THREE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ONE OR TWO

There are three great feasts in the life of the church. Each depends on the other two to be relevant in our lives as Christians. In our daily lives, however, one takes precedence over the other two. What is interesting is that this one is the one which we celebrate the least as individual believers, if we, in fact, personally celebrate it at all. As unbelievable as that may seem, I think it is true.

The three feasts? Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. In order of how we celebrate these feasts, Christmas wins hands down. We spend weeks getting ready for Christmas and the celebration can linger well into the next year, till Epiphany. Every home in my neighborhood was decorated from early December and the decorations did not come down until mid-January. Part of that reason, perhaps, sadly, the main part is that Christmas is more holiday than holy day. The real reason for the day and the season is the celebration of the birth of Jesus; but all too often, the Baby Jesus gests buried under the Christmas wrappings.

Then there is Easter. Christmas would have no real meaning were it not for Easter. Without the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus’ death would only be like millions of other deaths: an innocent man killed out of jealousy or anger, like what happens every day on our city streets, like Cain and Able way back when. So we should celebrate Easter. And we do. It takes three days, max, to prepare for the holiday and even less for the holy day. And it’s all over come Monday morning.

Christmas celebrates God becoming one of us to remind us, once again, what God expects of us and what we should expect of ourselves: to love God above all else and to love everyone else as we love ourselves. Jesus was killed because of that message, but God raised Jesus, I believe, to tell us that there is always resurrection to new life after a death, however and whatever the death. So we need to celebrate that truth by celebrating Jesus’ resurrection on Easter.

Then there is Pentecost, God’s sending us the Holy Spirit, without which the celebration of Christmas and Easter would have no meaning. We may be Easter People, as some preachers like to remind us; but we are Easter People only in and through Pentecost, in and through the life of the Holy Spirit living and breathing all though us, giving whatever grace and strength we need to love others when it seems impossible to do; to find resurrection and new life when some kind of death has come our way: loss of health, loss of job, loss of relationship, etc.

And yet, as important as Pentecost is in the life of the church and especially in our individual lives as Christians, we seem to fail to give it its proper due. Then, too, maybe that’s as it should be. It is as if we simply take for granted God’s working in and through us and are thankful, as we should be.

IT LOOKS GOOD ON PAPER

No one of us likes to admit that we are wrong. What we like even less is to admit that we have sinned, that we have deliberately hurt another. And all sin is deliberate and intentional, never accidental. But when called on the carpet, we look for an excuse. And the standard excuse is that it is always someone else's fault.

Perhaps what is even worse than our unwillingness to admit to our sinfulness is that we also believe that we do not have to do any penance for our sins. All we have to do is own up to them and we are off the hook. We want to have our cake and eat it, enjoy it, as well. We want to blame someone else for our sins or be forgiven without penalty or both, preferably both. Sin looks good on paper, as they say, but sin is not a paper product but a person product and is real.

There is only one problem: we are not in charge of forgiveness. No matter how hard we try, we cannot forgive ourselves. It doesn't work that way. The only person who can forgive us is the person we have hurt. And we can only be forgiven by first admitting that we have hurt another and then asking that person to forgive us. There is no such thing as self-forgiveness.

So often, I think, when we think about forgiveness, we think about hard it is for us to forgive someone who has hurt us. Often it is very difficult to do so, especially when the hurt is deep and cutting. But how often do we put the shoe on the other foot? How often do we think about how difficult it is for the person we have deliberately hurt to forgive us? Lest we forget, forgiveness is a two-way street.

The reason why we have such a difficult time asking the person we hurt to forgive us is that in doing so we come face to face with shame. That is why shame is such a perilous gift. It looks good on paper, in spiritual books and essays, to say, "Forgive and ask for forgiveness." We've all tried it and we've all found it difficult and shameful -- difficult to forgive others and shameful to ask forgiveness. That is where the grace of God and the support of the community comes in. It takes grace to grant forgiveness and to overcome shame. It also takes grace to admit that what we desire from another -- forgiveness -- we must also grant to the other.

