English Language Sermon – July 12, 2009

“Dance Naked?” (II Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19, Psalm 24)

July 12, 2009

Justin Thornburgh, Guest Preacher

Let me continue reading the lesson a little further (2 Sam. 6:20-22):

David returned to bless his household. But Michal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, ‘How the king of Israel honoured himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself!’ 21David said to Michal, ‘It was before the Lord, who chose me in place of your father and all his household, to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the Lord, that I have danced before the Lord. 22I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honour.’

Let me give a little context to what is going on in the passage we just heard. In 2 Samuel 5, David has been anointed the king of all Israel. And in a move that is mocked by her inhabitants, David decides to make Jerusalem the capital. It is said that David is too weak to make this happen, but alas, he was successful. He also has defended the land against a Philistine attack. This is where today’s reading picks up.

David has gathered the chosen men of Israel to come with him to retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. This is a move to let the people know that even though there is a new leader and a new government and a new capital Israel will still honor the old traditions. They receive the Ark from Abin-a-dab and it begins it trip to Jerusalem. It is a grand procession with singing and dancing and music. An ecstatic journey. Until (and this is what is left out of today’s reading) Uzzah tries to balance an unsteady ark and is struck dead. One of the commentators I read mentions that this is not divine punishment, but because Uzzah was not ritually prepared to deal with the situation. Whatever the reason (another sermon of another day) this incident literally puts the fear of God into David, and David is mad. Afraid and angry David leaves the ark in the care of O-bed-e-dom for three months. When David hears that O-bed-e-dom has been greatly blessed during this interim time, he decides to go get the Ark and restart the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Taking care to make sure Uzzah’s death was not in vain David offers sacrifice after moving the ark six paces. Some think this is every six paces. They journey of ecstasy resumes. Shouting and dancing and singing and music and all of Israel are rejoicing praising the LORD. David is only girded in a linen ephod. This is a garment worn by the priests, but as the text mentions he is only girding himself. It is believed that David is naked except for the wearing the ephod a belt. This is supported by the fact that Micahl, David’s wife and Saul’s daughter, looks upon this display and despises David for it.

At long last the ark is brought to its place and David continues to offer sacrifice and blesses Israel and his own house. Michal, though, chastises him saying, “How the King of Israel honored himself today, uncovering himself today before the eye of his servants’ maids as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself!” David respnds, “It was before the LORD, who chose me in place of your father and all his household, to appoint me as prince over Israel, the people of the LORD, that I have danced before the LORD.” I want us to look at this today. How can we dance naked, stripped of everything that keeps us from the LORD?

***

Let us pray: May it be, O Lord, that the words of my mouth and meditations of our hearts be acceptable to your purposes of grace. Amen.

Have you ever been walking down the street and been hit with such joy that it is a total surprise and you can do nothing but say, “Thank you God!”?

I had that happen to me recently. Every Tuesday I go to the farmers’ market located in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art just off Michigan Ave. I was walking back to the office with an arm full of freshly baked bread, asparagus, home made peanut butter and jelly. I was walking along watching the people, listening to the urban symphony (the percussion of the jackhammers, the staccato rhythm of a giddy child, soaring flute of the birds filling the trees while waiting for someone to drop a piece of lunch, the low cello countermelody of wind blowing through my ears), watching the pigeons going after the remains of a lunch at one of the outdoor seating areas of a local shop, smelling the humidity in the air, touching the trunk of a tree as I passed by and WHAM I can do nothing by smile with tears in my eyes and thank God for this moment. I had what John Prine calls the Illegal Smile on my face for the next several blocks. I worshiped God in that moment. I lived in to the mystery that is grace. I was so overwhelmed by the gifts around me that I lost myself.

It was a moment where I was totally open to and responding to the Holy Spirit. I was stripped of all the garbage that had been going on. The pressures of work, the thoughts of moving, the cloud of things outside of my control: they were all gone. I was there. Stripped of everything. Dancing naked before the LORD. In the glory of Eden.

It was a moment and it passed, but it will come again and I will be ready.

These moments, though, happen quite rarely…at least for me. There are many, many times when my life is not focused like it should be. I am focused on work. I am focused on making sure our bank account is ok. I am focused on pleasing everyone around me instead of focusing on the one who gave me all these things. I am wearing the cloak of the pressures of the world. Life gets in the way. Life shrouds us with the things that prevent us from giving God the worship and praise our Creator deserves. We are human. It happens to all of us, but do not fret. Our reality is one of brokenness. But it is also a reality of grace. A reality of constant reminders that even when we are broken there is the promise of a new day. We just need to go to God as we are.

Look at the Psalms for proof that this disconnect happened to folks we look up to and admire from the Bible. Psalm 51, one of my favorites, is a confession of brokenness and sin. The psalmist is laying all their troubles before the LORD. Going to God warts and all. Psalm 39 is plea from a confused leader for wisdom and forgiveness. A plea for God to “hear my prayer.” Psalm 140 is a cry from a person being overwhelmed by their enemies. A prayer for deliverance from those enemies. In these examples, and many many more, the psalmists are just like us. People living living, working, grieving, searching for the light at the end of the tunnel. People buried under the strain of work. People whose children are going away to camp for the first time. People who have recently lost their jobs. People who are dealing with the passing of a loved one. The Psalms are for us and about us.

The thing about the Psalmists though is that they, even in their darkest hour, go to God. They go to God with tears rolling down their cheeks. They go to God. The act of going to God frees them to begin the process of unburdening themselves. It allows them to begin to transform.

I look at the psalms and say to myself, yeah, but… I am too busy to sit down to pray. Too much to do…I can not give God the worship deserved. I try. I go in spurts. I will be good for a while of setting aside time in the morning to pray, but then the snooze alarm looks better and better. I try to set aside time at lunch hour to go to the chapel at the hospital across the street from the office and pray, but then I have an important project due and then I have a lunch meeting and soon I am back eating lunch at my desk. I try to make time at night, but I need to fix supper or I am too tired from the day at work to focus on anything by CSI reruns. I do not think I am the only one here today that is going trough this. How can I make the time to go to God? Again the Psalms help with this.

Hear today’s Psalm. Psalm 24 (read):

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it;

2for he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers.

3Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place?

4Those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully.

5They will receive blessing from the Lord, and vindication from the God of their salvation.

6Such is the company of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob.* Selah

7Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in.

8Who is the King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle.

9Lift up your heads, O gates! and be lifted up, O ancient doors! that the King of glory may come in.

10Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah

“The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it.” Look around you. These trees are the LORD’s. The grass is the LORD’s. The squirrels chasing each other through your lawn are the LORD’s. Psalm 148 talks about the very earth praising God. This is where I find the time and the ability to respond to God’s works in my life. I watch the birds going for worms in the morning. I look at the trees raising their leaves in praise on sunny days and bowing in reverence on raining one.

I love trees. I love the stories they tell. Have you ever stopped and looked at a tree and tried to hear its story? One of my favorite trees is just over on Magnoila, directly across from where we are now. It is on the west side of the street. It is a tree that tells me a story of a very rough life. This tree is a short squatty one. The trunk is twisted, badly. It has fought to get to where it is today. But there is a split in the trunk and there is part of this tree that is clean and straight. It is a limb that says “I am going to make it.” It is a limb that literally shows new life in this old tree. This tree is praising God. This tree is a witness to me that in all things God creates new life. God is present. Looking at this tree I am able to let my guard down and go to God. Nature is God’s way of reminding me that I am not alone. I can always go to God anywhere, anytime. I just need the reminder.

One of my favorite contemporary blues singers is a guy named Keb Mo. I first saw him at a special event at Chicago Shakespeare. He and Barbara Gaines, the artistic director, went though and looked at the musicality of the Bard’s works. Through that event I became a fan. On his album “Just Like You” there is a song that I look at as a modern day psalm. It is called “Hand is Over.” Here is a sample of the lyrics:

If your problems

won’t go away

and you’re worried

both night and day

hand it over

get on your knees and pray…

Ain’t no mountain

you can’t climb

ain’t no answer

you can’t find

All you need is a hand to hold

It’ll heal you body

and feed your soul…

Hand it over

Hand it over

Give it up,

Give it over

Hand it over

Get on your knees and pray

This song frequently pops into my head when I am overwhelmed. I use it as a reminder, like watching the trees, that no matter how busy or how tired, God is there. All I need do is hand it over.

Something begins to happen when we are able to hand our burdens over to God. We begin to open ourselves up to the transformative power that is Grace.

Worship is not for us, but for God. However; that does not mean we do not get anything out of it. When we go to the LORD and begin to hand over our problems; they are accepted and turned into seeds that help us to grow. As we allow ourselves to transform and be transformed, our worship of God fertilizes us and our roots grow deeper and our leaves turn greener and we begin to loose ourselves to our Creator.

As we loose ourselves to our Creator others begin to see the Creator in us.

As other see the Creator in us we can help them to begin to unburden themselves.

We give God our troubles.

We listen to the music of creation.

We open ourselves up for transformation.

We strip ourselves of the burdens and worries and stress that keeps us from God.

We hear the music of creation. We begin to dance in praise of our God.

We dance unashamed because the Grace of God is what sustains us and protects us from all that will try to bury us.

We dance. We dance. We dance.

English Language Sermon – October 26, 2008

“Jesus of the Waves” (Matthew 14:22-33)

October 26, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

The disciples had just witnessed Jesus feed five thousand from a few loaves of bread and few fish. They had tasted of the miracle. They had helped to gather the abundance that was left. Life was beautiful. This is the way life should be. Never do I hope you hear me say that life should not be embraced and richly enjoyed. To me, it is profane to have much, yet not enjoy it.

I think the disciples must have almost been giddy as they climbed into their boat. Their full stomachs were a result of a miracle, and they were close to and loved by the one who had performed the miracle. He had stayed behind to pray and they knew his prayers would include prayers for each of them. And they knew he would meet them the next morning on the other side. Life was beautiful.

They pushed out from the shore. They set their sail and put their oars in the water. They were blessed. All was well.

When I was a child much of my summer was spent on the water in a row boat owned by my grandparents. What amazes me in looking back is how young I was when my parents and grandparents allowed me to go out in the boat alone or with a friend. We swam off the boat. We fished off the boat. We used the boat for transportation to get from one side of the small lake to the other.

Although the Sea of Galilee is much larger than the lake I knew as a child, it is much smaller than any of the Great Lakes, probably about the size of Lake Chautauqua, where Sharon and I vacation every summer. For the disciples, the sea provided their livelihood. It was their highway from one side to the other. It cooled them on hot days. It provided them with irrigation and endless hours of calm repose and reflection as they sat at the waters edge and watched the sunset or rise on the other shore.

