Thus the last days in the Mother’s womb were filled with many questions and great anxiety. Finally came the moment of birth. As the twins left the watery world of the womb, the only home they had known, they opened their eyes. They cried. What they saw went beyond anything they could have imagined.4

Sources:
1. Jud Edwards, The Timber (newsletter), Woodland Baptist Church, San Antonio TX, 11/11/98
2. From John Claypool, Stages: The Art of Living the Expected, Waco: Word Books, 1977, 87-88
3. Ananda Shorey, “‘On Death and Dying,’ Author Dies at 78,” (AP), Kansas City Star, 8/25/04
4. M. Eugene Boring, no original source for this parable is known; Boring heard of it in 1999 as part of a German lecture in Göttingen from the lecturer Klaus Berger of Heidelberg who claimed not to be the author; the translation from German to English is by Professor Boring

Today is the birthday of Dr. Maya Angelou (1928), born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. She was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. When she was eight, her mother’s boyfriend raped her, and when she told someone about it, he ended up dead. She was mute for five years after that. During that time, she memorized poetry, including 60 Shakespeare sonnets.

She got a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School, gave birth to a son a few weeks after her graduation, and from there has led a remarkable life of artistic achievement – as an actress, a dancer, a teacher, a writer, and an editor in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Malcom X. She returned to America to work for his cause, and after Malcolm X’s assassination, Dr. King asked her to work for him. After his assassination, which was on her 40th birthday, she was devastated.

For years she couldn’t celebrate her birthday. She sent flowers to Dr. King’s widow instead, and talked to her on the phone, and said a prayer.

The novelist James Baldwin encouraged her to write her autobiography. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings came out two years after Dr. King’s assassination, and it was an enormous success. She has since published 30 more books and earned 30 honorary degrees though she never attended college. She teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where she is the Reynolds Professor of American Studies. In February, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation’s highest civilian honor.

She still writes on yellow legal pads. She said, “I see a yellow pad, and my knees get weak, and I salivate.”

She said, “the writer has to take the most used, most familiar objects – nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs – ball them together and make them bounce, turn them a certain way and make people get into a romantic mood; and another way, into a bellicose mood. I’m most happy to be a writer.

She said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

The story of Abram’s call in Genesis 12 is short but plainly said:  Abram heard the Voice and answered. When he acted on the instructions from the Voice and obeyed, his life was transformed and the rest, they say, is history. Other than a vague belief in the promise, it’s hard to imagine he had an idea when his life ended all that was set in motion as his life continued to speak generation after generation, across the boundaries of culture, language, race, and time itself.

We call him “Father Abraham,” but we’re not alone in referring to him as such. As a child growing up in a Baptist church, there was never any mention of others who claimed Abraham as their own. Even the early Hebrews we considered simply as “those who lived before Jesus” and not from a separate religion all their own. Maybe that’s like the first time as a child you realized others beyond your immediate family could lay claim to your mother or father or grandfather or grandmother. The discovery was there were persons wholly unknown to you who count your loved one as a dear friend and to whom your loved one was equally fond.

In this case, there are millions upon millions of persons who lay claim to Father Abraham … Jews, Christians and Muslims alike who revere this ancient man who heard God calling and answered. Writer Bruce Feiler has opened up this discussion in our day when the three great religions that claim Father Abraham as their own are in a constant struggle over ancestral land and the supremacy of faith.

God’s terse command to Abram living in the Babylonian land we now call Iraq has been translated and commented upon over the years in various ways with different meanings as simple as “Go,” Go forth,” “Get Thee out,” “Go for yourself (implying for your own benefit),” or my favorite, “Go-you-forth.”  A 13th century Jewish mystic interpreted the text as “Go to your self, (or, know your self),” implying Abraham must do what every journeyer ends up doing along the path by seeking to understand himself inwardly as part of the journey itself.

