The Story of Our Fraigility!

For Lent I have decided to preach on the Old Testament readings.

During Lent we will be hearing familiar stories from the Old Testament.

The reason I am preaching on them is because I want us during lent to think about our stories.

Stories are important to us.

They are how we order the world.

Stories explain who we are and what we are about.

We use stories to explain ourselves, to explain others, to make sense out of things, and so since the beginning of time humans have used and told stories.

The Bible is made up of a lot of stories.

These stories explain God’s relationship with the world.

I am hoping that through these stories we will be able to

Make sense of our own stories.

We will be able to see God at work in the stories we tell about our lives.

The first story this week is about creation.

There are lots of misunderstandings about this story.

But at the heart of the story is why there are bad things in the world.

Why is there good and evil?

Why is there sin?

For me the most important thing is that the sin of Adam and Eve was not eating the fruit.

The sin happened before they ate the fruit.

It was in them long before that moment.

It was exploited by the serpent.

Their sin was wanting to be like God.

According to the story God put two trees in the garden the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of the good and evil.

Adam and Eve are allowed to eat all they want from the tree of life, and are told not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

What they are tempted with is, “being like God”.

If we have both eternal life and the knowledge of good and evil then we are essentially God.

We miss understand sin in this way often.

We think that sin is about little things that we do.

But what all sin is about is this desire we have to make ourselves God.

It is to put ourselves at the top of the list.

To believe that we can do it all, we can solve every problem, we don’t need help, we don’t need anything but our own hard work and brains.

The story is about this deep truth.

The story is about our need for God.

I said this on Ash Wednesday and it bears repeating this morning that what lent is about is our need for God.

It is not about beating ourselves up because we are “bad people”.

We need to tell our stories about trying to be perfect, and how we failed that led us to rely on God.

I am wondering this morning what your story would be?

When is a time, or times, in your life when you realized that you couldn’t do it all.

Did you ever have a problem that you couldn’t solve?

Did you ever feel that everything was just “too much”?

What Adam and Eve did in the garden is in stark contrast to Jesus.

Jesus was God, but he humbled himself, he became a human and died on a cross.

Jesus is the anti-Adam and Eve because he can’t be tempted to take power, to use power, to play God, to be like God.

Jesus in a sense admits that he needs God.

This week I did some visiting of people that were sick, or dying.

Every time I do that I consider how fragile we all are.

I also know how much we hate being “helpless”.

When someone we love is dying there is really nothing we can do, there is nothing the doctors can do.

That is really hard.

When people are still in the process of fighting for life than there are things we can do.
We can encourage each other, we can send a card, we can make a call, we can love someone.

But when there is nothing to do.

It is hard.

It feels like we have failed.

But we have not failed it is merely what it means to be human.

We don’t live forever, and none of us can do it all despite what we have been led to believe.

This week I read a story by a woman who tries to do it all.

One day she was facing a deadline at work, and it became obvious that she was going to fail to meet that deadline.

In a fit of anger she stomped her foot and end up breaking it.

She describes what led to that moment, “The problem, I knew, was less in my body than it was in my head.

The culprit was that pesky little voice whose sole purpose was convincing me that there was never enough time and I would never get enough done.

It was the voice that urged me to be forever multitasking, that made me skimp on post-workout stretching, that had me constantly thinking about the next thing I had to do, rather than the thing I was doing right now.”

This is one of our problems that we are over programmed and over extended because we want to have it all.

We want to be successful at everything.

We want to be great parents.

We want to be successful at work.

And the truth is that life is not designed for us to be like this.

There are limitations.

I believe God intentionally built in those limitations.

There are only so many hours in a day.

We have only so many limbs.

We have only one body.

We can’t do it all.

That is what makes us human.

If we could be everywhere and do everything then we would be God, and we are not.

What I want to do this morning is give us permission to be human.

In lent we can take solace in the fact that we don’t know everything, we don’t have everything together, and we can’t do it all.

God did not create the world that way.

We are not created that way.

Instead we are left with something much more difficult.

We are left with faith.

We are left having to trust God, and to merely be human.

I invite us to be present in that wonderful truth.

I invite us too be perfectly content to be us, and to let God be God.

And to tell the story of how much God has done for you.

Go and tell the stories of your human fragility, and God’s presence in the midst of that fragility.

Amen

Rethinking Lent!

One time a friend of mine was attending an Ash Wednesday service.

As he was leaving the sanctuary something made him involuntarily laugh.

Another Church goer behind him in line to leave said indignantly, “Lent is no laughing matter.”

I have often reflected on this story.

This is how we think of lent.

It is a somber time.

It is a time to confess all our sins.

It is a time to reflect on how horrible we are.

However, most of us already know that we are horrible.

We don’t need the Church to remind us of this.

Most of us are all too aware of our short comings.

I also think that lent is a particularly hard time for people living in New Hampshire.

We are at the end of winter; there is still snow on the ground.

