Sermon: Gathered to be Sent

Isaiah 40

Mark 1

“Gathered to be Sent”

            Our lives are filled with various rhythms.  The sun rises and sets and the majority of us follow the rhythm with being awake and going to sleep.  Depending on where we are in our lives, we have the rhythm of school or work and hopefully days of rest within our weeks.  We have the rhythm of the seasons, knowing that spring does follow winter gives a lot of us hope that this cold days will, hopefully, soon be over.  Our rhythm of life is enhanced by various holidays that are scattered throughout the year. 

As a people of faith, we also have rhythms that guide us through our weeks and years.  We gather on Sundays to center ourselves in God’s presence, for some it is a time of recharging our batteries in order to move through the week ahead.  For some it is a time of prayer, sharing of concerns and joys, and sacred rest.  Together, it is a part of our rhythm, our time to gather and worship.  We also have the seasons of the church year that break us out of the ordinary, such as Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Advent, and Christmas. 

Today’s Gospel reading is one of rhythms.  Jesus and the disciples have gathered in the Synagogue for a time of worship, teaching, and learning.  As the time of worship concludes, Jesus is called to come immediately to the home of Peter’s mother-in-law.  As Jesus enters the home, he finds that she is ill with a fever and immediately, heals her.  As the day progresses, we are told at night, people come from the entire city to be healed.  One commentator shared that the reason it is at dark is that this is when the Sabbath has ended.  Once people are released from the Sabbath regulations they are able to come and be healed.  Jesus sets the course for one set of life pattern while the majority of the city still follows the rhythms of their tradition.  Sometimes, the patterns of our lives are so ingrained within us, we don’t even realize that they may be keeping us from wholeness.   

As the scripture continues, we learn that early in the morning, Jesus separates himself from everyone else, he goes alone to a deserted place to pray.  As his disciples realize he is missing, they set off to look for him and once he is found, they want him to come back and heal more people, but Jesus responds that it is time to move on to the next town.  It is time to share God’s presence with others, to move on to a new place.  This pattern of faith living is a little more challenging for us.  For many, we set aside time on Sunday to gather as a faith community to worship, but that day has ended and Jesus still sets aside time in his life for prayer, for entering into God’s sacred presence.  Finding that time in our busy lives is so challenging.  In order to make this time part of our daily rhythm, people use various devotions books or in today’s world of technology, you can even have a daily prayer, or Bible verse, or devotion emailed to you.  Over the next few weeks, I would like to see if there is enough interest to start a weekly Bible Study or monthly study group.  Beginning practices of gathering throughout the week then moves us into the next pattern of being sent to serve God. 

In just my two weeks with you all, I have already heard some really “God Moment” stories of how people have been called to serve God both within your local faith community and out in the world around us. 

            In Jesus’ daily living, he is establishing a model for how people of faith are called to live.  We gather to worship and then we go out to be present with each other.  They start with someone familiar, this is Peter’s mother-in-law, and then they are present for the community in which Peter’s wife’s family lives.  Perhaps this is also Peter’s community as well, but there is still a sense of being in a familiar community.  Then Jesus spends time alone with God in prayer and then pushes his disciples to move into the less familiar.  I think this is where most of us get a little uncomfortable.  When I was an interim pastor in CT, the choir once a year would go to the woman’s prison in Danbury and lead worship.  Little did I know, the pastor was also suppose to preach.  What?  Me?  You want me to go into a prison and preach?  I was shaking in my boots.  No way!  But I couldn’t tell my choir that.  I’m not sure how many times they told me that I had to have my driver’s license as a form of ID to enter the prison.  Well, that was fine, because I always had my driver’s license with me.  But when we arrived that day, I could not find my driver’s license.  Did I subconsciously remove it?  However my license disappeared, they still let me in.  We had done a security screening ahead of time, and I think that must have been when I did not put my license back in my wallet. 

            Long story short:  I actually enjoyed being a part of the worship service at the prison.  All of this fear, all of this, not me God, turned into a really amazing experience.  In fact, we went back.  Not as a choir to lead worship, but one of my deacons put together a four week self esteem program for the women.  So, we not only were present in worship, we began the formation of relationships, of hearing their stories, of being present with them in their pain, loss, failures, and hopes for a fresh start once they were released.  God calls us to the familiar but we are also called out of our comfort zones to enter into communities that might make us extremely uncomfortable. 

            We gather in worship to be sent into the world.  We gather to be sent to the familiar as well as the unfamiliar, but we gather to be sent.  This is something that I know you all have been discerning over the past few years.  Where is God calling you to serve?  Are there rhythms of life holding you back?  Are there patterns of tradition that might be holding you back such as the people that came to be healed only after the Sabbath ended? 

            I wanted to spend a little more time with Peter’s mother-in-law, but sometimes sermon writing takes you in a completely different direction than planned.  As Jesus enters the house of this woman, she is healed, and immediately she serves them.  For some, this can be a challenging text as women struggle with traditional and untraditional roles.  But, we have to put ourselves back two thousand years and understand that Jesus healed a woman.  Jesus knew she had value and worth and is ever bit a child of God as his male disciples. 