I

This ancient story is a model for faith that gets re-enacted everyday somewhere, anytime a desert nomad crosses an unmarked border from one country to another in search of a land of promise. Such a desert nomad may believe he’s following an inner impulse planted there by God. He hopes to find shelter along the way and water to stave off his thirst. Some bring their families with them and it’s danger they hope to avoid. There are life-threatening fears on the goat trails they follow so the husband may try to pass off his wife as his sister or even his daughter if it helps them avoid danger.

Thus, Abram’s hard journey is repeated around the world … not only those who risk their lives crossing the Sonoran desert of our own great Southwest, but we can’t forget those in boats filled with Africans that cross the Mediterranean Sea hoping to land safely on the southern shores of Europe huddled in the leaking hulls of boats as they flee starvation or tribal death camps headed to freedom.  Maybe it pulsed in the hearts of the thousands of immigrants and journeyers who heard the siren song a century and a half ago to “Go west,” hoping to find land and a chance at a new life.

“Now the Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.’ So Abram went …”
(Genesis 12:1, 4)

Abram was busy living life when he was called by God. Know there’s great mystery here and all we can do with this is reflect upon how significant that truly was. How else do we explain how we are moved in life to head down a particular path whether it’s going to school to train or it’s saying “yes” to a relationship above all others and make a home for yourselves. Maybe it’s as simple as the core life decisions you make about what values you will adopt. You make choices, then those choices make you and life is built solely on the platform of those things. Some look upon life as purely the making of decisions and that the future is actually created out of those decisions.

II

This story is built on a framework of God’s grace and blessing. It’s what Fred Buechner called, “a crazy, holy grace … Crazy because whoever could have predicted it?”

One of my strongest self-aware moments of blessing came when I traveled back home for the funeral of my mother’s aunt. I drove to North Texas where I spent the day immersed in the love and care of my family. It felt like home because I knew them all and was known and felt a sense of belonging in my multiple roles as son and grandson, cousin and nephew, and as the middle brother of three sons. The service was what you might expect, songs and hymns from the faith, a sermon of remembrance. There was melodious organ music with floral arrangements spread all across the front of the funeral home chapel giving the moment the requisite sounds and smells. When all the music ended and the words had been properly said, we loaded up in our cars to take the short trip out in the country to the Cottage Hill Cemetery which was a quaint white-framed Methodist chapel surrounded by a few acres of headstones.

In the torrid heat of the summer afternoon where the wind blew you as dry as dust, I remembered this cemetery for other funerals as we’ve traveled there faithfully with each loss over the span of my life. Walking in straight lines between the headstones so as not to walk on graves we walked out to the corner of Cottage Hill where my family was gathered. An empty grave awaited us along with a tent awning as our only shade from the punishing Texas heat.

As I stood there listening to the pastor say his last words of Scripture, I realized I was in the one location in the world where geography and story were joined. I looked around and read headstone after headstone from where I stood and remembered them all. I stood vigil with my brothers and my father and my uncle and felt a part of a family.

For the first time this all had meaning to me as I understood something of what John understood about Jesus, that Jesus knew where he had come from and where he was going.  That moment of clarity with my family standing among the family gravestones helped me see myself in time, as part and parcel of a living, dynamic family connected to the generations that have preceded me in the past and with a future possibility of generations that none of us can begin to predict.

III

This is our heritage. This is our story. This man, this family … as God calls them and they respond are acting out a spiritual drama that all of us are called to live. Like Abram and Sarai, we too are wanderers in life seeking to hear the Voice and to act in faith to our calling.

What can we learn from Abraham this morning? First we discover that God’s kind of security is not some static sort of thing; rather, God’s calling is always dynamic involving response and movement. We’re not allowed in God’s kingdom to sit on a pew like a sack of rocks. Nowhere is it implied or insinuated if we faithfully read the whole of the Bible. Instead of giving him something to hang onto, something steady that would ride securely through all the movement that change implied, God gave Abram a call to adventure and the promise to provide. “Get thee up from this place,” the Voice said, “and go to the place that I will show you.” No settling down, no “nesting” – he was forever on the move after this and that seems to be the essence of God’s partnership with humankind.

