Be our primary Disease: A prayer by Walter Brueggemann

Be our primary disease,
and infect us with your justice;
Be our night visitor,
and haunt us with your peace;
Be our moth that consumes,
and eat away at our unfreedom.
Be our primary disease, our night visitor, our moth
infect, haunt, eat away...
Until we are toward you and with you and for you,
away from our injustices,
our anti-peace,
our unfreedom.
More like you and less like your resistance.
In the name of the one most like you,
most with you,
most for you...even Jesus. Amen .

All will be thrown down

It will all fall apart. Do you sometimes feel like this? That things are just coming apart at the seams and you can’t do a thing to stop it from happening? Do you look around and think, things are just a mess. What a mess we’re in. Do you feel occasionally sick at what you see happening around you? The lack of civility, the lack of compassion, people’s indifference to others, illnesses, sufferings, depravity, the careless waste of good things…Do you think, how can people live like that? Sometimes it’s easier to bury our heads in the sand or to blame others. We are usually better at judging and commenting than at acting and doing. Of course, everyone is entitled to their opinion, unless they begin to take action to confront the situation we are in. Some of you are thinking, what situation? I mean the one in which everything is falling apart. The situation in which things are not how they used to be. The situation in which what was once whole is now broken, what once had life is in decay, what once worked no longer works. You’re a soldier in training on an army base on Texas and one of your own officers opens fire in a classroom and kills 13 soldiers and wounds over a dozen others. This person’s act is linked to some extremist Muslim views, allegedly. And the implications for other Muslims in the armed services is…now the army is a diverse operation, perhaps one of the most diverse institutions we have. But we are in a war with Muslim extremists. Welcome to Chaos. Do you recall Japanese Americans being interred in camps during WWII? Diversity is risky. But sameness creates the façade of tranquility. Chaos is when the forces are at work to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy any semblance of created order. The earth was formed out of chaos, according to Genesis. And yet chaos ensues and disrupts in so many ways, personally, corporately, systemically; threatening to overwhelm us. We are living in a chaotic time. Change is happening at an exponential pace as technologies and advances in communications make it possible to take action on everything from locating friends to buying stocks from the comfort of your computer or handheld device. And yet we feel more alienated, depressed, lost. We are living in a time of great transition and flux, a time of chaos.

Attractional church

So much of what churches are about these days is driven by consumer marketing instincts.   Let's call it consumer evangelism.  Using marketing and advertising techniques, churches intend to get more people to connect to their congregations.  A flashy sign or website, postcard mass mailers and special events to attract the masses.  These all appear to be consistent with the culture in which we live.  Bigger and flashier is better.  And often these events are effective, meaning that they achieve their purpose.  What is the purpose?  To attract a crowd?  To sell something or someone?  To appeal to a broad share of the market, labeled "the unchurched"? This form of Church growth resembles the expansion of businesses, like walmart and target.  The goal is to get the biggest share of consumers, putting smaller churches "out of business."  The indepedent churches who have expertly adopted consumer marketing strategies for growth are clearly competitors, all but telling the masses that their goods and services are better, more relevant, new and improved--compared to the old-line churches and their archaic ways. 

Feast of All Saints

This is All Saints Sunday--an ancient festival commemorating faithful Christians who have died.  This morning a dissonance is created as this group of children goes downstairs for children’s church. We see the future before us, even as we bear witness to our past. These candles on the altar are symbols and reminders of our loved ones, those saints who have died. We see the past and the future intertwined in this space, our confined mortality stretching out in both directions.

B. McLaren's prayer for the earth

Brian McLaren

Rest is NOT a four-letter word

I'm exhausted this week. Our oldest started Kindergarten and we are all up and running by 6:30 am. We need to adjust. It'll take awhile. And then, just as we bein to setle into the pace, we will leave town for a week of retreat/vacation in the Adirondacks. We are so fortunate to have been led to Silver bay, a YMCA facility on Lake George in Upstate NY that offers special hospitality and respte for pastors and their families. We will spend a week. Its an 8-hour drive, but it takes four hours just to realize we're heading for rest. It takes a couple of days before we sink into the rhythm of rest. And its clear that in order for us to really rest, we have to go away. Far away, into isolation, off the grid, unplugged. “The apostles gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done ands taught. He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest awhile.” Mark 6:30-31.
I don’t vacation very often. We took no summer break this year. The last time I took a week off was in the winter. Jesus, Justice, Jazz New Orleans was pastoral ministry with its own kind of service and responsibilities. I’m also not an office-bound parish administrator. I spend my time meeting people, planning for mission with various partners, learning and teaching, helping and praying. I have at least four meetings a month in Harrisburg. I am invited to teach and lead groups in various locations around the synod. Toss in Peter’s Porch, prison visits, various committee meetings, and sermon/teaching preparation each week and I have an active schedule. Most nights I work on the computer and read from 8:00 until 10:00 pm. And that is taking into consideration that my first vocation is to be a husband and a father. The rhythm of my week always begins with Sunday worship. But every week has its own character, experiences, opportunities, and challenges. Sometimes I feel more like a human doing than a human being. You know what I mean? I think this is a dangerously unhealthy aspect of American culture. Our value and our livelihood is based on how productive we are. Isn’t there something flawed in our obsession with work and production? What if there is a better way to be human found in the life of Jesus? What if we are called by grace to rest, to God's time that is not urgent and harried, but slow and gentle.
We leave for the Adirondack mountains on September 25 and return October 5. We love this special time of family retreat. We canoe on the lake, take hikes, go on leaf hunts, make apple sauce, visit friends in Vermont, and rest! As a child my congregation offered annual winter retreats to the Lutheran Camp. These were special weekends with out church family that blended worship, fellowship, play, and rest. I still feel that we need an occasional reality check and a spiritual recalibration by way of retreat.
Dr. Marva Dawn wrote a book called, “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly.” It is a book Cherie and I have read and cherished. Though we often forget the gracious implications of the chapters found in it, the book is a reminder to us of our need to cease, rest, embrace, and feast. Dawn wrote, “One of the ugliest things about our culture is that we usually assess a person’s worth on the basis of his or her productivity and accomplishments. One of the first questions we ask when meeting a stranger is, “What do you do?” She continues, “The need to accomplish also leads to a terrible frenzy about time. The criterion for everything in our society has become efficiency.” Sunday mornings are like races for me anymore. The tyranny of getting it done on time has detracted from my desire to worship. I know that I need a break.
Is Sunday a Sabbath for you? How does that time become holy, connecting you to the endless and eternal God? How much of retirement do you spend doing things to stay busy? Does Jesus invite us into a healthier rhythm of life by seeking solitude and rest in the grace of GOD? May we listen to Jesus, who gives rest to our souls. Amen.

