Where Your Feet Take You

Judith Robbins' Easter Sunday message from the 10 a.m. service.


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Isaiah 25: 6-9
1 Cor, 15: 1-11
Mark 16: 1-8

Where Your Feet Take You

There’s good news today. Because the Christ is risen, to quote the poet Dylan Thomas, Death shall have no dominion. Although he was bruised and beaten and died an ignominious death on a tree, Jesus, the Christ, is alive and among us this morning––in us, I dare say.

I am not going out on a limb saying this. I am speaking from the center of the tree, from the pith, the essential, the vital part, the essence of the tree, which is the spirit, the spirit of Jesus let loose in the world.

Because of this resurrection, Jesus is not relegated to the status of simply an historical figure we read about in a book, or in a thousand books. With the confidence that comes from experience, I tell you that he is a living presence, not a memory, but a presence. There is all the difference in the world between knowing about a person and knowing a person. The latter happens when that person will share, truly share his or her spirit with us, his or her life.

When Pentecost happens, 50 days down the road from now, I will talk about Jesus sharing his spirit, his very person with us, but for today, I’ll only refer to it with the allusion of how it is with a person in our own lives who genuinely shares herself or himself. We feel known and we feel that we know. We begin to understand that level of sharing when we act in love toward another. Imagine this at the divine level, possible because of resurrection. The One who died is alive. Love has resurrected love.

All that said, I would now offer you the source of the idea for the title of today’s message, “Where Your Feet Take You.” (What’s that got to do with Easter?) It’s Frederick Buechner again–– writer, poet and ordained Presbyterian minister, who still lives in the hills of Vermont, and, thanks be to God, still shares his insights and stories with us through his writings. It is he who suggested in response to a woman’s saying to him, “The way I understood it, you were supposed to devote these talks to religious matters. Incarnation and Grace and Salvation were some of the noble words you used.”

“I say that feet are very religious too,” he replied. “If you want to know who you are, if you are more than simply academically interested in this or that mystery, you could do a lot worse than look to your feet for an answer.”

“When you wake up in the morning,” he continued, “called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because, where your feet take you, that is who you are.”

Wise words, and ones we will consider this morning. I must defuse a possible distraction right off the bat. When I discussed this message with “a friend,” who will remain nameless, that friend said all he could think of was that his feet take him to the bathroom first thing in the morning. Rather than having a third to a half of the congregation possibly stuck in that thought or one like it for the rest of the message, may I say upfront, yes. Yes, indeed. Even to the bathroom our feet take us, when we are called in the morning to be a self again, and that is good. It’s part of the whole human condition, the whole human anatomy created by God, and wonderfully made, isn’t it? Enough of that? Okay.

I titled this message “Where Your Feet Take You” because yes, feet play such a significant role in the Easter Triduum we have just come through. On Thursday we heard about Jesus’s washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper, saying “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Peter objected to Jesus’s washing his feet, but Jesus told him, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me,” after which Peter vigorously assented.

After Jesus finished washing their feet, he said to them, “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet”––in other words, serve one another. “I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them.”

So, we have the Lord and Teacher washing the disciples feet with the exhortation to do for others what he, Jesus has done for them.

Feet are also a focus at the time of the crucifixion on Good Friday. We have seen enough images of the crucified Christ to know that the nails of crucifixion would have been driven through the feet, either one in each foot, or one foot placed over the other and a single spike driven through. Enough of that. That is where Jesus’s feet took him. All of his choices culminated in Calvary where he cried out to the one he called Abba, Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But that wasn’t the end. Yes, his choices had included acquiescence to the will of God, even if that included his death, which he did not want, by the way, and which he did not seek, but which he was willing to accept, if that is what was needed to fulfill his life. His life, as God was revealing it in him and to him. He went through death and was raised up. And even that was not the end but a beginning and how we meet, how we encounter him, no less than Mary Magdelene did, not in Mark’s gospel, which I read this morning, but in John’s, which I read at the sunrise service, where he documents the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. She thought he was the gardener, so transformed was he and so distressed was she in finding Jesus’s body removed.

Holy Thursday night, the washing of the feet, and the exhortation for the disciples and us by association to do the same. To serve, as Jesus served. Good Friday, the nailing of feet to the cross. Acquiescence in the extreme, to the point of laying down the life. We too are called to lay down our lives but seldom in such a dramatic fashion. Jesus’s choices had led him from Nazareth along the highways and byways of Palestine until he had come to this point, this seeming end point. He had followed his feet.

