Before Al Gore won his Oscar and became a big star in Hollywood … before the late Jerry Falwell claimed “Satan is using the talk about global warming among evangelicals to distract Christians away from preaching the gospel and toward environmentalism” … before the Exxon Mobil Corp. gave $16 million to 43 ideological groups between 1998 and 2005 in an effort to mislead the public by discrediting the science behind global warming  … before any these things were said or done, the Bible was speaking eloquently, even poetically about creation care.

There is a collection of psalms known as “creation psalms” written to extol the beauty and grandeur of all God has created and all that we enjoy as our earthly home.

Psalm 8:3-4a - When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established (ordained); What are human beings, that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

Psalm 19:1 - The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.

Psalm 65:9-10 - You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide the people with grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its furrows abundantly, settling its ridges, softening it with showers, and blessing its growth.

But that’s not all the Bible has to say on the subject. Go all the way back to the Bible’s beginning to the book of Genesis. There we find the story and intent of creation. In the first creation story in Genesis 1, God says, “Let us make humankind in our own image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over (them) …’”

And it seems that’s where the trouble began. The idea of dominion settled into the minds and hearts of the people of God believing God gave them the freedom, nay the right, to subdue and plunder the earth. Maybe political pundit Ann Coulter was closer to the truth than we like to admit when she cynically remarked, “God said: ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.’”

Maybe that’s why when Jesus was asked to describe hell he called it “Gehenna.” Gehenna is not this visionary place beyond the grave as a place where lost souls are burned for eternity.  Gehenna was valley just south of Jerusalem infamous during the Jewish monarchy period for the practice of child sacrifices by fire. While the term had a deep significance in describing a place where the dead were burned, it was also a trash dump for the rubbish generated by the residents of Jerusalem. Jesus’ description of hell was a garbage heap! That meaning seems to say that when we destroy the creation, we’re creating a hell on earth and how then can it reveal the glory of God?

And in the midst of this transcendent dream scene John had in a moment of worship, he sees the wiping away of the old world and God’s re-creation of “a new heaven and a new earth.”

From a Papillon-like penal colony on the island of Patmos, John has a vision of worship and the exaltation of God and in the midst of his worship he envisions this astounding scene from Revelation 5 where the voices of a mass choir of singing angels breaks out in full voice, “Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” They are uncountable simply out of sheer magnificence and John doesn’t even try to count them; instead, he describes them as, “… myriads and myriads and thousands and thousands.”

And in response to the moving nature of the majesty of their singing, the earth itself cries out an antiphonal response. “Every creature in heaven and on earth and in the sea, all that is in them sing:  ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” Then the four living creatures add the coda: “Amen!” And the elders gathered around the throne of God fall down and worship.

This is not the first time we get the idea that the earth itself is involved in worship. It’s a distinctly Hebrew point of view that appreciates nature and senses that the trees and the mountains and the skies and the flowers and the sea creatures and the birds of the air are all a part of a holy choir that sings every moment of every day. Remember what Jesus said as he entered the city a week before his execution to the throngs of people who lined the path leading to the Temple? The Pharisees tried their best to restore calm by telling Jesus to order them quiet. Their voices could not be stilled, he said, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out” (Luke 19:40b, NRSV). Jesus was tapping into that old Hebrew understanding that the created order was still mysteriously tied to the heartbeat of the Creator.

French paleontologist and Christian mystic Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin asked, “Is life an open road or a blind alley?” In answering his own question, he observed, “Man has every right to be anxious about his fate so long as he feels himself to be lost and lonely in the midst of the mass of created things. But let him once discover that his fate is bound up with the fate of nature itself, and immediately, joyously, he will begin again his forward march.”

Some mistakenly regard this understanding of the relationship between the Creator God and the creation as pantheism, the belief that God and the created order are one and the same. But what this seems to suggest is rather panentheism, the belief that God is immanent within the universe, while also transcending it. In panentheism, God is seen as creator and the animating force behind the creation. A deeper and more appreciative understanding of the relationship between the Divine and the creation seems to be in order. Our Native American tribes held the earth in reverence and seemed more connected to its beauty in a holistic way. That tradition would suggest we need to learn the truth about what is happening to the earth so we can make wise choices about its care.  For too long, the earth has suffered from the mismanagement that our dominion thinking has caused.

A Christian theology of creation care is simultaneously personal and corporate. It is grounded on the teachings of the Bible. And it’s something that’s considered both globally and locally. Professor Richard Wilson prods us to change by giving us two different methodologies upon which to act. The watchword of our time is “think globally, act locally.” That’s a terrific approach to getting started! But we could just as easily reverse that thinking. Sometimes doing something tangible at the local level can stimulate our thinking at the global level. Sometimes making the slightest of changes can set loose other changes that would necessarily mean changes at a deeper level. What is important, Wilson says, is to see our work as a part of what God is doing as a part of redemption and reconciliation.

