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Title: Companions without paychecks
Date: June 29, 2008
Text: Genesis 22:1-14

Just in case you happen to forget, people need a paycheck to survive. We do work, sometimes we enjoy it and sometimes we don’t, so we can get a paycheck. Everyone has bills to pay. My dad has never enjoyed his work; but he works hard for the family. And he’s good at what he does. But it’s work—and he works for a paycheck. Sure, he’s made some friends along the way. But at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, it’s a paycheck. When it’s time to retire, he will not return to the factory and put in a few hours on a machine for the heck of it.

Isn’t that how we think about salvation sometimes? Seriously, think about it. All this following Jesus stuff, all this Christianity, don’t we do it for a reason? Isn’t there a payoff? Don’t we do all this church business, all this discipleship stuff, for a paycheck? Isn’t heaven or salvation our paycheck? We make our investments now—call it ‘discipleship’—so we can get paid at the end.

To rip off some words from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, we give to the needy so that our heavenly father will reward us. And we don’t spend our time padding our bank accounts and investment portfolios because we’ve got a more important fund: it’s called heaven. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy… But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”

We do it all for a payoff at the end—something that will make it all worth while. Isn’t this what we believe?

That’s why the story of the binding of Isaac is so difficult to figure out. Abraham does everything he does because of one promise—that God will make of him a great nation. “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you.” That’s what God says to Abraham in Genesis 12. God gets Abraham to leave everything behind for a promise, a future paycheck—to be a great nation.

Abraham makes a cost-benefit analysis. He’s got a decent life in Haran. But if he invests his life in God’s project, then Abraham will have an unbelievable life. He’ll be the father of a great nation. So he goes. The investment is worth it. [Read more →]

Title: Nests and Hope, part III
Date: June 8th, 2008
Texts: Gen 12:1-9; Ps 33:1-12; Rom 4:13-25; Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26

“If I knew that tomorrow was the end of the world, I would plant an apple tree.”

—Martin Luther, a legendary saying

What is hope? And what does it mean to have hope? Jessamine asked some questions during church a few weeks ago that keep these questions on my mind. And it is especially on my mind this week given the recent developments with my blue birds.

Some of you haven’t been here for my recent sermons on my blue birds, so let me recap. I put up a blue bird house at the edge of my front yard, near the street. And despite all the dangers that come with my neighborhood—like cats, cars, and people—some blue birds started a nest in that house. Because that’s what birds do: they build nests that provide space for birth, for new life, right smack in the middle danger and threats to their lives.

And that’s what we do. We build nests of Christ’s love. We surround and sustain one another with the Holy Spirit—the embrace of God’s love. We are God’s nests of hope, nests for the birth and re-birth of life. And our nest-building becomes a reason for hope—that God is still at work, breathing and speaking life through us.

Then there was a problem. I told you the bad news. The eggs hatched, but a cat killed all the babies. The nest became a grave. Very sad. But, after a few days, the two blue birds came back to the site of the massacre and started nesting again. It was amazing. They couldn’t be stopped. That’s what hope looks like, stubborn hope. Death will not have the last word.

And I told you how that’s what our hope looks like too. The story of our hope is the story of a man named Jesus who made nests everywhere, surrounding people with the love of God, offering abundant life. And that life gets killed. But death does not have the last word. God turns a grave, a tomb, into the site of new life. Our hope is born in an empty tomb. The grave is the birthplace of resurrected life. We are now like those blue birds that return to their nest, despite the stench of death, and discover new life. Through that same Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, we are at work in this world making space for life.

Now, a lot has happened since that last sermon. And I think this will be the last one on the blue birds. Last week I peaked in the house. And I saw three eggs. Yes, that grave turned into a place for life. Three eggs waiting to hatch. I was so excited. I felt vindicated. I was right. Death didn’t have the last word. Life won. Promises of hope turned into reality. That bird house is now a sign of good news.

On Tuesday I was lucky enough to see a baby bird struggling to get out of an egg. It was late in the afternoon. I happened to peek into house and saw one little guy. It looked like an alien, or what I imagine an alien would look like. Pretty exciting stuff. I went back inside my house. And whenever I needed a distraction, I would get up from my desk and walk over to the window and check out the house.

After 30 minutes or so, I started to worry. Usually the blue bird parents are darting in and out of that house all day long. I realized that I hadn’t seen them all day.