Mary Magdala, and Mary, the mother of James and Salome, had been at the deep end of the slough of despond, as they were on their way to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus. There had not been time to do that following the crucifixion because of the setting of the sun and the beginning of Passover when no “work” could be done, even that work of mercy. So, they had come at the first opportunity very early in the morning after the Sabbath to render this last service to the body of their teacher, their rabbi. Their main concern was how they would move the stone that covered the opening of the tomb. In front of the opening was a groove, and in the groove ran a circular stone as big as a cartwheel, and the women knew it was beyond their strength to move a stone that size, but when they reached the tomb, the stone whad been rolled away, and inside was a young man sitting on the right side of the tomb in a white robe telling the unbelievable news of the resurrection. The gospel tells us that they fled from the tomb for fear, and astonishment gripped them. Their feet carried them away from the unbearable news.

In the case of these women friends of Jesus, the suddenness of the change from profound sorrow and grief to the incomprehensible news of the resurrection was more information than they could fully process in the moment, which is why they ran from it.

And Jesus? He had always been on the move. Famously he had said, “The birds of the air have nests, and the foxes have lairs, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” He was a man with a mission on the move, and he fulfilled that mission, and on the third day after his death, today, what we celebrate as Easter Sunday, he was raised up. And now he walks a different road, not Nazareth but the highways of our souls as we allow.

Indeed as we allow, our feet will be, our feet are his feet in the world. And we walk this way once dear friends, so let us look at where those feet come down. Think: All of the unkept promises, if they ever are to be kept, have to be kept today. All the unspoken words if you do not speak them today will never be spoken. The people, the ones you love and the ones who annoy or bore you, all the life you have in you to live with them, if you do not live it with them today will never be lived.

It is the first day because it has never been before, and the last day because it will never be again. Be as alive as you can be all through this day, like a risen Christ yourself. Follow your feet. Start the coffee or tea when you get home. Put on the ham, or if you’re an eggs-on-Easter kind of family, start the eggs. Look at each person around the table today. Make yourself know how important and good each of them is. Impress on your own mind that this is what you have: today. This resurrection day. This holiest of days you have them, and God be praised, you have the life of Christ in you to share with them.

In conclusion I would like to quote another poet, John Donne. He exhorts death,

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

And quoting again Dylan Thomas, who is quoting from Romans 6:

“And death shall have no dominion.” Death has no dominion over him or over us. Amen.

Dearly Beloved...

Judith Robbins' message for Membership Sunday:


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Community Happens

As often as not, those who marry these days have a nontraditional service, including writing their own wedding vows. But you must have been present at some time in your life at a wedding ceremony where the more traditional wedding service and vows were spoken. It usually starts off, “Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and woman in holy matrimony.”

In the old Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church, the service for the public baptism of infants begins with the same words: “Dearly Beloved.” And so will our brief service of welcome to our new members begin today: “Dearly Beloved.” At first I thought the expression quaint and perhaps outdated and considered updating it. I wisely abandoned that plan and will follow the form as it has been done in this church, at least from the beginning of the federation of the First Congregational Church of Newcastle and the Methodist Church of Sheepscott.

“Dearly Beloved,” I will say, addressing those who have chosen to join us as the worshipping community of the Sheepscott Community Church, “do you now then, in the presence of the church community, unite with us in the love of truth and the spirit of Jesus for the worship of God and the service of others?” As I address that question to those seated here in the front, I would ask all of us to consider whether that is indeed part and parcel of our purpose in coming together here each Sunday.

This is a solemn occasion––an occasion for joyful celebration, yes, and we will mark that downstairs after the service, but the choice to commit to worshipping with a group of others seeking wider and deeper understanding of spiritual truths is a solemn business. While all are welcome to worship in this church , whether members of not, with this willingness to join the church there is a deeper level of commitment. It is nothing less than a move from attending to joining your future to the future of the church.

The search for spiritual truth is a communal affair, and part of the joy of partaking of that communal affair is discovering how that search has been experienced and lived by others in the past and present. As circumstance would have it, in our little community we have many different traditions, different lived expressions of religious faith––most of the Protestant denominations: the founding Congregationalists and Methodists, Anglican or Episcopalian, Lutheran, Unitarian, Presbyterian, and the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions are also represented among us. There may be others I don’t know about. I used to think––because I was so taught––that the rupture of Christianity at the time of the Reformation was a bad thing. I have come to believe that the various expressions of Christianity, and other religions as well, can be seen as expressing the multifaceted being of God, which, whom, we finally can only wait on for revelation about that One’s self.

