Bob Kaylor

Thanksliving: A Meditation for an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service

What a great opportunity we have to be here together with people from so many different faith traditions. That we can all gather here and celebrate together, despite some of the differences in our theology, is a model for the rest of the world, I think, and something to be thankful for in and of itself.

I got thinking this week about some of the things we hold in common as people of faith, and one is that we all have rubrics and rituals, many of them centering on table fellowship. Communion, Passover, all the feasts and festivals of different traditions are all part of who we are.

And while we celebrate differently, there are some common threads about sitting down at the table, which are important especially at Thanksgiving. I found a little essay in the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago by Ian Frazier that I think we can all agree on in the midst of our dining diversity. The Essay is called “Lamentations of the Father” and this section is ‘Laws When at Table” (especially for children)

Laws When at Table

if you are seated in your high chair, or in a chair such as a greater person might use, keep your legs and feet below you as they were. Neither raise up your knees, nor place your feet upon the table, for that is an abomination to me. Yes, even when you have an interesting bandage to show, your feet upon the table are an abomination, and worthy of rebuke.

When you chew your food, keep your mouth closed until you have swallowed, and do not open it to show your brother or your sister what is within; I say to you, do not so, even if your brother or your sister hath done the same to you.

Eat your food only; do not eat that which is not food; neither seize the table between your jaws, nor use the raiment of the table to wipe your lips. I say again to you, do not touch it, but leave it as it is.

And though your stick of carrot does indeed resemble a marker, draw not with it upon the table, even in pretend, for we do not do that, that is why. And though the pieces of broccoli are very like small trees, do not stand them upright to make a forest, because we do not do that, that is why.

Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the gravy. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass.

On Screaming
Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault.

Laws Pertaining to Dessert
For we judge between the plate that is unclean and the plate that is clean, saying first, if the plate is clean, then you shall have dessert.

But of the unclean plate, the laws are these: If you have eaten most of your meat, and two bites of your peas with each bite consisting of not less than three peas each, or in total six peas, eaten where I can see, and you have also eaten enough of your potatoes to fill two forks, both forkfuls eaten where I can see, then you shall have dessert.

But if you eat a lesser number of peas, and yet you eat the potatoes, still you shall not have dessert; and if you eat the peas, yet leave the potatoes uneaten, you shall not have dessert, no, not even a small portion thereof.

And if you try to deceive by moving the potatoes or peas around with a fork, that it may appear you have eaten what you have not, you will fall into iniquity. And I will know, and you shall have no dessert.

Perhaps you’ll want to post these at your house on Thursday. We must not eat turkey while committing iniquity.

What we also have in common tonight are all the things we have, living in the place we do. Most of us will sit at table with family and friends and eat well in a warm house, and we’ll end our meal with our belts a little looser because we’ve overindulged. Then comes the ritual of football, followed by the inevitable rubrics for dieting and exercise.

Another rubric we share has to do with generosity. All of us operate under the principle that to whom much is given, much is required. While the rest of the culture bemoans the scarcity of an economic downturn and tightens its grip on money, we are still called to give, recognizing that we are only stewards of the gifts God has given us. We give because God has given to us, and we share because we recognize that we are blessed.

Not too long ago I read a report that puts our economic crisis into perspective.

For example, just $2200 in assets (not just cash, but assets) per adult puts you household in the top half of the world’s wealthiest people.

To be among the richest 10% of adults in the world, you only need $61,000 in assets.

And if you have $500,000 in assets, you are part of the richest 1% of people in the world.

We live in a place where even if we consider ourselves to be poor, we’re rich in comparison to the rest of the world, where most people live on just $2 a day.

To be a person of faith is to be a thankful person, a generous person, a person who sees abundance where others see scarcity, a person who is focused more on the needs of others than his or her own.

We always hear a lot of talk at Thanksgiving about “counting our blessings,” and we should. We are thankful for the family and friends gathered at table, for a new day, for life, for strength—for a lot of things that are both seen and unseen. As Helen Keller once said, “The best and most beautiful things cannot be seen or even touched; they must be felt with the heart." Paul would remind the Corinthians, “We look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:18). We are each thankful tonight because we are all children of God, and all richly blessed by God in so many ways.

But being blessed is only half of the equation. Many of us gathered here tonight share a common ancestor in faith in the person of Abraham, whom God called long ago to be the father of a people through whom God was going to bring about the redemption of the whole creation. In Genesis 12, God tells Abraham, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you , and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2).

As children of God, and Abraham’s spiritual offspring, we remember that we, too, have been blessed…so that we will be a blessing.

Tonight I not only encourage you to count your blessings, but also to think deeply about how you will be a blessing. How will you be a blessing to your family? To your coworkers? To the community? To those around us who are in need?

As you gather around the Thanksgiving table, monitoring the six pea minimum law of dessert, I want to encourage you to go around the table and not only ask, “What are you thankful for?” but “How might you be a blessing? How might we as a family bless those around us?”

No matter where we worship on Friday, or Sunday, or whenever—let us together be a blessing to our community and the world!

Born to Run: The Life of the Apostle Paul

Many of you know how much I like to read. I recently got myself an Amazon Kindle—one of those electronic book readers—that enables you to download a book in 60 seconds. This is kind of like crack for clergy. I figured out that I read seven books last month, some of which were for my doctoral program, some for sermon prep, and some just for fun. Right now I’m reading David Halberstam’s riveting book about the Korean War in preparation for my trip to Korea in February as part of my doctoral program.

In a sense I’ve always been like this—always reading and trying out what I read. I read a biography of John Wesley awhile back that said that Wesley’s theology consisted of whatever book he had just read. I find that to be true for me, in some sense. When I was a kid, I read a whole bunch of different stuff on a variety of subjects. And I remember vividly one summer in high school when a friend of mine from church and I decided to read together Jim Fixx’s book “The Complete Book of Running,” which was on the bestseller list at the time (this was like 1979 or so).

So we started running…and we hated it. Now, neither of us was willing to admit that we hated it, so we kept running, shin splints and all. I went so far as to join the track team, but I could only afford high top basketball shoes, so I didn’t run far or fast and quit after the first week. I joined the Army, where I knew I’d have to run, but figured that I’d just tough it out if it meant that I could shoot and blow stuff up. My only day on sick call in ten years in the military came during Basic, when I got shin splints so bad I could hardly walk. They sent me to the hospital, where I got some physical therapy from a very pretty 2^nd Lt. nurse who spent most of the morning moving my leg around…which was nice. She gave me some exercises to do and sent me back to my unit after lunch, with no restrictions on duty…or running—not so nice.

I’ve pretty much hated running since then. Biking, yes, hiking, of course…but for the most part I would rather hike 25 miles with a pack on than run 5 without. I just didn’t like the pain, the sweating, the mental argument in my head over whether I should just stop or not. But mostly the pain.

So I haven’t run very much in the last 18 years or so…that is, until I read another book.

A friend of mine, who is not a runner, told me about a book called Born to Run which is about a tribe of native Mexicans in a remote wilderness area that runs obscene distances wearing nothing but very thin sandals—50 miles being very common for them and a hundred miles or more a clip certainly doable. And they do this…get this…simply because they like to do it. Unbelievable. So I read the book.

The author, Christopher MacDougall, investigated the Tarahumara tribe, along with other ultramarathoners (our own Greg Adams is one), to find the secret to their joy of running. Well, it turns out that one of the reasons they run hundreds of miles—and that most of us think 26 miles is insane—has to do with shoes…or, more correctly, the lack of shoes.

MacDougall uses a big chunk of the book talking about the fact that running shoes actually hurt us and keep us from running the way that our physiology is designed to. We are actually, to quote the title, “Born to Run,” it’s the very technology that we use to ostensibly make us run better than makes us hurt all the more.

MacDougall says that we were born barefoot and that when we walk our feet naturally seek out the most stable surface. The more padding we put under our feet, the harder the foot works to find solid ground and the more stress is put on our joints and muscles. Shoes also keep our toes from splaying naturally, providing balance, and alter our natural gait. Running shoes also keep us from running more upright, which enables us to use our uniquely developed lungs to the fullest capacity and which allows us to run longer distances that any other animal in the world.

