®

EPUMC  -  SERMONS  FROM  DAN

WE  WELCOME  YOU  to

EDEN   PRAIRIE

 UNITED  METHODIST  CHURCH

OPEN HEARTS  to live and serve with compassion and to share God's love

OPEN MINDS  to seek spiritual formation and encourage each person's faith journey

OPEN DOORS  to invite and welcome all to join in discipleship

HOME

WORSHIP TIMES & STAFF

Weekly Sermons from Dan – January 1, 2012

“What Do They See in Him?”

Matthew 2:1-12

Like a lot of other people I’m a little nostalgic at this time of year.  There is something within me that has always enjoyed looking back and seeing the past through the eyes I’m living with now.  I’ve come to value this very much. In fact, in one evaluation I took called Strength Finders, my main strength, the survey said, was that I am a contextual person.  I try to understand the context or where something has come from before I do anything else.  

So the other night I was remembering my old college roommate, Charlie Headley, and the school year of September 1975 - May 1976.  Depending on how you count, using 2011 or 2012, that is 36 or 37 years ago.  While at my computer and on a wild hunch, I typed in his name and the name of our college. You won’t believe this, but they have digitized our college yearbook.  McKendree College was a small school, and as I flipped through the digital pages I found a couple of pictures of Charlie and myself.  At 20, I had long hair, wire rimmed glasses, jeans and not even a hint of a beard.

There is one picture I have never forgotten. It captures, in one frame, the most crucial time of my life. When I saw it, I felt as if I was back in that very moment in January of 1976.  Charlie and I are walking down the steps of the Student Center. It is snowing, and Charlie is buttoning his jacket, which has our fraternity letters on it. I am already wrapped up in my fraternity jacket with a scarf which my girl friend had given me for Christmas.  I remember we had just come from a very engaging round of double deck pinnacle, but for some reason, we had started talking about the religion class that we were in together.  In the picture, I’m pointing my finger and Charlie has his head down, and our lives are in front of us.

As we walked across the Commons, we saw the editor of the yearbook with his camera and his head sticking out of a window.  We stopped underneath the window, put our arms around each other and said, “Hey, you should take our picture for the yearbook.”  He said, “I already did.” 

Pictures are an interesting way to remember.   In them, we are trying to rediscover a moment to live out of – a moment we have perhaps lived from.

Each of the stories of the nativity is, in some way, a snapshot of not only of the moment of time when the Christ child is born but also of its context, the significance or what was important about that birth.  Nativity stories are told to create a picture to live from; they are a way of remembering, in shorthand, what our faith means. If we take the time and the spiritual energy it takes to read the stories of Jesus’ birth on their own, that is without the influence of the others, it can lead us to some interesting places.

For instance; today as we celebrate Epiphany Sunday that traditional time when the Wise Men visit the Holy Family, the question that comes to my mind as a contextual person is “What do these Magi or Wise Men see in this baby?  Another way of asking this question is, “What is  Matthew trying to tell us about Jesus in this picture?”

To do this we need to take a closer look at the story in Matthew without thinking about the story we read last week in Luke.  In Matthew, Jesus is a new Moses.  Jesus is going to be the one that God promised to lead the people out of slavery, not from the Egyptians as Moses did, but the Romans who are the most recent oppressors.  The main character is King Herod.  History knows him as Herod the Great, but he was also a puppet king of the Roman Empire.  That this baby somehow escapes the powerful King Herod is as much a miracle for Matthew as anything else about his birth. That these Wise Men are somehow convinced not to cooperate with this King is not only a miracle, but it is also subversive.  This tells us something very significant.

In their book, “The First Christmas,”  Dominick Crossan and Marcus Borg say, “The birth stories subvert the dominant consciousness of the first century world as well as our own.”  Matthew is telling us that from the very beginning of his life, Jesus is involved in a movement whose purpose is to change or transform the world.  Everything will change through the life of this child.

The Wise Men, of course, offer gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. These gifts are signs of the change that is coming.  Gold in ancient times was desired as both a sign of wealth and beauty.  Frankincense was the fragrance most often associated with temple sacrifice. Myrrh, another fragrance, was often used for embalming the dead, as it would later be for Jesus himself.  One preacher put it this way, perhaps the wisemen knew something that Mary and Joseph did not know, and that you and I only discover after the fact. That this child would grow up unconcerned with the beauty, wealth and power that consumes most other people in this world. That he, himself, would become the fresh fragrance in the temple that the religious leaders would despise. Perhaps somehow, the Wisemen knew that though he was the Son of God, women would one day prepare myrrh and other spices to embalm his limp body. It is not mere coincidence that the wisemen brought these specific gifts to Jesus.

