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 – July 27, 2008

“Finding God’s Story in Your Story” (Genesis 29:15-30)

July 27, 2008

Rev. Carol McVetty, English Language Pastor

In a well-remembered bit of narration from the movie “Forrest Gump”, the hero says: “My mother always said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. Because you never know what you’re gonna get.’” Forrest goes on to stumble through a life of seemingly random encounters with many of the chaotic world events of the late 20^th Century. There is no purposefulness to his life, no growth, no character development. He just wanders along through history a sort of present day court jester, an innocent fool.

In the book we have been studying together on Wednesday nights this summer, Scott Bader-Saye’s “Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear”, Bader-Saye suggests that one of our deepest fears is that life is like a box of chocolates, but for a different reason. “…because a box of chocolates is consumed, piece by random piece, in no particular order.”

Are our lives a series of random events, our days simply consumed until nothing remains? Or is there a story to our lives; a beginning, a middle, an end? Do our days move in a coherent direction that makes sense? Or do we stumble along like Forrest Gump from one event to another, searching in vain for the connecting thread? These are haunting questions for many.

In our scripture lesson today we met Jacob. Now Jacob in not nearly as appealing a character as Forrest Gump. In fact at times he is downright despicable. Nonetheless, for the next several weeks, we will follow the exploits of Jacob and his son Joseph in our scripture lessons and sermons. (I encourage you to read the whole story on your own. Move back a few chapters, perhaps to chapter 25, and read on through the end of Genesis to get the entire cycle of stories in context.)

Jacob was born hanging onto his twin brother’s heel. He spent much of his youth rebelling against “the system”, which in his day dictated that the first born of a family inherited all of the father’s wealth. You haven’t seen sibling rivalry until you have seen Jacob manipulate his older twin, Esau, into giving up his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup. You know nothing about dysfunctional families until you read how the parents in this one choose up sides: father Isaac backing Esau, and Rebekah, the mom, favoring Jacob. Rebekah even helps Jacob trick his dying dad into giving him the blessing which is due the elder son.

Having stooped so low and connived so skillfully to get the family farm, Jacob then had to run for his life because his brother was out to kill him. Surely on the long, dusty trip to Haran Jacob wondered “How is this going to turn out? Where is my life headed?” Today’s episode opens as Jacob has arrived in Haran on the doorstep of an uncle he had never met. He is a refugee, a fugitive, with only the clothes on his back and a price on his head.

Now Jacob has met his match! His uncle, Laban, is surely the Wiley-Coyote of the Old Testament. “You love my daughter Rachel? She’s a beauty, isn’t she? Sure, seven years labor sounds like a good bride-price.” So they shook hands on the deal. But seven long years of sheep-tending later Jacob had to remind his uncle of the deal. So a wedding banquet was thrown. What happened next is one of the most eye-popping tales in the Hebrew Scriptures. It actually believable if you factor in 1) all the women being veiled, 2) that it is really, really dark inside a Bedoin tent, and 3) a huge lots of wine having flowed throughout the wedding festivities. It wasn’t until the morning after, in the sober light of dawn (or noon perhaps), that Jacob realized he’d been had! He had married Leah, the older, not Rachel, the beautiful, whom he loved. And Uncle Laban, confronted with his treachery shows no shame. “Oops, not to worry. I had this older daughter I had to get off my hands. But you can have Rachel, too. That’ll be seven more years labor, thank you very much!”

What are we to make of this wild and crazy story? I have searched it, and as it stands on its own, I can’t find any moral. I have no uplifting lesson you can carry home with you today from this particular story. Reading today’s text is like pulling over to the side of the road to stare at a train wreck. We are left with Jacob—exiled from home, still no property or security, having invested seven years, seven hard years, for the love of his life, only to shafted and manipulated into working another seven years for no pay. This is the point where I imagine he went out and plastered the bumper sticker on the back of his donkey cart, the one that says “Sh-t happens.”

And we see Leah and Rachel—two women, two sisters, voiceless and unheard. Their hopes or desires were never consulted. Their lives had been arranged for them. Now they had been setup for a life-long, bitter competition for the attention of one man.

Then there is Laban—who comes off like a character in a Dilbert cartoon, gleeful, almost sadistic in his scheming, leaving chaos in his wake.