A reality that I cannot ignore in this context is that historically there has been enmity between and among denominations and religious expressions––extreme enmity that most of us don’t need to have drawn out because it’s a sad history we are well acquainted with, a history that is marked by the blood of martyrs for whichever cause depending on your sympathies, not to mention heated discussions with slammed down forks at holiday dinner tables that continue even in our own time.

I noted that the search for spiritual truth is a communal affair, and Christianity, like all great religions, is explicitly communal in its theology, but part of the damage that has been done to Christianity and to so many who have been disillusioned by it, has arisen from interpreting community as a matter of walls, like a ghetto. Everyone inside the wall is part of the community, and everyone outside of it is not. By virtue of our having come from so many points on the religious map individually and as a group, I believe we are a model of mutuality and acceptance, perhaps prophetic of what Christianity can look like when the focus is where Jesus directed it in John 13: “I give you a new commandment: Love one another. Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other. This is how all will know you for my disciples: your love for one another.”

If some are disillusioned by what are interpreted as walls that keep out and separate, conversely, one of the attractions of religion, for many people, is the existence of a supporting community, for which walls can function as a different metaphor. I think all of us in this church could give testimony about that. Jon and I have only been members of the church for less that two years, and yet, we have experienced the church’s support personally again and again, most recently when Jon badly cut his hand. I had no compunction or hesitation about reaching out to the prayer chain to ask for prayer for him while he was in surgery. I myself was carried up on wings of prayer by this church when I was knocked off my horse by Lyme disease last fall. In that pinch, Chuck Reinhardt responded to a Saturday night message I left and filled the pulpit the next day, when I was too sick to get out of bed. I would mention that he had been out late that Saturday night and yet got up at 6 to prepare for a 10 o’clock service. That level of commitment and professionalism and kindness has earmarked our association with this church again and again.

But it’s really the fellowship /at the time of worship/and before and after services/when the ties that bind are established and strengthened. For many, the attraction of becoming part of the friendships and energy of such a group is tempered by the implicit demand that people who do these things together must also be part of a total religious system to which assent must be given. But in reality, in this community, we are free to choose the strength and truth of a community without automatically choosing its total creed. This does not rule out any particular aspect of religious systems that we may, in time, come to understand, and appreciate, and choose.

Choosing to follow an insight we might have coming out of worship or fellowship in the community is a level of commitment. That insight may link up with other scarcely seen realities, and soon, in some way or other, we experience the fact of community, seen or unseen. Community happens.

Today you all are making a choice to become more fully a part of Sheepscott Community Church. Bruce and Dot Ullrich have been coming for years but simply have not signed the book of membership. We also welcome choir member Karin Swanson; Sylvia Martin, Eli Miller, our youngest new member at 7, almost 8––on April 27; his mother Lee Roberts; Barbara Meyer, whose son Damon with his children Sophie and Jack, whom we have all met before, and who are here to mark the day with Barbara; Linda Zollers; Ernie and Lily Mayer; and Carroll and Ted Smith.

You’ve all made a choice to build on a moment of spiritual awareness or just liking this church and what you’ve experienced here, to value it, to rejoice in it, and now today to officially join us as we unite in the love of truth and the spirit of Jesus for the worship of God and the service of others.

We all have a sense of being part of something large, yet intimate; seen and unseen; explicit and yet quite vague. If we don’t have that sense, we want it, and the importance of this awareness cannot be overstated because it corresponds to the nature of human being, which is interdependent down to the last molecule, whether or not we admit it or like it. There is comfort in a sense of solidarity, in a sense of being part of something beyond ourselves. Just the knowledge that other people haven’t given up can make a difference.

May you know yourselves, indeed, dearly beloved. Amen.

Membership Sunday 5.April.09

Today Judith Robbins and Board President Cyndi Leavitt officially welcomed a dozen new members as part of Sheepscott Community Church Membership Sunday-Palm Sunday-Communion Service.

