Category Archives: truth

Lord’s Prayer: Fourth Petition

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Give us this day our daily bread.
Hundreds of millions of people pray the Lord’s Prayer today. Tens of millions will pray it tomorrow. We all say it.
We all say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Millions of people say this and yet there are still hungry people. There are people who do not have enough. People who are unable to make ends meet. People who will go to bed tonight with growling stomachs. Children who will go without eating because they depend on the school lunch program for a meal each day and now it’s summer.
Most of us have enough. In fact, most of us have more than enough. And most of us are not hungry right now, unless we happened to skip breakfast today.
And yet we pray, Give us this day our daily bread.
We pray it and we pray in concert with all people around the world. It is not Give me or Give my family. It is Give us. We are praying with people who believe like us, who are living faithfully in God’s promises… we are praying with people who believe like us on behalf of everyone.
To pray for daily bread for all people and to expect the fulfillment of that petition is to take seriously three things.
1.    That you were serious about the 2nd and 3rd petitions (Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven).
2.     That you understand that God has not predestined some people for suffering.
3.    That you believe everything any of us have is a gift from God.
These three things, along with the Holy Spirit, combine to create a different kind of hunger than one for food. In Matthew, Jesus teaches this prayer in the context of the Sermon on the Mount- a long set of lessons about how to live faithfully. Hunger is mentioned more specifically in the Beatitudes- the series of specific instructions for holy living- living into Thy kingdom come…
Here Jesus says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.
God does not desire that anyone should be hunger- should have that feeling of hollow emptiness- should want for anything. Therefore, those who have enough, who have more than enough, should be hungering to share, hungering to improve the circumstances of those around them, hungering for justice for all people, hungering that no one should feel separated from God because of essentials they do not have.
Give us this day our daily bread is not an empty prayer. Or it shouldn’t be. With so many people praying it and expecting that Jesus would not have us pray falsely or without hope of answer, we have to seriously ask ourselves what gets in the way of this prayer being answered.
Those of us with enough to eat who will not be hungry for long today, if at all, are called (called!) to specifically hunger and thirst, to crave, something better. And in that craving, we are supposed to be moved to be a part of how God answers that prayer.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Everyone hungers until all are fed.
If we dare to ask for it, we must dare to act on it. Amen.  

Whose Blueprint

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I strongly recommend the sound file of this sermon (at the bottom) to you , as it has the transitions missing in the text. 

