Category: Sermons

A Divine Black Joke

The following is sermon I delivered Sunday, October 11 at East Side Christian Church in Tulsa, OK. Our church hosted Evan Koons that weekend as well, for our Wine and Words event. Check him out here.

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Myself, Evan Koons, and my wife Arianna

Does anyone here know who Kurt Vonnegut is?

Author and satirist, wrote Slaughterhouse-Five.

Well, I’ve heard a lot of sermons in my life so far, but I’ve never yet heard a sermon that quotes Kurt Vonnegut. So I’m proud to say I am breaking down that wall today.

And in fact, this Kurt Vonnegut quote is kind of the center of my message today. How about that for you?

In 1980, Kurt was invited to give a sermon on Palm Sunday, which is kind of a surprising thing in and of itself, given that Kurt wasn’t exactly a Christian or very religious, and in fact, liked to lampoon the church quite mercilessly in his criticisms of culture and modern society. But nevertheless, he was asked to preach, and he chose to talk about the same story we heard today, although he used the text from the Gospel of John.

John’s story is almost exactly the same as Matthews, except, as John tells it, it is Judas specifically who protests the women’s actions. “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii, and given to the poor?” Don’t you love that detail? Exactly 300 denarii, which was about what a laborer could expect in annual wages.

But, the author of John goes on: “Judas said this, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it.”

Do you see the scene setting happening here? Judas is being typecast as the bad guy he will shortly be. The author of John was many things, but subtle apparently was not one of those things.

And Jesus responds to this obvious villan, “Leave her alone….for the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me.”

Kurt Vonnegut, in his Palm Sunday message, says:

“Perhaps a little something has been lost in translation….I would like to recapture what has been lost. Why? Because I, as a Christ-worshipping agnostic, have seen so much un-Christian impatience with the poor encouraged by the quotation “For the poor always ye have with you.”…If Jesus did in fact say that, it is a divine black joke, well suited to the occasion. It says everything about hypocrisy and nothing about the poor. It is a Christian joke, which allows Jesus to remain civil to Judas, but to chide him for his hypocrisy all the same. ‘Judas, don’t worry about it. There will still be plenty of poor people left long after I’m gone.’”

As Kurt sees it, Jesus was engaging in a little black humor at his erstwhile disciples’ expense. For three years, he has been slamming his head against a seeming wall, trying to get his people to understand what this thing he is doing is all about.

And then here we are, and Jesus has just told them just before this, literally said, “in two days, I’m gonna be executed.” And so they are sitting down to one of their last dinners together and this woman, who surely heard Jesus tell his disciples the thing about dying in two days and thus wants to do something for him, something to show appreciation and love for this man she has followed and who is tragically about to be ripped away. And so she takes this jar of expensive nard, probably one of the most costly and precious things she owns, and she breaks it and pours it on Jesus’ feet, and uses he very own hair to spread it, and commits an act of selfless love, an act of wasteful extravagance. What a beautiful moment! Jesus is touched to the point that he declares that this woman, of all the people who have followed him and worked with him, this woman will be the one remembered forever.

Have you ever been talking to one of those people who are all over the place, who talk about like sixteen different things in a minute and a half, and you try to respond to each thing as best you can, and as they just ramble on, all of the sudden, something in their brain clicks and they randomly respond to something you said like 20 minutes ago?

Yeah, that’s basically the disciples here.FB_20151011_13_52_09_Saved_Picture

Jesus has spent three years trying to get these guys to understand. And like a stubborn mule they have fought and fought, and when he points them in some direction, they go off in the complete other. And then a woman pours ointment on Jesus’ feet, and all the sudden, in their minds, the disciples are snapped back to the Rich Young Man, and like Pavlov’s dog, the bell chimes and they all go “Sell it all and give to the poor.”

And Jesus engages in the world’s first recorded facepalm.

Think about it this way: if a man’s brother died, and that man went and pulled out his meager savings, and used the little he had in the world to buy his beloved brother a small, beautifully carved grave marker. Because, he may not be able to build him a great tomb, or name a mountain after him or anything, but he can do this, to show his love. What would you think if some guy went up to this man and said, “hey man, do you know how many homeless care packages you could have put together with the money you just blew on that slab of rock?”

What a jerk move, right?

“Why do you trouble this women?” Jesus asks them in disbelief. “She has done a beautiful thing for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.”

And from this verse, from these simple 15 words, Christians have been weaseling their way out of serving their less fortunate brothers and sisters for two thousand years. The core message of Jesus, that we are to love one another and thus serve one another; the thing he did time and time again in his earthly ministry, is all thrown aside because of one line.