            As she is healed, she serves.  We don’t know how any of the other people that are healed later that night respond.  But we know she serves.  She encounters the sacred in her life and she is restored to her fullness, she is restored to use her God given gifts, her purpose in life, she responds not by taking the rest of the day off, but by serving.  As we seek to find wholeness in our lives, as we encounter God moments and the sacred presence, we too may find ourselves in those moments where we know we are called to serve.  Not out of obligation, not because no one else will do it, but because we are restored to a fullness that calls us into serving. 

            As a congregation seeking to be present with God here within this place and out in the world around us, let us find the rhythms of our faith living that energize us, that heal us, that give us meaning and purpose, that open our souls to our God given gifts and then, let us serve.  Amen.      

Junk Food - Sacred Food

Deuteronomy

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

“Junk Food – Sacred Food”

            As we enter in this sacred journey together, I am glad that on this first Sunday, we have a mission component to our worship service.  I personally think that the Souper Bowl of Caring is genius and completely God inspired.  To think, this started as a small movement, a youth pastor in a church looking at culture, looking at the world all around us, and asking the question, how can we be a faithful people of God in and amongst this world in which we live?  Before becoming overwhelmed with all the issues of the world, God whispered and directed, Pastor Brad Smith, specifically towards Superbowl Sunday. 

As a child, I loved watching football with my dad, but over the years, I have drifted away and really only focus any attention to the game on Superbowl Sunday.    I have many fond memories of Superbowls past from those days watching the big game with my dad, to youth group gatherings where we would play games as we watched the game together, or as an adult, gathering with friends.  Over the years, things changed, and more and more attention was moved away from the game to the commercials.  And then, one year, I remember on the news that a 30 second commercial was running for a million dollars.

 I think at that point in my life it all clicked and connected and the inner faithful part of me questioned this use of money.  What!  That’s a lot of money to run a commercial for Doritos, M&Ms, and Coke.  I might have thought about how this just did not make sense, but I did not know how to respond.  I have absolutely no control over how businesses operate and they have every right to spend their money how they want to. 

            And perhaps that’s why I think the Souper Bowl of Caring is so God inspired.  For this one youth pastor, he sought a way, not to stop the commercials, but to respond to this inner calling that so many of us feel.  That’s a lot of money to spend on commercials that are selling food that – well, is junk.  Yes, very tasty, but junk.  And so, instead of condemning the culture, he found a way to walk along side and helped people connect a day of football which incorporates lots and lots of food, to the reality that a lot of people right here in our own communities are going hungry.  Would people prayerfully consider bringing in a can of soup for the local soup kitchen, or contribute a dollar towards the local feeding programs.  He invited people to faithfully think about the way in which we celebrate this day, with parties, and food, and junk food, and commercials that cost way too much money.  This year they are 4.5 million.  He asked us to prayerfully consider taking a step away from our own celebrations and make a contribution towards feeding others. 

            What started twenty-five years ago as a local movement is now a national day of giving raising over 8.5 million dollars last year.  Their vision statement is the following:  To transform the time around the Super Bowl into the nation's largest celebration of giving and serving.  One person’s spiritual creativity has been a gift to so many people over the past twenty-five years. 

            Food, we Presbyterians love to eat.  And we are also very good at feeding others.  But can you imagine, if in our faith, we were restricted as to what we could or could not eat?  Various faith practices have food restrictions, whether it is pork, beef, alcohol, or caffeine and that is just to name a few.  Our first reading today from Deuteronomy is an example of food restrictions.  At one point in time, people of God were not to eat any of these unclean foods.  In my own life, I’ve always just eaten the foods that I like.  I’ve never really examined food in my life to what God would or would not like me to eat.  My church, my faith tradition, has not given me restrictions on what I can and cannot eat.  My mom, at least, did her best to teach me to eat healthy, and to not have my dessert before dinner.  But that’s about the extent of it.  

So, can we even relate to this issue that Paul is addressing?  We purchase or food at the grocery store and I, for one, have never worried about it being dedicated to an idol.  We could look at it from the angel of how sports have become our modern day idols and all the junk food we eat while watching these games is part of the sacrificial worship we do while watching our games.  But, I’m not going to go there.

Instead, I think the real issue in this text is that food is not just food but can be a symbolic representation of our spiritual selves.  We are what we eat,  I learned that when I was rather young.  But does food impact our soul as well?  Paul is saying here that it can, depending on how strong our faith is.  In the case of food being sacrificed to idols, the food is then eaten, either in the temple or sold in the markets.  The food is just food but it carries with it a symbolic meaning of is intended purpose. 

I have various friends that are very specific about what they will and will not eat.  For them, food is not just food, food is a part of their life practice, part of their philosophy, part of their faith practice.  More and more people are buying organic fruits and vegetables or free range meets.  I attended a Vegan wedding a few years ago, several of my friends are becoming vegetarians and more and more people are on gluten free diets.  Various movements are being practiced by people, such as buying only local food, which means not purchasing food that has to travel more than 100 miles to get to your store.  Farmers Markets are a huge draw in the summer months as people seek to purchase the freshest produce. 

