Ordinary Time 10C, June 9, 2013

Guest Preacher:
Rev. Dr. Sheldon W. Sorge, Executive and General Minister
Pittsburgh Presbytery

When all Hope is Gone 

1 Kings 17:8-24 
8 Then the word of the LORD came to him, saying, 9 “Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.” 10 So he set out and went to Zarephath. When he came to the gate of the town, a widow was there gathering sticks; he called to her and said, “Bring me a little water in a vessel, so that I may drink.” 11 As she was going to bring it, he called to her and said, “Bring me a morsel of bread in your hand.” 12 But she said, “As the LORD your God lives, I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die.”13 Elijah said to her, “Do not be afraid; go and do as you have said; but first make me a little cake of it and bring it to me, and afterwards make something for yourself and your son. 14 For thus says the LORD the God of Israel: The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the LORD sends rain on the earth.” 15 She went and did as Elijah said, so that she as well as he and her household ate for many days. 16 The jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD that he spoke by Elijah. 
17 After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. 18 She then said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” 19 But he said to her, “Give me your son.” He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. 20 He cried out to the LORD, “O LORD my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” 21 Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the LORD, “O LORD my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” 
22 The LORD listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. 23 Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, “See, your son is alive.” 24 So the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth.” 

Luke 7:11-17 
11 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. 12 As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. 13 When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14 Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” 
15 The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16 Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on his people!”17 This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country. 

Over the past ten days, Pittsburgh has experienced a classic case of crashing hopes, as its beloved Penguins moved from being favorites to go to the Stanley Cup finals to elimination by the nefarious Bruins of Boston. Going into the series with the Bruins, Pittsburghers almost swaggered with optimism, but the swaggering stopped after the first game. Still, fans and local sports journalists were hopeful for a quick reversal of fortune’s negative turn. A disastrous second game all but snuffed out hope among most of our fans and media, with only the players themselves expressing real hope for winning the series. After a hard-fought multiple-overtime third game finally ended in Boston’s favor, even the players’ tone changed – all they dared hope now was for a single win, but of course one at a time, they could still win all four. A small sliver of hope still remained. But we all know the rest of the story… 

Hope for the widow of Zarephath was even more slender, as our Bible story unfolds. She had been victimized repeatedly, first by the death of her husband, leaving her to raise their son alone, then by the depredations of a drought that had ravaged the region for three brutal years. Moreover, she was outside the realm of God’s chosen people, a Gentile from the region of Tyre and Sidon, which was considered among God’s people in the same category as Sodom and Gomorrah. Even though she had none of the benefits of being among God’s chosen people, she shared in their punishment when God declared drought on the land in response to their persistent idolatry of the things enjoyed by their surrounding culture. 

Gentiles from that region are shown to be reached by God’s mercy in other parts of the Bible. In the days of the early church, Cornelius, a Roman centurion, lived near there, and called upon God to intervene in his life. During the time of Jesus’ ministry, a woman from that area had a sick daughter, and cried out to him for help. In both cases, after Peter and Jesus dealt with some serious wrinkles related to their being Gentiles, they received the blessing from God they sought. 

But the Zarephath widow asked God for nothing. She had abandoned all hope, and had resigned herself to the fate that she and her son would soon starve to death because all their resources had been exhausted. As if losing her husband’s support were not enough – the drought added only further to her misery. She was out gathering wood for one last fire to cook their final meal, when she ran into the guy who was at the top of the Most Wanted list down at the post office – Elijah, the guy who prophesied the drought into existence three years earlier. 

And there she came into her destiny as God’s anonymous servant. God had told Elijah, “I have directed a widow there to supply you with food.” So Elijah asked her first for a drink, which she was glad to provide, until he added, “And bring me, please, a piece of bread.” He asked nicely, didn’t he? But she had none to give. “As surely as the Lord your God lives, I don’t have any bread,” she replied. Notice the language – “The Lord your God.” She claimed neither to know nor to serve this God. Yet God claimed to have directed her to feed Elijah. That’s often how God uses us – we have no idea that what we’re doing is prompted by God, but in doing the right thing, we may indeed be instruments of the Almighty without knowing it. 

I used to think that the point of the story was that because she fed Elijah first, God blessed her with a bottomless supply of oil and flour. She got something because she gave something. I’ve heard preachers wax eloquent on that idea – give the little you have to the Lord (typically, that means give it to the preacher), and the Lord will reward you with more than you gave. But that’s not what the text says. According to the text, her provision for herself and her son came not as a consequence, but as an accompaniment to her gift to Elijah. As she went home to bake her last loaf, Elijah said in essence, “You’ll find enough in your pantry to make two loaves, one for me and one for you – and it will keep being that way for as long as this drought lasts.” 

The lesson is not that we should give in order to be rewarded, but that when we give to those in need, we are not depleted. That’s how it is with sharing spiritual gifts – we give to others what they need, and find that in so doing we lose nothing, because what we are giving comes from God’s storehouse rather than from our own pantry. 

That would be a nice end to the story – but there’s more. Not long afterward, the widow’s son fell ill and died. She bitterly accused Elijah of raising her hopes falsely by providing food to keep them alive, only for the boy to die of a subsequent illness. I can identify with her – I’d rather never have had my hopes raised at all, than to have them raised only to be dashed. This is how Jesus’ disciples felt at his crucifixion – “Jesus, you raised our hopes for deliverance, only to let them be crushed by letting yourself get falsely arrested and executed. We know you could have escaped easily – why did you raise our hopes only to surrender yourself to death?” 

Elijah didn’t scold the widow, but turned her distress into prayer. The text says he “cried out to the Lord” that the boy would be brought back to life. God answered his prayer, and the boy was revived. It seemed all hope was gone, but Elijah refused to give up. The boy’s mother had given up, but Elijah did not. 

That’s often how it works with hope and prayer – when we see no hope whatsoever, God brings someone our way to supply hope where we have none. We may believe praying is useless, but they pray anyway. We see no point in trying yet again to do something at which we have failed, but they encourage us not to give up. One of the main reasons we need each other is that each and every one of us sometimes loses hope, and were it not for others stepping in to carry hope on our behalf, we’d simply give up. 