I think maybe this is one of those things Jesus looks back on in regret. I picture him remembering his ministry, and thinking about how that wonderful women anointed him, and then remembering about what he told the disciples, and thinking to himself,

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Julian decided to help out a bit

“Man, I sure could have worded that a little better. Not my finest rhetorical moment.”

Because it’s true, right? How many times have you heard another Christian, someone who may not be quite so progressively inclined, justify their support for regressive policies and actions by this verse. “But we will always have the poor with us, so there is no point in trying to eradicate poverty right?” That’s what they say.

And us progressive Christians, good social justice warriors that we are, we live everyday in like direct opposition to this worldview. If there is a petition to be signed, or a protest to march in, or hope and change to be escorted in, by golly, we are so there. We know that Jesus didn’t mean we shouldn’t act to make the world better. We see it throughout his ministry, the example he lived every single day, of service and justice and love for others. We know that Jesus would absolutely be giddy if we finally beat poverty and the poor weren’t always with us anymore.

I know I’m that Christian. For me, the imperative to serve others, to, as the prophet Micah write, do justice and love kindness every day, are major reasons why I count myself as a Christian. I love a faith tradition, a way of life that is centered around making the world a better place through service to others. I love a God who identifies with the least, who calls for the liberation of those who are shackled, a God who so wanted to be in relationship with us that that God took on human form and came down and became weak like us.

But in this story, we are the disciples. We progressive, justice minded, outwardly focused Christians, we are like those foolish disciples. Remember what we were talking about? Look at your bulletin. Today’s verse isn’t “Do unto the least of these,” or “Feed my sheep.” Today, this verse is telling us, Jesus isn’t just interested in how many meals we bagged today at the food pantry, or how many children in Ethiopia we sponsored. It’s not that that stuff isn’t important; it truly is! It’s so, so important.

But, sometimes, Jesus wants us to just stand in awe at the beauty of it all. Sometimes, we need to just need to stop and be quiet and sit and listen for that still, small voice passing by. Sometimes, we need to remember the third requirement in that verse from Micah, which is to walk humbly with our God.

As progressives, we want to do, do, do. We want to fix things, and right wrongs, and make the world better. But for our own sakes, for the betterment of our own souls, sometimes, we need to practice some self love.

That’s what Jesus is saying to his disciples. It’s not that serving the poor isn’t important. And it certainly isn’t that we shouldn’t try. But sometimes, we are required to appreciate the beauty of this life. Sometimes we need to practice fellowship. Sometimes, we need to just worship.

The Bible tells us God is love. In God’s very essence, God isn’t just loving, God doesn’t just practice love towards us, God is love itself. As we are human, as we are made up of carbon and water and blood and bone and tissue, God is made up of this thing we call love. The universe was created and thus has an age, and everything in it does too, and we are one those things that are finite, and all of these ideas we have, all of these philosophical and theological principles we debate and write about and start wars over are finite and connected to our existence, but love…love is not one of those things, because love is God and God is love and God is outside of time and space and so love is too.

And the Bible also tells us that we are made in the very image of God, in the very image of Love itself. We are not made of love, but instead made in love, in the very image of that which is nothing but, and everything that is, love.

And we fall short of the God that we are modeled on, and we mess up, and thus we look to Jesus to see the example of him who most closely imitated the way of love here on Earth.

And so, all of that to say that, serving others isn’t enough in and of itself. We need to come at service not from a place of self-gratification, of patting ourselves on the back for how many good things we are doing, but from a place where the impetus for action is the very essence of God, that thing called love. And we can only do that by careful and frequent examination of and communion with Love itself, in the form of the God who created us and sent us.

Human beings, over the course of half a million years, have struggled and fought and drug ourselves up from the primordial mud and conquered the earth, and warred with ourselves, and called upon God to be on our side against ourselves. And then, with the advent of Jesus, God taught us that to prosper and flourish and bring the kingdom right here on earth, we must love each other, and thus serve each other as the only rational manifestation of that love. And for two thousand more years, we struggled and fought and ignored what we were taught. And then, in the last 150 years or so, we finally started to get it, and human rights flourished and we acknowledged the innate worth of all men and women, of young and old, of white and black and brown and yellow and red, of straight and gay and trans and. And we felt so good about ourselves, and patted ourselves on the back, and said “we figured this gig out, go us.”

