Sometimes Everything Has to Fall Apart Nov 13 2011

+Sometimes there’s pain and suffering before we get to joy.
And sometimes, everything has to fall apart to open up space for the new.
Chaos often precedes order. Things tend to get really messy before the new is established. While most of the time Incremental change works best, other times bringing about change requires something more dramatic, more sweeping, more all-encompassing. And such dramatic change can feel frightening and uncomfortable, it can seem thoughtless, even violent.
Remember our October Storm, the Columbus Day weekend 2006 snowfall that destroyed thousands of trees and left many of us without electricity for over a week? It seemed as if this storm was a disaster and that we’d never recover.
But, speaking from my own experience as a homeowner on Woodward Ave. at the time, the impact has been intense…but a disaster? Not at all.
The hundred year old magnolia tree in our front yard was one of the first to fall that night…but within two years of nature’s violent and seemingly capricious pruning that tree bloomed more fully and brilliantly than it had in a generation.
The trees that weathered the storm are healthier, more vibrant, more full of life. Yes, we lost a lot of old familiar trees, but through nature’s pruning, the new landscape is stronger, richer, fuller.
Sometimes there’s pain and suffering before we get to joy.
Sometimes everything has to fall apart before a new order can be born
Of course we could have, in a measured fashion, pruned the trees, but no one would make the dramatic cuts needed to bring forth such incredible new life. The storm did what we wouldn’t do. Opening ourselves up to the threshing of the old in order to make room for the new, is something most of us won’t do without kicking and screaming. After all, the old, even if it’s weakening, even if it’s stagnant, even if it no longer works very well, is still more familiar, more comfortable than opening up to the unknown unfamiliar new thing.

Sometimes there is pain and suffering before we get to joy.
Sometimes everything has to fall apart before the new can be born.
None of us likes today’s readings—a violent God banishing people to eternal damnation, a God of vengeance, a God of judgment. A God who is willing to rip apart the old in an effort to usher in the new.
In Zephaniah, the prophet is sharing a particularly vivid description of the Day of the Lord—the apocalypse.
Zephaniah was writing to the people of Judah soon after their last great king had died—Josiah. Their future uncertain, the glory days seemingly past; he was writing to people who were  looking backward, toward what was, and slowly realizing what will not be again. On the one hand the old order was destroyed. On the other, a new order was being formed, something incredible. The people had a choice—look back or move forward. What Zephaniah in our first lesson, Paul in our second and Jesus in our third tell us is this :
Sometimes everything has to fall apart before the new order can be born.
The Jews of the early first century, CE believed that the coming of messiah would be preceded by a lot of pain and suffering, a time when the good would be separated from the evil---when the worthy would be taken up into the arms of the holy leaving the rest behind to sure and certain destruction.
Jesus doesn’t shy away from this imagery…he just turns it around a little bit.
Well a lot bit.
You see Jesus did come to separate the sheep and the goats and the wheat and the chaff. But not to condemn one to eternal damnation and the other to paradise. Jesus’ separation is between those who “get it” and those who don’t followed by  a clear and precise road map for those who wish to move from the “I don’t get it,” to the “I do.”
The Parable of the Talents—our Gospel reading today-- provides just such a map.  The story tells us about money—a lot of money—and how each slave manages his masters’ fortune. But, of course, the meaning of the parable has nothing to do with money, and everything to do with riches. You see the bottom line to Jesus’ message here is—live life, take what you have been given and do good---don’t live in fear of what might happen, live in hope of what will happen. For life happens, stuff happens, some good and some bad, some thrilling and some terrifying but, if we live our life embracing all of our unique, varied and “especially for us” talents, if we use them to further the march of creation, then we’ll be ready for whatever comes next.
Think about it. If I had run out the evening of the October storm and shaken the snow off of the leaves the magnolia tree wouldn’t have snapped.
And it wouldn’t have grown back with such a vengeance. It wouldn’t be so healthy. If I had played it safe, the tree would have survived, endured, existed.
But I would have denied it the opportunity to regroup, to shed some of its old and tired bark, and embark on growing anew. Of being born again.
Jesus came to earth as an October storm: he came to shake up the old order and bring in a new. He, as he stretched out the loving arms of his holy embrace on the hard wood of the cross, loaded all the destruction, all the vengeance and violence, all the crying and gnashing of teeth upon his beaten body and, with the wail which tears through us all on Good Friday, caused everything to fall apart, once and for all, so that, on that first Easter morning, he could walk out of that tomb presenting us with something all together new.
A God of vengeance and violence is part of our biblical heritage…but it is only part of the story…the full story—the rest of the story-- includes a young man from Galilee who took all of the violence, all of the vengeance we can muster and defeated it. For every one. Forever. The itinerant preacher from Nazareth takes our fear, our doubt, our love of order and hatred for uncertainty and rips it to shreds, leaving us with the space to allow something all together new to germinate. Leaving us open to being Born anew. Again and again and again.
Sometimes there is pain and suffering before we get to joy.
Sometimes everything has to fall apart before the new can be Born.
And sometimes we need to let the snow fall, the branches crack and the old fade away. For you never know what will grow in its place. +