What does food mean to us?  Throughout the Biblical story, food has often had greater meaning then just what we need to eat.  Jesus gathered with people over a meal.  Food represents hospitality.  Food is essential to our celebrations: Thanksgiving, birthdays, Christmas and Easter.  What symbolic meaning does food have for us as spiritual people?  I know for myself, I have been living on a processed food diet for most of my life.  I am seeking to grow in my own spiritual practice of sacred eating.  Of being more intentional about what I eat and how I feed not just my body but my soul. 

            It is no accident that God uses food to meet us in this sacrament that we call Communion.  God told the people when they fled from Egypt to remember the Passover and to celebrate and to remember once they were not a people and now they are a people, once they were slaves in Egypt and now they are free.  As a spiritual people, God continues to use food not just as food but as a symbol of who we are.  We can argue whether this bread and this cup are just bread and cup or the real presence or symbolic presence of Jesus.  But more than that, we come to this table to remember that we do not journey in this world like locusts tearing through a cornfield, but that we are created to be a community, a community that has a God given purpose to be set apart for sacred living.  Sacred living where we walk alongside our culture and listen to those places where our souls sit uneasy.  Are there places, such as the high cost of commercials for food, that make your soul uneasy?  Take, eat, and remember, that God is calling us to listen and respond. 

            Ann Weems writes this:  Ordinary bread made by ordinary people is holy when we take and eat and remember.  Ordinary grapes taken by ordinary people made into ordinary wine is holy when we hold it to our lips and rink and remember.  This bread…remember his body was given for us.  This wine…remember his blood was poured out for us.  Bread and wine, from ordinary to holy, Remember. 

            Food is just food, but as spiritual people, our creating God recreates food as we gather in this sacred time and are blessed by this covenant of Grace, Forgiveness, Renewal, and Love.  Amen. 

Sermon - In the Spotlight

Epiphany

Jeremiah 31:7-14

John 1

 

 

“To be in the Spotlight”

 

 

            I was first introduced to the magic of Broadway as a child when my family moved up to CT from TX.  I am pretty sure my first show was Annie, and I feel like I have been hooked ever since.  The costumes, the sets, the music, the dancing, the lights, it is all so captivating, so enchanting, so, did I already say, so magical?.  Although I have not yet taken my own children to a Broadway show, I am introducing them to the theater through the children’s shows in Morristown.  As it is time for the show to begin, the lights dim, the room silences, the curtains draw, and a spotlight will often pinpoint one particular character as the show begins. 

            The spotlight is a powerful thing.  It shines itself upon the center of the show, highlighting what is essential, the significant character, the one that your attention is supposed to be drawn towards.  Have you ever been driving at night and suddenly noticed a spotlight shining up in the sky?  Businesses will use this tactic for a grand opening or some sort of big event.  For miles around, the light can be seen shining up into the sky, making people wonder, what am I missing?  What is happening?  What event is this?  And perhaps a very curious few will make it their mission to go on an adventure to find out where the light is shining.   

            To be in the spotlight means the attention is upon you.  During my studies, this is one of the key things I have remembered about the Gospel of John: read the Gospel of John as if it is a theatrical show.  Pay attention to where the light is shining.  The Gospel writer uses light as if it were a spotlight, placing the key character in its embrace.  Just as a show begins, the lights dim and it is dark and then, the spotlight breaks through the darkness, capturing the main character of the show, bringing the entire audiences eyes to one place and one person.  Darkness and Light.  Anytime you read a passage from the Gospel of John, pay attention to these two things, darkness and light. 

            In these opening verses of John, the writer proclaims:  the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.  Words of hope, right from the start.  And yet, the Gospel writer holds off on revealing this main character’s name.  A second person, John the Baptist, is named first.  We get hints, we get clues, we get this rich creation story of God bringing forth life through the Word.    The Gospel writer is playful, he is drawing the reader in, he is creating tension because the world has such a hard time seeing, even when the light is shining directly on the key player of the story.  And yet, the world did not know him. 

            I can just visualize the opening of this Broadway show.  Complete darkness, and then, a piercing light, shining, but shining upon nothing.  And then another light softly exposing John the Baptist, over on stage left who is pointing to the light.  Pointing to the light, and perhaps shadows of other people, such as Moses, flicker through the spotlight, and then, then, with our modern technology, words splash around the darkness such as: love, joy, peace, grace, and merge together in the spotlight reveling the manger scene, as the Word becomes flesh.  Eighteen verses later, the light that has been shining can now reveal the Son of God born into this world as Jesus Christ.  But even through the entire Gospel story, with all the emphasis on Jesus by placing him in the spotlight, there will still be those who do not know him.  There will still be those that choose the darkness instead of the light.  There will still be those that cannot embrace the love, joy, peace, and grace of God. 