Mark 7:24-31
In last week’s gospel story (Mark 7:1-23) Jesus terminates purity religion. Keeping yourself clean to keep the offensive out would not be part of his kingdom message or way. This is not a sectarian holiness movement, like the Essenes, who were keeping themselves undefiled out in the desert. Jesus is not forming an exclusive group of “holier than thou” religious purists, self-righteous in their good works. Jesus has declared kosher laws dead and cleanliness rituals obsolete. Because the kingdom of GOD is not about purity laws that exclude. It is about pure hearts that bless and include and serve the weak and the poor.
But Jesus is put to the test in our gospel for today. Will he embody the new rules of the kingdom he is establishing as he goes along teaching and healing and walking to the cross? He is on a mission to reorient the Jewish community to love God by loving the neighbor; even the sin-sick, poor, wretched Gentile. But he is met by a woman, a stranger, a foreigner, a syro-phoenician woman---a Gentile. Whose daughter is possessed by demons! A single mom at her whits end—her daughter is using drugs, hanging out with this awful boy doing God knows what. Her only little girl curses at her almost every time she sees her. And now she is in real trouble. 16 years old. Sick. In danger. After a night of drinking and who knows what else, she comes home and calls for her mom, “mommy help me” she hears her say softly. Her daughter is lying on the floor convulsing. When she comes downstairs she finds her unresponsive, tremoring, vomiting. She calls 911 and the ambulance comes. She hears the medics begin CPR; she isn’t breathing. Oh my God. She says. Oh my God. No. As the ambulance speeds away, she falls on her knees in the front yard crying and she prays, “Lord, help me, I beg you. Save her. Please. I’ll do anything. Don’t let her die tonight.” No answer. And then the overwhelming self-doubt. Its my own fault. Her mind is racing. She thinks of her divorce and her alcoholic ex-husband’s abusive temper and how long her daughter had endured him. And she thinks of her own sins, her own missteps, her own sicknesses. She curses the damn cigarettes and the weight she has gained since the divorce. She curses the house in disrepair and the money she has spent on herself. She curses the second shift nursing job that prevents her from seeing her daughter in the evenings. She curses her distance from her sisters, who seem to have it together, and clearly judge her a failure. She is a failure. She curses her loneliness in the world. She is so angry with herself. She does not deserve God’s help. Would God even listen? Had God not turned his back on her, after all she had turned her back on GOD. She hadn’t been to church in 20 years. Her daughter had never been. And now she is on her knees begging for her daughter’s life. She dared to beg God. Why should God care about her or her messed up daughter? She clutched her stomach and sobbed and sobbed in the grass. This was it.
Why should God care? A purity religion might say, God doesn’t. God takes care of those who take care of themselves. Or God blesses those who are worthy, God-fearing, religious, faithful, etc…A sign of God’s blessing is prosperity, health, harmony. She is obviously cursed. Punished. God does not work on behalf of the ungrateful, on behalf of the sinful or the wicked. God does not care for those who reject God’s commands and laws. They are left to their own devises. They get what they deserve.
Jesus was in no way obligated to speak to this woman, in no way obligated to help. He could have ignored her. Jewish custom and religious habit, actually obeying God’s commandments, would require that he ignore her. She has three strikes against her: the wrong gender, the wrong race, and the wrong religion. Jesus was supposed to let this one go.
So why does Jesus help her? Is it not love? Not his, but hers. She loves her daughter enough to face rejection and humiliation, scorn, prejudice, misogyny, abuse. She could’ve been hurt or killed. And then where would her daughter be? She takes a bold risk in fear and trembling because she loves her daughter. Like all of us. She loves. Love is boundless. Ask anyone, who do you love? And they will tell you.
Jesus recognizes this maternal love. It is how he understands God the Father. Love. It is why he has come to teach and to suffer for sinners. Love.
The Kingdom of GOD has been opened for all who will hear this message of grace and tell its wonders. When have you begged God? When have you felt unworthy and yet somehow blessed? How has God saved your life or the life of one you love? This woman is out there. I met her. She is a neighbor. And God loves her too much to let her suffer alone. Jesus knows its safer and easier to hide, to ignore her, to walk away. There’s only so much I can do. Her story is overwhelming and her needs are too great. She is offensive to me and undeserving. God’s work. Our hands. Amen.