And God just chuckles, and says, “no, you haven’t.” And we can’t see that because of the cascading ticker tape at the parade we threw ourselves. We are too busy congratulating each other, we can’t hear God asking for our attention. And so, like Kurt said, we are hypocrites, because we do these things, not for them, not for the glory of God, but for us.

This right here, this thing that we do on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings, and Wednesdays, and sometimes from sunup to sundown on Saturdays, or once a year on a good Friday, this thing we call worship or temple or church, it is so so important. When we walk humbly with God, when we listen for that still small voice, when we taste God in the bread and wine, when we appreciate and engage in acts of pure love towards the One we are made in the image of, that’s when we are reminded why we are here and why we go out there and do justice.

And so that brings us back to the “divine black joke” Kurt Vonnegut references. Jesus chuckles with gallows humor because his disciples just showed that they still didn’t have what it takes to make sure there were no more poor, because when they called for the ointment to be sold “for the poor,” they were forgetting to ground themselves, to experience the beauty of a moment with God, of a moment of pure love, and thus to see the meaning of why Jesus did the things he did. And so Jesus laughed to himself, and etched a moment and a nameless woman and her selfless gift into history.

So what am I trying to send you home with? What is my “go and do?”

What we do here is to make us better at what we do out there.

There is more to this Christian life than just social justice, than righting wrongs and healing the sick and lifting up the poor.. It’s exactly like what the book of James tells us: “Faith apart from works is dead.” So often we hear that verse reminding us that we have to do things in the world as Christians, but today, I’m asking you to hear that verse as reminding us that we have to have faith, we have to been enmeshed in the love of God, in order to make those works really matter.

One of my favorite old hymns is “The Gift of Love,” and I think the words from it’s first verse are so relevant to the point I’m trying to make. It goes,

“Though I may speak with bravest fire/ and have the gift to all inspire/ but have not love/ my words are vain/ as sounding brass/ and hopeless gain./ Though I may give all I possess/And striving so my love profess/ But not be given by love within/ The profit soon turns strangely thin.”

We need to take time for ourselves, time spent worshipping and praying and filling up our tanks with love that can only be found through communion with God.

So cherish this time each week. Realize that this worship is just as important as the justice work. In fact, that work can’t happen without what we do here every week.

Amen.

You Just Need To Be Hungry

The following is the Invitation to the Table I gave at East Side Christian Church in Tulsa this last Sunday:

Bishop John Shelby Spong tells of an Episcopal church he once visited that had a sign on the front door. It said, “The only pre-requisite for receiving Holy Communion in this church is that you be hungry.” What a wonderful distillation of the theology of the Eucharist as we Disciples understand it.

We believe this table, the Lord’s Table, is the ultimate equalizer. All people can come to dine with Christ, and in doing so, all social status and stigma is washed away, leaving only the divine image present in each of us.

Jesus never means tested those who wanted to eat with him. He never examined their ability to pay, their purity in the eyes of the religious authorities, their moral standing, or their social identifiers. He simply broke bread and poured wine and shared it with everyone around him.

We strive to embrace the same spirit of inclusion and acceptance at this table. All are unworthy of communing with God. All of us have fallen short of our potential, have done things we aren’t proud of, things that disqualify us from sharing in the holiness of God’s presence.

But here we are.

Despite our faults and shortcomings, God desires our presence at this banquet. Like Jesus taught, God is like someone throwing a great feast, who tells their servants: “Go out at once into the streets and lanes of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame….Go out into the roads and the lanes and compel people to come in, so that my house may be filled.”

This is how badly God wants us at the table. God desires the table to be full, the house to be filled to overflowing with guests, no matter who they are or what they have done. God turns none away, and in fact, goes out and finds those who didn’t feel worthy of trying to come in the first place.

And not just so God can say that the table was full for the sake of being full. God wants this because God knows that there is no better way to a person’s heart than through their stomach. God welcomes us because God wants this to be the impetus of an ongoing relationship. God wants to meet us at the table because that is where family comes together, where lasting relationships are born and nourished. We come here week after week to continually renew that relationship that we first entered into through broken bread and a shared cup.

To come to this table, you don’t need to have this all figured out.

You don’t need all the answers.

You don’t need to fix yourself, to clean yourself up, to be respectable, or calm, cool and collected.

You don’t need to have the prayers down, the liturgy memorized, the songs sung just right.

You don’t need to unlock the magic formula that will win you a place in heaven.

You don’t need to be a straight A Christian.

You just need to be hungry.

Sermon on The Fullness of Time

I had the opportunity to preach at my home church, College Hill United Methodist in Wichita, this last Sunday. The following is the text of my sermon. The scripture reading for the day was Galatians 4:4-7.