I went back out there to check out the newborn bird. When I opened the house I saw the baby bird alone with two unhatched eggs, opening his mouth as wide as he could, waiting for food. I started to panic. I quickly did some google research on the internet and discovered that newborn blue birds need to be fed every half hour, or something like that. My mind kept repeating that image of the blue bird with a wide open beak, dying for food—literally. [Read more →]

I wrote a piece for The Mennonite last year. They published it in the recent June 3, 2008 issue. The editors introduced some errors into the text, but for the most part it’s what I wrote. For example, despite what the article says, Chapel Hill is not in Durham N.C.—they are different cities.

You can read the article here: Radical Ecumenism

I use Lesslie Newbigin to talk about how Christian unity takes place on the ground, at the grass roots—as he put it, ecumenism needs to be about “organic unity.” Here’s a quote from the end to give you a feel for the article:

If ecumenism is to be truly radical, then it’s not something that distant leaders can create in the branches and leaves. Rather, this kind of rooted ecumenism emerges from the local soils where our churches grow. Congregations test their soils and decide how and where to sow ecumenical seeds that produce plants bearing fruit of the Spirit for all the neighbors to enjoy. That’s when we find that our ecumenical church is also our missional church—one embracing movement of God’s love.

Congregational Prayer: 5.25.2008 (lectionary text: Isaiah 49:8-16)

Here we are God: the same building, the same time of the week, with the same people. We are here because we can’t remember your promises on our own—that you promise new life, redeemed life, holy life, abundant life. God of life, breathe through us the life of your Holy Spirit—your comforting and forgiving Spirit. Surround us in your loving embrace, flowing through our sisters and brothers sitting next to us, in front of us, behind us, across the room from us. These are the people who show us that you, O God, will never leave us nor forget us.

As our passage this evening from Isaiah says, you are a mother who can’t forget her nursing child. And like hungry children, we will continue to cry out, because we hunger and thirst for your righteousness, for your justice, for your peace and mercy. God, may your reconciling grace flow throughout the earth.

This weekend we pray for your grace to move in people and places we aren’t used to praying for since we are a peace church. We aren’t used to praying for soldiers; we’re not used to remembering them. But, as it says in Isaiah, you are a God who remembers—and that means we should too, even if it’s confusing and strange.

God, tomorrow is Memorial Day. And when our country remembers the women and men who serve in the armed forces, we also remember them. We pray for all those people who have been taught to do things that no human being was ever meant to do: to kill. God heal them. They have wounds too—deep wounds, down to the soul. Wounds that make it difficult to return from war and love their spouses, and children, and friends; wounds that make it difficult to be loved, to receive love. When they kill, they also kill parts of themselves. Presidents and generals and recruiting officers don’t tell them that. In your great mercy, make a way for life to have the last word, not death; a way for grace and peace, for justice and forgiveness.

We pray that your Spirit would fall upon all flesh; and when your Holy Spirit falls, we ask that we will be moved toward repentance and forgiveness, toward the joy found in reconciled peoples, toward peace and mercy, toward your kingdom.

And that’s why we pray the prayer your Son taught us to pray, “Our Father…

Title: Image of God
Date: May 18, 2008
Texts: Gen 1:1-2:4a

I preached my first sermon, here, 5 years ago this past April. And it was really bad. Hopefully no one remembers it. I do. And over the past 5 years, I haven’t had to preach on the creation stories in Genesis. That’s something I’ve counted as a blessing. Until this week.

Sure, I’ve studies the creation accounts. And I’ve read some of the other creation myths—the ones from Mesopotamia, from Egypt. I’ve had casual conversations about the troubling similarities and strange differences among the different accounts. But how does one begin to think about preaching the passage? It reverberates with so much mystery. And I have more questions than answers.

So, tonight I’ll share with you a question I have. It’s something I can’t stop thinking about. There’s something in this story that I’ve never noticed before—maybe you have and can help me think through this strange passage. I’m haunted by what I discovered this week when I read Genesis 1.

I’ll have to read some parts of the text again so you can see what I’m talking about. Genesis 1, verses 3 and 4: “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.” Verses 9 and 10: “God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” The next verses are about vegetation—plants, trees, flowers. Verses 11 and 12: “Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation… And God saw that it was good.”