What are we to make of this messy, ambiguous story? What are we to make of our own messy, ambiguous lives….when our best efforts still leave us empty-handed…when our future is manipulated by others…when we tumble from one mess to another, or wander through our days, not knowing where they are headed? Is life just one darn thing after another? Is it really like a box of chocolates after all, consumed piece by piece, randomly, till it’s all gone?

Some years ago I heard a woman, a totally secular, non-church-going mom, explain why she brought her children to Vacation Bible School. She said “On the way home in the car, my kids sing the songs they’ve learned. They repeat the stories that have been told. This is the only place they’ve heard a story like this. You are the only ones who really have a story.” Sisters and brothers, that is the good news. The Gospel says that God has given the world a story, and it’s a story of redeeming love. The Good News of the Bible is that God has given the world a story, and has called each of us to participate in it, to play our part.

The book “Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear” has introduced us to a way of understanding that story that helps us see ourselves as part of it. God’s story is a drama in five acts. Act 1 is God’s creation of the world. Act 2 is God’s calling of Israel. Act 3 is God’s incarnation in Christ. Act 4 is the calling and sending of the Church, and Act 5 is the culmination of the story in God’s reign of Shalom. We live in Act 4. We are the ones called and sent by God to live out his love in the world. Jacob lived in Act 2, God’s calling of a particular people, Israel. In fact, it is just this big picture that the narrator had in mind when recording Jacob’s story.

The Hebrew people told these earthy, colorful, clearly entertaining stories about their ancestor Jacob for generations around the campfire. The stories may have seemed to them as random and ambiguous as they are to us. But the narrator who put this series of stories in writing was able to read these events in light of God’s story. He could detect the thread of purpose that runs through them all. Our faithful narrator arranged the stories to show us the point. The whole Jacob cycle is arranged as a series of frames, or matching bookends to surround and draw attention to the central point. In the series of stories, the first is conflict with Esau, matched with reconciliation with Esau at the end. Next, is an encounter with God at Bethel, matched with an encounter with God at Peniel. Inside of those two frames is the conflict with Laban, balanced by a truce with Laban. Right in the middle of all these stories is the birth of Jacob’s children. That is the key, the central point of the whole Jacob saga. While in Haran, he had eleven sons, and one daughter. On his return to Canaan he had one more son. Those twelve sons became the fathers of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The narrator looked at Jacob’s messy, chaotic life full of conflict and trouble, deception and lies. He looked at all that and still could see God’s story being played out. He saw that ancient promise to Abraham, of more descendants than there are stars in the sky, coming to fruition in Jacob. That is not to say that God caused each event. To say that we would have to conclude that God is as mean and manipulative as Laban, that God is a trickster like Jacob. God’s way in the world is much more mysterious than cause and effect. Somehow God is at work. In ways beyond our understanding, God weaves even the darkest turns in life towards God’s good ends. We set aside explanation to tell a story of God’s purpose having it’s way, even in the midst of our messes and screw ups.

As Christians, our job is to learn to do what the Genesis narrator did. Our task is to read the jumbled, random events of our lives in light of God’s story. You can learn to recognize your bit part is God’s vast drama and thus pick up the thread of meaning and purpose running through your days.

Through my high school and college education I invested eight years in studying science…eight years dedicated to the dream of becoming a doctor. Near the end of college that all fell apart, and I went home not knowing what I was going to do. What if I had been able to see that time experience in the light of the story of the fishermen who left their nets and their whole lives behind and walked away to follow Jesus with no idea of what came next? If I could have seen my story in the light of that part of God’s story, then perhaps I would have been spared some of the sense of failure and shame that I felt at the time.

I have heard Karen folks in the refugee camps in Thailand, having fled the horror that is Burma, say: “We are like the Hebrew children wandering in the wilderness. We have no country, no home, but God is providing us with daily manna. And I know many of those who have resettled in our midst see the US as their Promised Land.

When Judge Lefkow’s husband and mother were brutally murdered just down the street, the first thing their pastor did was to tell the family the story of Job. She told them how his life was trashed, and yet he clung to God; and how Job eventually discovered that God was hanging on to him.

To learn to see our story in the light of the Great Gospel story of God’s redeeming love…

That is our task. For life is, after all, not like a box chocolates. Life is not a random series of events that lead nowhere. Our lives are lived out within the great drama of God’s loving purpose….

And within that story, your story moves toward a good end.

Amen.