Pentecost 2, How do we respond?

its still a draft, the first, but it is a formulation of what will become a sermon.

How do we Respond

Front Yard 1 Juniper hole

My front yard needed something to replace the juniper that had taken over the front of the porch, toxic as it was to some of us living in the house. So I bought a plant to replace the juniper that was cut off last fall leaving a stump.

The Question of the sermon: how do we respond?

Through all the lessons for today a theme winds its way: How do we respond? Who do we respond to?

In Isaiah, God is ready for the people to respond to God, but they tell him to stay away. The Psalmist cries to the Lord for rescue from the enemies, God saves the Psalmist, and the Psalmist with all who fear the Lord, sing God’s praise. They remember who God is and whose they are.

In his letter to Galatians Paul recounts how we are to respond to the demands of the Law. We can set it aside. And how we are to respond to the Gospel of Jesus. We can trust it fully to justify us before God, for our faith is a gift from God and it alone is what we need to be counted among God’s own children, and heirs of God’s own Kingdom!

The Gospel story recounts how a mass of demons respond to Jesus’ arrival with great fear, how the herders respond to the drowning of their pigs in the lake, and how the towns people respond to Jesus driving the demons out of the man they’ve possessed for so long. Most significant is how the healed man responds. He sits at Jesus’ feet in worship, asks to come along, and when denied that request follows Jesus’ command to tell everyone all that Jesus has done for him! He becomes the one who proclaims in this foreign land Jesus’ Good News!

Trump

This past week Trump found himself in another brinkmanship showdown this time with Iran. He stood minutes away from ordering an attack that would break out in another long and costly war. Threatening had spiraled down to making good on extreme threats, had come to ordering a military preemptive response.

Despite advice from many corners to stop such brinkmanship showdowns, and this one in particular, Trump had carried on. Then a phone call from Fox News came, alerting Trump that his planned attack would certainly lose him the next election. So Trump stood down the military attack.

Front Yard 2 Snow-shovelled ‘salted the earth’

My front yard also needed something to fix a foot wide strip of grass along the driveway where no grass will grow. Each winter snow was shoveled to the side of the driveway, the only place to shovel it, and all the salt from the vehicles from the streets has been dumped on the lawn. Generally it’s suffered, but that first foot has been thoroughly salted earth. A few brave weeds try to conquer it each summer with little success. I had tried, as many others had, to ignore that I’d salted the earth there, but enough was enough.

So I planned to put in some kind of walk way, which would absorb the salt and snow melt, and not need to have anything grow there, without just extending the ‘salted earth’ effect another foot into the lawn.

Responses that deny anything is wrong

Sometimes it is just easier to deny that things are wrong.

In Isaiah, God stands ready and eager to have the people respond, but they do not. They go so very far as to tell God that they want God to stay far away.

Tevye, in the Fiddler on the Roof, when he is asked, proposes such a blessing for the czar: He asks God to bless the czar and keep him from them very far. Of course the Czar wishes no good for Tevye and his community. Good wishes Good for us all!

Sometimes it is just easier to assume that someone else is the source of the problem that we encounter, or to pretend there is no real problem at all, even as life itself seems to melt away to viruses, antibiotic resistant bacteria, or cancer.

Woman without the Cookies

A woman waiting to catch a flight bought herself a book and a bag of cookies, settled in a chair, and began to read. Suddenly the man beside her started helping himself to her cookies. Not wanting to make a scene, she read on and ate cookies. For every cookie she took, he took one, too. She got more irritated and muttered, “If I wasn’t so nice, I’d give him a piece of my mind!” She wanted to move the cookies to her other side but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. When only one was left, with a smile on his face and a nervous laugh, he took it and broke it in half.

Then he offered her half, and he ate the other. She snatched it from him and thought, “This guy has some nerve, and he’s so rude. He didn’t even show any gratitude!” When her flight was called, with relief she headed for the gate, refusing to look at the ungrateful “thief.” She boarded the plane and sank in her seat, reached in her bag to get a book to read and to forget about the incident.

Next to her book … was her full bag of cookies.

Front Yard 3 Porch covered HOLE

My remembering had not completed the whole picture. Under my front porch, with the ground for a good 12 to 20 feet around, there is a sinkhole in the corner of the foundation that had dropped a good three feet below grade. The sump pump was right there. Good. It pumped out the water about 12 feet away along the other wall right at the rhubarb plant just three feet from the porch corner where the juniper stood, so all the water freely flowed right back down the foundation to the sump pump again. No wonder the rhubarb and juniper did so well every year, no matter how dry a summer we had!

So I planned to fill that sink hole in with extra black dirt, but then thought that I’d better fill it with clay, so the water would not just seep through the black dirt.

Cookies, Clay, Good Creatures, possesed but redeemed by Jesus

Sometimes we not only get it wrong whose bag of cookies we are eating from, we forget the big hole that we have at home, right in our own hearts, and we simply do not remember what will fill it.

Clay is fine for my hole under the porch. But what of all the holes left by all the losses we encounter through life? What do we fill them with?

According to the Norsky Sunday School song, the workers wouldn’t work and the painters wouldn’t paint, so God in creating the earth thought the quickest thing to do was to fill it up with dirt.

But when God came to us humans, God did not create with just dirt. God breathed into us, gave us spirit and life, memories and regrets, and thoughts and hopes. God gave us the ability to fear and love God, and each other. God made us Goooood. Then when we were possessed by the demons of sin and evil, God sent Jesus, God’s own Son, to demonstrate for us what we can barely comprehend, but we can remember: God so loved the world and all of us in it that God rescues us from all the demons.

In our baptisms God claims us and makes us God’s own children. There is no greater thing that God can do for us.

ML Baptized I live in the face of all demons

Martin Luther knew about demonic powers. In his early adult life, after being near-struck by lightning he completely gave himself over to fighting against demonic powers. He became a monk serving God with his whole being, disciplining himself harshly, even flogging himself, to drive the devil’s demons out, and to make penance for the many sins he committed every day.

Then one day, Martin Luther again read the letter to the Galatians. That simple word, justified by faith, not by works, turned his whole understanding of his part in God’s Kingdom right-side-up. Luther read that it was not his doing or even believing the right things that saved him. Rather God acted, through Jesus, to create faith in him, a faith that trusts the story of Jesus’ sacrifice for him. This faith saved him.

Thereafter when Luther encountered demons he fought them off with a little word: “I am baptized” (although he said it in Latin). …He did not battle Satan with, “I believe in Christ” or “I am a Christian.” His confidence was not centered on his faith or beliefs, but on an act of God — God’s claim on his life given in baptism. (Stoffregen 2010- reworked )

After baptism, after we know we have faith given to us, then the battles against demonic powers are not ours any more. We simply surrender 100% of our lives to Christ, and the war is won, though the battles still rage on.

Lutherans believe that trusting God’s actions to create faith in us is the Gospel within the Gospel. It is the central Word of God by which we discern the Word of God in the rest of Scriptures, in the rest of literature, in the rest of our lives.