What a very different picture we see when we have only Matthew behind the camera. There is none of the sentiment of Luke.  Matthew has an attitude of, “just the facts, man.” No matter that the baby looks scarcely in charge and the wise men don’t want to look him in the eye. When we read just the gospel of Matthew, we are encouraged to see the baby Jesus through the telephoto lens of the cross.

So here is the thing about that picture of Charlie and I; in a very short time we forgot all about that day, about that picture.  We didn’t believe that the picture make it into the yearbook.  And then, at the end of April that year, something very tragic happened in my life. My girl friend, who had made the scarf I was wearing, was killed in an auto accident. That event, that time has in many ways shaped my life.  Maybe on another day I’ll tell some of that story, but today I want to finish the story of this picture. 

This picture did make the yearbook.  It is at the very back next to a picture in which the yearbook is dedicated to my girlfriend.  But here is the thing.  In the text, the dedication talks about “helping hands.”  Without mentioning our names but right beside our picture, the editor, in a few short sentences, describes how my friend Charlie walked beside me through this desperately difficult time.  It is a picture taken six months before any of us knew how much it would mean to our lives.  My guess is that anyone who knew the woman that yearbook is dedicated to also knew that the editor was talking about my grief and Charlie’s helping hand.

When I stumbled upon that picture this week, I was drawn back to that year; that eye opening, life changing, absolutely unbelievably fun, emotional roller coaster, academically difficult, and spiritually draining year.  And what I remember, the thing that has stayed with me even more than the grief of losing one I once loved, is the helping hand Charlie offered that year.  We have remained forever close. 

In some ways, you could say, I have modeled whatever good has come out of my life from this picture. Two guys talking – unaware of when the call for friendship, courage and compassion will be needed.  After I had looked at the picture for a good long time, I posted an email and sent the picture to Charlie.

The story of the birth of Jesus in Matthew announces that everything, in the world as we know it, is changing.  The world is changing from being ruled by those who used the iron fist of oppression to those who like Jesus knew how to be the beautiful helping hands of sacrifice. It shows as the hands of the wise men are extended, the beauty of the sacrifice that will come and how it is that even as we smell death approaching, we can also detect the faint odor of the new life God is trying to offer all the world.

Weekly Sermons from Dan – January 8, 2012

“How Wet Do You Need to Get?”

Mark 1:4-11

How wet did you get at your baptism?  Was it a sprinkle of water, like most we’ve seen here, with someone holding you and keeping the water out of your eyes so you wouldn’t cry?  Do you know the date?  Was it so long ago that you can only remember it in the cells of your body that wondered why a stranger was holding you and why, this time, you were held only so close to the water and no further?  Were you frightened or curious?  Were you asleep or shall we say “not cooperative”?

How wet did you get at your baptism?  Was the water poured over you like washing your hair in the kitchen sink?  Did it happen on your Confirmation Sunday, just before you were confirmed?  As the water came down in front of you, did you see it taking anything of yourself into the basin, bowl, altar rail or whatever else was there to catch the water?  Did it refresh you or invigorate you?  Did it embarrass or annoy you?  Did the water remind you of how oily your hair was or how you looked when it was wet?

How wet did you get at your baptism? Were you put all the way under and then pulled up water dripping down the back of your neck like it does when you climb out of a swimming pool?  Did it sort of cling to your clothes before you went to the little room to change back into something dry?  And there, did you have a minute or two to be by yourself to experience what was now new or different about yourself?  Did you stand there, in the moment before you dried yourself off, wondering if you should let it soak in just a little longer just in case there was something real about what the preacher said? Did you wonder how you could save just a little of this very water for a time when you might doubt it or for a time when you would need something like saving?

Like some of you I was baptized in a different tradition.  I’ve told you I was Baptist when I was a child. In that tradition you are not baptized until you have made some sort of public affirmation of faith. That can happen as early as around seven years old.  I’ve heard stories of folks baptized in the moment before they die.  This is known as believer’s baptism. Baptism is, in this understanding, a sign of a decision or choice we have made about what God has done for us.  Here baptism becomes something of an initiation.  Usually you get really wet, one is immersed.

