Gary Brinn’s Blog

The second sermon going up tonight is the one I preached in the Divinity Hall pulpit on Thursday (where Emerson gave the Divinity School Address!) as part of the 2008 Billings Preaching Prize competition. It is really just a shorter version of a sermon I preached at First Cambridge last April. I made the finals this year, which will be held April 23rd, but I honestly don’t think I’ll win. I’m up against my dear friend Sheila, or as I like to think of her, “the Rev.” She’s a grandmother from Brooklyn, and wow does she have the Spirit!

(Update: Sheila did, in fact, win the Billings Prize, one of Harvard’s oldest awards, for “eloquence in the pulpit.” I am very happy to have been among the finalists, as the finals sermons were all amazing, and filled with God’s Word.)

The Sermon

The standard sermon for the story of Doubting Thomas goes something like this: Poor Thomas, he just didn’t have enough faith. It’s a good thing we have enough faith. Yeah us! Or maybe, I know you’re having a hard time believing the teachings of the church in light of the real world, but don’t be a doubting Thomas. This is not going to be that standard sermon.

Now, let’s imagine for a moment that I’m an author, and the Gospel of John is in manuscript form, and here I am sitting before my editor waiting to hear the magic words: cash advance. But instead what I hear is: “Let’s talk about the motivation of Thomas in the final chapter. I’m not sure you’ve made your case. The man has seen Lazarus raised from the dead, the storm stilled, walking on water, miracle after miracle. Why doesn’t he believe now? It’s just not plausible.”

We probably all feel a bit like my fictional editor. Just because something happened while I was out getting the milk and bread doesn’t mean I don’t believe it. Judas Didymus Thomas has been with these folks, these women and men traveling with and learning from Jesus, for several years. They’ve been through some amazing times together. And they’ve seen miracles, they’ve seen death defeated. So why doubt now?

It probably helps to think a little bit about what was going on when this text was written. Early Christians didn’t know what to believe about Jesus. Christianity was moving towards orthodoxy, but it wasn’t there yet. The authors of the Gospels were deeply involved in a struggle to understand. Jesus mattered, they knew that, but he always seemed to be just beyond their understanding.

One area of conflict was how were they to understand the resurrection? Was the resurrection bodily, with flesh and blood? Or was it a resurrection of spirit. This was a question not just about Jesus, but a question about what it meant to be human. This gospel story affirms the physicality of the resurrection, flesh and blood, stuff you could touch. One hint of the counter-argument can be seen in the story of the appearance on the road to Emmaus.

Another struggle was between those who would come to define orthodox Christian belief and those who adopted other understandings of Jesus. The apostles most commonly associated with the heterodox group called the Gnostics were Mary Magdalene and Judas Didymus Thomas. Our text is about confirming that Jesus was resurrected in the body, and it is about deciding whose understanding of the Christ event is correct. That is not to say that these events did not happen. But it helps us to see the humans involved in the gospel story, in the creation of the gospels, in the decisions about which stories were written down and which were not.

So what are we supposed to do with the story of Doubting Thomas? If this text is very much about doctrinal struggles, what can a Christian today learn from it? Well, we can all admit that Thomas comes off looking like a knucklehead. But they all look like knuckleheads. Let’s start with Simon Peter. In the Lucan version of his call, we always skip to the line where Jesus says “I’ll make you a fisher of humans.” We ignore Peter’s first response. “Dude, I’m unrighteous. Go away.” I suspect Peter gets nicknamed Rock not because he is “the Rock of the Church” but because he is about as smart as a box of rocks. Who can forget the three denials? Of course, he gets it right sometimes too.

Then there are James and John, so rowdy that they get nicknamed the Sons of Thunder. I like to think of them as the biblical Bash Brothers. If you’re the right age to know the Mighty Ducks movies, you know what I’m talking about. “Dude, let us be your top two guys?” they ask Jesus. And Jesus’ response? “Dudes, you so do not know what you are asking.”

These guys don’t know what’s going on, don’t know what to believe, the gospels writers tell us that Jesus isn’t even trying to make it clear, because it will become clear on resurrection morning. The preaching and teaching and miracle, the feast in the Upper Room and the murder on the tree, it will be clear. The Holy Spirit will comfort them and inspire them and they will change the world. But they’ll still be a bunch of knuckleheads! Even after the resurrection. After he has assumed a leadership role in the early church, Peter still blunders at Antioch. “Unclean food? What unclean food?” They don’t know what to believe, what to do, how to act. But they do know this. Jesus changes everything!

They tried to explain Jesus in terms of his own Judean religion. They took up term of the Roman Emperor. They used many terms trying to describe who Jesus was, what he did, what he meant. And in the midst of this confusion and this grasping for meaning, they did an amazing thing. They changed the world.

No doubt, the mixture of sheer terror and overwhelming hope of that one weekend in Jerusalem stayed with the apostles, women and men, for the rest of their lives. The confusion, the shock. But they took their evangelion, literally the good proclamation, and they went out there and said this: Jesus changes everything.

Today, the name Jesus is controlled by the neo-Pharisees who have the audacity to speak for God. They’ve reduced Jesus to death insurance, to an excuse for self-righteousness, to a nationalistic warrior. Many of us sit back ashamed of what has been done in the name of Jesus, afraid to speak it in public. Jesus has been co-opted by Empire, by the individualism of the Enlightenment, by the thinly disguised selfishness of our economic system. You don’t have to be a theologian or a biblical scholar to see what is at stake. You don’t even have to be certain. You can be a knucklehead and spread the good news!

When I get up in the morning, a week and three snooze-buttons behind schedule, I can do so knowing this. God is good. Jesus changes everything. Even a knucklehead can get that! Do you know that Jesus loves you? That God is good? Does knowing Jesus change your life? We must be the ones to proclaim it. Jesus lives! Reclaim the name. When others preach hatred and division in the name of Christ, confront them, tell them they are worshipping idols of their own creation. If progressives are silent then Christianity will die a slow irrelevant death.

The world today wants Jesus, a real authentic mysterious Jesus. Easter Jesus is always just beyond our grasp, and that’s okay.

If we prayerfully engage the world, if we bring sacrament and Scripture and love with us into the world, we can change it. We can be the leaven in the loaf, not because we can do it on our own, but because Christ is with us when we are gathered in his name, because the good news is the tree and the empty tomb, because Easter is joyful hope, stunned confusion, it is fear and love , it is life in our amazing God.

We must reach back to that original Easter morning, and tell the world! Change the world. Proclaim the good news. Christ is risen indeed. Jesus changes everything. If Peter with his head of stone, if the Bash Brothers and Thomas and Mary Magdalene, if they could go out and preach, so can we. They didn’t know what they were doing either. They lived in that Easter moment. So can we. So must we. Welcome my knuckleheaded sisters and brothers. Welcome to the joy of life in Christ! Proclaim the name! Jesus the Christ, our salvation. Amen.

I’m putting up a couple of short sermons. First is the sermon I will be preaching tomorrow, Baseball Sunday. We’ve invited folks to wear their uniforms, team colors, etc, and to bring their equipment. We’ll be having a special blessing for the season. Brian Packham is leading the music, and will be serving up some baseball flavor of his own… BTW, Brian is an amazing musician. Check out his website: http://www.okihikoki.com/

The Sermon

Sermon
Baseball Sunday- April 13, 2008
Gary Brinn, Pastoral Intern

You might be wondering what baseball has to do with being a Christian. Well you could say that our whole story starts in the big inning, that Eve stole first and Adam stole second, and there was that incident with Gideon and the pitchers. But that would be silliness, and we’ll have none of that!