Our Gospel story sounds some very similar themes – a widow loses her son, her hope is gone, and she has no faith for God to intervene. Still, Jesus raises up her son, even though she didn’t ask him to. She is not a Gentile like the Zarephath widow, but we have no indication of any piety on her part. God blesses her not because of who she is or what she has done, but simply because Jesus infuses his hope into her situation when she has none. 

The parallels between the two stories are obvious enough. Both are part of a small collection of resuscitation stories scattered through the Bible. In each case, resuscitation happens to highly unlikely folk, people without faith or power or wealth. They do nothing to deserve a second chance at life, yet it is given to them. 

There is a raft of current books written by people who have had what we call “near death experiences,” detailing what they experienced during the time they were declared clinically dead. Many of them state that they were not particularly pious before their near-death experiences. God blesses us with second chances, not because we have earned them, but simply because God is good. That’s just how it was with both of the widows in our readings. 

These stories confirm what we learn definitively through the death and resurrection of Jesus – death is not the end for us! The widows from Zarephath and Nain didn’t know this – all they knew was that they had been cut off from their last true hope. Their stories remind us that our hope rests not on how advanced our faith may be, but solely on how good God is. 

Frankly, I am prone to skepticism when I read people’s accounts of what they experienced when they were declared clinically dead. We certainly can’t build any good theology on such anecdotes. But one thing I have learned over my years as a pastor, as I have kept vigil with people as they breathed their last – the line between life and death is nowhere near as clean as you see on the heart monitor, which is either pulsating or flat. I’ll never forget when I prayed for Frank as his heart fluttered its final feeble beats – I prayed aloud, with his family beside us, holding Frank’s hand as I did so. Frank had been comatose for a couple of days, utterly unresponsive to anyone or anything. As I prayed for him in his dying moment, long after he had uttered his last words, I closed with my customary “Amen,” whereupon he suddenly gripped my hand with a vise grip and fairly shouted, “Amen!” Then he was gone. 

As I said earlier, I can be quite the skeptic when I read stories about purported experiences of people while they were clinically dead. But here’s one I can’t deny, because it happened to someone I know, and I was there. Margi was a middle school teen in the church I served. Her Granddad, to whom she was very close, lay dying in the hospital, and she kept nearly constant vigil with him. But she had to go to a dental appointment to get some work done, so she left his bedside and headed to the dentist. She was deathly afraid of needles, so she opted to be put under general anesthesia during the procedure. In the middle of her procedure, she suddenly awakened, sat bolt upright, and said, “Granddad just came by to tell me not to worry, everything is fine.” Much relieved, she went promptly back under, until the dentist finished with her. When she awakened, she called her parents to ask about Granddad, and sure enough, he died at precisely the moment she sat up and said he had come by to see her. 

Again, we can’t build theology on such experiences. But one thing we can take away is this – it is never too late for hope. Death itself is not the end of Christian hope. We preach a risen Lord, and hope that we too shall share in his resurrection, somehow. In the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship, the funeral service is called “A Service of Witness to the Resurrection.” Its focus is on our hope that, because Jesus conquered death, death is not the final word for us. 

Some folk look on churches whose numbers have dwindled, whose glory days seem to lie somewhere in the past, and pronounce them to be “dying.” It’s getting harder and harder for those who remain to pay all the bills, and it’s just a matter of time before they’ll have to close their doors. At least, so say those who have abandoned hope. But just when all hope seems gone, God sends someone along with a vision for new life. The congregation’s future may not look like its past, but God isn’t done with it – far from it! The question is not whether the church will live or die, but what will be the nature of its life in the years ahead. 

That how the Lord works: to send us someone who stirs up our hope just when all hope seems gone. The Penguins’ hopes for a Stanley Cup may be gone for now, but they will revive in a few months. If that’s true for something as mundane as a hockey team, how much more true is it that for the church of Jesus Christ in the face of temporary setbacks! 
Each of us will eventually die, just as those boys eventually did whose lives had been restored to their widowed mothers. But even when we die, that will not be the end. This is the Christian hope, sealed in the resurrection of Jesus. It is as sure and dependable as God’s Word itself – but sometimes we need someone to help remind us of it. Thank God, that just when we need it most, God sends us just whom we need to help restore our hope in the Lord. To God be all the glory and thanks, now and forever! Amen. 

Memorial Service -- June 9, 2013

Meditation

B.J. Robertson

Romans 8:31-39

31 What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? ³²He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? ³³Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. ³⁴Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.^{* 35}Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶As it is written,
‘For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’ 
³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

What then are we to say about these things?  What to say indeed.

One of the challenges in putting together an obituary or meditation for someone who lived as long and as fully as B.J. is that you are inevitably going to miss something important.  Even B.J.’s dear cousin Linda confessed that she kept B.J.’s newspaper obituary deliberately short as she was pretty certain she’d miss something significant if she tried to list all of B.J.’s organizations and activities. 

I know how Linda feels.  I feel entirely inadequate as I approach the task of meditating on the life and faith and witness of our beloved B.J.  I am sure that everyone here this afternoon had a very particular way of knowing her.  B.J. played such a meaningful role in the lives of so many people. As a volunteer. Board member.  Teacher.  Choir member.  Quilter.  Neighbor.  Cousin.  Aunt.  Friend.  The long list of her accomplishments, activities and relationships is reflective of an active and curious mind that never stopped learning and a generous heart that never stopped giving to her community.  And already, I’m certain that I’m leaving something important out.

I will, however, boldly go on to speak about B.J. because her life had such rich meaning beyond what an ordinary resume or lengthy obituary can possibly capture.

When I think about B.J., the image that comes to mind is that of a precious gem – a diamond -- with a multitude of endlessly gorgeous facets, all of which reflect and throw out incredible, dazzling light on all of us who were fortunate to be caught in B.J.’s unique sparkle.  B.J. was one of those people who just shimmered, wasn't she?

But today, in this place, in this particular moment, what matters most is that we name out loud the source of B.J.’s extraordinary light.  And that task is a simple one.   The wellspring of all that B.J. was and did and meant to all of us was her deep and abiding trust in Jesus Christ who was and is her Lord and Savior.  If anyone ever tried to faithfully be Christ’s light in the world, it was B.J.  And absolutely nothing about her faith was hidden.  She did not hide a single God-given gift under a bushel basket.  The Christ-light in B.J. shined for everyone.  With perpetual humility and grace, B.J. gave all the glory to the Christian witness of her family and to God the Father in heaven.   B.J. was blessed beyond measure, she knew it, and she never stopped thanking God for every single one of those blessings.