And so we continue to tell the story.  And God continues to shine the spotlight through the darkness because the darkness cannot overcome it.  We have just journeyed through the Advent and Christmas Season where we have symbolically remembered the light as the four Advent candles were lit representing more and more light shining into God’s world.  And life outside of the church walls glisten as people adorn their homes with light after light after light.  Today is what we call Epiphany Sunday, and is often connected to the Three Kings that followed the light of the new star in the sky.  Epiphany: when God’s love extends out into the greater world and strangers, foreigners, Gentiles, and outsiders are invited in and join the story.  Epiphany: taking the joy of the Christmas season and extending it into our daily living, focusing the spotlight of our beings to shine God’s love and goodness into this world in which we live.  Epiphany: when the light bulb comes on and we say to ourselves – I get it. 

            God’s spotlight is a powerful thing.  It draws foreign Magi to search for this new born king.  It causes King Herod to tremble in fear.  It stops shepherds in their tracks.  It calls people to foreign lands to use their resources and skills to open schools and medical facilities, to teach and heal the sick.  God’s spotlight calls people in Morris County to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and share the Christmas Spirit through the giving of gifts to children that are living on the fringes.  God’s spotlight calls us to pray for each other, to cry together, to laugh together,  to gather together as faith communities, to be a people of God that embraces God’s love through Jesus Christ and shares that love with the greater world. 

 

Where do you see God’s spotlight in your life?  What is God calling you to?  Just as the Magi saw this star in the sky, and they embarked on a journey to find the new born king, we too are on a journey.  As a congregation, you have discerned that you are ready to engage where God is calling you in the greater community, whether it be through Habitat for Humanity or Succa Sunny days or other town events.  Some of you may have amazing stories of where your journey has taken you and how the source of God’s light has given your life deep meaning and purpose.  Some of you may just be embarking on this journey.  But together, we are here in this place, to learn from each other, to grow together, to share, and to embrace the love, joy, peace, and grace that God has granted us through the Christmas Story of the birth of Christ.   

God’s spotlight is always there, always pointing on Emmanuel, the Messiah, God with us, whether we can see it or not.  Whether we just see the words bouncing around the stage, or John the Baptist on stage left proclaiming the good news, or whether we are catching the shadows of others that are called into God’s service or if we can clearly see Jesus Christ at center stage.  In and through each and everyone of us, God’s light grows stronger and stronger and fills the stage of life, pushing the darkness further and further away. 

            Epiphany:  the church of God gathering together, inviting all to be a part of the journey, and then going out into the world, shining God’s light, even in the darkest of places.  Amen. 

1 Peter chapter 2 - sermon series

1 Peter 2

“Building a Spiritual House”

            Last week, we entered into the first letter of Peter.  He is writing to people that have found themselves living in exile.  A people that desire a different way of life for themselves, a people longing to return to Israel.  Instead of raising their hopes that they will have a future promise of returning home, the writer of this letter instead encourages them to embrace their current reality.  Embrace living where they are, embrace the purpose God has for their present, instead of a focus on what God might be doing for their future.  Last week the focus was on how to be a Holy people, even in exile. 

            Today, the writer of this letter continues to help guide this group of people into defining what it means for them to be community with each other.  This part of the letter calls this gathering of people to think about their behavior, to think about their actions, to think about how they are treating each other.  They are told to rid themselves of:  all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.  Before they can move forward as God’s people, before they can move forward to living out the purpose God is calling them into, they need to create peace within themselves.  They cannot just be a group of people gathering together, they must be a group of people gathering together for a Holy purpose. 

            This whole first section of 1 Peter, is directly connected to the Hebrew scriptures.  The writer is reaching back into their faith story and drawing on the scriptures as they are creating a new community in their present situation.  Taste that the Lord is good, is from the Psalms. 

            They are to prayerfully examine what in their lives connects them to God.  How do they taste God?  Is it through study?  Is it through prayer?  Is it through the kindness of another?  Something has impacted their life in such a way that they are being drawn to this new fledgling faith community.  Somehow they have been introduced to God’s work through Jesus, and they believe that in and through his life and teachings that he is indeed the Messiah.  In their current setting, this was not an easy decision to come to.  They are breaking from the cultural setting they are living within, they may even be breaking from their family heritage, alienating themselves from the family community with which they live. 

            And this is partly why, 1 Peter is guiding them on how to be community.  For some, the faith community might be the only community they now have.  Embracing the faith of the early Christian church was not the standard way of life.  The writer emphasizes this within the letter, “Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight…”  We usually understand this Hebrew scripture of the corner stone being rejected as a direct reference to Jesus being rejected by the religious authorities of his time.  But here, it is being used for all those that are a part of this community of faith.  Just as Jesus is the living stone, rejected by mortals, so are they.  They are living stones, yes, rejected, but living stones in God’s sight to be used by God for God’s holy purpose. 