Actually baseball, or at least the ideas behind the sport, have a lot to do with being a Christian, and no, I don’t mean the competition, nor do I believe that God cares whether my overpaid professional athlete beats your overpaid professional athlete. But I do believe that baseball calls on us to celebrate this amazing creation, nature and ourselves, these amazing bodies. Sure, we sometimes have a disagreeable relationship with these bodies. They break down, ache, eventually they all will fail. But life is good, and these bodies, these amazing miracles, are a gift from God, a gift that Jesus took on himself when he walked among us. Of course, Jesus had a task in mind when he became human like us, but imagine the sensory delights of being one of us, the caress of his feet being washed, the taste of the salted fish, the texture of the sand as he bent down and wrote while challenging those who would throw stones. These bodies are amazing, and at their best they are agile and swift like David with his sling, the young athlete facing the great adversary.

But this sermon is not about the miracle of the body. It is about the infield fly rule and our covenant through Christ. To begin with, I’ll need to explain the rule. If a ball is hit and pops up so that it is a fly ball that will come down in the infield, the batter is automatically out, the umpire simply signals that the rule is in effect. Now you may ask why, after all, a pop-up that is in foul territory must be caught, even if it requires that the catcher run into the television cameras, that Jeter dive into the stands. The reason for the rule is this. If a ball is popped up in the infield and there is a runner on base, the infielders would be rewarded for NOT catching the ball. You see, if they catch the ball, only the batter is out. But if they drop it, they stand a very good chance of making a double play, getting two outs for NOT performing to the best of their ability. And every player, after a certain level of play, CAN make that catch. So without the infield fly rule, players are not rewarded for doing their best, they are rewarded for failing. It may not surprise you that the leagues with the youngest players do not have the infield fly rule, because there is no guarantee that they’ll make the catch, and if they hit a fly ball in the first place, its likely as not to come down in the infield.

Now Paul, in Romans, spends quite a bit of time on the difference between our covenant in Christ and the old covenant, what he calls the Law. This is tricky ground, our Christian story is marred by a history of anti-Semitism that finds its basis in supersessionism, the idea that the new covenant with Christ replaces or supersedes the old covenant completely. Theologians and scholars have argued this point for two millennia. In fact, the question of Paul and his relationship to the old covenant is the topic of much current research and debate. And the horrors of the Holocaust have made us keenly aware of the evil that can be done with a wink and nod from bad theology. So I’d like to avoid being tarred with the brush of supersessionism, but I will risk suggesting that there is a fundamental difference between the old covenant as it is portrayed in traditional Protestant theology and the new, and that that difference looks a little like the infield fly rule. Like the game of baseball without the infield fly rule, the old covenant did not reward you for doing your best. It rewarded you for doing enough. There were benchmarks you needed to meet, over six hundred rules regarding everything from social structure to honoring God, rules about purity and sacrifice and financial dealings. It didn’t matter what you felt, what your motives were, and there was no reward for going beyond the standards set by the Law. You just had to do enough. And if you kept the rules, as tough as that might be, if the nation kept the rules, there would be immediate reward. Like so many in the our nation today, there were always individuals looking for loopholes, for ways around the laws, the Sadducees for example. The various parties were in constant dispute over how to live in the law, or get around the law, to throw out the law, with only a tiny handful saying “the Law isn’t enough.” This nation is in the financial state it is because of this tendency to believe law is enough, is the boundary for appropriate conduct, and that whatever you can do to get rich is okay. You can skirt the law, regardless of whether it is ethical, right, or good, in fact you can even break the law. You are only foolish if you get caught.

Then, in the midst of the Judean system of Law came Jesus. And the message of Jesus was this. You think it is about the Law? You thought it is about obeying some set of rules, and if you just obey, you’ll be rich? Israel will be free again? Think again. It’s not about ticking off the right boxes. There is no such thing as enough. You can’t say I’ve obeyed enough Laws, I’ve honored God enough. There is no enough in the kingdom of God. Never enough love, never enough honor. The Law, Jesus asks? Really? Did you miss the whole spirit of the Law? It is love and justice, not a simple “enough.” What God is asking of you, what I am asking of you, has no limits. There is never enough. You’re not going to be rewarded for doing anything less than your absolute best. And that absolute best has only one limit, the boundary which separates this life from the next.

In fact, Jesus tells us, there is no greater love than to sacrifice your own life for another. And to prove that he meant it, he did it. Jesus was willing to carry the amazing, boundless good news of the boundary-less kingdom of God all the way to Golgatha, all the way to a grave that could not hold him. The message of Christ is the same message again and again… the Law is not enough. The law is a thing, and I don’t want a thing, Christ says, God doesn’t want a thing, God wants you. All of you, infinite you, nothing less.

What an exhausting challenge! You’re not there yet, whether you’ve served Christ for eight days or eight decades. Christ tells us repeatedly that we need to be willing to give up everything. Follow me, he says. Follow me to where the sick and contagious are housed. Follow me to where sinners join together. Follow me to the table, where we will break bread and share the cup in a way that transcends all of the old boundaries, all of the old divisions, that will not replace the Law but that will transcend it, that will fulfill it, that will make the Law all that it was supposed to be. Follow me, Christ says, on the road to Jerusalem, up the slope of Golgatha, into horror and sadness. And follow me, in love and shock and miracle, on the road to Emmaus.

You’re not done. I’m not done. How exhausting! But God HAS actually provided for that feeling of being incomplete. God has given us Sabbath, a day that God intends for us to rest. Not many of us do, and if you have kids you may feel like you can’t even choose Sunday as a day of rest, because the very sports leagues we celebrate this morning schedule practices and games on Sunday, even as we speak there are teams practicing, children missing church, missing Sabbath, for fear that their absence will land them on the bench. I know, having a Sabbath is hard. But you need that rest if you are going to give everything. Everything in love, of God, of your fellow humans, of yourself. And yes, to fulfill the Great Commandment, you must love yourself too.

The new covenant does not reward enough, it rewards excess. It rewards hearts that are opened, floodgates of love and compassion. It rewards your desire to do more, your efforts to do more, even if you don’t always live up to what you might hope. Christ doesn’t call for you to be perfect, Christ calls for you to try!

Paul’s letter to the Romans could be the pep talk of any coach. You are all part of a team. You all have a part to play. Outdo one another, do not lag in zeal, rejoice, persevere. What can you respond to such instructions but amen, let’s get out there and play in the fields of the Lord! Paul knows a thing or two about tough losses, about perseverance, about love. Paul is a pastor coach calling on the churches, ones he started like that in Thessalonika, and those he did not start, like the church in Rome, and ones today like First Congregational to go beyond, to go out there, to stand on the edge of what we think we can do, and to do just a little more. No reward for enough, Paul says. Give your heart. Give your possessions and your money. Give yourself.
And again I say, how exhausting! Jesus and Paul and God, our amazing God, may grant us Sabbaths, but never, on this side of the grave, will we have arrived, will we be sure that we have done enough. The check boxes have been erased, the tick marks are gone, no one is keeping score in this game, because it ain’t over until its really over, and we have loved beyond this life.

To be fair to the old Law, we must admit that the prophets got it right. They kept telling the people of Israel, the people of the Exile, the people of occupied Judea, that the Law wasn’t about check boxes and tick marks. But it took Jesus, it took God to say enough with your petty fighting about the Law, and enough, more than enough, with your efforts to get around the Law. I’m writing a new Law, writing on your heart. Play all out. Never stop until the final out. Never drop the ball because skirting the rules will give you an advantage! I know you can get that out. What I want to see is that amazing beautiful diving catch. What I want to see is that leap of faith. What I want to see is you best. Because I love you, more than you will ever know, more than you can ever measure, beyond all limits. Love one another as I have loved you. As my son has loved you. Run, and jump, and sing and love, and do so without measure. It’s never enough. It’s divine love!