For all of these reasons and more, a person like B.J. is the kind of person everyone wants to be around.  A person like B.J. is the kind of person you want to call when you have been utterly wiped out by life and are standing in the need of prayer, which is why B.J.’s number was the first phone number on the church’s prayer chain.   A person like B.J. is the kind of person you want in your Bible study because her faith is mature and deep enough to acknowledge that there’s always something more for us to discover about ourselves and about God in scripture.  A person like B.J. is the sort of person who makes the world a better place simply by her presence, which is why we are all sitting here today with a big old B.J. shaped hole in our hearts and the awareness that we are all better people for having known her.

So to consider B.J. a rare and cherished gem is not overstatement.  She was all of that and so much more.

The apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, ““I am convinced neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  As B.J. was united with Christ in her baptism, so too has she risen with Christ.  She has been united with Christ and with all the saints who have gone before her.  Her grandparents and her parents and her sister.  And with all the saints of this church whom she loved well for more than 9 decades.   She has been received into the presence of Almighty God, and as God’s child she will dwell with her heavenly forever.

The problem is that we are not exactly certain how to fill the space that B.J. left behind here on earth. Who on earth can do that?

I remember my first Christmas here at Emsworth -- my first Christmas as a new minister.  After all the work of Advent and the anxiety of leading a Christmas Eve service on a Saturday night, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself about having to get up and lead worship on Christmas Day.  And then, B.J. came into my office and gave me a copy of a poem she thought I might like.  I didn’t know it then, but the poem was written by one of my theological heroes, Howard Thurman and this is how it reads:

When the song of the angels is stilled,


when the star in the sky is gone,


when the kings and princes are home,


when the shepherds are back with their flocks,


the work of Christmas begins:


to find the lost,


to heal the broken,


to feed the hungry,


to release the prisoner,


to rebuild the nations,


to bring peace among the people,


to make music in the heart

B.J. knew better than anyone that being a Christian means doing the work of Christmas by actively engaging in the mission of Jesus Christ.  Hers was a lively faith thoughtfully lived out with warmth and love.  She walked the talk better than almost anyone I’ve ever known.  I’m sure many here today would say exactly the same of her. 

I know it's true, because one of you told me about B.J.’s skillful work with young children struggling to learn to read and the great patience she showed in untangling the mysteries of language for each and every child lost in the confusing world of letters and words.  Another of you told me about B.J.’s extraordinarily low tolerance for gossip and how nobody dared to say an unkind word about anyone in B.J.’s presence because B.J. always chose goodness over meanness.  Kindness over controversy.  Peace over discord.  B.J. did not overlook the suffering of others or attempt to gloss over difficult situations.  Rather, B.J. directly engaged with people and their needs.  She was Christ-like in her desire to serve rather than be served.  And her example challenges us to do the same and be to others as B.J. was to us – the bearer of Christ’s light in the world. 

When we come to the Lord’s Table today, we enter into communion with all who have died and now live eternally with Christ.   We cannot come to this table without finding mystical union with all who are in Christ.  At this table we meet prophets and apostles.  At this table we meet great leaders of our faith like Augustine, Luther and Calvin.   Here we meet the ordinary men and women who poured their hearts into this church and this congregation.  Here we meet our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, our children and our friends whom we still love and will always remember.  And at this table we meet Betty Jane Robertson,  a child of God and an ordinary saint who has left us to feast in glory with God forever and ever.

I know that B.J. is waiting to have communion with us today.  And if you listen closely, you can hear her and all of the saints that have gone before us encouraging us to follow in their footsteps of love and kindness and goodness and mercy.  To take on the work they have begun in Christ.   To finish our race with courage, empowered by our memories of their strength and love. Here at this table, we are lifted into the presence of the risen and ascended Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.  It is Christ who invites us to this table and it is Christ who sends us back out into the world to be light and salt.  For a struggling child learning to read.  A hurting friend.  A hungry neighbor.  A lonely shut in. 

Nothing can separate us from the love of God.  Not even death.  Thanks be to God.

With thanks to cellist, David Bennett who played both of these pieces during the service, as well as a beautiful medley of B.J.'s favorite hymns:

Ordinary Time 9C -- June 2, 2013

Outside Over There

Luke 7:1-10

After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. ²A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death. ³When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. ⁴When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, ⁵for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” ⁶And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; ⁷therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. ⁸For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” ⁹When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” ¹⁰When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.

When I was growing up, there were only a couple of kids in my neighborhood who didn’t go to some kind of church most every Sunday.  Pretty much every family we knew had some sort of religious affiliation.  It was just the way things were when I was young, and I’m sure many of you have the same sort of memories.  In fact, membership in mainline Protestant churches reached its peak in the mid-1960’s when I was a child.

But just a generation later, my children have had a very different experience.  It isn’t only the fact that Rachel has grown up with children who come from many different religious backgrounds – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist.  I would have to say that one of the most notable differences between her childhood and mine is that the majority of her friends come from families who practice no faith at all. 

As far as I can tell, there’s not a lot of difference between the children I grew up with and children today.  Every one of Rachel’s friends that I’ve met have been unfailingly kind, respectful, polite and genuinely nice people.  They have always addressed us as Dr. Rothenberg or Rev. Rothenberg.  None of them has ever raided our liquor cabinet or been arrested for drug possession.  The vast majority of her friends have the desire to do pretty normal things – get jobs, eventually get married, have kids, etc., etc.   They’ve grown up into good people even without the benefit of any kind of church experience. 

Many of the people of Rachel’s generation are what religious researchers have begun calling the “nones.”  N-O-N-E-S.  Most people in their 20’s or early 30’s have grown up with very casual or non-existent connections to a religious community and now that they are adults, they feel no particular need to join one.  Some of them are spiritual but not religious, many of them believe in God, but few of them regularly engage in what we consider “church.”