John Claypool points us to Jürgen Moltmann’s recognition that this is not just another of what some would call epiphany religions, those religions that feature some internal religious insight or clarity but that builds no bridges to life as it’s lived in real time. Instead Moltmann writes that we worship a God who has called us to an exodus life.

“Along the way,” we might say, we realize God has called us to live the adventure of faith where changes and movement are not regarded as enemies to be resisted, but the way God works and calls human beings to fulfillment. God’s idea of security is not to sit still and possess something no one else has nor is it to remain static. We are travelers on an adventure full of surprise and challenges headed toward some goal beyond the present that beckons but is as yet unattained. Father Abraham helps us see that to answer the call of God is to accept that we’re issued sails to catch the breeze of God, not anchors to tie us down!

In Abram we learn perfection is not a prerequisite before God beckons us to come along for the adventure. From the very beginning we come to see that God chose Abram, not because he was already living faith, but so that he could live faith. God didn’t even hold out for better to come along. God called and Abram agreed and the adventure began. We’re called to trust God and follow our adventure wherever God might take us.

Frederick Buechner recalls a low time in his life when the Spirit broke through to him in an unusual way. “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once,” Buechner writes, “terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s [anorexia] and what was going on in our family.” As he was sitting there lost in worried thought, he noticed a car that seemed to come from nowhere. The word he most needed to see at that moment, was found on its license plate:  T-R-U-S-T.

Buechner describes the difficulty of putting such an experience into words. “Was it something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? Or was it, the word of God?”

Speaking of this incident awhile afterwards, the owner of the car came forward and identified himself as the trust officer of a local bank. Eventually he presented Buechner with the license plate that bore the word he so desperately needed to see that day: TRUST. Buechner placed the license place on a bookshelf where he could be reminded daily to trust God. “It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”

Fellow travelers in life, this is our heritage. This is our story. We are children of Abraham every time the Voice calls and every time we heed the call. No matter where the Voice might lead, the promise of Abram’s is ours that we will have companionship, as God is our fellow traveler. To such we are called … let us go now to live the adventure.

In the season of Lent, what we don’t expect is to hear a word of good news. So let me frontload this Lenten meditation with good news, really good news:  We come to God not by our perfection but by our imperfection.  For those of you who’ve come to the assumption that you’re not worth much as you stand here today … take heart, for God doesn’t need your goodness as an excuse to love you.

Frederick Buechner held these two truths in balance in his Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale. In his lectures, he advises those must look out over the people and the silence to tell a truth beyond telling. So he says to those of who are called, “Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him (or her) preach this overcoming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true…”

For most Lenten sermons, that’s a perfectly lousy place to begin because Lent’s focus is upon our sin and our mortality, but so be it. Like it or not, the Bible comes to two truthful realities about us. First, we are utterly ruined by our sin. We have “missed the mark” as most definitions of sin go. Second, God is at work in redeeming us from our sin with God’s love, a love beyond our comprehension and of which we do not deserve but receive despite our utter failure to deserve it. Amen! “Let the preacher tell the truth,” Buechner advises.

This past Wednesday we shared in a service of ashes that was a powerful experience of introspection and renewal. We Baptists are latecomers to celebrating this poignant moment together because the church has shared this simple service for centuries as the first step to a pathway that leads to the cross where Jesus suffered and died. But the cross is not the ultimate destination as the journey continues all the way to the resurrection. Such journeys are not taken lightly and the traveler must prepare for it. As in the season of Advent, we see the need for preparation. We take note of our mortality and recognize that sin has invaded our lives and separated us from God.

It seems to me that we have become all too accustomed to our sin and the separation and think it might be “just the way things are.” But the Bible tells us otherwise. Jesus shows us another way. The stories the church has told throughout the years tells us that God has been busy making newness out of old, broken and fouled lives. Nevertheless some of us have become accustomed to the nature of our brokenness and have a difficult time seeing that God wants to rid us of the shame the guilt we experience and call “normal.” All of us live under the shadow of our culpability that’s wrapped in our denial of the true state of things. We live in an illusion about those things we’ve done. Maturity is the process by which we shed these illusions and move toward a more realistic view of ourselves. And no illusion is more persistent than the illusion of our innocence.

