At The Table

Where does faith come from?

For me it started when I was a kid.

On family nights around the dinner table we would finish eating and then we read from this book.

The book contained different lessons about faith.

At the end of each story there were questions that we had to answer.

Some nights after dinner we would stop eating and play a game called aggravation.

It was there around that table playing this game and reading these stories I learned about God’s love, about Jesus, about playing by the rules.

I learned at that table to thank God for our daily bread.

I can still here my father saying, “We are lucky most people don’t have a job.”

I learned at that table to cry and laugh.

I learned to forgive.

It is often in our families that we first learn about faith.

We learn it from grandparents who pass it down from hard fought times.

Parents who learned to trust God in the most difficult of times.

It is through the pain of experience that we learn faith.

Most important it is through the Holy Spirit.

It is through a force that is so much bigger than any of us.

It is beyond us.

In this way we can never really understand faith.

This morning’s Gospel is a good example.

We have a centurion who has great faith.

Even Jesus seems surprised by this faith.

“When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him.”

I have told you my story of faith, but I have heard many others that are nothing like it.

I have heard stories of people who never grew up in a religious household who still believe in God.

That is the story of this centurion.

He didn’t learn his faith from going to synagogue.

Yes…he helped build it.

Yes…he was respected by the religious people in his town, but he wasn’t a parishioner.

He didn’t attend Hebrew school.

He didn’t recite the Ten Commandments.

But he knows something about this Jesus person that all those religious folks miss.

This spiritual but not religious centurion has faith.

This is the Holy Spirit at work.

It gives us hope in our day.

When less and less people are going to church we can be sure that God is still at work.

That there are conversations happening at dinner tables where people are sharing and learning about faith.

That there are people we are going to meet who will surprise us with their faith.

There will be people who we don’t expect who will come to faith without ever stepping foot in a church.

It would seem that this might demean the importance of what we are doing here.

I disagree.

For us to come here every week is not for us to receive faith.

It is to be reminded together of the importance of the faith already given.

To be reminded of the faith that the Holy Spirit has already poured into us.

To remember together the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The faith that is present every night around our dinner tables.

Today this is what Sam, Madeline, Ava, Elijah, and Karl are being welcomed to.

These young people already have faith.

They express that faith in different ways then you and me, but they have a faith.

They know Jesus, they believe in Jesus, the love Jesus.

I am sure that around their dinner tables faith is being taught in overt ways, but also in ways that we don’t fully recognize or understand.

Around our tables in our homes God is present, God is working.

When we come home and share our days, the good things that happen and the bad we are sharing love.

We are giving each other encouragement, challenging one another, and uplifting each other.

In those moments God is present, and faith is taught.

Hard questions are asked and answered around our tables.

How can we make it through this day?

How can I be myself?

We can do it because we believe God’s word that God loves and cares about us.

There was a woman who I met once.

Her parents never went to Church.

They never talked about God or religion.

One day a pastor moved next door to her.

She told her parents that she wanted to go to Church.

Her parents arranged it so she could go with the pastor on Sunday mornings.

When I met her she was on fire for telling others about God.

She was a great evangelist.

God was at work in her life that whole time.

I know that there are stories in our own congregation like this one.

I know there are people who never thought they would be here this morning sitting in a pew singing songs about Jesus.

But the Holy Spirit is funny that way.

It is surprising.

It shows up all the time.

What I want our young people to know this morning is that God is at the table.

God is at the tables in our homes.

God is there as we eat food created by God.

God is there as we grow.

God is most certainly here at this table.

God is here for us every week.

As we come to this table with our joys and sorrows.

God is here as we come with our sin.

God is here as we come not perfect, but on our knees hands out begging for grace.

Jesus has promised to meet us here in whatever state we find our lives.

I hope for all of us, but especially these five young people, that this will be the place we come to with our whole unvarnished selves.

I hope for them faith.

Faith like that of the centurion, who trust that Jesus only needs to say the words and it is done.

That they come here to this table to be loved here and sent here to do God’s work in the world.

Today I would like to end with a poem by the poet Joy Harjo called, “Perhaps the World Ends Here.”

The world begins at the kitchen table.

No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table.

So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens and dogs away from it.

Babies teeth at the corners.

They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human.

We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children.

They with us at our poor failing-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table.

It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror.

A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow.

We pray of suffering and remorse.

We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Come now to this table that God has prepared for us.

Come as you are.

Frail and strong, happy and sad, sinner and saint, rich and poor, with faith and without.

Come for the table is ready let us eat every last sweet bite. Amen

Lost Causes

 

I believe in lost causes.

I have been on the side of many things that had no chance of winning.

Lately I have been working with other leaders in Concord on the issue of what will happen to our homeless sisters and brothers.

It certainly feels like a lost cause.

There is nothing to be won for politicians to take up the cause of people experiencing homelessness.

They don’t have any money.

And most of them don’t vote.

The people who do have money and who do vote are often people who want a nice place to live without having to look at or be around others who don’t look good, and who don’t act good.