Once we have the courage to look into that mirror and restrain ourselves from smashing it so that we do not ever again have to look on the face of a sinner, then we can begin to reshape our lives. It is a slow process, but a grace-filled one. It is also a community process because we cannot do it alone. If we have the courage to both forgive and ask forgiveness, so will others.

It will never, ever, be easy for them or for us. Jesus died on the cross so that our sins would be forgiven. Yet God's forgiveness is only half the process. The other half is in our hands and in our hearts. Forgiveness will never be easy, nor should it be. Shame will always be with us, as it should be. We grow as a person and as a church only to the extent that we are willing to forgive and willing to admit our guilt and ask for forgiveness.

 

 

BURNING BUSHES ARE SOMETIMES JUST BURNING BUSHES

Once one of my favorite articles of clothing had a name. I called it my "Elect-me-to-be-a-bishop-because-everyone-says-I-look-good-in-purple" sweater. Maybe I do look good in purple. That's for others to decide. As long as what I wear makes me look thinner, I'm satisfied. All someone has to say is "That outfit makes you look fat," and it gets taken to Goodwill immediately.

The last reason anyone should be elected a bishop is that the person looks good in purple. Clothing is not even skin deep. Yet there are those whose episcopal veneer is all you get. We've elected people to be bishops -- and rectors and presidents -- for all the wrong reasons. And we've paid dearly for our folly. Yet we did not start out to wind up looking foolish. We wanted to do what was right. We still do.

In wanting to do what is right, what we often do is look for a sign, even a sign from God. Moses' burning bush was a sign to him that God had chosen him and would be with him as he fulfilled God's call. In the important decisions of our lives we all would like some sign from God, some burning bush that tells us that this is God's will. We usually don't get it, not a clear sign anyway. Looking good in purple is not a clear sign. Well, maybe not. Since it is the dumbest reason for electing someone a bishop, it is a clear sign not to.

Every day we have to make decisions. Most are not momentous, only merely mundane: what to wear, what to eat for breakfast, what route to take to work, and so forth. In fact, there are probably few decisions in life that are life-changing, that almost cry out for a burning bush so that we can have a clear indication of God's will for us and God's blessing upon us. But even then, we are rarely privileged to come upon that bush. What we usually get is a purple sweater: either a mixed message or no message at all, and even worse, the wrong message.

So how do we know what to do, whom to choose, what is God's will for us? Most of the time we never know for sure ahead of time. It is only in hindsight that we can determine if we made the right choice, that God was with us when we took that leap of faith. That, however, is only one side of the problem we have when making a decision. The other side is that we simply fool ourselves into believing we are doing what God wants us to do because that is really what we want to do in the first place.

We all need help in discerning what to do. Only a fool would think and act otherwise. We need the wisdom and support of other people. We need the grace of God. And we need the continued presence of the Holy Spirit. We need all of this to help us make those life-giving, faith-filling, even life-changing decisions in our lives.

We may never know for sure, never see that burning bush, but at least we won't be so foolish to believe that the call comes from the purple sweater. Our friends, our faith community will be our burning bush, unless, of course, we don't listen. But if we listen, if we support one another in our faith community in our faith journey, more often than not we will make the right decisions and do what God would have us do.

NOTHING SACRED

Granted, I have a vested interest in this: it seems that almost every television show in which either a clergy person or a dad is a character, that person comes across as either a bumbling idiot or a fool or both. They certainly are not depicted as normal human beings. But then, the last time I looked, every clergy person, every dad I have met was never more than human.

The last time I read the Bible, everybody God ever called to follow Him was totally human -- Abraham, Moses, Ruth, David, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Martha, Mary Magdalene. God called them all, warts and all. And they remained human to the very end, which is to say that they remained sinners, filled with foibles and foolishness, just like everyone else. They were not saints, if we define "saint" as one who does not sin. Mother Theresa on her best day sinned probably seven or eight times. My best days don't even come close.

