Get Her Words Out

Storybooks

Preached at St Paul Presbyterian, Aurora, Colorado, May 24, 2009

Text:  Psalm 1

As I was just telling the children, I love stories.  All my life, while moving through sixteen different states, through many schools and jobs, they have been my constant companions and the place where some of my best friends lived.

And not just books, but movies and TV also.  I’ve already seen the new Star Trek movies three times and Nancy will tell you that I’ve thought way too much about it.

I saw the first Star Wars, what we now know as “Episode IV” 13 times…

The summer it opened, I was 12 and it was the last summer that I could get in the child price:  $1.25.  Since that summer I’m sure that I’ve seen it more than a hundred more times.  I know that movie backwards and forwards.  From “There’ll be no escape for the princess this time” to “You’re all clear kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home!”  I know that movie.

Since that summer, I’ve learned much more, I know about the last of the V-8 Interceptors and that “if you want out of here, you talk to me.”  I know that “it’s 106 miles to Chicago, we’ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.”

I’ve learned important life lessons like:  “never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line,” That “when someone asks if you’re a god, you say yes” and that if anyone ever asks “are you Sarah Conner?” you say no.

“I think that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” that “you just put your lips together an blow,” “we’re not in Kansas, anymore.”

I know that “Death is her gift,” that “they got the mustard out” and that “I’m pretty sure I said ‘no interruptions’”

I know that “A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day.” And that “If nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do.”

I know all about “the Knights Who Say ‘Ni,’” and sometimes I think “of the immortal words of Socrates, when he said, ‘I drank what?’”  I know that “I never wanted to do this…I wanted to be a lumberjack.” And most of all, I know that “no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.”

Then there’s the Bible and all the amazing stories in there, just think about the stories that we’re perched between this Sunday, with the Ascension of the Lord last week and Pentecost coming next week. But there are so many more, the familiar like Sampson and Delilah, David and Goliath or the Nativity, and the lesser known like Jephthah’s Daughter and “Shamgar, son of Anath, who killed 600 Philistines with an ox goad, he too delivered Israel.”

I love all those stories; they have taught me, inspired me and guided me through my whole life. For me, the great Good News of the Bible is contained in the great, timeless stories that it tells.
So I was not all that thrilled with this morning’s Psalm when it told me that the secret to a happy, full life to study the law.

I mean, have you read the law?  Page after page of exacting descriptions of how to build the tabernacle, then page after page of exacting descriptions of how the tabernacle was built.

Then there are all the rules about what’s clean and what’s not clean and what you have to do to make yourself clean if for some reason you ended up not clean.

And really, when you think about it, isn’t when we focus on the law that we get into the most trouble?  When was the last time you heard someone arguing about David and Goliath?  No, if you hear two people arguing about religion, it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re arguing about some part of the law.

So, with my love of stories and my, let’s just say, ambivalence toward studying the law, am I destined to sit in the “seat of the scoffers?”  I really would rather be a “tree who bears its fruit in season, and whose leaves don’t wither.”

Do I need to give up on my beloved stories and knuckle down to study all those laws?  Maybe.
But then again, maybe not.

The physicist Steven Hawking tells the story of how, when he was writing his book A Brief History of Time his publisher gave him the rule of thumb that for every equation he put into the book, he could count on loosing half of the books potential readership.  He took that advice to heart, and in the end only included one equation in the book, deciding that it was important enough that it was worth the potential drop in purchasers.

During the course of seminary, preachers and ministers learn a similar rule of thumb, that for every Hebrew or Greek word that we put into the sermon and try to explain, we risk putting half of the congregation to sleep.

But just as Dr. Hawking felt that he just had to include that one equation in his book, consequences be damned, there is one word from today’s Psalm that I just have to dig into, so if you see the person to your left or right start to fade out, could you do me a favor and give them a little bit of a nudge to wake them up?

I’m not too worried, though, because the word I’m going to talk about is at least one that I think most of you will have heard before, and one that you may even think that you already know pretty well.
It’s used twice in today’s Psalm, and both times I would say that it is translated incorrectly even though the way it is translated will match what most of you probably think the word means.

Not surprisingly, it’s the word that is translated into English as law, but in the Hebrew it’s Torah
You will almost always see Torah translated as “law” and I guess it’s not correct for me to say that “law” s an incorrect translation, because the torah does include the law, but the problem is that it’s a terribly, terribly limiting way to translate a word that means so much more.