A poetic way of thinking about Earth Day today is to see the creation, the entirety of it, (not just those beautiful places where the nature shines) as God’s body. If we could take it in and see it as something God has created and given to all of us that inhabit it, would it make a difference? Would it be something we could see as a part of our fellowship with God that we would faithfully tend to it if we could see it as God’s body? I think it would make a world of difference.

Like many of you, I admire words and how even the simplest of thoughts can be strung together until their beauty shines brighter than the sum total of the words themselves.

I’ve come to love reading Mary Pipher - known widely for her courageous exploration of how fragile young girls can be in their journey to womanhood. Pipher is a psychotherapist with a poet’s heart.

Recently, I read a Mary Pipher book I enthusiastically recommend, Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World. After Pipher experienced what some would call a mental breakdown triggered by her own wild success as an author, she had to retreat in order to save herself. Here’s a snippet from the last chapter of her story of recovery:

“At sixty, I am still ahead of the horses, as my grandfather used to say. But I am aware that I have only a finite number left of Thanksgivings, full moons or spring flowers. That realization makes me sad, but it also makes me notice. I don’t often squander much time or let beauty pass me by.

I heard recently that Japanese companies offer employees what is called heartache leave - days off after they break up with a partner. With a young person it is only one day; for older people, heartache leave is longer. At this stage of my life, every day is a kind of heartache leave. I am always losing someone or something I love.

But here are the gifts of this stage of life:  A deep reverence for all living creatures. The realization I have been useful. The freedom to do as I please. The knowledge that I am loved. The acceptance of my place in time.

I do not fear death, but I hate to think of abandoning people who love me. I wish I could always be here to watch over my generations of family. I especially want to be part of my grandchildren’s lives as long as I can. I want to take them to see the Sandhill cranes, read them the books I loved as a girl, teach them the constellations and the names of butterflies. I want to give them what my grandmothers gave me - a deep sense that I was loved and understood …

Not all adults have grandchildren or find them fulfilling. The key to happiness is not so much grandchildren as it is Generativity. This was Erik Erikson’s term for a sense that our work will leave a good and useful legacy for the generations to come. Many people without children or grandchildren experience this through their professions, their avocations and their commitments to their communities. The fullness of life comes from an identity built on giving and on joy. This is the great trick at this stage in the life cycle - finding useful work that gives us pleasure.

I luxuriate in my life, and it will be hard to say good-bye. Yet death is the greatest democrat. In the end we are all equals. There is a comfort in knowing that I face what every human being who has ever lived faced in his or her time. I expect to return to the great commons where all our ancestors will be waiting to greet us. I predict that whatever comes after death will be better than I can possibly imagine …

All transformations are returns. After setting forth on a voyage of discovery, being chased by monsters, encountering great suffering and beauty, getting lost and being pummeled by storms, we find our way back to our original place and realize that the truth has always been there waiting for us. We connect with that which we knew before we were born. We can resume our ordinary lives with eyes unclouded by longing.” 

The fifteenth chapter of Luke is a pivotal and compelling bit of storytelling because there are three stories told sequentially, each illustrating the same lesson. In many ways, Luke 15 has been considered “a gospel within the gospel” because it so typifies the message that Jesus embodied. The three stories he are told in response to how he is received by the Pharisees who note that, ” … a lot of men and women of doubtful reputation were hanging around Jesus, listening intently … the Pharisees and religion scholars growled, ‘He takes in sinners and eats with them, treating them like old friends,’” (Luke 15:1-3).

The notion of grace and forgiveness is uniquely divine. Only in the mind of God could such an idea come among us. It’s not in our nature to think up the idea of grace. In order to see that the divine message of grace gets shared, we have to treat the subject with care so that our own fallen natures don’t corrupt that which is divine.

The church has always wanted to intervene with the idea of grace and forgiveness by making the church a ticket booth to God’s grace. In order to receive grace, you need a ticket that only the church can dispense. That’s the human twist we give to grace:  We take that which is free and liberating and we make it cost something. In order to obtain the ticket of salvation, you must meet the prior approval of the church. We question whether the grace of God is enough for certain sins. We expect that you clean up appropriately before receiving God’s grace and afterwards that you meet our expectations of behavior and belief. That’s why Jesus had to tell these stories … about a lost coin, a lost sheep, and ultimately a lost son. Why, we’ve even gotten the nature of the stories confused. They are not stories of things that are lost; they are stories of things that are found.

Jesus wanted in the deepest way possible for the Pharisees to discover how they had missed the point of the message. The point was God is out on the front porch looking for any sinner who realizes they need acceptance and forgiveness. He is out there waiting and willing to offer grace to them all, no matter how lost they have been. He has already paid the price for their sins … all they need to do is simply come home and receive it. That’s our message, too, if we are willing to hear it for ourselves.

We see ourselves mirrored in the lives of the two sons. We’re either the younger lost son who took everything that was due him and left, or we’re the older son who obediently stayed at home and yet resented the father who gladly welcomed the wayward boy. We’re both lost and broken and we come to realize it, or we’re lost even while we’re obediently trying to earn our acceptance by being good enough. I guess ultimately in the good grace of God, there is even a grace for us lost older sons who are lost in our goodness, our niceness, and our morality.