The boat the disciples used was bigger than my row boat but not nearly the size of the power boats that populate our lakes today. Their boat was primitive and much more vulnerable to the storms that could rapidly occur, unlike any of our lakes of comparable size.

The boat is the Church. From ancient times and probably even known to the writer of the gospel, the boat has been seen as an image of the church. It is the symbol of the World Council of Churches. It is seen in the architecture of various church buildings across the world. The boat is the church and I hope every child finds the same pleasure in the church as I found in my grandparents rowboat.

Thus the church takes the new born infant or the new professing Christian on board at a service of baptism, promising to care and nurture the child or professing Christian through his or her journey through life.

Some days, however, when I was out in the rowboat I would look down into the water. It was deep and dark yet I could see the weeds that in my child’s mind looked like the arms of a giant squid. It was frightening, but in the boat I was safe. I hope that is how every child feels in church. It is a safe place to be. I applaud the inviting, creative, child friendly atmosphere of North Shore, hosting a large day care program, sponsoring an after school tutoring program, and maintaining a gym that is in use from morning to late evening. But all of our building should be welcoming and child friendly. Children should feel this is a good place to be and if their fingerprints get left on walls or smudge the windowpanes, praise be to God, because those fingerprints reminds us of God who has known and loved the one whose fingerprint it is from the beginning of creation.

The church is the boat and the disciples climb aboard and set sail. They leave the shore, but what are these shores, the one they leave and the one that is their destination on the other side. In Galilee the terrain of these shores is beautiful. There are green meadows and slopping hills with little towns lit atop. But, if the boat is the church what are the shores?

On the one side are the blessings of life where Jesus gives of the bread we need to live and the miracle of love that always turns scarcity into abundance. In tradition the other shore is not a temporal location but an eternal destination. The other shore is heaven where the fullness of love is known.

But, what of the sea that in the story read this morning became so turbulent the disciples feared for their lives? What is the sea? The sea and the boat upon it is the journey of our lifetime. It is our encounter with the world, our pilgrimage through this world. The boat, Christ’s Church, takes us aboard, shelters and guides us through life, leads us through our journey, then when our destiny is complete, docks at the port on the other side, when the one who was once young is now an ancient mariner and ready in a service of resurrection to be carried ashore on the other side.

Out on the sea, before that shore is reached, however, I realize I was right as a child to fear the weeds beneath the surface of the water, and every parent fears for their child, aware that the calm beauty of a placet sea can become a raging storm before the night is through. The sea is the world and it is often a very turbulent place to be. What of the storm? What of the heartache? What of the turbulence? Here, in these questions, in the midst of the storm, is the most important point of the story ready this morning.

The disciples’ boat was being battered. They were far from land. They held the rails and clung to one another. We see the picture, and suddenly we realize, there is one more question we haven’t asked. “Where is Jesus?” The Gospel of Luke says, “…he came walking toward them on the sea.” The psalmist says, “Your way was through the sea, your path, through the might waters, yet your footprints were unseen.” The most important point of this story is Jesus on the water, Jesus in the midst of the storm.

This is what we want to teach our children. This is what we need to learn, over and over as adults. Where is Jesus? He is where people hurt. He is where lives have been ravaged. He is where oppressors have stolen people’s freedom, famine has taken people’s food, disease has halved their bodies, and corruption has stolen people’s resources.

Where is Jesus? Jesus is where he is needed. Jesus is walking the waves in New Orleans. Jesus is walking the waves in Iraq. Jesus is walking the waves in Jerusalem and Darfur. Jesus is walking the waves of the clinics in Africa that treat the epidemic of Aids. Jesus is walking the waves of poverty on the garbage dumps of Guatemala. Jesus is walking the waves of anxious waiting rooms in our hospitals. Jesus is walking the waves of every mental hospital and nursing home corridor.

Peter seeing Jesus, shouted across the waves, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” The Lord said, “Come.”

A part of every parent’s education of their child is teaching them how to step out of the boat and encounter the storm. Every parent wants the best for their children and I agree, but what parents must come to understand is that the best is not all contained in school athletics, dancing lessons, play stations, cell phones and personal computers. The best may be, as youth must be given opportunity to learn, clearing the yard of a homebound person, or visiting a nursing home, or participating in a mission trip to New Orleans…life found, not by always being pampered, but by being helpful.

I believe, as I said at the beginning of this sermon, that children and youth should find church to be a fun place and a safe place, but I realize the church cannot compete with schools and clubs and rock concerts in providing entertainment and amusement. But what we have is a vision of a wider world. We can provide like no one else is mission trips and work projects that begin to introduce our children and youth to the Jesus of the waves.

Peter got out of the boat and started to walk toward Jesus, but then he lost his faith and began to sink until Jesus reached out and took him by the hand. We will never know the hand of Jesus in that way until we are willing to enter the storms of life. Thus a part of helping our children to know Jesus as Lord and Savior is getting them involved in helping others, entering the chaos of life upon the waves and finding their faith in holding onto Jesus. And it is the same for each of us. The full meaning of life will never be found until we take the risks. Jesus calls you out onto the waves. He calls you to be mediators and healers. He calls you to be teachers and volunteers. He calls you to get involved. He calls you to enter the turbulence and when you do there you will find the God who as Job says, “…stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea.” (9:8)

The waves calmed and Peter and Jesus reentered the boat. You always need the church to return too. It is your abode during the storms. It is your transport from one shore to the other.

You are not expected to swim from one shore to the other alone. You are not expected to go it alone. You have the hymns of the church to sing. You have the Bible to train your mind and inspire your soul. You have the symbols of the chalice and the baptistry to remind you of the one you serve. You have one another to encourage you and support you. You have the church, which in the name of Christ embraced you at your birth and journeys with you across the sea, and one day will enter the harbor on the other side, the journey ended, and take your body ashore.

And there on that shore at the end of your life you will meet the one you call Father. He will raise you up and welcome you. He will embrace you in love and call you his child. And he will ask you, how was your journey? How was your pilgrimage across the sea? And you will tell him about your life on earth.

God will listen, but then one question will remain. He will ask you, “Did you ever leave the boat, did you ever walk the sea, did you ever meet My son upon the waves?”

Let us pray: God, thank you for the security of this hour, this ship of faith and that when we leave and enter again the world we go to meet your Son upon the waves. Amen.

English Language Sermon – October 19, 2008

“Jesus’ Best Friend” (John 21:20-24)

October 19, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

When I was a young man I copied down two quotes about Richard Nixon. The card on which I typed them is now yellowed with age but the quotes remain important, not because of what they say about Richard Nixon but because they can be applied to all of us.

The fist quote was by Arthur Burns, whom President Nixon appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve. He once wondered “if he (Nixon) ever really had a good, close personal friend.” Sadly, he decided not, and said, “A friend like that could have saved him – from his lifelong isolation, surely, perhaps from his inability to trust.” The second quote was by Henry Kissinger who once said, “Can you imagine what Nixon would have been had somebody loved him?…He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.”

This morning I want to preach about friendship, particularly that rarified category of those we refer to as our “best friend.” It is an important subject because friendship is one of the models we are given for our life together as Christians in the Church and understanding the highest expression of friendship through what it means to have a “best friend,” the ideal of friendship, gives us an image to strive for and emulate in all friendship, particularly in the Church.

The Bible has some fantastic stories of friendship, but the one I want to focus on this morning is one that is seldom mentioned when we speak of Biblical friendships, and that is the story of Jesus’ best friend, John, the writer of the fourth gospel and one of the disciples.

Normally, we do not think of Jesus needing a best friend or even suffering the need of having friends in general, but if our creeds are correct, that Jesus was both “Truly God” and “Truly human,” and we profess that in the incarnation Jesus became in all ways as we are, then in Jesus in being truly human, he experienced in himself all the longings we know so well, including the longing for human connectedness.

Jesus was as susceptible to colds and flu bugs as we are. He would feel hunger the same way we do. When the soldiers beat Him he felt every b it the pain we would feel. And, as being fully human Jesus would also feel what it means to be lonely, but then also the reverse of that, what it is like to be loved and beyond a love for humanity, what it is like to have out of that humanity one person who stands next to him, closer to him than any other.

John was that person. John is the one disciple identified as the “disciple whom Jesus loved,” and John in his gospel refers to himself in that way, and for as much as the other disciples were confident in Jesus’ love for them, they knew that there was this bond between John and Jesus.

Now, what I would like to do is look more closely at this relationship between Jesus and John and what it meant to Jesus and what it means to us to have such a close friend and how from these friendships we begin to understand what it means to be in relationship with one another in the church. I particularly want to look at specific incidents where John referred to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved and see what is the possible meaning in these incidents for having a friend who as the book of Proverbs says, “sticks closer than a brother.”

We begin with the Last Supper. Jesus and his disciples are sharing a meal together. It is the evening in which Jesus will be arrested. John is seated next to Jesus. John writes, “One of his disciples – the one whom Jesus loved – was reclining next to him.” Jesus announces that one of the disciples will betray him. The disciples are shocked. The burning questions is, who will it be. No one, however, wants to ask Jesus. Then Peter leans forward and says to John, you ask.

John asks the question. Mary, the mother of Jesus, can’t ask the question of Jesus; it would be too painful for her. Peter can’t ask the question, he is not close enough. It has to be John, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who not out of gossip but because Jesus loves him, shares in the truth of Jesus life. John asks the hard question, and this is one of the provisions of close friendship. A close friend keeps us to the truth. A close friend keeps us tethered to reality. A close friend is someone who asks the hard questions of our life.

John could have attempted to be reassuring to Jesus, offering a false security saying to Jesus, “Don’t be silly Jesus, you know everybody loves you. You know none of your disciples would ever turn against you.” Or he could have said to Jesus, “I don’t want to talk about it. It is to painful. Let’s pretend it isn’t so.” This isn’t being a close friend. A close friend risks his or her own comfort and possibly even the friendship for the sake of the friend, for the sake of adhering to an honesty and forthrightness with the friend that possibly no other human being can have with that friend. Jesus needed someone in whom he could confide on that night. John gave him that opportunity by asking the hard question.

Praise God if you have someone in your life in whom you can confide and who will ask you the hard questions as you confront the sometimes extremely difficult issues and situations in your life.