All Saints Sunday Nov. 6 2011

In our church calendar, this past week could easily be labeled: the week of death. Besides Holy Week, no week in the church year is more death-loaded than this one. But, because we are a Resurrection people, death isn’t the end and a week of death focus is not morbid.
I’ll always remember the moment my father died. After 9 months of fight, he just couldn’t battle lung cancer anymore. We knew that it was The Day, for he had requested the morphine drip and the doctors said, once the morphine began he would fall into a coma and then slip away. Having never seen anyone in a coma before, I was shocked to discover that it’s not a passive state. Periodically he would moan, move around and, scariest of all, open his eyes… but behind those eyes, there was barely a hint of Dad….On the one hand, there he was. But, on the other hand, there he wasn’t.
Finally around 4 in the afternoon, he died. It was then that the creeping vacancy I’d noticed earlier was complete. Just moments after his death there was no semblance of “Dad” left.  One moment I looked upon my father and the next, an empty shell—just an abandoned container of failing muscles and skin…Dad wasn’t there, he was GONE.
Dad’s soul had taken flight, his earthly fight complete. As we read in the Book of Revelation:
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no
longer be any death;
there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain;
 the first things have passed away."
Dad’s first life, the temporal one was over, his second, life eternal continued… he was off to take his place with the saints.

I have shared these remembrances of Dad’s death with many of you before, and I’m sure I will again…for his death, the experience I had of it---has formed me and my theology of death, my theology of the saints, for the almost two decades since it occurred.
For at that moment I realized---not intellectually, not even religiously, but spiritually and temporally, in my soul and in my bones---I realized that who we are is far beyond what we see, or what we hear, or what we smell or what we touch. We are what’s inside—our soul—and that soul is encased in our bodies at birth and removed from our bodies at death. Our bodies are containers, they’re not us.
Ok, so this is a basic Christian belief and one you probably all thought I should have learned LONG ago—but knowing something and knowing something are vastly different.
On April 18, 1993 I learned that lesson.
A lesson which is at the crux of our theology of the saints.
Death is a fact of life-- it’s a universal experience. …and it fascinates, terrifies and befuddles most of us.
We spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out just what the after-life is all about---it’s one of the reasons the book Heaven is Real is so popular---we want proof, we like proof--because even though we proclaim it, we don’t really know it—we can’t really know if Heaven is Real.  We just have to believe it. That’s what faith is all about.
And that makes an awful lot of us uncomfortable.
This past week was our officially sponsored Church search for an  understanding of life, death and the after-life—the Tridduum of All Saints—All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints Day and All Soul’s Day.
These three days give us three distinct glimpses into life eternal. Of life after death:
Halloween-- derived from an ancient Celtic observance of a time when the veil between this world and the next is thinned---lifted even---giving us a glimpse of the other side. This practice allowed the living to help the dead complete their journey from this life to the next—by protecting them from evil spirits so they could safely arrive into the embrace of the Holy.
All Saints Day--- a day to relish in the glory of the Saints, thanking them for what they’ve given us.  It is so important to our faith we celebrate it twice—on the actual day, November 1 and on the first Sunday after Nov 1—today. I wear my gold, we pull out as many stops as we can—for we want the saints to know, we appreciate them, we love them, we rely on them.
The third and final day is All Souls—the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed---a day focused on all who have died in the past year. A day we allow ourselves to remember those who have died. To miss them, to long for them.
The All Saints trifecta helps us to honor that Great Cloud of Witnesses, the great cloud of souls who have left us in one way, yet return to us in another.
Our uniquely Anglican theology says that this Great Cloud of Witnesses—the saints of God---is made up of all sorts and manner of people:
Saints of the Church Universal----Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul
Saints of the Church specific---Elam Jewett, Darwin Martin, the Northrups, Ruth Noller, The Barry’s, John Mears, Fred Tripi
And Saints of our own families---my dad, my grandparents…
People who no longer physically walk among us, but who nonetheless inspire us, encourage us, berate us, and nudge us.
IS Heaven Real? Are the saints really surrounding us, right now?
Well let’s get real quiet. Listen….Listen intently.
Do you hear them? Can you feel them?…they’re right here…our parents, our grandparents, our sons and daughters, our friends and neighbors our patriarchs and matriarchs, the saints of the church universal, the saints of this parish specific, the saints of our towns, our families….
The saints of God, that Great Cloud of Souls are witnesses—witnesses to our lives, witnesses to our hopes, our dreams, our longings. Partners in our searching, helpers in our times of need. They are the Holy Spirit’s foot soldiers here on earth. Right now, we’re surrounded, surrounded by this great cloud of souls: Folks who long for us, miss us and pray for us. Just as we do them.
So Happy Death Week, Happy Eternal Life Week, Happy Day of All Saints--may we continue to be encouraged and sustained by that great cloud of souls---folks like you and me who have done and continue to do extraordinary things for us, Saints to Be. Amen.

