Sermon - "Rewind"

Sermon: Rewind - John 10:22-30

Let me begin today with a question: what do you expect from God? So let’s think together. What do you expect from God?

Answers. In a real foundational way we want answers. We want help in making a decision so we pray for guidance, discernment, for thy will to be done. We look around the world and ask about suffering, famine, abuse and neglect. Why O God. But our quest for answers isn’t always so altruistic is it? I know mine isn’t.

Why O God do you keep your mouth shut when things start to go haywire? Why O God are some of the best and most loved people in my life suffering? Why O God does my nose start itching every week right after I am done sanitizing my hands for Communion? Why O God did you call me to be a Pastor when the overwhelming smell of Easter flowers give me headaches and Palm Ashes make my forehead red and blotchy? Why O God did you make many of the foods I love so terribly unhealthy & caffeine addicting? Why O God why?

I don’t feel bad about bringing these questions to the Lord. There is nothing wrong about going to God for answers. In a real sense there is no better place to bring our questions and because I am often going to God for answers I have a fair amount of sympathy for the folks we meet in our reading. They wanted answers and so do I. They wanted to know if Jesus was in fact the Messiah and if he was, a clear and definite yes or no would suffice. No roundabout Jesus answers thank you. Like Dragnet they just want the facts. It is a fair question; I think especially when we consider circumstances. The winter stroll along Solomon’s Portico took place during the Festival of Dedication, which goes by the name Hanukkah in today. Hanukkah celebrated the retaking of Jerusalem by God through the heroic faith of the Maccabees and when people gathered to celebrate the successful revolt of the Jews over an oppressive empire, trying to sniff out a potential Messiah takes on all sort of political flavor. “How long will you keep us in suspense?”, they ask. “If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.” The problem is that this is the Gospel of John & what they don’t know is that Jesus is hardly ever saying much plainly.

The other day I had the youth group go around and label all the stained glass windows. They got most of the them right including the ones of the Gospels that have their names right there on the windows. Think of it as a warm-up. The Gospel of John is pictured with an Eagle and has been for sometime. The image is a strange one but the Eagle is attached with the forth Gospel because John seeks to write at the lofty heights of Christ’s mind. Things in John are spiritual, they require thought or as one of my books put it, “People who like black and white answers and who prefer plain meaning to subtlety and allusion may find reading the Gospel of John frustrating.” The Jesus we encounter in John is frustrating & no doubt the vibe we get from the story is that those who asked Jesus if he was the Messiah were frustrated too. They are tired of the dodgy rhetoric. They are tired of the “sound of one hand clapping” type answers they are getting from Jesus and they want to know. They want to know. They want to know. They want to know. They want to know and Jesus is talking about sheep again. They want to know if Jesus is the one who will overthrow, take back, and establish. They want to know if Jesus is the one they are to follow and the answer is of course, yes but they will never be happy. They will never get the relationship, the love, the embrace of Christ because what they want isn’t going to be available to them. They want answers about Jesus, they want information, they want to know A or B, Left or Right, Up or Down, but Jesus is a Shepherd and not an ATM, spitting out what you want when you ask for it. There are sheep who hear his voice and follow, and there are sheep who do not. What the folks in our reading aren’t accepting is that it is in the following that we can ever know anything about Jesus and through him God.

Brothers and Sisters, knowing Jesus may come in handy if you ever get on Jeopardy but we have not been redeemed, overcome by grace, and embraced so that you could win the Daily Double. We are not called to know, but to hear. We are not called to answer, but to follow. This is where faith is formed. Not in answers but in experiences; experiences that we may never be able to articulate or explain but experiences of following. Let me ask you a question. Did any of you learn to drive just by reading a book? Learn to play the Piano without touching the keys? Learn how to pray by Google’ing it? Did any of you go to the Library to find Trusting God for Dummies (that is what I should have called this sermon…)? No you didn’t because you can’t learn to drive without actually driving, play the piano without actually playing the piano, pray without actually praying, and you certainly cannot learn to trust God from a book, a pastor, or even Oprah. Like my old Little League Baseball coach used to say, the only way to know what it is like to get hit by a pitch is to have actually been hit by a pitch. The only way to trust the Shepherd’s voice is by following where he leads time after time.