Next, we turn to the crucifixion. Jesus looks down from the cross, and the gospel says, “When Jesus saw his mother and the disci9ple whom he loved standing beside her.” (19:26). John was with Jesus’ mother and Jesus before he died then entrusted the care of his mother into the hands of John. A best friend is someone you can turn to for help. It is not even a point of consideration. It is a given. Jesus is dying, but he has to know his mother will be taken care of. John, alone, is able to give that assurance. Sometimes we can’t let go until those kind of assurances can be made.

Everybody needs at least one other person in their life upon whom they can call. It doesn’t matter if it is a big thing or a little thing, this person can be counted upon. Now, you can’t expect this of everybody, but praise be to God, if you have that one somebody whose name comes to mind when you need help or assistance, and hopefully, the church, is this way for one another. Jesus carried the sins of the world at the crucifixion, but in a very human way he also carried the care of his mother, and you can say that in John there was someone there to minister to the human side of him, so that he could be the Son of God for the world. We need somebody we can call, somebody who will be there for us.

The third incident that reveals the relationship of Jesus to John follows the resurrection and occurs at the Sea of Galilee. The disciples were out fishing and a figure appears on the shore. The disciples had caught little, and this man on the shore calls out to them, “cast your nets on the other side of the boat,” he shouted. They do and their nets became full with the catch. The disciples are mystified as to who this figure is, but the gospel says, “That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, ‘It is the Lord.’” (21:7).

Everybody needs somebody who knows their name and can call it out and say, “That’s my friend.” I like the definition of friendship I once heard from John Savage. He said, “A friend is someone who knows you really well and likes you anyway.” I don’t want to die with my life a secret. I want there to have been at least a few people who truly knew me, and in knowing me, hopefully still stuck by me. I want someone, out in the boat, able to recognize me on the shore.

This kind of knowing I am talking about is a special kind of knowing. It is a knowing embedded in love. John’s recognition of Jesus came out of love, because with love, even before the sun has risen and a mist still hover over the water, you see in the hues of the person on shore the one you love.

You recognize the little idiosyncrasies. You catch the inflexion of the voice. This person is alive to you in all the manifold mystery God has made him or her. This person is your best friend.

And this leads me to the fourth mention of John in the gospel as the disciple whom Jesus loved. It is in the last verses of John’s gospel. Peter turns, after his own discussion with Jesus and the gospel says, “He (Peter) saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them…” Then John writes, “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them.” John identifies himself at last as this disciple and says, I am the one who has written this gospel.

Jesus needed a best friend to write and speak his testimony. One of the privileges of being a best friend is that you can speak the praise of the one who is your friend, and as long as you are alive, even after the friend has passed this earth, that friend’s memory and presence will be known through you.

You carry his or her memory in your heart. You don’t let the presence of the one who was your friend be lost to the universe because of death. What you saw in your friend is what helps you make sense of the world and reveals to you more of what the world should be, so even though your friend is taken from this world, through you, she or he remains a gifted part of this world, especially to you. In life, you speak praises of your friend, and if death separate you, you don’t let the memory of your friend get lost.

Thus, there you have it, reflections on Jesus’ best friend, the disciples whom Jesus loved. He was the one who could ask Jesus the hard questions. He was the person Jesus could turn to in his hour of greatest need. He was the one who knew Jesus better than anyone else and recognized him on the shore. And, the love that bonded Jesus and John never ceased but remained alive and is alive today in the Gospel of John. John was the one who testified of his friend’s life.

I hope this speaks to you of the sacredness of friendship. I hope it tells you that if you have such a friend, apart from the gift of family, it is the most sacred and holy gift you will ever receive. I hope it tells you that all friendship is of God and this is the way we are to be to one another in church. And, I hope it tells you that if Jesus needed such a friend, the longing for human connectedness is Spirit driven and that its answer in having a friend is as well Spirit given. The gift of friendship helps form you into the person God created you to be.

But, I hope it does one other thing. In exploring John’s special relationship to Jesus Christ, I hope it causes you to ask about your own relationship to Jesus Christ and how close it comes to being like John’s. When we sing “What a Friend We Have In Jesus” this morning, I hope you will consider your friendship with Jesus and how it parallels the friendship John had with Jesus.

How close does your friendship with Jesus come to being like John’s. Is Jesus a friend of whom you can ask the hard questions about discipleship and life? Do you use Jesus as an escape from life or does Jesus help keep you grounded to life and facing sometimes the hard questions? Are you a friend upon whom Jesus can call to help care for his mother and father, sister and brother or the stranger? Are you close enough to Jesus so you are able to recognize him on the shore or those times when he would reveal himself in the stranger or the person next to you or amongst the least of his children? And, do you testify of him? Do you speak his name and tell others what he has done for you?

But, this isn’t where I want to end. There is one last word that needs to be spoken and that has to do with Jesus’ relationship with us. John saw himself as being Jesus’ best friend, the disciple whom Jesus loved. It was a unique and special relationship, but here is what I believe. What John understood for himself is true for all of us. Each of us is the disciple whom Jesus loves. Each of us, in the eyes of Jesus and our relationship to him, is as a best friend. We are to Jesus, each of us, as though we were the only person in the world and all his love is poured into us.

The problem is, and the only difference between Jesus and us and Jesus and John, is that John accepted it, John understood it, John saw with his own eyes of the soul, what was really real, and that was that he was the beloved. It isn’t a difference of kind, Jesus’ love for John being of one kind and his love for us being of another kind. It is a difference of perception. John saw Jesus with his heart. John saw Jesus with the eyes of his soul and the more we allow ourselves to see in the same way, the more in faith we allow ourselves to believe, the more we will see what is really real and that is, Jesus loves me, Jesus loves you with the same love and the same depth with which he loved John, and all the qualities that applied to John in his friendship with Jesus, are the very same qualities with which Jesus loves us, asking the hard questions, being one upon whom we can rely, recognizing us from afar off, and always speaking sweetly of our name. Jesus loves you. Amen.

English Language Sermon – October 12, 2008

“IMPOSSIBLE – Not a Reason for Not Doing” (Philippians 3:12-15; 4:11-13)

October 12, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

Today is the beginning of North Shore’s pledge campaign for the 2009 budget, culminating in a unity service on November 2 when all the congregations of North Shore Baptist will worship together, share communion and present their pledges.

I want to begin this campaign with a international focus, a focus that has been so much a part of this congregation. I want to begin on January 11, 1811 when Adoniram Judson set sail with three other passengers on a ship named the Packet. All of us here this morning are descendants of this one man for Adoniram Judson was not only the first American missionary and a Baptist, but ultimately, his field of service, for 37 years, would be Burma, which is now, Myanmar, and the homeland of all those in our Karen fellowship.

We are linked together in the story of Judson, a story that can still inspire and guide us as we consider our discipleship to Jesus Christ.

It begins on January 11, 1811. The destination on that day, however, was not Burma. It was England where Adonirm Judson under the direction of the Board of Foreign Commissioners was to consult with the London Missionary Society to see if a join venture might be undertaken and if the London Missionary Society would help finance the American mission endeavor. He was not yet a missionary but was attempting to find the support and financing to be a missionary.

On the way, because England and France were at war with one another, the ship was commandeered by a French vessel and Judson was thrown into the hole of the ship as a prisoner along with the crew. When they reached France he was imprisoned and only escaped when an American visitor walked out with Judson hidden in this large cloak.

Ask yourself, how you would have reacted in similar circumstances. Wouldn’t the temptation be to say, “This must be a sure sign I have misread the plan of God for my life. I am going back home. I am going to settle into a quiet existence in some small New England village and never be heard of again.”

Adoniram didn’t. He went on to England, received the support of the London Missionary Society and only then returned to America where within less than a year he set sail for India and the first assignment of a foreign missionary from American.

Today, I want to examine three aspects of Judson’s life which I believe made possible the great deeds he was to accomplish. I also believe these three aspects to his life can be emulated in our life, so there is about ourselves the same sense of divine purpose and fulfillment, whether it is in deeds of daring or the support and encouragement of those who attempt the great endeavors.

We begin with Judson’s faith. Judson was a man of great faith. His trust was in God. The success of his life was not dependent on the immediate circumstances of his environment or his life. He had a faith that lifted him above the present and grounded him in the eternal. He could sit in the hole of the ship, a young man, far, far away from any tangible evidence that he would ever get to be a missionary, and still have hope, because his faith was in a God who had brought life out of death, victory out of a crucifixion. His faith was in a God whose incarnation revealed His love for humankind.

Judson shared the faith of the Apostle Paul whose words he had probably memorized, “…I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content. I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound; in any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and want.” (Phil. 4:11,12)

Here is what we learn from Judson: Great deeds begin with great faith. In your own life you will face situations similar to Adoniram Judson. That is not to say you will end up in the hole of a ship or as a prisoner in France but there will be those times and those occasion in your life that will seem contrary to what you believe for yourself or the hopes you have for the future. We are all facing this in the present economic crisis, recognizing our vulnerability. But that bad news may also come from a doctor, or when some tragedy occurs , or a door closes, or an accident happens – the way you hold on, the way you get through, is having a faith that is centered not in circumstances but in a God whose love transforms circumstances, sometimes using us.

Your mantra is borrowed from Paul, “I can do all things in him (Christ) who strengthens me.” (Phil. 4:13)

Second, Adoniram had great support. He didn’t go it alone – ever. He always had behind him the support and the encouragement of other Christians who were praying for him and working with him.

When at last Adoniram sailed for India in 1812, there were a total of eight missionaries on two boats, the Harmony and the Caravan. After reaching India one of the missionaries, Luther Rice, became gravely ill and it became necessary for him to return to America. That was the end of his missionary experience but he spent the rest of his life encouraging others to enter missionary service and traveling the country and speaking in churches to raise funds to support Adoniram Judson.

Perhaps, this is our call: we are the ones who encourage and support the great deeds of others. Others will be the Judson’s, but through our pledges, and in every other way it is given to us to lend support to another, we can all be Luther Rice.

The apostle Paul in the same way was sustained by the support and prayers of others. In his letter to the Philippians he says, “…it was kind of you to share my trouble. And you Philippians yourselves know that in the beginning of the gospel, when I left Macedonia no church entered into partnership with me in giving and receiving except you only; for even in Thessalonica you sent me help once and again.” (4:15,16)

God gives us to one another to be helpmates to one another. We are who we are because there are people working with us or behind us or for us. We get from here to there, even when it looks like a solo act, because there have been others whose yesterdays made possible our todays. Some of us forget this and when we get up against an obstacle or face a seemingly insurmountable problem or personal crisis, we exhaust ourselves trying to shoulder the weight alone.