Amen.

Below is my sermon for the ecumenical Easter Sunrise Service tomorrow morning. There might be nothing new under the sun, and there is certainly nothing new in this sermon, but some of these folks will not have heard me drone on about the same old things, read from the same old texts…

Easter Sunrise Sermon 2008
J. Gary Brinn

The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 24, Verses 1 to 11.

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them:
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”
Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the women with them who told this to the other apostles.
But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.
This is the Good News of our Savior, Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God. Amen.

Under the old Law, under the purity codes and sacrifices designed to sustain the economy of the Temple’s bloated bureaucracy, uncleanliness was contagious. If I were to touch a dead body and then touch you, I would become unclean and you would “catch” the uncleanliness, which you could then spread to the others, an epidemic of impurity. To be sure, prophets consistently argued against this system of sacrifice and artificial purity, offering instead a religion of humility and love, but it just didn’t take. Humans were, and still are, all about creating categories and rules to decide us versus them. To be sure, John the Baptizer suggested a spiritual purity, a cleansing repentance, but most people still thought of uncleanliness as contagious. And then Jesus happened and reversed the whole system.

Let’s think of one encounter that illustrates the reversal of the purity system in Jesus. In the fifth chapter of Mark’s gospel, a woman touches the hem of Jesus’ garment and is cured. The women has been hemorrhaging, I don’t need to spell it out, she is about as unclean as a person can get under the purity codes, yet Jesus does not become unclean because she has touched him, in fact, she becomes clean. Women were by their natures carriers of uncleanliness under the old system, and here was an unclean woman, and it was not her uncleanliness that was contagious, it was his cleanliness. Jesus touches the dead, touches the unclean Gentiles, Jesus surrounds himself with what is unclean, and he makes it clean.

And then there is Good Friday, where Jesus is executed by an occupation army of unclean Gentiles, who drag him out to Golgotha, the garbage dump, which is unclean, and crucify him as they had done so many others, as they would continue to do to hundreds. And Paul tells us that to be hung on a tree is the most unclean death. Thrice defiled, our Savior is buried in filth. The man who has reversed the purity system by making cleanliness contagious has been made ritually unclean. His corpse is left unclean, unwashed, for the Passover feast, and it is only on the third day that the women, already the bearers of uncleanliness under the old system, come to wash the battered husk of their beloved.

And what do they find? Not Jesus, but two dazzling young men and an empty tomb. Dazzling. Let’s think about that word- we want dazzling smiles and buy toothpaste and whiteners to accomplish this goal. We want dazzling whites and eye popping colors in our clothing, and buy detergents to that end. Dazzling, cleanliness, purity. Jesus has been buried in filth, has been murdered by the occupation army, and has even transformed that victimization into cleanliness, has left behind two clean beings, two angels to announce the good news. The first to proclaim the good news of the resurrection were the angels, the first to receive it were the women, were humans who were not able to legally testify, who were a continual threat to the purity of the community. Mark ends with them running away afraid, telling no one. Luke makes clear that the male members of the group of apostles did not believe their good news.

Here were humans, always one step away from impurity, always one step away from an imperfection that they believed would cut them off from God, always fighting a losing battle against an absurd ideal, and then comes Jesus. You’ve got it wrong. You don’t have to be perfect and pure to approach God, you’re never going to be perfect, to be pure. God approaches you, and when God comes, cleanliness happens. You are washed clean, not because of something you’ve done, but because the goodness of God, the dazzling cleanliness of God, overflows. Centurions and women and thieves on a cross and you, yes you, become clean when you encounter Jesus. And it’s contagious! It is catching, if, and only if, you carry the cleanliness of the Tomb, the cleanliness of the Risen Christ, the cleanliness of our God with you into the world. In the world but not of it, not because we are better, but because we are the carriers of holy contagion, because we carry love and cleanliness, we carry God with us into the world.

This cosmic reversal, this being transformed in Christ, is captured by the 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, after lines detailing how impermanent, imperfect, how defiled we humans are, writes:

Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Immortal diamond, miracle! But we insist in re-creating the old system of laws and rules, of clean and unclean, we re-inscribe division, create us versus them. We have become the same self-righteous legalists that Jesus condemned during his own ministry. He calls us now as he called us then. It’s not about your rules, its not about your purity. It is about a love that overflows, that makes all new, all clean, that even death, even a degrading horrifying death cannot defeat. Life and love that never ends!

Today I will be made clean by prayer, by sacrament, by amazing grace, and I will be made clean by you, and you will be made clean by me, and we will dance and sing in a world transformed. We will be made immortal diamond, we will be made clean and pure, in Christ. Jesus has changed everything! It is Easter again this morning, it is new life, rebirth, it is miracle again! From the muck and filth of our despairing hearts, from our petty self obsessions, from our fears, God has made beauty, has made us vessels of grace, filled with divine love, filled with God’s spirit! Okay, we’re still sometimes despairing, sometimes self-centered, sometimes afraid, but Easter is always there. It is no surprise that we associate Easter with the early dawn approach of the faithful and clean women, for every dawn is Easter all over again, every day is miracle, is a call from God to go out into the world, carrying the love virus, the grace virus, the God virus, into the world. Are you contagious? How might you become contagious? With tomorrow’s dawn, when so many of us will trudge off to work, will you feel “eastered”? Will you carry God with you? Will I? For we can, and we will, with faith, with grace, and with our Risen Savior. We can be vectors not of uncleanliness, of dis-ease, but of contagious cleanliness, of ease and comfort in Christ. May it be so tomorrow, for a thousand tomorrows, may it be so until the world has been transformed, until we are in the Kingdom of our amazing God. Amen.

Call to Worship

One: We are a people of the great commandment
All: We are a people of love
One: Always calling one another
All: Always called by our God
One: The body of Christ with its many members
All: The body of Christ with its many miracles
One: We are a people of the Spirit
All: We are a people for today
One: Let us lift our voices as one
All: We lift them in worship and praise

Invocation

Divine Mystery, Loving God: We are a people gathered together in your name, in the name of your Son, our savior, in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are a people gathered, threads on a loom, woven into this amazing church, this witness, this hope.

Loving Father, we are both the weaving and weavers. We pray that our weaving is pleasing to you even as we become, even as we are transformed together in your great work.

Weave from us, we ask, a garment of love, of joy, of praise. Weave from us a cloak of comfort, strong cloth for hard labor, beautiful cloth for miraculous days, warm cloth for cold nights, and even, we pray, a shroud for the journey.

Weave from us, we ask, weave from us all, a shimmering garment of many colors, a Joseph coat, a miracle, a masterwork. Bind and tie us one to another, each strengthened by those around us, each unique, amazing, loved.

As your Son selected his disciples, Peter and Mary and Salome and John, and turned them into a church, woven into the fabric of your kingdom, so you turn us into a church, living, growing, weaved and woven. And so we pray as your church, your kingdom, in the words he taught us saying: “Our Father… trespasses… for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

Prayer of Confession

You call us a covenant people, a people gathered, but we are alone. Alone behind walls of our own construction. My rights, my property, my privacy. Mine. And yet you call, again and again, calling us out from that small life that hides behind those walls. You call and we emerge, only to retreat, convinced that this is what you want from us, for us: human justice, personal salvation. Mine.