Now if you are here today and you are thinking about the “what ifs”, if you mind is saying, “I don’t know”, or maybe you are thinking about what your friends would say, or you are wondering about the risks then you are in the right place because Jesus has one more thing to say. If you are thinking about risks, if you are terrified at what might happen if you trust a Messiah like Jesus who isn’t handing out easy digestible answers to make us all feel better but instead wants you to follow then hear these words one more time: No one will snatch them out of my hand. What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father's hand. Brothers and Sisters, the hands of Christ are filled with people just like us. People who seek to follow where he leads but are afraid, people who hear the voice of the Shepherd and venture out slowly but lucky for us there are others here in the hands of Christ too. Grasped in the same hands that held Christ to the cross we find those who have followed Christ’s call and have learned to trust despite the world telling them not to. Here you will find the woman who made it through the death of her husband by placing her burdens on the Lord. You will find the couple who, despite making just enough, tithes more than 10%. You will find those who will pray for you. You will find those whose trials and trust have borne great wisdom. You will find someone who knows what you are going through. In the hands of Christ we find that we are not alone but surrounded by those who hear the voice of the Shepherd and will walk with you as you take your first steps because those first steps are some of the hardest.

Let me wrap all this up with a story from college. I was a Religion major and I had to take a class entitled American Christianity. I loved that class. One of the required books was In His Steps the book that first asked What Would Jesus Do? Now while I was in college WWJD? was everywhere. Bracelets, t-shirts, I even remember seeing a WWJD Cremation Urn. Of course there were those who parodied the phrase, my Dad being one of them, who had a number of WWJD items that he believed stood for What Would Jeff Do?, Jeff, of course, being my Dad’s first name. There was also the briefly popular We Want Jack Daniels, and then the take offs like What Would Shaq Do, and the now infamous What Would Jesus Drive? The culture ate it up but my professor thought that it was fundamentally the wrong question. What Would Jesus Do, was about an answer for every circumstance and had little to do with what he believed we should be asking. He cam up with the slightly less marketable WHJDITPAWCTDITF? – What has Jesus done in the past and will continue to do in the future? If we want to know what lies ahead then we need to look back to the places that Christ has taken us & remember Amazing Grace - Through many dangers, toils and snares 
I have already come; 
'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far and grace will lead me home.

My May Newsletter Article

Huntington Park, the home of the Columbus Clippers, was named the 2009 Ball Park of the Year by Ballparks.com, an independent site dedicated to all things Baseball Ball Park. What makes this designation interesting is that the award has virtually no restrictions or quantifiers. It isn’t the Best Minor League Park, it isn’t the Best New Park, it isn’t even the Best Designed, Best Concession, Best Turf Park. It is just the plain old Best Park in 2009; a year when the new Yankee Stadium, the new New York Mets’ stadium, and others debuted. It is no wonder that that you can’t see a single piece of advertising from the Clippers without this fact front and center. I can’t blame them. If my park beat out both the Yankees and Mets - two of the top-5 wealthiest teams in all of baseball - I would make sure everyone knew about it too.

Huntington Park teaches us a valuable lesson. Rather than trying to build a park to rival the biggest, the most luxurious with the fanciest foods, or the most hip and modern, the people who planned this park took a good look at who they were , who the Clippers were, who their fans were, and the location where they would find themselves in and from there they began designing. Huntington works so well because it is a testament to honesty. By not trying to be something they weren’t they were able to be something great.

For people of faith it is an important lesson. When we struggle to become
something we are not we often feel disconnected from God and God’s embrace. Rebelling against the gifts we have been given means that we will never truly be the most fulfilled. It is only by being honest can we ever be the “Best (Insert your name here) of 2010.”

Going to the Clippers Game

I am taking part of the day today and heading out to the Columbus Clippers day game. First pitch is 11:35am and the weather forecast is legendary - no clouds, 83 degrees, slight breeze. I am looking forward to my first game of the season.

When I get back into the office today I will fill you in.

Life Changes Fast

The other day I learned that a good friend of mine was told that after years of working on an adoption that a birth mother had chosen her and her husband and they would be the adoptive parents of a beautiful little boy. They went from childless couple waiting for a call to parents of a newborn boy in something like 72 hours. Life changes fast.

Things change in a instant. I am going to let you wrap your minds around this rather than hear my thoughts on the matter. Or better yet, if you are not some sort of Spammer, feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section.

