For All the Saints!

The hurricane disrupted many lives this week.

We still are praying for those who are still without power.

My disruption was small.

I was supposed to go to the Bishop’s convocation on Cape Cod this week.

It is something I always look forward to.

Mainly because I get to catch up with my friends and colleagues.

I get to spend a couple of days thinking about ministry and the church;

I get to hear what other people are doing.

I get to hear how other congregations are tackling some of the more difficult problems we as a Church are facing.

I get to have my own assumptions questioned and challenged.

It is renewing for me.

So instead of going to Bishop’s convocation I spent some time with my family.

It was equally as gratifying.

On Tuesday My wife, Vicki, and I, took our son, Charlie, out to eat for lunch.

I made them talk to me about the Church like I was at the Bishop’s convocation.

I asked Charlie what he thinks the Church should be about.

He thought about for a little while and said, “The Church is about love.”

Vicki and I looked at each other and said, “See it is that simple.”

Perhaps I should have Charlie be the main speaker at next year’s Bishop Convocation.

He could just get up and say, “the Church is about love.”

And then sit down.

Perhaps sometimes we try and over think things.

Jesus this morning simplifies for us and this earnest scribe who asks him a question.

What is the greatest commandment?

Love.

Love God and love neighbor.

It is really that simple.

(This of course is a dangerous thing to say because it might put me out of a job.)

We put way too much time into things that don’t really matter.

This has always been my struggle with organized religion.

We spend way too much time talking about, and arguing about things that don’t really matter.

What time will the church supper be?

What hymn will people want to hear on this Sunday?

What would be the proper lighting for All Saints day?

Where should the flowers go?

All other good things that we might come up with are subjected to these two commandments.

These two commandments are were the Church should be giving all of its attention.

There were many other things in Jesus day that also occupied people’s time and energy.

There were many religious laws and observances that people put time and effort into.

This scribe asked Jesus this question while he was in Jerusalem.

It comes at the end of other questions that Jesus was asked.

And they really were all beside the point.

Should we pay taxes?

If a woman who had seven husbands dies whose wife will she be in heaven?

These are all questions that are interesting to ponder, but they are all beside the point.

There are only two things we need to love God and love each other.

So instead of debating points of minutia we should be putting our time and energy to living out these two very simple commandments.

Of course, it isn’t that easy.

Lots of things in our lives want our time and energy and we are often diverted from making God our priority.

Many people come into our lives that are hard to love.

This morning I don’t want to get caught in the complications, it is enough just to acknowledge that they exists.

This morning I want to talk about the people that surround us.

These people whose names we have written and surround us this morning.

They are all people that we remember this morning.

We remember them because they are saints.

And they are saints not because they were perfect, but because of the love they shared with us.

They are saints because of their love for God.

That is all that is needed to be a saint.

What are the stories that you share about the people that surround us?

Those stories might be funny, might be sad, might be informative.

But I bet they include some way that person helped you, encouraged you, and influenced you.

I bet that they include some way that they showed you that they loved you.

And that love is equivalent to God’s love.

Jesus connects them together.

To love God is to love others.

I think of the people who loved me who now are in eternal glory.

I could tell you a story about each one of them and how they manifested that love.

And all of them were people who knew God’s love and who passed it on to me.

I think this morning of my Grandfather’s.

0Grandpa Kent he used to take us out in his garden when we were kids and tell us the story of Peter Rabbit.

My Poppop would stock his house with Tasty Cakes whenever we would come to visit.

They were both very different men.

Grandpa Kent was a pastor, he was a FDR liberal.

Poppop was in upper management for Sears and Roebuck, and was an Eisenhower Republican.

But both men were men of God, they both worked hard, and they both loved their family and friends with warmth.

In their own ways they were extremely generous.

Neither of them was perfect, but I don’t remember their flaws all I remember when I think of them I remember how much they loved me.

How they both inspired me in their own ways to be the person I am today.

How I am really a little bit of each of them.

I bet that all of you have stories and memories of people that you loved.

Saints who have shared God’s love with you.

The saints of God are not just the names on these walls.

They are not just the ones who have died.

You all too are the saints of God.

You are here this morning because you love God.

You have given up this part of your week to be with God.

You all desire to know God better.

And all of you love someone else.

All of you have passed on that love to someone.

If nothing else we have an opportunity to give that love to one another here.

A couple of the people I wrote down I am not related to.

They are people who taught me something about Jesus in my life, or who I loved.

They are church people who gave me faith in my life.

And all of you continue to encourage and inspire my faith with yours.

I see how you love God, one another, your families, and our community.

You are the saints that God has called to love.

What made me most happy about what my son Charlie said was that he thought the church was about love and that is because of all of you.

You will be his saints that he remembers and encourages him to love God and others.

Loving God with all of our heart, mind, and soul, and loving our neighbor as ourselves are the marks of our faith.

They are outward signs of an inward belief in a God who gave us everything.

And that is what our Church is all about.

Let us continue to live that out saints of God.

Amen

What Do You Want Me To Do For You?