That’s what Robert Capon calls, “being a bookkeeper.” He says, “The human race is positively addicted to keeping records and remembering scores.”  You stay at home, near God, where it is safe and predictable. What you don’t realize is that, given time, your bookkeeping behavior has, in fact, become your god, and you, too, are far away from “home.”

Grace is a kind of mercy that we in the church have had a notoriously difficult time handling. We’ve taken that which is free and we’ve made it something to earn. It’s sad in a way because we first come to God seeking forgiveness and the desire to be whole. And then, after experiencing the liberation that only God can bring, we go out and get lost all over again.

Seminary Professor Tom Long tells of the seminary student of his who went jogging with his father in their urban neighborhood. As they ran, the son shared what he was learning in seminary about urban ministry, and his father, who was the pastor in the inner city, related experiences of his own with his son. About halfway into their run, they decided to call a local pizzeria to order their lunch to coincide with their arrival back home. A phone booth (remember those?) was on the corner and as they stopped, a homeless man approached them and asked for spare change. The father reached into both pockets and pulled out all the change he had, offered it to the man and said, “Take what you need.”

The homeless man, hardly believing his good fortune, said, “Okay, I’ll take it all,” and scooped the coins into his own hands. It only took a second for the father to realize he now had no change for the phone so he called out, “Pardon me, I need to make a call. Can you spare some change?” The homeless man turned and held out the two handfuls of coins and said smilingly, “Here, take what you need.”

Professor Long claims we’re all homeless prodigals and beggars. “Head home,” he says, “and expect nothing. Be astonished beyond all measure when the dancing begins, the banquet table is set and the Voice of God says, ‘Here, take what you need.’”

I say words at my share of funerals, memorial services and gravesides. Sometimes they’re over folks I know and other times they’re for total strangers. It’s part of the work I do as a pastor. I am both minister, priest and friend in those moments. I’ve adopted the attitude of Thomas Lynch, Milford Michigan’s poet-undertaker whose newest book is titled, Apparitions and Late Fictions: A Novella & Stories (2010). In an interview, he once said:

“In The Undertaking, I followed that up by saying something like, ‘A dentist is a dentist, but he has no particular fondness for root canals or bad gums.’ That is sort of his office in brief, to take care of that, but what I wanted to point out is that it is not death-death as a subject is dull, mum, it says nothing-but all the meanings attached to the dead that are the basic stuff of human beings.”

Despite what you think about death and the whole experience of grief and strange, mixed feelings at a funeral, I typically don’t mind the role I play by helping put words to what some are feeling and others are thinking. In most accounts, I see myself putting a big frame around what’s happened so that the experience itself is sharpen in focus. I think “last words” are important to the grieving because they are ways spoken to describe what large looming event has happened that they can’t quite name themselves.

A while back I ran across a poem by Nöel Coward that seems to capture or perhaps re-captures the feeling that one has lost something significant …

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

“Nothing Is Lost” by Nöel Coward, from Nöel Coward Collected Verse © Methuen Publishing, Ltd., 2000. Reprinted with permission

In 1867, Mark Twain joined a group of religious pilgrims and boarded the Quaker City, a retired Civil War side-wheel steamer with auxiliary sails coming off commissioned duty by the Union Navy in the War Between the States. When the war ended, the ship was retrofitted as a cruise ship for a five-month cross-Atlantic journey that visited various ports of call along the Mediterranean Sea until it reached Palestine, its ultimate destination. Not yet Israel, not even British Palestine, what we call “the Holy Land” was mostly populated by Muslims and Arab Christians and was still a part of the fragmenting Ottoman Empire.

My friend Kyle Childress wrote of the story of what happened when one of his town’s football heroes was drafted and went off to serve his country in Southeast Asia. Kyle remembered him as one of his boyhood idols and he felt particularly close to him because that young man had been in his father’s Sunday School class before going to war. The young man had lost a leg in battle and was discharged and came home a hero. But the young man also came home with a message. “God told him,” he claimed, “that the war was wrong and that his church and town should change their hearts and minds about racial segregation.”
 
Being the town’s local hero, he had ample opportunities to spread his message and the results were predictable. Some said the war messed up his head. Others said this or that. Not surprisingly, not many believed in him because of his message. But one Sunday, Kyle’s father said he didn’t know whether the young man had mental problems or not but that didn’t mean he was wrong. It wasn’t long before Mr. Childress, a member of the school board, pushed for integration.
 
Had the story in Luke 4 stopped with Jesus’ reading the scroll from the prophet Isaiah and had Jesus been content to simply make his one-line pronouncement that this scripture was being played out before their eyes, I think it would have been an ideal launch pad for the rest of the story. But as we read, you can’t put a big bow on his trip home because the story was spoiled when Jesus poked a hole in their ideas of religious nationalism. In other words, he took a risk and meddled with their Jewish understanding of their exclusive covenant with God. And for that they threatened to kill him by throwing him off the precipice in order to silence him.
 