In our tradition we practice a different inclination on this sacrament.  Baptism can occur at any time in one’s life, including as an infant or child. Baptism can be by sprinkling, like we did today, pouring as I often do at or before confirmation or what is often known as immersion, which I’ve never done but I’m sure willing to do sometime.  In this understanding, baptism is a sacred sign or sacramental act of something we believe God has done for us without our acceptance or rejection of it.  In our tradition we are asked to affirm this act at our confirmation.

Usually we don’t get babies or folks very wet.  It’s a bit civil.  But it does the same thing as putting someone under water as a sign that they have given up or died to one way of living and have been pulled up into another.

If you ask me the real question about baptism is not really how wet you get, or when you get wet, but when do you recognize that you feel the water dripping down your back or streaming down your hair or soaking into your skin?  When do the heavens open up for you and you experience something of the blessing Jesus experienced? The real question is how wet with life do you need to get for the heavens to open as they did for Jesus when his cousin, John, stood in the Jordan River with him and the heavens were torn apart and Jesus heard, “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.”

I came upon one of the richest images of what Jesus arising out of the water means for us in a very odd place – at the movies.  I was watching “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” which is modern version of an ancient Greek tragedy.  It’s about three escaped prisoners trying to find their way to something like a new life.  As you watch this scene, pay close attention to the fellow who goes under the water. Watch his face.  What do you see in it?  When in your life have you seen yourself, experienced yourself looking like him?

These three men, who are somewhere between funny and tragic, encounter a white robed choir marching down to a river singing, “I went down to the river to pray, studying about that good old day when we shall wear the robe and crown, O Lord show me the way.  O brother let’s go down, come on down, O brother let’s go down, let’s go down to the river to pray.”  As they reach the river they are immersed.  Elmer, one of the three, suddenly turns, cuts in line and is baptized. 

Just before he is lowered under the water, the camera angle shifts to show his face from above.  You see Delmer break the surface of the water going under. Then as he comes up, just as he breaks the surface, it is like the heavens are torn apart for him.  He sees or hears something on the inside of himself and turns to the preacher.

Did you see his face when he came out of the water?  What does that look like to you? What was it like when it was you?  I don’t mean you coming out of the water of a murky river but coming out of a tragic time, a challenging time, a scary moment, a surgery, an accident, a test at school, a new job, trying to find a job or any other things which we often refer to as a “baptism by fire.”  

What blessing did you experience; what did that water look like in your life when you see your face in the mirror as you held your new born son or daughter? What did you experience as you stood in a serving line at Simpson Shelter, spooning out some of the hot dish you had made to someone you never saw before? Did you understand the gift they were giving you?   When do you break through the embryonic fluid of your spiritual life and burst into the fullness of life that had been awaiting you? Was it in a way that welcomes you into a fullness of life? Did you have any idea that it was so close?

What do the waters of life, that we live in every day, say about how we can be transformed by life?  What do these waters say about how wet you need to get in life before we recognize that we are not alone?

I’m not sure you can ever be wet enough to realize that baptism is not about you.  It’s not about the water; it’s not even really about the events that twist and turn and knead and sometimes transform us; it’s about God.  And it is not just about what God has done for you or is willing to do for me.  Baptism is an attempt to describe something of the nature of God.  God’s nature is to be forgiving. God’s nature is to take the worn out parts of our humanness, clean them up, freshen them up and then never let them dry up again, ever – because God is going to use them to bless this world.

How wet do you need to get to take that in?  How wet do you need to get in life before you begin to live with that divine nature as a part of your humanness? I’ll tell you what I think. I think we can’t get wet enough, we can’t dive into life enough, we can’t allow enough of life to come pouring down upon us, we can’t get enough of the sweet sprinkles of life in order to take all that God is attempting to provide for us. This is the message of Jesus Christ.  God will do whatever is needed. God will even break open the heavens, to bless this life, to bless your life.

May we together march right into the waters of life. And may you hear that divine blessing, “Come on in – the water is fine.”

Weekly Sermons from Dan – January 15, 2012

“From Faith to New Life”

I Samuel 3:1-10; John 1:43-51

At home, my office is upstairs. Katie has taken over the dining room table, which is downstairs, to write her sermons.  On my way up to my office, cup of coffee in hand, I asked her how it was coming. She gave me the “I’m trying to write the first sentence” look.  For those of you who don’t know what this means, it means, “Please don’t talk to me now.”