We respond to God’s gifts with fear, love and diligence: We pray as if everything depended on God. But we do not rest. We work as if the salvation of the world depended on us.

There are pathways to be built, holes to fill, grass to sow and plants to plant. There are broken hearts to heal. There are broken dreams to re-form into something possible. There are the denials of sin and evil to overcome … not with more threats, but with love and the promise of healing.

Like the man free of the demons, we each have a story of God’s work in us to heal us and give us new life. Our work is to tell our stories, which are really God’s story of God loving us, and to tell it with an abundance of love for each other, even love for our enemies.

Front Yard 4 Remembering the whole project together

As I shared with Tim my plans to plant that replacement for the juniper, I remembered that the sink hole would be filled part way with the clay dug out from along the drive where the earth was salted. The whole area where I wanted to put that plant would be a construction site, and it needed to be this summer.

I also remembered that all the ground around the porch, rhubarb, and the new plant spot needed to be sloped with fresh black dirt so that water drained away from the building towards a trench in the lawn that would take it to the street.

I also remembered that flagstone was possibly the best for that path: solid but with space between the rocks to allow water and salt to seep down.

Well, I was reminded so I remembered, which was just as good.

So I went to Burnco to chose stone with Tim, and then got out of the way as he took his three days plus to pull out the juniper stump with the truck, dig out the salted black dirt and 8 inches of clay along the drive, toss that clay and more under the porch more than filling the hole. He then layered the bottom 6 inches of the resulting trench along the drive with road crush and topped that with a layer of sand. With help from Richard lifting the heavy rock to save Tim’s back he danced the irregular stones into a pattern for the walk and filled in the gaps with more sand. Then he took new black dirt, re-sloped the grass area to be, and planted seeds.

That’s when I stepped back in to help ensure the area was watered lightly many times each day. A week later the seeds have sprouted.

Remember that was all to replace the juniper with the plant I bought two weeks earlier. Meanwhile it had to be planted elsewhere, to be out of the way, and so as not to die in it’s pot.

Respond by remembering, working, fearing, praising and telling

How do we respond? Sometimes it’s all about remembering.

Remembering how God created us, made us good, and sent Jesus to save us from our sins. Then we can see the steps, hard as they may be to bring living beauty back into our lives where something toxic has grown and even the ground has been salted.

Sometimes, remembering will remind us that there is a great deal of work to be done. God needs us to be the hands of Christ to make things happen, to make the Goodness of Creation possible also today. Often that will be something completely new, un-imagined until we see the desperate need of those around us.

As we remember God’s great gifts given to us, we will be fearful, awestruck, and we will give God praise. We will go out to tell all everything that God has done for us, healing us of our every ill, naming us as heirs to God’s great promises.

Amen

Pentecost 2

There are demons everywhere, the power of evil. There are weeds everywhere even in beauty.

Thoughts

The lessons present powerful images, critical issues, and connections to issues today are profound.

This is a sermon not to missed, not to be sloughed off as something ordinary, or made into something other than what the lessons present: The reality that is ours: God verses Evil in our own hearts> God wins every time, and it always looks like Evil wins, because our measure is tainted, while God’s measure of winning (and everything else) is pure, simple, clear and based in truth.

I could just jump to write a sermon, it is after all already Saturday morning, the week being a series of tasks that once started commanded my full energy-time-focus so that here I am, not starting with the sermon process, but putting it to paper (so to speak) for the first time this week.

Reminder of the steps I take at a minimum to prepare to write a sermon:

1. read the texts at least once through.

2. re-read each text, highlighting in yellow all the crucial phrases, and in green the really outstanding phrases or words, so that in a glance I can see the text again with the significant points clear before me.

3. I read others’ take on the lessons. This presumes that I have already through the years done many proper exegeses of the texts. I wish I had time to delve back into the original language but those resources were jettisoned when there was no room for me in the Inn.

4. I develop an outline from the crucial ideas of the lessons, connected to this world, connected to this week, and this congregation (which sometimes is an actual congregation and sometimes, without a congregation I place it in any one of many congregations I am a part of this week): I organize, prioritize, and start to develop the flow, the point, the purpose of the sermon, and the story of the sermon as a whole. All this answers one question first: What will the sermon proclaim?

5. I rework the outline, to that crucial question: does everything help or hinder proclaiming what the sermon will proclaim.

6. I look again at the outline, and sometimes the paragraphs I’ve written to fill out some points: I ask: does this proclaim Gospel or Law. Does it proclaim the freedom from sin and the bondage to Christ? Because if it is the other way around, it needs to be fixed. This is often a matter of a few degrees, and it is so easy to allow one’s writing and preparation slip away from Gospel into ‘laying on the people what they must do to please God.’

7. I write the outline into paragraphs.

8. repeat 6

9. I shorten the sermon to 13.35 minutes give or take 5 minutes. While shortening I use the criteria of the question in 4. Everything that can be dropped or shortened or tightened, so that the Sermon remains the proclamation it is intended, that’s what’s done to shorten the result. This is where good thinking, good writing, and excellent language skills come into play. The editor.

10. Then I repeat 6 again, and invariably there are a few degrees that need to be made. When there is not, I become suspicious of my ability to see the Gospel.

11. I repeat 9 and 10 until I run out of time or energy. Sometimes, rarely, I need to add an idea back in, or find a completely new idea. Unfortunately, if that happens, that usually happens Sunday morning, requiring 9 and 10 to be repeated yet again. It helps to know I can preach well from an outline, so if I need to jettison the whole thing and start over, I only need an outline. But that’s got to be significant, because … well see 9 and 10: doing those on the fly is nearly impossible!

These ideas from the highlighting:

From Isaiah 65:1-9

God is ready. What is it like when God is not?

God calls Here I am! But the people are rebellious. As always? Or often!

The people follow their own devices. Today the language means something interestingly different and significant: the people follow all their electronic devices, instead of being able to think clearly for themselves, and like following GPS directions, they/we often end up someplace wrong! Which applies to the original meaning of following their own devices.

The people provoke me: and in the sense of the old law: sacrificing in gardens, incense on bricks (other god worship … see devices above), sit in tombs (see the Gospel: the man who lives in tombs), eat pig with abominable things in the broth.

Then the staple of worshiping other gods prevalent still today: the people say to God: keep to yourself. That’s Tevye’s blessing for the Czar: may God bless him and keep him from us very far!

But then the real kicker: Stay away God, for I am TOO HOLY for you!

God’s response: smoke in my nostrils, fire that burns all day. In the wake of forest fires leaving the air difficult to breathe we know how putrid and tiresome smoke in the nostrils can be.

How does God respond!? Look out! (here is the temptation to become the proclaimer of the LAW:

God will repay, I will measure into their laps as they have done to me!

But then that extreme judgment is taken back: and the whole is spared the judgment of the few.

Instead, the chosen will settle the land of those who worship other Gods.