As ones called to preach, we must face the music eventually although to do so is to invite trouble. Most preachers weaken and tremble with the thought they must say a word on a delicate topic thus caving in to our ministerial Achilles heel of wanting to be liked by everyone. Our temptation (our weakness) is to plow down the middle and not say a word driven by conviction. But if we’re to preach the heart of the radical nature of the gospel, we must come to terms with the notion that the good news of Jesus is not meant to sanitize our provincial view of the world.
 
Jesus came to turn things around and seldom missed an opportunity to stir the bottom of the pot. He adopted an agenda that came from the Hebrew prophets to care for the poor, to set free those held captive, to heal and to fight oppression. Ultimately, he came to inaugurate the year of Jubilee (a holy season only God would ever dream up) dedicated to righting all that had gotten tangled in our relations with one another.
 
In Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet, he writes that the task of the preacher is be “a voice that shatters settled reality and evokes new possibilities.” Brueggemann claims most sermons instead support the settled reality by not questioning, “the way things are.” Pastors tend to color compliantly inside the lines and seldom risk saying anything that unsettles that safe ground. One wise old social activist said if you preach and live out the prophetic call of God, “you had better look good on wood because that is where you’ll end up.” 
 
What do we do with those who speak against the grain? Ultimately we get rid of them. We malign them by calling them misfits or that hated word, “liberal,” meant to neutralize them and scare people away.
 
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a 20th century prophet who delivered a message of racial reconciliation by challenging segregationist attitudes as racism. He was a passionate prophet who preached boldly and eloquently about the Beloved Community, a community not meant for blacks only but wide enough to include the world. God bless Dr. King, he held nothing back. He said it all and he continued to hold a mirror of love up to our faces and made us look deeply within at our abuse of others based solely on race. King’s struggle with the church was its consistency in being on the sidelines for some of our most perplexing issues such as the struggle for racial equality, poverty, and against the war in Southeast Asia. The dominant culture controlled by the white community held him up as a dangerous agitator and most would consider his assassination the result of white anger and distrust. Maybe things haven’t changed all that much in two thousand years for how the settled reality considers those who speak against it.
 
In his opportunity to read from the scriptures Jesus chose this passage from Isaiah 61 and with it he made a statement to his home congregation that clearly declared to all of them just what kind of person he had become in recent days. He wanted them to know that his life was headed in a new direction. Then he silently rolled the scroll back up and handed it to the attendant who solemnly made sure the scroll was put back into its container. All eyes were fixed on Jesus who sat quietly until the attendant sat back down. Then, in a measured way of speaking, Jesus straightforwardly announced, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
 
By reading Isaiah 61:1-2, Jesus announced what his messianic role was to be: The fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. The phrase from this ancient servant song, “He has anointed me,” meant, “He has made me the Christ or Messiah.” When understood literally (as Jesus meant them to understand it) the passage said that the Christ was God’s servant who would bring to reality the longing and the hope of the poor, the oppressed, and the imprisoned. It meant that Christ would usher in amnesty, liberation, and the restoration associated with the proclamation of the year of Jubilee.
 
But Jesus’ first sermon among his own kin received an evocative response:  Some were filled with open admiration … some wondering … some doubting. Some scholars wonder if what followed was Luke’s confusion over two visits, one received happily and the other received angrily. However it happened, Jesus provoked an angry response by quoting two well-known proverbs:
 
“Physician, heal thyself”
“No prophet is acceptable in his own country”
 
The proverbs help us understand that Jesus realized the people would be expecting a demonstration of the ministry he had been doing over in Capernaum. Maybe the people expected more because he was the “hometown boy.” Maybe they assumed privileges would be theirs for having known Jesus all his life. Perhaps there was a secret resentment of Jesus because he had already taken those favors and miracles to others beyond Nazareth (Capernaum was said to have had a heavy non-Jewish population.).
 
Jesus defended himself by offering two Old Testament stories: Both Elijah and Elisha, prophets in Israel, took God’s favor to non-Jews. That these stories were in their Scriptures and quite familiar perhaps accounts in part for part of the intensity of their hostility. When faced with the truth of these stories, anger and resentment were sure defenses. In truth, they were victims of their own scriptures.
 
For Luke, the tension that erupted here was not between Jesus and Judaism; it was between Judaism and its own Scriptures. Consequently, their very own Jewish Scriptures caught Jesus’ family and friends on the horns of a dilemma. This passage points out a fatal flaw among them:  They read the scriptures as the exclusive word of God to them only … as an exclusive covenant with them. Jesus as a prophetic voice of provocation couldn’t let that idea go unchallenged and so the subtext to the reading of his inauguration text from Isaiah 61, he drew the line in the sand that he would not be associated with that kind of exclusive form of love. He understood his mission clearly and did not flinch from the political fallout that came from his first encounter of substance. And because of that we get a foreshadowing of his fate when the people of God hung the Son of God upon a wooden cross. Jesus was too dangerous to ignore and considered a political and theological threat to the settled realities of his time. In their great anger, they carried him up to the brow of the nearest hill and were ready to destroy him.
 