So it was somewhat remarkable a couple weeks ago when the new pope made news by suggesting in a sermon that Jesus Christ redeems everyone.  Everyone.  Including those who are Roman Catholic and those who are not.  Those who believe and those who don’t.  Christians, atheists, everyone.  Even the Nones.  The pope went on to say that all people are created in God’s image and all are redeemed:

"The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.’ Yes, he can... "The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‘Father, the atheists?’ Even the atheists. Everyone!" We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.”[1]

Vatican officials tried to put their own spin what the Pope said, but it was pretty clear that this Pope was expressing a genuine openness to people of other faiths or no faith at all. 

One of the characteristics people have really liked about Pope Francis is that he lived a simple life when he was a Jesuit priest.  He cooked his own meals, lived in a small apartment, and relied upon public transportation.  His simple lifestyle brought him into contact with ordinary people – fervent and not so fervent Catholics, Christians and non-Christians, pious and not so pious people.  And as it has for my children, living and working and being with people of other faiths and non-faiths does something to a person, even a person who has dedicated his life and work to Jesus.

For starters, spending time with people who do not believe as you do makes you far less likely to judge or condemn. When we really get to know people with no religious affiliation or different religious affiliations, and see them doing good things every day – in our schools, in our neighborhoods, and our workplaces, it becomes harder for us to believe that God has split the world up into two categories of people – insiders and outsiders, good and bad, saved and damned.  When your friends and neighbors are Buddhists or Jewish or atheists, it becomes more and more possible to believe that the Holy Spirit is truly present in the good we see them do every day.  As the Pope seemed to say, the good we do draws us together -- not the things we believe.  I’m not talking about works righteousness or earning our way into heaven with our good works.  It is about expanding our view of how God works within every person and within different communities of faith.

The pope was preaching about Christ’s inclusive love for everyone in the context of the story in Mark 9 where the disciples tell Jesus that they tried to stop a man from casting out demons because he wasn’t one of them, an insider.  But the Pope been could have gleaned a very similar homily from the text we just heard from Luke because it is the story of another outsider becoming involved with Jesus’ ministry.  In this story, the outsider is a Roman centurion. 

Centurions show up frequently in the New Testament.  Which is not particularly surprising because centurions would have been a very visible part of daily life in Judea and Galilee.  Centurions were sort of the middle management in the Roman army.  They were put in charge of about 80 soldiers, but ranked below those who commanded larger cohorts and legions. 

A centurion like the one in our text today would be considered an outsider  -- not only is he not Jewish, but he is also a visual, daily reminder of Rome’s brutal, occupying force.  If you were a Jew living in 1^st century Palestine, a Roman centurion might seem as threatening as a German soldier in occupied France or Italy during World War II. 

Of course, in this story from Luke, we never actually meet this particular centurion.  Instead, we hear about him from other people – first a group of Jewish elders and then a group of his Gentile friends.  The Jewish elders come to Jesus on the centurion’s behalf and ask Jesus to heal the centurion’s slave who is very close to death.  Then the centurion’s Gentile friends come out to tell Jesus that the centurion feels unworthy to receive Jesus in his home and that he trusts that all Jesus needs to do is speak a word in order to heal the slave.

So it’s really sort of stunning what Jesus ends up saying about this outsider --  “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.”  Can you just imagine how that statement sounded to those hearing this story in Luke’s time 30 or 40 years after Jesus’ ascension?   Because if one thing hadn’t changed in those 40 years, it was the fact of Roman occupation.  Rome was still brutally enforcing its will on every kind of Israelite.  The centurion was still a potent symbol of Rome, yet it is this outsider that Jesus considers more faithful than any of the insiders.  Jesus never meets the centurion, yet at the end of this story, Jesus is amazed enough to exclaim, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” 

It may be worth stopping for a moment to recall Jesus’ peculiar habit of associating with outsiders.  Luke spends a lot of time documenting how Jesus drove the religious establishment absolutely nuts on a regular basis.  You remember Jesus’ first public sermon in his hometown synagogue at the very beginning of his ministry? Jesus first reads from the scroll of Isaiah:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has appointed me to bring good news to the poor…release to the captives…recovery of sight to the blind…to let the oppressed go free.”  The crowd loves his reading and for a moment, Jesus is the hometown boy made good. 

But then Jesus goes on to remind them of Elijah’s ministry to a widow from the wrong side of the tracks in Sidon.  And then Jesus mentions Elisha’s healing of Naaman the Syrian – an archenemy of Israel.  It was like Jesus telling his friends and family that God had become a chaplain for the Ku Klux Klan or that God has passed over a Sunday school teacher to take care of an ailing Hindu.  It is that kind of direct and intentional identification with Israel’s enemies that makes Jesus’ hometown crowd want to push Jesus off a cliff.  Unlike the Vatican spokespeople, the guys in charge of Jesus’ synagogue don’t even give Jesus a chance to clarify his incendiary statements.

And after he makes it out of his hometown by the skin of his teeth, Jesus just keeps on going – blessing and healing and eating with all sorts of unacceptable people.  A crazy man, a mother-in-law, demonics, lepers, paralyzed people and tax collectors.  He plucks wheat on the Sabbath – a definite no-no. And then Jesus heals a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath in the synagogue of all places.  Jesus’ actions absolutely infuriate the scribes and Pharisees. 

Have you noticed that Jesus almost always does these controversial things right in front of the religious leaders as if he is intentionally doing it to make sure they cannot miss it?   Like when Jesus heals the leper in Luke.  First he tells the man not to tell anyone.  But then Jesus says, “Oh, by the way, make sure to go show the priest.” 

But here’s the thing -- Jesus is never telling the religious establishment anything they shouldn’t already know.  Jesus isn’t making this stuff up as he goes along.   Jesus was always telling the religious establishment exactly what was right there in their own scripture.  There’s nothing particularly creative about what Jesus is saying or doing. 

But the religious establishment didn’t interpret scripture they way Jesus interpreted it.  They used scripture to decide who was in and who was out.  Then Jesus comes along to remind them that God’s sense of community is much bigger than they think.  From the beginning, God reached out not only to Israel but also to all of creation.  God loves it all.

Every time Jesus inspires faith and heals in the gospels, someone gets angry and thinks he is out of line.  Crowds get so large Jesus has to preach from a boat, but he is rejected in his hometown of Nazareth.  The same dynamic happens to Peter and Paul in Acts.  Paul starts awakening faith and draws people in and as a result, he gets arrested and thrown in jail.  But there’s even a silver lining to that because jail gives Paul time to write all those letters. 