And from that we have ages of wars over whose land it is anyway. As we all forget that it is God’s creation to be shared equitably!

From Psalm 22:19-28

The cry, the deliverance, the freedom, the praise.

God does not despise the poor their poverty! Unlike the world!

The Psalmist will praise God, and the poor will eat and be satisfied.

All who FEAR the Lord will praise God!

All the ends of the earth will REMEMBER! That one’s green!

REMEMBER, it is not to learn something entirely new, though it may seem so, it is to remember God as creation’s creator, as faith’s giver, as life’s breather into us!

And Dominion (green) is God’s. All that we seek to take as our dominion, all that is false, corrupt and the core of the demonic! All dominion is God’s.

I had a friend who came to me amidst great lies and gaslighting and worse, and proclaimed to me that God was not out there somewhere, but in her. So that she could create a false reality and make it true! It is the same kind of thing that the movie Vice portrayed Bush and Cheney shows motivated them, as one must surmise may motivate Trump: the unitary executive theory claims that if the president does it, it is legal. Which is a bunch of hooey and trouble for everyone.

From Galatians 3:23-29

The wonderful Galatians: the source of Luther’s realization (remembering) that we are not saved by what we do, but by faith, which is what God does to us.

There was the LAW, imprisoning and guarding us, but with Christ we are freed from the LAW, we do not need it?, at least we are not saved by it.

Instead we are clothed in white clothes of Christ’s righteousness. We are justified by faith (which is God’s gift to us.)

There is no distinction upon which civilizations are built: Jew or Greek (nationality or land of origin or culture practiced), slave nor free, NOT even male distinct from female! All ALL are ONE in CHRIST!

And we are all HEIRS, offspring of Abraham (by God’s act, not by blood), and heirs according to the PROMISE. The Promise is after all that by which Abraham became significant for us all in the first place!

From Luke 8:26-39

There is work everywhere, even finding the light.

First Jesus has passed into the foreign territory and there encounters a demon, not just a single demon but a legion of demons.

This is a serious case: the demon has possessed him for a long time, and many more demons have entered the man. He no longer wears clothes, lives in a home (but tombs instead, the the OT notes). The people have sought to control him with chains and shackles, but like a person on Meth he breaks the bonds and goes wild. See the movie, A Beautiful Boy (2018 with Steve Carell), if you wish to begin to understand Meth and other drugs’ destruction of and attraction in a young person’s life.

The demon knows Jesus is God’s Son. Demons may be evil, but they do know the truth of what they are and who God is. They just present it differently to those they possess.

The demons want to know what Jesus has to do with them. They expect to be tormented, as they torment their victims!

Jesus asks first what the demons’ name is. The name is the handle. It’s sort of like computer programming. If you do not know the name of a procedure or event or function or container it is really hard to even start programming or make anything happen, without getting stuck in the goo or gui.

So the demon gives up it’s name, and then begs not to be driven back into the abyss. Speculation is rife on what that means, with plenty of scifi to go with it. But the result is the demon begs to be sent into the pigs, Jesus does that, and the unclean pigs drown themselves. They are not that dumb, they know a demon when they see one! And the demon ends up in the abyss anyway. Water is the pre-creation void and abyss welling up from below.

So Jesus sends them to the abyss after all and the difference is that a whole herd of unclean animals gets eradicated in the process. Of course we eat pork. And we understand the waste. So is this cleansing good for the poor pig farmer? Is it fair? Is it necessary? All questions beyond the Gospel of the day, but worth another look at some other time than in a sermon, maybe?

The result is clear: the people of the country side are seized by fear, and they want Jesus to leave them. The thing that the demon wanted. The thing that the people of the Isaiah lesson do to God, which raises God’s ire!

And Jesus leaves.

For these people who want nothing more of him, Jesus leaves a witness and no better witness is to be found. The man, once demon possessed and driven mad and wild for a long time, now healed, tells all the people all that Jesus has done for him.

It is those that know their illnesses most closely and clearly, who Jesus heals, who can tell the wonders of God most poignantly, so that God can create faith in many more people.

And those people can recognize their illnesses, honestly, and they will be healed as well.

That’s the Gospel: If you do not know your illness, there are plenty of people who can tell you the power of Jesus to heal, how it healed so many people. Thus armed and emboldened, many will be able to face their own horrific illnesses, the ones that drive people to dishonesty, destruction, and false claims of being healthy, even while cancer, viruses, and diseases eat the very life out of them.

And to heal us, sometimes there are things that we or others must lose in the process, even things that are our livelihoods. Instead we are left with the bread of life, the Good News of all that Jesus has done for us.

Even as the sun sets Golden and we lose another day of the few allotted us, all is well.

Trinity: 42, Chocolate or Love

What do we dream of

What, if it were to take place for you this week, would fill your eyes and heart with tears … tears that could hardly stop, tears for all things lost, and tears of unbounded joy.

Yearn for the Light, but move away from it?

Age of Adeline

In the movie Age of Adeline a woman stops aging as a result of a car accident at the age of 29. This starts out to be the fulfillment of a dream that many of us may have: to live without the effects of aging. The movie follows her life as those around her age and she does not, as she is able to accumulate wealth that others simply cannot, for she has time and through the years an abundance of wisdom. She remains a young and beautiful woman inside and out as she accumulates decades of life with no end in sight.

Ah, to have it so. No arthritis, no forgetfulness, no impending death, no illness, no drain of one’s energy, no need to be impatient with life, but to be able to travel, to enjoy, to work, to read, to write, to create; all without the pressure of knowing it will not be so someday, for one will eventually lose the ability to do all of these wonderful things, yet one will live on.

Today we celebrate the Holy Trinity

This Sunday is the only Sunday of the entire church year that we celebrate a doctrine of the Christian Church. The doctrine of the Trinity is the core doctrine of the Church. The doctrine that defines more than anything else what is Christian and what is not.

The spectacular Doctrine: relationship

God is Three Persons in one Godhead. So God is one God, but God is three. Three yet one. That’s a paradox. What usually cannot be is: Three describes one and one describes three.

Martin Luther spoke of the two sacraments, and then he would name Baptism and Holy Communion, and Marriage and Confession, and on he would go until he had named most of the seven sacraments of the Catholic church that he tried to reform, had booted him out, named him a nonperson who could be killed by anyone who wished, and it would not be murder, and who Martin Luther demonstrated it’s corruption as he corrected it and established churches similar but improved, sort of. Still filled with sinners, even if everyone is a God made saint.

That kind of numbering of the Trinity, Three in One, is not what Martin Luther was all about in naming the Sacraments. This is us being as clear as we can be about God who really is beyond any clear explanation.

What we know and affirm is that God and all of creation is at it’s core about relationship.

The lessons speak about Trinity and about life.

In our lesson from Proverbs Wisdom calls out to all who live, to know her. (As the original Hebrew ascribes gender to her): She is God’s first act of creation. She witnessed all God’s acts of creation and she was God’s delight as she delighted in God’s inhabited world and in the human race.