Someone once asked Baptist pastor Carlyle Marney, “Where is the Garden of Eden?” Marney replied simply and without hesitation, “215 Elm Street, Knoxville, Tennessee.” “You’re kidding,” the person said incredulously. “Don’t you mean to say it’s somewhere in the Middle East?”  ”You couldn’t prove it by me,” he said, “for there on Elm Street when I was a boy, I stole a quarter out of Mama’s purse and went to the store and bought some candy and ate it. I was so ashamed that I came home and hid in the closet. It was there she found me and asked, ‘Where are? Why are you hiding? What have you done?’”

Our feigned illusion of innocence is what derails our attempts to find home and community. Those of us who live this side of our own Edens must surrender our claims to innocence so we can find our way home where we discover the community of the broken and healed.

I read this past week that Augustine had taken this Psalm and had it written above his bed so it was the first thing he saw every morning.

Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
Happy are those to whom the LORD imputes no iniquity,
and in whose spirit there is no deceit …
(Psalm 32:1-2, NRSV)

Before Saint Augustine was a saint, he was a moral mess.  When we think of Augustine’s rampant sexual promiscuity as a young man growing up in North Africa, we realize his sexual history was a “headlong rush toward carnal oblivion” as William Styron would call it.  So one reads Augustine’s Confessions as a testimony to his shame and guilt.

Augustine agonized over his remorse for his wasted years that scarred his soul with guilt. And as he struggled with these things and longed to know himself as truthfully as possible, he reported, “I was admonished to return to my own self…” Shame and guilt can be a spiritual disease that eats away at the core of our being and so God finds a way of dealing with our sin that maintains God’s purity even as God absolves us from our guilt through grace.

Richard Rohr, a native Kansan who has become a well-known Franciscan writer on spirituality and formation, says ultimately there is no knowledge of self that doesn’t lead to knowledge of God. Likewise, there is no knowledge of God that doesn’t lead to knowledge of self. Likely Rohr read Thomas Merton who said:  “If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.” When Augustine said, “I was admonished to return to my own self…” maybe what he was suggesting to us was that God is closer to me than I am to myself.
I stood before you Wednesday evening and as I marked your foreheads with the ashes from last year’s palm fronds, I quoted from Genesis 3:19, “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I looked you in the eyes when I said it as I was making the sign of the cross and yet I came to feel something was wrong in those moments. I quoted the words rightly (and they are truthful about us to the core). But I still felt something was missing and later it dawned on me that I was pronouncing the words of Scripture correctly but should have said, “we are dust and to dust we shall return,” as I have no claim to exemption from this truth.

Psalm 32 is known to be a part of the traditional listing of the seven penitent psalms. It’s a prayer of thanksgiving offered by individuals after the forgiveness of sin and the experience of healing.

Walter Brueggemann is perhaps the most widely known Old Testament scholar living today. In Brueggemann’s study of the Psalms, he has constructed a three-part pattern of how God works in the world. First there is a time of orientation. The psalms sing the songs of creation and of God’s glory and power in making the world. These orientation psalms speak grandly of God’s world and of wonder about the making of human beings, male and female.

But there’s a second group of psalms that describe a time of disorientation. These are the songs that are sung in sadness and disarray. They are mournful as they describe the days of lament of personal wrongdoing or of those days when the people of God were disobedient to God’s laws.

Finally there is the time of re-orientation. These are the songs of surprise and celebration at the restoration God has brought to the unfaithfulness of the man or woman of God. These are hymns and songs of thanksgiving offered up to God for doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.

The season of Lent is a haunting reminder to us from Genesis to “remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.” We’ve entered a 40-day season that began on Ash Wednesday and counts down to Easter (not counting Sundays) as a season dedicated to devotion and discipline. To do that properly, we must take care to pause long enough to let it all sink in.