If you ask me, the hardest sentence, for any preacher, writer, student or anyone trying to put down a thought to a piece of paper or computer monitor, is the first one.  Really, the first sentence, the first line you say or thought that you allow to pass though the filters of your brain, is the hardest for most any conversation, encounter or relationship.  Even your relationship with your life-long friend or spouse had a first word.  Our relationship with God is no different.

In the stories we’ve read, both Samuel and Nathaniel have trouble with deciding what they should say, what they should do, what their first response to an invitation to an encounter with God should be.  Samuel, still a boy, runs to his surrogate grandfather. He is confused about what is going on. “Here I am, for you called me.”  Don’t jump to conclusions or be misled by Nathaniel. He uses an old, adult version of being confused which he turns to sarcasm and says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  Both are stumped, stuck.  I can see Nathaniel staring into the sand of the shores of Galilee wondering – “What is Andrew talking about this time?” Or perhaps, for just a moment before he spoke, he considered what we all have considered, but not allowed ourselves to quite hope, which is, “what if….”

As I finished my first cup of coffee, there was a knock at our door.  Me, being the caring husband and equally understanding fellow preacher, walked out of my office to the landing to see if the other preacher was going to move from her first sentences to answer the door.  Katie could see me from where she was sitting. She also had seen who had walked up to our front door.  Katie looked glued to her seat.  She looked up at me and said, “We have Mormons at the front door.”

If you want to learn something about how to think about what you are going to say, before you say it, remember the last time you opened your front door to Mormons, to a salesperson, or, for that matter, were approached by the people in the mall who try to hand you things from a little kiosk.  I had my line all ready before I hit the last step.  Want to hear what it was?  “Excuse me, but we are two United Methodist pastors trying to write our sermons, and, you know, Sunday is coming.”  So I opened the door and I was surprised. There was a young couple, in their mid 20’s, (the same age as our kids) standing there. I was so surprised to see a young woman that I didn’t get my line out before she started to speak. 

When you listen to the story of little Samuel, he doesn’t seem so surprised by what he hears.  In his innocence he finds a perfectly good explanation for who is calling him, but in his innocence he is mistaken.  Nathaniel, although not an innocent child, is described as something of a good person.  It’s Jesus himself who says of Nathaniel, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”  This means that Nathaniel is ,what I call, a “good duck.”  Nathaniel may be the disciple who can be the mentor or model for many of us.  We are not bad people; we have our own dramas and concerns in life. On the whole we’re functioning, contributing members of society, people who are enjoying life.  And the sarcasm we use is an invitation to say more, to help us to ponder “what if….”  Many of us are like Nathaniel who was walking with his friend, Andrew, to meet Jesus. Jesus calls him a good duck, and he says, “How do you know?”  We are at least surprised, if not startled, that faith has come knocking on our door.

I was so surprised to be talking to a young woman who was about my daughter’s age, that I didn’t catch their names. I only caught that they were husband and wife, they were from some place in Chanhassen, and that they were on a visitation ministry, inviting people to read the Bible more.  She said it so nicely, almost skillfully, and they looked so cold standing on my stoop that I was glad I had my line already coming out of my mouth.  They even laughed when I said, “…. and Sunday’s coming.”   On another day, I just might have invited them in. I like to think I’m a “good duck.”

I do not believe that all “visitation ministries” of this type are the kind of witness to our faith I want to be associated with.  They are not the initial way of witnessing to faith that I envision Jesus encouraging us in. First it feels like an assumption that it’s OK for someone to knock on your door at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning because they have a need to get you to do something they think you should be doing. An invitation I can live with, a manipulative first line to get me to your church, I’m not so sure about. The second thing is I’ve been around long enough to know that the invitation to read the Bible is an invitation to read the Bible a certain way, and that just rubs me the wrong way. 

However, you’ve got to admire whatever it is that has so motivated this young couple in their mid twenties to get dressed up on a Saturday morning, to stand out in the cold, knock on doors and have a word to say to all of the good ducks and the not so good ducks of this world – or at least in Eden Prairie and Chanhassen.

Each time this happens to me, I think of my own kids, in their 20’s, and whom I love and am so very proud of.  They would not consider doing something like this for the very reasons I’ve just said.  It’s why I keep saying to Katie and to myself, “We set out to raise kids in an open minded, thoughtful faith and, by gosh, we did it. 