Proverbs was written long before Jesus walked the earth, before the triadic expressions of God in the NT writings, and before the doctrine of the Trinity was formalized starting with the Nicene Creed of 325, revised in 381, and settled under the leadership of the three Cappadocian Fathers in its current form by the end of the fourth century. In Proverbs we have a similar relationship between God and wisdom as Arianism understood the relationship between God and Jesus; that God created Wisdom and Jesus. This understanding was not accepted by the wider church. It was supplanted first by the understanding that Jesus is fully God, present always as one of the three persons of the one God. The last piece of the doctrine to be settled was that the Holy Spirit, often understood to include the OT traditions of Wisdom, was also not a creation of God, but existed with God always, the third person of One God, the Trinity.

Even in Proverbs we see how significant it is that God delights in Wisdom and how Wisdom delights in the human race. Creation is all about God’s delight and God’s glory, all portions of what love is.

The Psalm celebrates God’s glory, and presents that same glory in lesser portion given to humans. It is stated that God has put all things under the humans’ feet. Today we would understand that this is not just dominion over, but responsibility to preserve, nurture, and ensure the survival of. We would no longer embrace any idea that we are to exploit creation for our selfish benefit to the detriment of future generations or the future of creation. Which is also a good portion of what love is all about, love for future generations and for all of creation.

The Gospel of John is chosen because in Jesus’ Farewell words, given after the Last Supper and before his arrest, he gives words to the trinitarian God; God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Today we might better express that as God the Parent recognizing first the equality of all genders, second our innate limits when it comes to knowing anything about gender for God, and third the powerful impact our providing God a gender has towards gender inequality.

The one powerful and crucial point that John’s Gospel makes is that it is God the Holy Spirit who continues to reveal to us more of the truth, as we are able to bear it. There is a kindness in God’s approach, revealing to us what we can bear; and we would expand that to say, revealing to us what we can grasp, understand, and make use of. It is always helpful to remember that God is not ever done teaching us about the truth.

At no time do we posses the truth of God in its entirety. At best we have a good start. That is a powerful reminder that humility is always a good starting point and ending point for us. Which is also a good portion of what love is all about.

Our lesson from Romans is one of the enduring passages of wisdom, hope and love that Paul provided to the Church. First that we are justified before God not by what we do, but by the faith given to us by the Holy Spirit. Second that what we value and can boast about is not us, but God, and not our accomplishments, but God’s, and not in our glories, but we boast about our sufferings.

And here we encounter what appears to be the upside down, and inside out logic of God’s relationship to us and our relationship to our own experiences. Who ever heard of boasting not about our successes, but about what others have made us suffer! The Word of God though is right side up, outside out, inside in. It is our thinking that is topsy turvy. It is our taking over God’s place by thinking that our successes are what constitutes real glory. No Paul makes it clear, we followers of Christ know that our suffering is what we can boast about, because suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

God’s love begins with the Holy Spirit pouring love into us and it grows through suffering that begets endurance that begets character that begets hope.

And hope is an essential portion of love, which the Holy Spirit pours into us!

Relationships

Through all the generations of Christians, we have utilized the doctrine of the Trinity to clarify that though we cannot know many things absolutely about God, as the Holy Spirit continues to reveal to us more and more as we can bear more truth, we can affirm whole-heartedly that the basis of God’s own being is not as an independent God. God exists in relationship with God’s self, with all three persons together.

As we are created in God’s image, God intends for us to exist in relationship as well, in relationship with God, in relationship to each other, and in relationship to all of creation.

Though they involve suffering, endurance, character and hope supported by love, our relationships with God, each other and all creation are to be fundamentally relationships of delight; which is perhaps the best portion of love.

All the things that we could dream of

Work success,

wealth

reputation

security

enjoyment of life’s opportunities and options.

(You can fill in examples or stories about each of these.)

The one thing that the doctrine of the Trinity affirms is THE EVENT of our dreams.

A relationship of love.

It can be a life partner, a spouse.

Or a companion, or a person with whom one can share one’s life’s work.

There is a reason that movies, books, poems, yearnings, and our hopes so often land on falling in love.

We fill life with all kinds of other strivings and measures of success.

But our life is made up of what we are: we are made in God’s image. We are made for relationship.

Our lives are made to make sense only when we love.

It is not that we need to be ‘in love’ which is indeed a life changing matter. We are made to love other people.

Not just the people we like.

But the people, all the people around us. Even our enemies.

The meaning of life, not 42, or chocolate: but love

What really is the meaning of life??! The Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy presents it as the completely random and meaningless number 42. Some people say with taste buds delighted and a bit of energy renewed from the caffeine and sugar that it is chocolate.

On our death beds, almost everyone, who has opportunity to tells us, reports, we will find no solace in the many things that we have striven for and achieve or not.

Not in Work success, wealth reputation, security, enjoyment of life’s opportunities and options, nor anything else.

On our death beds only one part of life will gives us solace, comfort and a sense of union with God’s universe. Only one thing will afford us a sense that all is well, all is well, indeed all manner of things are well. The one thing that will give us a sense of what God has had for us all along is the love we have given to others, and the love we have received.

Adaline Looses the Essential of Life: to Love and be Loved

Adaline’s ideal life, where the ravages of age do not touch her, does not progress so ideally. Because she does not age she suffers profound losses. She loses the ability to keep her own name. She loses the ability to develop life-long friends, not even pets. But most of all she loses the ability to love and be loved; and most precious of all, to face suffering and one’s impending death with someone she loves, with someone who loves her. She has great opportunities to delight in all of creation, but her tears that continue to increase in intensity are of losing the meaning of her life; she is unable to love.

The cinematic highlight of the movie arrives when she must decide, whether to risk choosing to love, as she is able, even though she will never grow old with the one she loves; even though if she is found out, she will be treated as a specimen to be studied, probed and experimented on. Can she, will she dare risk that suffering, in order to finally be able to love someone?

Jesus’ Command: Be as God Created us to be

This Trinity Sunday we celebrate that God is a God of three persons in one godhead. Which sounds paradoxical, but that is how it is with relationships of love. We are people meant to love one another.

Jesus’ command to love our neighbour as ourselves, and even our enemies, is not a command that we need to follow … or else!

It is a command that we should follow if we want to not just to be happy, but because it is who God created us to be! As we love others we will be right with God’s universe and with God’s Will for us.

The words sincerely said: “I love you” do not just give us life, but withholding love from another robs them of God’s intent for them. So wherever you are in your life, know this: God the Parent, Jesus, and Holy Spirit, all three, in one voice that shakes the greatest molecule at the beginning and ends of the universe … God says most sincerely to each of us, “I love you.”

Now it’s okay to cry with tears that cannot stop, for both the suffering and pain of all that has been lost, for the pain of all that never was which should have or could have been, and with all the joy of all the love that has been, is and always will be. It’s always okay to cry those tears of loss and overwhelming joy. This is what being at Peace with God looks like!