And so we call to mind those times when we have forgotten your radical call to love, to love God, to love each other, remembering only to love ourselves. We call to mind these moments when we have hidden behind the walls of selfishness, of selfness, when we have missed opportunities to be more ourselves by forgetting ourselves.

We are a people called, forgiven and forgiving. Call us still, forgive us still, even as we reflect upon our failures, growing from them into our true selves, a great choir of worship and love. Amen.

Assurance of Pardon

Know this: God will never fail to reach for us, God will never fail to call to us, infinite patience and infinite love calling us into communion, into the kingdom, into a romance with one another, with life, with this blessed creation. Dare and God will dare with you. Fall and God will reach out. Be amazing, be love, be the church the changes the world, be with me in this radical love, and God will be with us. Amen.

Imperfectly Perfect: Our Lives Together

Most of us know the story. The Allies were within hours of reaching the camp when Prisoner Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell, escorted to the gallows, and executed. His crime was treason against the Third Reich, specifically, he had joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reformed pastor and committed pacifist, had become a modern martyr, a witness to Christ. Most of us know these facts. His letters from prison are widely read, as is his thin volume titled “Life Together.” We know this Bonhoeffer, the man of courage who returned from London to lead an underground seminary.

There is another Dietrich Bonhoeffer we often neglect, the committed theologian who struggled with this beautiful church situated in an ever-changing world. In his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer wrote about sacred community, and he made one very bold claim. You do not stand alone. God did not execute a covenant with individuals. God executed a covenant with a people. You are not a person without others, we only become ourselves in the context of community, we are only in relationship when the God-called in us is connected to the God-called other. Now, this should make perfect sense to us, after all, Jesus promises to be with us if two or more are gathered in his name. He tells us to baptize one another and to break bread together, to feed and clothe and visit. Of course, Jesus also tells us to sometimes enter seclusion, to go off and pray in quiet. We are at once together and alone.

Now, you’re here, so you get it. You understand that the church is the living body of Christ, that this is the sacred, sanctifying and sanctified community that Christ formed. Heck, some of you even socialize together! But let’s take a moment to really think about the place of community in today’s world, in today’s America, in today’s Boston. Take, for example, that funny little commercial for a local web site. You know the series, all about what makes Boston unique. One of those commercials features the guy, you know him, the guy with the lawn chair in the parking place while the city is buried in snow. And the joke is that they might give that space away in some other city, but here in the Boston area we claim a share of the public street with complete disregard to social conventions around first come first serve or equal opportunity. It is not about community, it is all about me. We celebrate our selfishness.

And since it’s Super Bowl Sunday, let’s take a look at the NFL. Now there have always been stars, guys that seemed just a little bit more, just a little better. But it was always about the team. Brady is amazing, he may be the best quarterback ever on the best team ever, and he will be the first to tell you that it is a team. Then there is T.O. Terrell Owens now plays for the Cowboys, but just a few short years ago he played for the Eagles. But he wasn’t happy there. It wasn’t all about him, there were others stars, other players. So Owens became a disruption in hopes that he would be traded. And in a rare show of courage, the Eagles refused to trade him, suspended him, withheld his pay. Just this week the arbitrator decided that Owens was indeed out several million dollars for his actions. But does it matter. You see, Owens is now playing for the Cowboys with a salary that makes a couple of million dollars seem like pocket change. It wasn’t about the team, it was all about him, and millions of young athletes learned a terrible lesson.

We’ve always had this rugged streak of individualism in the U.S., we’re proud of it. It is innovation and adventure, it is exploration and creativity. But it has this other edge, this self-centeredness and greed that has become dominant and accepted since Reaganomics, this idea that I stand alone. It has even crept into some of our churches. My personal relationship with Jesus. I am saved. If I check off the right boxes, if I follow this legalistic path wrapped in self-righteousness, I can escape death. Never mind that legalism, greed and self-righteousness were the very traits that Jesus condemned throughout his ministry. Even salvation in Jesus has become all about me. Maybe also about us, but definitely about me.

Then there’s Bonhoeffer. It’s not about you. You do not have a covenant with God, you are not baptized into a relationship with God. We have a covenant with God. You are baptized into the body of Christ which is the church which is us. Your salvation is not worked out in the privacy of your own home. Your salvation is worked out in Christ, in Christ the man who taught and healed and died for others, in Christ the church, this imperfect perfect body of love and openness. We come together in love for one another, in love for God. This is the church that Jesus created, the church to which Paul wrote. Paul the pastor. We read Paul’s letters to the churches he started and visited and we see the word “you” a lot. Unfortunately, our language makes it easy to miss the fact that the “you” is almost always plural. We are church, imperfect, and yet always perfect in Christ, a people of the Great Commandment and the Great Commission, lovers and evangelists fully engaged with the world, fully engaged with one another.

There is another organization that is imperfect. Started by a general, a hero of the Boer War in which the British Empire protected its selfish colonial interests, a man with mixed personal motives, it has become despite this beginning one of the largest international organizations dedicated to the formation of honorable men, men who will serve their God and their country. The Boy Scout is called to do a good turn daily. That is, they are called to serve others. There is no all-star in Scouting who scores more points, there is no accumulation of goods. Sure, there’s some friendly competition, but it is never about the individual Scout. Sunday School helped form my value system, but so did Scouting. I learned how to be part of a team, I learned how to lead and how to be led. And I am not the only man in this congregation whose character was developed in Scouting.

And there is more. As we all know, Girls got in on the act. Structurally different, and attuned to the needs of young women, Girl Scouting has been important in the lives of many women and young ladies sitting among you.

Today is Scout Sunday. This isn’t something we invented. Scouts throughout the United States are attending worship at their own churches, and at the churches which sponsor troops. The Scouts that have joined us this morning are here because we sponsor their troop. You might have heard a rumor to this effect, and it is true. They meet in the basement, and they joined many congregants and Girl Scouts in our basement renovation project yesterday morning. Their leaders share our values, our commitment to turning these amazing children that surround us into amazing adults. They are our hope, they are the treasure that we will leave the next generation.

But what does it mean to sponsor a troop? And how can we sponsor a troop? Aren’t the Boy Scouts a militaristic conservative and homophobic organization? For gosh sakes, they wear uniforms!

Let me begin by explaining that the Boy Scouts of America is a democratic organization owned by the institutions that sponsor troops and packs. If the Boy Scouts is dominated by conservatives, it is because progressives abandoned the program rather than working to change it. But as a sponsor, we have a vote. We have a voice in the policies of the local council, of the national organization. Imagine what would happen if progressives organized to push their agendas as successfully as the religious right has done!

Militaristic? No. Homophobic? Well, yes actually. At the national level. But this local council defied the national organization and adopted a policy that prohibits discrimination based on affectional orientation. This local council is a witness for justice, and they have suffered for it. They lost a tremendous amount of money and membership when they took this stand. And the forces of hatred and division are working hard to reverse the policy and regain control.
So yes, we have Scouts in the basement. And we have their courageous leaders. They tie knots and hike and camp and wear uniforms. And they teach boys that it is not all about them. That it is about us. That it is about service and duty. That they must be willing to lead and to be led. A Scout, who must, in order to be a Scout, serve others, cannot exist alone. A Scout is only a Scout in relationship with others, whether those others are members of his troop, family, church, school or community. As we are not Christians alone. As we are not called alone. We are called into this imperfect perfection of love, this Joseph coat of a church. We exist for and because of one another, always calling one another to Christ, always bringing God with us, always finding God in one another, Immanuel, miracle, love.