I will be the first to admit that there are some people experiencing homelessness who will probably be homeless for the rest of their lives.

There are some who will never get a job or be respectable.

You can ask Bill and Gail Megan and they will tell you that in the many years they have been feeding people at the Friendly Kitchen there are some who have always been there and some who always will.

It seems like a lost cause.

So why do I do it?

I believe in peace.

In my life I have done what I can to fight for the quest to live in a world without violence as the solution to our problems.

Don’t get me wrong I understand the need for our armed forces.

I am glad for the sacrifice of the men and women who risk their lives, who put their country first.

But I think we all yearn for a day when that will not be necessary.

And yet that always seems like a dream.

There has always been strife between people.

At the beginning of time there were disputes and people fought to get their way.

Peace is a lost cause.

So why do I do it?

Why do any of us believe in lost causes?

Why does the mother keep helping her son who is addicted to drugs even though he keeps stealing from her?

Why does a father pray at night for his daughter to turn her life around?

Why does a grandmother talk to her grandchildren and tell them how much their actions are hurting her and others?

I would contend that even if you don’t agree with my lost causes all of us have been involved in a lost cause or two in our lives.

Why do we do it?

We do it Because of hope.

Because this time it might be different.

This time someone might listen.

This time it all might change.

We as a people believe in hope.

More specifically Christians are a hopeful people.

We don’t give up because we just don’t know what will turn things around.

More than this we believe that God does not give up on us.

At a certain point in my life I was considered a lost cause.

But thankfully God and others did not give up on me.

Today our Psalm essentially asks this question.

Who are we that God is mindful of us?

We are people that are constantly messing things up.

We can’t seem to love each other as we ought.

We can’t seem to set aside our pride and do what is in the interested of everyone and not just ourselves.

And yet through all the years God has not given up on us.

Why not?

Perhaps God is hopeful that this time it just might be different.

This time we just might understand.

But maybe even more than this that God has made us a little lower than gods.

That God, for good or ill, has chosen us as his co-workers in kingdom making.

Sometimes, Christian theology is presented to us as God loves us even though we are unworthy and useless.

I disagree with this.

God loves us because God created us.

God loves us because God knows that despite even our failings there is something worthy about us.

God believes that there are things about us that are lovable.

That we are redeemable and we can do to great things.

Perhaps one of our greatest attributes as humans is our capacity to hope, our capacity to reach for the stars and do better.

This is why it is important for us to be involved in lost causes.

The Psalmist today tells us that God has a very high opinion of us.

That God gave us rule over the works of God’s hands.

God could have created the world and run the whole thing by God’s self.

In fact, it might have been a better plan.

There would have been no humans to pollute the planet, kill others, and create the atomic weapon.

But God created humans because God wanted helpers.

God didn’t want to do it alone.

God crowned us with glory and honor.

There are many things that we don’t do well.

But we stand in the grace of God, hoping to share in the glory of God.

We know that things cannot stand as they are forever.

So while we wait for God to make all things right we don’t stand idle.

But we suffer with our homeless brothers and sisters.

We feel angry and sad that there are people who have no place to call home.

We feel a need to speak when people are evicted from the one place they can sleep without a place to go.

We hope that perhaps this time our elected officials will listen and act.

Even though war might be necessary we still pray for peace.

We hope that this time cooler heads might prevail.

We hope that we might find words that will produce understanding.

St. Paul today tells us that we suffer now and that suffering produces in us hope.

Not because we are naïve about the world, but because we know of God’s love that is poured into us.

We know of that love since the beginning of all things.

We know of that love that was spoken to through Noah, Abraham, Moses, Ruth, the prophets, Mary, Jesus Christ, the apostles, and Paul.

We know of that love because we still sing “Jesus loves me this I know”.

Even in a world that seems to become more evil, and more complex, we still know of this love and believe in it through faith.

A couple of weeks ago at our adult forum I was saying that we simply cannot create peace.

Peace is too far from us.

There has been no time in human history have we known true peace.

Then someone in the class said, “But we continue to keep trying.”

Amen to that.

We keep trying because we have hope that perhaps this will be the day and time when God’s glory will shine through the heavens and there will be peace in our time.

We keep trying because Jesus told us that it is the peacemakers who are blessed.

We keep trying because Jesus told us that it is the poor who are blessed.

That it is those who weep that God cares deeply about.

We keep trying because all is not lost as long as God’s love is poured into us through the Holy Spirit.

I pray for all of you to be involved in lost causes.

So that you know suffering and that suffering leads to endurance, and that endurance leads to character, and that character leads to hope.

So that you may live in faith and know the glory of God.

Amen

Life Moves Pretty Fast!

If you have heard me preach before you have heard me talk about how chaotic life can be.

I usually talk about life that way to describe big things that happen in our world that we can’t explain.

Today I want us to think about how our ever day lives are growing more and more chaotic.

It is no secret that we are busier than we used to be.

We are always going from one thing to the next.

Life is moving and it often seems or maybe feels like organized chaos.

