Sermon for April 22 - Earth Day

The Scripture Reading for this sermon is Luke 24:36b-48

Meister Eckhart once said, “If I spend enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar – I would never have to prepare a sermon.  So full of God is every creature.”  This sounds like a great idea to me.  How perfect is it that I won’t ever have to write a sermon again.  And since, as many of you know, I love watching nature documentaries.  I watch them avidly, I figure I’m a step ahead.

The last time I saw a caterpillar, however, was in December.  And there was something quite tragic about that.  A caterpillar in December in Manitoba.  The little guy was in his full furriness, inching its way across the road.  There was melting snow all around it, but the possibility of spring was still very distant.  I’m not sure how this happened.  I don’t know whether the caterpillar was late in arriving, or whether it was early, hatching from an egg, its body somehow fooled by the warm weather.  Nevertheless, it would not survive until spring.  I pondered the idea of squishing it, I imagined that would be a quicker way to go than freezing.  But I didn’t.  I moved it off the road, and hoped that a hungry bird would see it. 

That I remember a simple encounter with a caterpillar 4 months later, I think speaks to Meister Eckhart’s words.  “If I spend enough time with the tiniest creature – even a caterpillar – I would never have to prepare a sermon.  So full of God is every creature.”  I say this with all seriousness, and all gratitude, but I built a little relationship with that caterpillar.  It was able to evoke feelings within me, feelings of joy and sadness.  That was its gift to me.  And I do still at times wonder what happened to my little friend, knowing full well that whatever it was, it probably was not good.

This seems so far away from our scripture story for today, where we once again find ourselves in the company of Jesus’ disciples.  Rumors are starting to fly among them.  They talk about the empty tomb, they hear about an encounter on the Road to Emmaus.  Excitement is building, but they don’t know what it could mean to them.  Finally, the Risen Christ appears before them, and their response is the most normal response I can think of.  They are terrified.  They think he is a ghost.

As in the Thomas story, Jesus then invites the disciples to reach out and to touch him, to feel his wounds.  He is no ghost, he walks among them, he breathes among them in the fullness of his body.  And sure enough, he eats among them, he physically needs nourishment.  Whoever wrote Luke is really emphasizing that the Risen Christ has a body.  This is incredibly important to the author.  This is not a story about some transcendent being.  This is not a story about an ethereal Jesus, a ghostly Christ who dwells in our hearts and minds, a heavenly presence that whispers from far away.  This is a story about flesh and bones, which we all have.  It is a story about physical bodies, about creation and the world around us where we all live.  It is right here.

So often we want to put God far away.  We want to put God in the heavenly realm.  When we do that, the purpose of Christianity becomes about getting somewhere else, about leaving creation.  This world becomes a sort of proving ground.  It becomes a world that doesn’t really matter in the long run.

But the emphasis on the body in this story, says something entirely different.  Christianity is not a faith about heavenly places and superbeings.  Christianity is about this world.  Christianity says, if we want to encounter God, we can do so right here, right now, in creation, not outside of it.  When I use a word like incarnation, that’s what I mean.  That God is incarnate, to me, means that God dwells here.  That God has a body, that God is physical, that God can be touched, and seen, heard, smelt and tasted.  This is the wonder of the Incarnation.

Today we are celebrating Earth Day.  I think this is an important day to celebrate in the Christian calendar.  It is a day where we are reminded that holiness exists all around us, that to spend time with a caterpillar is to spend time with God.  And so I’m going to invite you to do that.  Spend time with a caterpillar, or a fly, or a shrub, or even a blade of grass.  Take a seed before it is sown and marvel at it.  Just marvel at it.  Today is an invitation to the fullness of our faith as Christians, a faith that does not look for God far away in the future, but a faith that knows God right here, right now.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Sermon for December 18, 2011 - Ramifications

The Scripture Passage for this week was Luke 1:26-38

Has anyone seen the movie Saved?  It’s a great movie, and it does a good job of pointing out some of the inherent hypocrisies of Christianity.  The story is of a young girl who goes to a Christian High School, and she discovers her boyfriend is gay.  She doesn’t know what to do, and she worries for his immortal soul.  She soon comes to the conclusion that sex before marriage is less of a sin than being gay, so she decides to have sex with her boyfriend, with the hopes that it will make him straight.  That’s the first 10 minutes.  Well, she ends up getting pregnant, and the movie goes on from there.