What was it about the centurion that impressed Jesus?  What does it take to amaze Jesus?   Remember the centurion’s request.   The centurion asked for healing.  But he wasn’t asking for himself, but for the least powerful, least visible person in this story – the slave.  Remember the slave?  Did you even notice the sick guy in this story?   In all of the fuss over the centurion and the Jewish elders and the Gentile friends and Jesus, it is easy to forget who is really suffering in this story. 

A slave could be ignored.  A slave could be replaced.  If the centurion had enough money to build a synagogue, he surely could have bought himself a replacement for the sick slave.  He probably could have purchased a couple replacements slaves.   

But the centurion couldn’t do that. He could have, but he didn’t.  He wanted this guy to be healed.   And I think that’s what gets to Jesus.  That’s what amazes Jesus.  It is not because the centurion built a synagogue, although that was a pretty nice thing to do.  And it isn’t even about what the centurion believes about Jesus.  We don’t hear about what happens after the slave is healed, but we have no reason to believe the centurion becomes a follower of Jesus.  In fact, the centurion doesn’t seem that anxious to meet Jesus.  And Jesus doesn’t seem particularly interested in getting the centurion involved in the on-going life of the faith community.  All the centurion believes is that Jesus can do something that he cannot – save the life of his slave.  And ultimately, our faith ultimately boils down to this – the realization that we are not the ones in charge and there are limits to what we can do or know or be. 

It is the centurion’s concern for the kind of person that Jesus is concerned about that seems to stun Jesus.  Of all the people in this story, the centurion is the only one who is truly following the commandment about loving his neighbor.   Maybe the centurion never read the commandment in the Bible or heard it in a sermon.  But that doesn’t matter one bit to Jesus.  The centurion is living out the greatest commandment.

We tend to imagine that there was a time in which faith was so much easier than the time in which we live in right now.  But the truth is this – the church today is no different from the church in Jesus’ time or Luke’s time or any time.  We believe that the diversity we see around us now is somehow different or more threatening than the back in the good old days – whenever you imagine those good old days were.   The truth is that most if not all of the early Christians had family and friends who did not share their beliefs.  Perhaps Luke includes this story and the many others like it to remind Jesus’ followers that God’s love doesn’t end at our boundaries.

Jesus continually reminds the religious community that their most hated enemies are God’s best friends.  Jesus does it again and again, right in front of them and he does it so blatantly, so in-your-face that you begin to realize that the healings are not only for the benefit of the sick and the lame and the poor and the rejected people.  In fact, the healings also seems designed to remind the religious people – the ones who think they are the healthy ones – may in fact be the most needy people in the room.

The same God who showed up in the man crucified on a cross, regularly shows up where we don’t expect God to be and never, ever stops delighting in surprising us.   May God would open our hearts and eyes to see that God’s love extends far beyond the confines of our church or faith, and God’s healing power is truly for all.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

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[1] Huffington Post, May 22, 2013.  “Pope Francis Say Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics.”  Accessed Wednesday, May 29, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/pope-francis-good-atheists_n_3320757.html

Hallelujah! A Testimony of Healing.

     “When I sat down to put my testimony to pen and paper, the CD I was listening to started to play, “Hallelujah,” by Leonard Cohen and I thought – ‘This must be inspiration.’

     So here goes.  Some might think a stroke and how it devastates the body is a taste of Human Hell.  But that’s not how I see it.  I see it as a Blessing.  In this life, I have found myself knocking on Heaven’s door a few times.  But this time was the first time I felt Someone on the other side turning the knob to let me in.  But alas, it was not to be, so I am thinking there must be more for me to say and do before I stand before the Throne and offer my own Hallelujahs to the King. 

     In the time remaining, I have thanks to give.  I would like to thank Yahweh, Jesus and the Holy Spirit for allowing me to feel the mercy and grace of Heaven and the Blessing of this stroke – a Blessing I’ve yet to see in the natural world, but a Blessing I feel deep in the core of me.

     Next, I would like to thank Priscilla (who I’m sure doesn’t see much of a Blessing in the hand we’ve been dealt).  She in herself is a Blessing to me.  Without her and my brother Bill, I fear the road home would have been even longer.  Last, but by no means least, a large Thank You to Rev. Susan, Keith, Tom, Carol and all of Emsworth U.P. Church.  Thank you for all the prayers.  I felt each and every one of them.”

Written by Clyde Williams and read in worship at Emsworth U.P. Church on Sunday, May 26, 2013.  May 26 was the first time Clyde was able to be in worship since he suffered a significant stroke in the early hours of December 26, 2012.

Trinity Sunday C, May 26, 2013

Higher Than Ants

Psalm 8 (NRSV)

1 O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens.

2 Out of the mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence the enemy and the avenger.

3 When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established;

4 what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

5 Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor.

6 You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet,

7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

9 O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Every year around Valentine’s Day, I hear ads on the radio for a company that will sell you a star so you can name it after your beloved.  Have you ever heard any of those ads?  I went to one of their websites this week and found out that the starting price for a star naming kit is something like 50 bucks. 

Alas, I am sorry to report that like many other beautiful things in life, you cannot buy a star for love or money. The tracking and cataloging of stars is controlled by the International Astronomical Union, the recognized authority in the scientific community for naming things like stars and celestial bodies. And the International Astronomical Union stopped naming stars back in 1922. Today, stars are not named, but catalogued by number according to their positions in the sky. Even a little piece of the night sky cannot named or sold.  At least not yet. 

One of the other things we cannot buy is the kind of night sky that the writer of Psalm 8 saw when he looked up.   The starry sky described in Psalm 8 is available only to people in rural parts of Africa and Asia – people who do not have much in material things and infrastructure but have a much better view of the night sky than you and I have from our perch in America. I know some of you have seen extraordinary night skies in places like Malawi, but the rest of us have to get out of populated areas or squint through a telescope to see even a tiny percentage of the stars in the sky.

I remember spending New Year’s Eve on the beach a couple years ago and I can still recall my heart-pounding awe as we sat on the sand, listening to the roar of the sea in the darkness, and looking up at the night sky just crammed with stars.  Even that sky was nothing compared to the heavenly display people in the undeveloped world see every single night.  We may have comfortable well-lit homes and perfectly paved, well-lit roads in our part of the world, but I think we have lost some of our connection to the wonder of God’s creation.