Ted and Carroll Smith of Bristol, Lily and Ernie Mayer of Walpole, Barbara Meyer of Whitefield, Karin Swanson of Sheepscott, Linda Zollers of Wiscasset, Eli Miller of Tenants Harbor and Alna, Lee Roberts of Alna, Sylvia Martin of Alna and Bruce and Dot Ullrich of Amherst,N.H. all joined the SCC today. Mike Colbert of Lacunae Productions took the photos.

The Hair of the Dog

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Numbers 21: 4-9
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Hair of the Dog That Bit You

When I read the Old and New Testament readings for today, all I could think of was the hair of the dog that bit you. For those who might not be familiar with the term, the original meaning refers to the supposed therapeutic effect of the topical application of the hair of a rabid dog that has bitten you to the bite wound itself to prevent rabies. The contemporary appropriation of the term is probably more familiar and more frequently employed. It has to do with treating a hangover by having some of whatever you were drinking the night before that caused the hangover.

Although I have never been a consumer of homeopathy, friends of mine have and I could see the parallel there as well, viz., whatever symptoms are manifesting of whichever disease, the homeopathic practitioner will prescribe miniscule amounts of substances actually connected with the disease to help cure it. The substance is put under the tongue and allowed to dissolve.

You may have heard on the news recently that children allergic to peanuts have been being treated in what sounds like a homeopathic way for some years now as an experiment. The allergic child is given the smallest amount of peanut or peanut product every day, very slowly increasing that amount, while the overseer of the experiment watches carefully for symptoms that might need to be treated swiftly if there is an allergic reaction.

Preliminary results look favorable. Some of the children documented in the study as allergic to peanuts have been declared allergy free. On camera, one of the formerly allergic children delighted in taking a bite of peanut-buttered bread.

Anyway, all that is what today’s reading about the serpent on the pole made me think of. If the people bitten by snakes looked on the serpent atop the pole, they would be cured or healed.While incidents in the Book of Exodus in which we have recently been reading, stressed the patience of Yahweh, who always listened to Israel’s needs and intervened to help, chapters 11-21 of the Book of Numbers from which Tony read today, on the other hand, stressed the people’s constant rebellion that led Yahweh to punish them time and again. In Exodus Moses intervened and interceded for the people, and God softened in his anger and turned back his punishment or healed the victims. By contrast, Numbers 11-21 is one series of the people’s murmurings after another––complaints about the lack of food, then the lack of meat, the lack of water, about Moses’s leadership, and so forth. In this morning’s reading, it’s the people grumbling about food again. They just don’t like it.

The constant repetition of the theme of rebellion would not have been missed by the Israelites of the sixth century for whom P, the writer of the priestly tradition of Numbers, wrote. They could look back on the centuries of injustice, disobedience and false worship, the condemnations of the prophets, the failures of the kings, and know that the loss of their freedom and land in exile had been richly deserved. The message was that God cannot be pushed too far without asserting his own justice and honor.
But even at that late hour, he could turn from his anger and spare them if they would only turn to him. More than most books of the Old Testament, the Book of Numbers lets us see why the Pentateuch––the first five books of the Bible––came to be what it is: a gathering of very old traditions and much later added developments. For Israel, each part of the ancient faith tradition had a message for later generations.

Including us. In the ancient faith tradition the Israelites in the desert looked on a bronze serpent, which Moses fixed atop a pole in obedience to God’s directive. Looking on that bronze serpent would heal the people from the bites of the snakes among them––whether those are literal snakes or represent a plague of some sort––that tradition has meaning for us. And that is why the writer of John alludes to the event in this morning’s gospel in verse 14: “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

That reminds me of a story. I once did a newspaper interview with a priest who had been the chaplain at Thomaston for years. He was a tough old bird, the antithesis of sentimentality. We talked about a man we both knew of who was in prison and had been convicted of the murder of his wife, whom the inmate professed to love and which murder he avowed was manslaughter, completely accidental. I won’t go into more particulars about the case, only about the man’s conversion.

The man was in an agony of regret about what had happened, completely depressed about the death of his wife and the prospect of years in prison. After he had been there for a few years, he went to see this priest, who had a crucifix up on the wall. A crucifix is different from a cross in that it has the corpus or body affixed to it. This inmate, convicted of the murder of his wife, suffering his own personal agonies tried to talk to the priest about it all. The priest, as he told the story to me, said he simply nodded toward the crucifix. There was nothing else to say.