Still, I worry about just how my kids are moving from faith into life.  How are they, how are we, taking into our lives, what is, for most of us in this room, a belief that God was and is working in the world through this one called Jesus? How do we see ourselves being motivated to reach out to the good ducks, the needy ducks, the worried and fearful ducks as well as the not so good ducks of this world?  What are the first words we use to move from beyond believing to a new life, to a new way of living? 

This is what both stories we have read today are about.  Samuel hears his name as the first words to a long life of service. Nathaniel hears the first words of Jesus as something of a mystery; Jesus seems to know about him. John tells us about Nathaniel standing by a fig tree a few minutes before, but what he is getting at is that Jesus is perceptive. Jesus knows something about Nathaniel that only Nathaniel knows. Today we might call this, Nathaniel being, “called out” by Jesus. Jesus cuts through Nathaniel’s sarcasm and reintroduces him to something like the innocence of the boy, Samuel, who is willing to listen, who is willing to be open to the moment that is before him. And it is in that moment, the moment Jesus speaks, that Nathaniel begins a new way of living.

I want to share with you a brief paragraph from one of the moments when something holy cut through my sarcasm. It was at a time in my life when I was ready to throw the baby of faith out with the bathwater of the religion which I had been taught. It comes from a voice that still speaks to me, that still calls to me in the night that invites me in the middle of every day to consider a fuller life.  It is the voice of Dietrich Bonheoffer, a German teacher and pastor, who wrote from the Nazi prison cell where he eventually died.

“I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. By this worldliness, I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world. That, I think, is faith.” 

I have come to believe that this living unreservedly in life is the new life Jesus promises, and it is also where we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God. Some may believe that it calls you to knock on a door on Saturday mornings.  I believe it has more to do with how you talk with the person who makes your coffee, the person you see every day, it’s the way you relate with the teacher your child may be having difficulty with, and it’s the moment you decide to no longer be complacent by your silence when people are talking behind someone’s back.

The end of the gospel story says that great things can happen when we do this. When we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, others can know the new life Jesus lived.

May you hear something of that knock on your heart’s door, may you pay attention to that tap on your life’s shoulder and may you learn that faith leads you to a full life and leads others to a new life in Christ Jesus.

Weekly Sermons from Dan – January 22, 2012

“Beyond the Horizon to a New Shore”

Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 1:14-20

We have all left something behind: a net, a job, a relationship, a dream.  We have all dropped something like a hot potato or at other times dropped it after years of trying to hold on.  We have all left something behind, soaking up the sand and the salt as we found a way to move on. It might have been a habit that annoyed even ourselves, a routine that became mind-numbing, or an addiction that threatened too much. 

We’ve been in the bare feet of these fishermen who Jesus talks with in our scripture today, looking beyond the horizon, as they knew it - toward the new shore he is inviting them.  We’ve all been in the moment when the net is slipping out of our hands and onto the sand, the ID badge is being handed over to the HR person, the paper is signed and passed across the table to your now ex-wife’s lawyer, the email is opened and you let go of the past, however good, bad or indifferent, and look forward to a positive future.

We’ve all had a time when something different in life calls out to us, and we have found ourselves in the moment of listening to the siren’s call to a different life, an unfamiliar direction, a new shore. As we listened, we also left behind those things that have caused us pain, grief or disappointment, as well as those which have given our lives richness, fullness and the comfort of contentment.  We left behind distress, worry and the anguish that comes with wondering “what if.”  We also leave behind the calm that comes in the satisfaction of happiness, the ego boost of accomplishment, or the approval that comes with success. We have known the empty hands and the bare feet of the fishermen Jesus invited along his way.

We have also been in the foul smelling clothes of Jonah, the prophet, just out of the belly of the beast.  We’ve been in the moment, when just after the most challenging time of our lives (the lost job, the death of a love of our life, the bill we cannot pay), and we find ourselves being asked to accept, to endure one thing more; which is one thing too many  and one we never anticipated. In that moment, we realize that we have become hostile to life, harsh with those around us, maybe even bitter at our core. If you have ever really been bitter, you know it is not just seeing the edge of an abyss; it is watching the rocks and dirt, you have kicked over with your own feet, drop out of sight as you test how far down you might be willing to go.