In fact, this morning it was snowing.

We all feel beat down already.

We are anxious for spring, for warm sunshine.

We already feel in a sour mode, and now we have to come to church and hear about how awful we are, how awful life is, how dreary is the human condition.

What are we going to do with lent?

It is no laughing matter, but it comes during a time when we need to laugh more than ever.

One of my friends on Facebook posted this.

“This year I am giving up Lent for Lent.

Just this one time.

I've heard people say that for years and years and understood but never really internalized it.

I love the ash, I love Holy Week and all the rituals and all the reminders but this year I have had too much death already.

I'll take Easter, you take Lent.

Bring on the spring!”

Maybe you feel that way about your life too.

Too much death, too much bad news, too much winter, we need resurrection and spring.

Perhaps we can shift just a little our view on lent.

First of all it is not a time for the church to tell us that we are bad people.

I always feel that I don’t need to point out other people’s sins because they know those sins already.

We are often harder on ourselves than others are.

Instead what we can see lent as is permission to let go of the idea that we need to be perfect.

We can let go of the idea that everything in life has to be a certain way.

In our Gospel for this evening Jesus gives us permission to let go.

To not worry about tomorrow, to not worry about what we look like to the outside world.

Jesus gives us permission to lay our burdens down at God’s feet.

Second, lent is not really about sin.

At least not in the way we think about sin.

We think of sin as actions that we do.

We sin when we are mean to someone, when we rob the local store of some bread or milk.

Instead it lent is about the human condition.

It is about the condition of human fragility.

It reminds me of the Sting song, “On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are how fragile we are”

Life is precious because it is so fragile.

We are fragile.

We are fragile because we so easily mess up our own lives with self-destructive behavior.

We get hurt easily, we get bruised by life, and we get cut up by other people.

And we die.

Lent is an invitation to merely ponder that fragile existence.

Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.

Third, lent is not about punishment it is about renewal.

As our Psalmist says, “Create in me a clean heart O’God and renew a right spirit within me.”

Lent is about us renewing ourselves by giving ourselves over to God.

And perhaps this season of lent renewal is exactly what we need.

We need it because we are worried about so many things, and it will feel good to let go of those burdens.

We need it because things are just not going in the right direction in our lives, or we feel that they are not.

We need it because we have lost the ability to connect ourselves to the source of God’s love and redemption.

If lent is about how fragile we are, it is also about reconnecting to the source of our strength.

Forth, lent is not just about us.

Lent is about Jesus.

In lent we focus a lot on ourselves.

We focus about giving things up to improve ourselves.

We focus on our spiritual journey.

But the truth is that what is at the heart of this is not self improvement.

It is God as we know God in Jesus Christ.

It is about getting to know Jesus better.

That is why we give something up to know Jesus in our lives better.

It is to live more fully into the truth that Jesus is teaching us tonight.

“Do not worry about your life.”

Instead trust and turn toward God.

Give that life over to God in faith and watch and see the miraculous things that God will do for you.

If life is fragile and because of this we need to be renewed than it is Jesus Christ that is the source of that renewal.

  

I would like to share a story with you tonight that illustrates this it is about a man named Bill.

A man named Bill was a successful business man on Wall Street.

He believed in his abilities, his mind, and his good work.

He was out to prove to the world that he was important and that he mattered.

He was always a heavy drinker.

In 1929 the stock market crashed and so did all of his dreams and money.

Over the next years he became more and more heavily drinking.

He became powerless over alcohol.

He couldn’t control it, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he promised his wife that this was the last drink.

He lost everything.

Until one day an old drinking buddy showed up at his house to tell him about how he had gone sober, about how he had found “religion”.

The only cure for his alcoholism was to submit to his higher power.

As Bill tells it, “I humbly offered myself to God, as I then understood God, to do with me as God would. I placed myself unreservedly under God’s care and direction.

I admitted for the first time that of myself I was nothing; that without God I was lost.”

This story is told by Bill W. who was the co-founder of AA.

The story is told in AA big book.

I share it with you tonight as an example of what lent is really about.

It is about our reconnection of our fragile life, and our need to rest our lives in the hands of God, and the need to be restored and renewed by God.

It is a serious thing no doubt.

But it also is something to laugh at.

It is something to find joy in knowing that we are not condemned to live quite lives of desperation without hope.

We can instead give them over to God.

As Bill writes, “There is a vast amount of fun about it all.”

There is a fun in life, and there is fun in knowing God’s love and care given to us in Jesus Christ.

So may we laugh this lent.

May we throw worry and sin into God’s arms.

And may we know of God’s grace given in Jesus Christ.

Amen

Living the Mystery

Since it was school vacation week I took my kids to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on my day off.

I love museums and art so we had a great day.

I usually don’t love the modern art section of a museum.

Usually it looks like something that a three year old can do.

But this time something happened to me.