Let me preface today’s message with a request. Now, I know as a progressive, rational Christian, I can get tied down in the details of Biblical accounts like that of the Nativity. My brain knows that Jesus wasn’t born in December, he probably wasn’t visited by shepherds and Magi, it’s doubtful his birth was any less ordinary than any other, and that the idea of a Virgin Birth wasn’t earth shattering, but is in fact a common tool used by ancient writers to set a part a person regarded a special or supernatural. But sometimes, all that can get in way of a good story, of the meaning and truth conveyed in a tale like that of the Nativity. So I ask you this morning, be aware that I am thinking about the story of the birth of Christ as written in the Gospels, manger and Magi and star and all, to carry the message I want to pass along today, and I ask you to also immerse yourself in the truth and beauty of the Nativity Story.

We have just come through Advent, through the long four week lead-in to the birth of Christ. Advent is a time of waiting, of thinking, of pondering. It is a time pregnant with hope.

For Mary and Joseph, it was a hope-filled time of anticipating the arrival of a child heralded by angels. A child conceived beyond reason, sent for a purpose they could barely understand. Joseph had been told to name him Emmanuel, “God with us.” They knew this baby meant a change in everything they had ever experienced, that he would usher in a new life for them. Mary references this in her great song, when she says “From now on, everyone will consider me highly favored.” All in all, it was a pregnancy full of hope, excitement, expectations beyond what could be imagined, the promise of a life that would change human history like nothing before and after.

And yet, it was still a pregnancy. For all the fanfare and angels and songs, Mary was still charged with carrying a baby for ten months at a very young age. And at the end of those long, nauseous, sleep-deprived, pickle-and-ice cream-filled months, Mary would go through intense labor, without the modern convenience of epidurals and pain relievers, not to mention air conditioners and ice cold water. All the prophecy in the world could never quench the nervousness that Mary surely felt. Undoubtedly, in her very own village, she had seen multiple pregnancies and births, and very likely several unsuccessful ones. It had to be scary.

Ari and I have been through two pregnancies over the last three years, as well as two births with no medication, no epidurals, and no artificial induction. Granted, we had ac and cold drinks, not too mention steak dinners waiting for us on the other side. But nevertheless, for as wonderful as the experiences were, they were also scary. Especially the second time, after the massive hemorrhaging we experienced with Julian, knowing it could happen again. And it did, and it was quite scary. But we had the best medical care any one could ask for. We were well taken care of, and saw the wonderful benefits of 21st century science and medicine. I can’t imagine going through all of that without the safety net of well trained midwifes and doctors, and state of the art hospitals and birth centers.

All of this is to say, Mary had to feel fear and apprehension. Giving birth to a child was no sure thing in first century Palestine. And then showing up in Bethlehem, finding no where to stay, and facing the prospect of giving birth in a stable. A stinky, unsanitary, animal-filled stable. Terrifying is probably to mild a word to attach to the teenage Mary and her husband. And we haven’t even mentioned the shame her and Joseph must have felt. At the time of the pregnancy, they were not married. To have conceived a child before marriage was something that would have brought mountains of shame not just on them, but on their families. With that would come anger, and perhaps even exclusion from their families and home.

And yet, clearly, the birth went well. A happy, healthy, beautiful little boy was born. And to welcome him into the world were shepherds there to worship God, and Magi from the east, bearing priceless treasures. Out in the fields, a host of angels sang the new baby into the world with their heavenly voices, and high above, a shining star marked the birth of this remarkable child. An awe-inducing scene, a fitting majestic entrance for the one who is destined to change the world in unknown ways.

But again, reality surely intruded. The next day dawned for an exhausted Mary, sore and weak and cold and hungry. Joseph was tired, worried about his wife, anxious that this child, whom so many were counting on, show all the signs of health. And, for all the pictures we see of a haloed, smiling, reassuring little baby Jesus, the fact is, he was a newborn baby. Which means he probably didn’t allow mom and dad much sleep that night, or for several night after. He cried. He had spit up. He had dirty and wet diapers. And those weren’t nice, snug Huggies from the local Dillon’s.

In the face of all these ordinary baby events and habits, surely Mary and Joseph felt a little let down. They had this child built up to mythical proportions before he was born, and yet, he was still a baby, and life for this small, poor, rural family was undoubtedly HARD. The disappointment they had to feel at the normalness of their life’s in those first months and years had to be almost devastating at times.