People even in the most remote corner of our planet only receive a tiny glimpse of the existing universe.  Thanks to images provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists estimate that there are at least 176 billion galaxies in the universe.  And each one of those galaxies contains 200-400 billion stars.  So that’s at least 176 billion galaxies times 200 billion stars.  I’m not doing that math because the number of galaxies, the number of stars – and these are only the ones we’ve been able to see so far – is beyond awesome.  Billions and billions of stars.  Why so many stars and galaxies?  Why couldn’t God stop at a million?  Two million?  One billion even?  Why this extravagance?  It boggles the mind.

So we might indeed share a little of the awe and wonder of the psalmist as he stares up into a night sky and feels his smallness underneath the weight of God’s abundant creativity.  This ancient poet, even without the benefit of a telescope and certainly without the knowledge that there are a trillion or more stars up in the sky, can look up and be reminded that one human being is pretty small potatoes compared to the vastness of the universe: 

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

  

I heard a speaker in Nashville last week echo the question of this psalm: “What are human beings?”  She said, “For the first time in human history, we do not have a real definition of what it is to be a human being.”[1] For many centuries, humanity distinguished itself as different from the rest of creation by virtue of our ability to think.  But in the 20^th century, biological science established that there are other animals who can also think – animals can remember, anticipate, mourn, learn, problem-solve and even use complex language.  And as we begin to understand more and more about the human brain, we realize how much of our understanding of who we are is controlled not by consciousness but by chemistry; our sense of self resides in whatever chemical wash bathes our neurons and brain synapses. 

I know this all sounds like pretty academic stuff, right?  Billions of stars.  Billions of brain synapses.  Why waste our time pondering why there are so many stars beyond our view, or what it is that makes humans a little lower than angels but a little higher than a dolphin or a chimpanzee?

But I think that the poet who wrote Psalm 8 is engaging in exactly that kind of cosmic questioning.  He looks up at a night sky and he is absolutely blown away by the idea that there is so much he will never know beyond the simple truth that God is majestic and glorious.

And in many ways, we do not know much more than the writer of this psalm.  Even with all our scientific knowledge, we cannot add much to this meditation on the inexplicable wonder of a creation that goes infinitely on and on and on.  We cannot explain what makes us uniquely human any better than we can explain God’s lavish creativity that continues, at this very moment, to empower the multiplication of stars and galaxies beyond our comprehension and even our imagination. 

Today is Trinity Sunday, the only feast day in the Christian calendar that does not celebrate a biblical event or person, but rather a “doctrine.”  And doctrine is one of those unfortunate words that sound kind of cold and distant and unapproachable.  Which can make doctrine not only a tricky thing to preach, but also a real stumbling block for anyone who is doing their best to understand how it is that God can be one in three persons, blessed Trinity.

But I think that the Doctrine of the Trinity is a terrific example of how poets and philosophers and theologians approach unapproachable mysteries like the vastness of the universe or the intricacies of a human soul.  Science and philosophy and theology can only take us so far until we find ourselves gaping in wonder at what we cannot know. 

And that is what happened in the early church when they hit a theological wall in thinking through the biblical words – God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.  The doctrine of the Trinity came about because the early church needed, desperately, to stop fighting with each other about Jesus, and begin to understand how God revealed God through Jesus.  What came out of those negotiations was a humanly imperfect but faithful description of how God can be experienced by human beings in relationship with God and with one another, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the reality of the resurrected Christ.  It was, simply put, the best that the early church could do.

And it didn’t help matters much that Jesus himself didn’t give a whole lot of thought to the problem of the triune God.   At no point in the gospels did Jesus stop to explain the intricate dance between Father, Son and Spirit.   It would have been easier if Jesus had done that, but instead, Jesus said, as we heard in the gospel reading this morning:  “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (Jn 16:12).

So what was it that Jesus followers weren’t ready to hear?  What is God holding back from us?  Why can’t we hear the rest of the story?

Barbara Brown Taylor used a phrase in a recent lecture – “We need to allow God a certain amount of privacy.”  Which is a very good way of saying that God is more transcendent and more mysterious than we can possibly imagine or our doctrines can possibly contain.  But even as we dwell in the mystery of God’s sheer otherness, we cannot toss out our doctrines, as imperfect as they are, because they invite us into God’s creative, transforming work.  The Trinity affirms that God is, indeed, mindful of human beings.  The triune God cares for us, and longs to be intimately involved in the life of all humans who are made a little lower than God out of not much more than star dust.  And as if the sheer gift of life isn’t quite enough to fill you and me and the whole family of humanity with unending awe and gratitude, we and all of our fellow mud creatures are crowned with glory and honor.

We don’t know everything and we never will.  And together with our never-ending curiosity about what everything means, we have an equally strong impulse to keep God at a distance.  We do want to allow God some privacy, maybe because we hope God will give us exactly the same thing.  Maybe we want to give God some space, because we really cannot bear to hear the whole truth about God.  Or the whole truth about ourselves. 

Maybe the ancient Hebrews really were onto something.  You can discern this tension between the eminence and intimacy of God throughout the Hebrew scriptures.  Listen to what ancient person had to say about being in the eye line of YHWH:

“What are human beings, that you make so much of them,
that you set your mind on them, visit them every morning, test them every moment? Will you not look away from me for a while,
let me alone until I swallow my spittle? If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?
 Why have you made me your target?
 Why have I become a burden to you?  Why do you not pardon my transgression
and take away my iniquity?
 For now I shall lie in the earth;
you will seek me, but I shall not be” (Job 17:17-21). 

Job had grown weary of God’s obsessive attention for humanity and wanted nothing more than escape from God’s steady, ceaseless gaze.  And who could blame him?  The ancients knew full well the otherness of God because they remembered what happened when Moses encounters the Divine Spark burning in the desert wilderness.  Moses said: “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 

 God replies: “I am who I am. …Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent me to you.’”…‘The Lord,the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.

“I am who I am.”  That is who God says God is.  “Ehyeh aser ehyeh” in the Hebrew. Which literally means: “I will be what I will be.”  “I am who I am.”