The root of the word Torah is in a Hebrew verb that means, “he teaches,” the particular form of the of the verb translates roughly as “that which he teaches” or “that which he causes to be learned.”  Or most simply, “teaching.” 

I think, therefore, that a better translation of the second verse would be “but their delight in the teaching of the Lord, and on what he teaches they meditate day and night”

When translated that way, it encompasses so much more than just a list of rules and commandments, it’s also the stories that surround those laws and in the oral traditions that through the centuries have grown up around those stories and laws.

Think about the five books that are usually included in the Torah, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.  Those books do contain long lists of rules and regulations, they also contain many of the best known and best loved stories of the Bible.

Think about all that’s in there, from Adam and Eve, to Noah, to Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his fancy coat, the Tower of Babel, and of course, Moses and the Flight from Egypt.

All those stories give context to the rules.  When we read all those laws and instructions we need to remember the context of the covenant between God and Abraham, when we look at the Ten Commandments, we need to remember the whole story of Moses and the Exodus.

What happens when we don’t?  Well, we can see one example, in the passage from Acts that was read earlier.

I’ve been amusing myself this week by thinking of this passage as the minutes of the very first Session meeting.

Jesus has ascended, the Spirit hasn’t come yet, and so what could be better than to have a committee meeting?

Peter calls them to order and explains the agenda, that they need to elect a new elder, I mean disciple, so that they can have the right number as required by the rules.

Then they proceed to nominations and then determine the choice by the rolling of dice.  Mathias is the winner.

Let me tell you every thing we know about Mathias…

…

Mathias won that roll of the dice.  That’s it.  We never hear another word about Mathias.

Now, we now don’t know that Mathias was a bad apostle, we just know that he was an unremarkable one. Which is damning with faint praise if I ever heard it.

And maybe, just maybe, if Peter and the rest of them had been more interested in letting the story continue and waiting for the Spirit to come as Jesus had promised than in making sure that they had the right number of people on their team, they might have ended up making a better choice.

And maybe, when we go to make our decisions, we need to have more room for the stories and not just look to the laws.

Is studying the law a bad thing?  No.

What’s bad is focusing on the law at the expense of the stories that give the law context and heart.
When the time comes to stand for judgment and join the congregation of the righteous I hope to be able to say that I have loved all of the Torah.

And to quote another favorite story, “may the same be said for all of us!”

Amen.

The Joy of The Routine

A short homily for a seven am Wednesday Lent chapel chapel service

Text:  John 5: 1-18

What is it about us, anyway?

How is it that we an take the most joyful, the most wonderful gift and turn it into a duty, turn it into a job?
I love to drive.  Whether it’s across town to Target or across country to Atlanta, I love to drive.  I don’t know exactly why.

Maybe it’s the feeling of being in control of something.

Maybe it’s the freedom of being able to go anywhere I want.

Maybe it’s the chance to listen to my music, as loudly as I want.

Whatever the reason, it’s something that has been a joy and a privilege in my life.

But recently there’s been a change in my life.

My nice, easy, part-time, work-from-home job became a full-time, work-from-the-office-in-downtown-Denver job, which means that each morning at about 6:15 I get in my truck and drive 30 miles down to Brighton where I catch an RTD bus for the rest of the trip in.  Then in the evening, I catch the bus back to Brighton, get back into my truck and drive 30 miles back home, arriving right about twelve hours after I left.

It wouldn’t be very hard to imagine that after a few months of this routine, driving, one of the great joys in my life might become little more than a chore.

It’s going to be up to me to strive to remember the things that I love about driving and not let them fade into the background.

By now I’m sure you’re wondering, “What does your love of driving have to do with Jesus healing that guy?”

Well I’ll tell you:  Not much at all.

But I do think it has a lot to do with other things that happen in the text.

A miracle happens.  There’s not much fanfare, but a miracle happens nonetheless.  There are Jews at the temple who witness the result of the miracle, a lame man who has been laying on his mat hoping to be made well for thirty-eight years is walking around carrying his mat.  That’s pretty impressive.

Are the Jews excited?  Are the Jews amazed? Not so much.  What they are is annoyed that the miracle happened on the wrong day.  They’re so annoyed they want to kill the person responsible.