Think about it—if you can run six miles on a hot day, you could very likely run down a deer, which can only sprint and can only pant to cool off. We’re the only animals that sweat, which is a natural cooling system. Our natural running gait, too, is actually longer than that of a horse. Ancient hunters could literally run down a deer—and do it barefoot or close to it. We were uniquely made to run.

MacDougall’s conclusion? Run barefoot, or nearly barefoot, and you’ll discover the natural joy of running. He writes, “If running shoes never existed…more people would be running. If more people ran, fewer would be dying of degenerative heart disease, sudden cardiac arrest, hypertension, blocked arteries, diabetes, and most other deadly ailments of the Western world.”

So, I read the book but was still skeptical. Right. I hate running. How would running barefoot make it better? I always chide my kids for chucking their shoes off every time they run outside because, by gum, you’re supposed to wear shoes all the time. But, according to MacDougall, they’re just doing what comes naturally. Hmmm.

Then I saw R.J. Guiney one Sunday wearing these shoes, called Five Fingers. They look really, really weird…a slot for every toe. But he swore by them. They’re just enough to protect your feet from the elements, but still allow you to have the sensation and experience of being barefoot. Now, RJ reads a lot, too, so we compared notes on MacDougall’s book and he brought me a sample pair he had to try out. I put them on and Jennifer says they look like “gorilla feet.” But I decide to try running in them, just to prove the theory wrong, you know.

Oh, man. The first day, I ran a mile with no pain, which I usually get in my left knee or my hips. OK, it’s only a mile. Got some weird looks at the field house. But then, a couple of days later, two miles, then three, now I’m up to four and…I like it. I mean, I really like it…like, I actually look forward to a morning run. My stride is shorter but more powerful. I run with my back straighter, so I get more air into my lungs. I can feel my calves and ankles getting stronger. I feel lighter, faster, stronger…I’ve been converted. I have come to love that which I have hated for so long because it came to me in a radically different way.

I thought about that when I read again the story of Saul’s conversion. Here was a guy, after all, who spent much of his life deeply hating the people of “The Way” – the early Christians – and who ran them down at every opportunity. As a zealous Pharisee, Saul believed, as did his compatriots, that this renegade sect of Judaism was threatening their way of life. By not keeping the Law the correct way and by insisting that Jesus was the Messiah, these people were flying in the face of convention and attracting people to a cause that he believed to be dangerously out of step.

And yet, one day there on the road to Damascus, Saul encounters a completely different story that alters his view of reality. The risen Jesus encounters him in person, which means that the story that these early Christians had been telling were true. He really was alive…he really was the Messiah. Saul’s old life of hatred, sprinting after the followers of Jesus, was being turned into a marathon for Christ.

This may be a questionable metaphor, but the equivalent in our day would be if Bin Laden became a Christian missionary. It’s that radical a shift. The thing Saul hated became the thing he loved the most.

Why does Jesus choose Saul for this big task, rather than simply go back to one of the more experienced and reliable disciples? Well, I think there are some good reasons why Saul is his choice.

First, Saul has his foot planted firmly in two worlds. He is a Pharasaic Jew, which means he knows the Law and is well-schooled in Jewish custom and practice. He will be able to frame Christianity within the context of Judaism perhaps better than anyone—an important resume to take into the synagogues in all the cities of the Roman empire.

But Saul is also from Tarsus, in present day Turkey—a Hellenistic city with influences from Greek philosophy and learning. He knows the philosophy and world of the Gentiles to whom he will be called to speak. And, he is a Roman citizen, which is a major deal in the first century world. He probably was born into it because his father was a citizen (likely a merchant who purchased his citizenship). Roman citizenship gave Paul safe passage on Roman roads, and gave him a right to the full protection of Roman law (which non-citizens did not have). Paul would use his citizenship status a couple of times in his travels to help his cause.

So, here we have a man who is highly educated in both the Jewish and Hellenistic worlds, a man who can speak to both worldviews, and, perhaps most importantly, a man with the tenacity to pull off the seemingly impossible mission to which God calls him—a mission that will take him all over the Roman world….a mission that will see great success and bitter disappointment. Paul will gain a hearing in the seats of power, but will also be the victim of a lot of pain…listen to his litany of trials in 2 Corinthians 11:24-29 –

²⁴Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. ²⁵Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, ²⁶I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits, in danger from my own countrymen, in danger from Gentiles; in danger in the city, in danger in the country, in danger at sea; and in danger from false brothers. ²⁷I have labored and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. ²⁸Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches. ²⁹Who is weak, and I do not feel weak? Who is led into sin, and I do not inwardly burn?

Why is Paul so driven? Because he had encountered the risen Christ and began to see how the covenant promises he had so long hoped for had come together in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It was a radical change of heart and mind that sent Paul running all over the Roman world to bring this message. No one was more responsible for Christianity and the message of the Kingdom being spread. We are here today largely because of him.

Paul goes from a persecutor to a runner, which is an image that was also popular in the ancient world. Being from Tarsus, Paul would have known about the games that were often staged throughout the empire, where the athletes competed naked (and barefoot). As Paul writes, you almost get the breathless sense of urgency of one who is racing against time, wanting to bring the good news to as many people as possible…Maybe that’s why running metaphors show up so often in his writing.

I Corinthians 9:24-26 - ²⁴ Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. ²⁵ Athletes exercise self-control in all things; they do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. ²⁶ So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air; ²⁷ but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others I myself should not be disqualified.

Galatians 2:2 – Paul checks his mission with the other apostles, wanting to “make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain.”

Philippians 3:14 – I press on to toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

2 Timothy 4:5 - I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

For Paul, Christianity was a running faith, and he was born to run. And all of us are called to run, too. Oh, maybe not putting on goofy shoes or going barefoot, but certainly to embrace our call to go into our world and tell the good news of Jesus. If we have been “born again” in the waters of baptism, we have also been born to run. As the psalmist says, “How lovely on the mountain are the feet of the messenger who announces peace and brings good news” (Is. 52:7).

When I was a kid I learned a little reminder that goes like this: What do the first three letters of the word “Satan” spell? SAT. And what do the first two letters of the word “God” spell? GO. Which will you follow?

Paul got converted, and started to run, to do the thing that he was born for. Have you every thought, “What was I born for?” How has God uniquely crafted me to do the work of his Kingdom during my life? Who needs to hear the message I can carry? Am I willing to leave behind a cushy life that gives me the illusion of stability, but really causes me pain, and run barefoot on solid ground the race that God has laid before me?

Like Paul, each of us is uniquely crafted and gifted for a Kingdom mission. I want to invite you to experiment with that reality, to try something new, to move outside your comfort zone, to strip off the insulation and touch the earth where God is calling you. Perhaps it’s a new ministry, a volunteer project, an idea you’ve had to help someone…maybe it’s a call to run overseas, or a call to join the race of full-time ministry. Whoever you are, you were born for this. Embrace it! Go with it!

As you read through his letters, I invite you to feel the passion and love behind the words. Paul is my favorite person in the Bible (other than Jesus, of course). Tradition describes him as a scrawny, balding, hook-nosed man with a grating voice and poor eyesight…see, we have a lot in common! But it wasn’t the package, it was the passion that changed the world.

Let us run the race that God has set before us!

 

 

Bishops say UMC needs restructuring (Hallelujah!)