Great deeds, seemingly impossible deeds, are accomplished when we work together.

When Adoniram Judson reached India he encountered stiff opposition from the British East India Company. This necessitated that he look for another mission field which was found in the country of Burma and to which he sailed on June 22, 1813. In Burma it was six years before he had his first convert to Christianity. It was six years of sitting by a roadside, underneath a thatch roof, inviting travelers to rest in the shade, and speaking to them of Christ…six years before anyone responded.

At one point he was arrested. The treatment he received was brutal. He was put in a cell without a window and with fifty other prisoners. At night a long bamboo pole was put between his ankles and he was lifted, feet first from the ground, and had to spend the nights with only his shoulders and head resting on the dirt floor where rats and other creatures accosted the prisoners. Next, he was moved to the death house where every day at three a gong sounded and a prisoner was taken and executed.

Adoniram Judson survived and was eventually released because beside him and with him was his wife, Ann. They sailed together from America. They endured together the disappointment that they were not wanted in India. And after Adoniram’s arrest Ann courageously met with officials to secure permission for visits and daily walked the two miles there and the two miles back to visit her husband, only missing when she gave birth to their first child. Great deeds require great support.

Third, Adoniram Judson had Great Vision. He saw what could be and that vision remained stronger than any obstacle he ever encountered. The vision of God’s love for the world and the Burmese people enabled him to endure the incredible suffering he faced through the years in Burma, including not only his imprisonment, but the eventual sickness and death of his wife and child and a period of sever depression.

The vision, though at times it might have seen as though it sunk beneath the horizon, never went out. Adoniram Judson produced the first Burmese-English dictionary. He translated the entire Bible into Burmese, and at the end of his life there were in Burma schools, mission stations, and churches where there had been none all giving testimony to a vision that was able to see what might be.

Sometimes we have the faith, sometimes we have the support, but what we lack is the vision. We have to be able to see what can be and we have to let it burn inside of us until it is branded upon our human spirit so that no matter what happens or what obstacles we face the impression is still there, reminding us and inspiring us onto what can be. The image of that vision should be in our pledge and the commitments we make in our life.

We will not all end up on the mission field but we can all help and we can all share in the vision. We can help to sustain the ministry of this church. We can serve as volunteers in our community. We can imagine the world as God loves it and let our lives be used so others can see that love through us.

When Adoniram Judson first sailed to England to gain the support of the London Missionary Society, he went because back home there was a lady by the name of Mrs. John Norris who underwrote the cost of the trip and later in her estate left $30,000 for missions. Her name may not be remembered on buildings and in books, but her faith, her support, her vision is written as a part of the legacy belonging to every Burmese Christian and to North Shore Baptist, where today we worship with our Karen and Burmese brothers and sisters in Christ as one body in Christ, sharing together a common heritage in the fulfillment of a journey that began in 1811 when that boat named the Packet, left the harbor, carrying a passenger named Adoniram Judson.

English Language Sermon – September 28, 2008

“The Two Sides of God” (Exodus 3:1-6; Philipians 2:5-11)

September 28^th, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

To me there is a universe between the Old Testament passage we read this morning and the New Testament passage we read. The Old Testament passage represents the Otherness of God. God is not like us. God is apart from us. To be near God is to have to divert our eyes or risk blindness, and to take off our shoes because the ground we stand on is Holy Ground.

The New Testament lesson speaks of God in a different way. It focuses on the approachability of God. God is with us. God comes near to us. God’s presence before us is no more threatening than that of a slave, someone who has no authority, someone who has no power.

Two radically different notions of God, yet it is the same God. This morning I don’t want to synthesis the two, but to look at each and how the one follows from the other and how we need both in our understanding of God. We need to know both the Holiness of God and the Friendliness of God.

Let us pray:

God is not like us. God is above us. God is beyond our ability to fully comprehend or define. Whatever we might say about God we must recognize there is always more that could be said and even then we would not have exhausted all that could be said. God is God.

When orthodox Jews write out the word for God, they never fully spell it out because the word is too Holy, so in-between the first and last letter there is a blank. It is in that space we as well must recognize something so totally other we do not have the capability in our limited being to fill it in.

It is in that space we are filled with a sense of awe and mystery. It is there that we are left speechless. It is the sense of transcendence, the sense that life is more than its moments, that there is something beyond the veil that is terrifying and wonderful, fearful and enticing, all at the same time. It is this sense of the transcendent the architects of the Gothic Cathedrals sought to capture in their vaulted ceilings.

God is not like us. God is above us. God is Holy. Most of the psalms are hymns to the Holiness of God. Psalm 30:4 says, “Sing praise to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name.” Psalm 99:5 says, “Extol the Lord our God; worship at his footstool. Holy is he!”

The problem with a lot of our modern culture is that there is nothing transcendent about life. Life is flat. The reason that I believe we are so obsessed with sex is that there is so little transcendence in our life. There is so little beauty. There is so little mystery, so little awe, all elements of transcendence, that sex at least generates a little excitement. But, this sense of excitement cannot compare to the idea of the Holy, the sense of being on Holy ground as Moses experienced. It is so powerful that even though it speaks of what cannot be known it also illuminates everything around you.

Read the psalms. Also, become better acquainted with nature, for paradoxically, nature in its rawest form can lead you toward the Holy. All through the centuries there has been a correlation between sacredness and holiness and our awareness of the majesty and mystery and awesomeness of God and our human touch with nature.

I think every parent has experienced this in the birth of their child. It is at once the most earthly occurrence and the most sacred. Childbirth parts the curtain between us and the sacred. We stand in awe each time it happens. The speechlessness, that lump in the throat, that overwhelming sense of great humility in the presence of new life is transcendent. It is standing in the rays of God’s holiness.

I love the way Thomas Merton writes about holiness in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation. He says, “The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate being, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God.

“The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this April day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God…

“The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.

“The leaf has it own texture and it own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength.

“The lakes hidden among the hills are saints…The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints…”(p.30)

Nature in its holiness points to the holiness of God. If you simply read about nature and the advances in biotechnology and the latest animal to be cloned you can perhaps lose this awesomeness but if you do as I have had the privilege, watch a nest of eggs from a mother robin be hatched and see how the featherless birds grow, the mother feeding them and eventually encouraging them from the nest and to flight, if you are in nature and still enough, never will that sense of awesomeness leave you. The world is filled with lighting rods pointing to heaven and receiving the light from heaven.

Silent, empty churches can have the same effect. Places dedicated to the worship of God, places that have used the finest architects and the most skilled craftsmen and been inspired by the hopes and visions of a people can lead you into the realm of the Holy.

Why is the natural inclination of men and women to tone down their speech, speak in whispers or not at all when they enter a structure dedicated to the worship of God? What stills them? I believe it is in the idea of being the presence of the Holy. Someone told me of his mother, visiting a cathedral in Germany. Standing beside her was another woman who spoke only German. The two of them gazed upon the stone arches and stained glass and so overwhelming was it to them, they spontaneously embraced and tears came to their eyes.

It must have been something of the experience of Moses before the burning bush and the hearing of those words, take off your shoes for the ground upon which you stand is holy ground.

“O Lord, our Lord,” we sing, “how majestic is thy name in all the earth.

SONG

The God above us. The God of mystery. The God who can never fully be explained or defined. The God who is too Holy to have His name written out in full. The Unknown God, as Paul discovered written upon a stone in Athens. The God of creation. The God who was and is and ever shall be. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God who knew you before you were born. The God of the clapping sea and roaring thunder. The God who says to Job, “I don’t need to explain myself to you.”

This God, the very God of gods, the God who gives you breath and counts eons as though they were seconds. This God who says no one can look upon me and live. This God who commands Moses to bare his feet. The God all knowing, all seeing, all powerful…is the God we meet in Jesus Christ.

This is the message of the New Testament. God emptied Himself. God became as we are that truly we might look upon Him and see Him as He is and live.

Sometimes in our palsy wellness with Jesus we forget who Jesus is. To take the holiness out of Jesus and make Him only our buddy is to diminish the role of Jesus in our life. We need a Jesus who is our brother but we also need a Jesus who is able because of Who He is to forgive our sins, a Jesus who can take us by the hand at our death out of death, a Jesus who while in every way was as we are is at the same time everything we are not. We need a Jesus both human and divine, truly one with us and truly God.

Then and only then can we truly respond to his invitation, “Come to me and I will give you rest.” Jesus is that bridge between the Old and New Testament image of God. I want a Jesus to whom I can not only talk but one who leaves me speechless. I want a Jesus to whom I can not only share my burdens, but one who can lift my burdens from me. I want a Jesus who can not only empathize with my weakness but a Jesus who can heal me with his touch.

Now, if Jesus is just a buddy, buddy, you might have a friend but you might not have a Savior. Jesus is both friend and Savior, and it is both His Love and His Holiness that makes Him such. Majesty and Love are combined in Jesus Christ; the Old and New Testament reveal one God and we see that God in Jesus Christ and that God’s desire is our well being. We know that by Jesus Christ and it is made possible by Jesus Christ in whom is pleased to dwell all the fullness of God – His majesty and His love.

This is the God you are asked to believe in. This is the God you are asked to place your trust in. The God of Moses who is the God you see in Jesus Christ, and to know that God is to know that the ground you stand on is sometimes Holy Ground.

God is Awesome. God is Holy. God is Love and you meet that God in Jesus Christ. Belief, trust, faith, it all centers in the Christ who emptied Himself, taking on human form, that you might know God in all God’s fullness, including both His Holiness and His Love. The only thing I can entreat you to do is to say Yes to the God you meet in Jesus Christ.

Let us pray: God of the burning bush and the stark cross, God of Holy Ground and empty tomb, help us to come to a point that our word to you might always be one of saying Yes, both to Your awesomeness and Your love. Amen.

English Language Sermon – October 5, 2008

“How Wide Is God’s Mercy, How Deep is God’s Love?” (Philippians 2:5-11)

October 5th, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

When I was young I remember waking up one morning and walking down the hallway of our upstairs bedrooms and looking in the bedrooms of my family and seeing no one and hearing no one downstairs. A flush of panic overtook me. I thought to myself, what if Christ had come in the night and I have been left behind? If you have ever had such a thought you know it does not stem from a sense of God’s Love but God’s wrath. Yet, every Sunday I sat in a church that proclaimed Jesus Christ as personal Savior, and I had made profession of faith and been baptized.