The creation account goes on and on like this, with the same pattern. God creates something with his spoken word, and then sees that it is good. “And God saw that it was good”—that’s the constant refrain. It’s good. Creation is good. Everything is so good. Light, water, plants, the sun and moon and stars, birds that fly, sea creatures that swim, and animals that walk and run and creep on the land. It’s all so good. The passage says that over and over again, like a mantra, so we don’t forget it. Good, good, good, good.

Then we come to verse 26, and the trouble begins—at least for me: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’” The passage goes on to say more about how God commissions the humans to be fruitful and multiply, just like all the rest of creation is fruitful and multiplies. And then, at the end of the creation of the two humans, we get this: “And it was so”—that’s at the end of verse 30. [Read more →]

This is the sermon I preached—it’s a continuation of my last one: Nests, part I. It starts out the same, but I take it a different direction half way through. I think it’s better than the one I didn’t preach. But who knows.
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Title: Hope and Nests, part II
Date: May 4th, 2008
Texts: Ps 68:1-10, 32-35; Ac 1:6-14; I Pet 4:12-14, 5:6-11; Jn 17:1-11.

Nests and hope. That’s what I preached about the last time. I told you about the blue birds who moved into the birdhouse in my front yard near the road. I talked about how they show us what hope looks like in our world today. Despite all the dangers, all the threats to life, those birds still build nests, right smack in the middle of it all.

That’s what birds do; they build nests that provide space for birth, for new life. And that’s what we do. We surround each other with the love of Christ; we sustain each other with the Holy Spirit; we offer one another the embrace of God’s love. We are God’s nests of hope, nests for the birth and re-birth of life, abundant life, life upon life. We show, with our lives, how hope is a verb—it’s something we do through the power of the Spirit. We become a reason for hope.

Well, my neighbor told me this past week that he saw a cat climb up that blue bird house while Katie and I were in France. He scarred the cat away before he left for work. But in the evening, when he got back, he peeked into the bird house and found that all the baby birds were dead. The cat killed them and left them there. The nest of abundant life turned into a grave.

What can I say now? I felt pretty good with my hopeful sermon about nests and abundant life. I felt good about that hope—and you all gave me reason to believe it because of your care for one another. But reality has a tendency to get in the way of hope and rain on our parades. That nest, full of abundant life, gets killed. Reality stinks of death.

So now what? [Read more →]

Here’s sermon I decided not to preach. I think it’s good, but I realized that it’s not necessarily what my church needs to hear—the Holy Spirit led me elsewhere at the last minute (it seems like God always interrupts a good thing). If you’re into politics, it may be interesting for you. The idea for this sermon came to me when a friend gave me a Barack Obama campaign sticker. It’s awesome. But it’s also dangerous…

According to Acts, hope is a people’s movement. As I say at the end, Power and Hope can’t be abstracted through representation—it’s ours.

It will probably make more sense if you read the sermon… Hopefully.

Disclaimer: this isn’t really about Obama in particular. It’s about election politics in general. More importantly, it’s about our true hope. As Nicholas Lash has taught me, Christianity is an iconoclastic movement—that is, we point out how images and icons lead us astray. (Paul Murray’s essay on Lash is a decent place to start.)

Title: Hope—a verb.
Date: May 4th, 2008
Texts: Ps 68:1-10, 32-35; Ac 1:6-14; I Pet 4:12-14, 5:6-11; Jn 17:1-11.

Nests and hope. That’s what I preached about the last time. I told you about the blue birds who moved into the birdhouse in my front yard near the road. I described how they show us what hope looks like in our world today. Despite all the dangers, all the threats to life, those birds still build nests, right smack in the middle of it all. That’s what birds do; they build nests that provide space for the birth of new life. And that’s what we do; we surround each other with the love of Christ, we sustain each other with the Holy Spirit, we offer one another the embrace of God’s love. We are God’s nests of hope, nests for the birth and re-birth of life, abundant life, life upon life. We show, with our lives, how hope is a verb—it’s something we do through the power of the Spirit. We become a reason for hope.

Well, my neighbor told me this past week that he saw a cat climb up that blue bird house in the front yard while Katie and I were in France. Apparently the dangers birds face are more real than I imagined—as real as a cat reaching it’s deadly claws into a nest of baby blue birds. My neighbor scarred the cat away before he left for work. But in the evening, when he got back, he peeked into the bird house and found that all the baby birds were dead. The cat killed them all and left them. The nest of abundant life turned into a grave.