Easter 7 (Narrative Lectionary, Year C)
12 May 2013
Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29
What bewitches us?
            We are (all) easily distracted (or seduced) by things that are not important. How many times have you lost an hour or three to television or to the Internet and ended up feeling guilty about that time? Very few of us have had that same experience in prayer or devotional time. Yet, false piety can be equally bewitching. We are not called to live lives of sequestered prayer and study, but prayer and devotion in word and deed. Our prayers are in how we live, how we use our time and talents, how we reveal our trust in God’s grace.
            The Galatians were “bewitched” by false teachers who continued to emphasize the necessity of fulfilling all of the laws of Judaism in order to be assured of God’s blessing through Christ. Paul rejects this notion. The law was and is important for those who were born into it, he says. However, God is bringing others into the good news of freedom in Jesus Christ. Their right-ness with God comes through Jesus’ faithfulness alone- not through anything that they are able to do to merit that grace or favor.
What do commercials/ads tell us is important?
            We are all subjected to advertizing- both subtle and overt- that says we are not yet what we could be. We can be stronger, faster, more beautiful, smarter, more useful, more clever, a better parent/neighbor/child/spouse… with just one more product, one more item, one more thing. That final thing will give us what we’ve been missing to have a perfect life. Until we get it and we find that we are still lacking. In addition to exacerbating and exploiting our fears, commercials reveal a poor system of creation- where the only way a person can succeed is if someone else fails. In the commercialized and commodified system, people become the means to our achievements- not through support and mutual aid, but because we can climb over them in our race to the top. 
How can we live into God’s grace in our lives?
            Faithful living seems daunting when we understand it to be a system of perfect and perfected belief. The Spirit tries to draw us away from that idea- into an understanding that the life of faith is one of trust in God’s promises and actions. Neither our belief system nor our actions save us or even get God “right”, but we trust in God’s work of justifying us through Christ. Furthermore, our trust is not in the on-going act of justification (being made right), but in the completed action of justification. It’s not something God is doing that God could decide to stop. Bringing the world into right relationship through Jesus Christ is something that God has already done. It is finished. (Heard that phrase before?)
            Thus, we are being helped by the Spirit to understand that justification, to accept that right-ness, to live into the trust that God’s on-going work of creation and healing serves to help understand what God has already done. Not to earn it. Not to complete it. But to come to see ourselves and everyone around us through the light of Jesus.
Blueprint
            This is a blueprint of a proposed remodel/addition to this church dated May 1969. There is a note on it from 1977 saying that this proposal was never used. Yet we’ve saved it. We have saved proposed changes to a building that no long exists as it did forty-four (44) years ago.
            Why do we still have it? Some of you would say it is because we never throw anything away. I suspect that for years, people said, “We might use it. It might be useful. Don’t throw it away just yet.”
            Even as the building changed and changed again, we still held on to an old idea, an old picture, a possibility- even though it wouldn’t work.
            This is what so many of us do when it comes to grace. We keep our old blueprint. We say: Yes, we are clothed in Christ. Yes, we are new creations. Yes, we have been made right with God through God’s own actions. But we want to keep this blueprint… We want to hold on to our notions of how the world works… We are afraid… and we might need a fallback plan- in case God doesn’t come through.
            Don’t raise your hand. Has anyone thought that before? It sounds so terrible when I say it out loud, but it is what so many of us do. We trust that grace is true, but we want to hold on to our blueprint- our way of seeing the world, just in case.
Bewitched by our illusion of control
            We are bewitched by our illusions of control. When my grandmother died, the rabbi for the funeral home (who didn’t really know her), spoke very briefly at her funeral service. I am sure he meant to be comforting and inclusive when he talked about remembering her and her legacy and then said, “Whatever God there is or isn’t…” I thought, “What?!? Whatever God there is or isn’t…” It is one thing to be cautious about the actions one attributes to God, but it’s another thing entirely to straddle the fence at a time of proclamation.
            I called another pastor after the service and complained, “Who says that? I could do better than that.” The pastor laughed and said, “Sure you could, but more importantly, God does better than that.”
            We have been called, through the Spirit, into lives of proclamation- lives that say “God is”, lives that are lived without fear, lives that are carried forward because of what God has already done.
            When we hold onto our blueprints- our maps and attempts to say that we might need our own power later- we are living lives that say, “Whatever God there is or isn’t…” When we refuse to listen to the siren song of the commercial world or the whisper of the forces that oppose God, when we swallow our fears and live by trusting in God’s grace… we are living like Abraham and Sarah.
            When we trust that we are not defined by our work, our race, our abilities, our body types, our mental state, our family’s achievements, our church’s size, our ability to pray… when we trust that we are defined by Christ and Christ alone… then we have the courage to welcome all people, to care for our neighbors, to work for change in our community, to appreciate creation.
Trust is not about fully comprehending and explaining a formula or creed. It is about prayerful and devotional living- without fear- through confidence in what God has finished in Jesus Christ.
            The promise we have inherited is not that there may or may not be a God who may or may not be working on something for the future. The promise we have inherited is that God who knows all things, who made all things, who has saved all things has included us in that salvation through Jesus the Christ. It is on the authority of this promise that we throw out our plans and live into God’s blueprint- an outline that has remodeled us all into the image of Christ. 


Unexpected, Mysterious and Fun

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I’ve been trying to think of what to say about this article from the New York Times, in which the author calls himself a “None”- meaning no religious affiliation. It’s not this designation that bothers me. I’m also not too upset when he goes on to comment on how many such Nones get turned off religion by religious people. Been there, seen that, had it happen to me.

