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Month: July 2021

If only

If only

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Tuesday mornings, I meet with members of the Deer Isle Writers’ Group. We gather at 9:00 am at the home of one of our writers. We chat and catch up with each other for about a half hour and then spend an hour and a half writing, often in response to a suggested “prompt.” At eleven, we regather and read aloud what we have written, inviting comments and critique. The prompt for this last Tuesday was “if only …”

This what I wrote …

If only she had placed her foot just a little bit to the right …
If only she hadn’t been wearing the Birkenstocks …
If only she had agreed to switch places after she told me she couldn’t see her feet …
If only I had waited until our son could help me move the bridges into the woods …
If only COVID had not meant she was teaching her last semester remotely here in
Maine instead of in person in Iowa …

If only I had not built the bridges in the first place …
If only I had not the built the trail that required the bridges in the first place …
If only we had not bought the home in Blue Hill with seven acres on which to build a
trail in the first place …
If only we had never lived in Maine and would not be drawn back to it …
If only we had never lived …

“If only” is a rabbit hole of despair. Each “if only” wishes away a little piece of my life, a little piece of me. And as the “if only’s” multiply, gratitude gives way to bitterness, anticipation is overshadowed by regret, and my once hot-blooded life turns colorless and listless while my soul feeds only on itself.

She had the better idea. Almost immediately, she began making a list, a long list, of all the good things that resulted from her accident. It was not to ignore the loss or deny the grief, but to embrace her life as it is, as it now is, because of the accident. Her list includes Jeanine, the ICU nurse who lives on our road, and Jeanine’s parents who live on our road, too, and who are now, because of Jeanine and because of the accident, counted among our friends. Her list includes tangible expressions of care from new friends in our Deer Isle church and the Deer Isle writers’ group. Her list includes a September retirement party in Iowa with both of us now able to attend which would not have happened had the accident not cancelled her May Iowa trip.< And her list includes me, shopping and cooking and washing dishes, doing laundry and prepping her shower and managing her meds, loving her in new ways because this is what it is.

“It is what it is.” It’s one of our favorite phrases. “It is what it is” is an antidote to “if only,” said not with begrudging resignation, but with clear-eyed honesty and bold acceptance. “It is what it is” embraces the here and now because it is here and now and because it is the only here and now we will ever have.

“It is what it is” is a conscious and even joyful choice for faith over despair, for hope over resignation, for life over something that may resemble life but is mere emptiness.

It is what it is … and it is good!

One People

One People

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Sermon preached on Sunday, July 18, at Deer Isle Sunset Congregational Church …

Have we ever been more divided?  I mean, we don’t even agree on who won the last presidential election!  We don’t even agree whether or not it is a good thing to be vaccinated against a deadly disease.  We don’t even agree on what we should be teaching our children about who we are as a nation.

In the latest issue of The Atlantic, George Packer argues there are four Americas, four distinct and competing and incompatible visions of what it means to be American.  There is, as he names it, “Free America,” those who espouse a “Don’t Tread on Me” libertarianism, who want to do whatever they want to do unfettered by government regulation and unimpeded by folks “dependent on the system.” 

There is “Smart America,” those who believe in the value and profitability of education, who believe they deserve everything they have earned and both pity and disparage those who somehow lack the will or the skill to succeed.

There is “Real America,” those for whom the real Americans are “the hardworking folk of the white Christian heartland,” while the enemies of America are the “treacherous elites and contaminating others [that is: non-whites and immigrants] who want to destroy the country.”

And there is “Just America,” those who divide the country into oppressed and oppressors, privileged and unprivileged, for whom the only way forward is to turn everything upside down.

Packer writes: “I don’t much want to live in the republic of any of them.”

Dialogue among these groups is useless, because we don’t have the same facts (we can’t agree on what is real and what is fake) and we don’t speak the same language — freedom and justice and fairness and truth mean entirely different things in the different Americas to which we pledge our allegiance.

The last time I remember a real sense of a commonly shared American identity was in the immediate aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  We were all mourning together, lamenting together, both the loss of life and a never before experienced feeling of acute vulnerability.  We were not at first angry or bitter, not seeking revenge, but comforting each other and reaffirming our dedication to what we loved most about our country: its open-armed welcome, its commitment to equal opportunity for all people, its affirmation of right over might, of law over lawlessness.  And the world mourned with us with a generous outpouring of goodwill and affection.

But that good will quickly dissipated, both outside and inside our borders, as we mounted a dubious and ill-fated invasion of Iraq.  George W. Bush became a lightning rod for Democratic mistrust and anger and the nation was more divided than it had ever been.

Barack Obama reaped the fury of a Republican backlash as Congress’ sole agenda became thwarting his proposals whatever merits they might have and the nation became even more divided.