What can I say now? I felt pretty good about my hopeful sermon about nests and abundant life. In fact, in my completely unbiased opinion, I thought it was one of my better sermons over the past few months. I felt good about that hope—and ya’ll gave me reason to believe it because of your care for one another. But, reality has a tendency to get in the way of hope and rain on our parades of hope. That nest, full of abundant life, gets killed. Reality stinks.

So now what? My bird house isn’t a sign of hope anymore. Dead baby blue birds—that’s all I see when I look out my front window. And it’s a lot of what I see when I look at the world; and it’s what I see in the lives of some of my friends—completely hopeless situations.

(pause)

When will hope happen?

Title: Nests
Date: April 13, 2008
Texts: Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; I Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

We have two blue birds living in our front yard. Last fall our neighbor gave Katie and me a bird house, and I put it up near the street this past January. That probably wasn’t the best place to put it. They said to install it as far away from our house as possible—since humans scare them. Well, I did that. And now it’s a couple feet from the street which is probably worse. People walk by with their dogs, and cars speed by. It’s probably the worst spot for the blue birds—a very threatening environment.

Whenever I go out to my car, or walk to the street to pick up the mail, the birds get anxious and fly away. Apparently, I’m dangerous. No matter how cautious I am, how quietly and slowly I walk, once I get within 15 feet of the house, the male blue bird leaves his perch on top of the house and flies to a nearby tree. And if I keep on walking, the female shoots out from the house and into another tree.

But when I go back inside, and after the dog walkers pass by, the blue birds return to their nest inside their birdhouse. They are stubborn with their nest.

This isn’t something necessarily special about the blue birds in the front yard. Birds everywhere build nests in the most precarious places, in the midst of danger: even with predators nearby, like neighborhood cats; or at UNC, in a corner of awning alongside a busy walkway. Nothing will stop them from building nests. And they can build them anywhere, in any corner, no matter how dangerous.

Birds live in a dangerous world, but that doesn’t stop them from building nests in the midst of it all.

Psalm 23 invites us to be like my blue bird neighbors. Psalm 23 tells an honest story about death and darkness—wandering in a valley of darkness. I’ll read a couple verses: “Even though I walk through the darkness valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff—they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows” (vv. 4-5).

The Psalmist is a realist. [Read more →]

I’ve started writing short pieces for The Mennonite magazine. My first piece appeared in the April 1st issue: “Blessed are those who mourn.” Here’s an excerpt:

Mourning is worship. Sometimes we worship with our tears. To worship any differently would be dishonest and deny what Paul affirms: We preach Christ crucified (1 Cor 1:23). We misunderstand the message of resurrection if we think it means we must always rejoice in our worship. Resurrection doesn’t mean we rush past the wounds of suffering in order to find hope. We too easily forget that the risen Jesus appears to his followers with open wounds. In John 21, Thomas can put his hand into the hole in Jesus’ side. The crucifixion is not erased at resurrection; Easter doesn’t rush past Good Friday. Instead, resurrection remembers forever the wounds of suffering and the pain of death. As Blaise Pascal put it, “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world” (Pensée 919).

A few years ago, someone from our church went to Iraq with the Mennonite Central Committee to work for peace while our country waged war. During the Easter season of 2004, he sent us a letter, a dispatch from the front. Peter Dula wrote to us, “Jesus has indeed risen even if it was a hell of a long time ago and even if there is no evidence of it in Baghdad.”

Peter has written an essay on what it means to celebrate Easter while evil seems to be winning the day. Well worth reading—best essay I’ve read in a few years (but I’m biased). It appears in the March 28th issue of Commonweal Magazine (a Catholic publication—what’s a Mennonite doing talking about the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Mary?). Here’s the link: “Easter in Baghdad: Theology in the Shadow of War.”

Dula leads us into a place where silence is the only possible thing to say—where worship is a political protest against the powers of evil, but one where we cry Maranatha “while our eyes swim with tears,” as Barth put it (CD IV/2: 789). Peter Dula writes,

We do see Jesus-the broken and bloody body of Christ-scattered across the margins of the American empire…. If theology is helpful it is not because it allows us to say anything, but because it pushes us toward silence; it unveils our ignorance and makes it hurt.