            Rejection is one of the hardest emotional stresses people wrestle with.  Most people do not desire to be rejected.  Most people want to be liked.  They want to be a part of their community.  And yet, we know, there are people we like and people we just don’t seem to connect with.  Within the faith community, there is no room for this.  God calls us together, God has given each purpose within the community a purpose.  The outside world, the cultural around the church might be full of rejection, but within the faith community, God desires acceptance.  God desires each member of the community to be a living stone, to be built up into a spiritual house for the Lord.  The writer of 1^st Peter is calling them to understand that together they serve a purpose.  And together, they are the spiritual house for God. 

            Their time period was rather different than ours.  They did not have this independent individualistic society that we have today.  Community was absolutely the core of their everyday lives.  In our world today, we value independence.  We value being able to stand on our own; to support ourselves, to not have to depend on anyone but our self.  For many, we no longer live within our family communities.  We are transient, we are able to move from place to place and more often, it is our job that dictates where we live. 

            For many of us, we do not grow up going to school with our cousins, or spending weekends with the extended family.  Rather, we recreate family, we give close friends the title of aunt and uncle and develop new networks of familial community with those that live close by.  Even in our individualist culture, we still crave, desire, gravitate towards community. 

            This is one of the critical questions the church of the 21^st century must ask of itself as it seeks to remain relevant to people in today’s world.  What kind of community are we?  How are we tasting that God is good?  How can we share that spiritual milk with others?  How are we God’s living stones being built into a spiritual house for God?  How are we facing rejection and embracing love? 

            God has not called us together as a family of faith just to recharge our own batteries.  God has not called us together as a family of faith, for our own individual needs, but God calls us together to be a community.  A community with a purpose –   But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people,^[c] in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.  This text is part of our baptism liturgy.  It is essential that we embrace the understanding that together, our purpose and our very being is to proclaim that we believe God’s light of love is at the core of our own lives. 

            Being God’s living stones gathered together to build a spiritual house for the Lord changes from generation to generation and looks different depending on the cultural context.  We are living in a day and age where people proclaim they are spiritual but not religious.  We are living in a day and age where people no longer desire to be a part of a faith community because they are finding community in other places.  In a very real sense, the greater church is finding itself back in the day and age of 1^st Peter, living in a world that doesn’t really value us.  But we know those small gatherings of people kept the faith and found a way to make it relevant to the world around them and the church grew.  In the ebb and flow of life, in the changes of the seasons, God will continue to work through the church and through communities of people that gather, and God’s story will continue to transform people’s lives as we taste and know that the Lord is Good.  Amen.  

sermon: The Wedding is Ready

Matthew 22

“The Wedding is Ready”

            In today’s parable, Jesus uses the imagery of a wedding banquet to illustrate what the Kingdom of Heaven is like.  Throughout the scriptures, the prophets also used the imagery of marriage to speak of God and God’s people. At times, God is the groom and Israel is his wife.  At times, Israel is the groom and they have married away from God, as God calls them back from their idolatry. 

            So, as Jesus begins this parable, those that are familiar with the Hebrew scriptures are hearing an echo of their heritage.  They are hearing yet again, the voice of the prophet that asks: are you my bride?  Are you truly my people?  Except the imagery has changed, no longer is relationship that of groom and bride but now the people that Jesus speaks of are guests.  This too should catch the listeners attention.  If Jesus spoke of a parable about a wedding banquet where all was ready but the bride did not come, the Hebrew people would sit up and take notice.  They have always been the bride so who are these guests?  And why don’t they want to come to the wedding banquet?

            Most of us enjoy parties, especially weddings.  When it comes to a family member or a really good friend, to turn down a wedding invitation is usually not an option.  Seven years later, I am still disappointed that I was not able to attend a really good friend’s wedding, but I was pregnant with Andi and very sick.  I couldn’t muster up the energy to drive eight hours so I had to tell her, we just couldn’t make it.  And, for my own wedding, there were a few really good friends that could not come and I remember feeling rather disappointed that they were not able to be there.  When it comes to family and good friends, attending the wedding can be a reflection of the relationship.  Yes, you are truly a good friend, I will make sure I do everything I can to make sure I am there for you on this special day. 

            But then there are those invitations from friends, but not close friends.  And sometimes those are easier decisions to make.  Well, yes, we went to high school together but we haven’t really stayed involved for the past ten years and it is going to be expensive to get a hotel and travel expenses so I think that perhaps this is one wedding that I can easily say thank you for the invite but I am not able to attend.  And then, there is the rarer invite from someone that you are extremely surprised to get an invitation from.  Why in the world would this person invite me to their wedding?  

            So, what is going on in this parable?  The King, sends out an invite to a wedding banquet and no one shows up.  This is the King, does he not have any friends?  Does his son not have any friends?  Are there no relatives that want to be a part of this celebration?  There are very few royal weddings in our world today, but when there is one, people want to be invited.  Even if they don’t know the couple, they want to be a part of this special day.  In fact, they line up along the streets to just catch a glimpse of the couple, they get themselves as close to there as possible without actually being there.  And it becomes part of their story.  They go back and tell their friends, hey, I saw the royal couple, I saw them enter the church, I saw them leave the church, I saw them in their royal carriage, the bride, she waved at me.  But none of this is happening in today’s parable. 