They were so caught up in the rituals and rules of the Sabbath, that they completely lost sight of the fact that the Sabbath is one of God’s greatest gifts to us.  The Sabbath is Good News!  It’s God saying to us “I got it.  I’ll take care of things today, rest from worry, rest from fear.”

Or as Jesus says in another gospel, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

God gave the Jews the Sabbath as a gift, a day to rest, a day to change their focus from work and toil, to the Lord and to their fellow man.  The Sabbath could have been their greatest joy and privilege. And what did the Jews do with their gift?  They made it a day about rules and rituals, “you can do this, you can’t do that, do everything right or you’ll be in big trouble.”

God gave us not just the Sabbath, but also the gift of his son Jesus Christ, that we celebrate through Lent and through the Eucharist.

 On Sundays, our Sabbath, we get the joy of gathering as a community to worship God.  In Lent, we are privileged to reflect on the journey of our Lord and in Communion we receive the gift of what Calvin called the real presence of God.

What do we do with these joys, privileges and gifts?

On Sundays we whine, “do I have to go to church?” or we complain when church runs too long.

During Lent, we focus on what we give up and on the length of our journeys.

And in Communion we try not to celebrate it too often, so it doesn’t become “too routine” and when we do
celebrate we take the smallest possible piece of bread, the barest taste of wine and we blind ourselves to the unlimited grace of God.

So this morning, in the middle of Lent, as we gather around the table, I invite you to remember that God’s grace abounds and that there can still be joy in the routine.

Charge

At the beginning of December, my friend Laura Kuster was ordained and then installed at two small churches in rural New Mexico.  She asked me to give the Charge to the Congregation at the two installation services.  As opposed to my normal process, I went without a manuscript, mainly because I didn't finish until right that moment. Here is what I reconstructed after the fact:

At seminary, in between teaching us about the Bible, Greek, Hebrew, Theology, Pastoral Care and Christian Education, they teach us a little about how to write sermons.

What I learned was, when it came time to write a sermon, I’ll a journal like this and just write and write and write. I’ll write in church, I’ll write at Starbucks, I’ll write wherever I have a chance. Eventually I’ll come up with a beginning, a middle and an end, not necessarily in that order, but a beginning a middle and an end.

When I get to that point, I rush home, sit down at my computer and type them up into a neat manuscript before they get away.

When Laura asked me to write this charge, I started out the same way. I grabbed my journal and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.

And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and eventually I came up with . . . three beginnings and an end.

So if this seems a little disorganized and disjointed, that’s why.

Because I’ve never written a charge before, the first place I started was to contact some preacher friends and get them to send me samples of what they had done.

What I learned from that was that I’m supposed to tell you about how he needs his time off, how you haven’t hired his wife, and how his kids are just kids and need to be held to the same standards as other kids.

I was going to go from there to congratulate you on calling someone who, in another time and place, would not have even been considered.

But I also wanted to talk to you about the different ways our society treats men and women and married and single people.

The truth is that a man coming into this position would be granted a certain amount of authority simply because he’s a man.  Laura needs that authority and she shouldn’t have to ask for it.

Married people have the advantage of all kinds of built in excuses to get away, “I have to pick up the kids,” “Dinner is almost ready.”

But a single person doesn’t have those excuses, and it is very easy to think, “she doesn’t have any one waiting for her at home, so it’s no big deal if she stays an extra couple of hours.” Or “it’s no big deal if Laura is here all night.”

That was a good beginning, but it wasn’t going to get me where I wanted to go, so I went back and started again.

This time, being the big Presbyterian geek that I am, I went back to my favorite book, The Book of Order and specifically to the part where it reminds us that Ministers of Word and Sacrament differ from every body else “in function only.”

All of the praying, laying on of hands and all nine sermons this weekend have not changed the fact that Laura is a human being like any of us and like any of us, Laura is going to make mistakes.

We believe in our tradition in the “priesthood of all believers,” and that means that Laura is not on her own, but you are all in it with her and you need to work with her and support her when she makes those mistakes.

That was a good beginning, but again, it wasn’t going to get me to where I wanted to go, so I had to start again.

This time I thought I would start with a more casual, personal approach, and tell you about Laura who I met in seminary and who has stood beside me in some of the hardest moments in my life.

I was going to borrow a phrase from poker and tell you that Laura is “all in.” I know that because Laura is “all in” in everything that she does, school, work, friendship.