Okay, it wasn’t my best effort… and certainly not a Gaudete sermon. In the end, that didn’t matter. I was all the way to Melrose in treacherous conditions when I got the call that church was cancelled. So I drove home in the blizzard, put on clean jammies, and settled in for a day of work!

Here is the sermon:

For the last two weeks, our Advent bible study group has been looking at the stories of miracle babies in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament. We have asked ourselves again and again, what do these stories tell us about the Israelite faith? About the faith that Jesus lived? About the faith of Jesus’ followers? If we are going to call ourselves disciples of Jesus, and I can think of no better title, then we had better all ask these questions, ask them again and again… or maybe I’m wrong. If you have it worked out, if you understand what Jesus meant and means, if you understand God’s will, if you can pick up that pew Bible and read a consistent and coherent message, please raise your hand.

No takers? I’m not surprised. You might be here in a UCC congregation because you were born in this tradition, either the UCC or one of its antecedents. But many of us are here as refugees. We couldn’t make sense of our own traditions, could not find the same meaning in that book as those around us. We could find prosperity theology in some portions of the Hebrew scriptures, but we could not find it in the prophets, in the teachings of Jesus, not even in the teachings of Paul. We were told to have a personal relationship with Jesus, a relationship of righteousness grounded in faith that would guarantee immortality, we were told that Jesus came to cleanse us from the stain placed on us by a treacherous woman, a weak lesser human who had succumbed to supernatural temptation. We were told that personal morality and some abstract concept of faith was all that mattered, that Christians must fight abortion rights and homosexual rights.

Many were raised in a pick and choose Christianity that used Jesus as a weapon, that freely mixed passages to justify the dark desires of the human heart, the fear of strangers, self-righteousness, legalism, greed… though these were in fact exactly the topics about which Jesus preached, he spoke of the evils of self-righteousness, of legalism, of greed, not about sexual conduct. The record of the teachings of Jesus and the stories of the first Christians are often combined with selected passages of the Scripture of Jesus, that is the Hebrew Scripture, and twisted to make a monster of the gospel. Good news? I think not! And like so many others, I fled from that empty faith that contained nothing of Jesus. I was a refugee seeking a home… and I found one in the United Church of Christ.

You might be thinking, now wait a cotton-picking minute there, Gary. It’s Advent, it’s Incarnation and obedience to God, and its joy and family, and it’s not time to go off ranting about the evils of the fundamentalist heresy. And I’m going to answer that it is Advent, that the question is, the advent of what? What is arriving, beginning? What are we celebrating? Is it a happy tale with a couple of twists like the no vacancy sign, but one that ends with a tableau of Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, some kings and shepherds, a little drummer boy, and a shining star? Or is it a tale of a child born into a poor family in the backwards colony of a great and brutal empire? Is it the shepherds and the obedient Mary of Luke? Or the slaughter of the innocents, the homage of earthly kings, and the obedient Joseph of Matthew? Why does the author of Mark, the first gospel written, feel no need to tell the story of Jesus’ birth? What is so important to Matthew and Luke, that doesn’t matter Mark, that they had to expand their gospels, both of which use Mark as a source? Why are Matthew and Luke so different? What are they trying to tell us about Immanuel, about God with Us?

Advent of what? Not of the personal Jesus uber-morality immortality of the Christian conservatives! Jesus was born in a country not at all unlike today’s Iraq. Constant violence, competing factions of what was the same religion. An occupation army that viewed itself as superior, that did not mind using torture and execution to get its way. We have twisted this story into a bucolic narrative complete with lambs and kittens. It’s not a pretty story!

Our gospel reading speaks of God’s power to reverse the human order. Luke tells us that the hungry get to eat, that the rich are thrown down, go away hungry. Tell me how that’s supposed to work with a pledge campaign!

The gospels record two messages delivered in one package. Message one is be good, treat one another well, love God. It is the message of faith and personal conduct. Message two is this: change the world. Do something now! Everything you think you know about God and how the world works is wrong. God wants something better for you, God wants something better from you. Comfortable? Don’t be. Jesus tells us to abandon our families, give up our possessions, to go out and act, to, as the prophet Micah tells us, do justice and walk humbly with our God. And the package is this- the kingdom of God is at hand.

Not the kingdom of heaven, as the author of Matthew writes. The kingdom of God. Not some unknown then… now, right here, right now. As we build our own kingdoms day in and day out, walling out the things that scare us, that challenge us, God is there to break it down. Not your kingdom, God says. My kingdom. A kingdom of radical amazing selfless love… a love so strong that it can survive the most brutal conditions, the most brutal death. God is calling us again and again to live into the kingdom of God. And the reason we need to celebrate it every year is that it is breaking in all of the time. The kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, is dynamic, is kicking the legs out from under our own petty kingdoms and daring us to soar. This is what Jesus means when he tells us again and again that the Kingdom of God is at hand, has come near to you, that you will not taste God before you enter the kingdom of God. The kingdom is now and never, in time and timeless. It is today and it was yesterday, and it will break through tomorrow. It will break through again with the next season of Advent, and the Holy Spirit will quicken our hearts, the stories will be told, and if we listen, if we study, if we pray, we might just hear the call of the kingdom!

Now, I’ve been going on quite a bit about a kingdom, and some might question the language, might wonder if such a term still makes sense, after all we are a democracy, we threw off the yoke of kings. And king, that’s a masculine word, surely I’m not endorsing just one more patriarchy. And the fact is, I’m not. I’m using the language adopted by the first followers of Jesus. The titles Son of God, King, Savior, these were titles for Augustus, and by extension for the succeeding emperors. To declare faith in Jesus was an act of subversion, it was high treason. There’s the edge we need! Jesus was brutally tortured and executed by an occupation army, he was an enemy combatant. Are we happy now that we are the empire?

Advent of what? What are we preparing for? For God with us? Yes! For the Kingdom of God? Yes! For the moral courage to live beyond ourselves, to stretch and to grow and to leave what is comfortable for what is brave and courageous and of God and just? Yes, I tell you, with grace and together, yes! We can re-claim Jesus from those who would turn him into a Victorian prude. The British had a wonderful ad campaign for the Easter season a few years ago. Jesus was depicted Che Guevarra style, and underneath were four words. Meek. Mild. As if.

The ad campaign got it right. Jesus the subversive is asking you to forget everything you think you know, is daring you. I’m daring you. Life in full is a life lived into the kingdom, is a life that straddles both worlds. I’m standing on the edge of everything I’ve never been before .
Years ago I stood in a small house just north of Bluefields, Nicaragua. The walls were bullet ridden. The elderly woman described hiding in the cistern as the US-funded contras tortured and killed her husband. This was a land that had suffered incredible cruelty. Under the dictatorship, when they wanted information from you, they would take your entire family up in a helicopter. And then they would throw them out of the helicopter one by one until you confessed or divulged, until they got their way. And here sat this woman in her tiny bullet-ridden house, free of the Somoza regime a few short years before we Americans waged a proxy war against them, and she looked at us with eyes full of love and said “I have hope.” I have hope. I have hope that we can reclaim our scriptures from those that do evil in God’s name. I have hope that we can stand on that edge of everything we have never been before, and that we can have the courage to dive over, to be in the world but not of the world. I have hope! And I have faith. I have faith that this Sunday, this year, this blizzardy gross morning, is the Advent of the Kingdom of God. May it always be so! Amen.