And the just past president came to power precisely by stoking the fires of division, making no pretense of governing a united country, but finding pleasure instead in pitting Americans against each other, those who, as he claimed, love America, against those who, as he claimed, hate America.

Have we ever been more divided?  And we are not merely divided into this camp and that camp, but fragmented, splintered into a myriad of tribes delineated not by shared values or principles or dreams, but by “identity.”  We define ourselves and align ourselves by our blackness or our whiteness, by being gay or straight or bisexual, male or female or transgender or non-binary, blue collar or white collar, heartland or coasts, Muslim or Christian or Buddhist or Jew or none.  Even being a None is a thing.

Have we ever been more divided?  We believe our identity wholly determines our destiny, rather the the other way around.  Think about it!  We believe our identity wholly determines our destiny, rather the the other way around.

But enough already!  I am not called to be a Cassandra, to bear bad news, but to be a minister of the gospel, to proclaim good news.  This is why we gather here in this sanctuary, week after week, not to bemoan a crumbling world, but to hear the gospel, so we might be believe and be made glad, and so we might live what we believe.

And this is the gospel: We are one people.

We are one people.  I had a seminary professor who liked to say that in the gospel, the indicative precedes the imperative, that is, what we must do only comes after what God has done.  It’s not that we must try to get along, try hard to bring people together, do our best to overcome the divisions among us.  We are one people.  God has made us one people.  Oneness is not something we achieve, but something God gives.

We are one people.  Who is?  Who is included in this one people?  All those who believe as we do, walk in the light as we do, share the same stories and values and religious commitments as we do?

No!  We are one people.  We — look around you, look all around you, and see the “we!”  Whom do you see?  Whom can you name?  This is the gospel and this is what Paul boldly declares in his letter to the Ephesian church: God has made us one people.  God has made us one people in Christ Jesus.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is a wonderfully expansive and audacious and thrilling letter.  Eventually, he will turn to practical matters, counseling wives and husbands, parents and children, even slaves and masters about honoring and respecting each other, urging them all to live lives of purity and piety, truthfulness and kindness.

But here, at the beginning of his letter, he is occupied with the big picture, with a cosmic reality.  He writes about God’s plan, what he calls God’s “secret plan,” — a plan that is certainly no secret because he tells it! — God’s secret plan to “bring all creation together, everything in heaven and on earth” in Christ.

All creation!  Not just human beings, but all creation!  This is Christ’s mission: not to judge, not to divide, not to separate sheep from goats, not to start a new religion or discredit the old, not to carve out a faithful remnant from among rebellious humanity, but to reconcile, to bring people together, to bring people together back to God, to bring all creation together and back to God.

This is what God wants, this is God’s dream, this is God’s plan — to bring all of us and all of creation too into the arms of God’s loving embrace, to bring us and all of creation into shalom, into peacefulness, into wholeness, into fullness of life, into joy, our joy and God’s joy.

Paul is writing in particular to Gentile Christians, non-Jewish believers.  The early church struggled with the division between Jews and Gentiles, insiders and outsiders, people of the book and the heathens, people with entirely different histories and cultures and religious practices.  But Paul declares there is no division: “Christ himself has brought us peace by making Jews and Gentiles one people.”  Jews who have studiously kept themselves separate from non-Jews, and Gentiles who have habitually disparaged Jews, are one people!

How?  By Christ’s blood: “You, who used to be far away, have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

The blood of Christ.  You look upon it every Sunday.  It is the focal point of our worship, at the center of the gospel we preach — the cross, the cross on which Jesus was executed, the cross on which he poured out his blood, poured out his life.

The cross is not the emblem of an unwarranted and untimely death.  The cross is not the remembrance of a failed martyr.  The cross is not even a model for us of ultimate sacrifice.  It is the emblem of victory, God’s victory, the victory of grace over sin, of God’s love over human rebellion, of life over death.  At the cross, God wins, which means we win.

“With his own body,” Paul writes, “with his own body [Christ] broke down the wall that separated them.”  The wall is down.  The wall is down!  We don’t need to tear down the wall,.  The wall is down!

The wall is down — between you and me, between Jew and Gentile, between black person and white person, between Muslim and Christian, between gay and not so gay.  Really!  We are one.  We have been made one by the death of Christ.  His death is the death of all division, and his life is the promise of life together, as one people.

This is who we are: one people, all of us children of God, created for joy, and God gave us Jesus so that we, so that none of us, would be denied that joy.

So what are we to do?  We are called to live as if we are one people,  because we are.  We are one people!  We are called to live in the peace, out of the peace, for the sake of the peace, making the peace that God has gifted us in Christ.  The walls are down, but for God’s sake, don’t try to rebuild them!