So, where did this fear come from? It came in the restrictive way in which salvation had been preached and taught in my church. Salvation was for the few, the very few who made profession of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but even with such a profession the fear lingered, because how did you know you were believing in just the right way that would save you. Instead of being taught the wideness of God’s mercy and the depth of God’s love, I was taught the limits of God’s mercy and the restrictivism of God’s Love.

On the other hand, salvation can be taught in such a way that everybody is saved and nobody is left out. It is a very generous concept but in the end can lead to a relativism in which nothing matters, everything is relative and no theological statement or doctrine is any more true than any other and it really doesn’t matter what you believe because in the end everybody’s belief is as valid as anyone else’s. So, which is it, the many or the few?

There are these two extremes of restrictivism on one hand and universalism on the other hand, and you are left to choose between one or the other. I refuse to make that choice. I can’t make that choice, but I can tell that over the years my sense of God’s mercy and my awareness of God’s love has grown wider and wider, embracing more and more, and the way this has happened is by an increasingly greater appreciation for the work of the Holy Spirit in the work of salvation.

This is where my journey has led me and I hope by sharing it with you it opens up discussion and causes you to reflect more seriously on how you would answer, who are saved, the many or the few? This morning I don’t mean to sound autocratic. I am not trying to say, I am right and you had better listen to me and get all the right answers. Instead, what I am asking for is an attitude within the church that nurtures a spirit that allows for openness and freedom where we can truly become exploratory in our faith and allow for the open presence of God’s Spirit in the very act of discussion. The message this morning is prompted from a request by the Chicago Baptist that we focus this morning on the Holy Spirit in recognition of a national conference of American Baptist on the Holy Spirit that was held at our church this weekend.

I begin on an airplane. Sharon and I were flying into Athens, Greece, and the plane dipped down and was practically on the runway when the pilot for some reason revved up the engines and took the 747 back up into the sky. My heart raced and I held my breath, but we ultimately landed safely. Even before we landed, however, when I had gotten over my initial fear, what came into my mind as we had such a close view of the city from the air was the thought, can it possibly be that all these people below me, these millions of people I could almost see we were so close to the ground, can it be that all these people are doomed to an eternity of hell unless here on earth they came to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and professed him as Savior?

I couldn’t answer. The thought that so many people would be lost seemed too horrendous to me. I think the reason the thought entered my mind in the first place was that we were entering the land of the Apostle Paul’s missionary work. If, however, this was the way it was, that only the few who made a personal decision would be saved, I wasn’t able to comprehend it. To me, such a theology inevitably meant that hell was gong to be a much, much bigger place than heaven ever could be. Most people are not Christian and never have been. This means that the work of Christ on the cross, for all the agony of it was only for a minority of people.

Is this fair to the redemptive, cost giving part of salvation? God gave His son, let Him die on a cross, yet, in a sense, in the end, you can say the devil won because even today if all souls professed Christ as Savior, you still have all the souls of history who never even heard of Him. Do we dare say, Christ died only for the minority of people, or do we profess, Christ died for the world?

Second, it is not just the numbers but the duration of time we are given to decide that haunts me and always has. Is it really Love that gives a person 60 or 80 years on earth to decide a fate that seals that person’s doom for all eternity? Can we say that a God who created the world out of Love and sent His Son to redeem that world then forgets for all eternity more than half of humanity when they die and never again utters their name because they didn’t utter His Son’s name in the brief moment of time that was theirs on earth?

I know if one of my children was lost to me, there would never be a day in my life that I would not carry in my heart the pain of that love. I cannot conceive that God could ever enjoy the fellowship of His children at the Messianic Banquet in heaven, knowing that while these children are celebrating most of the children He once loved are now doomed to the every lasting torment of separation from Him. It seems to me that if this was true, it would be in the end that God’s wrath trumps God’s Love.

The thing is in spite of what we are taught and in spite of what we say we believe, we find ways to ease the pain of it when it comes to thoughts of our own family and those we love who might have died without ever in anyway giving any indication to us of being a professing Christian. Something in us cannot give into the thought that someone we loved is right now spending eternity in hell. In our heart we profess a hope that somehow that loved one died knowing the Lord. The alternative is too painful. We have to somehow believe that God’s mercy is somehow deeper.

I think that hope within us is warranted and I will tell you why. It is because though Christ has chosen as His primary witness to the world, His Church, and this behooves us to be a witnessing evangelistic people, God is not limited to the Church. There is a third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit is not bound, and everywhere on this globe and in every human heart the Holy Spirit is working to bring each person to an awareness of God and the Love God has for that person.

Sometimes the evangelistic role of the Church is not so much to take God’s love to the world, but to help people identify where God has been working in their lives long before the Church got there or long before they knew the name of Christ.

My daughter told me about a time in her life when she sat on a park bench at a bus terminal. All the money she had in the world was in her purse. A homeless person came and sat beside her. She was living in another city, but her apartment hade been destroyed by fire and she had lost her job and she didn’t know what to do. The homeless person started to talk to her and she told him her story. She said to him, “I don’t know whether to use this money to run away or if I should go home and start over. The homeless person said to her, “Honey, if I were you I would get on that bus and go home.” My daughter told me this story, which I never knew, the day of her wedding.

That homeless person helped to save her life and all across the world, that same Holy Spirit who worked through that homeless person is working to bring people Home.

I believe there is no other name under heaven whereby we are saved than the name of Jesus Christ. My theology is restrictive in that manner. But I also believe as stated by the Apostle Paul, “That at the name of Jesus every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

I haven’t put all the pieces together, but both my mind and heart tell me that in the end hell will be a lot less empty and heaven a lot fuller than any of us have ever imagined.

Zechariah 14:9 says, “The Lord will become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be one and his name one.”

Clark Pinnock, a Baptist theologian says, “God is Person, and people can receive the gift of his love without knowing exactly who the giver is or how much it cost. This is the way that holy pagans like Enoch, Melchizdek and Job were saved.” (p.1980)

Zwingli, the great Protestant reformer said, “There has not lived a single good man, there has not been a single pious heart or believing soul from the beginning of the world to the end, which you will not see in the presence of God.” (p.198)

Wofhart Pannenberg, the theologian, has written, “Others…without even knowing it and without knowing Jesus, honored Jesus and his teaching by the way they treated the needy and will participate in the kingdom of God.”

But, alas, it is Jesus, who most influences both my heart and mind. When I look at Jesus, I see God, and the God I see is a God filled with Love, a God all loving, a God who is Love. That love is not bound by my theology. That love is not bound by my human restrictive ways of sharing my own love. That love will find a way.

In the book of Isaiah there is an image of the end time which for him is expressed through a vision of a mountain and this is what he sees and it is with this vision I end. It is the same vision I read at Rev. Reyes installation:

“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wines…

And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever.

Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all face, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken.” (Is. 25:6-8)

How can this be? I don’t know, except to say, as I see when I look upon the face of Jesus and see God. “‘Tis mercy all.”

English Language Sermon – September 21, 2008

“Never Again” (Genesis 9:8-17)

September 21^st, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

We live in a period where pronouncements on behalf of God and speech about God is over saturated with references to God’s wrath.. We hear it from both politicians and religious leaders. We hear it from both conservatives and liberals. We hear it from both Muslims and Christians. We hear God is not pleased with us, or God is not pleased with “them.” God is angry with us or God is angry with “them.” God is a God of wrath.

When Barak Obama scheduled his acceptance speech for the outdoor stadium of the Denver Broncos, James Dobson, a leading conservative figure, it was widely reported, called on God to rain down on the stadium the night of Obama’s speech. The next week when the Republicans met, Michael Moore, a leading liberal spokesperson, called Hurricane Gustav “an act of God visited upon the Republican convention.”

Meant to be humorous or not, both of these statements represent the tenor of much of our religious discussion, focusing on getting even, God’s wrath and punishment. And it is understandable how people might be taken in by this rhetoric, wondering, is God getting even with us, is God punishing us, is God responsible for all these calamities: the fires in California, the hurricane in Texas, the earthquake in China, the tsunami in Thailand? And what about religious dimensions of our wars – do they reveal God’s purposes? There are those who are able to ascribe God’s wrath to everything that happens.

But is it right to so speak of God? I understand how people might conclude that God is angry or that God’s wrath is being unveiled, but is it right to so proclaim or speak of God? Is there any other word from the Lord? Is there any other way to speak of God during desperate times? What is our message?

Strangely, for me, the answer comes in what has always been, for me, the saddest story of the Bible, the story of the flood and Noah and the ark. It is the story of such wholesale, universal destruction, that as a child, haunted by its images, and also as an adult, I have not been able to fully fathom or comprehend it.

Every living creature on the face of the earth, other than those saved on the ark, was destroyed. Oddly, as a child, and still as an adult, I view the scene mostly from outside the ark.

What I see are mothers holding babies being swept away in the rising currents of the flood waters. Animals swimming for their lives, desperately in search of land, falling exhausted beneath the water. The remaining birds in flight, hovering in the air as long as possible, but their wings at last giving out and they plummet to the sea and float upon the surface of the universal water.

Though I try to concentrate upon the security in the ark my mind will not protect me from seeing the images of what it must have been like outside of the ark as the waters rose. I hear the screams and cries, and see the bloated bodies and then the ultimate silence.

I know the justification is the evil that was in people’s hearts and lives. I know the book of Genesis starts in paradise, but after the disobedience of Adam and Eve, paradise is lost and the succeeding chapters of Genesis recount the spiraling down of human nature. It just gets worse and worse. Finally, the waters come and all is washed away and destroyed. I know the justification but I can’t get use to the severity of the sentence.

The ark floats upon the waters, a little ark in a vast sea. This goes on for days and months. Then at last the latch on the top is opened. Blue sky is seen above. How beautiful that sky must have looked. How holy the rays of sunlight must have seemed streaming inside the boat through the open hatch.

Still days and weeks pass. At last it is deemed save to open the ark and leave. The latch is unlocked and the door is opened. They begin to descend; the living creatures and Noah and his family. Above them is the blue sky, but what do they see on the ground?

Is it all green and lush or is there still mud and slush? And what of all the bodies, they haven’t been buried have they? And what of the empty towns and cities below the mountain where the ark rested? Does the wind blow through empty rooms and dry the mud caked on the walls? What of the pieces of cloth caught in a thicket when the waters receded or the half buried toy miles from the child who once played with it? What of all the evidence of a world that once existed?

Noah bows his head, walks through the debris, takes up twigs and branches, builds an altar, lights a fire, and offers a sacrifice. The smoke ascends onto the heavens, God receives it and the Bible records in His heart God says, “Never again.” It is the phrase that is used over and over at the end of this story, “Never again, never again.”