When we have lost our ability to be in awe of “I am who I am,” we have Psalm 8 to remind us that the creator of billions of stars and billions of people is still coming close to us, while still remaining the wholly other and holy one of Israel.  Our doctrinal habit of nailing down the “whys” and the “hows” and the “whats” of the divine will never come close to disclosing the fullness of God.  So while we do not discard the doctrines, neither do we allow them to hold our imaginations hostage. 

I thought about all of this last week as Tom and I spent a sunny hour or so hanging out on George Jackson’s back porch.  We were delighted to find him enjoying a tall glass of iced coffee and gazing out at his garden that used to be the domain of his wife, Ollie.

Now, I do not know very much about gardening.  Ok, that’s not really true.  I know nothing about gardening.  But I inherited a very nice garden when we bought our house and there are two flowers in my front yard that have absolutely thrived despite my benign neglect.  The lilies of the valley are still going great guns.  And the other flower that is doing really, really well are the peonies.  They are crazy beautiful and I love them because I do not have to do a thing for them.  They just grow.

George also has peonies in his garden.  And as we were chatting, I observed that they seemed just on the verge of blooming and he said, yes that is true.  The ants are doing a really good job and the flowers should be appearing any day now.

Ants??  I was intrigued and looked a little more closely at the peony buds.  Yes, there did appear to be a quite a few big fat black ants having a lovely time on the still-closed buds. George told me that there is sweet nectar on the flower buds that the ants are crazy about.  Once the ants have done their thing in eating all that good stuff, the peonies open up and bloom.

I was absolutely delighted by this information.  Because I am an ignoramus about flowers, I had no idea that peonies depended upon the hearty appetite of ants in order to burst open in the late spring.  Ask Tom – I was giddy about this simple yet profound interaction between ant and flower.  I even took pictures.

When I got back to my office, I committed the fatal human error of not leaving mystery alone. I sat down to my computer and typed into the Google:  “Peonies and ants.”

You can guess the rest.  Turns out that George and I were both deceived by a common old wives tale.  While it’s true that there is a substance on peony buds that attracts ants, the peonies will bloom whether the ants show up or not.  So while the ants are fed by the peonies, the peonies do not need the ants in order to bloom and, in fact, if you’re not careful when you bring cut peonies into your house, you can probably count on an indoor ant infestation.

I didn’t want to know that truth.  I was happier when I was in George’s backyard, in awe of the interdependence between ant and flower, and marveling at God’s creative hand in putting bug and bud together.  I could not bear the cold, hard fact.  

We may have dominion over the works of God’s hands on earth, but we do not have control of God or how God will choose to reveal God’s self.  We cannot buy a star or fathom the universe or even really understand the mystery of the triune God.  But Jesus said the Spirit of truth will come, in its own time, in its own way, and in a billion different ways, and declare to us what it means to be human– a little lower than angels, a little higher than an ant, and wrapped in the mystery and jaw-dropping awe of God’s care and mindfulness.  And in this season of Pentecost, in this small moment, that’s all I need to know.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

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[1] Phyillis Tribble, Emergence Christianity.  

Presbyterian Response to Oklahoma Tornadoes

Here's a link to Presbyterian Disaster Assistance including a prayer, hymn and ways to help in the aftermath of the Oklahoma tornadoes.  http://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/pda/oklahoma-tornado-may-2013/

Lord of mercy, hear our prayers.

Pentecost, May 19, 2013

Drunk and Disorderly

Genesis 11:1-9
Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ²And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.³Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.⁷Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’ ¹²All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ ¹³But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them: ‘Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. ¹⁵Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel: 
¹⁷ “In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
   and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
   and your old men shall dream dreams. 
¹⁸ Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
   in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
     and they shall prophesy. 
¹⁹ And I will show portents in the heaven above
   and signs on the earth below,
     blood, and fire, and smoky mist. 
²⁰ The sun shall be turned to darkness
   and the moon to blood,
     before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day. 
²¹ Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Guest Preacher:  Sue Washburn

My daughter came into the world talking. That might be an exaggeration, but as a child, she talked early and she talked often, following me around like a little chatterbox. At first we couldn’t understand her words, but she was so intent with her talking we intuitively knew that they had meaning to her.

Some were easy to figure out –

Gock was sock.

Ptse was pizza.

Goobiga was a little tricky. We finally figured out that was my mother—her grandma.

The most puzzling of her words was gubadee. For weeks, she’s say gubadee. Gubadee she’s say to me or my husband and we wondered to ourselves, What does this mean? Was it a toy? Was it a person? What was she saying with gubadee?

Despite our desire to understand, gubadee remained a mystery.

Learning to speak is the cornerstone of knowing ourselves and God. It allows us to reflect on our lives and connect with others. It is through the power of the Word that we experience Christ.

The Tower of Babel and Pentecost stories are foundational to the way we encounter each other God.  In these two stories we see that language can be used to create shared understanding, keep order and unify communities. Language can also be used to create new paradigms and shift our understanding.

In the Babel story, the tower builders were seeking to create order and avoid chaos of the big, outside world. As Presbyterians, we can relate. One of our foundational understandings is that we do things decently and in order.

In the stories we can also see language can create a healthy disorder—shake up expectations so that they can be realigned in new ways. God creates disorder though language in both the Tower and Babel story and the Pentecost story. But that disorder serves a purpose. In both cases it leads to a greater understanding of who God is what God can do.

The Tower of Babel describes our fear of the unknown. Biblically, it’s placed in the Old Testament between the story of Noah’s sons and God’s call to Abram to leave his country. It describes a paradigm shift as the world becomes a much bigger place—bigger than their own tribe and their own story.

Before Babel the Bible story is about a small tribe of people and one language and after Babel it’s a multicultural world of Egyptians and Canaanites and beyond. It shows the world expanding in much the way our experience of the world is changing through cheap travel and improved communication technology.

The Hebrews build the tower to keep themselves contained, to keep them from scattering. They burn their bricks and begin piling them in a careful and orderly way to build the tower. It was their beacon. It was their boundary. It was the symbol of their unity, but it was also the symbol of their fear. 

They feared the big world that was beyond the edges of their knowledge.

In fact, when we read the opening of Genesis 11 we read that the whole Earth had one language and the same words, but safa, the Hebrew word for language  can also be translated as edge. The opening of the story could also be translated as the whole earth had one edge and the same words, indicating that the Hebrews were concerned with protecting their edges, their boundaries.

