sermon - Lent (community)

Mark 2

“Being Community”

            As we continue our journey through Lent, we have explored a handful of spiritual practices.  On Ash Wednesday, I shared that the word Lent has roots in the word of lengthening.  The days are lengthening as we move towards Spring.  In our reformed tradition, we can view Lent as a Spiritual Spring, a time of preparation as we move towards Easter, towards the Resurrection, a time for us to till the soil of our souls and water the seeds of faith as we seek to bare fruit for our loving God.  Today’s spiritual practice, in honor of the sacrament of Baptism is:  Being Community. 

            For so many of you, being community here in this place is second nature.  Many of you have grown up in the church or even grown up in this particular church.  Eleanor Rose is a fourth generation present here within this place.  Not only is she a part of this community, she is very literally a part of this community’s family.  Many churches describe themselves as family.  That is how I have always described the church from my own experience in my childhood.  My family moved a lot when I was growing up and one of the first things we always did was find a new church family as soon as we were settled.  Our own extended family was far away, but we were able to create relationships within our church family for support, nurture, and growth. 

            Being Community, being a family of faith, something that might seem as natural as breathing, is a spiritual practice because we need to be aware of it.  For those of us that are comfortable within our community, we need to be aware of each other.  Not everyone has grown up in this church and even more so, many people are not growing up in the church at all.  So, what does that mean for us?  It means we need to be open and receptive to visitors, to new members, and to ourselves. 

            God created us people to be in community.  Whether it is community with our families, community within our children’s schools or sports, community with our hobbies and activities, whatever it is that we do, people tend to gravitate to each other and form community.  Once it was our neighborhoods, I still remember a new family moving to town back when I was in high school.  We met the new kid at a school activity and the next day, my best friend and I decided to bake brownies and take them over to his house and welcome him to town.  When we arrived at the house, the mom woke her son up, not the brother we had met the night before.  We were so confused.  It turns out they had two sons, the football player, popular son and the quiet brother.  The mom just assumed we were there to flirt with her son the football player.  Now, so many of us don’t even know our neighbors, let alone welcome to town with a cake, brownies, cookies, or homemade bread.   

            The Spiritual practice of being community.  I could have gone with the scripture passage:  Love your neighbor as yourself.  And then the whole conversation of who is my neighbor?   Instead, I chose the passage of the four friends that go to the extreme to get their paralyzed friend to Jesus.  We are told that the crowds are so large that these friends cannot get close enough to Jesus.  Their mission, their desire, their purpose is to bring their friend to Jesus so he can be healed.  This passage shows extreme love, commitment to the other, and self-sacrifice in order to bring wholeness to someone other than one’s self.  In our world today, we spend a lot of time focused on ourselves, we are living in a very independent, individualistic society.  Some of my own biggest struggles are because I was taught to be a self sustaining, strong, independent person.  Which is good, but sometimes it is my own worst enemy.  We have to be self aware enough of knowing when being independent is good and when being a part of community and engaging the needs of the whole is appropriate. 

            We can look at this passage in several different ways.  Place yourself into the story – are you one of the four friends?  If so, who are you concerned about?  Who are or what are you carrying?  And who is working with you?  Are you trying to carry something alone or are you working in community to bear the burden, to share in the process, and to be community as you seek to encounter God in your life?  Or are you the one that is paralyzed?  Are you the one on the mat, needing the support of the community to carry you for awhile.  And what are those things that paralyze us?  There can be many things in our life that hold us back: guilt, fear, anxiety, stress, the unknown.  And so often, we hold it inside, trying to be strong, instead of being present to our community that is called to carry us through these times.  And again, that is why it is a spiritual practice, because there may be times that we, as the community have no idea how to be present, how to carry the other.  And sometimes, all we can do is just be present.  We cannot always be the ones to fix it.  These friends could not fix their friend, they could not heal him, they could not make him whole.  And so, together, they bring him through the roof into Jesus’ presence.    This is a community of extreme measures. 

            Barbara Brown Taylor says this in her book: an Alter in the World – sometimes “the hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self-to encounter another human being not as someone you can us, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.” 

            Where ever we are in the story, if you are able to find yourself within it, together we are called to encounter God.  Each person in that scripture is hungry for something, whether it is curiosity, the desire to be healed, a spiritual hunger, or being present for a friend.  They all have the potential of being in God’s presence and to be community for each other.  Jesus does not send any of them away, and as chaotic as the scenario seems to be, imagine someone being lowered through the roof, he engages the moment, brings healing and wholeness to paralyzed friend, and whether those four friends were looking for a spiritual moment in their own lives, I am sure just being present to this divine encounter, changed and altered their own lives as well.  The spiritual practice of community, of giving of one’s self for another, can bring us closer to God. 

            Taylor shares:  “If you have ever spent a Saturday volunteering at the Special Olympics, taking Meals on Wheels to the elderly, or picking up trash with the Riverkeepers, then you know that you can arrive back home dirty and tired but also oddly refreshed, with more lift in your heart than you could have gotten from a day at the beach.”  I think this is what happened to those four friends, they perhaps had just as much a healing moment as their dear friend.  The spiritual practice of community can bring new life, new life to all who are engaged as a family, as a community, as people who love their neighbor as themselves.  Isn’t that the calling of baptism?  Celebrating the new life we are given in Jesus Christ as we are nurtured in the faith and come together to live out that faith together in God’s holy community.  Amen.  

sermon - Lent

Jeremiah 31:31

John 12

“Incarnation – Being in the Body”

           

I can still remember, sitting in the field house back in High School, getting ready for track practice when one of my friends said to me:  Carie, you do know that Jesus was a real person, don’t you?  Hmmm, well, no – I guess I didn’t.  I heard the Bible as stories, just like many other stories I read.  I didn’t read or hear it as a history book.  It was a story about God, a story for us to live by, but a story.   My friend then said:  Jesus lived, just like other people in history.  These stories are about a real person.  Her statements to me caused an awakening in my faith journey.  What did it mean to me to know that Jesus truly walked this earth, that he was in a body just like mine, that he had real parents and real friends?

Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book:  An Alter in the World calls this:  The Practice of Wearing Skin.  She reminds her readers that our bodies are the address for where our soul lives.  As we walk around this earth in which we live, we are very connected to our bodies, but our souls are present with us as well.  As we build community, we should be building community not as bodies, not as people who look the same, or dress the same, or enjoy the same activities, but as souls.  As people that acknowledge the sacred in each other.  Jesus crosses all boundaries, Jew, Samaritan, Greek, Gentile, male, female, young and old.  He does not cringe away from those with leprosy or other diseases.  He sees the soul as he heals the body.

Incarnational ministry is understanding our faith that as something we just read about, but about real life connections.  About knowing God desires a direct connection to us as God’s people.  That God knows us so well, our fears, our pains, our joys and celebrations.  God gets it, God gets us.  And just as God was present directly with God’s people, we too are called to be in sacred and holy relationships with each other.   Not just friends, but holy and sacred relationships with each other. 

            As we journey further into the season of Lent, we draw closer to Holy Week, to the time of Jesus’ betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion.  Today’s reading, is a simple way in which Jesus teaches his followers about what is to happen.  Jesus walks the earth in a day and age where people are interconnected to the earth.   They are farmers, they are herders, they are fishermen, they know about times of scarcity and times of abundance.  And so he uses very simple language and a metaphor that the people around him would have no problem understanding. 

            In order to grow the next crop of wheat, seeds must be kept aside to plant.  For those of us that have oak trees in our yards, we know that one oak tree yields thousands of acorns.  Although the squirrels in our neighborhood do a good job gathering them up, each year we have dozens of little seedlings that begin to sprout in the yard around the trees. 

            One seed can give yield to an abundant crop, if it does what it was created to do, fall into the ground and be transformed into something completely new and different from itself.  This is usually a basic science lesson in elementary school.  Kids are given a seed, usually a bean, and place it in a zip lock bag with a wet paper towel.  Over the week they watch the seed change, sprouting roots, then a stem and leaves, bursting what once was a bean into a new plant.  I love doing this with the acorns in my yard too, pulling them up and showing the children how this seed is changing and somehow within itself knows how to create roots, a stem and leaves.  I find it yet another expression of God’s creative powers in this world.  Something as small as an acorn becoming a mighty oak tree.  Something as small as a grain of wheat becoming a stalk yielding an abundance in the stalk that it grows. 

            The obvious lesson in this is that Jesus is sharing that he is the grain of wheat.  In order for his work, here on earth to be fruitful, to lead to abundance, he must first give of himself completely and die.  He is sharing that death does not have the last word, but in death new life is born.  Life that is greater than the seed, more abundant then the small part that is lost. 

            For those of us here on the other side of the story, we can see the abundance.  We can see how in the death of Jesus, in his letting go of his life, he was reborn into a movement of people living God’s teachings in a meaningful and transformational way.  People embraced each other, shared their property, took care of those that could not care for themselves.  They honored people in a sacred and holy way and more and more people became a part of this faith movement that eventually became Christianity.  We see the abundance in churches scattered all around our towns and throughout the world.  We see the abundance in various ministries that have formed throughout the world brining fresh drinking water, education, medical care, to those that live without. 

            Every once in awhile, I play this mental game with myself and I ask: what would this neighborhood, or this town, or this state look like if the church did not exist?  Would there be soup kitchens?  Would there be Habitat for Humanity?  Would there be homeless shelters?  In the life of one person, new life has continued to be born for hundreds of generations. 

The spiritual practice of being in the body, the Incarnation involves transformation.  It involves letting go of one’s self in order for a future of abundance.  This does not mean neglect of self, but letting go of our selfishness.  It might mean asking the question:  There is abundance within each and everyone of us.  There is abundance within this congregation.  What do we have to die of in order for new life to be born?  Questions that you all already asked through New Beginnings:  Who is God calling us to?  What is God’s purpose for us here in this place?  How do we get from here to there?  We embrace the spiritual practice of the Incarnation, of being in the body and we practice authentic community. 

            I was at an installation service this past Sunday, and the elder giving the sermon shared this:  God’s story has been shared generation after generation and it is now in our hands.  It is our turn to share the story to pass it along to the next generation.  What does this mean for us? 

            Lent is the perfect time to ask ourselves about the Spiritual Practice of being in the body.  We name Jesus as the incarnation of God, that is: God being in our human body, God in the flesh, Emmanuel – God with us.  Jesus was in the body. 

            In closing: Taylor shares this:  “The daily practice of incarnation – of being in the body with full confidence that God speaks the language of flesh – is to discover a pedagogy that is as old as the gospels.  Why else did Jesus spend his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash fee and share supper?  With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal, he did not give them something to think about together when he was gone.  Instead, he gave them concrete things to do – specific ways of being together in their bodies – that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself.  We are now God’s flesh on this earth.