Love isn't just a noun. It's a verb October 22 2011

+Growing up, my family didn’t say “I love you.” It wasn’t that my family was cold... I knew I was loved…but we were the poster-child for WASPs—White Anglo Saxon Protestants.  In our Irish family, talking was very popular, but talking about feelings? Not so much. Our family, more than anything, avoided being vulnerable…and talking about love made my family of origin far too vulnerable for our WASP sensibilities.

But love is a whole lot more complicated than just saying it. In Greek there are a number of words to describe the various and sundry things our English word LOVE describes. Love, as expressed by Jesus, is “agape” literally translated as: a Feast of Love.  Perhaps instead of calling our service “Holy Eucharist” we should call it a Love Feast, for that is exactly what we’re doing, we’re Feasting on Love. Once fed in this manner we are strengthened to go out into the world, seeking and serving Christ in all others.

It’s good we’re strengthened, for when we commit to living out the message of Christ in the world—being his hands and feet, his eyes and ears, and his mouth—we are making a significant, difficult and lifetime commitment. A promise to live according to the Greatest Commandment, the greatest two, actually, upon which hangs everything else: Loving God with all our might and loving our neighbors just as God loves us.

In the Jewish tradition there are roughly 613 commandments, (go ahead and count they are listed in Deuteronomy and Leviticus) and it was out of those 613 the Pharisee in today’s Gospel asked the question: which of these is the greatest?

Now of course, this was a trick. For by asking Jesus to name the greatest, they are backing him into a corner of blasphemy—for to place any of those commandments above another was to violate the very law the commandments outlined. However, Jesus, in his way, outsmarted them, for he didn’t “diss” the other laws, he just said that the rest of them flow out of the two he mentions. In shorthand Jesus is saying Love God because by loving God—by actually trying to give God back a modicum of what God gives us--- we will be filled with such an abundance of Love that loving our neighbor—loving everyone, no exceptions—will come more naturally.

         In other words, You gotta give it. You’ve gotta do it. Love isn’t just a noun. It’s also a verb. As one commentator notes:

Biblical love is not passive and it is not strictly emotional. In the Old Testament, there are references to many kinds of love, but the love referred to here by Jesus is… far from passive. It is the active response of the faithful person to the love of God...To love God with all one's heart, and soul, and mind, is to choose to respond to [God’s love]. Feelings and emotions do not enter into the equation.[1]

My parents would love this quote---especially the part about feelings and emotions------but of course, we aren’t talking about the love we have for our parents, our children, our spouses or partners. We’re talking about God’s love for us and our love for God. The love from which all other love flows. What today’s Gospel commands us to do is to allow the Love we experience when we are fed at this table to nourish us in the ways of Agape---in the ways of a Love Feast. And, when we’re nourished at this feast, we can’t help ourselves, we must share this love with others, by acting out of Love, in Love and through Love. Clayton Schmit, a seminary professor puts it this way:

This means that, to those with whom we are intimate, to those we do not know, to those who may be dirty or repugnant, and even to those who harm us, we can act according to the law of love. We can be merciful and gracious. To love the neighbor as ourselves is to make a conscious choice and act upon it.  …

When we love God's people, we are always, and at the same time loving God.[2]

You see, as UCC minister Kate Huey says:

[The] primary component of biblical love is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that [the Greatest Commandment] demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment" [3]

Commitment means giving of ourselves, it means giving this place (GS, ASC) your time, your talent and your treasure. It means increasing your pledge or pledging for the first time---not because I ask you to, or our stewardship speakers ask you too, but because your love for God is so great you feel compelled to return that love to God…..

And, we return that Love by taking what we’ve been given—for all things come from God------and give it back.

Now, some of you may be thinking, all I have to give God is heartache, bills, poor health, and unhappiness. You know what? That’s OK, give it to God. Let God have it. If you don’t feel you have any bounty at all, if you feel as if God hasn’t given you anything good, then give all the bad back to God. For God can take it. God will take it. God wants to take it. You see, that’s what this Agape, this God Love is all about-----God loves us so much that God wants all of us---our heart, our mind, our soul, our anger, our fear, our sadness….and our abundance, our joy and our bounty. God wants it all.

We fail to live into the Love commandments when we stop giving it all to God. As long as we hold onto what we have—good bad and ugly--- as long as we refuse to give any of it up--- God is left out of our lives. And God, above all else wants to be part of our lives. That’s why God took on skin and bone, heartache and pain in the person of Jesus---because God wants the whole of the human experience.

Maybe that’s the best way to understand this God Love, this Agape----God so loves us, God even wants us on our worst days.

Love isn’t just a noun, it’s also a verb.

Biblical Love isn’t just a feeling….it’s an action. Love isn’t a sentiment as much as it is a commitment. Feeling Love is one thing, doing Love is something altogether different.

---

[1] Clayton Schmit Arthur DeKruyter/Christ Church Oak Brook Associate Professor of Preaching Fuller Theological Seminary Pasadena, CA www.workingpreacher.com accessed 10.21.11

[2] ibid

[3]Kathryn Matthews Huey, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/october-23-2011.html