Being a Christian, being a community of Christians, being a church, is a messy business because we are all sinners. We are tempted every day by the beauty of God's creation: the body, the chocolate candy bar, the you-name-it. We are tempted to use and abuse. The more tempting something is, the more beautiful and alluring, the more we want it for ourselves, baptism, ordination, profession of faith notwithstanding. It has been that way from the beginning, is now and ever shall be world without end.

We don't suddenly become sinless and immune to temptation because we believe in Jesus Christ. Would that it would be so easy. In fact, life becomes all the more difficult because now we know better. Now we know what is right and what is wrong. That does not mean that nothing is sacred, that we’ll all go to hell in a handcart and we might as well accept that fact. The struggle that we all have is that we know our failings and shortcomings, our sins, and that they do get in the way of our living out of our faith as we know we can and should. Our humanity gets in the way.

And because our humanity is so evident, we sometimes feel that we have an excuse, even a good excuse, why we cannot and even should not be a witness to our faith -- tell others about it. In fact, it is because we are so less-than-perfect that we are even better witnesses than those who are less sinful than we. We have more to tell others about how God has been working in our lives.

We may not understand how God works in us or even why, but we know that God does -every day in every way. And when we tell others about the workings of God in us, when we remind ourselves of how God works in us, we not only share our faith and our faith journey with others, we also make that journey – theirs and ours – a little easier.

One of the reasons why Mother Theresa was such a saint was that she knew she was such a sinner (at least in her own eyes and mind) and that God still loved her, forgave her and wanted her to continue doing His work, witnessing to His love by her love. Is there nothing sacred? Yes. Our humanity, foibles and all, is sacred because it is in and through our humanity that God's work is done today.

FREE TO BE YOU AND ME

For many years, eleven, in fact, I led the Senior High Camp at the Peterkin Conference Center in West Virginia. Every year we would choose a theme for the 12 or so days my staff and I had 100 or so teenagers under our supervision and care. Hormones ran wild. Teenage angst was rampant: Who am I? Who will I be today. What will I be someday? For, as the Prayer for Young Persons puts it, they were “growing up in an unsteady and confusing world.” They still are today.

One summer we used the theme from Marlo Thomas’ song Free to Be You and Me. The words were apropos back then and still are today: “There's a land that I see where the children are free/And I say it ain't far to this land from where we are./Take my hand, come with me, where the children are free/Come with me, take my hand, and we'll live,

“In a land where the river runs free/In a land through the green country/In a land to a shining sea/And you and me are free to be you and me. I see a land bright and clear, and the time's comin' near/When we'll live in this land, you and me, hand in hand./Take my hand, come along, lend your voice to my song/Come along, take my hand, sing a song.”

Some may say the words are silly or childish, but I would beg to differ. The song was a reminder to them (and to us) that as confused as they were about the present and the future (and so are we today), it would only become better if they (and we) walked hand in hand together. They (and we) cannot make this world what God created it to be all by ourself. It is a community (small and large) project. Always has been and always will be.

That is what a community of faith is all about: people of all ages, of all sorts and conditions, or all sorts of opinions, likes and dislikes, working and walking hand in hand together. We are freed up to be who we are and not who someone else wants us to be, which is so much of what those young people were dealing with back then and with they are still dealing with today.

When Jesus called together his followers, he chose people of all sorts and conditions knowing that each had a special gift for the community to be able to carry on his ministry once he left. And they did. They were free to be who each was in order for the community to be and become what it was supposed to be. It was not easy and is still not and probably never will be, but that is life in a confusing and unsteady world.

Those young people are now adults with teenagers of their own who are struggling with the same issues their parents dealt with. Unfortunately, they and we are still looking for and creating that land where the river runs free, where each of us is free to be who we are. We may never arrive at such a place, but it is a vision we need to hold onto when the going gets rough, knowing that we will make it through, as they did, only if we take one another’s hand.