Bishops say UMC needs restructuringRobin Russell, Nov 17, 2009 UMNS FILE PHOTO BY MIKE DUBOSEUnited Methodist bishops say the church needs to lower the average age of its members if it is to survive.By Robin Russell Managing Editor LAKE JUNALUSKA, N.C.—If the United Methodist Church is to survive the 21st century, it will need an overhaul to its structural system. The denomination’s bishops approved some “interventions” at their fall meeting, including working to eliminate the guaranteed appointment for clergy and revamping the format of General Conference, the denomination’s top law-making body. “We don’t know yet what that will look like, but there are steps that will lead us into that conversation,” said Bishop Larry Goodpaster (Charlotte Area). “We see through a glass darkly, but we are turned to the future, to see what God might yet do through the United Methodist Church.” The council’s Call to Action recommendations, drawn up by a steering committee in conjunction with the denomination’s Connectional Table and agency executives, will help “break through the inertia and reignite a movement at the local church level,” Bishop Goodpaster said. A 12-person steering committee, along with an outside consultant, will seek input from clergy and laity across the denomination to assess how church structures are operating, from the council itself to annual conferences and general agencies. A progress report will be given at the council’s spring 2010 meetings and final recommendations will be made that fall. According to the Book of Discipline (Par. 414), bishops are called to lead and oversee the church’s mission, ministry and structure. Bishops said the church’s structure is no longer able to support its mission and ministry, which leaves the denomination in trouble: Its membership has continued to decline over the last 40 years in the U.S. and is increasingly growing older than the national average. “Institutionalism has been embedded in our system,” Bishop Goodpaster said. “We are still trying to fit new wine in wineskins from 40 years ago. The mission is paramount; the mission is everything. Structure follows mission.” Sensing an urgency to their task, bishops even discussed the possibility of a special called session of General Conference—or some other churchwide gathering for “holy conferencing” before 2012—to move more quickly on engaging conversation around the action plan as well as develop a sustainable pension plan. That motion was referred to the bishops’ spring meeting. At Lake Junaluska, bishops agreed to engage in regional conversations to develop a set of standards across the church; work to redesign the church’s leadership development system to give priority to youth and young adults—with the intention of lowering the average age of United Methodists by a decade (the current average in the U.S. is 57); seek to eliminate guaranteed appointment for clergy; and help reorder the structure of the church, including the format and frequency of General Conference, to become more effective in fulfilling the church’s mission. Bishop Grant Hagiya (Seattle Area) said that while the guaranteed appointment system has offered protection for women and ethnic minority clergy who might not otherwise have received an assignment, clergy ultimately need to be deployed based on their fruitfulness. “Our present leadership development system is broken,” Bishop Hagiya said. “Guaranteed appointment will not help us.” And the structure of how and when General Conference meets needs to be evaluated, said Bishop Mary Ann Swenson (Los Angeles Area), because it’s not fiscally possible to continue with its historic pattern. For one thing, she said, though the body’s function is legislative, it has “slipped into governance as well.” What’s more, there’s not a way to respond to needs in between the quadrennial sessions, she added. “General Conferences have become so very political,” Bishop Swenson said. “We need to help shift them toward being missional. Is the four-year cycle appropriate for us? We start over every four years, and that’s a hindrance to moving forward in achieving our mission.” Bishops said reordering the denomination’s structure might mean reducing the number of general agencies, or perhaps the creation of a coordinating denominational office to enhance United Methodist ministries around the world. In other action, bishops also expressed concern over clergy pensions in light of the U.S. economic recession and approved a special task force to respond to the challenges of sustainability. Task force members are Bishops Jonathan Keaton, Scott Jones, Leo Soriano, Clifton Ives, Paul Leeland and Warner Brown. Barbara Boigegrain, top executive of the denomination’s Board of Pension and Health Benefits, said the task force will work on gathering data from 12 annual conferences that have not yet provided financial information on either the affordability of benefits or their financial difficulties, including debt and compensation. “We do not have a financial picture of the annual conferences,” she said. “Often the right information is not collected or is turned in intermittently or not at all. The task force is seeking to get the rest to help us make good decisions. “It’s time to take a measured stance, not a reactive stance. This will help us do that.” rrussell@umr.org Share

via www.umportal.org

Just saw this article from UM Reporter about the latest meeting of the Council of Bishops. Some really great ideas here that probably should have been implemented years ago. I'm encouraged to see our bishops thinking missionally and being willing to significantly change the culture and structure of our denomination. Getting rid of guaranteed appointments for clergy is a key leadership task, as is reducing the number of denominational boards and agencies (which, as it stands currently, is a bloated bureaucracy that sucks up a lot of our apportioned funds).

I have been saying for awhile that United Methodism has drifted farther and farther away from focusing its ministry on the needs of the local church. Missional thinking places emphasis on congregations serving within their local communities to transform them for the Kingdom. If the denomination can become leaner systemically and turn all of its resources toward insuring the best leaders are equipped as to lead churches as missionary outposts within communities, it will be a tectonic shift.

My only concern? That this gets studied to death (UM speak for we don't really want to do it). This is one of the problems that comes with having our primary decision-making being done by committees and conferences. I pray that our bishops will take a firm hand in this and work to the extent of their power and influence to make change happen. There are many of us who have been ready for a long time!

God Explained - A Look at the Trinity

The Book of Acts is the story of the early church and is one of my favorite biblical books. But it’s also one of the most confusing. This week as we enter into it, there comes the inevitable question about the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples. The risen, embodied Jesus had ascended into heaven—God’s space—but promised the coming of the Holy Spirit, which was God’s Spirit and Jesus’ Spirit all at the same time.

Acts thus confronts us right at the outset with one of the most perplexing questions in the Bible and Christian faith—the question of the nature of God. We have been learning all along that the Israelites believed in one God, yet the early church, who were primarily Jews, believed that while God was one that God also was three persons. While they never used the word “Trinity,” the concept is present throughout the Bible.

What is the Trinity? As a child I learned and memorized the great creeds of the church – the Apostle’s Creed, the Nicene Creed – which affirm belief in one God in Three Persons – Father, Son, Holy Spirit (or, for those uncomfortable with the biblical language – Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer). We’ve recited the creeds (statements of faith) often as we did earlier today.

But when it comes to discussing the Trinity, there seems to be a hesitancy and a tendency to throw up our hands in frustration.  I mean, how does this work?

A lot of images have been used to try and illustrate the concept. St. Patrick used the shamrock or three-leaf clover to illustrate the Trinity to the Irish druids – three leaves but one plant. I’ve heard the example of water – it can be a liquid, solid, or gas but still be H2O. Another one is more personal – for example, I am one person who is simultaneously a father, a son, and a husband. You can probably think of others.

I’ve always believed in the Trinity as a reality – but a lot of Christians struggle with it and those outside Christianity often dismiss it altogether. I’ve heard all kinds of arguments for and against the concept. Some have said that the Bible doesn’t use the word “trinity” in reference to God (which is true) and therefore we shouldn’t talk in those terms as they seem to imply that there’s more than one God (which the Bible firmly denies). Others look at the Scriptures, like the early New Testament language – such as the letters of Paul- and see very clear Trinitarian references there (which also seem to make sense). 

Ultimately, however, any discussion of the Trinity really boils down to what we believe about Jesus of Nazareth. When we ask, “What is the Trinity?” what we’re really asking is “Who is Jesus? Is Jesus human or divine or some combination of both.

Take a look back at the Nicene Creed and you’ll see that the bulk of the language in the creed has to do with the relationship with Jesus and God. We’ve recited this creed for centuries, but one of the things we have to realize is that this understanding – that Jesus and God are of the “same substance” – did not come easily to the ancient church. In fact, the debate over the personhood of Jesus became a violent one.

A great book on this period of Christian history is entitled, When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity in the Last Days of Rome. It’s written by Richard Rubenstein, who is a scholar with expertise in religious conflict. He looks at the political intrigue and power plays that took place in the Christian church after the emperor Constantine took over and made Christianity the state religion of the empire (a quick turnaround after years and years of persecution of the church). It seems that there were really two camps, two thought processes about Jesus during that time. On the one hand, you had the views of a bishop named Arius – who asserted that Christ was greater than a human being but less than God and, on the other end, the views of Athanasius, another bishop who contended that Jesus and God were one in the same. The debate was nasty, leading to open warfare in some parts of the empire. So deep was the theological divide that, says Rubenstein, one could not buy a loaf of bread in Constantinople without being asked whether you believed Jesus was God or not.