For this God created us, to be delighted with one another, with all creation, and with God, three in one.

Amen

Readings and Psalm

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

A Name for Ourselves: God’s Gift

Who are we? Do we need to make a name for ourselves? Will we ever be satisfied with God’s Word present among us?

Good Potential

God created the universe. On the seventh day God rested and declared it was all good. God created us with such potential: the potential to reach for the stars, the potential to love one another, ourselves and even our enemies. Our power of imagination to see what is not and strive to accomplish things new and wonderful carries us from one generation to the next. We can share the breath of beauty, the wind of hope, and the fire of the future with one another.

Evil Potential

God also gave us freedom, so that we have the potential to reject the gifts God gives us. The goodness of life is fragile. There are so many ways for life to go wrong. We can choose to dive into the depths of darkness, to hide our false pride and our self-centered arrogance, to wallow in the despair that consumes generation after generation. We can succumb to addictions and armed conflict, to abuse and terror that causes PTSD in its victims, to Gaslighting, bearing false witness, and even murder. We have the potential to destroy all of life on earth, but the real destruction are all the avenues we create for life to implode on itself.

Jane

Jane sat at the table in her favourite restaurant, enjoying the familiar smells that reminded her of the news she had received here. Years ago, on this very spot she’d opened her letter of acceptance into university, the first one in her family, ever. That shaped everything about her life, now a Doctor of History, a professor emeritus, a famous author. Later that same day years ago she’d received the other news that formed her life and was bringing it to an indecent early end. She had MS. She had lived with it for so long, many years in a wheelchair, but now her systems were slowly giving out. Her name given to her at her baptism is Jane.

The White Purity of Birch, The Bleach of Life is not so pleasant a white.

Babel Blessing

In the lesson from Genesis we read how the people came together to build a marvelous city and a tower that would reach the heavens, in order to make a name for themselves. They also distrusted God’s rainbow, and wanted security from any future flood. God comes to bless the people with confused speech, with different languages, so that their prideful project will halt. Divided the people disperse far and wide to inhabit the earth. Ever since, we create divisions and conflict more easily than we build healthy communities. We have built more than a tower of Babel as our fossil fuel consumption produces more pollution than the earth can tolerate, resulting in violent climate change. Our civilization is built on time bombs that destroy people.

George and Emily

George and Emily walked the beach, they’d grieved the addiction of their daughter for an eternity, grieving the birth of grandchildren, each lost to foster care. Now they’d received the phone call they’d feared. Jenny had overdosed on drugs yet again. This time she had not recovered. Their names are George and Emily and they gave Jenny her name at her baptism.

Languages A Gift

Today we recognize the power of languages. They keep us apart and distinct. Yet when we live in a second language, we experience not just different grammar and words. We experience more of the world that God created good. Different languages carry different pieces of the marvels of this creation which we can barely fathom in a full lifetime.

First Pentecost

That first Pentecost the disciples proclaimed in their own language the wonders of God’s work for everyone. God inspired the listeners to hear the disciples in each listener’s own language. As at Babel God confused the language of the people to save them from their pride, so at the first Pentecost God overcame the language barrier in order that people could hear and understand each other and the Good News of what God had done in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Language is powerful.

Greta

Greta was born in Jena, in East Germany. A Christian, at great cost she had dedicated her life to serving Christ. Working with youth she excelled, until jealous gossip was started about her. Under intense pressure and unearned shame Greta slowly lost her confidence, then her sense of self, and finally her sense of reality. She succumbed to a half living state of senseless babble that sometimes erupted into excruciatingly painful clarity about what had been done to her, and how helpless she was. Her name, given to her at her baptism, is Greta. She remained Greta even as she lost her mind to the horrendous cruelty of gossip that pretends to know reality beyond God’s goodness.

Clarity in Miracles

Like the disciples we always want God to be more clear. The words are plain enough. Yet God rarely leaves it to just the words. The signs, the miracles, that accompany the Good News are remarkable. We may not recognize what God is doing, but we always hope that in the end all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well, for God created the universe and said it was good.

That first Pentecost so that people could not miss the miracle of the Holy Spirit given to God’s children, God marked the disciples with tongues of fire.

Small Miracles, double sun, leaves growing.

Fire

One of the distinct gifts God gave humans is Fire. It is powerful, both for good and for evil. God spoke to Moses from a burning bush, guided the people through the wilderness with a pillar of flame, and will cleanse us at our judgment with God’s purifying fire.

As we have breathed these past weeks, the result of climate change brings more wildfires, and more smoke that covers vast areas, inhibiting life in so many ways. Humans are not the only ones affected by wildfires. The smoke reduced the available solar power, a nuisance at least for those whose electricity is produced by solar power. The greater loss was to the plants whose basis of life depends on photosynthesis.

In the face of life so challenged, God finds ways to bless us, with hope.

Sam and Allicia

Sam and Allicia both lost their childhoods to wars of terror and genocide. In their teens they each survived the squalor and hunger of refugee camps, their families having all been killed. Sponsored as immigrants in their late teens by a Lutheran congregation in Edmonton, they met, shared the struggles of finding their way, fell in love, were married and are expecting their first child this summer. With different mother tongues they communicate in Canadian English. Their names given to them at their baptisms are Sam and Allicia. They have chosen names for their first child at its baptism, in memory of their families lost.

Our Name

Though we reach for the stars, to make a name for ourselves, to succeed at what we attempt, even to make life more than it is, there is no name that we can make for ourselves greater than what God has already given us. With tongues of fire God has marked us, anointed us, and called us.

Three Confirmed, we stand with them

As these three, Tristan, Connor, and Aysiah, were marked with the cross in their baptisms, and now they stand as young people, maturing, beginning to accept responsibility for their own being, so we each were marked. At the right time we also stood on our own to respond to the gifts that God gives us, promising to receive, abide in, act out of, and grow into the people God calls us to be. Today we still stand, not on our own as if our faith were merely personal or private. Rather we stand as one faith community united by the fire of the Holy Spirit. As we stand with one another in love, so we stand with these three young people. Their names, given to them in their baptisms, are Tristan, Connor, and Aysiah.

Our name: potential as love

Again today we share with them the name God has given us all. There is no greater name. It is not a name we could make for ourselves. It is the name that God gave us in our baptisms and shares with us each day. God names us God’s children.

The language of our name is not limited to one of the diverse languages that God gave us to propel us across the earth, to inhabit it and do well by it. The language of our name is love, in all its rainbow colours.

In our love for one another we best reflect the One who abides with and in us, the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit. It is in our love for our enemies that we dance with the miraculous power of life which the Spirit pours down on us in the form of flames of fire.

As we do what it takes to love one another, though the world roils with conflict, abuse, and destruction, we rest in the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit. We have no cause to be troubled. Nor do we suffer the greatest enemy: the denial of evil’s potential. Nor do we need to fear flood nor fire nor anything, for God is at work to keep evil in its place and God in God’s place … and to keep us on earth with and for each other.