A gangly seventh-grader in the youth group of her small Baptist church ran track in her junior high school and when a track meet was cancelled one Saturday and re-scheduled for the following Saturday it ran into conflict with the commitment she had made to join with her youth group on a one-day mission adventure. So she went to her track coach and described her dilemma. She was told her fellow track mates were depending on her to compete and the coach expected her to be there. She went home in tears. The next day she broached the subject once more and the coach said it more bluntly:  Either show up or turn in your track uniform. The next day, she went to her coach a third time with her uniform and walked away.
 
It generated the typical range of responses from the parents who knew about this situation. Some of the church parents were surprised she caved in to the coach’s demands and seemed supportive that she should have cancelled on her wish to serve on the mission project with her youth group. So they were surprised when the girl said back to them, “This is about God.”
 
The God-called prophets always see things the rest of us don’t see. Standing up to the Jr. High track coach is not the same as the standing for more important issues such as race relations or the death rate of children in war or the dire needs in a country like Haiti, but it’s a beginning.
 
When Jesus read the text and sat down, he was saying in the plainest of terms: “This is what I’m about … this is who I am. All of this is coming true right before your eyes.” In doing so, he was bearing witness to what God was calling him to say and do on behalf of the kingdom of God. What is it we will do with this one we’ve pledged to follow? Will we follow him and his agenda of challenging the settled reality?

After his presidency had ended, Ulysses S. Grant once gave a friend a fine cigar. The gift was an extension of his friendship and esteem. Realizing the cigar was a valuable memento from a famous person, Grant’s friend saved the cigar rather than smoking it and kept it dutifully in his humidor under ideal conditions. It was thus handed down to his son who kept it who gave it to his son late in life.

Some seventy years later, the man’s grandson decided to smoke the illustrious cigar at a public ceremony honoring a historic occasion in the grandson’s life. He proudly lit up the cigar that had been given to his grandfather by President Grant and puffed away importantly … whereupon the cigar blew up in his face! Grant had given his good friend an exploding cigar as a joke, but it took seventy years for the joke to deliver the power of its punch line.

How many unexploded cigars lie around us? Maybe they’ve been in the form of ideas and dreams that have come to us in the night we’ve not had the courage to explore. Maybe they’ve been an inner impulse to do more or be more. Most of us have an urge to make more out of the little we’ve received. When I think of the future, it comes to me in the form of dreams about all that we could do or be.

For myself …
I want to live more open to the adventure of life by being more conscious and by living in the energy of the moment. I want to embrace life as it offers itself to me and not shirk the moment by withdrawing. When an opportunity arises that demands something of me, I want to see past my hesitancy and to see what new thing might be enjoyed. I want to savor the moment, drinking in all flavors of life I can by tasting, touching, hugging and loving. I want to throw open the windows of my soul and my mind as an act of gratitude to the God who made all things. Gratitude for others, gratitude to God and gratitude for the gift of this moment … all of these I want to savor.

For my family …
I want my family to be my centeredness to the world and a constant reminder that I have people to whom I live in debt for love and friendship. I want to see my children as my extension into the future and my parents as my link to the past. I want to see my life honestly along the arc of a life’s span, whatever days may be left for me to live. I want to live deeply by being connected to my family. I want to break free from the ironic tendency to live as though my family is there to serve my needs of self. I want to celebrate their joys and share their burdens out of the pure and simple sense of loving them, no matter what happens.

For my community of faith …
I want my church to be a community where people of all ages who find it to be a wholesome, healthy place where real needs are taken seriously and met. I want my church to be accepting and engaging. I want those who feel alienated from life to feel and experience a sense of God’s blessing. I want my church to see itself as agents of change and where our members feel authorized to do and be what Christ would do and be. I want us to be willing to meet one another in the spirit of Christ who loved and changed destinies. I want the outsider to feel a sense of “coming home.” Loneliness is a powerful and degrading emotion that causes one to feel empty, lost and devalued. I want us to be a place where dreams and visions are honored … expected even! I want my community of belief to have a holy sense of the drama God has led us to engage in this world and in our community. I want us to have big dreams and a commitment to something larger than we can do on our own.

What do we have to lose? Let’s light our cigars and take our chances!

The coffee shop may be the last place you talk openly about sex, but with Birdie as your friend, all things are possible. The table talk can be at the mid-range of acceptable decibels for a normal conversation in a public eatery, but just say the word ‘sex’ and every head snaps your direction. That snapping motion is not gender specific because every woman’s head turns too. There must be a special decibel for the ears that includes words that make for good gossip because everybody knows a noisy coffee shop is a fabulous place to catch up on the latest skinny.

Gossip’s so powerful, we’ve given thought to adding to our church website a special members-only page where the latest news can be added. No names would be used in this chat room, only initials. You know, of course, that whoever puts a patent on the software for this idea will make a killing because every church needs this. In fact, we’ve considered putting that idea on the table of our next missions committee meeting as a fund-raising idea for foreign missions. We could call the software, “Bear One Another’s Burdens.”