The Nicene Creed was an attempt at compromise (Constantine wasn’t concerned about the theology as much as having peace in the church). The word homousios – one substance (one Being) – became the linchpin in all of this. Eventually, Athanasius’s view won out and we have been interpreting it that way ever since.

Not that the debate has stopped, however. Recent scholarly debates go over the same territory. On the one hand you have groups like the Jesus Seminar who want to deconstruct the supposed mythology about Jesus and get at the supposed “real” historical Jesus who, they seem to be saying, was a Jewish mystic and sage but not at all divine. On the other end of the continuum are the more conservative scholars whose focus is on the divinity of Jesus and his saving power (sometimes over and against his apparent human nature). Still others frame the debate in terms of metaphysical issues – asking questions like, “When Jesus prayed, was he talking to himself? Why did he call God “Father”? etc.

And what about the Holy Spirit? Many Protestants only reference the Spirit at Pentecost. Being post-enlightenment people, we are puzzled and often troubled by the idea of a Spirit. When I was a kid, the church I grew up in called it most often the “Holy Ghost.” Not exactly a friendly concept. Talk too much about the Spirit and you’ll be accused of being a Pentecostal, which conjures up images of speaking in tongues and “holy rollers” (although some of my Penecostal brothers and sisters would be more than willing to educate you on what actually goes on in their worship).

Perhaps we need a new way of understanding Jesus, God, the Holy Spirit and the Trinity that we can all really get behind. After all, our beliefs really don’t mean anything unless we flesh them out and use them. I believe our creeds, doctrines, affirmations, and statements are helpful in that they tell us something about God in, as much as is possible, a cognitive way. They give us a place to start, flawed and confusing though they may be. I hold to them, say them, preach them, believe them.

But I’ve also come to believe that the real heart of the matter is not what we say we believe about God – that’s what I’d define as religion. Religion can be organized, systematized, synthesized, debated, debunked, affirmed or rejected. I’ve spent most of my life doing, debating, and dispensing religion.

These days I’m discovering that the real heart of faith, for me is found in relationship to God – that we understand concepts like the Trinity, the humanity and divinity of Christ, even the church not primarily as a system of belief to be studied,  but as a relationship to be explored, experienced, and enjoyed.

John of Damascus was a seventh century Greek theologian who, I think, captured what this really means. In much of the western Christian world at that time, the dominant symbol for the Trinity was an equilateral triangle – very distinct, hard edges, differentiated with angles that can be measured – a technical view of God. In a sense, this image functioned as an organizational chart – the points of the triangle representing the three persons of God with the Father “on top” – a hierarchical view that, in many ways, also represented the hierarchies of both the church and the empire.

But John of Damascus, who grew up in the eastern Christian world, described the Trinity with a completely different symbol – a circle…in fact, he used the word perichoresis to describe God (peri – round or circle, choros – dance). He saw the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit not as a hierarchical system but as a circle dance – a relationship wherein the three persons of God were in constant movement, intimate, equal, unified yet distinct, and in loving relationship. Notice that when people gather out in the Fellowship Hall to talk and share, they most often form a circle – not a triangle or a box or a lecture hall…it’s a way of expressing equality and openness – the pre-requisites for loving relationships. That’s the way that God works and we, being made in God’s image, do it naturally – relationally.

John of Damascus saw the nature of God as being first, foremost, and always relational – not only within God’s own personhood, but in relationship with God’s creation. It was natural, then, that God’s relational nature would find an outlet in engaging in another relationship – with us.

Here, at the intersection – the connecting point of God and humanity-is where I believe we find Jesus – fully divine and fully human for the sake of full relationship with both.

Still with me? OK, here we go. First, what do we mean when we say Jesus was “fully divine”? It can mean a lot of things – Jesus had a God consciousness, Jesus believed he was God or the second person of the Trinity, Jesus had a God complex (it has been interpreted in many ways).

But here’s what I think…I think that when we say that Jesus was fully divine, what we mean to say is that Jesus was, in an unprecedented way, fully in relationship with God – so full of God as to act as God acts, speak as God speaks, love as God loves. In a very real sense Jesus embodied the God of Israel, YHWH, “I am Who I am”. At various times in his ministry he acts and speaks for God, to God, and as God. He doesn’t “channel” God as some new agers would say – he embodied God because he was a full participant in the circle dance with the full nature of God. For him it wasn’t a matter of  simply believing he was God (you could believe that and be wrong!) or wanting to be God – he characterized it always as being “one” with God (I and the Father are one!) – that’s a relational term.

Lots of people in the history of the world have claimed to be divine – the Caesars, various rulers and potentates, cult leaders, you name it – and in nearly every case they claimed divinity as a means of gaining more power. Jesus claimed quite the opposite – his mission, his divine relationship, his power was realized in giving his life away as a servant – thereby forever redefining what we mean when we say “God."

That brings us to the other half of the equation – he was also “fully human” – the epitome of the best of humanity lived out in relationship with other humans. He lived, loved, forgave, challenged, taught, and died for and with humanity. In an unprecedented way, his relationship with God was lived out in relationship with others – and with everyone – the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Even many of those who don’t see Jesus as God in the way we Christians do, would likely admit that he is probably the greatest person who every lived. That’s something – fully human in the best sense of the term.

Jesus is fully divine because he was and is in full relationship with God. Jesus is fully human because he was and is in full relationship with us. In him the best of both natures come together.

Now, having said all that, I’ll have to admit that even this construct is incomplete. After all, how does one fully define a relationship? Think about the person you love best – how would you define your relationship? You could use words, symbols, actions, rituals – but ultimately, at the deepest level, the relationship goes beyond our ability to express it. It’s simply something we “know” in the deepest parts of ourselves.

I think the same is true when we talk about God. The creeds, the Bible, our discussions, our musings and wonderings can only take us so far. The only way we can truly experience God, the only way we can really know God, is by opening ourselves to the deep intimacy of relationship with God, with Christ, with the Holy Spirit—the ongoing and indwelling presence of God, empowering us for the work of the Kingdom.

To put it another way, if we want to understand God, if we want to experience the power of God in our lives and see God working through us in the Holy Spirit, we have accept God’s invitation to join the dance.

When Jesus engaged people during his ministry, his words were always invitations to join the dance. Notice that he didn’t say to those around him – study me, talk about me, think about me, analyze me. He never said anything like “construct a religion around me.”

What he always said was….Follow me. Follow my lead as we dance together…

That’s how we’ll know him, be more like him. That’s how we’ll know God more fully. And that’s how we ourselves will become more fully human.

You gotta join the dance. You need to join the circle.

Now, I’ve talked for awhile and I’m fully aware that the words aren’t adequate. I don’t expect them to be. But perhaps there’s another way to understand it and I want to share that with you today.

As I said earlier, the eastern Christian tradition is rich in symbolism. The eastern orthodox tradition uses art and icons more often than words to express the holy mystery of the Trinity. One of my favorite icons was painted by Andre Rublev, a Russian monk who lived in the 14^th and 15 centuries. A copy of that famous icon is in your bulletin as an insert. There’s a lot of symbolism in this work, entitled “the Old Testament Trinity” – depicting the visit of what many scholars believe to be the three persons of the trinity to Abraham at the oaks of Mamre. Rublev painted this icon to depict the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in relationship to each other. The symbolism is rich if you look closely. For example, look at the hands. Henri Nouwen said that one way of looking at the icon is that the Father is on the left, making a hand sign that encourages the Son (in the middle) who has two fingers displayed, indicating his divine and human nature. The third figure, the Holy Spirit, points downward toward the rectangular hole in the front of the table, which represents the narrow path of faith to which we are directed. Lots of symbolism here. But the main feature I want you to focus on is this…notice the orientation of the icon…the three figures sit at a table, but the part of the table that is open is facing the viewer.

What’s it mean? There’s a place for you at the table – a place to join in with and engage the living God in relationship.