Wayne Oates once told the story of the South American tribe that after traveling on a long journey consisting of several long days of strenuous travel would stop, sit down to rest for a while, and then make camp for a couple of days before going further. They said they were letting their selves catch up with their bodies. Doesn’t that describe it for us? We get out of step with our selves and our bodies and our habits of being and need a season to let our selves catch up with the rest of us.

These are the days of re-orientation when David the psalmist can see what a mess he has made of himself and how he has gone before God confessing his sin. After his contrition has been offered, to his utter surprise he discovers he has been granted a reprieve by forgiveness. In that great and boundless joy, he can say:

Thou art my hiding place;
Thou dost preserve me from trouble;
Thou dost surround me with glad songs of deliverance.

It’s often said the airy heights of the mountaintop are enough to make mystics out of all of us. Perhaps it’s the exertion of the climb or just the way the world appears altered beyond its ordinariness. Once we have the chance to catch our breath in the thin air, we’re struck with just how truly extraordinary the beauty of the earth can be.

So when we read the story of the Transfiguration, we readily admit it tugs at us from the depths of our mysticism. For some, it evokes the surprising realization there’s a spirituality within they didn’t know existed. For others, it’s simply a moment one must stop and attempt to take in hoping to capture a piece of it to savor at some later time like a morsel of bread saved from an extravagant meal. In truth, there’s a mystic’s world right under our noses waiting to be savored for any and all that would open their eyes to take it in. Henry David Thoreau observed, “People talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.”

Stephen Shoemaker calls the Transfiguration “the hinge of (the) gospel (story)” because it’s at this point the story shifts and heads in a new direction.  If this were a novel, it would close the chapter known as “Jesus’ Galilean Ministry.” The story would then shift to tell how Jesus took to the road doing largely the same things he was doing in the towns and villages near the Sea of Galilee, only now he and his disciples appeared to be wandering about aimlessly.

But if the reader pays close attention, it’s apparent that the willy-nilly wandering about in fact does have a general direction to it. Track their movement and we see they’re headed to Jerusalem. Just past this event on the top of the wild and windy mountain, they slowly wind their way “up to Jerusalem” because as the story moves along, they are climbing the hilly trails. You see, they’re headed to another mountaintop in the city of Jerusalem where another transcendent experience will occur in the suffering death of Jesus.

So this story closes one chapter and opens another in the story of the Jesus. And in the church today, we too are closing one chapter while slowly opening another. The Transfiguration is the hinge between two seasons, Epiphany and Lent.

The Transfiguration provides just the right experience to shift our attention. Jesus called upon three of his disciples to join him in the climb to the top of the mountain where they had no clue what might occur while at the top.

Unbeknownst to them, the mystery of all creation was about to open up to them. It was if they were standing on a six-foot ladder and the mystery to be climbed was Mount Everest. It’s as if their capacity to understand such things was a snorkel but the wonder to be experienced sat on the bottom of the ocean.

We don’t know if or when it dawned on them that they were re-enacting another mountaintop experience every Jew of their day recognized and cherished. In Exodus 24, an ancestor of theirs climbed a mountain to meet God in the desert plains of Sinai. The people of God, recently freed from their slavery in Egyptian captivity, waited impatiently at the base of the mountain while Moses disappeared from their view on the cloud-covered heights. And when he came down from that terrifying encounter with the Holy God, his face shone and his hair had turned white. He looked as if he had been face to face with God and had barely escaped with his life.

Peter, James and John were Jesus’ entourage invited to share a holy moment that none of them could have foreseen. These two stories mirror one another in that the man of God went to the mountaintop to be with God. Both Moses and Jesus climbed to the peak so they could see God and hear the word of God for their journeys. Samuel Terrien calls it “a beholding of God” in that moment of sheer terror and wonder. In that moment, one was there not to speak but to listen.