Now that’s a wonderful gift, but it is a gift that can be very easily squandered and snuffed out.
It can be squandered not through any malice, but because when someone is so willing to give, it because far too easy for people to ask for “just a little bit more” and eventually, there’s nothing left to give.

So I was going to talk to you about boundaries and about not only allowing Laura to take time off, but encouraging her to.

And I was going to tell you that when she does take a day off, you need to let it really be a day off. If you have an emergency, call her, she wants to hear from you, but if you have a question about the docket for the next session meeting, it can wait.

And that was a good start, but it didn’t get me to what I really wanted to say to you.

That one thing is simple, it’s not eloquent or elegant, but it is the charge that I want to give you today:

This is Laura, my best friend, whom I love, and I need you to take of her.

Grant her the authority of this office, while allowing the mistakes that all of us humans are bound to make.

Hold her tight when she needs to be held, and give her room when she needs to get away.

So that’s my charge to you as brothers and sisters in Christ:

Take care of my friend.

Pumpkin Style?

At the supermarket today, picking up Thanksgiving parts, when I stumbled on this:

 

My first thought was that it's a pumpkin pie style dessert, that is it didn't really count as a pie because it was no bake.

But then I read it again and realized it was a "Pumpkin Style Pie"  and that awoke a sense of dread and suspicion within me, and Lord Peter Wimsey's discourse on advertising words jumped into my mind:

"Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words 'with' and 'from.' Suppose you are advertising lemonade, or, not to be invidious, we will say perry. If you say 'Our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only,' then it's got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable; if you just say it is made 'from pears,' without the 'only,' the betting is that it is probably made chiefly from pears; but if you say, 'made with pears,' you generally mean that you use a peck a pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you -- such are the niceties of our English tongue."  (Sayers, Dorothy L., Murder Must Advertise (Harper and Row, New York, 1933) p. 68)

What, then, does it mean when you say "pumpkin style"?  It means that, while it may look like pumpkin pie and it may even possibly taste like pumpkin pie, it does not, in fact, contain a single molecule of pumpkin:

Buffy Season Eight #18 - Time of Your Life, Part 3

"Summers, you drive like a spaz."

"And that phrase stood the test of time?"

Holy Cookies!

My mother's church got flooded out of their building after a big storm at the beginning of August and have been meeting at the presbytery offices for the last few weeks.

This last Thursday they held a work day to finish up things so that they could be in the building this morning. I wasn't  able to go work, but I did make a couple of batches of cookies (oatmeal raisin and chocolate-chocolate chip) for the people who were working. I delivered them around noon Thursday and that was the last I thought of them.

This morning, we went to our separate churches as usual, and as usual, I went to meet her at her church after the services.

As I walked into the building, people walking out complemented me on my cookies, which was nice of them.

It turns out that there was more to it than that. Apparently, in the excitement about getting back into the building, they forgot that it was a Communion Sunday and no one had thought to buy bread. So they used my cookies.

I'm sorry I missed it. I've been told that the visual of their interim saying the Words of Institution and breaking an oatmeal cookie in half was quite a thing to see.

Buffy Season Eight #17 - Time of Your Life, Part 2

"Vampires are lurks, a spin is a lie, toy is bad, but spled is good.

Boy the English language is losing it.

I should have treated it better. . ."

*Plus an OMFG!!! moment at the end*

I have a question

Why are all the organic/gourmet breads at the grocery store too big to fit in the toaster?

Is it not green or something to want to toast my bread?

New Sermon -- Excluded Middle

For St. Paul Presbyterian, Aurora, Colorado

Text: Matthew 14:22-33

I’m going to begin this from what will seem like a weird place.

I don’t know, because I’ve only visited here a few times, but it seems unlikely that you’ve heard many sermons that have started from this place.

You see, the thing is, for years when I’ve read this text, one of the first thing that has come to my mind has been what a jerk Jesus is in this passage.

There, I said it, for a long time I have though that, in this passage, and in particular in his interaction with Peter, Jesus is a bit of a jerk.

I mean c’mon, Peter steps out of the boat, Peter walks on water, then Peter realizes how amazing, how incredible what he’s doing is, has a moment of hesitation and starts to sink.

And what does Jesus say to him, to the only other human who has even come close to having enough faith to be able to walk on water?

Not “Good try, buddy,” or “Great start, you’ll get it next time.”

Nope, all Jesus has to say is, “You of little faith.”

“You of little faith.”

Jerk.

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