The inmate, who had had no hands-on experience of Christianity, understood. For him, everything was in that suffering figure, and out of that first understanding came instruction and deeper understanding that carried him into new life and sustained him through the years before his release from prison. I don’t know what has happened to him in years since then, but the story of his conversion does make me think of the serpent on the pole. If the Israelites looked on that serpent, they would be healed from the bites of the snakes among them. If this inmate looked on the broken Christ crucified, he could be healed from the anguish of guilt and regret from which he suffered. And he was. Of course there was never rejoicing in the event, but life lived for God became possible. Hope revived. He could live and not die the death of the spirit or of the mind and emotions. Would the body have been far behind? I doubt it.

Having been raised myself with a keen awareness of sin and its consequences, the need to confess sin and be forgiven, and indeed an awareness of the suffering, crucified Christ––definitely an excessive awareness––I have happily done a 180 in adulthood into the life of the resurrection. I had thought and felt that too much time and energy goes into contemplating the crucifixion and the suffering Christ, and not enough emphasis is placed on the resurrected Christ, which is, after all, the basis of the Christian faith. While hundreds, who knows, perhaps thousands were crucified as a matter of course because it was a usual Roman form of capital punishment, only one man was raised up by God, and that was Jesus, the Christ.

“If there is no resurrection of the dead,” as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, “then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”I became and am a strong believer in the resurrection, the Christ who lives and moves among us and through us as we say yes to his ongoing invitation to the resurrected life and how that plays out in our lives, as our lives.

I repeat, I was early formed in the crucifixion, in perceiving the value of the crucified Christ. But with age and experience and the need for it, came the resurrection and a new understanding, which I advocate for strongly. However, I am not so foolish that I miss the lesson the crucifixion and the power of not just the image of the Christ on the cross but the reality that underlies it: An innocent person acquiesced to giving his life that others might have life. But this has happened before, you might say. We all have heard of heroic actions by different ones through the years. The one that occurs to me in the moment is the airline passenger who helped fellow passengers out of the water at the time of that plane crash into the Potomac River years ago. He kept helping others to safety until he himself quietly slipped under the frigid water in the snowy air. This is the Christ crucified in our time, and maybe each of us could come up with a like story––a person who gives of herself, himself to the point of surrendering life. And that not for a loved one, a family member, but for other human beings, strangers. Like Christ.

And we ourselves wonder whether we would be able to act in such a Christlike way in a similar circumstance. God willing we won’t ever have to find that out, but if it does happen that we are so challenged, may we have the unspoken but lived awareness of the Christ, crucified and raised up, who is at our right hand. Who is our right hand.

We have been impressed by and with the crucified Christ in the circumstances of our lives. When we are up against it and there is no recourse, no recourse, picture, if you will, the crucifix, the body of Christ on the cross, as that inmate at Maine State Prison did. Let the reality that informs that painful image be your recourse where there is none. I cannot predict what you will feel or think. That is between you and God, but you will come to a new level of understanding about the healing to be found in that horror, and the raising up that can follow. More often than not, it is that which crucifies us which also raises us up. There is a season for crucifixion, a season for resurrection.

So, while I had enough of crucifixion when younger and longed for resurrection that was surely waiting in the wings, I learned some of the lessons that that sad event had to teach, was able to know the crucified Christ as the serpent atop the pole, and that gazing on that one carried its own healing for my sins, my sorrows, and the sins of the world. And insofar as we imitate the selflessness of that one whom we recognize and hail as the second person of the trinity, the son of God, we can be part of bringing about the redemption of the world. That sounds way too big, doesn’t it? Way too ambitious, the redemption of the world. How about the redemption of one situation in our small corner of the world, whatever form that might take. Heartfully listening to a friend who has had some very bad news, testing water quality levels in the Sheepscot River to preserve the environment, having affectionate patience with a teenager who is demanding all of that by remembering how it was for us when we were teenagers. These are all acts of redemption, reclaiming for good and so for God that which might go in another untended direction.

As I mention those works of mercy, I think of the second reading today from Ephesians. Paul says clearly in this letter, “it is by grace you have been saved, through faith––and this not from yourselves, it is a gift of God––not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works...” This is the core of Martin Luther’s great revelation: that all of his works were as nothing. It is and was only by faith that he and we are saved. The good works will inevitably proceed from the faith, but it is the faith in Christ that saves us, that saved that inmate at Thomaston from his guilt and anguish. Who and what that Christ is will be revealed to us as worthy of faith.