            Why does the king and his son have no friends?  Why does no one want to come?  So he sends out his servants to bring the people to the wedding banquet.  And, just like last week’s parable, there are not good results.  Why won’t the guests come?  What is so hard about attending a party?  Being a guest involves very little obligation, doesn’t it?  Or does it?  What would coming to the banquet obligate these people to?  In a literal sense, it would involve a loss of a day’s work, it might involve purchasing a gift, it might involve having to buy the right clothes.  In a literal sense, there might be some financial obligations that the people just cannot meet. 

            In a spiritual sense, since this is a parable about the Kingdom of Heaven, what are the obligations for the guests?  They are not being asked to be the bride, but just come and attend and be a part of the celebration.  Why won’t they come?  Perhaps because this is something new and different.   The people are comfortable in the way they are living their lives and they are not seeking anything new and different in their faith, in their understanding of God.  By coming to the wedding banquet there is a sign of respect for the family members that are getting married.  Spiritually, there must be a response of respect for God and for Jesus.  Spiritually, there has to be a connection to this king, to God, to what he is doing in the world by presenting his son to the world.  If there is no connection, there is no need to attend.  If there is no relationship building there is no reason to attend.  If there is no respect, there is no reason to attend.  So, is the Kingdom of Heaven about the king or about the guests?  Who is at fault?  If the king was connected to the people wouldn’t they have come?  Or are the people just too busy to pay attention to the king? 

            So, the parable continues.  The first round of guests don’t come, so anyone and everyone on the streets are gathered in and brought to the feast.  And they come.  The wedding is ready.  Although this parable has some really rough edges, the spiritual message behind it is that God’s grace is extended to all.  Everyone is invited to the wedding, but, just like the people on the streets, perhaps not everyone knows they are welcomed.  God does not act alone, this parable illustrates that there are servants, there are loyal people connected to the king that go out into the streets. 

            This parable is a spiritual message of both/and.  I asked earlier, who are the guests?  But I didn’t ask, who are the servants?  The wedding feast is ready.  What does that mean for us?  Who are we in the parable?  Are we the first round of guests, are we the second round of guests, or are we the servants?  If we are the second round of guests, let us come and enjoy the wedding.  Let us feast on God’s word, and God’s love, and God’s grace in our lives.  Let us celebrate that God is good, that God loves us, and God desires us to be at the wedding.  Let us build our relationship with God so that we hold God as one of those dear friends that we would drop just about anything for in order to be there for him. 

            Do often think of God being there for us, but what would it look like to think about ourselves as the guests and being there for God and for the son?  Take a minute and think about one wedding that you have attended as a guest that was extremely meaningful for you.  I just did a wedding vow renewal for a couple that have been married almost fifty years.  At that celebration people shared how they were at the wedding almost fifty years ago and what a wonderful relationship they have had with that couple over the past fifty years.  God desires that of us.  God desires us to say, I am so glad to be a part of this spiritual wedding and what a wonderful relationship we have had over these past – ten, or twenty or eighty years. 

            But let’s take a second look, what if we see ourselves as the servants.  God sends those servants out to gather others in.  Do we feel called in any way, shape or sort to go out and bring people in?  And if we do, what does that look like?  Some people have invited friends to come to church.  Some people have invited friends to come to Bible Study.  Some people have invited friends to come to the community breakfast.  Some people have invited friends to come our events such as the Tea or Strawberry Festival and this is a great start. 

            I just heard a story about a church that was having a community breakfast with the agenda of bringing in families.  But families did not come, instead those that came were homeless or on the fringe of homelessness.  The congregation was surprised and didn’t know what to do.  They wanted families with children.  As I heard this story, it just reminded me of us.  Now, the difference between this other congregation and us was this, they held the breakfast on Saturday and when they had worked through what they wanted and what God had sent them, they decided to put together a very informal worship service during the breakfast.  Now, some of you have heard me mention wanting to do this with our breakfast, but I have not figured out the logistics.  Do I do it during the breakfast maybe at 9:30?  Is there an elder or two willing to lead this service?  If I lead the service would an elder or two lead our worship service upstairs?  How can we make this work?  I was so surprised to hear this story because it showed me that another church stopped asking the logistic questions and just did it, and it worked. 

            The servants went out, they offered a breakfast, and the people came, and they fed them with food and the word of God and new life emerged.  Nothing like what the people expected, but truly the Kingdom of Heaven in their midst. 

            Come, the wedding is ready, come and build a loving relationship with God, come and feast on God’s love and mercy and grace.  Come, and then go out and bring others in.  The wedding is ready and it has been prepared for all.  Amen.  

Sermon: Plant, Grow, Produce

Matthew 13

“Plant, Grow, Produce”

            Today’s parable is all about the good soil.  In order for the seed to grow and produce it needs to fall into the right the environment.  It makes me think of the commercial that is run every spring by miraclegro – they show you a plant grown in ordinary soil and the same plant grown in miraclegro soil.  The miraclegro soil plant is twice as large and produces twice the flowers or tomatoes then the other plant.  Makes me want to buy miraclegro since of course I want the biggest, healthiest plants and flowers possible. 