As we do more and more, as we work more and more, we have little time to do the little things that are so important.

We eat fast food instead of sitting down and eating as a family.

We don’t take time to be together to listen to each other.

I was told this week by a colleague that this is what mothers understand better than anyone else.

They understand how to get multiple things done.

They know how to cook dinner, do laundry, clean the bathroom, and help kids with homework all at the same time.

In the midst of a chaotic life mother’s no how to serve.

So can the rest of us.

Today’s reading from Acts is about serving in chaotic times.

There is a woman, a slave, with divination.

She follows Paul and his companions around yelling at them until they relented to curing her.

In the midst of the chaos Paul finds a way to serve.

Paul and his companions are beaten with rods and then thrown in Jail because this woman was a money maker for her captures.

They are thrown in Jail, and while in jail the pray and sing.

Brings comfort to the other prisoners.

In the midst of the chaos of being in Jail Paul and Silas found a way to serve.

Then there is an earthquake.

It is discombobulating to the jailer so much so that he is going to kill himself.

Yet after this the jailer takes Paul and his companions to his house and washed their wounds, and feed them.

In the midst of a discombobulating earthquake the jailer finds a way to serve.

In the words of Ferris Beuller, “Life moves pretty fast.”

So much to be done and not a lot of time to do all the things we wish we could.

We have to work, feed our families, take care of the lawn, fix the car, pay the bills, do laundry, fill out forms, and file taxes.

This doesn’t stop when our kids get older either.

For many people they are helping out with the grand kids, and also taking care of aging parents.

Some of you know that my mother is facing stage four cancer.

But this is not her first time with cancer.

She had it twenty-five years ago.

At that time I was a teenager.

At that time chemo therapy was much harder, because they didn’t have all the advances they have today.

I can only imagine that for my mother it was a pretty chaotic time.

But the thing is I don’t really know.

Because she managed to make everything seem normal.

She still cleaned the house, made dinner, went to work, and took care of us kids emotionally and spiritually.

A midst all the chaotic she still found time to serve, to wash the wounds of those around her.

Perhaps this is the way the Gospel is spread.

Not through serene times of prayer and contemplation but in the midst of chaos.

In the midst of the demands of everyday life we show forth God’s light.

I know that I admire my wife for this, because her life is much more hectic than mine.

She works, helps the kids with the homework, does most of the household chores, serves the church as the head of the education team, serves on the PTO, bakes cakes for the kids things at school, signs all their permission forms, volunteers in the kids classroom, keeps track of the family schedule, runs half marathons, finds time to be a good daughter and sister, and hardest of all puts up with me.

In the midst of the chaos she serves and in that serving honors God.

What about you?

What are the ways that your life is hectic, chaotic, even out of control and how do you find time to serve with all the demands on you?

What are the ways that you honor God in your lives?

I have been thinking lately that it is not so much in the big things that we honor God, but in the small everyday things.

It is in the midst of life when we are tired and worn out.

It is in those times when we muster the strength to spend time reading to our kids, or listening to a friend who is having problems, that we spread the message of this God who saves.

I want to take some time to talk about this idea of saving.

When we think of that as Christians we often think of it meaning that we have saved someone from hell.

Salvation has been belittled to only mean that we are saved at the end of our lives and go to heaven.

Certainly this is one of its meanings.

But in our reading today the word that is translated as saved has a bigger meaning.

It could also mean wholeness and healing.

It also means what happens to us here right now on this planet.

When we talk about saving others it also can mean that we are helping them in some way to be whole to heal.

When God saves us it doesn’t just mean that we are going to heaven someday, but also that God can heal our wounds and make us whole.

So if we are saved by the grace of God we are able to react differently in times of chaos.

Paul and Silas are saved by God’s grace making it possible for them to pray and sing hymns even though they have beaten with rods and put in prison.

Knowing God is our companion, in this hectic crazy life, makes it possible for us to serve even in the chaos.

I know that is what helped my mother when she had cancer; I know this is what helps my wife every day.

I know that many of you rely on God to wake you up and get you through the day.

It helps me.

Some days I like to say this little prayer.

Dear Lord,

So far today I've done all right.
I haven't gossiped, cursed, or lost my temper.
I haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish or over indulgent.
I am really glad about these things.

But, in a few minutes Lord,
I am going to get out of bed,
and from then on,
I'm probably going to need a lot more help.

It is easy to feel that you have done all things right when you are lying in bed.

It is totally a different thing to do all those things right in the midst of a busy and hectic life.

I know that I often fail at this.

But I also know that I am saved by God.

I am forgiven, redeemed, and empowered; I am given second and third chances.

And so are all of you.

Life moves pretty fast.

Life is hectic.

Thanks be to God that we are saved because then we have opportunities in the midst of all of it to serve and to show God’s light to our families, our friends, and our co-workers.

Thanks be to God for the mothers in our lives who have served us in the midst of all the craziness of life.

May we leave here this morning ready to serve by the grace of God who saves us.

Amen