Regarding works, as the writer of the epistle of James says, “...faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” I think this is a false dichotomy, yet it comes up again and again in Christian circles as the quality or mettle of one person’s faith as gauged by another. I maintain that the relationship between God and the individual is a privileged relationship and that it is the height of presumption for one person to judge another and what he or she does as far as expression of faith in works. Let us give one another the benefit of the doubt in this department, that we are usually trying to do the best we can at any given time, considering the constraints of work, health, time and all the responsibilities inherent in any life.

Let us trust that we are all looking at the same Jesus, but that he is revealing himself in our lives in different ways, depending on who we are and what our needs, our inclinations and individual histories are. God in Jesus is enough. Let us have faith in him, way more faith even than the Israelites in the desert gazing at the serpent on the top of a pole. The bronze serpent was an inanimate fashioned thing. The crucified Christ was a living man, who died and was raised up and lives now. How much more is he able to do for us who gaze on him than the bronze object that was eventually idolized by the people and broken in pieces by the fervent King Hezekiah, whose heart was after God.

God’s heart is after us. Know that. Be sensitive to that over these next three weeks as we move toward Easter. Remember, and respond as best you can. It’s all for you. Deal with it. Amen.

A Question and an Invitation

Sheepscott Community Church March 15, 2009

Exodus 20: 1-17
1 Corinthians 1: 18-25
John 2: 13-22

A Question and an Invitation

When Ted Smith read the first verse of Genesis 17 last week, I was electrified by it: “I am God almighty; walk before me and be blameless.” I had read the verse several times in preparing for last week’s service, and had rolled right over it as though I were cutting grass, in a hurry to get to the other side of the yard and get the job done. What was the difference on Sunday? I attribute it at least partly to hearing someone read the word aloud. It’s like poetry in that sense. Poetry on the page, the text of poetry, gives its own satisfaction. But poetry––and much of scripture is poetry–– is an oral art and something happens in the air when it is spoken. It happens between and among people and between the Spirit and a person. That’s the first explanation I gave myself about my visceral reaction to that line: “I am God Almighty; walk before me and be blameless.” I wanted to do that. I wanted to walk before God and be blameless.

Another piece of the explanation is that the word itself, declared by God to Moses, is true. When we hear the truth spoken, our spirits respond, whether or not we fully understand what we are hearing. I remember falling in love with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins when I was a young undergraduate. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but the rhythms and the sheer beauty of the arranged words captured my imagination and engendered exultation when I would read the poems out loud or hear them read.

Bear with me as I cite another example of hearing truth in poetry. I taught units of poetry to grades K-8 at Whitefield School for probably 10 years. In one of the third-grade classes, the kids were assigned to write a poem. I took their poems home and was blown away by two written by a child who was labeled as “trouble.” He was set off by himself on one side of the room because he didn’t pay attention well and would distract the other students. He spent a lot of time looking out the window and was labeled a dreamer. I suspect if he were in school now, he would be labeled ADD, attention deficit disorder. He had written his poems as blocks of text, rather than in the arranged lines of poetic form. I marked the poems to show him where the natural breaks were and looked forward to talking to him about them the next week.

With undisguised excitement, I spoke to the teacher at the beginning of class about the boy’s work. “Yes, yes,” she said somewhat impatiently, “you see? He can’t even spell.” I was taken aback and handed out the poems, telling that child how good the poems he had written were and explaining briefly about lineation. I asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to read his or her poem, and his hand immediately shot up in the air. He came forward and read one of the poems, which I’ll read to you now.

The snow covers an area so great
It’s like God making the bed of reality
And the dust of an old chair falling upon us.

In the only instance of this happening in all the years I taught poetry, those third graders broke into spontaneous applause for this poem by one of their own. I have always thought that was a response to the truth that they recognized in the poem, a truth that is at the heart of any artistic expression.

Just so you won’t be be left wondering about the second poem, I’ll read that as well.

A Sleigh Ride

The snow glistens in the sunlight
As the steel-runnered sleigh
Glides through the blanket
of silky white powder of winter
Leaving a trail of beauty.