In truth, we need moments like the Transfiguration; at least every now and then we do. We live starved lives hungering and thirsting for the numinous to come along wondering when or if it will appear. Transcendence helps us connect the dots of experience between the numinous and the ordinary. We go to the heights to get a glimpse of the world from a different perspective. We need the mountaintops to renew our vision of the ordinary world and get a new vision of our lives. But deeper than that, we need a fresh encounter with the living, awesome God if our lives are to move beyond the ordinary; in those moments, we need to fall silent and listen to whatever God might wish to say to us.

But the Bible is honest in both cases about how the people reacted to the experience of transcendence. Within weeks the wandering Israelites complained about missing what they left behind in Egypt. The forgot what they learned from on high when they marched across the ordinariness of the desert. Such boredom made them wish to go back to slavery. So powerful was their failure to remember, it was if they had never seen the awesome power of God in smoke and fire.

We’re no different. Søren Kierkegaard once told a story of the geese sequestered in a farmer’s yard (they could have easily been “church geese” like we have here at Holmeswood). Every seventh day they gathered in a corner of the yard, and their best orator would flap up onto a fencepost and honk eloquently of the wonders of being a goose and about the glory of flying, of the heroic actions of their ancestors soaring across the sky, and the mercy of the Creator in giving them wings. Deeply moved, the other geese would nod their heads solemnly.

But one thing they did not do. They did not fly because the corn in the farmer’s crib was good and the yard was secure.

The truth of the matter is we’re closer to transcendence than most of us ever realize. We’re surrounded by it because the Creator has embedded the creation with a generous glimpse of that which transcends the ordinary … even we ourselves are embedded by the Creator with a touch of the Divine Presence as we’ve all been made in God’s image. Oscar Wilde knew of this when he wrote, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Thomas Merton once wrote:  “Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and maybe we see it frequently. God shows (God’s)self everywhere, in everything – in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without God. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.”

The transformation of Moses and the transfiguration of Jesus both give us a model of the encounter with God that leads to noble and significant living. The problem with most of us is we don’t seek out the airy heights of the mountaintop. We stay stuck in the lower places where the needs of the world cry out for us to respond. But on occasion, God takes us by the hand and leads us up to the clouds where we can sense the startling reality of God’s presence. But we can’t stay there for long because God leads us back to where the needs demand our attention.

And so we say, “God dazzles!” both in the Heavens and on the earth and wherever we have our eyes open to see as God reigns over the whole of creation.

A few years back, James Dunn, feisty defender of the historic Baptist principle of the separation of church and state, bemoaned the adjective that came to be used to describe Baptists who had stepped away from the Southern Baptist Convention and its movement to the hard right. You know the term … after the theological dust had settled we came to call ourselves “moderate Baptists,” a term more descriptive of politics than heart-felt belief. Will Campbell smirked at it all and said it was more of a “shouting match (between) the conservatives (and) the slightly more conservative.” But Dunn rightly complained about the word because he isn’t moderate about anything. He said, “A moderate is a person who sings (old hymns such as), “My Jesus I Like Thee,” or “Some to Jesus I Surrender,” or “Take My Life and Let Me Be.” To drive home his point he told the story of the man who died and stood before the pearly gates, where Saint Peter met him and asked, “Man, where are your scars?” The man looked puzzled and asked, “What scars?” and Peter shot back angrily, “Well, wasn’t there anything worth fighting for down there?”

To follow Jesus might cost you something in the end; but “moderately” following Jesus has no place if you listen closely to what he says. Bend your ear to hear what he said and you’ll realize he couldn’t be more earnest about this Kingdom of God he described.

Interested? Picture it this way as Dietrich Bonhoeffer imagines it: “Jesus sees his disciples: his disciples are over there (close at hand). They have visibly left the people to join him. He has called each individual one. They have given up everything in response to his call. Now they are living in renunciation and want; they are the poorest of the poor, the most tempted of the tempted, the hungriest of the hungry. They have only him. Yes, and with him they have nothing in the world, nothing at all, … but (rather they have) everything, everything with God.”