The stories we’ve read today in scripture are, if you ask me, a study in contrast.  Jesus invites a few disciples along his way, and they are dropping what they are doing, letting go of whatever life they were living in order to readily, immediately, and enthusiastically follow the new life Jesus invites them to.  Contrast that with poor Jonah; who having endured the belly of the beast, ends up going to the hated city of Nineveh anyway. He is thinking that he will at least have the pleasure of gloating over their doom, even if it is he who has been chosen to offer a forlorn hope of repentance.  And then, as we have read today, of all things… they listen to him, and they listen to God. They change their attitude, God changes his mind, and we are left wondering if Jonah will ever change his heart.

This contrast makes me wonder which model, which response, which reaction we recognize in our lives.  Or is it a bit of both, a bit of knowing immediately that this is what you had to do and a bit of being dragged into a new direction?  Which one have you been this week?  Which one of these was it for Don, as he moved or morphed from being a teacher, writer, editor, to becoming a choir director, music coordinator, worship leader?

When does this happen? When in our lives have we taken up an opportunity or have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into something so new and different that it changed us forever?  When have we given ourselves over to something quickly that helps us to see the better part of ourselves, which has been awaiting its release?

Let me tell you something of my story.  My call story of leaving something behind cannot be told without telling you about something called The Academy for Spiritual Formation. The Academy is a retreat that occurs over five days.  It is full of prayer, worship, lectures, small groups, and, if you can believe it, hours and hours of silence. I was a bit desperate for some model, some way not just to deepen my spiritual life but, to tell you the truth, to save it.  After initially hearing about this retreat, I did not want to go to this Academy thing because, I think, I was more like Jonah than Peter, James and John; not only did I really not want to be transformed, I had become bitter.

But I went.  I sat through worship, I listened to the lectures, I endured the small groups, but it was, of all things, the silence that I was drawn to, that I could not wait to get to. You must just believe me, it was in the silence that I found a way through my bitterness; it was the silence that turned me to look not at the abyss I had come to, but towards the horizon and eventually to something like a new shore for my life. How I have come to value silence is a study in contrast in my life.  There is a moment when it became clear, and yet I am still getting used to its call.

One night, after a very long day of reading, remembering and listening, I was finally by myself, in a private room and unable to sleep. I was so moved by thoughts and ideas that I could not keep them pinned up inside of me. I had to tell myself that sitting on the floor of an old convent with a candle burning in front of me and a cup of tea beside me is just like sitting by a campfire with whatever one has at a campfire in order to keep something of one’s man-pants on. But I’m telling you that is how I looked at this experience.  I was just there, not reading, not talking, not really even thinking, but just being quiet.  This was, if you can believe it, very different for me.

So I began to write in my journal.  I wrote so fast that when I look back at that entry now, I can barely read what I wrote. I wrote until my hand hurt.  But it’s not what I wrote; it is what I heard, something I saw.  And it wasn’t something from our Christian tradition, it wasn’t some vision of Jesus, it wasn’t even someone from my past being the prophetic voice in my life.  What I saw, I’ve come to understand, was a Native American totem.

Things we hear, and, for us visual people, see in silence are not always what they seem.  For me, it took literally years to discern what came to me, what I saw in those moments that night by that candle.  Like Jonah, it was a long time before I came to trust what some might call a vision, another might call a hallucination and still another, a revelation.  I had spent much of my adult life refuting and dismissing stories like the very one I’m telling you. And so, I spent years really doubting, questioning and trying to explain what I saw.

The truth is, it took me a long time to leave behind the insistence that I could understand and thus control all there was to my relationship with God.  I left behind the hope that just tradition, only doing good in the world or even the time and effort I had put into study and reflection would provide all that was needed.  I left all these behind and looked to the new shore of mystery in my life. And when I did come to trust that calling, that direction, I began to recognize its relevance for my life in a way that was so powerful, so deep that it was visceral, primal and, what I have come to claim as, spiritual even of God and Christ’s calling and direction for my life.

Like Jonah I had to spend time in a different if not darker place than I wanted to be. Since then, I have not often hesitated to follow the direction of that silence. Like Jonah, I had prayed and had been faithful without much which could be measured as an accomplishment in the spirit.  But then, like the disciples, that night I experienced prayer in such a different, deeper, and, for me, more visceral way, a way in which my attention was immediately turned on, my inner light was lit up. 

Perhaps it is recognizing that the life of the spirit is sometimes a life of contrast. I have known the truth of the old Jewish proverb that says, “Whenever someone says, “I have a plan, God laughs.”