Mystery Trip

Yesterday the Youth Group here at Boulevard took what we call a Mystery Trip. Mystery Trips are essentially outings where the participants have no idea where we are going and what we are doing. Yesterday's trip took us to the Dublin Corn Statues, a Wendy's for Dinner and then the Chief Leatherlips monument and park. We had a great time!

On the way to the Leatherlips statue we had a conversation about some other churches and their groups. One of the kids in the car mentioned that she went with a friend to one of the "big big churches" for what that church calls the Girls Cell Group. She said that while she didn't love the church she thought it was interesting that the group read the Bible and found ways to tie that to real life. The way she talked about tying the message of Jesus to everyday, 24/7 life seemed like this was the first time (or at least the first time she noticed) she ever experienced the Bible being informative to the way she lives out her days.

Her comment got me thinking. Isn't connecting our faith & our life what most churches are up to? Why did it take her so long to piece this together? The person that I am talking about here is smart, perceptive, and while her 6th grade taste in music is suspect, she is exceedingly bright. Therefore I am going to guess that it wasn't her fault that she never made this connection; never found faith & life informing each other "interesting" before this specific Cell group encounter. I think that this is the fault of the gathered church.

As a faith community we need to do a better job of talking about the everyday, mundane and challenging life as a place where we can see the Gospels come to bear. We tend to do a good job with Christmas and a slightly worse job with Easter but other than those two Sundays we lose the "this is a big deal & it is important for here and now" vibe that is at the foundation of Christ's message. The truth is that Jesus redeemed the everyday by living an "everyday" life. The events and parables that we read of in the Bible didn't just happen on important days but everyday. When we lose the "everyday" nature of Jesus we make Sunday Holy and the other 6 days fair game. But the good news is that we can do something about this.

As a church, as a community, as people, parents, brother and sisters, we need to do a lot more talking about living a faithful life. We need to talk about the "why" along with the "what and how." We can begin to turn the tide by talking to our children about why we made the decision we made, what informed it, and how we know it was the right decision. We can talk about why it is painful to see the hungry on the streets & why you choose to support a homeless shelter. We can share our struggles with choosing to do the right thing when the opposite is often the most convenient. We can talk about why we pray, why we give, why we volunteer, and the like. By living out our faith in dialog with our children, spouse, friends, family, and faith community we can begin to pool a common witness that shows that faith and life so intrinsically connected that separating one harms both.

Love One Another

I am on a big reading kick right now. I finished a wonderful book the other day entitled This Odd and Wondrous Calling: The Public & Private Lives of Two Ministers which I am willing to now call a "must read" for Pastors but especially younger clergy like myself. I am going to recommend it to my Young Pastor Squad during our next meeting.

Along with three other books I am reading (different books for different places...at work, by the bed, etc.) I just picked up a forth inspired by our staff meeting today. It is called Love One Another: Becoming the Church Jesus Longs For by Gerald Sittser, my college professor of church history. I finished the first chapter in 5 minutes - not because it was short but because it was good. Sittser tells of the story of his daughter who was hit and cut up badly by a motor boat while studying abroad in Quito, Ecuador. From time of accident all the way through recovery she was surrounded by people who gave of themselves, stood by Catherine (the daughter), and ushered her though all stages of her recovery for no other reason than "she needed to be loved." For Sittser this is the image of the church that Jesus longs for. A caring community that loves because people need to be loved.

So I think that once I get through this other book I am going to let Love One Another become my full-time "at work" book.

He is Risen! - Happy Easter

Today is Easter, the most significant day in the life of Christianity. This is the day that we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his defeat over the power of sin & death. Currently the sanctuary is all decked out in lilies, daffodils, and white which is used to symbolize resurrection. Thanks to my mom, who keeps me well stocked with stoles, I have a number of white ones to choose from.

We don't wear white all that often. While green (which symbolizes what we call "Ordinary Time") is the most common color, white is reserved for funerals which the church refers to as Services of Witness to the Resurrection, & Easter. The two actually have a lot in common. In a Funeral/Memorial service we proclaim that death is not the end which also serves as a foundational claim for the Easter celebration. In Easter we claim the promise that sin & death are defeated by the life & death of Christ and new life abounds.

Have a wonderful Easter!