            But, I have also learned, it takes more than miraclegro to really make the plants grow.  They need to be watered, they need the right amount of sun, they need additional nurture.  Just putting them in the best possible soil is not enough. 

            I have also been amazed, in and around my yard, at what grows and what does not grow.  Seeds from last year’s petunias must have fallen down into the cracks of our driveway around the big flower planters.  Those same flowers that I had such a time with last year, making sure I watered them to keep them alive, without any care at all, grew up out of the driveway pavers and bloomed beautiful purple flowers through the summer.  Go figure. 

            So, as I think about the literal translation of this parable and the spiritual meaning behind it, I wonder why the sower is so careless with the seed.  It seems as if the seed is falling everywhere, including places that it will not grow.  But then, when I think about my own experience to where I have witnessed seed growing despite the best odds, it makes me see this parable in a new light.  The sower is not careless, the sower is willing for seed to fall in non-fertile environments because there is always the possibility.  There is always the possibility that in what appears to be rocky soil, or the beaten path, the opportunity for growth. 

            Our God, is a God of possibilities, a God of risk taking, a God of what might even appear to be careless generosity.  But since our God is also a God of hope, God provides seed in every environment of our lives. 

            So, what is this seed?  Jesus uses everyday objects to help people learn more about God.  So, as he explains this parable, he shares that the seed is the Word of God.  So, then we may need to ask: what is the Word of God?  Is it scripture?  Is it the commandments?  Jesus, himself, reaches back into the scriptures of his people and quotes from Isaiah – about the blind shall see and the deaf shall hear.  The word of God may come to each of us in a different way.  For some, the Word of God is the message of eternal salvation.  For others it is the call for justice and peace and this world.  For others it is to be the light of God’s love.  For others, it is a moral teaching to be a good person.  For others it is the gift of forgiveness.  And with forgiveness, some feel that the Word of God is the call for reconciliation. 

            What is the seed?  What is God sowing so generously upon this world?  What is God expecting to grow and bear fruit?  Can the answer be as simple as love?  We say that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.  We have the Golden Rule – to love our neighbor as ourselves.  And if the seed is love, if the Word of God is to love others, how do we till the soil so that the environment is fertile?  Do we, as a congregation, see ourselves as the good soil, open and receptive to God’s word?  And if not, what are we willing to do within ourselves, within our congregation, to move towards healing and wholeness and love? 

            And do we believe, that when the soil is prepared, God will continue to throw seed upon us and life will grow?  God never gives up on God’s people.  We are faced with a lot of stress.  Over and over again, when I push certain conversations, there is such concern about our finances and keeping our building open.  We need to name this stress and ask ourselves, in this stress, is the seed of God’s Word for us able to grow?  Bearing fruit for God is not keeping our building open, as hard as that is to hear.  Bearing fruit for God is taking the Word of God and multiplying it:  Multiplying justice, multiplying peace, multiplying love, multiplying forgiveness and reconciliation. 

            Each and every day, God is sowing seed.  The Word of God is constantly falling into our lives.  Jesus is a realist.  He names it as it is.  Some days, the seed falls onto the hardness of our hearts, of our lives and just bounces off.  Other days it takes root but the stress of the world around us just chokes it dry.  And then, then there are days where we have what some call a God moment, and we really feel the joy, the peace, the love of God in our lives and we are renewed and energized and given hope .

God is continually planting, the seeds are continually growing, the soil needs consistent attention, and from there, God desires results.  God desires the seeds to bear fruit.  Your session has  a letter to go home with you all today, a letter that asks for your patience as we journey through this rocky time together, and let us work towards a path of forgiveness, so that together, we truly can bear the fruit God calls us to bear.  Amen.  

sermon: parable of the Yeast -

“Embracing God’s Story in our Lives”

Q: What did the yeast say to the bag of flour?

A: Come on we Knead to be serious! 

Q: Why did Mama Flour and Papa Yeast tell Baby Bread to get a job?

A: He was just loafing around! 
            I can’t even remember the last time, I personally, used yeast.  Once, many years ago, I did try and make my own bread.  But, after all the work, it didn’t really turn out that great so I didn’t try again.  I do have memories of my mother making bread.  Of setting the dough aside, letting it rise, being fascinated by how it grew in the bowl, and then my mother kneading it, setting it aside, and letting it rise again.  I learned, through the power of observation, that there was something special about yeast.  And I was amazed, that such a small amount of it, could be so powerful.  I still am not sure what yeast is.  It is some sort of microorganism, that is actually alive, so when it is in the right conditions, grows and produces carbon dioxide.  The carbon dioxide it is what causes the bubbles which makes the dough rise.  Archeologists believe people have been using yeast to bake bread for over 4,000 years. 