Our name given to us in our baptisms is children of God. We are the inheritors of the miracle that brings life to be with a word, with a breath, with a breeze, with a fire.

Amen

Pentecost: Thoughts Toward a Sermon or more

Genesis 11:1-9

Thoughts

One language,

One language, one gathering,
making a name
making a name for themselves:

God helps

God helps them avoid disaster: nothing will stop them! Not even them destroying the planet or at least life on it.
God saves us by ending it, prayer answered: NO!
God comes to see the city, the tower, and God is alarmed? Displeased? Not said: just God ends it: confuses languages and scatters them.

Divisions vs community

Divisions over conflict is EASY, building community despite differences is the challenge, the miracle that shows God is at work with us!

Confuses Gramma [r]s

God confuses their language, into different words, sounds, gramma(r)s, they leave off the tower building.

God Blesses us, even in our conflicts, with the healing power of the earth

Acts 2:1-21

Thoughts

Language

HS with ability to hear and understand, unites people from every language into the church,
All hear in their own language: not glossolalia! But clear speech beyond language barriers!

Fire:

All that it is: God’s presence, God’s guide in wilderness, mark of humans, gathered at campfire safe from animals who fear fire, fire that purifies by consuming dross, as judgment purifies us of sin, by consuming it with fire.
Fires burn, destroys: revenge of the earth to climate change by burning fossil fuels beyond our share. We’ve built more than than the tower of babel. We’ve setup the earth to turn on all the life on it, us included.
Fires: prevented fought down, now the fuel available is generation’s worth, burns all at once and the sun is blotted out.
Solar power: winter 1.2 to 3 maybe 4 amps. Now in mid day 15 easy.
But with fire’s smoke, down to 3 or 1 or less.
Solar power, the basis of photosynthesis; the growth of plants, upon which the chain of food is built, from smallest life forms, to plants, to small bugs, to small animals to larger animals to largest to the most dangerous: humans.

Prophesy of Joel:

All will prophesy, sons and daughters, slaves men and women; old men will dream dreams (usually stop because there is no hope that the dreams can be fulfilled or seen through, a surrender of the world to the younger generation) but here: old men dream and set to being the fulfillment of dreams, God’s dreams.

Portents:

blood, fire, smoky mist, moon to blood,
Lord’s Day
before the Lord’s glorious day!

Be saved

Call upon him and all will be saved!

John 14:8-17 [25-27]

Thoughts

Satisfied

We will never be satisfied, but we continually hope.
Even when what we ask for is right in front of us, we ask for more.

Miracles

DO help us believe that Jesus is God is the Holy Spirit is Jesus … is working in our midst
Ask, I will give. But so much asked for and not ever yet given.
Be careful what you ask for, sometimes Jesus gives us what we ask for: we ask for foolish things, impossible things, things that will hurt others, and Jesus answers NO. Other times Jesus gives us what we ask for and we do not recognize it.

Love and Obey

Love is to obey Jesus’ commands: to love your neighbour as yourself and your enemy!

Lawyer in court – Advocate – Of New

God gives advocate (lawyer in God’s Court for us), who will be with us forever, though Jesus goes away.
We see HS, the advocate, the Spirit of Truth! Able because God is in us, HS in us
World cannot receive him, does not see him,
New, always present
Jesus tells us, so we will know, but the Advocate will be with us, reveal new things, make us see new things, remind us of Jesus!

No worries Mate

Do not be troubled, do not be afraid (Fear is the greatest enemy), anxiety gets people to behave in bad ways.

1. Thoughts Towards an Outline

Fire:

the season, the ban, the power, the saving power – distinctively human
the destroying power, wildfires, smoke, solar blocked, photosynthesis, stopped, dross, judgment where sins are burned away like dross, leaving us pure, ready for the New Jerusalem.
Spirit
Ruah, breath, spirit into inert forms →life, inspiration, spirit means vivified, and for God’s good purposes.

Language

Language, the basis of communication, but more, the basis of thought! New language, new thoughts, new history new manners:
2nd language: a world opens up when one lives in it.
Computer languages: a whole new world opens up, but it is not filled with people, but imaginations made statically moving, reading conjures up the creative imaginative mind. TV rests the mind and slowly atrophies thoughts and creativity; computer interactions with games, deepens the narrowing of the thought, away from others, to chips. Everyone knows chips are not healthy, not potato chips, not chocolate chips, though tastey; neither computer chips alone.
But as a tool, as an avenue to other people, to expand imagination in writing and conceiving uses, ways to be used, ways to be helpful to others: first text to talk: allow blind woman to continue significant work in the community (PR),

Reaching to the Heavens

*All that we dream of is seen in our dream of reaching the stars*

Reaching to the Heavens, the dream of humans since we peered at the stars outside the safety of the cave.
Space travel.

Conflict and Differences

Conflict and Differences : Blessed by God, caused by God to save us from our own selves.
Limits on name for ourselves: God’s blessing

Working out the bugs

*Misquotes in even the smoky photos*: upper left, that’s no helicopter.

There are some bugs to work out, of course, these are just rough thoughts scratched together.

Enemies — Love

June 2, 2019 Be One: Love your enemies Easter 7
The story setup

Nice Ice Left Over
Hostiles
In the movie, the Hostiles, set in 1892 starting from New Mexico a small band of soldiers and their charges, their enemies, ride across the wilds of the west north to Montana.
In 1876, just 14 years earlier General Custer made his last stand in the Battle of the Greasy Grass. Before and after that battle both the army and the Indians, (or indigenous warriors we might better refer to them now) engaged in warfare as despicable as ever. Soldiers, non-combatants, women and children were captured, raped, tortured, and killed without reason.
The captain in charge of this little band moving north had lost his wife and children to the Indians, learned their languages, joined the fighting against the Indians, killed, slaughtered and revenged death upon death. He lived out his hate under the auspices of the army and he did it better than most.
Arriving at a fort in New Mexico with captured Indians, he receives new orders. Orders he cannot stomach.
The captain is ordered to escort and protect his enemy, a chief, along with his family, who’ve been held captive 7 years in New Mexico, back to the chief’s home ground in Montana. There the captain is ordered to release his enemy, to give the chief back his freedom.
This chief is responsible for the death of the captain’s family. He has engaged in slaughtering settlers, among them women and children, as well as scalping and torturing his victims. He has revenged the killing of his people as effectively as the captain.
The captain can hardly believe his orders. He rebels and refuses, threatening to resign his commission. Then it’s pointed out that he will not be allowed to resign. Instead he will be courtmarshalled and stripped of his pension. At that, against every angry bone in his body, the captain begrudgingly accepts his orders.
He obeys.
As they ride across the wilds of the west north to Montana the captain puts his male prisoners, the chief and his son, in chains. The chief is old and riddled with cancer. He will soon die, which is the reason his request to be allowed to return home is granted.