Even if all others choice to speak of wrath or call down wrath, I know these two words will always be for me the words I cling too, these two words of promise. It is in these two words I find my solace and offer promise and hope rather than judgment and condemnation to a world seeking the Word of the Lord. Here it is, “Never again.” After God vows in His heart he speaks these words to Noah and says to Noah, “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendents after you, and with every living creature…never again shall all flesh be cut off…and this is the sign of the covenant – I have set my bow in the clouds.” The rainbow becomes the reminder – never again. The rainbow, not a mushroom cloud, is God’s symbol for our world.

Now some of you need to be reminded of God’s covenant. You need to be reminded of it in your own life. Your image of God that you live by is too cruel and harsh. You see everything negative that happens in your life as punishment from God. You fear God. You do not trust God. You keep thinking that God is some how going to zap you, that God is going to take every good thing in your life away from you. It simply is not true.

Others of you need to be reminded of these words as you look out upon the world. You are too quick to label every natural disaster as punishment from God and forget about the rainbow. You are too quick to call down the wrath of God. You are too quick to pronounce judgment in the name of God and to forget the forbearance and patience of God, the covenant of God who speaks the words, “Never again.”

Let me tell you what happened after God made this covenant with Noah. Noah went out and planted a vineyard. He grew grapes and harvested them. Then he made wine out of the grapes and when it was fully fermented he drank the wine and grapes until he became ripe roaring drunk. This is the Noah who God had seen as the one righteous person in the entire world.

Noah was drunk and he went into his tent, stripped naked and fell down and passed out. At the very beginning of this new creation, just as at the first creation, we are witnesses to the frailty of humankind.

Then Noah’s son Ham comes into the tent and the Bible says, “he saw the nakedness of his father.” What we must remember is these stories in the Bible were not originally children’s stories, even though this is how we often remember them. As adults, however, we have to revisit them to see how unblinking the Bible is in looking at human nature. The phrase, “he saw the nakedness of his father,” is a euphemism for something much more degrading. It is at this point a tragic tale of a righteous family gone astray. No sooner is the new earth started when the chapter of the fall is once more written.

Something there is that lies in the human heart that cannot be purged, and God in giving His covenant to Noah, knows this. For, even before Noah had fallen down drunk and his son had entered the tent, God recognized the inevitability of things to come saying, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth.” When God said, “Never again,” for his side of the covenant God knew the inevitability and continuing propensity of human being to commit evil.

It is the sad, sad tale of our history. We are sinners. Our history is bathed in transgression. “None are righteous, no not one.” It is true of you. It is true of me. It is true of all of humankind. Nothing you read in the paper should surprise you. No thought in your own mind should surprise you. We tend toward that which is wrong.

God has seen it all before, but what should surprise you is God’s response. Never again does God unleash the magnitude of his potential wrath upon the earth. Even when we create our own holocaust, never again will God walk away and seek to destroy that which He has created. Even with the saving of Noah in the ark, there was away in which God couldn’t entirely give up. He had to save a family. God can’t let go of us and won’t let go of us.

And there is one word we have for that holding on by God of us. It is the word, “Love.” It is the word “Love” and not “wrath” we should be proclaiming. In spite of our sin, In spite of our waywardness, in spite of our pride and arrogance, God can’t let go of us. God loves us, and never again does God stop trying. First, through Abraham God chooses a people, then God seeks to work through Prophets and Kings. And at last He sends His Son.

And when we mock His Son and put Him on a cross, even then God doesn’t give up on us, but raises His Son from the dead that He might be the way of our salvation. In the shadow of the ark is the story of Christ, because God knew in saying “Never again,” it would one day cost Him His Son. In saying “Never again,” God is in fact speaking words of redemption.

When you call down cursing, when you season your language with words of wrath, you are not helping God. The way you help God is by bringing His redemption closer by allowing the same love that was in Christ Jesus to be in you.

Oh, but you say, there is so much corruption, and it is true but let me point out one last word from the story of Noah. The flood is over, God has made his promise that never again will destruction supersede redemption, and then God instructs Noah after giving the covenant about the order of things and how to live. In those instructions God places a prohibition against taking a human life, and the reason God gives is the other side of why we do not give up. Earlier God had recognized the tendency toward human corruption and sin, but, now, God articulates the other side, the deeper part. God cautions Noah against the shedding of human blood because, “for in his own image, God made humankind.”

The other side of our sinful self is that we are created in the image of God. God never forgot this. You don’t either. Every human life is in the image of God. There is not one human being created who has not been created in the image of God. It may be so filthy with sin you cannot see it, but you cannot forget it and it is to that side you minister. It is that side you wrap in bandages and serve. It is that side you serve as though you were serving Christ.

You respond, but the times are so corrupt and fearful. What do we do when there are wars and rumors of wars? What do we do when there is so much suffering? The answer is, you put away the words of wrath, and now more than ever, you show what it means to Love. You bind up wounds. You help rebuild lives. You practice tolerance. You reach out. You build bridges. You seek understanding across cultural divides. You pray for those who persecute you.

And in your own life, you both go easy on yourself, accepting as God has accepted you, that we are all flawed, needing forgiveness and the change to begin again and again and again. And at the same time, you see in you, what God also sees, you are worthy, you are beautiful, you are created in the God’s image. You must never let the sin in your life or the sin in another’s life, keep you from relating to all people as those for whom Christ died and in whose image they were created. You live in hope just the way God did when God said, “Never again.”

Let us pray: Thank you God that in spite of our sin you never give up on us, never seeking to destroy but always reclaim and redeem. We praise you God for your forbearance and patience toward us. Amen.

English Language Sermon – September 14, 2008

“Crisis of Faith” (Genesis 1:26-31)

September 14^th, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

The first time Tony Hendra went to see Father Joe, Tony was fourteen years old and filled with trepidation. He had never been inside a monastery before and all he knew of his religion was fear and rules. In that first meeting everything changed. Father Joe conveyed to him something he had never before experienced – the Love of God. This epiphany was mediated through the embrace, the acceptance, the peace, the joy, the understanding of Father Joe. It changed everything.

Tony returned home with a new fervor for his faith. He had fallen in love with God. At first like other enthusiasms he had experienced in his life he was afraid it wouldn’t last, but it did. He regularly and willingly attended mass, kept up a regimen of daily devotions and every night after his brother had gone to sleep, he knelt beside his bed and prayed, and whenever he could he returned to the monastery and his conversations with Father Joe. His one desire, unlike any of his peers, was that one day he too would become a monk.

He lived in the aura of God’s Love. Nothing was more real to him then that. He was filled with religious fervor for his God, but then one night at sixteen as he knelt beside his bed it all came to a crashing halt. All awareness of God died. All religious feeling of the Divine Presence left him in one swell swoop. It was there…then it was gone.

He writes of that night kneeling beside his bed, “I was falling in an elevator with its cables severed, accelerating down into the blackness of the shaft…I knew even as I fell that my faith was being torn from me…I prayed desperately, please God help me…grant me a miracle but there was no help or miracle.” (Father Joe, p.88)

He writes that in this fathomless space, “there was no God nor Christ nor wraith nor hope nor certainty nor salvation and never would be ever again.” (p.88)

It made him physically ill. He said, “I begged the darkness to give me back my faith. But the darkness said nothing. There was no one there to give it back…I was utterly alone. I had never felt such loneliness.” (p.89)

All of us live and hope for some religious certainty and feeling of the Divine. We want to know Christ with us. We want to be filled with the power of His Spirit within us. We crave to know that Presence, to know the certainty of God with us, to live on the mountain top where we can see with our soul the glory of the risen Lord. We want to know Jesus in our hearts, and in many ways, God has blessed our desire. There have been moments or long periods in our life when we have been filled with the awareness of the glory of God.

But, like Tony, there has also been, for many of us, the awareness of God’s absence. We don’t have that religious feeling we once had. Something is taken away. Something is missing. There is an absence of any awareness of a Presence we once knew.

Tony felt bereft of everything that had become so important to him. He felt alienated, alone, where was the God he had loved so dearly? It wasn’t that Tony on his own had decided there was no God. He had believed in God, but it was as though he had been robbed of that belief. It wasn’t as though he had walked away from his faith; it was while he was on his knees, in the exercise of his faith, that it was taken, lifted out of him, ripped from him.

One day, after school, not even telling his parents, broken, sorrowing, unable to study or sleep, he got on a bus, and took the three hour journey to the monastery where Father Joe lived. When at last they met, Tony sobbed his confession and plight. Father Joe listened. He neither tried to cajole or argue Tony back to faith. He comforted him, gave Tony a room to spend the night, called his parents to assure them Tony was safe, then the next day, while they walked the grounds Father Joe became his counselor.

What could he possibly tell Tony? I am not Catholic but I have underlined his words of counsel. This is what he said, Tony dear, “You fell in love with God, you see, and now the romantic part is over…Feelings are a great gift, but they’re treacherous if that’s all we live for. They drive us back into ourselves, you see. What I want. What I feel. What I need.” (p.98)

Then he went on to explain how feelings can become a kind of prison. He said, “Feelings trap us in the self and all our motive begins to become a question of how does it make me feel so that even helping others begins to be motivated by how it makes us feel.” We do it expecting that it will make us feel good, and how often have you heard that as an explanation for helping others. It will make you feel good.

Likewise with our religion or our faith when we are looking for a feeling we end up evaluating Sunday School, or Bible Study, or Worship by asking ourselves, What did I get out of it? How did it make me feel? It becomes a trap where as much as we may not want to, we are still focused on the self. We have this inner barometer that is constantly on alert to how everything and everyone is affecting us and making us feel.

Father Joe was right; it becomes a kind of prison. At the end of his conversation this is what he told Tony, “God gave you a great gift that terrible night…He gave you a vision of Hell. Not that silly fire-and-brimstone stuff. True hell. Being alone with yourself for all eternity. Only your own self to hope in, only your own self to love.”

People, perhaps the reason God sometimes withdraws the awareness of His Presence as Father Joe says and the Bible says, is so that we might find His Presence beyond ourselves and the in the presence of others.

It might be that Tony was ready for the next step. God had nurtured and cared for him all along the way, inspiring Tony in his daily walk, encouraging him in his devotion and worship, giving him the warmth of His presence all along the way, allowing feelings of intimacy to develop in Tony’s love for him while he knelt beside his bed and worshiped him in the sanctuary, but then one day God said, “It’s time, Tony, for you to know me beyond yourself.” God knew that all Tony knew of Him was insular and private.