Birdie sat coyly across from me swirling her coffee spoon ever so slowly. The cream had just been added and for the briefest of moments there was the two-toned psychedelic look of dark roasted coffee giving way to the soothing effects of the cream. Birdie was over-spooning the coffee yet she was relishing the soothing circular movement of her spoon going round and round waiting for me to ask the question she so desperately wanted me to ask.

I followed my cue. “Okay, it’s obvious you have an agenda for our conversation. Why don’t we cut to the chase and you tell me what it is you want to talk about?”

“No games, preacher. Just questions. You’ve been to the seminary and you’ve even studied the subliminal where all the sick stuff from inside occasionally bubbles to the surface so here’s my question:  What gives with the sexual obsession of the faculty at Southern Seminary? It seems every time I pick up to read the latest news story involving one of their faculty, all I read about are goofy opinions about sex or procreation that are passed off to the rest of us as gospel. A while back, I read about their weird view on singles who wait until they’re in their late 20’s or early 30’s to marry. Seems they’re being disobedient to God by waiting. I also read where couples that choose to delay having a family until they feel ready sin against God by not having children early and often as a sign of their commitment to God. Pardon me, but it seems these are two ideas only men who feel threatened by sharing control in the bedroom would think up!”

The heads seated nearby turned suddenly because Birdie didn’t have a volume control on her voice. Even the hard of hearing are amazingly good at hearing when the word ‘sex’ and ‘bedroom’ are said.

“Birdie, you’ve raised the right question but could we keep this talk more private? You said the words ‘sex’ and ‘obsession’ in the same sentence and that group of businessmen sitting next to us even stopped talking about football. You’re talking loudly about the oldest sport known to man and you may need police protection getting out of here because the women look like they’re ready to slice and dice you.”

“Preacher, you know I don’t give a rat’s clacker about them and their sordid thinking.”

“Well, Sister, you have successfully put your finger on the central question. Why are those guys so obsessed with these weird views on sexuality and procreation? Notice who’s missing? Notice there are no women in the dialogue? Notice the Women’s Missionary Society hasn’t put out their own press release that says, ‘Amen, brother! Preach on!’ Only men are doing the talking here. But that’s not all … what’s so strange about those issues are how they link them to the numerical rate of growth among Evangelicals. ‘Fewer babies make for fewer Christians,’ they say. Wives need to submit to their husbands without resistance and bear as many babies as God gives them so the men’s quivers can be full … Lord, it’s even known as quiverfull theology, of all things! Pardon me, but I thought church growth came through evangelism, not procreation.”

Birdie jumped in. “On top of that, you’ve now got this bizarre discussion the seminary president’s zany speculation about an imaginary gay gene and that if we did learn that homosexuality is caused genetically would you choose to zap your child’s DNA to ensure they were straight? That’s not only ignorant and offensive; it goes against almost every other thing they’ve said about the ethics of genetic experimentation. I keep thinking about Nixon campaigning on a law and order platform only later to be forced into a corner where he said, ‘I’m not a crook!’”

“Hmm,” I exhaled. “Sex is weird enough on its own without the weird advocating for the weird.”

“Hmm…”

While it doesn’t happen all that often, it’s interesting how a person can be linked to a place almost as if we can’t think of person and place apart from one another. Think of Neil Armstrong leaving behind the first footprints on the surface of the moon or Ernest Hemmingway and his tropical ties with the Florida Keys. Think of Calcutta and most of us remember a humble little nun known as Mother Teresa ministering on the desperate streets of a place our minds can barely imagine. Or in movies, how about Tommy Lee Jones portrayal of a West Texas county sheriff in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men? His weathered face alone looked like a map of that hardscrabble country and his voice drawled authentically in the style of the old-timers of that harsh land. Think of Marilyn Monroe and our minds wander to an iconoclastic scene of her standing over a subway grate in New York City … or at least its honest to admit our minds do wander.

So when it comes to John the Baptizer, no doubt we have to think of the Judean wilderness and the fiery personality of someone so wild and untamed, living in a place so stark one is hard pressed to label it sustainable. John’s only occasion in Scripture to reside in the city is in a prison cell where he gets his head cut off and presented on a platter for saying to the king what no one else would the king’s wrath to say. Raised in Jerusalem in the shadow of the Temple, John left to save his soul and lived as an outsider. Yet the people of the cities sought him out on his turf – away from the bright lights and the carnality of city-life. John preached out in the wilderness where it was harsh and arid. It was a place where his message made sense.

Poet-storyteller John Shea described John the Baptizer this way:

There is another pointer of the way, a map of a man, who when you try to read him, reads you. Unexpected angels are pussycats next to this lion, a roar that once overrode Judea. You may not heed but you will hear, his insistent, intruding, unsoothing voice. Some say this thunder is because his father stumbled mute from the Holy of Holies, tongue tied by an angel who was peeved by the old man’s allegiance to biological laws. The priest was silenced by the temple because he thought flesh could stop God. The son of the priest shouted in the wilderness because he feared God would stop flesh. His open mouth was an open warning.