The view south as we move north
Similar stories nonfiction setup
There are so many stories like this one. The movie is fiction. But is a fictional story filled with truth. There are so many non-fiction stories like this one.
M&B Mizen
In May 2008 16 year old Jimmy Mizen from South London was brutally attacked and killed by another boy. His parents could hardly believe it.
http://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Elements_Love-Your-Enemies-Stories.pdf
Gee Walker
In 2005 by two racist thugs torturously murder Anthony Walker, 18, with an axe. His parents could not believe it.
http://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Elements_Love-Your-Enemies-Stories.pdf

It may seem ordinary but …
Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas
In 1944 one evening in German occupied France, Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas preached a fiery sermon against the persecution of Jews and deportation of French men as forced labourers. The following night he was arrested by the Gestapo. He was sent to a detention camp at Compiègne from where most prisoners were transported to concentration camps in Germany.
http://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Elements_Love-Your-Enemies-Stories.pdf
The normal course:
There is no life lived without being hurt by others. Our normal and natural response, built into us by millennia of survival instinct, is to allow hurt to grow into anger, and terrible hurt to grow past anger into rage. Over time, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, we instinctually allow anger and rage to grow into determined revenge. Revenge may become polite comeback. But, fuelled by hatred, our anger becomes vicious payback, just reckoning, and even, in the extreme, murder or even mass murder.
We find polite comebacks and even vicious payback short of killing to be somehow expected and acceptable.

Stand Tall in the Dark
God’s Doch
To that acceptance God says a strong DOCH! But let me put that in a context that will perhaps help us understand exactly what God does with our natural urge towards revenge, polite or vicious, or even outrageous.
Intro to Doch
As we celebrate the last Sunday in Easter we remember that on Easter, God changed everything. On Easter God undid the laws of causality and set all of us free: God took death and turned it to life; God took despair and turned it into hope; God took the emptiness of consuming and turned us to value each tiny piece of creation. God took everything that breaks us, dosed it in Light and made it into a salve of holy healing which makes us stronger, more compassionate, and more loving than we were before.
In the words of Rev. Dr. Anna Madsen, who presented Grace to us at the Study Conference in Canmore a few years ago, God took the world God created good, which we broke bit by bit and said “Doch!”
Now if you – like me – don’t know German we need a translation or really an explanation of Doch. Doch, D O C H, has different degrees of intensity.
Doch can mean simply ‘Not so’: If I say: “His shirts are wrinkled” and you respond “Doch, he ironed them.” It’s just a few degrees different.
Or Doch can be a voracious protest against what is previously stated. It’s a change of many degrees.
When a person suffering alone from mental illness cries out in fear of what will come, We say “Doch! We will learn to stand with them, to give people with mental illness what they need to be able to stand tall and function well and live among us!”
Or taken to the extreme, Doch can mark a change in the universe. It can be God turning us or the world around 180 degrees.
God created the world good, but we broke it, which could be the end of our story! But God says “Doch, Doch, Doch! My Son, Jesus redeems the world.”
God constantly changes our paths, by just a degree or by 180 degrees and we end up in completely different places. God’s doch shepherds us.
Most people grow up and find their way into a vocation, a career, a job or series of jobs; Doch the prophets, in other words all of us children of God, are called even before we leave the womb to the task of proclaiming God’s Good News with our choices, actions, and lives.
This job is not easy or safe, DOCH, God calls us to turn as many degrees as it takes to challenge the throngs of people that have turned away and call them back to God … as many degrees as it takes. It can be dangerous work, fraught with risks.
Aber (Ahh Bear) Doch, We, the people of God, will not live afraid of what can be done to us, for God is with us.

The View is wide and wild
Emotions not to control, but motivate us
There is too much hurt in every single life. Now we cannot stop an emotion. Try to just stuff it down and it’ll just go somewhere crazy on us.
But we can choose what to do with any and every emotion that comes our way. We can let it run loose and effect our words and actions OR we can choose to align our choices and actions with our priorities and goals in life. Since our No 1 Priority is to be and do the Good News, then we soon learn, often the hard way, that letting loose with even a bit of revenge, yet alone with outrageous vengeance, and being the Gospel to other people are mutually exclusive.
Most emotions own us for about 90 seconds. Our feelings should not be stopped. But we don’t have to hang on to them for even hours yet alone weeks or years. Furthermore raw action should never erupt out of our emotions. DOCH. Our actions should always be a choice of our heart and mind and body, so that we live according to the goals God calls us from the womb to strive toward. Emotions, carefully chosen, can motivate us towards God’s calling for us.

Emotions seem to loom over us, but we can choose how to respond

Themes all Easter
In today’s Gospel Jesus prays, “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Last week we heard an earlier part of Jesus’ prayer put it more simply. We are to love one another as Jesus loved us, so that by our love the world will know us as Jesus’ disciples.
Story of Paul and Silas
In the first lesson for today, Paul and Silas heal a young girl who was possessed by a demon. The owners, who were making money with the demon’s ability to tell the future, have them arrested, flogged, and imprisoned.
An earth quake hits the city as they sing and pray. The doors are broken open and the chains unfastened. Instead of escaping, Paul and Silas urge all the prisoners to stay put, thus saving the life of the jailor. That jailor is so impressed with the unusual manner that his life is saved that he believes the Gospel that Paul and Silas proclaim. He and his household are baptized.

A view through a grid; Still Christ’s Light Shines Golden

God’s Doch
God’s constant DOCH is ‘at all costs, love even your enemy.’

Story resolution
Hostiles
In the movie the Hostiles, as they ride across the wilds of the west to Montana the captain encounters God’s Doch.
As they stop where the chief has returned home and will breathe his last breath in the wild mountains of Montana, the captain says that, though they have each fought against the other, and each has lost so many friends to the other, when the chief dies a piece of the captain will die with him.
In obeying the orders he cannot stomach, the captain eventually gives his enemy his last breath in freedom at home, no longer as an enemy, but as a friend.
The captain recognizes the gift of life, even in his enemy, as they ride across the wilds of the west to Montana.

In the wild … there is the Light

What about us?
As we encounter the terrible ravages of evil that leaves us so wanting for life, can we recognize the gifts of God even in our enemies?
Can we give them life at their last breaths, as friends, because God has made us, all of us, while yet sinners, children of God?