The Harvard Divinity community gathers on Wednesdays at noon for worship. This week the UCC students hosted, and I was blessed with an invitation to preach. The reading was an amazingly scripted parallel of the Gerasene demoniac(s) story from the Synoptic gospels. (Thanks to Matt, Alex and Gusti!) The audience included HDS students and staff, as well as vistors considering enrollment. Here ismy sermon:

The Task of the Christian Minister

Jesus crosses the sea and casts out some X number of demons from some Y number of demoniacs. The gospels don’t agree, but when it comes to scriptural disagreement, this is minor league, nothing like the differing accounts in the Birth and Passion narratives. Okay, fair enough, Matthew’s version has an unflattering image of Jesus as tormenter of demons, kind of like the little boy burning ants on the sidewalk with his magnifying glass, not at all congruent with the happy clappy Jesus of the liberal tradition. And Matthew has that whole “before the time” line that is way too eschatological to be comfortable. Well, actually all three have this thing about Jesus not sending the demons back to the abyss, or at least letting them off easy with a piggy-back trip over a cliff, maybe an indication that demons running loose are part of God’s purpose. Try fitting that one into your theodicy. So maybe even these straightforward passages with their minor variations do have some theological implications. At least our congregants won’t hear them in the same lectionary year!

And we don’t have to preach on them. We can dodge them, try the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures on for size, and if that doesn’t work, throw the whole thing out and pick a reading that feels more comfortable. Besides, the budget isn’t looking good, Shinji and Heidi need marriage counseling, and Rebecca just lost her father, and don’t even get me started on the war that is raging over the flower arrangements. I don’t have time to deal with abstract theology… this is a church you know!

Of course, we sit at this end of the Christian trajectory because of women and men who did get caught up in abstract theology. Little scriptural details and subtle differences in belief were make or break, you were orthodox or out, cut off from salvation. And here we sit at our end of the trajectory, of our particular branch of the trajectory, because others became obsessed with these details, with scripture and theology and the meaning of God with us, of salvation and of sin. And here’s the bad news… our branches, and especially the branches of mainline and progressive Protestantism, are withering, becoming irrelevant in our world. We wrap ourselves in liberal self-righteousness, preach sermons designed to challenge, but not too much, and then re-wrap ourselves in our cloaks woven from the slave labor of brutal regimes. Jesus may have said drop it all, walk away, leave your family, but we have responsibilities!

What is the task of the Christian minister in such a time? What are we to do when the only forms of Christianity that thrive are those that perceive themselves as at war with the world, those who see the world as broken, those who embrace apocalyptic? What is our task, I mean other than serving as caretakers for a dying church?

We might begin by being honest with ourselves and our congregations. We like to pretend that God’s revelation closed at the end of the apostolic age, with the formation of the biblical canon. We flatten the developing theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, whitewash the contradictions. But here is the truth, a truth that the United Church of Christ has been bold enough to proclaim. God is still speaking. God has always spoken. And while God speaks, we change, our world changes. And so, necessarily, our understanding of God changes. Now before you accuse me of violating the doctrine of divine impassability, a fair accusation, understand that I am not suggesting that God changes. I am suggesting that if we change and our understanding of God changes, then we should attend to that process. We should stop viewing our faith as some modern incarnation of a religion that was finalized centuries ago, whether we choose Chalcedon or Wittenburg as the end point. Because here is the truth… the understanding of God and the human evolves throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, continues to evolve in the particularity of Jesus, and evolves further as the Jesus movement collides with the Roman Empire. It continues to evolve and diverge to this day. Our story is now and always has been one of constructive theology. Lying to ourselves is not helpful, God may be God, but I’m not my grandfather, and his understanding of God in his world is not my understanding of God in my world. The prophets knew this, they also were constructive theologians… practical theologians, with an urgent message for humans to change how they were in the world, but also very much in the business of reshaping theologies that no longer fit the world in which they lived.

Heck, we’re willing to embrace Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, we are willing to get on the post-modern wagon, at least here in the safe halls of the academy, but are we willing to ride that wagon up to the pulpit. Are we willing to preach a constructive theology? Are we willing to ask the hard questions, questions like how can we make sense of the “Our Father” when we’ve abandoned the image of a male ego-needy god upon whom we depend as helpless children, passive before divine gift? Are we willing to ask hard questions? What if they cost us our pulpits?

If we don’t ask these questions, we might keep our pulpits, but there won’t be any pulpits left in the future. Our faith survives because it evolves… if it stops, it withers and dies, because the world doesn’t stop… When we change our understanding of human dominion over creation because the consequences are right before us, when we go green and develop a green theology, we are doing constructive theology. And when we say that God is not for war, despite the warrior God depicted in the scriptures, we are making truth claims. We are not only constructing a theology that goes beyond the plain text of the scripture, we are stating that others are wrong.

Let me repeat this last bit, because it is important. When we make claims about justice and scripture and theology, we are always contradicting someone else’s claims. Progressives shy away from telling others that they are wrong… but we must. Theologies of oppression must be denounced… we must follow Martin Luther… “Here we stand, we can not do otherwise.” We’re actually pretty good at this part… but we won’t call it theology, and we won’t admit that these new understandings are the result of a changing world, of a changing humanity, of a changing constructing theology.

If you are going to keep Christianity alive, and especially the particular branches of mainline and progressive Christianity, then you must be honest with yourself and with others. You cannot be a caretaker, satisfied to keep the budget balanced and the parishioners happy. You must be a prophet, and like the prophets, you must be a constructive theologian.

As a candidate for ordination in the United Church of Christ, I will be charged with faithful study of the scriptures, and with a life of prayer. Scholar and practitioner, believer and theologian. I will be asked to strive for unity in essentials, diversity in non-essentials, and charity in everything. Charity is the most important of these, for if I am to do my part in this great tradition, I will have to often admit that I’m unsure, and I will often disagree with colleagues. We will struggle and build and tear down and rebuild. We will be a community of charity, a community of theologians and biblical scholars and pastors. A community that stands in amazement at this miracle world, this miracle life, that weeps in joy and in sorrow. We will throw off the comforts of detachment… but we will remain scholars! We are constructive theologians because we believe, because Jesus changes everything, because life in Christ is raw and joyful and yes!

It is so easy to get caught up in the day to day. It is so easy to let the pastoral and administrative aspects of our jobs overwhelm us. So listen carefully. The world is filled with counselors and administrators. You are called to be a pointer, a bridge, a sign… you are called to be a prophet, and yes, a biblical scholar and a constructive theologian. You are called to be the rabbi to whom the villagers come when they cannot reconcile their experiences with their beliefs. And you are to take the raw stuff of life and the powerful stuff of faith and you are to reshape it, a potter for Christ. Earthen vessels, yes! But my aren’t they lovely!

Go forth in unity, in diversity, in charity. Go forth as theologian, ready to serve our God. Amen.

It is easy to focus on the right now… there is plenty of “right now” to go around! Right now we need to repair the walls. Right now we need to make room for our growing Sunday School. Right now… it’s endless. And it’s not much better at home. Right now we need to repair the car. Right now the orthodontist has sent her bill. Right now those shoes don’t fit anymore.

Jesus calls us out of the practical world of right now, into the impractical world of the Kingdom that is right now. I personally am far more like Martha than Mary! I’d have been tempted to say to Jesus “Do you want to eat? Then let me finish cooking, and send Mary in here to get the salad ready.” How do we balance the craziness of Christ’s call, to live radically, in confidence, from abundance, with the “right now” of our complicated practical in-need-of-repair lives?

Maybe we can start where I started with my children’s sermon a couple of Sundays ago. I spoke to the children about connections. With these, our youngest Sunday-Schoolers, I emphasized the literal and physical. The Sunday Times is a newspaper, yes! But it is also sunshine, and dirt, and the logger, and the logger’s breakfast, and the coffee the reporter drank, and the people who elected the leaders covered in the articles. In fact, the Sunday Times contains an infinite web of lives and resources.