I speak especially to those of us who are Gentiles, non-Jewish believers, and that is most of us in this sanctuary.  How dare we, how dare we, build walls between anyone else and ourselves?  How dare we presume to judge any neighbor and draw a line between ourselves and them?  How dare we ever talk about “us” and “them?”

We Gentile Christians must never forget that are the outsiders!  We are the foreigners!  We are the ones who don’t belong, who had no part in God’s promises, who were not counted among God’s chosen.  We have been grafted into God’s family tree, adopted into God’s family, welcomed home by nothing other than sheer grace, utter gift.  So how can we be anything but gracious, anything but generous, anything but welcoming to other outsiders, other strangers, other lost ones?

We are called to live as one people, to embrace our identity, our true identity, which is ours in Christ.  I am European-American.  I am male, cis-gendered as they say.  I am heterosexual, married to my wife.  I am college-educated.  I am a retired professional.  All of these parts of who I am matter, and all the parts of who you are matter, but none of these matter more than my identity, your identity, our identity, as one people, children of God, children together in a family made by Christ.

We have never been more divided as Americans, as Christians, as human beings, and yet, we are not.  We are not divided.  We are one people.  And all the bitterness, all the contention, all the lying, all the hatred do not make it any less true.

This is the gospel … we were created in joy for the sake of joy, to live in peace for the sake of peace, to embrace each other as God has embraced us, to join ourselves to Christ in his death — putting to death our pride, our prejudices, our pretensions — so we might be joined to Christ in his life, living in love as he lived in love.  We are one people, so let’s live that way!

Numinous

Numinous

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Sermon preached on Sunday, July 11, at Deer Isle Sunset Congregational Church …

Father, we adore you,
lay our lives before you,
how we love you.

Why do you come to church? Or, maybe a better way to put it is this: When you do come to church, what do you hope to find here? What to you hope to do here?

There are many reasons for coming to church, many different expectations that each of us bring with us. I cannot speak for you, but I can speak for myself and share with you some of the reasons I have for coming to church, and I expect that some of my reasons may be yours, too.

I come to church to be connected. In other words, I come to church to be with you! I come to church to be part of a community, part of a community of believers, a people joined by faith, by our common experience of being loved, of being loved by God and of being loved by each other.

I come to be connected to a community of mutual help and encouragement, where I will be welcomed and befriended and supported, and to be connected to a community of mutual dedication, where we look for ways together to support and encourage people outside these walls, to bless them as we have been blessed.

I come to church to be connected and to make connections.

Second, I come to church to hear a word, a word that is different from the many and noisy words that fill most of my days. A word that carries authority. A word that addresses me, challenges me, enlightens me. A word that puts things, everything, into perspective. A word that helps me make sense of a world that is often so confusing and bewildering, to know what I can know and to acknowledge what I cannot know.

A word that makes me look at myself and my place in this world with a critical eye, not to be critical, but to look past appearances and pretenses, to see things as they are, to know what I am and who I am, and to know what I am for and who I am for.

I come to church to hear a word, a word that puts everything into perspective, like the view from the top of a mountain.

And, third, but most importantly, I come to church to experience the numinous. Do you know that word, “numinous?” I know exactly what I mean by it, but it is hard to explain!

Numinous is what is beyond me, above me, something very real, overwhelmingly real, but at the same time mysterious and elusive and unreachable. Numinous is wonder-ful, full of wonder, awe-ful, awesome, full of awe, holy, not holy is the sense we often use it, as something surpassingly good, though the numinous can be and certainly is surpassingly good, but holy in the sense of uncommon, set apart from the everyday, something heavy, deep, glorious, overwhelming, awe-ful.

Numinous is what Moses encountered in the fire and cloud and thunder atop Mount Sinai. Numinous is what Isaiah saw in his vision of the Lord Almighty filling the Temple. Numinous is what Job heard in the voice that spoke to him out of the whirlwind.

The numinous is the One who cannot, must not, be seen, the One whose name cannot, must not, be spoken. The numinous is God, the God who is. When I come to church, I come to encounter God, to experience, be touched by, come close to, the presence of the living God.

If God is, then God is, and God is who God is, not whatever we might wish or want God to be. God is something, someone, standing over against us, apart from us, awesome, awe-ful, wonder-ful, holy, beautiful, overwhelmingly real, more real, more substantial, simply more there than any of us, more real, more substantial, simply more there than the universe itself. God is something, someone to find and to be found by, someone to acknowledge, to worship, to love.

The Covenant Box is numinous. The Covenant Box, also called the ark, was built by Moses according to God’s instructions. The stone tablets on which the laws binding the people of Israel to God and God to the people of Israel were placed inside the box and two winged creatures adorned each end of the lid of the box. That place atop the lid between the two winged creatures was thought to be God’s throne, the place where God met the people of Israel, the place from which God spoke to them.