[John Shea, “The Man Who Was a Lamp, Starlight, NY: Crossroads, 1995]

Jesus and John were the sun and moon to one another. One paved the way; the other came as promised from ancient days. “Behold, the lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world!” John announced boldly (John 1:29, KJV) when he saw Jesus approaching. They argued on the river’s edge over who should baptize whom and Jesus pressed John with Hebrew prophecy of centuries before. They were the oddest of couples, this sun and this moon in orbit together.

Shea describes the two as linked in the holy story:

Opposite of the sought-after child in every way. The child is round, this one has edges; The child nurses on virgin’s milk, this one crunches on locusts; The child is wrapped in swaddling clothes, this one is rubbed raw by camel hair. Yet they know one another, even exchange smiles. They share a mystery, this hairy man and smooth child.

Jesus came out of John as surely as he came out of Mary. John was the desert soil in which the flower of Jesus grew. John was the voice in the wilderness who taught Jesus to hear the voice from the sky. John would push sinners beneath the water and Jesus would resurrect them on the waves. John was the fast who prepared for Jesus the feast.

The man John was formed and haunted by the Judean wilderness east and south of Jerusalem. The wilderness spoken of in the Bible was a desert. Not a desert like the sands of the Sahara in Northern Africa but a desert more like of the southern border of the United States … a wilderness marked by arid and rocky terrain. In the wilderness, the voice of God came and spoke to many of the Bible’s main characters. It was the place where God had been creatively at work through the silence and the waiting. Will Willimon described the desert as, “the place where Israel lost its way; lost its way and bowed before alien gods … (The) wilderness is not a place … it’s a state of mind … a metaphor to describe a terrifying situation where wild beasts lurk. There are no clear paths, and chaos, temptation and bewilderment reign.”

John encountered the God of his fathers out in the wide and silent desert. Out there, the calling of God for his life became clear. The wildness of the desert became for him a place of revelation. It was a place of conversion and a place of transformation. And like all revelations, it was a disturbing event because it demanded a response from him. In a sense, it was disturbing because if called for an inner revolution. It involved being “made over,” in being made new, in being “born again,” if you don’t mind me using that kind of language.

For John, the transformation had to go down into his bones, into the marrow of how his life was being lived in order for him to fulfill his calling as a messenger. John had to be the message in order to deliver the message. The message of the desert is that all of us must submit to the revolution and submit to the transformation God has in store for us.

To make sense of this, Richard Swanson reminds us of an ancient and deep truth about the world … something John’s tough message carries … the world is upside down and needs righting. What God is up to in our time, John claims, is that One is coming who will establish a new world where the wrongs of the world will be turned around. Did you hear John’s prophetic warning? “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Swanson rightly points out that this is a central and insistent perception of Jewish faith, namely, that the world is upside down. Richard Wilson reminds us, “Peace is not about maintaining the status quo. Peace is about striving to be empowered and transformed by the presence of God in our midst. To speak in favor of peace always is to find a dissenting voice, a voice that articulates what could be – what should be – for followers of Jesus.”

On the promise side of John’s preaching, we can recall the history of the ancient Jews who had received God’s promises long before John came along, the people “who sang the song” as they held onto those promises. So John began his career by singing the old song again, by holding out the old hopes, even six hundred after those words were first delivered by prophets of another era.

Our work today, is to sing another verse of that ancient promise clinging to the possibility that God is still at work laboring to make the promise come true. Jesus came to us with a purpose and during Christmas, our temptation overcomes us every time we live as though there’s another purpose.

Once more, poet John Shea helps us …

Legend says, the cave of Christmas where the child of light burns in the darkness is hidden in the center of the earth.

Access is not easy. You cannot just amble to a mantle, note the craft of the crib child, and return to the party for more eggnog. You may see a figurine this way, but you will not find the child of light. The center of the earth is not the surface. You must journey and, wayfarer, you need a guide.

An Advent Meditation From Luke 21 & Jeremiah 33

David Buttrick tells the story of the poor black woman deep in the bayous of Louisiana who had raised over a dozen children over the years – most of them adopted and foster children. When a newspaper reporter asked her why she had done this considering her own meager resources, she replied, “I saw a new world coming …”

The feeling of expectation can be a powerful thing. No doubt the feeling of expectation can be an incredibly powerful force in our lives. Expectation can force new directions or create new habits. It can keep us steady when everything else is flying off into different orbits. Or, it can take the form of the expectation of relief or the hope of healing. Expectation can force us to consider a new path as in the expectation of an answer to some vexing problem we’ve been facing. Perhaps it’s simply the expectation that God will intervene in your life, making a way that did not exist because of your own efforts.