Advent and Christmas can make us feel the same way. We spend four weeks anticipating, building up to this most important of Christian holidays. We celebrate joy and peace and hope and love. We are encouraged to pray and meditate and practice new spiritual disciplines. Here at CHUM, we contemplate the coming of Christ and the hope of a justice filled world that he showed us was possible. We think about how we can roll forward into a new year, emboldened by the holiest time of year to live our lives with Christ in pursuit of the Kingdom he described to us. Hope is truly the best word to describe the feelings we experience during Advent.

And yet here we are. Three days since Christmas. And its still the same old world we find on the other side of the holiday. It’s still a world filled with injustice. And it still will be going forward. In 2015, we will see more Eric Garners and Mike Browns, more shutdowns and budget cuts, more Ebola and ISIS, more “religious liberty” fights and roll backs of the gains made over the last fifty years in civil rights and voting rights and equal rights.

What was all that hope about? We go through Advent every year. We dream of new world, ushered in by the birth of a baby, sent to make justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an every-flowing stream. And yet it doesn’t seem like things are getting significantly better.

Disappointment is a good word. We can commiserate with Mary and Joseph a bit.

We see the same theme in the Old Testament Scripture from today’s lectionary. Isaiah 61:10 through 62:3 was written as the Israelites were returning to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon. It was without a doubt a hopeful a time, to see the kingdom and Temple restored. And yet, arriving back in the Holy City, they find the remnants of destruction: scattered, weed-covered old building stones, and empty Temple mount, very few people. It must have been a sad sight, one made all the more overwhelming by all the work needed to be done to restore their home.

And yet the author of Isaiah finds words of reassurance and hope to give them strength. From the ruins of Jerusalem, he finds the words they Israelites need. “As the earth brings forth its shoots,” he says, “and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all nations….You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of you God.”

Amidst the ruins and destruction, Isaiah sees hope still alive. He sees the potential, and finds the words Israel needed to restore itself, to plant itself once again as God’s people, doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly. Most of all, he senses the presence of God in Jerusalem. Despite the terrible things Israel has been through, he knows God is still at work among them, that God has not once abandoned them.

Mary and Joseph needed this same kind of reassurance. And they found it in Jerusalem as well, on the seventh day of Jesus’ life, when they brought him to the Temple to present him to the Lord as first born child. In the temple, the priest Simeon attended to them, and took Jesus from them, and said “This child is destined.” And the Gospels also describes a prophet named Anna who began praising God and to tell everyone who was looking for the redemption of Jerusalem about the child Jesus.

Imagine the reassurance of hope Mary and Joseph must have felt upon hearing this from the religious leaders of the Temple! To be told again of the great things awaiting this child must have renewed for them the feeling that they were in the presence of God, that God was now dwelling with them, not just in the Temple, but right in their very arms, in the form of this beautiful baby.

And so we look for reassurance as well. We look to have our hope restored, to see God present in our world amidst the injustice and suffering and cynicism. We long for the Kingdom described to us by the man this child grew up to be. And we can find it in the verse from Galatians we just heard. When I first read this verse in preparation for this Sermon, that first line really jumped out at me. “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son.”

That’s our hope. That’s our reassurance. In the fullness of God’s time, when God choose, the Son was sent to us. Jesus showed us the kingdom, he lived the example of a life immersed in the presence of God, a life embodying justice and mercy and love.

Paul goes on, writing to the Galatians, “So that we might receive adoption as children…So you are no longer a slave but a child.” To unpack this a little back, I look back at the verses leading up the selected reading. Paul writes about how children who are heirs are yet given about as much privilege and freedom slaves were given, which is to say, not a whole lot. He then says, “in the same way, when we were minors, were enslaved by this world’ system.” So when he tells us we are no longer slaves but instead are children, Paul is saying our status has changed in light of Christ’s time on earth. We are no longer the wards of God, entitled to much but asked of little. Instead, we take up the responsibility of heirs. We are given the task of, not just hoping and waiting, but instead of inheriting our birth right, of being the hope we dream of during Advent. It’s our duty, as children of God, to work with every ounce of our passion and talent and will to bring about the Kingdom here on earth.

When we look around post-Advent, when we feel that let down from the high of Christmas, from the ecstatic feeling we get amidst the singing of hymns and lighting of candles and the hope the birth of a child brings, we can remember that we are all named Emmanuel, “God with us.” We all are stamped with the enduring and everlasting image of God, and with that stamp comes great responsibility, to show the world that the fullness of time is NOW, that we are the hope of the Christ child in the world.

Amen.