The persecution, the condemnation, and the judgment that she faces at school from her peers, and from the school’s principal are a key theme in the movie.  But held against that, is the love, the compassion, the Grace she receives from all the other outcasts in the school.  From the only Jewish kid at the Christian school, from the brother of the seemingly perfect Christian girl, who is a self professed agnostic, but readily points out all the hypocrisy of the school, from the principal’s son, and from her gay now ex-boyfriend.

What does it mean to be the Body of Christ in the world, and who embodies Christ more in this movie?

Last week, we spoke about the Magnificat, about Mary’s song of Joy to God.  It was a joy that swelled within her, as she experienced and encountered the wonder of God’s Grace.  We spoke about how important and yet how difficult it is to truly understand and accept that Grace which is freely offered to everyone.  We spoke about how wonderful an idea it is, that our value is not dependant upon what the world around us says about us, but is based only on the faith that we, as in all of creation, are the Beloved of God.  Our value does not come from anything we do, or anything the world says about us, it is simply a matter of faith that we have value.

That love of self is important.  It should not be confused with selfishness and egocentricity.  But rather it is a marveling at our own createdness, a respect and admiration for God’s handiwork in our very nature, and a honoring of that handiwork by devoting our lives to figuring out who we truly are.

But you may recall, I ended with some words; they might be hopefilled, they might be ominous, they might be a bit of both.  I said, “There are ramifications of such a notion.”  Since we’re continuing with Mary in our scripture readings for this week, I’d like to continue with our discussion of Grace as well, and what those ramifications are.

Today we’re going to talk about that love of the other.  I’m cautious about separating love of self and love of other.  I don’t think we can love the other as deeply as we do when we love ourselves, and I don’t think we can love ourselves as deeply as we do when we love the other.  But for the sake of practicality, today we’re talking about the love of the other. 

Once again, we need Mary’s help in this understanding of the ramifications of Grace, and how that Grace calls us to love the world.  Mary brings that love out in all of us.  She draws it forth from us, and helps us to see how possible it is.  And she does it all under the radar.

A teenage girl, pregnant out of wedlock, mystery father, from a poor village in the backside of a rebellious country in the dusty corner of the Roman Empire.  And remember from last week, by proper Law, so great was her sin that she could by all rights be stoned to death.

And we love her.  We love this social deviant, this outcast, we love this young girl who according to society did something so horrible as to deserve death in her time of history.  Gabriel is right, she is the most favored.  Not only favored by God, but favored by the world, by two thousand years of history.

And that we do hold her up is a sign of how possible grace is.  Love is possible, and not just for those we like, or agree with, or think are morally upright.  Love is possible, and fully embodied, when we realize what Grace says.  That everyone, that all of creation, has value, simply because of the love of God.

This Sunday is the fourth and final Sunday of Advent.  It is the Sunday of Love.  And what better way to celebrate love than to see how broad, and how far reaching it can be.  Yes, loving family is good.  Yes, loving friends is good.  Yes, loving our community is good.  Yes, loving ourselves is good. 

But who are the “social deviants”, who are those outsiders that we stone every day, not literally but metaphorically?  Or even literally!  How many gay kids get beaten up every day as we sit back silently?  Often it is Christians who do it!  “Send them to a special camp to get fixed.  Because it says in the bible that it is wrong.”  Yeah, well, it said in Mary’s sacred text that she should be executed, and how well would that have worked out for us?

We were able to move beyond social convention when we first held up Mary as beloved in God’s eyes and in our own eyes.  What other social conventions can we move past today?  Who else in the world needs to be held up as beloved? 

What about addicts?  What about the homeless?  And not just saying “yeah, the mentally ill ones should be helped”, but what about the ones who got there because of poor decisions?  What about our First Nations sisters and brothers?  What about prostitutes?  What about the billions of poor in the world?  What about the earth?  The earth is groaning under the weight of humanity, do we need to hold up the earth as a beloved creation of God’s, rather than as an impediment to our wealth?  Who or what are all those aspects of creation that we stone everyday, stone with our economic systems, stone with our politics, stone with our words, that deserve to be loved?

One week from now we will be celebrating Christmas.  We will be celebrating how God’s love became embodied in the world, in Jesus.  And let’s ask ourselves how that love became embodied.  Did it come into the popular crowd? Did it come in the hallways of power?  Did it come with all those perfect people who followed all the rules, and condemned anyone who didn’t?  Did it come to people who had made all the right decisions?  Did it even get a room at an inn?  Or did it come into the world in a stable, with the animals, stinking of crap, born to a woman who by all rights could have been condemned, worshipped by poor shepherds and foreigners, living, sleeping, and eating with sinners, with prostitutes, with outcasts, with people who had made mistakes in their lives, with deviants, with people no one else wanted to touch, with those who the rest of the world thought they were better than?  Did it come breaking all the rules and conventions itself?