Rather than try to describe the Trinity, perhaps the best way we can learn it is to live into it, be in relationship to God – Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer. And when we live into that relationship with God, maybe we’ll find our relationship with others transformed as well.

Daily Bread

NOTE: This is the text of today's sermon as it was written, not as it actually came out "live." To listen to the live version, check out the podcast on our web site. I'll have it posted there by late tomorrow morning. The text for the morning was John 6:1-12. For my text-based readers, however, here's the manuscript that the Holy Spirit kind of circumvented:

If you’ve been reading through the New Testament along with us, you’ve probably noticed that it is filled with meals. Jesus, in particular, seems to always be around food. Think about all the eating that goes on – ceremonial meals, potluck suppers, wedding receptions, grand banquets, intimate dining, parties, and, like today’s story, even large outdoor picnics. While we’re phasing through diets, Jesus seems to be carbo-loading as he goes from place to place.

But there’s a reason for this (with Jesus, there’s a reason for everything!). Remember that in first century Jewish culture, eating a meal was really more of an event than simply horking down fast food. Meals were about hospitality, about sharing, about bonding. If you ate with someone it meant that you were friends for life. Jesus goes around eating with lots of people, from the religious elite to the outcasts of society – for Jesus, eating with people was a sign of things to come and was very much tied into his mission of proclaiming God’s Kingdom. One of the images of that Kingdom is a banquet – a grand feast where everyone is invited. Jesus was acting out the idea that the Kingdom is a party thrown by a God who sits down with everyone and feeds them only the best. It wasn’t so much what he ate, but who he ate it with that counted.

The story that was read for us this morning is about one of the most famous of those parties—the feeding of the five thousand. It’s a story that shows up in all four of the Gospels—the story of taking scarce resources and turning them into an abundance. I think it’s a great story for tough economic times, you know…rather than thinking we don’t have a lot to offer, Jesus invites us to think that there’s always enough if we’re willing to trust him.

I think about this every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer and get to that part about our “daily bread”—that Jesus encourages us to focus on God’s provision for the day, the moment, and not worry about the future. It’s only the next meal that matters. If we trust God for a little, we can trust him for a lot.

“Bread” in the Bible is the term used for subsistence, for life, for that which satisfies the deepest human hunger. In our Old Testament lesson, the children of Israel are grumbling about their situation – they’re thinking of their plight as a whole – we’re in the desert, we’re hungry, we could be here a long time, how are we going to survive this? Well, God gives them a lesson in “bread” – he tells them that daily they will receive manna (a type of flaky substance from a coriander tree that grew out there in the desert) and quail. God will supply this daily for them. But, Moses instructed them, they could only gather what they needed for that day – hoarding it meant that anything you took beyond what you needed for that day would spoil overnight. You had to trust that there would be more in the morning – in other words, you had to trust God for your daily bread. You had to live from meal to meal!

With this in mind, Jesus instructs his disciples that life is best lived one day at a time, one meal at a time. He says in the Sermon on the Mount “Do not worry saying ‘What shall we eat’ or ‘What shall we drink’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things and your heavenly father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

I got a graphic lesson in this when I enlisted in the Army after high school. I left Slippery Rock, PA very gung ho, but once I got to Ft. Jackson, S.C. I began to think that I had made a very big mistake. I also knew now why they always bring in new recruits at night—so they don’t know where to escape!

Despite all the screaming and exhaustion that was now part of my life, I came to realize early on that no matter what the drill sergeants did to us, the Army had to feed us three meals a day, no matter how much they screamed, no matter where we were or what we were doing– didn’t matter if they were in the mess hall, in the field, or just a C-ration…there were three times in a day where a meal was going to happen. At each mealtime I would have at least a minimum of 5 minutes where I could simply focus on putting food in my mouth – didn’t matter what it was (often I couldn’t identify it anyway).

Knowing this, I deduced that my survival was predicated on making it to each meal, one meal at a time. And so I began to live meal to meal. I’d be awakened at 4:00AM for physical training – usually pushups, situps and other exercises, followed by a long run – and while I was running I would think to myself – if I can just make it to breakfast! After breakfast we’d road march somewhere and train all morning in the hot South Carolina sun and all I could think about was making it to lunch – even if it was something called (and I am not making this up) “ham and chicken loaf”. After that, then I was concentrating on dinner, which usually involved some type of something over rice

For me, then, each meal was like a party! Woo hoo, I made it! Green eggs, spam and grits were as good to me then as a night out at Grappa! Grey creamed beef on toast (which we called something else, mind you) was a royal feast! And that C-ration candy bar – stiff as a board - was absolute heaven.

Pretty soon the 8 weeks were up and I did graduate from basic training – and now weighed 140 pounds! To this day, I’ve always seen meal-times as a reason for celebration (which is why I like to meet people for lunch so often!).

I never made the connection before, but I have an inkling that this is what Jesus was talking about when he told his disciples to pray for their “daily bread.

We have been saying for several weeks now in this series that the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached about is an in-breaking reality – the future breaking in on the present. God’s rule, God’s reign, God’s presence is here now and is also coming. The Kingdom is a day by day, ring by ring, meal by meal progression. Keeping that long view in mind, says Jesus, and hungering after the Kingdom in the present is much more satisfying than worrying about the future. When we seek the Kingdom daily, then daily we find the right amount of bread to live – to make it to the next meal.

We live in a culture that says to us “make all your bread now so you’ll have enough later.” We’re taught to hoard our financial and material resources, protect them, shelter them. Now there’s certainly nothing wrong with having a long term financial plan, but if it’s all about personal gain and building our own little material kingdoms, then the bread can become spoiled – spoiled by greed or gluttony. Every day we see scandals where people who have made a lot of bread for themselves wind up spoiled and spiritually hungry.

Praying for “our daily bread” is a way of reminding us that ultimately, every good thing comes from God who, according to Paul, “supplies all our needs according to his riches in glory” (note - “needs” not “wants”). When we live life dependent upon God’s provision, we begin to hoard less and give more so that every one may receive their daily bread. When we recognize that our individual lives find their meaning in the larger purposes of God, the Kingdom of God, we begin to worry less about our survival and enjoy the day to day blessings that God bestows on us.

It reminds of a story I once heard about how they used to trap monkeys in the wild. What they’d do is put a small piece of fruit inside a hollowed-out coconut with a hole just big enough for a monkey’s hand to go in. The monkey comes along, reaches in and grabs the piece of fruit in his fist – but his fist is too big to come back out through the hole. Rather than let go of the fruit, though, the monkey would continue to try and ram that fist through the hole without success – his greed not allowing him to move to freedom. All he has to do is open his hand and let go.

Praying for our daily bread is a way of reminding ourselves that we must live life “open-handed” in order to experience real freedom – freedom from worry, freedom from security, freedom from dependence on our stuff. If we’re seeking after God’s Kingdom first, says Jesus, then we’ll live our lives with open hands – hands that give more than they receive, hands that insure that everyone is receiving their daily bread. We live day to day, meal to meal seeing every thing as a gift from God – a gift to be shared.

It can be easy for us to lose sight of Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom, and to start worrying about everything that seems to be crashing down on us. Perhaps a better way for us to live is to put aside worry about the big picture problems we’re facing – whether it’s illness, a financial crisis, or some other worry -  and instead break it down…living meal to meal, day to day, piece by piece, and seeing each new provision of God’s daily bread as a celebration! You made it!

Jesus demonstrated this type of thinking in his own life. In a sense he, too, lived from meal to meal and for him every meal, it seemed, turned into a party! There was that wedding in Cana where he turned water into wine for everyone to enjoy, there was today’s story of the feeding of 5,000 people and then 4,000 – huge picnics on the hillside. He seemed to always be around some kind of celebration or starting it.

One of the knocks against Jesus by his contemporaries was that he partied too much, seemed to enjoy his meals a little too much. Not only did he party, but he did it with all the wrong people – tax collectors, prostitutes, the sick, lame, and lazy, the distressed and the disillusioned. He was accused of being a “wine bibber and a glutton” – charges which were, according to the law of Deuteronomy – punishable by stoning.