“What do you want me to do for you?”

This is the very same question that Jesus asked James and John in last weeks Gospel.

In that case James and John want Jesus to give them glory.

They want Jesus to let them sit at his right and his left hand.

But today we have a different answer.

This blind beggar asks for healing, for wholeness.

Most important he asks to see!

The disciples are blind and yet they ask for power and prestige.

This blind beggar at least seems to know what he needs.

Do you?

Do we know what we need?

This is a great question for us to ponder together this morning.

What do we want Jesus to do for us?

What have we come here seeking?

This morning we will be witnesses to the Baptism of Noah.

We will be reminded that at some point in our life we too were drowned in these same waters.

In that moment God claimed us as his children.

And really it is God who continues to serve us.

God continues to care about us and ask is this question, “What do you want me to do for you?”

In 1517, a German Monk, named Martin Luther, changed the world.

He changed the way that people thought about God.

Many people in Luther’s day thought of God as angry and vengeful.

They thought that the only way to appease this angry God was to buy God off.

Luther himself saw God this way.

Luther believed that he was unworthy of God’s care and love.

And Luther wanted to understand.

Luther asked God to help him see.

And he was given insight into God.

God was not angry and vengeful.

God was merciful, filled with grace, and love.

God did not desire our demise.

God desired for us to see.

Luther once wrote, “Anyone who regards God as angry is not seeing God correctly, but has pulled down a curtain and cover, more, a dark cloud over His face.

But in Scriptural language “to see His face” means to recognize God correctly as a gracious and faithful Father, on whom you can depend for every good thing. This happens only through faith in Christ.”

Just to paraphrase what Luther wrote, those who see God as angry do not see God properly.

The problem is not God; it is how we see God.

This morning what we see is Jesus ready, willing, and able to give this blind man what he wants/needs.

This morning I would like you to think about times in your life when God helped you.

Those times in your life when you were down and out, those times you were angry, those times you were lost.

When were those times when God uplifted you?

When were those times when God gave you the ability to see better?

When are those times when God helps us to see mercy instead of judgment?

When are those times when we can see forgiveness instead of revenge?

When are those times when we can see love instead of hate?

Grace instead of law.

There was an article in Newsweek written by Dr. Eben Alexander.

Dr. Eben is a neurosurgeon.

By his own admission he did not believe in near death experiences of people traveling to heaven.

He contracted a rare bacterial meningitis.

It attacked his brain and left him for dead.

During that time Dr. Eben said that he went to heaven.

He explains in the article his experience in vivid and great detail.

In part of his journey an angel sits with him on the wing of a butterfly and tells him three important truths.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

Dr. Eben like Martin Luther was given the gift of sight.

He was able to see an important spiritual truth.

But we this morning don’t have to be a medieval scholar, or have a near death experience.

We can know these truths because they are spoken to us by God every day.

They are spoken this day to Noah as he is washed in these waters.

They were spoken to us on the day of our baptism.

The trick is not to lose that sight to be able to see the world, not through our eyes but through the eyes of Jesus.

Perhaps then all of our life can be like the blind man.

We can bet the one who knows that Jesus can save.

We will be the one who does not let people stop him from screaming and yelling to get Jesus attention.

The one who believes that Jesus can and will follow through on his promises.

Do we still believe it?

Do we believe that Jesus can heal us, save us, forgive us?

It is about sight.

Faith is about being able to see into greater truths then what is presented to us.

Faith is about being able to see.

I used to do this Bible study at a day center for seniors.

There was one woman, Hazel, who came to the Bible study who was totally blind.

But every time she would quote from Psalm 46, “God is our refuge and strength,
   a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change,
   though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;”

She would talk about not needing her eyesight because she saw God just fine.

Indeed she saw better than most people.

She knew that it was God that really was her resting place, not her health, wealth, or anything else.

Interesting it is Psalm 46 that Luther used as the bases to write the great reformation hymn, “A Mighty Fortress.”

Hazel, like Luther and Dr. Eben had gained sight.

These last four weeks we have been talking a lot about discipleship about giving ourselves over to God and about serving others.

Today we get the most important part of that equation how God serves us.

That it is God who gives us the insight to see the needs of others.

It is God who makes us whole enough to be able to serve others.

It is God who cares tenderly for all of us.

God says to us today, “What do you want me to do for you?”

God takes care of us so that we can have the strength, ability, and eyesight to be able to take care of others.

God stands ready to help us.

Are we ready to ask for help?

Part of our insight has to be into ourselves.

We have to be able to understand our own limitations.

We have to know that we can’t do it all.

We need help.

We need saving.

We are the blind man by the road asking Jesus for healing and wholeness.

And when we realize that then God is there ready to lift us up, gives sight, and healing.

Today we can go forth and ask God for what we really need sight to see as God sees us beloved children of God, so that we are made whole and healed.

Amen

Be Careful What You Wish For

“You do not know what you are asking.”

Most of the time, like James and John, we don’t know what we are asking for.

 We don’t know what we are getting ourselves into.