            As I learned a little more about yeast, it struck me that yeast – breathes.  Well, it doesn’t have lungs so it doesn’t really breathe, but it does convert sugar into carbon dioxide.  In a sense, it does breathe.  Throughout our scriptures, breath is so important.  In the creation story, God breathes into Adam and gives him life.  In one of the resurrection stories, Jesus breathes upon his followers as he offers them peace and sends them out into the world.  Without breath, there is no life.  We even have a method of praying called a breath prayer. 

            Does Jesus know this as he uses yeast as a metaphor for rapid growth?  My guess is that he does.  The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast – that a woman took and mixed with her flour until it was all leavened.  The Kingdom of heaven – God’s reign, God’s peace, God’s presence in the world, just requires a small pinch of an active ingredient that is willing to come alive and breathe, that is willing to come alive and convert the environment around it into something it can use, creating growth.  Is it no accident that Jesus, in this simple parable, speaks of something that can hardly be seen and uses it to illustrate growth? 

            The Kingdom of heaven, this is what is important to Jesus.  He wants his followers, he wants those who will listen to connect to this.  The Kingdom of Heaven.  And then he explains that in something small, growth can happen.  But then, in just a few chapters later, we get another example of yeast:  The yeast of the Pharisees.  Rapid growth can happen in both the positive and the negative.  We have to be careful, we have to use caution, we have to live in this world with both the good and the bad and discern where it is that God is at work and where it is that other powers are at play.    

            And that brings me to the following exercise that we are going to examine this morning.  Last month, I asked you all, what makes you thirst?  If Jesus says to us, I am the living water, come to me and you will not thirst, why is it, that we thirst?  We do, we thirst about so much.  Today, in your bulletin is an insert with a list of where, we, in this particular congregation, are thirsting.  We thirst, we desire, we care deeply about – that is what these expressions are about.  We care for this world, we care for the hurts around us, we care about our community right here in this place.  So, in our care and compassion, when we see things in a way that are not the way in which they should be – we thirst.  As yeast, when we thirst, we are encounter what Jesus calls the yeast of the Pharisees.  We desire the good but we come across the powers that seem to be in contrast to God’s Kingdom, God’s reign. 

            On one side of the insert are the various ways in which you, gathered here in this place, have named as areas in which you thirst.  On the other side is something I have called God’s story.  The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast – that a woman added to the flour until the entire batch was leavened.  God desires us to be a part of God’s story.  As a people of faith, we are called to live into God’s story, we are called to embrace it as our story.   Our call to worship this morning comes from the creation story, where God created the world and called it good and blesses it.  That is our story.  We believe God created this world, and we believe that this world is good.  We also believe that in human free will, not all people choose to participate in God’s story.  And so we live in this tension, we live in this world view that the world God desires is not always the world we encounter.  And that is the list we have before us of where we thirst. 

            The exercise I want us to explore is this:  if we truly want to be the yeast, if we are living into full participation of God’s story then we name and proclaim that God’s story is our story.  We can be the yeast of love, peace, forgiveness, and that we are willing to take God’s story out into the world so the world can be leavened.  All of those places where we thirst, those are places for us to be engaged, to be embedded, to be active participants.  For example:  if we thirst because there are people who are hungry and homeless – learn their story, build a relationship with the other, seek ways to be a resource for those immediate needs.  Being the yeast is messy.  It means losing oneself into the whole in order to produce results.  Once the yeast is mixed into the dough, you can’t pull it back out.  It is in there.  If you thirst for peace in our world, there are so many groups working on ways to promote peace, such as the Rockaway interfaith clergy group that is creating a group called Interfaith Neighborhoods working on building peace in our own communities.  Of course we want war to end, but maybe we need to focus on something right here in our own community.  If we cannot be at peace, how can we expect the greater world to be at peace. 

            And that is the next part of the exercise.  There are two stories – God’s story and the Story of the World.  There is so much anxiety and fear in our world today and we are called to go out and bring God’s story into the mess.  A huge problem exists when we allow the story of the world to come into God’s story.  And that is where some of you named the conflict within our own church family.  We have allowed the story of the world, the yeast of the Pharisees to come into God’s story and we need to address this.  We need to pray about it.  We need to be adult about it.  We need to live into forgiveness and mercy and grace and most of all love.  We need to say, no more, yesterday is gone we cannot change it and from this point on, we will only allow God’s story to be the story we live in this place.  We will be more patient with each other and we will set aside our own fears and anxieties and stress and allow God to guide us as we focus on our role of being God’s yeast. 

            Jesus started small.  He focused his attention on twelve disciples.  He even turned some people away.  If people’s hearts were not ready to be a part of God’s story, he let them go.  Enough people understood what it meant to be yeast that the church grew, enough people desired to encounter the Kingdom of heaven that the Holy Spirit led more and more out into the world and lives were changed and transformed.  We thirst because there is work to be done – so go out into the world and let go of yourself and embrace God’s story as your story as you live your life.  And just like the yeast, you will, by your very nature, convert the environment around you into the Kingdom of heaven.