But there was a method to Jesus’ apparent madness and it has to do with the Kingdom of God. The Jews of Jesus’ day were looking forward to a future day when God would once again dwell with his people in Zion. The cycle of their worship involved various feasts and festivals. The great banquet would occur on that day, when God once and for all would destroy evil (kick out the invaders) and dwell with his people in the Temple.

What Jesus was doing was turning this expectation on its ear – that God was dwelling among the people in his own person, that the great banquet is already beginning to take place and that every one – and I mean everyone – is invited, not just those who have deemed themselves worthy. For Jesus, every meal was a sign of the Kingdom of God that he was announcing – a great party to which every one is invited.

Remember the parable of the prodigal son? When the wayward boy returns home, after squandering his inheritance, his father embraces him and throws a party. The older son, who’s been home all this time, is furious. Why throw a party for this kind of person? But the father says, “We’ve got to rejoice! This one that was lost is now found! It’s party time!”

Praying for our daily bread, then, is a way of also remembering that the Kingdom of God is a party to which we and everyone else are invited no matter who you are, where you come from, or what you’ve done. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says “I am the bread of life” – I am God’s presence, God’s promise, God’s daily provision, your personally engraved invitation to the Kingdom party. When we receive the “bread” of Christ, we go away satisfied, transformed, nourished, made new and looking forward to the next meal.

This is a big part of why we celebrate holy communion – it’s always “the next meal” that we look forward to – another celebration, another party, another way of saying “we made it” and “we’re all here”! It’s a sign and sacrament of the great Kingdom feast where all can be fed.

In the early church, communion always took place in the context of a larger meal – a banquet if you will. It was a way for them to share, literally and figuratively, their bread with each other – the daily bread they received as a gift from God.

In our day, we’d call this a “pot luck” or as it’s called in Western PA a “tureen dinner” (I never did know what a tureen was when I was a kid, but I guessed that it probably had something to do with Jello Salad Tupperware). It wasn’t just about the food, but about a gathering of the whole community where there were no strangers, only friends.

And so we pray “our” daily bread. The bread that we receive is meant to be shared – that those who hunger and thirst not only for God but for the basic needs of life – food, water, shelter, love – will be fed. Praying this prayer means that we pray not only for our own bread but for that of our neighbor – that we walk across the street or around the world to share the bread we have.

Today we bring our financial commitments to God as a congregation. It is an opportunity for us to share our bread with the world—to buy into Jesus’ vision of abundance in the face of the world’s fear of scarcity. Jesus calls us to “enough-ness” – to focus on God’s daily provision over and against the illusion of economic security. We ask God for our daily bread, we see how Jesus was offering it everywhere he went…now we are called to imitate him.

Can we live with open hands? Can we see all that God has blessed us with? Can we capture Jesus’ vision for the Kingdom and realize that we are being called to build for it day by day, using God’s provision and resources?

 

We are a community of faith…a community that is called to share our time, our talent, and our treasure for the Kingdom. May our giving and our vision reflect that call. And may we always be asking, “With whom can I share my daily bread?”

Grave Matters - A Sermon for All Saints Day

    Last night was Halloween, which is a “holiday” that just about everybody celebrates in one form or another. But while you may come here this morning still a little loopy from sampling the kids’ candy stash, I want to introduce you to another really “holy day”—All Saints Day.

            Now. Traditionally, All Saints Day has had a couple of meanings. In the old days there was All Saints Day, which celebrated those Christians who had been singled out as exceptionally “saints” of the church—your Mother Theresa types, that sort of thing—followed the next day by “All Souls Day” when the rest of the departed hoi polloi of the church was honored—your regular Christians.

            But, biblically speaking, “saint” is a word that is most often used to connote a regular, faithful Christian. There was no celebrity saint distinction in the early church, so a lot of traditions have dropped All Souls while still others have dropped the whole concept of honoring the righteous dead altogether.

            I think it’s a total God-thing, though, that All Saints Day happens to fall on a Sunday where we’re scheduled to talk about the resurrection of Jesus as part of our year-long journey through the Bible. Last week we talked about the crucifixion, about what Jesus’s death means for us, so this week we need to address the event that is inseparably joined to the cross and stands at the center of Christian faith—Easter and the empty tomb.

            My doctoral dissertation is focusing on the resurrection of Jesus, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading in this area. A couple of weeks ago I picked up a book, Accompanying Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral by Tom Long who teaches preaching at Candler. It got me thinking a lot about the nature of death and the meaning of resurrection (I’ve also been reading books about burial practices, the concept of the soul, and other creepy stuff). Long does a great job, I think, of setting us up to celebrate All Saints Day not as a day of death, but as a reminder of Easter and resurrection.

            Long argues, and I think correctly, that the Bible tends to talk about three kinds of death, and knowing the difference can help us begin to understand what’s going on in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection. Using Tom Long’s categories, we might call these “small-d” death, “capital-D” death, and, finally, the death of Christ.

            Small-d death is what we might also call natural death. It’s simply the recognition that we humans are mortal—that we have a certain life span, whether it is short or long. Some might wish that we had life spans like those we read about back in Genesis (Methuselah – 969 years old—imagine how much he had to save for retirement!), but we have to remember that by chapter 6 God had already set a limit on human life – 120 years—which seems to be true even today. The world’s oldest man, Walter Bruening, was 113 on September 24.

            Truth is that each of us has an expiration date, which reminds us that we are human and not divine. Our mortality is thus a mixed blessing. On the positive side, the fact that we don’t hang around forever means that our lives have a sense of urgency that can generate things like creativity and faith. If you’re a procrastinator, mortality reminds us that you can’t procrastinate eternally! There is a deadline for all of us. Small-d death keeps us from living in a state of atrophy.

            Small-d death also has the somewhat positive affect of assuring us that suffering does not last forever. I’ve sat with a lot of families whose loved ones were suffering terribly in pain and for whom death was a blessed end to their suffering.. While we can never say that small-d death is desirable, sometimes it is a release from the prison of pain. Sometimes death might even be considered a friend to those for whom drawing breath is a struggle.

            We’re even more familiar of the downsides of small-d death, however. It reminds us that every day we live we are one day closer to dying (aren’t you glad you came to hear all this today?). And when we die, there’s a pretty good chance we will be forgotten. I’ve done plenty of funerals where a family member will try to say something helpful like, “He’ll be remembered forever.” Well, the truth is that Park City cemetery is full of people that nobody remembers. Very few people are remembered for more than a couple of generations after their passing. Psalm 103 reminds us of this fact: “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it and is gone, and its place knows it no more” (v. 15-16). Knowing that we’ll likely be forgotten, we can get trapped by what Tom Long calls “the anxiety of impermanence” which can cause us to a “what’s the point?” way of thinking. When people think that their lives won’t be worth much in the long run they can wind up wasting their lives in self-destructive ways. Maybe sin itself is really a byproduct of mortality. Conversely, people may also simply try harder to stave off their mortality and drive themselves to an early grave trying to “make their mark” in the world. I once heard somebody say that lying at the root of perfectionism is an inherent belief that if I could just do everything perfectly then I just might be able to avoid death. We all want to be remembered, but will we? Small-d death is a great equalizer, but also a great antagonist.

            Capital-D death, however, is a different reality. Capital-D death is never welcome under any circumstance and is never a gentle friend, but “an alien and destructive force.” It is an enemy—in fact, Paul says that it is the enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). It is God’s enemy, and it not only steals life from individuals but also captures “principalities and powers” (to use Paul’s terms). Capital-D death can enslave human institutions, turn people to warfare, cause hate and genocide, lead to systems of injustice and violence, and make a mockery of God’s good creation. Capital-D death seeks to destroy hope for the future, mocks our very existence, and “scorns human beings who are set down in the middle of history with aspirations for eternal worth” (Long 40). Capital-D death wreaks havoc in the world and we see it at work every time we open a newspaper and read the accounts of madness and mayhem perpetrated by human greed, malice, and sin. Capital-D death convinces humanity to embrace consumption over compassion, greed over grace, and self over our neighbors. When we begin to believe that the world is a dark and evil place, rather than God’s good creation, Capital-D death is at work. I wonder sometimes if our celebration of Halloween is really just an unconscious homage to Capital-D death—the spattering blood and axe murderer caricatures being seen as innocent fun instead of a symptom of our casual alliance with Capital-D Death.