I hinted, though didn’t discuss with the children, how the newspaper also pointed out moral connections. Burma tortures and kills religious leaders fighting for justice because an equally brutal regime in China serves as its shield. And we prop up that brutal Chinese regime with so many of our purchases!

What does all of this have to do with the pledge campaign? Surely you are not telling us to give to the church so we won’t buy stuff made in China! Come on Gary, get back to the walls and the Sunday School! Okay, fine… let’s go back to that newspaper.

Jesus was right. Everything is connected. The kingdom is now. The details are kind of fuzzy… we don’t always get it right, but our decisions around support of our church, around our pledge of financial resources and our time and talents, these decisions matter now. Are connected to other decisions in our lives. Are connected to walls that need repair, to space for our Sunday school, to the orthodontist and to the logger’s breakfast, to the “fair trade” coffee I purchased at the same time I purchased that copy of the Sunday Times. I can never follow every chain of connections… I can only know they are there, connecting me to others, so that my every decision can be the proverbial “butterfly flapping its wings on the far side of the world.”

Maybe I… maybe we, should try to be a little more crazy Jesus! Maybe we should trust that radical love and trusting abundance is life in the Kingdom, that the connections matter, that we can feed love and justice and generosity into that web of connections. How can we be anything but generous? Now, having had my Mary moment, I’ll go back to fixing the dinner…

Blessings,
Gary

This is my concluding prayer from the Peace Vigil we held on the church lawn Sunday night. We were trying to honor the complexity of matching Jesus’ call to radical non-violence with situations as de-centering as the Holocaust, as ethnic cleansing and genocide…

Amazing God,
You call us. You knock on our doors, you shout in our ears,
You whisper in the still small hours of the night.
Mary, you are blessed,
Samuel, you are called,
Moses, free my people.
We are called to do what we cannot do alone.
To dive into love,
To turn over the tables of greed
Of self-righteousness,
To build lives of justice,
Of kindness,
And to walk humbly.
Fills us God with your Spirit,
Let the Comforter be with us
As we walk this challenging path.
Narrow indeed the choice between justice
And between violence.
Open our ears to your call.
Open our eyes to what is real.
Unstop our tongues and
Like Jeremiah,
Let us be women and men on fire,
On fire in the love of God,
On fire in love for one another,
On fire for an end to the brutality of war.
We ask this in the name of your Son,
Himself a victim,
And yet also a sign to us always,
Of victory in love,
His love,
Your love,
Our love.
Amen.

Karl Barth on the Minister:

“Before him lies the Bible, full of mystery: and before him are seated his more or less numerous hearers, also full of mystery- and what indeed is more so? What now? asks the minister.

-from “The Word of God and the Word of Man”

For those of you who sometimes read this blog (poorly attended as it is during the summer), you might recognize the story I use in this sermon from an earlier prayer service I did at St. E’s. It’s a good story! In any case, the lectionary is on sin and repentance… and God’s joy at finding the lost sheep… and I’m at a new congregation, so they don’t know the story yet! Blessings- Gary

Welcome and Announcements

We welcome you this amazing morning to this house of God, this community of caring and love and service, whether it is your first time with us or whether you are a longtime pillar of the church… welcome, welcome, welcome. My name is Gary Brinn, and I am the Pastoral Intern here at First Congregational, a part of this congregation’s teaching ministry to the wider denomination. Rev. Dominic has been away this weekend, but should be landing at Logan even as we speak, and will be with us again next Sunday morning.

Please join us in the narthex after the service for coffee and conversation, and please join us again next week, when after the service we will have a barbeque! You can find a number of other announcements in the bulletin about events and ministries of the church. Here are a few additional announcements:

Invocation

God, we are your people, called to and calling out, cried for and crying out. Let your spirit fill this place as we weave our broken and incomplete lives, these fragile gossamer strands, together into a shimmering garment of love, of grace, of forgiveness. Force open our stubborn eyes, penetrate our stuffed ears, break down the doors of our hearts, so that we might receive the love you offer, so that we might offer it to one another, even as Jesus broke barriers with his radical love, even broke death itself. And so we pray the prayer that he taught us saying: “Our Father … trespasses … for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

Prayer of Confession

Divine Healer, we are your people, but our senses are dull. We become busy, we declare things to be important, we chase and we acquire. We often fail to see our mixed up priorities, the subtle webs of evil that connect our comfortable lives with those oppressed, those exploited. When we do see the connections, when we feel our guilt, we often turn away, dull the pain with some token gesture, some small luxury. And yet you call us again and again. Open our senses and let us see things as they really are, acknowledging in prayer our failures, big and small, acknowledging the opportunities we have missed to love.

Assurance of Pardon

As we have failed, so also did the disciples fail, those who heard the Good News first hand, at the feet of our savior. And as they were forgiven, so too are we forgiven, called always to our better selves, to a radical love, a radical joy that triumphs over death itself. Know that we are forgiven, we are loved, we are children of the Living God!

Prayers of the People

Amazing God, we come before you this morning stunned. How can we ever understand the love that reaches out, the love that is Christ, the love that breaks through our most stubborn hearts? How can any honor we pay you, any praise we offer, bridge the gap between our weakness and your love? How can we look honestly at ourselves and still turn to you?

And yet you call us, in our weakness, in our failures, in our fear, into a life of radical and abundant love! And though our thanks and praise may seem small, it is offered with all of our hearts… a leap over the boundaries of ourselves into a community of love that knows no limits… we praise you and thank you for the overflowing of miracle that is this moment, the next moment… that is life in your church!

And now as your church we offer up our individual and communal praise and petition, both in the silence of our hearts and in the spoken words as we light these candles, knowing that you hear, that you love, that you are with us always, patient, loving, eternal.
Amen.

Sermon

The epistle to Timothy speaks about sinners. In the gospel, Jesus is hanging out with sinners. The one lost sheep in a hundred is a sinner, so is the lost coin. We are inclined to focus on the rejoicing, the party held when the lost beloved is recovered. We are all about the prodigal son… and sometimes about the prodigal’s father. But we are decidedly not about the prodigal’s sin.

Sin is a hard one for progressive, modern, and dare I say, post-modern Christians. We are all about affirmation, about living full and fulfilled lives. And we like our Jesus happy-clappy, our Jesus on the felt-board surrounded by lambs and little children. Now, to be fair, we also like our morally outraged Jesus kicking butt in the Temple, throwing over tables… we’d like to believe there is a little of that Jesus in us, in fact there might have been a little of that Jesus in us in our younger days. We like little baby Jesus, we love Resurrection Jesus, and in a pinch, we can even deal with Good Friday Jesus, though sacrificial atonement makes some of us queasy. But we decidedly do not like the Jesus who looks at us and says you are a sinner, you are greedy and self-righteous and you have failed to hear what God is asking of you, you have failed to live as God would have you, you must repent. That Jesus is the Jesus of the hellfire and brimstone preachers, that is a Christianity of guilt, we’ll have none of that nonsense here.

But there it is… that preacher who walked around Galilee, who made his way down to Jerusalem, and died on a cross, that man announcing the Kingdom of God, that man who broke open death itself, did so with a consistent message. Repent! Change your lives! You are a sinner, but God is calling you… God wants you back. You are the lost sheep and I have been sent to find you.

Yes, you are a sinner. I am a sinner. Those are words we don’t say very often… but if we are to be true to the preaching of Christ as recorded in the gospels, we have to deal with it.