It happened while I was looking at the Jackson Pollock (for those who don’t know Jackson Pollock was the 20^th century abstract painter who dripped, flung, and randomly put paint unto canvas) they had hanging at the museum.

I was looking at it and thought to myself, “What is this?”

What does this mean?

And then I realized that you can never really answer that question.

There is something about Jackson Pollock’s work that is just unanswerable.

And therein lies some of the point.

It is a mystery.

It is not straight forward like a picture of a chair or apple.

It is just looks like random pieces of paint flung onto a canvas.

But this time as I looked there seemed to be something more to it.

I couldn’t tell what it was but maybe that was the point.

There was room to wander, to imagine, to dream.

It was mysterious.

I always find Transfiguration a difficult day to preach, for exactly this same reason.

There is no easy to discern story or point here.

There is Jesus, there are bright lights, there is Moses and Elijah, there is a voice, and there are confused disciples.

I have read lots and lots about this text and the Transfiguration over the years.

I have read lots this week trying to discern for you what we should take away from it.

And I am not saying that there are no answers.

But really none of them are completely satisfying to me.

Even Peter in our second reading trying to explain what happened on the mountaintop that day seems at a lost for what it all meant.

But it all doesn’t add up to something simple.

And perhaps that is exactly the point.

There is simply some things in our faith that cannot be answered neatly and put into a nice package.

This is good news!

There should be mystery in our faith.

There should be things that don’t have an easy answer.

I know that many people know this and express it.

They say something like, “God works in mysterious ways.”

Absolutely, God does.

And our lives are filled with those mysterious things.

Those moments we can’t explain but know that something really wonderful happened.

Or even those moments that we think God was involved in, but are maybe afraid to say out loud because we might be seen as crazy.

If everything has an answer, if we know all about God then I think we have missed some of the point.

Faith has to be an open question, a place for us to dream, to imagine, to be creative.

If not it could be become stale and dead.

It becomes a series of clichés, and bumper sticker sayings.

Faith is alive, and active, it moves in and through the world.

And all the time it is taking a turn we don’t see coming.

Our lives we think of as Straight lines.

We often do this we put our lives on a timeline.

We put the dates of major events.

I was born in 1973, moved to NH in 1976, graduated Highschool 1992, college 1996, Married in 2000, seminary 2003, ordained in 2002, kids born in 2004 & 2006, called to Concordia in 2009.

Looking at life this way leaves out the best parts the twist and turns that got me to those places, the stories that enlivened each step.

And it also leaves out some major themes of what it meant to live each of those moments.

It leaves out the wrong turns I took that taught me about myself, about God.

For example, it mentions that I got married, but it leaves out all heartbreak and learning I had to do to prepare me to fall in love with my wife.

For if not for that I wouldn’t have been ready when Vicki and I started dating.

It mentions that I went to seminary, but not how I got there, why I felt called to this particular calling.

And that is a great story.

We need the mystery.

We need the paint that is thrown on the canvas in what seems to be a random act, but it makes up more than the sum of its parts.

For all those things shape us into who we are, what we are meant to be, where we are meant to be.

Perhaps this is why so many people are so unhappy with their lives, because what they pay too much attention to is the simply the time line.

They have ideas about what is supposed to go on that timeline.

They have ideas about what type of work they want to do, who they want to marry, what kind of life they want.

In other words they have painted the picture already.

And when it doesn’t look like the one in their head they are disappointed, or not satisfied, or unhappy.

But if life is a mystery, if it continues to unfold in all of its seemingly random ways, then maybe we can enjoy the ride.

This is what happens to the disciples.

They have an idea of what the picture should look like.

It should be like the painting we saw at the museum of George Washington about to cross the Delaware.

By his white horse a confident commander ready to overthrow the imperial evil.

That is who Jesus was going to be the greatest and best figure.

They were not ready for the chaos that came with following Jesus.

They were not ready for the twist and turns in this story.

They were not ready for Jesus to be killed, and they certainly were not prepared for him to be resurrected.

They were not ready for the mystery.

Perhaps that is why Peter wants the booths; because that is what you do with great heroes you make statues of them.

You show others their bravery.

But the mystery of what it all means, what will happen that is harder to live in.

It is hard for us not to know.

It is hard not to have life work out the way we planned.

It is hard for life not to look like a beautiful painting.

This morning I want to encourage us to be content in the mystery of it all.

To be OK with not knowing how it all works out, or what it all means.

But to know a simple truth that is imbedded in the story, but lost among the sensational parts of the story.

At the end of the light, the clouds, the voice from heaven, and Moses and Elijah showing up, in the midst of the chaos and confusion, Jesus simply says what he always says, “Get up, do not be afraid.”

Do not be afraid that all is not as you think it should be I am with you.

It is a mystery to us, but not to God.

God sees something in those splotchy paint droppings that we don’t see.

It is not for us to know, but to live into the unknown, to live without fear, and with faith.

So get up, walk on, and do not be afraid.

Amen