Perhaps you also have had this experience of finding what you were not looking for after a time of stubbornness or skepticism.  Perhaps it was years before you agreed to go on a mission trip because the best thing for you to do with any real tool is to hand it to or go get it for someone else.  But now, it’s you who immediately considers giving up a week of vacation to go wherever, whenever as soon as you know the dates.  You do this because you know the mission that happens is not just in the work; it is what you bring back, how being with someone who needs you brings out the better part of you, and how it is that this better part of you is more than you ever thought you would become.

Maybe for you it was a long, long, time of just doing church as usual and then one day, while you were sorting out the rotten potatoes at the little Mom and Pop grocery store, or one morning while talking to your boss, that you heard something in his voice that caused you to to pursue whatever it was he seemed to have in his life.  And although you can pin point before or after a particular potato; it has also taken you years to develop a discipline of reading the Bible.

What has called out to you? Was it the music of a choir, a band, an orchestra an organ, a voice?  Was it the beauty of a campsite?  Was it the eager eyes of a student you were teaching? Was it the conflicted crying eyes of an adolescent in trouble?  What has called out to you in this world and, either in that very moment or over the years as you look back out of that moment, you pursued a deeper more intense faith.

Today, we are invited to look beyond the horizon of life as we know it to a new shore, to a different life both in the immediate moment like Peter, James and John, and in

the rolling of the waves of time like Jonah.

Weekly Sermons from Dan – January 29, 2012

“From Bondage to Freedom”

Mark 1:21-28

What do you think had a hold of him?  Was it some sort of other being – a demon that had somehow chosen him, somehow become such a part of him that it spoke without correction?  Was it some sort of mental illness? Was he bi-polar or passive/aggressive? Could he have been a manic/depressive? Had he come to Jesus to soothe the savage beast within, only to have the beast erupt in an awful and spine tingling outburst? “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth; we know who you are….”  Whatever it is that speaks in this man’s voice, it uses the plural, “us.”  It’s as if there is more than one demon, more than one person, or part of a person who interrupts Jesus that day.

The ancient world, the world of Jesus, believed in demons as much as we moderns believe in psychosis, addiction, obsessions and phobias.  And the writers of the gospel were not so much attempting to explain their world to readers who would come around 2,000 years later, but rather, they were attempting to reveal what it was that Jesus had to say to the world they knew, what Jesus did for them, in his time.  All this is to say, that it really doesn’t matter if you believe in a demon as some sort of supernatural being that are like those creatures in science fiction movies who find their way into a human body.  Maybe we would recognize what had a hold of him as a mental illness, an emotional instability or just a very bad day. Whichever it is, we moderns can recognize ourselves in the story.  We recognize that there are powerful forces at work within in each of us, within all of us that we do not always control, and sometimes they have a hold of us, sometimes they control us.

Whatever it is that has a hold of him, it is important to recognize that this demon, more than the religious leaders Jesus was talking with, acknowledged Jesus as “the Holy One of God.”  It was a case of opposites attract, or the dark side of deep speaks to the deepest part of us, that is connected to God. The demon in this story knew its nemesis and wanted nothing to do with Jesus.  The demon feared its’ rival. Whatever had a hold of that man did not want to share him with whatever it recognized about Jesus.

Do opposites attract?  And if they do, when they do, what happens?  I “googled” this yesterday, and one of the first options I had was a You Tube story from National Geographic. It was about a kitten and a crow that played together, ate together, and slept together.  Another was a list of how our culture has incorporated this idea; opposites attract, to create tension or plot in plays and movies.  Think of what the Odd Couple would be if Felix and Oscar both wanted to clean the apartment.  Or where would be the fun in Tom and Jerry or the Road Runner and the Coyote or the drama in “Beauty and the Beast?” Yesterday morning as I was saying hello at the Women’s Retreat, I asked about opposites attracting. Somebody said, “My mom and dad.” Sometimes it takes seeing ourselves differently to see our true selves.  Maybe the first step in moving beyond the bondage of the demons that have a hold of us, toward the freedom that faith offers is recognizing what we have become.  Maybe we need to take a very good look in the mirror.

This story tells us that we forget who we really are; we are taken over by roles, by wants, by circumstances.  We are drafted into wars, thrown into lives, and learn quickly to participate in oppressive systems. We are caught up in impossible situations and, instead of the best of us rising to the top, it sometimes sinks down to the bottom and is hidden, holed up, or held down by something that is within us, but not really of us.