            You may want to chew that over with all your candy…

            The point is that there is a difference between small-d and Capital-D death. Small-d death ends our life in time and place. Capital-D death seeks to end humanity altogether, consigning it to a future without hope. Sure, people have often thought that they could simply act better and the world would be better, too. The whole Enlightenment project was about human progress—that things will just keep getting better and better and eventually things like war and disease and even death will be conquered by reason, science, and technology. New Atheist voices like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, direct descendants of Enlightenment thinkers like Nietzsche and Kant, write screed after screed decrying faith and calling for pure reason. But how has that Enlightenment project been working out? Is war being eradicated, for example? No—and now we have nuclear weapons (which science gave us, by the way). Try as we might, humanity hasn’t been able to beat back Capital-D death, or even small-d death for that matter. If we’re thinking that we can change things on our own, well, I’ve got bad news. On our own, we’re still subjects of King Death. So we might cry out with Paul, “Wretched people that we are. Who will rescue us from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24)

            Well, the answer is why we’re here this morning. Sunday morning. An echo of Easter. We read the story of Jesus’ crucifixion last week—all that happened on a Friday—the day that Jesus was nailed to a Roman cross, enduring the pain and agony of death—small-d Death in his broken body and Capital-D death in the form of the evil and violence of empire and hate that put him there. “Death and death apparently had won, as they always do” (Long 42). And Jesus’ friends did the only thing they could do in the face of death and death—prepare for a funeral.

            Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross—which was unusual given the fact that the Romans most often left the corpses on them to rot for days and weeks as a warning to others—a reminder that Capital-D death was still in charge. But Jesus is allowed to be laid out in a tomb, which was a temporary state. Burial in the first century was a two-stage process. The body was laid out on a slab in the tomb, wrapped in cloths and anointed with spices to hasten the decay and cut down on the odor. One year later, the family would return to collect the bones and put them in a stone box called an ossuary. Go to Israel today and you’ll see that there were so many of them that many ossuaries are used today as flower boxes. First century people were intimately acquainted with the process and bodily byproducts of death, more so than we are in an age of sanitized funeral homes and graveyards. Jesus had been a reason for hope—now he was just a statistic. Another in a long line of those defeated by death.

            But that was Friday.

            Sunday morning, the women came to finish the anointing process and found the stone rolled away from the entrance, the tomb empty, and the graveclothes laid aside. The body had moved and the funeral was over. Jesus’ body was gone and he would appear in his resurrected body to his friends—not a ghost, not an illusion, not a magic trick not a collective fantasy—but a body. There were continuities; the body of the risen Jesus was in some ways like his former body, like our bodies. His followers looked at his face and recognized him, he ate food with them just as before, and he invited them to touch his flesh so they would know he was not a ghost or a dream. But there were also discontinuities; his risen body was not like his former body and not like our bodies.“ He could stand with his friends yet they did not immediately recognize him. He could walk through doors and could vanish in an instant. “This was not just the old Jesus given a shot of new life.” Rather, the Gospel writers were saying that this was a transformed body, a glorified body—but a body nonetheless. The risen Jesus was embodied, but it was not precisely the same body he had once had. This was not a mere resuscitation of a corpse—a la Lazarus--it was a resurrection.  (If you want to explore some of the evidence for the bodily resurrection of Jesus, I invite you to Bible study this week)

            What does the resurrection of Jesus mean for us? For death (small-d and big-d)? Well, for the early Christians, it meant nothing less than the defeat of death itself. In the human Jesus, God had done a radically new thing—he had gone through the small-d death that we all experience and had taken on directly Capital-D death and all of its sneering power. Humans have long sought a life of eternal significance—to be remembered, to have our lives count for something, to make our time valuable in a larger sense. Death has always blocked that from happening. In the resurrection of Jesus, God has removed that roadblock and the life-crushing threat of death.

            Yes, we still experience small-d death, but the resurrection tells us that this is a temporary state of affairs. Ultimately, we look forward to a resurrection of our own, made possible because Capital-D death will no longer have dominion over us. Our lives have eternal significance, our work in the present matters for eternity, we have a place in the coming Kingdom of God and a role in building for it. When that Kingdom becomes a reality, as Jurgen Moltmann puts it so wonderfully: “Death will die, not-being will be no longer, hell will go to hell.”

            So, we might add a third kind of death to our list—Jesus’ death. It is Jesus’ death and resurrection that trumps small-d and Capital-d death with another—the death we experience in baptism. When we are baptized, our death becomes enfolded into Jesus’ death on our behalf and in the victorious reality of resurrection. I like how Long describes this:

“Because God did not raise only the idea of Jesus or the spirit of Jesus but the body of Jesus, what makes up the embodied stuff of our lives—our relationships, the words we have spoken, the acts of love we have done—counts, counts eternally. The commitments of our lives and the places we have placed our bodies are gathered up by the power of God and transformed in the resurrection into the very life of God” (45).

On All Saints Day, we celebrate this reality—that those saints who have gone before us, whether we hold them in our conscious memory as loved ones or whether they are not yet known to us will all be known in the Kingdom and their work and life celebrated in the light of God’s new creation. We will join together with them in this new reality, unimpeded by death in any form, and become part of God’s glorious future—a new heavens and a new earth, with new bodies for new work, new worship and new life.

            In the interim, we still deal with death and the pain of loss, but we do so knowing that it isn’t the last word. Through our tears of grief, we remember resurrection and can shake our fist in the face of death: “Where, O Death, is your victory. Where, O Death is your sting? But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” shouts Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:57. We celebrate today because we know that great cloud of witnesses has come before us and we build on their legacy. “Therefore, my beloved,” Paul continues, “be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (v. 58). Resurrection means that our lives matter for eternity!

            I continue to use N.T. Wright’s metaphor of a medieval cathedral as a vision for how our lives are fitted for the Kingdom. You may recall my sharing with you his image of a guild of 11^th century stonemasons  in a yard, each chiseling out a design on a block of granite or limestone. Each has his own piece, and none has an idea of how it fits into the whole project. Only the master builder knows how it all fits together. Then, after many years, comes the great day when the master builder announces that all the work is finished. He gathers all those stonemasons together and leads them through it, pointing up at the ceiling or to a column and saying to each craftsman—“There’s your piece. Here’s yours. You did this.” No matter how small or seemingly insignificant, every stone matters. Every stone is part of a cathedral.

            Someday, I imagine, God will take each of us by the hand, as he will those who have chiseled out their work for the Kingdom before us, and tour us through the new creation. He will point out—“There’s your piece. Your act of compassion built that, your prayers did that, your visit, your giving, your leadership…all of it has a place in the eternal work of God’s Kingdom.

            So, today we honor all those who have gone before us and we thank God for their witness in our lives. This morning I want to invite you to offer a special prayer for a person or persons who is now part of the great cloud of witnesses, awaiting the resurrection at the last day. Thank God for their influence in your life, thank God for those whose influence you may not even realize. And, because of resurrection we can be this bold, pray for those who will come after you and build on the work you are doing today for Christ and the Kingdom. And if you can’t figure out what work that is, then maybe it’s time for you to use the sense of urgency that small-d death gives us and ask God to fill you and show you your piece of the Kingdom project.