So what does Jesus mean by sin? Are we willing to buy into a theology of original sin, a transgression passed from one generation to the other? We rarely talk about it any more, but most of us have thrown off the concept of original sin as we have thrown off the notion that Eve, the first woman of our creation story, introduced it into human history… with a little help from a talking serpent. Maybe we are willing to accept the narrow rule-based understanding of sin that we see in some scriptures, an understanding that makes God a petty judge whose ego demands our adherence to a lengthy list of rules and standards. But we can see Jesus rejecting exactly this sort of understanding in his interactions with the scribes and Pharisees. If we are to be honest, we must admit that our Christian history is filled with this understanding of sin, even in our reformed tradition, and our conservative sisters and brothers in Christ still cling to this way of thinking. Maybe we are comfortable looking to Amos, to Deutero-Isaiah, to Micah… to a definition of sin that is found in our failure to do justice, to clothe and to feed and to visit… this is much more our speed. We can deal with that idea of sin… it is generic, it fits well with our guilt, and we can still look ourselves in the mirror.

I’m not sure how long it has been since you’ve taken a look at the Statement of Faith of the United Church of Christ. It’s not a creed, and we don’t recite it like one, so it might get by some of us, might get a little rusty. In reflecting on our scripture reading for this morning, I turned to my copy of Roger L. Shinn’s Confessing Our Faith. In it, Shinn devotes plenty of time to the concept of sin. And well he should! No matter which of the three forms of the Statement of Faith you prefer, the word sin is there three times…

From the 1981 Doxology form of the Statement:
“You [God] seek in holy love to save all people from aimlessness and sin.”
“ In Jesus Christ… conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to yourself.”
“You [God] promise to all who trust you forgiveness of sins and fullness of grace.”

Okay, Jesus speaks of sin and repentance. In our Statement of Faith sin is mentioned three times… and it just isn’t that long! Even as progressives, we’re just going to have to deal with the idea of sin… and not the generic “gee isn’t the world unjust” type of sin, but the down and dirty, look in the mirror, personal sense of sin. I am a sinner… and I must repent. I must apologize to God, to my neighbor, to myself, for my transgressions… the traditional sins of commission and of omission. We can deal with the details of what that looks like later… but sin and repentance are central to Christian identity. And that’s a good thing! The centrality of sin in the Good News is good news! As Shinn writes…

“The traditional doctrine of sin, so often assumed to be demeaning to human dignity, actually embodies a noble conception of self-hood. Sin is possible only for persons created in God’s image, empowered with freedom. The doctrine of sin tells us that we are not basically animals, dragged down by predatory instincts, insufficiently humanized. […] The Christian doctrine tells us that our deepest nature is love, and in sin we betray our true nature and destiny.”

When I was a boy, I used to hate report card day. I’d bring home perfectly good grades, average and sometimes above average grades, and my parents would look at me and tell me how disappointed they were. And the reason was always the same… “we know you are capable of better.” Now I’d never advocate this style of child-rearing… today we would find better ways to convey that message. But there it is… isn’t this what God is telling us? You can do better… and guess what… doing better leads to life in the kingdom, to a constant awareness of the divine… it’s more fun! I, God, want you to do better because I love you… just like your parents wanted you to do better because they loved you. Be more! Live to your fullest. Your sin is not in petty rule breaking… your sin is in not reaching for the stars.

As many of you know, during the summer I head off to camp. A couple of summers ago at camp I had an experience I’d like to share with you… one that might help us understand God’s call to us… God’s search for every lost sheep, every lost coin.

Now, summer camp isn’t about discipline, its about fun, so we try to be careful, to use a light touch. Jake wasn’t one of mine. He was an intermediate boy that year, and that year I was in charge of juniors, so this twelve year old boy was one with whom I had little interaction, and here it was, the night before a changeover. Changeovers happened every two weeks, when some several hundred of the campers would leave and a new batch would join those who remained. Jake was one of those leaving. I have to tell you, camp friendships are intense. You can spend more time with a friend in a few weeks at camp than you will another friend in an entire school year. This is especially true of your cabin mates. There are often a dozen boys sleeping in one room smaller than the bedrooms each of these boys have back home in their McMansions. So changeover is emotional. One custom the kids have developed over the years is to sign shirts for one another. But kids don’t just sign…

So there I am at flagpole, the glorious end of the day, and there is this boy with his signed white shirt. And boy is it signed. I don’t know who started it, whether it was Jake or a bunkmate, but this shirt was covered in profane, sexualized words and drawings. And he had it on in front of the whole camp, in front of the whole senior staff! I had to act. I pulled Jake out of the group, asked him to remove the shirt (he did have another underneath lest you think I ordered the child to strip!) and marched him up to the Cooler. The very name is ominous. The Cooler is the office of the camp owner/director. It is where serious issues went. And if you’d read this shirt, you’d have thought it pretty serious. Violent sexual images don’t belong on a twelve year old.

We never made it. Walkie-talkie traffic was jumping, things were busy. Jake’s shirt was not going to make it onto the radar of the camp director that night. So I turned the shirt in, and prepared to turn Jake loose. He was terrified. Was he going to be DNR’ed? Ironically enough, at camp DNR means “Do Not Re-admit.” Even worse, was I going to tell his Mom when she picked him up the next day? Now, this kid was bright, personable, good looking, but he didn’t know the ways of the world… he certainly never should have told me that he didn’t want me to tell his mother, because that became the very thing I determined to do. A mother who could inspire that sort of fear could certainly teach her son about appropriate language, especially given the attitudes toward women displayed on Jake’s shirt. But somehow, that’s not what happened. God happened instead, or the Holy Spirit to be exact, because I am convinced that I could never have done what came next.

I turned to Jake before he left and asked him one question. “Jake, is this the man you want to be?” His eyes teared up, he looked up at me, and quietly answered. “No.” And the words were put into my mouth again. “Jake, the man you want to be is already there. I know you don’t really know him yet, but he’s there. Let him out. Pretend like you are already him and you will be.” I’m not sure who was more stunned, me or Jake, but we both walked away in silence.
The next morning at breakfast Jake approached me. “Do you know what is going to happen to me?” I didn’t. I told Jake that he might get a free pass, that things were busy, that the shirt was gone and the lesson learned. He thanked me, and we spoke once again about the man he wanted to be.

Several hours later as kids rolled out of camp, this boy who I barely knew came running up, threw himself around my waist, thanking me, telling me goodbye, promising to be the man he knew he could be, that he wanted to be.

This, for me, is what God is saying to us, what Jesus is saying to us, when we are called to repentance. Are you the person you want to be? Are you the person you can be? Sure you fail… we make thousands of little decisions a day, and sometimes we get them wrong. I can be petty and self-centered, I can be lazy… I can sin and yet God is there, walking the fields, looking under the couch, calling my name… come back lost sheep, come back lost coin, I will rejoice when I have found you. Be all that you can be. I am calling you.

Sin is not some theological club used to batter and abuse us into submission… it is an understanding that we can be so much more, that to embrace the life that Christ invites us into we must repent of our failures and be scooped up into the arms of the Good Shepherd. I am a sinner and I rejoice in that fact, for it means I can do better. I can dare to love more, to give more, to be more like Christ. I have an opportunity to improve and to grow. Now that’s an idea that fits into our progressive way. God calls us into abundant life, Christ shows us how to live it, breaks through all of the barriers… all we have to do is say yes… dive into the waters of a baptism of repentance! Dare to be… and God will be there waiting, rejoicing. Amen.

Benediction

Go forth into the world, meeting each day as a God-given miracle, each person as a universe of love, each challenge as an opportunity to dive into the radical and amazing life in Christ, for as he was with us then, so is he now, and will be forever. Amen!