Who among us has not at some time come to the realization that we were something like an eagle pecking at the ground with a flock of turkeys?

I was talking to a mom the other day about her experience of helping her second teenager learn to drive.  She was telling me that, in a moment of panic that many parents like her have known, she absolutely “lost it” in the car.  After what amounted to a confession, she said, “I don’t know where it came from, but it came right out of me.” I think this mom has done well with what ever had a hold of her.  That demon was called out, named, confronted and then, let us hope for the next teenager in the family… transformed. 

Let me tell you another story.  I could tell by the sound of his voice over the phone that something different had a hold of Chris.  A few years before, when his sister was in my Confirmation Class and he was a senior in high school, he had been the one with so much self-confidence and self-esteem that he came into our class in an angel outfit and his wrestling head gear. He was the angel who was wrestling with me as Jacob.  Chris was one of the sharpest, smartest, most impressive yet unpretentious young men I have ever known.  But on this day, when he called me out of the blue, his confident nature was gone, his voice was conflicted, stuttered, struggling to say something. 

I had not heard from Chris in years. He had not done well in life. He was facing a second DUI charge and the consequences of entering rehab or facing jail time. Now, Chris was nothing short of conceited, snobbish, even self –absorbed. As is the pattern, he had excuses for all the things that had gone wrong. But there was more; there was an edge, a meanness, a nastiness in his voice that came through the phone as distinctly as any slime or blood curdling creature I’ve seen in any horror movie.  This is what troubled me more than anything else; I knew it wasn’t Chris I was talking to but something else, someone else, some disease, some anger, some embarrassment, some shame, something else.

Jesus did not say much to this man.  The gospel lesson has him speaking only directly to the demon. I imagine Jesus, staring down the voice, as he says his only words in the story, “Be silent, and come out of him.”  It is in the brevity of Jesus’ words that I think something very important is shown.  Just as Jesus is recognized by the demon, Jesus recognizes that he is dealing with forces that are far beyond this man’s reach, much deeper than they appear.  This is not just a man interrupting an important meeting, it is not another opponent wanting to argue with Jesus, and it is not just a crazy person escaping the asylum. This is, for the gospel writer, the wickedness of the world taking voice, having shape, coming out of hiding and challenging the good that has come into the world in Jesus.

We moderns often find ways to explain away this idea of a battle between all that is good and the opposite end, the darker side, the evil in our world.  We do this when we polarize ourselves politically and blame another ideology, instead of recognizing the fanatic within ourselves. We do this when we deny that we participate in larger even oppressive systems that are at the root of poverty, injustice and inequality in our world.  We participate in this when we are satisfied to fix the problem of hunger by donating food and not taking a long and difficult look at the inability of our affluent culture to care for the basic needs of all.  We deny the clarity and how high the stakes are when we do not see or listen for or call out the evil that is beside us and within us.

I listened to Chris for a very long while, and he became increasingly hostile. Like the demon in Jesus’ story, whatever had a hold of this young man was not going quietly into the night; which, when you think about it, is the way it goes for most of us. The scars that have taken root within us emotionally and spiritually do not come loose without some pain.  We shake in anger, squirm in discomfort or shudder with sobs too deep for words when whatever has a hold of us begins its release.

Chris was in the middle of making another conceited claim of superiority, when I simply said, “Enough.”  Chris stopped and said, “What did you say?”  I repeated, “Enough.” When I said, “Enough,” for the second time Chris became quiet.  He just quit talking.  I’ve learned that this is not the time to fill the air with the noise of your voice.  So I was quiet also.

And then out of the quiet over the phone, I heard the sharp, focused, not so much humbled or humiliated voice of the one who once was willing to wrestle in an angel outfit so that a Confirmation Class could learn a story. Chris spoke three words.  He said, “I get it.” 

I have no idea what brought Chris to say those words.  I’m guessing that whatever brought him to that place helped him to see or hear a burdened and bound part of himself.  I like to think that a little of what Chris “got” was the love of God in Christ Jesus. Chris – like a lot of us – is still getting it. He has spent almost a year learning about his affliction, repairing the damage it has caused, and being accountable to others.  I just heard from him last week. I heard a voice that was free, I heard Chris again.

Perhaps we are attracted to Jesus because we recognize something in him that overwhelms us, something that will cleanse us with truth, with deep and loving truth, and like that one in the gospel story, that truth about ourselves will set us free to soar.

Back to EPUMC Home Page

You are visitor number