Here’s the thing that gets me:

We are more religiously polarized than ever. In my secular, urban and urbane world, God is rarely spoken of, except in mocking, derisive tones. It is acceptable to cite the latest academic study on, say, happiness or, even better, whip out a brain scan, but God? He is for suckers, and Republicans.I used to be that way, too, until a health scare and the onset of middle age created a crisis of faith, and I ventured to the other side. I quickly discovered that I didn’t fit there, either. I am not a True Believer. I am a rationalist. I believe the Enlightenment was a very good thing, and don’t wish to return to an age of raw superstition.We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt.Nones don’t get hung up on whether a religion is “true” or not, and instead subscribe to William James’s maxim that “truth is what works.” If a certain spiritual practice makes us better people — more loving, less angry — then it is necessarily good, and by extension “true.” (We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: “It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”)By that measure, there is very little “good religion” out there. Put bluntly: God is not a lot of fun these days. Many of us don’t view religion so generously. All we see is an angry God. He is constantly judging and smiting, and so are his followers. No wonder so many Americans are enamored of the Dalai Lama. He laughs, often and well.

This gets my dander up in a variety of ways. First, and you may read however much defensiveness you wish into this because I can’t stop you, I appreciate reason and science and I don’t check my understanding of either at the church door. I don’t expect anyone else too.

But I take my reason and science right in there with me and somehow, someway, somewhere… they encounter mystery. It’s not hocus-pocus or woo-woo, it’s something intangible, indescribable and desirable.  Mystery is not automatically irrational, it’s just inexplicable.

Truth isn’t what works. What’s true is true, regardless of our ability to believe it. All of which means that I could be wrong in what I believe. I could be a little wrong (this life could be all there is). I could be a lot wrong (see: Reformation, the). I could be going to hell (does that really need parenthetical explanation?).

When Eric Weiner says that God is not a lot of fun these days, I think he might be talking to the wrong people or listening to them. The loudest voices don’t speak for God. They speak for themselves or whoever is paying them. They don’t speak for me. Speaking for myself, I have a darn good time.

Being religious, for me, is full of surprises, moving moments, laughter, questions and
discussion. And I see lots of people around me having a good time as well. I saw people laughing together tonight as they distributed food. I heard clergy laughing today as they pieced together sermon ideas for this week. I heard children giggling through the Christmas story and I heard adults chuckling about how to tackle serious issues related to healthcare.

I’ve said the wrong words during church, choked on what I was singing when a spider jumped on music, forgotten major points of what I was going to say and even skipped elements of the service. Nothing happened. To me that’s not because there is no God, but because God isn’t worried about that.

I don’t think God’s worked up about perfect worship. Solemn faces. Pristine on-key singing. Regimented liturgical actions.

For me, my life of faith is on the edge, pushing the envelope, and skidding right up to the altar rail and thinking, “The Spirit led me back again! All right! We must be okay! Grace wins again!” Because I believe in a God of fullness, a fleshed out God who lives and breathes in all creation. The God who made me laughs, because I laugh and I am made in God’s image.

I believe this. I believe it is true, but my faith doesn’t make it true. It either is true or it isn’t. And I am living, whole-heartedly, like it is.

Which brings me back to mystery. Just because you can’t pick apart and explain every detail doesn’t make something unreal, dishonest or untrue. In age of science and reason, I think it’s good for all of us to know that there are things we cannot explain, we cannot fully grasp, we cannot totally control. That’s right. We’re not totally in control and it SUCKS to admit it.

Some things are mysterious. The pull and push of certain sounds, sights and smells can be unraveled and unraveled, yet still remain, in part, unexplained. And here’s where I think some Nones (not necessarily the author) and certain religious fundamentalists are singing from the same page. Everything has to have an explanation. Either it’s God or science. Having an explanation is about control.

Mystery. Learn to live with it. Learn to embrace it. Roll in it and let it wash over you. Babies in hay, stirring songs, sunrise, sunset, quiet nights, bustling cities, bread and wine and thou, fire, flower buds, blue skies, water, first words, last words, kisses, and amazing coincidences.

There will be some things you will never explain. This is most certainly true.

And you just have to laugh about that.