Who can blame them? When we go to a country beyond our own borders, there’s no telling what might happen. We might order the wrong food, end up lost or be without a restroom for far to long.  We may get sick or be unable to read the road signs. In other words, we are vulnerable.

The tower builders wanted to remain secure, not vulnerable. Their fear pulls them together and keeps them close, but God scatters them by confusing their language.

In the New Testament reading, the disciples are gathered together for Pentecost or the Jewish Festival of Weeks. The holiday brought together Jews from different cultures. The hustle and bustles of people and languages might be like visiting some of the tourist sections in New York City.

There you can see people from all over the world in a clash of fabric, language and culture. Today, you don’t even need to leave the United States to be overwhelmed by the diversity of culture.

It is into a setting like this that the Holy Spirit blows in at Pentecost. Suddenly, everybody can hear and understand the good news of Christ. People talk. Words fly. Understanding abounds. The good news of Christ’s resurrection breaks out in different languages and disorder ensues.

 The people are bewildered, amazed and astonished. This isn’t the brick by brick wall dividing people into groups because of fear. This isn’t a safe and stately sermon in the temple preserving unity. This is God at work in a holy disorder, a reorganization of expectations, a breakdown of walls. The people who witnessed the event looked on with skepticism and decided that the people in the crowd must be drunk.

When I try to picture this, I think about the joy and abandon that would take place if the Pens win the Stanley Cup. It’d be crazy and unsettling. There would be throngs in the streets and people on the sidelines shaking their heads. The more reserved among us would assume that all of the revelers are drunk and disorderly and dismiss them with a shake of the head.

It’s the same shake of the head that we in the mainline churches give to the non-denominational or Pentecostal churches because they unsettle us. Their churches may be hastily constructed in shopping malls, not made of bricks. They don’t have bulletins to tell them what comes next. They shout out of turn.  They stand and wave their arms. They may even fall down in the aisles. These Christians don’t know what might come next in worship—and they are OK with that.  They are “drunk” with Spirit and disorderly as well.  But God is there amidst all that craziness.

When I read about Babel and Pentecost, I can see the spirit of Christ weaving through them in ways that are puzzling and compelling.  They force me, and I hope you, to ask that we hear in acts: What does this mean?

What does this mean? It’s a question we ask ourselves all the time. What does my daughter’s babbling mean? What do God’s words mean for my life? What is the meaning of my illness or healing? What is the meaning of my job loss or sudden raise? Sometimes the answer reinforces what we know. Other times it breaks what we think we know wide open. It is when we experience disorder, both good and bad, that we ask this question. It is when we experience disorder that we change the most.

I confronted that question head on when my family and I went to visit the World Trade Center site. I was a little leery of visiting, fearing that there would be an undercurrent of hostility. I worried that it might be like the Tower of Babel—a monument to a culture that wanted to stay isolated, to lift itself above others, to insulate itself our of fear.

But when I got there, it wasn’t like that at all. The line was filled with people from all over the world—Arabs and Asians and Africans and Americans. The workers who took the tickets and answered questions varied were different than what I expected. Some wore headscarves and others spoke with accents and others fit the true, blue American stereotype to a T.

As I stood at the memorial pool, I traced the names that were engraved on the railing along the outside. I realized that they weren’t all traditional American names. They were names from around the world.

That visit made me realize that I was connected to all of the world, that the edges or boundaries are more often than not illusions of our own making.  Reading the names showed me how narrow my own vision was of that event. I had reduced to a polar tragedy of us versus them rather than a world event with a web of connections reaching out to all the world.

I was very much like the Tower of Babel builders in my thinking without even intending to be. In that moment, Jesus’ call to love my neighbor seemed like a much bigger endeavor. I stood there with the brand new impression of the impact of the tragedy of 9/11 and wondered, what does this mean?

That moment disordered my thinking and gave me a new understanding as to who I was as an American in the world—as a Christian in the world and who we all are in a big world that belongs to God. At that moment, I felt so connected to people I hadn’t ever met. I was moved by their loss.  My eyes filled with tears.

I was experiencing a world without edges. A world with many languages. A world that is disorderly yet loved by God. The world isn’t just my people. It is God’s people. It’s God’s world.

This experience ties in to the Babel and Pentecost stories because it caused me to think about my own boundaries. It helped me to understand God’s scattering at Babel and the joining of hearts at Pentecost happen all the time, in big and small ways all the time. We as people, nations and the world move from unity to diversity to unity in diversity as the Spirit flows among us.

That’s how we are here in this sanctuary and as Christ’s church in the world. We are united in diversity as the Holy Spirit brings us together and enables our understanding.

As individuals we are joined in our differentness by something bigger than ourselves.

As a church are connected to Christians—to people— around the world in the power of the Holy Spirit despite our different worship styles and theologies.

Sometimes this unity in diversity is decent and in order. But a lot of the time it’s disorderly. But in each moment, the Spirit, continues to call us into deeper relationships with each other and with God. The Spirit gives us new understanding of life’s events.

At the nudging and prompting of the Spirit, we ask: What does it mean? in big and small ways. It took time for me to figure out what my daughter was saying each time she said gubadee. I’d think about that word while I placed some cheerios onto her high chair tray, while I bathed her or watched her play on the living room floor while I sipped my tea. 

Then one day it happened. I put a few toys out for Sarah to play with and was sitting on the corner of the couch. I had placed my tea on the steam register to keep it warm. After a few minutes she lost interest in the toys and walked up and pointed to the cup. Gubadee, she said.

I knew exactly what she meant. Cup of tea. 

I gathered her up in my arms laughing and she looked at like I was crazy. I wasn’t drunk or even disorderly, just filled with joy. Yes, I exclaimed to her, cup of tea, enunciating it clearly over and over.

Gubadee. Cup of tea. One word or three, it didn’t matter. We were connected and communicating. And so on Pentecost, I want to thank God for the gift of language and the Spirit for enabling a greater understanding. Amen.

Sue Washburn is a freelance writer and candidate for ministry in Redstone Presbytery. For more sermon excerpts and .jpgs and random musings, check out her blog at www.suewashburn.blogspot.com. Find out more about her freelance work at www.suewashburn.com.