And when you answer that, answer this, what does it mean to love?  Where is God’s love in the world?  Yes, there are ramifications of accepting God’s Grace.  Thanks be to God, Amen.

Sermon for October 9, 2011 - Something From Nothing

Scripture Passage for this Sermon: Luke 17:11-19

Read Something From Nothing by Phoebe Gilman

You can’t get something from nothing.  These are the words, the little boy in the book we just read, was told.  You can’t get something from nothing.  It seems logical.  Matter cannot be created right?  You can’t have an effect without a cause right?  In general, people get what they deserve right?  But the story doesn’t end there does it?  The little boy does indeed get something from nothing.  He gets a story.

You can’t get something for nothing.  Jesus, called to the lepers, he invited them to lean in just a little bit.  They had been told many times over, “You can’t get something for nothing.”  They were unclean, cursed with an illness that separated them from the world around them.  They could not offer anything to the world, and so they would get nothing in return.  They were nothing, and people treated them that way. 

They leaned in towards Jesus.  Then he invited them to lean in a little bit more, and at this time, all the disciples and the whole crowd was starting to lean further and further away, because, come on, its lepers, and no one wanted to be anywhere near them.  So Jesus began to whisper, he said, “All these people will tell you, you can’t get something from nothing, but you know what?  You CAN!  And somewhere, deep down inside each of you, you believe it, you know it.  You wouldn’t have called out to me if you didn’t.  You CAN get something for nothing.”

The lepers were in shock! Could it be?  Was it possible?  They ran to the priests who confirmed that they did indeed get something for nothing.  They had been cleansed, they had been healed.  And they didn’t have to make promises about what they would do, they didn’t have to be wonderfully good people, they just had to believe that they might get something from nothing.

They had nothing!  They had absolutely nothing.  They were unclean.  They were diseased.  They were on the outside looking in.  They had no access to society.  They had no access to the temple.  They had no access to anything.  They couldn’t offer anything to the world around them.  They had nothing.  And yet they trusted that even though they had nothing, they could get something.  And they were right.  A scandalous thought in the first century CE, and still a scandalous thought today.

This is not a story about miraculous healings.  This is a story about grace.  This is a story about getting something from nothing.  These lepers were not healed, they did not encounter God because they were deserving.  All the rules and regulation, all the laws of the day, in fact, insured that they would NOT have access to God. 

And yet… Sure enough.  They woke up one morning as lepers, as outsiders, as marginalized members of society, as excluded, as unclean.   And they went to bed with the ability to fully participate in the community.  From nothing, they suddenly had something.

This is what grace is.  It is the idea that we can get something from nothing. This is the faith that Jesus compliments at the end of the story.  The faith in God’s grace; a grace that is boundless and that is freely given.  A grace that is something from nothing.  We just get it.  We just get God’s grace.

In our world, we have created a deceptive reality.  Because we ourselves so often struggle with the idea of getting something from nothing (or worse yet – giving something without reason); subsequently, our image of God is one that often demands sacrifice, demands saintly perfection, demands correct doctrinal belief.  God will love us if we believe this… God will love us if we do that…  That’s counter to the Gospel.  Jesus heals first, before anything else happens.  God’s love always, always, always, comes first.  That is grace.

But the story does not end there.  One of the ten lepers comes back.  And he’s all healed, all clean, possibly skipping like the ex-leper from The Life of Brian. And this leper, responds to that grace which all of them had received.  He says, “thank you.”

And though Jesus is saddened that the others have not come back, he is delighted with this one man.  Jesus sees in him the model of his disciples, the model of who Luke thought Christians should be.  We are all recipients of God’s grace.  We are all bound up in God’s love, created and cherished.  To be Christian is not to be loved any more than anyone else.  All ten lepers were healed.  To be a Christian is to respond to that grace with gratitude.  To be Christian is to respond to that grace with humility.  Remember, grace touches everyone, we’re not better than anyone, we are just called to be grateful for it.  To live in response to that love God gives to the whole world.  We are called to live lives within that grace.

The question I’m going to leave you with is, and this Thanksgiving Sunday, is how do we show our gratitude to the God that loves everyone and everything?  How do we live lives that say “thank you”?  How do we fully live lives that embody that grace we are freely given?