So, God in one sense withdrew, but not so Tony would feel the absence of God, but so that Tony would come to know Him in all that is.

We are the ones who separate the sacred from the secular. We are the one’s who compartmentalize religion from the rest of life. We are the ones who divide people between us and them. We are the ones who construct the barriers while all the while God is saying, “see me in the sunrise, follow me in the current of the river, hear me in the music of the composer, and touch me on the lips in the kiss of the one you love.” It is all life. It is all of God.

God is in the wind. God is in the fire. God is in the cry of the new born infant as well as the light from the most6 distant star. Christian contemplatives have understood this all through the centuries, and the psalmist extols it in the line of his hymn, “There is no place I can go where God is not.”

And most especially Christians have understood this to mean that in every human face there is the face of Jesus waiting to be recognized. So, Father Joe takes hold of the hands of the distraught Tony, looks him in the eyes and says, “My dear Tony, God is manifested in others. God is the Other. That’s why the self must find itself in love for others.” (p.99)

If right now you are living a spiritual high, if God has never been closer to you, if the awareness of God’s Spirit within you has never been more real to you, if you know what it means to say, I have been to the mountain top, I have seen the Lord, then let me say for you, “Praise God.”

But, if you are in the valley, if that religious feeling of ecstasy has faded, if you have felt the dark night of the soul, a sense of the absence of the presence of God, wondering, worrying, praying, God where are You, let me also say for you, “Praise God.”

God has not left you. God is waiting, God is inviting you to a bigger, wider world than you have imagined, God is inviting you to lose yourself by finding yourself in a bigger wider world where everything that is pulsates with Divine intention and every human face mirrors the image of His Son. God is drawing you to Himself in everything that is.

As I was preparing this sermon, however, I kept thinking to myself, we are feeling creatures and I know what it is to feel the closeness and nearness of God, but what if that nearness isn’t felt, and it is all because God is calling us outside ourselves to know Him in a wider world, beyond ourselves, to lose ourselves in the stuff and glories of life, is there then no feeling or is there another new feeling that helps us understand God’s presence in the world?

Is there any feeling that parallels the awareness of God in the world with the feelings of intimacy with the awareness of God in the soul? What can compensate for not being on the mountain top and knowing we are called into the valley, knowing that most of our lives cannot be lived on a spiritual high, we cannot sustain it, it is not ours to sustain, but what is it in the day to dayness that will make us aware and confirm God’s presence in everything that is? “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, thou art with me.” What is the feeling that can draw me to this public awareness of God? This God who is in everything and especially in the one who stands before me? How will I know Him? What will be the feeling?

The answer is in the feeling of gratitude. The public face of God is confirmed in all the gratitude we feel toward life. Feeling thankful is the greatest holistic, religious feeling you can have.

Only one healed leper returned to thank Jesus. All ten were healed but nine of them would remain insular and isolated and selfish, and it would not be too long before once again they would require another miracle to have confirmed for them that God really existed. Only the tenth, only the one who returned to say thank you, began to understand life beyond himself, a life with God at the center of all that is, a life that can only be experienced through gratitude.

You can’t say Thank you and not be aware of life beyond yourself. It forces you outside yourself and there always you will find the God you seek, a God Tony thought he had lost that night he kneeled before his bed.

Learn gratitude. The apostle Paul writes, “giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (Eph. 5:20). In all ways, learn to be thankful. Gratitude is the greatest religious feeling you can experience. It is infused with the presence of God.

If in any way there is a sense of gratitude in your heart, you stand on Holy Ground. You are in the Presence of the Lord. God is with you, opening the eyes of your soul, helping you see a wider world, leading you to Himself, helping you see Christ in the other, showing you, there is no place you can go where God is not…in the stars, the first crocus from the ground, and especially when you look into the eyes of another…there is the nearness of God, calling you to Himself in calling you to the other. There in that gratitude you feel for the person standing next to you, you have rediscovered the presence of the Lord.

Let us pray: God, may our spirits be open to the awareness of Your Presence in all of life, in one another, and especially the one seeking our help. Amen.

English Language Sermon – September 7, 2008

“In Whose Image?” (Genesis 1:26-31)

September 7, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

I was standing at the receptionist’s counter in the lobby of the nursing home waiting to get the room number of the church member we were going to visit and give communion. I was visiting on behalf of First Presbyterian Church of Maumee and with me were two elders from the church. The receptionist was on the phone and while I was waiting I happened to turn around and against the opposite wall was a mirror where for one nano second I glanced at my image staring back at me.

It was not, I thought, a pretty sight. The guy in the mirror looked so different from the image in my mind, and it wasn’t for the better. The shoulders were rounded, the waist was wider and the hair grayer. It was a moment of stark reality. I thought who is this guy staring back at me? I barely recognize him. When did he change?

I took one more glance just to make sure that what I saw was what I saw. It was. It was me staring back. I quickly turned away. It was an experience that pierced through the retina of my eyes landing with a thud, bruising my psychic. I left the counter without getting the room number and with the two Presbyterian elders we found our way to the church member’s room. We made our visit, offered communion and once more passed through the lobby, this time ignoring the mirror.

In the middle of the lobby, facing us, as though she had been waiting was an elderly lady sitting in a wheelchair, aided in her breathing by a portable oxygen tank. As we passed by she called out, “Dr. Andersen.” I turned around and said, “Yes.” She said, “I know you. You are from First Baptist.” I said, “No, but I use to be.” She said, “I am a member of Ashland Baptist, and I recognized you when you came in.”

It was from many years ago, but she still recognized me. I wanted to kiss her. I thought, well maybe I haven’t changed all that much after all. I said to myself, “Oh, bless you my dear lady. You are like an angel sitting in that chair, an angel waiting with a blessing for a bruised soul. I glanced in the mirror barely knowing the person I saw but you still recognized me and called out my name.”

I use to think that one’s identity was something with which you wrestled early in life as a teen-ager or young adult, but then it is solved and you live out the rest of your life firmly rooted to that identity. I realize, now, after having lived most of the stages of life, it is not quite so simple and that all through your life questions of identity continue to be raised and contemplated. The question, “Who am I?” is ongoing, revealing ever new dimensions to its answer as one gets older.

You ask it as you look for a life’s work. You ask it when you get married. You ask it when you become a parent. You ask it again after the children have grown and left home. You ask it when you have finished your employment and retire. You ask it as your body changes. You ask it when you join a new group and wonder about your place in it. Always there is the search for identity, identity being explored.

It is not an easy search, this quest to know one’s self, but it should never be despairing, it should never be entered into without hope because however far that journey of discovery takes us and however many times a new situation or circumstance in life causes us to reevaluate that sense of self and our place in the world, always, always, at the core, it is written that who we are was spoken in a Word at creation. It is the significance of this beginning point I want to explore with you this morning.

As much as the Bible is about journey and exodus and pilgrimage the beginning in a sense always becomes the ending, because whatever we might find out about ourselves along the way, as new as it might seem to us, it is always about from whence we came. We are who we are. Everything in our quest for identity is commentary upon our beginning, and what is that beginning? It is that we are created by God, and this sets the stage for everything that follows. You are created by God. This is who you are.

But it is more explicit than this, the Bible says, you are not only created by God, you are created in God’s image. It says, you have God’s breath in you. It says, you are loved by the God who created you.

We may experience lots of angst in our life. We may go through periods of existential despair. The church may focus on our sinfulness and flay against it. Society may reduce us to a number. But none of that can change from whence we came. Forrest Church says, “The universe was pregnant with us when it was born.” I am created by God. I am created in the image of God. I have God’s breath in me. I am loved by the God who created me.

All Christ was and is, everything Christ did and taught, and is doing, including speaking through a woman in a wheelchair, is to get you back to the awareness of who you are as created by God, in His likeness with his breath giving you life.

“The universe was pregnant with you when it was born,” and for each of us that exploration, that journey of discovery toward self means not that you have to create the spark of light but that you explore in your self what that light reveals. “I apply the name ‘God,’” wrote Martin Buber, the great Jewish mystic and writer, “to my Creator that is the author of my uniqueness.” This is your pilgrimage, finding, uniquely, what it means that God has created you in his image.

And along the way, in this journey of self discovery, through every phase of your life God is with you, supporting and encouraging you, healing and inspiring for you, through the intervention and support of others. This is my second point. Never do you have to do it on your own. Always, here on earth, God is going to help you along the way by placing in your life and through companions along the way, others that will encourage you and nurture you and when necessary forgive you, doing whatever it takes, so that you may realize the image of God in you, your own uniqueness, kept alive forever by the breath of God.

Sometimes it may be something so incidental as a seemingly chance encounter in the lobby of a nursing home. Other times it might be a mentor or a teacher or a spouse or parent or a group of life long friends. Hopefully, always it will be when we sit together at the Lord’s Table. Mark Rutherford wrote, “Blessed are those who heal us of our self-despisings.”

It is important who you hang out with.

A few weeks ago Sharon and I received an email from a couple, who with four other couples, had been our friends when we all lived in Charleston, West Virginia. We had all vacationed together and partied together and worshipped together. This couple in was cleaning out their attic in preparation to move and came across a letter Sharon and I had written and read to the group on the eve before Sharon and I moved from Charleston thirty years ago. These friends emailed a copy of that letter to us and the other members of the group.

I had not read this letter in thirty years, but in it Sharon and I addressed each member of the group and what they had meant to us. Here is what we said: To Margaret for your genuine compassion for other people…to Arlen for you sense of decency and search for more insight…to Kathy for your support and compliments even when we really disagreed…to Bruce for your interests so varied and in those interests for being an original…to Norma for your gentleness and sensitivity toward others…to Buddy for your exuberance, loyalty…to Lavonne for your affirmation of life and willingness to dare and share what you find…to Joe for your camaraderie, generosity and depth of friendship.

I am today because of what those friends were for me thirty years ago. In my mind without them I may have understood that I was created by God in God’s image, but it took these friends to show me what that meant and to give me the courage and acceptance to explore its dimensions in my life. Of this I am certain, we need one another and God gives us one another, including Jesus Christ and Christ Church and family and friends, to help us become what God has created us to be.

Finally, that same image is how we are to view all of humanity. We see in every human being the story of creation reenacted, and it evokes in us the same love with which we are loved and the love with which we embrace, humbly and gratefully, our own life.