But that’s not all he sees, Bonhoeffer notes: “So far, he has found only a small community, but it is a great community he is looking for, when he looks at the people. Disciples and people belong together,” Bonhoeffer says. “The disciples will be his messengers; they will find listeners and believers here and there.”

When we hear these great words from Jesus seated at the top of a hill and the crowds cascading down the hill below him, it’s easy to take the stance of trying to listen to the lofty ideals of the Beatitudes and be lulled into thinking they are gentle philosophical sayings but not hear Jesus when he makes it all concrete as he does in these words.

“You have heard it said,” he says, “but I say to you.” He answers his own question as though he was carrying on a conversation in his head. It’s a way of teaching we might better understand as Point/Counterpoint. They’re connected in that he’s pointing us to an old wisdom that’s never been challenged from a new perspective. He’s talking about old Hebrew truths that are found in the sacred words of Scripture. But to be honest, there are many sayings in the Bible we look beyond sensing a deeper meaning than what is written. He’s talking about a common sense way of living that we learn as children and seldom take the time to re-think as adults. But we make a mistake believing we disregard them because they don’t make sense anymore because what Jesus does with them is harder, not easier, to obey.

Jesus talks about retaliation and generosity and ultimately about loving our enemies. They are issues all of us struggle with when we peel away our piety and sweet smiles. It’s what happens when the little girl complains to her parents about her older brother pestering her and picking on her unmercifully because he’s bigger and older. The parents chide for it, but little changes. So when the little girl runs for protection to her parent after the umpteenth time she’s been picked on, the dad tells her, “The next time he touches you, put your hand in a fist and hit him!” So she does, catching the boy totally off-guard, and the he drops like a rock because he never expected her to retaliate with physical force like that. But all of us know that such retaliation may only be a short gained pleasure because it quickly backfires on us and only makes things worse. Retaliation and the anger that inspires it are dangerous and we suffer immeasurably when it overtakes us.

Here’s what Fred Buechner has to say on this: “Of the 7 Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is where we get lex talionis, the law of talion (from Latin from which we use, “retaliation”); it’s the legal principle that “the punishment fits the crime.” But there still a limitation in God’s kingdom as to where this will take us, and so Jesus elevates the idea to a larger dimension as it relates to the kingdom he came preaching. To be honest, lex talionis is found in the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, so Jesus had to tell them, “But I tell you …” to drive home his point. Gandhi understood the limits of revenge: “If we practice an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.” An old Chinese proverb says it this way: “He who seeks vengeance must dig two graves: one for his enemy and one for himself.” Likewise, Jesus sets up the tension between the demands of others place upon us and how we deal in return with a generosity that exceeds the demand. Ultimately, he draws a line in the sand about how we relate to those who oppose us, persons in our lives we consider our enemies.

One of my friends claims there are ten people in everyone’s life at one time or another who hates us. Maybe that’s the ultimate price of being human. We rub against the grain with those folks who in turn wage war with us. It may be the outcome of some thoughtless action we’ve incurred that’s hurt someone or it may be something we failed to do. Nevertheless, they make it their mission in life to hold it as a sign of our war with one another. Maybe it’s helpful to know that on occasion, someone will unconsciously wage war with us because they’re waging war with some broken off, unresolved part of themselves.

Jesus gives no wiggle room on this issue as he commands us to offer love in return – something that goes against the grain of everything we instinctively know about life. “You have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’”

Jesus describes the faith of the new kingdom in terms as a tension between our instincts and new, better self willing to love God and receive the demands as a sign of our love of God, committed to a love greater than our instincts. We’re to be willing citizens of a new kingdom that places hard demands on our native selves and invites us to evolve. On top of it all, Jesus commands we become perfect – a word we recognize is not absolute perfection but maturity. We are to grow! We are to accept that God is at work in our lives pulling us toward a life more in tune with the kingdom.

I love what Winston Churchill observed:  “They say nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.” In the end, Jesus is pushing the law from the head to the heart. It cuts against the grain, but that’s how God about doing things. Our job as the followers of Jesus is to go with him.