We have all heard the expression, “be careful what you wish for.”

That is essentially what Jesus is warning James and John about.

To be a disciple of Jesus, to follow Jesus, to be great means to get low and serve others.

This is not something that one can take lightly.

It is not so much that being a disciple is about being perfect.

It is about the calling to serve, and about being a servant of all.

To give of ourselves without thought of what we get in return.

I have seen it many times in people.

They are searching for God.

Wondering where God is for them.

And when they find God they want nothing but to allow God to use their life.

The problem is that once God has a hold of your life there are all sorts of ways we are called to follow.

There are all sorts of things that we do that we never thought we would do.

It is hard.

And here is the hardest thing.

To do God’s will means to serve others.

Let us be honest about something this morning.

It is not always enjoyable to be around other people.

Other people are lazy, rude, and hurtful.

Other people break your heart.

When I went to seminary I remember having this conversation with God.

I asked that God would use my life to help others, to spread the good news.

I had no idea what I was asking.

When I was on internship in Philadelphia I got my first taste of what this would truly mean.

I became friends with some homeless people in Philadelphia.

Especially a man named Clearance.

I met Clearance on the street through the Church’s feeding program.

I began to drive down to downtown Philly on Sunday mornings to bring him to worship with me.

Soon I learned that Clearance had been keeping everything he owned in a storage unit.

And even though he was homeless he had a job.

The pastor of the church, with my advice, decided that we should help.

The Church put up his first month’s rent and security deposit.

It was in an apartment across the street from the church.

I saw Clearance every day after that and I tried to help him budget his money.

Clearance told me he wanted to get gold teeth.

I told him that he needed to pay his rent.

Sure enough the next time I saw him he had new gold teeth.

A week later I got a call from the landlord that Clearance was two months late on his rent.

Since the church signed the lease we were responsible for the money.

Clearance broke my heart.

I got burned.

I see this all the time in people in the church.

Out of desire to do God’s will they get involved in the work of the church.

They serve on committees, on council, and they give of themselves because they want God to use their lives.

But they get burnt out; they get disillusioned that people are not working as hard as they are.

They get upset that people don’t see things the way they do, or that the church does not live up to its ideals.

Eventually they get burnt out.

But Jesus this morning warns us all about what it really means to be a disciple.

It is not for glory.

It is for servant hood, and that is not always pretty.

It does not always live up to our glorious expectations.

I really believed that the church was going to change Clearance’s life.

That once he had a stable place to live and a community that supported him he would turn his life around.

Life is not that easy.

People are not that easy.

Serving real people does not always produce the results we would want.

But what are we to do?

Should we give up?

Should we stop helping others because it is not going to give us the desired results?

After that incident I learned and grew, but I decided this was merely the price of doing God’s work.

This was what it meant to be a servant.

Jesus’ own work was not some glowing success in the eyes of the world.

It ended in him being killed on the cross, a reality that he saw very clearly.

My internship supervisor told me that if he had to do it all over again he would do the same thing.

He told me this is where the church lives in the real world that is often brutal and failing.

I prayed a lot during and after that time with Clearance.

I asked God why this all had to be so hard?

Perhaps some of you have prayed that exact same prayer?

But if you know me now you know that I am still committed to helping those experiencing homelessness.

I am more aware of the limitations of the help we give.

I am more aware of the issues involved in people who are in a long term homeless situation.

But I have decided that if I really want God to use my life I cannot run from serving others because of one bad experience.

I also realize now that the help I offer is just as much for me as it is for others.

I serve and care because spiritually I need to do it.

When we do God’s work in the church or outside of it, we do it because in the serving our lives are glorified.

In the loosing of ourselves we gain greater spiritual blessings.

Perhaps we should realize what we are asking God for before we do it.

The good news in the text for us this morning is that Jesus says that we can do it.

We can share the same baptism that Jesus has.

That is a baptism of giving our lives.

Jesus is baptized to prepare him for his mission in the world.

So is ours.

For me the waters of baptism help to put out the fire during those times when I do get burned.

Our baptism prepares us for a life of having our hearts broken.

Just as Jesus was heartbroken that people do not accept the gift of the kingdom of God so are our hearts sometimes broken by other people.

But it is in realizing that the journey to Jerusalem has greater purpose.

The journey of faith is only amplified and made all the sweeter through those heart breaks.

If we never experience the heart break then we never tried to live in the calling of God.

God gives us the gift of life and what we do for others is our gift back to God.

God calls us to be in this world for each other.

I heard a quote this week that really hit me, "Anyone can find God alone on a picturesque mountaintop, the hiking trail, or the sunset.

The miracle is that I can find God in the company of other people who are just as annoying as I am." 

Sometimes we might have our hearts broken, we might get burnt out, but what Jesus tells us this morning is that if we want to do God’s will we have to do serving others.

We have to be willing to risk to endure, and in that there will be something greater in store for us.

New avenues of understanding ourselves, God, and the world will open up for us.

So let us go out and serve others, so that we can be the greatest we can be for God.

Amen