            We gather on a Sunday morning, every Sunday morning, as Easter people. Every time we gather in this place we are really spitting in the face of death. We gather here to remember our baptism and celebrate the death of Christ that defeats all death by sharing in Holy Communion. We sing songs of resurrection and not dirges. We greet one another with peace and not fear. We are Easter people…and so we pray…

             

 

Random Gleanings from the Graveyard

For Halloween and All Saints weekend, here's a list of "I never thought of that" death-related stuff that may, um, leave you howling (Caution--if you are squeamish or don't like talking about death, now is the time to click out to a happier, fuzzier blog):

• WalMart has apparently begun selling caskets and funeral urns via its web site. That's nothing new really--Costco's been offering theirs for about five years. It's not like their stacked up next to the toilet paper, but you can still get a decent casket for a lot less than the funeral home will charge (and, by law, a funeral home has to accept the casket you bring in and can't charge you extra for doing so). I just finished a fascinating (and kind of gross) book by Mark Harris titled Grave Matters which looks at all the possible ways one's body can be laid to rest. Bottom line is, no matter how embalmed, sealed, vaulted, or encased your body is after the funeral, it's going to wind up a decomposed slick of--well, read the book. So, it doesn't really matter what kind of casket you get--it's just delaying the inevitable.
• Then there's the whole process of getting the body ready for viewing and casketing. Harris describes it in detail in the book. Let's just say that the chapter he writes about that is something one shouldn't read right before bedtime, like I did. The toxic chemical stew that results is also a real environmental problem on a whole lot of levels. 
• Harris also writes about cremation and about "green" burial in the book, which was intriguing. When we visited the Trappist monastery in Kentucky last summer, we saw a film about how the monks bury their dead in a simple grave with the deceased simply wrapped in a shroud. A natural process then takes place. Green burial sites are popping up (okay, probably not the best description) all over the country as people seek a more natural way of burial with no chemical embalming and no expensive metal caskets.
• Thomas Long's book Accompany Them with Singing: The Christian Funeral is one I've been recommending to colleagues recently. Long describes the interesting history of the early Christian movement and burial. Seems that in first century Rome common people were simply tossed into a ditch when they died (the Platonist idea that the body didn't matter dominated the landscape then as it, unfortunately, does now). The early Christians, however, would take the bodies of the poor, wash them, and prepare them for a proper Christian burial. Why? Because of their belief in resurrection of the body. The funeral and burial was thus an act of farewell and preparation for the resurrection to come. The body still mattered. 
• Jesus' own burial comes into discussion here, too. First century Jews practiced a two-stage burial process. In the first stage, the body was washed, wrapped in cloths and laid out in a tomb or burial cave hewn out of rock. Spices were applied to the body to both hasten the decomposition process and cut down on the odor. A year after this first "burial," the family returned and placed the bones in an ossuary or "bone box" which was then put in a niche elsewhere in the tomb or buried. There are so many of these ossuaries in Israel that people now use them for flower boxes (sans bones, which have been long buried elsewhere).
• But what happens when we die? I'm now reading Joel Green's interesting book, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible. Green takes a monist view of the body--that the body, mind, and "soul" are not separate entities and that science is proving this out. His discussion of what it means for humans to be created "in the image of God" is very intriguing. Point is, however, that it all goes to the importance of the idea of bodily resurrection over and against the immortality of the soul. I'll review it further when I'm finished.  For a more popular (and humorous) discussion of science and the idea of the soul, check out Mary Roach's Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife.Her description of MacDougall's famous experiment where he tried to prove that a separate soul existed and that it weighed 21 grams is fascinating. I also enjoyed her other book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
• Some of you may think I've gone off my rocker, but this stuff is actually fascinating. Hope you pick up some reading for "the day of the dead!"

WNYC - Radiolab

Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility.

via www.wnyc.org

As an insatiable podcast listener, I love stuff that makes me think. "RadioLab" is one of the most interesting and mind-blowing pocasts out there--a mixture of science, anthropology, culture, and a whole bunch of other stuff that makes for a fascinating and entertaining hour. Subscribe via iTunes. And if you're not listening to podcasts (mine included) then what are waiting for?

The Meaning of the Cross

Click here for the audio of this week's sermon or subscribe to "Bob Kaylor's Sermon Podcast" on iTunes.

Download MeaningoftheCross - the Powerpoint presentation for the sermon. 

This week, we looked at what it means when we say, "Jesus died on the cross for our sins." The answer lies within the whole narrative of Scripture that we've been studying throughout the series. Jesus reinterprets and opens up some key symbols and understandings from the Old Testament to form a new community for a new creation. I hope you find the message thought-provoking and spirit-lifting!

Reflections on the Clergy Retreat and the Missional Leader

Just sitting here in the Denver International Airport waiting for my flight home from our annual Rocky Mountain Conference clergy retreat and thought I'd do a little reflecting for my readers. Some of you who attended the retreat may want to add your comments.

• I was really excited that our Bishop, Elaine Stanovsky, was leading the retreat. It's so refreshing to see an episcopal leader with a vision and passion for ministry that is contagious. Her choice of "The Missional Leader" as our basic text for organizing and understanding our work together and individually was exceptionally helpful for many of us. Unlike some other books that we've read together as a conference, Bishop Elaine has already been integrating some of the learning about Pastor/Leader teams into her own work with the Cabinets of RMC and Yellowstone. I come away with a lot of hope for us as a Conference that is looking at emerging ways of doing ministry.
• I had the privilege of leading the group through some of the material on the missional church, which is a great imaginative exercise for both lay and clergy church leaders. There was a lot of energy in the room about the material and in our small groups we had the chance to do a little evaluating on where we all find ourselves and our congregations. For those in the "Red Zone," there is hope. For those who are comfortable in the "Blue Zone," it's a great time to be evaluating how you might look ahead at some emergent ways of thinking and doing ministry.
• As always, though, the best part of the retreat is getting reconnected with a lot of old friends. Since coming to Rocky Mountain in 1998 I have been blessed by many friendships that are vital to me despite the miles that separate us all. Some of my friends are very different than me theologically, but somehow we find ourselves doing well together in community. The collegial spirit of the retreat is always a blessing.
• As a (nearly) life-long drummer, I was excited to see that one of our exercises was getting all of the elders together for an hour or more of playing in a drum circle. It got me reflecting on the fact that we are, indeed, part of the "dust of the earth" and that primal, earthy, embodied way of living resonates in us. Playing drums together was deeply moving for many...but it's been therapeutic for me for a very long time! I was wondering how we might be able to do some of this in our local churches. "Instead of our regular order of worship, this morning we're doing some drumming." How cool would that be once in awhile?
• I continue to be impressed by the preaching of many of my colleagues. We never get to hear each other and the retreat gives us a chance to do that. All of those who preached blessed me with their words that resonated with the Scripture text for the week (Luke 10:1-12). I loved the fact that we focused on one text during the whole retreat.
• Line of the week: "We have to remember that every once in awhile a chihuahua kills a bear." - Chuck Schuster, talking about how all things are really possible.
• I was sad to see that Snow Mountain Ranch is not as, well, appealing as it used to be. Most of the trees are gone due to disease, which gives the place a stark look. They also got rid of their fitness center, which means no workout equipment anywhere on a YMCA camp property. What's up with that? The food was also pretty substandard. When that happens I always compare it to Army field rations. To put it succinctly, I would have welcomed an MRE. For what we were paying, that was pretty weak. Accommodations were fine, though, and the staff very pleasant.
• With doing some presenting and playing in the worship band I didn't have a whole lot of time to just relax. I was kind of hoping that I'd get a little down time after all the hectic work of the last few weeks and much more to come. Still, I was energized by the experience and very glad I was able to be there.
• Dan O'Neill's presentation on Central Conference pensions was moving for me. I am making a pledge to that cause to support our brothers and sisters in Africa with pension funds after retirement. My guess is that many of them have pastored in the "Red Zone" for a long time with very little resources, but who have done amazing things to make Africa one of the fastest growing places for Christianity in the whole world. I will also be donating the money I get from the HealthMiles program for working out this year both as a thank offering to God for my own health and to support my colleagues in Africa.
• And, last but not least, I always enjoy traveling with my friend Dave Hiester. Our conversations are always interesting and we have a lot of fun together. Great time last night at Hernando's eating stromboli and watching the NLCS. Thanks, Dave!