Similar stories nonfiction resolutions
In the real life of so many people, this is exactly what they chose.
Gee Walker
After Anthony Walker’s murderers were sentenced Gee Walker, his mother, said: “I cannot hate. I have to forgive them. … Their minds must be very tortured. … Hate is what killed Anthony.”
http://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Elements_Love-Your-Enemies-Stories.pdf

No Matter, Let the Light Shine

M&B Mizen
After her 16 year old son was killed, Jimmy Mizen’s mother Margaret said “I just want to say to the parents of this other boy, I want to say I feel so, so sorry for them. I don’t feel anger, I feel sorry for the parents. We have so many lovely memories of Jimmy and they will just have such sorrow about their son. I feel for them, I really do…. People keep asking me why I am not angry but I say …There is too much anger in the world…. it was anger that killed my son. If I was angry I would be the same as this boy.”
On the first anniversary of his murder Jimmy’s father said, “today, for us, was a message of peace, a message of change that we have been gradually working towards over [a] year. … This affects everybody. If somebody is killed in your local park or in your local shop, then this affects you. We didn’t just get here overnight…. If the will … is for it [here and now], we can change.”
http://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Elements_Love-Your-Enemies-Stories.pdf
Bishop Pierre-Marie Théas
Bishop Théas was imprisoned for ten weeks with Protestants, Jews, non-believers, trade unionists, young resistance workers, and French officers. When some prisoners asked for a day retreat he preached about forgiveness, and suggested they should pray for their captors. This provoked outrage. Théas replied, “My friends, I cannot proclaim anything except what the Lord said: Love your enemies. No more, no less.”
http://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Elements_Love-Your-Enemies-Stories.pdf

The extreme story, resolution
Cartier and Nixon
When former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey died hundreds of people from across the world attended his funeral. All were welcome, but one – former President Richard Nixon, who had recently dragged himself and his country through the humiliation and shame of Watergate. Eyes turned away and conversations ran dry around him. He was being shunned and ostracized.
Then the current president Jimmy Carter walked into the room. President Carter, not of Nixon’s party and well known for his honesty and integrity, moved toward his seat, until he noticed Richard Nixon standing all alone. Carter changed course, walked over to Richard Nixon, held out his hand, and smiling genuinely and broadly embraced Nixon and said “Welcome home, Mr President! Welcome home!”
Newsweek magazine reported the incident including the words, “If there was a turning point in Nixon’s long ordeal in the wilderness, it was that moment and that gesture of love and compassion.”
Source: Reported in Maxie Dunnam, The Workbook on Living as a Christian, pp.112-113
https://storiesforpreaching.com/category/sermonillustrations/love-for-enemies/

Whatever comes our way, God’s Light will shine!

MLKing
Martin Luther King dared to suggest that Blacks should have the same civil rights as other Americans. For all he stood for King received death threat after death threat, he was maliciously accused of being a communist, his house had been bombed, and he was jailed over 20 times. Yet in his essay, Loving Your Enemies, he wrote:
“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.’”
https://storiesforpreaching.com/category/sermonillustrations/love-for-enemies/ and
http://paxchristi.org.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Elements_Love-Your-Enemies-Stories.pdf
Jesus
Jesus says to us, love one another as I have loved you. Love even your enemies.
Us
Following Jesus as his disciples is complicated, challenging and sometimes calls us to things we can hardly stomach. But still through words from each other and in so many other ways the Holy Spirit guides us to see Christ loving even our enemies, as we journey through the wilds of our lives, even when our greatest enemy is ourselves.

Whatever, However, Whenever God embraces us, even when we are our own enemies the Light still shines beautifully for us.

Amen

Late Notes to 26 May Sermon

apologies that there is not a finished sermon for this week, not yet.

The computer that I usually use has decided to run so slowly as to make it nearly unusable, and an OS upgrade was needed. That brought everything else to a stand still, at least as far as writing goes.

Setting up and taking down my home on crown land had to happen on schedule. There is no forgiveness, just eviction, if I am even one day late getting out, and huge costs if I am not back in as soon as possible.

But that computer is barely running, with no real connection to the internet, yet.

The sermon is about including women as disciples.

The sermon is about healing illnesses, even those that have gone on forever, but not waiting even one day (until the Sabath is done) to heal the illness … enough suffering is enough!

The sermon is about healing the nations: the vision of the New Jerusalem gives John a view that the leaves of the 12 trees, which produce fruit (ie. that’s the 12 tribes of Israel, or all of Israel, or all of God’s people) … the fruit is good, but the leaves are even more important.

The leaves heal the nations.

Which is really the connection point that I wanted to use to ask:

What is it to heal?

To heal an illness?

To get to that then to ask first: what is it to fix something?

A broken bicycle, a broken window, a broken whatever (so say now, what is it to fix a broken computer!)

Then by comparison and for clarity: what is it to heal?

Take a hip replacement for example. The surgeon does not heal anything. She cuts open the leg, saws out the bone of the hip, replaces it with specialize pieces of special metal, and sews up the muscle and tissue. (maybe I could research it, or ask this special retired nurse I know, my mother, who at 80 some has recently had a hip replaced, and I would know more of the details, but his will suffice : it’s cutting, taking out, putting together, and sewing up.

Then comes the rehabilitation and the healing and the pain and the stiffness and heartache, and hip ache … which is still better than it was before.

Except sometimes it does not feel any better, and is actually worse, like one man I visited in the hospital after hip surgery. His never got better, until they opened up his hip again with cutting and slicing … to take out the forceps and sponge gauge that somehow was left in the wound.

His healing took years, first for the ability to walk, but it took longer for his ability to walk without feeling the ghost pain of that forceps digging into his muscles and that gauze, infected eating at his flesh.

Healing is a deeper, more profound event or process, that the organism itself accomplishes. Outside interference is just that, interference.

The next question moves on to the healing of the nations. That’s not just a quick fix, like sewing a broken shoulder strap with camping think waxed cord. It is a very complex event, one that usually bucks all rules, regulations and expectations.

There is another story that will taken much longer to write out to be shared. That story is a kind of “If Beale Street Could Talk?” kind of event

But I am sure that the reader could probably add there own stories of healing.

Mine is of being in a foreign country, biking everywhere, and coming down with a cold. I could hardly shake. Then the sponsors of my full scholarship to study abroad gave me good tickets to a concert downtown, a string quintet.

Mozart and other composers gave witness to the rightness of the universe.

I biked back up the hill to the Studenentheim, free of the cold.

Healing is a spiritual event. It is finding the spirit to allow the body to heal.

What would the man, ill for more than 38 years smell like, dream like hope like… be like, after he was free of the illness?

That’s us: ill for so long, needing help to heal. And we receive it, What do we do with it?

if it is healing of the nations, then we help others heal, until the whole creation sings in praise of what God has done for us.

At least that what collected for me around the desire thwarted to have a sermon ready before today. Somehow that just seems a bit

26 May Easter 6

First Thoughts

Theme for ALL

“Love one another, even as I have loved you.”

The lens for all else in this Easter.

May 26, 2019 For Women, too. Easter 6

Having chosen to use the Alternative Gospel from John:

Jesus’ Story and Love, contrary to common practice, included Women.

And Jesus Love Heals; thus we heal one another.

Acts 16:9-15 – Lydia

Acts Thoughts

A women, if you judge me to be faithful, come and stay with me. Response of faith: to provide what is needed: hospitality for travellers, for homeless. Now common? Enough, but in those days, accepting a woman as one of the disciples was a rare act of equality.

No matter our traditions, our culture norms, our expectations; Jesus love reaches all people.

And we are to love as Jesus loves us,

We are to love those whom our tradition excludes from consideration.