Sometimes both fable and parts of the Bible itself seem to attach “magical” properties to the Covenant Box — think “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — but it has nothing to do with magic. It is not that the box contained God or that God lived there or that the box itself is God. The box is simply the emblem, the reminder, of God’s presence among them, and the place where God, by God’s own choice, chose to meet them, just as God may choose to meet us here.

When the people of Israel tried to use the box as tool of magic, when they tried to control and manipulate its supposed power, they failed miserably. They carried the box into battle with them and were utterly defeated and the box was captured by the Philistines. The Covenant Box is no talisman, no good luck charm, no magic wand. God is no tool, no idol, to answer to our beck and call.

The ark was absent from Jerusalem for some twenty years, and now, as we heard read in the scripture, David is ready to bring the Covenant Box home, to “put” God back at the center of their lives. David leads the procession, all of them singing and dancing and playing musical instruments to honor the Lord, and then …

And then, suddenly the oxen pulling the cart on which the box was laid stumble and Uzzah reaches out to steady the box and … he is struck dead.

Oh, my!

You should know, my friends, that this text from 2 Samuel is the designated Old Testament reading for this Sunday, that is, most of it. The lectionary lists 2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12-19 as the Old Testament reading, omitting verses 6-11, conveniently leaving out — timidly leaving out! — the whole part about Uzzah and the stumbling oxen. That’s not right! That’s not fair! We should have to deal with the hard parts of scripture, too, shouldn’t we? I saw that this was the text for the Sunday I was preaching and said to myself, “Oh, no!” But I knew we had to read the whole story!

So what’s going on? What sense do we make of this? Perhaps we can’t. Perhaps we cannot make sense of this. And that is okay. We do not have to have everything figured out to our own satisfaction to be able to put our trust in the God who is.

In my mind, this is not about some moral transgression on Uzzah’s part or some capricious, vengeful act on God’s part. It’s about a God who cannot, must not, be seen or touched, who cannot, must not, be trifled with, a God who cannot, must not, be treated as we might treat anyone or anything else, a God utterly holy, wholly numinous, a God who is not “safe,” a God who is … God.

Would you want a God who was “safe,” harmless, innocuous, impotent, toothless, entirely understandable, entirely predictable, entirely controllable? We do often want such gods! And I call them gods (lowercase “g”) because the gods of our own choosing are not God.

There are parts of the church that treat God almost as a cosmic “buddy,” a friend who gives me whatever it is I want, whose sole purpose is to make my life better, happier, more fulfilled.

And there are parts of the church that use “God” as an emblem, a symbol, a name to lend credence to our own political and social ideologies, whether conservative or liberal. This “god” becomes a means, to motivator, to use in the pursuit of our own political ambitions.

There are parts of the church that see God as a guarantor and defender of the lines they have already drawn, between friends and enemies, insiders and outsiders, good guys and bad guys, a god who is always conveniently on their side.

And there are parts of the church that see God everywhere, God in everything, indiscriminately endorsing and approving of whatever it is we want to endorse and approve, asking nothing of us, not asking us to change anything about ourselves.
There are many, many, many more such “gods,” but what all these gods have in common is that they are a means to an end — money, power, health, wealth, happiness, fulfillment, control, peace of mind — ends of my own choosing. What all these gods have in common is that they are not God, but idols.

God is … and we can only come into the presence of the living God as David did, with fear and with joy. Fear and joy? Can these, do these, belong together?

They do! Fear, because God is fearful, awe-ful, glorious, powerful, mighty, all-mighty, and joy because God is — because God is! — because God is the source of all that is, because God is the source of all that is good, because God is good.

What happens when people come into God’s presence? What happened to Moses, to Isaiah, to Job? They are humbled … and healed. They are overwhelmed with their own insignificance … and they are made to understand their true identity, their true calling, their true value as children of God. In getting a glimpse of who God is, they better know who they are, finally leaving behind that endless compulsion to have to be the ones in control, pulling the levers, manipulating the strings, fashioning the future, ensuring the outcome.

My friends, we are not God … thanks be to God! And we are doomed to misery and to failure whenever we try to be God or to worship a god of our own making. We are not God, but God chooses to come among us, to be among us, to grant us access to God’s own life-giving presence, to invite us into relationship, into covenant, into communion, into life.

Fear and joy. May we come to church expecting to meet God here and may we come to worship in that spirit, the spirit of fear and joy. May we tremble like David trembled and sing like David sang and dance like David danced. With all his might! With all our might. That’s how Jesus said we were to love God … with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our might.

Father, we adore you,
lay our lives before you,
how we love you.