Upon moving from South Texas to the Midwest ten years ago, I bought first one snow shovel, a stiff sturdy workhorse of a shovel, then I bought another with a snazzy ergonomic handle and made of some ultra-light alloy. Between the two, over a decade’s time, I’ve avoided spending $400 or $500 on a snow blower. I cheaply reasoned if I doled out the big cash and bought one, we’d almost certainly end up moving to some tropical locale and I’d be out $400 or more on a seldom-used commercial grade blower that had no future in our new warmer setting.

Last night we got the most snow in one storm than we’ve had since moving here: mid-calf snow, heavy and wet, the worst kind and halfway to zero in temperature. I first uncovered the two kids’ cars parked outdoor and went to work uncovering the double car driveway so we could drive to work. Over two hours’ time, it took me three sessions of shoveling interspersed with four cups of coffee before I finished.

Near the end, as I thought I might be finished, I looked at the sidewalk bending from the driveway to our front door still buried under snowdrifts that topped two feet in height. “No one’s coming to visit in this kind of weather,” I reasoned. “Don’t do it!” my back yelled out. It was 25-feet of curving concrete with the biggest drifts built up around the front door. It was irrational to worry about it, I thought, but then I noticed my retired Greek neighbor doing his front porch before tackling his driveway and it dawned on me that making a path to the front porch made a statement of welcome. Making a path for hospitality was at the heart of the issue and it gave my sore back something to reflect upon as I worked my way steadily toward the front door.

How often do we look upon an intentional, thoughtful gift of hospitality as the work of God in our community?

A few years ago, a couple visited my church after I had been involved consulting their former church over conflict that had gone on between their pastor and the laity. The presenting issue of dispute grew further after the pastor left and the conflict was then waged between two rival groups of laypersons as they considered the future of the church and how they would either work together for a new ministry or whether the schism would continue to grow until they fractured down the middle. In their case they fractured and church members fled hither and yon in the aftermath.

This couple, two lesbian women, in seeking a new place to join visited my church and loved our sense of worship. They had already accepted me as a pastor they could embrace. I felt their love and acceptance and visited with them one day after church about the possibility they might enter into the community of our church. The issue of sexual orientation had been a nervous anxiety in the past and, yet, our pastors regularly preached that God’s love is boundless and inclusive as we learn in our discovery of imago dei; we are persons created by God and bear an undeniable resemblance to God’s image. I recognized sadly that in honesty about my church, it’s one thing to preach God’s love and another to practice it.

These two women were committed followers of Jesus and had loved one another in a committed relationship over many years. We talked about whether the church could accept them just as they were, recognizing their sexual orientation was about the least interesting thing about them, and that they were both daughters of God who wanted and needed a community of faith with whom they could embrace and be embraced in return.

In the middle of a very serious conversation about the idea they might seek membership, one of them asked me bluntly, “Is it safe here?” I asked whether she meant whether our members could accept them as they were and she nodded her assent. “I’m not sure,” I said. I knew when I said it that I was admitting, “I don’t think it is safe here.” In truth, I could not say for sure whether the sanctuary of God’s people was safe for them to join. I couldn’t say with all certainty that I could even broach the subject with our church leaders, as it would put them in the position of objectifying them as nameless, faceless persons representing an anonymous morally-considered idea and not deal with them as persons made in the image of Christ.

Tired and sore from shoveling snow that had generously exceeded the norm, I plunged into the sidewalk leading to my front door, the visible symbol of welcome to anyone who might come along wanting warmth and acceptance. When I got to the church I discovered the front porch of my church was already cleared of its snow by our diligent custodial staff. Strangely though, I still can’t say for certain whether it’s safe inside for those who come to visit. We live in a broken world in which we are considering a more honest reflection on God’s hospitality. For many, the snow of winter will melt before the snow in the cold of our hearts. But spring always comes … and in that hope, there is a glimmer of hope that our communities of faith will become safe refuge for all God’s children.