Kathleen Norris in her book, Dakota, recounts the story of an early monk “who is surprised to hear that a gardener in a nearby city has a way of life more pleasing to God than his own. Visiting the city he finds the man selling vegetables, and asks for shelter overnight. The gardener, overcome with joy to be of service, welcomes the monk into his home. While the monk admires the gardener’s hospitality and life of prayer, he is disturbed to find that the vulgar songs of drunks can be heard coming form the street, and asks the gardener: ‘Tell me what do you conceive in your heart when you hear these things?’ The man replies, ‘That they are all going to the kingdom.’ The old monk marvels and says, ‘This is the practice which surpasses my labor of all these years. Forgive me, brother, I have not yet approached this standard.’ And without eating, he withdraws again into the desert.” (p.98-99)

The gardener was attuned to the majesty in each person, created in the image of God, even the revelers outside his door, and it filled him with compassion. The same God who fashioned me in His image and which I find in being myself and is supported by my friends and church, is the same God who fashioned my neighbor, and the strangers I sit with in the theater and those whose lives I only touch through television.

We are all from the same stock. We all have the same beginning. We were all given life by the same breath and my destination to know as I am known by God is the destination toward which we all travel. So, along the way, whether it be the person sitting next to me in the pew or in Myanmar or Thailand, or New Orleans or the inner city of Chicago - their suffering becomes my suffering, their burden my burden, and the same compassion with which God spoke the words, “Let us make man in our own image, male and female God created them,” becomes the compassion with which we look upon one another and every other human being. In that compassion is all the light of God and is revealed most fully what it means that God has created us in His image and it is God’s breathe that has given us life.

And God loved all that God had made – may that same love be in you, a love for yourself, a love for one another, and a love for the world. And may that love guide you to be less harsh and more kind to yourself, less critical and more affirming of those who are your family and friends, and less judgmental and more helpful, especially, toward the many who suffer, but who like you are created in God’s image.

English Language Sermon – August 31, 2008

“The Human Touch” (Mark 1:40-45)

August 31, 2008

Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor

Deaconess Judy Hoshek of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in an article in Christian Century recounts the story of an older woman in her congregation who said to her, “I live alone, and I love it when somebody passes the peace and gives me a hug.”

In another issue of the same magazine which has as its by line, “Thinking Critically, Living Faithfully,” there is a lengthy news report on hugging in the church. In the report Margaret Paloma, a sociologist at the University of Akron, is quoted as saying the church provides a safe place for human contact in a society in which more people are living and playing alone. She says, “it’s part of a need we have as human beings, and it isn’t easily satisfied in our culture.”

The article says it has always been there in the black and Latino and Pentecostal churches, but it is now finding its way into the mainline churches. “The bottom line,” states the article, “in many mainline churches is that once people try hugging, they like it.” We see it in the Lutheran Church and Baptist Church, and although they are not mentioned in the article, I can testify and tell you by the relationship I have had working in the Presbyterian Church for the past three years, it is there too, in the Presbyterian Church. The Presbyterian Church I served would come alive with handshakes and hugs, especially in the contemporary service, when we passed the peace and greeted one another. I use to kid them, that “the chosen frozen” were thawing, and I don’t think it had anything to do with global warming.

To me, it is a matter of reclaiming and affirming outwardly, our inner connectedness in Jesus Christ. We are brothers and sisters, bonded together in a community of caring in Jesus Christ, and the outward expression of this, be it a handshake or a hug, is in the human touch.

I think what is happening is that deep down, there is a longing, spiritual to its core, to be connected, and whether it is through a warm handshake or a hug, the Spirit through human touch, just as Jesus touched the people he healed, is ministering and healing that ache within us, and whether we recognize it or not, the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit, is being used by God in the proper way for which it was designed, to be a vehicle of God’s caring.

While still pastor of the First Baptist Church of Greater Toledo I was called to the home of one of the most faithful members of the church. This member was one I would call, “the quiet in the land,” an early church phrase used to describe the work of those anonymous Christians who served in the name of Christ without thought of the need for recognition. Sue, this member, had been part of a volunteer cleaning crew at the church and for years cleaned the bathrooms, including the toilets, at our church.

I had been called to her home because she was dying. Her husband answered the door and led me to the back bedroom. In the room with her was a deaconess of our church, who was also a long time friend of Sue’s.

Sue lay in the bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. Her friend sat on the edge of the bed next to her. Then unfolded before me one of the most remarkable scenes I have witnessed. Sue’s breathing was labored and her head moved from side to side. The friend stroked Sue’s hair and then she leaned down, moved her legs onto the bed and lied down with Sue, holding her, continuing to stroke Sue’s hair. Sue drifted into restful sleep and the all embracing arms of God.

Human touch is a sacrament, making real in finite form the way it is God lifts us into eternity. It is with a touch. It is with an embrace. To be held on earth is to understand what it is to be held by God at the entrance to eternity. Every human touch is potentially electrified with the healing graciousness of God’s Spirit ministering to us not just through our mind and spirit, but our bodies, as well.

We all need that touch, like the hug given on Sunday morning to that older woman in the Lutheran Church. In that moment when our hands reach out to shake or our arms embrace to hug, for that moment the sphere of our awareness is on one another, and in that awareness we are given the perspective in which we can begin to understand in an eternal sense what it means that God in His mercy and love has that same kind of focus on us. What we give in that moment helps us understand what is unceasing with God. He sees us. He knows us. He loves us.

Somehow we have ignored this. We have sought for God in the intellect and studied theology. We have focused on the ethereal and gone on retreat. But what we have often ignored is the very physicality of our relationship to God. God uses the physical world to communion with us and bring us to Himself, and something as simple as a handshake can be part of meditating the graciousness of God’s love toward us.

I have been thinking a lot about this as I have been preparing to come to Chicago and serve as your supply pastor for the next three months. I have been thinking about what we can give to one another. I have been thinking about what I can bring to you. Three months isn’t a very long time. It is one season in a year. It is one quarterly report. I figured up that there has been 264 quarters to my life. I am going to spend the 265 quarter with you.

What can we do? The most basic and elemental answer, and at the same time the most gracious and life affirming response we can offer, is that during these three months, we can become present to one another. We can touch each other’s lives. We can learn each other’s stories, and it all begins with a human touch when following this service we shake each other’s hand. Grace is mediated when in that handshake we begin to become known to one another.

It is a miracle what can happen during these next three months. We who were strangers to one another now get to see each other as God sees us, as real persons, person’s filled with uniqueness and opportunity, person’s with stories to tell, confessions to be made, dreams to be shared, all starting when we pause, and for that brief moment, let he or she who was a stranger, become known to us in a name and a handshake.

In a way it is like we have all gone off to camp together or we are on a three month retreat together. Remember how you would go off to camp when you were a child and that first day might have felt like the loneliest day of the year, but by the end of the week, when your parents have come for you, you prolong as long as you possibly can getting into the car, because you don’t want to leave all the friends you have made. Or, at Green Lake, you go for a conference, knowing those only from your church, but by the end of the conference, you are literally hugging the people you have met from across the country.

That is how I hope our time together will be. Along the way, I am going to do some preaching, some teaching, some visiting, but I also hope, along the way, you might introduce me to your Chicago. Let me see what turns you on to this great city. Take me to the places that you enjoy. Let me see through your eyes that which confounds you and disturbs you, but also that which gives you delight.

A few years ago there was a movie staring Jack Nicholson entitled, “About Schmidt.” It was about a man forced to retire from his job and who then faced the death of his wife. Everything that brought purpose to his life was shattered. A broken and empty man, he locked the door to his house, took off down the road, alone on the highway.

Finally, after several weeks he returned home, still a broken man. He goes to his desk and starts to pen his mail. Then he sees it. He holds a piece of open mail in his hands. His head is bowed, and tears begin to stream down his cheeks. He is coming alive again. Life is coming back into him, be it, through tears. What happened?

Slowly the camera goes to the piece of mail in his hand. The background is that a number of years ago Schmidt had begun sending $25 a month to an orphan in a third world country, an orphan whose name had been given to him when he answered a television children’s relief ad. The letter is drawn by the young orphan. It shows two hands reaching across an ocean, he and the orphan, holding on to one another. That human touch, though only in a drawing, is what brought the tears and begins the process of healing in his life. The power of human touch, mediating the grace of God.

It is that same touch we give to one another, that we take to the world. Remember the leper in the Scripture this morning. The sequence is important. First there was the touch and then the healing. It is the way it works in our life, as a community of faith, and it is the same way it works when we enter the world to serve. First there is the touch.

To be a leper was to be an outcast. It was to be considered unclean and untouchable. Lepers were never touched, yet it was while the man was still an outcast Jesus touched him. What we need to ask as Christians is who are the outcasts today and how might it be that Jesus’ hands become our hands when we touch them. Oh, to be touched while you are still unclean, while you are still on the outside, while you are still a sinner, while you are still looked upon with suspicion. That is what Christians offer the world – that touch before they are saved, that touch before they are made whole, the same touch with which we embrace and welcome one another into our midst.

About a year ago a book was written about the inner conflict in Mother Theresa’s own soul. She knew anguish. She had doubts. She felt the spiritual absence of God’s presence. Yet, we still see her as a saint. We see in her a faith that transcended the dark night or dark season or dark decades of the soul. Why? Why do we still recognize her as a saint, a daughter of God, one in whom God’s love was so transparent? Why, because we see her touching the poorest of the poor, running her hand gently across the cheek of a dying child, lifting into her arms the dying leper.

We know in seeing those scenes, there is a God of Love, and we know, in our bodies, the temple of the Holy Spirit, we are capable of that same touch whether it is laying beside a dying friend, or beginning to know one another as pastor and people in the simple act of a handshake, or holding a body born of crack addiction, or putting our hand on the shoulder of someone everyone else has decided to make an outcast. This is who we are, conveying God’s grace in a human touch and I am delighted to share that life with you for the next three months.

A year ago Sharon and I stood in the Sistine Chapel and stared up at Michelangelo’s great painting of creation. You all know it, especially the sixth day which portrays God’s creation of humankind. It shows God and Adam, each reaching out to the other, each with an arm extended, each with a finger pointing. We know, without being told, this is the moment of creation, when those two fingers touch.

How magnificent that Michelangelo conceived to use touch to convey the giving of life by God. He knew in that portrayal we would all understand because in our own lives we understand the significance of touch and how it is that to be touched, even by a handshake, is to know we are alive. People, whenever your hand reaches out to someone and your hand touches the hand of that other person, or when your arms open and you embrace another, that act of creation, that act of giving life continues.

You become with God a co-creator of His universe. God continues His act of creation through your touch. The touch we offer one another. Amen.