The season of Advent has two faces, two orientations. First it has a look to the past, a way of seeing backward in time to that time in the revelation of God when a savior was hoped for. It is an orientation to the past in the sense that it is a recapitulation of the longing of a long ago time when women and men of faith anticipated the coming of God’s Messiah. The Hebrew prophets had a strong sense of the coming of God to save God’s people. In the midst of strong oppression and suffering, there was the anticipation that God would most surely enter into human history and actively work for the freedom of Israel.

But Advent also looks to the future in an attitude of expectancy over what God has yet to do in history. Consequently, we have a Sunday in the season of Advent dedicated to thinking in future tense about the coming of Christ in judgment and power and glory. In today’s reading from Luke’s gospel, we have the strident message of the second coming of Christ to the world. It is an apocalyptic message of harsh and harrowing words warning all of us:  “Be on guard …”

Abraham Heschel claimed a prophet was someone who knew what time it is.  Six centuries apart, both Jeremiah and Jesus stood on the streets of Jerusalem and proclaimed to those who heard them that the city would be destroyed. The message was so disturbing they both shed tears over their own words.

When Jesus put on the mantle of prophecy, he turned to Jeremiah for inspiration and drew upon Jeremiah’s prophetic imagery in his words. Jeremiah’s message was spoken under the shadow of oppression and it’s a word we have to hear as though we’re dispossessed slaves living under the control of others who control every aspect of our lives. In fact, those who share in the power systems of the world should hear these words and tremble. People who run banks, people who work in city governments, people who have profited from the status quo, should twitch nervously whenever apocalyptic language is used because it means a change is coming which will likely reverse the conditions for those who are oppressed by their oppressors.

How about this example from history? Columbia, South Carolina, Mary Chestnut’s diary of March, 1865:  “Sherman marched off in solid column, leaving not so much as a blade of grass behind. A howling wilderness, land laid waste, dust and ashes.” Her comments record the devastation to the Old South whose glory was built upon the old plantation system where slaves from Africa tended massive acres of economically viable crops that created wealth for the slaveholders. It was no small matter, then, that Mrs. Chestnut failed to mention in her tale of devastation and woe that the slaves were dancing in the streets. Hearing apocalyptic news is more about one’s position in the world and how the reversal that’s coming will affect their place in the old systems.

There was a fierce gleam in Jesus’ eye as he said these words. Most of us have had experiences with churches that had the message of judgment down pat. We know what it means for the judgment of God to be preached. But like everything in life, we need balance … a little of this and a little of that. God’s grace and God’s judgment are both forms of faith we should hold in tension ever so carefully.

Will Willimon told of when he pastored a large church in the South and the church focused its pastoral attention on the family that lived next door to the church. The yard of that home was always a mess and the children were poorly cared for. Rumors in the neighborhood were that the husband was drunk on most weekends, abused his wife and cursed his children. The church decided to help him so Willimon visited the family next door. The youth group invited the kids to go with them on their retreat to the mountains. The women’s group asked the mother to join them at their annual Day of Prayer. The man and his family came for a few Sundays, and then quit coming altogether. That was the last anyone heard of them until nearly a year later when the pastor met the man on the street. At first he didn’t recognize him because he looked different. “Joe, is that you?” the pastor asked him. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said with a big grin. “At least it’s mostly me. I’ve changed.” His change was obvious because his whole appearance had changed – he looked great! Come to think of it, his yard looked better than anyone recalled it ever looking. What had happened, the pastor wondered?

The man told Willimon how a few months ago, a group had come by to prayer with him after they heard he had been on a drinking binge. They were a church group, but not from Willimon’s nice, middle-class Methodist church. They were from a fundamentalist church, the one across town, the one in the pre-fab metal building … the premillenial, fire-baptized, Bible believing, washed in the blood Baptist church. They told him if he didn’t stop drinking and beating his wife he was going to die and burn forever in Hell. They told him God was going to get him and that God was mad.

That got his attention … got him to church where they prayed for him by name when he showed up in worship and asked God to let him live just a little longer ‘till they could get him saved. He got saved, turned inside out, upside down, … redeemed.

Willimon said something about how he was sorry his church had been unable to meet the needs of his family, but he was glad their church had. “Preacher,” the man said, “don’t feel bad. Your church gave me aspirin and I needed massive chemotherapy.”

We need to hear the sweet gentle message of the coming of a savior into the world. But we also need to hear the message to live expectantly as if Christ’s coming means something right here and now where we live faithfully on his behalf.

So the schoolteacher says to her class, “Now class, I am going down the hall to the principle’s office for a few minutes. I certainly hope I can trust you to act like responsible fifth graders. But just in case, I’m leaving the door open. I’ve asked the teacher across the hall to listen for trouble. I hope you will show me how responsible you are. I’m leaving now. I had better not hear a word out of you. You have work to do while I’m gone …” And with that she softly leaves the room. The anticipation of her return lingers in the quiet classroom. In our hearts, we long for Jesus’ presence, for we are at our best when the Master is with us. The trick to all this is to hold in our mind’s eye a vision that’s on its way … but not yet here.