Needless to say, that student shone in the weeks of poetry class and it was a joy to see him get recognition from his peers for good work. Why do I mention this example? I think there is a correspondence to my response to the first verse of that reading from Genesis––and perhaps yours as well––and the Whitefield third graders’ response to one of their fellow student’s poems. We all knew we were hearing the truth and were thrilled. That’s why they applauded.

That word of invitation from God to Moses in last week’s reading from the Hebrew Bible, “Walk before me and be blameless,” is a perfect reading for Lent. And speaking of perfect, that’s actually the earlier translation of the word that became blameless. I think sensitivity to the idea of perfection in a human being, and the inevitable striving and failing that that gives rise to rendered the second translation more livable, shall we say.

But the challenge of the invitation was laid before all of us last week, and now we come to the giving of the Ten Commandments in this week’s Old Testament reading from Exodus. In trying to follow the Ten Commandments, we can begin to practice walking before God and being blameless. Actions follow thoughts and words, the words like the cement poured into the forms that will harden into the foundation of our actions into habitual behavior. I would argue for memorization of the Ten Commandments, of prayers. These form the foundation stones for our lives.

But before we delve into the matter of the commandments, let’s go forward to the New Testament reading from John, where we might get some help to hear those commandments. Jesus’s turning over the tables of the money changers in the temple, calling them to task for making his Father’s house a den of thieves, running after them with a scourge, the high drama of the scene, his burning anger––not an easily forgotten picture of the so-called gentle Savior, the one who is foreseen in the servant sayings of Isaiah, including vs. 2 and 3 of chapter 42: “He will not shout or cry out,/ he will not raise his voice in the streets./ A bruised reed he will not break,/ a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.”

Ha. I’d say we were dealing with another side of the Savior here, and it is a side we need to pay attention to, to learn a lesson from. Jesus was after all a whole human being. “How dare you turn my Father’s house into a marketplace!” In relation to this incident, his disciples remembered after his death and resurrection the scripture, “Zeal for your house consumes me.” When those who witnessed what he did asked him on what authority he did that, he said that if they destroyed that temple, he would rebuild it again in three days. They mocked the assertion, not understanding that he was speaking about the temple of his own body and not about the center of worship in Jerusalem.

We’ve heard this figure used before––the body as a temple. As with Christ our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, God, and as such, taking responsibility for full understanding of the idea, we have to indeed treat them as temples of God. It can be easier to take better care of our dogs’ and our cats’ diets and bodies than our own. Easier to make good choices for them. Commendable even, but if we tell the truth of it to ourselves, it’s easier perhaps because we don’t have to deny ourselves what we like, what we want to have or do. Our virtue can be projected out there, on our animals, on our children, not in here, where the real work of caring for the temple of our God-given bodies is done.

I am suggesting that we need to hear this word that Jesus spoke about raising up our own bodies, not in quite so dramatic a fashion as the resurrection, but after that fashion nevertheless. What am I talking about? It’s Lent. Say no to something that you know is bad for you and yes to something that you know is good for you, for the glory of God and for your own health’s benefit, whether that’s a food or drink, whether that’s an action or behavior. Try to hear God saying, “Walk before me and be blameless.” The thrill that word was for me, as the week unfolded after hearing it, was that I wanted to be blameless. It wasn’t as though it were a breast-beating, woe-is-me kind of thing to do. I wanted to walk before God and be blameless.

I note, especially for the hedonists among us, one of whom I spoke with when preparing this sermon, the emphasis is usually placed on fasting and abstinence during Lent. While that discipline can be good for the body and the soul, and the idea of self-denial is attractive to some people, just the mention of it can cause others’ levels of anxiety to rise precipitously. Therefore, I must note as well that perhaps more important than these seasonal physical disciplines are the spiritual disciplines of forgiveness, that includes not seeking revenge, not wishing ill on the other, not being jealous, and so on. Surely unforgiveness, vengefulness, spitefulness, and jealousy, along with blaming, slandering, adultery––the list really is endless, isn’t it?––surely these are like the money changers in the temple, only here they are desecrating the Body of Christ, who we are.

I am suggesting that if we internalize the picture of Jesus driving out the moneychangers from the temple, if we translate that word into driving before us those habits and actions that prevent our approaching the altar of God in anything like a complete fashion, if we drive them before us with a cord formed of will and desire, we can make ourselves more amenable to the voice of God. And what does the voice say?

I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in the heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God;
You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God;
Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy;
Honor your father and your mother;
You shall not murder;
You shall not commit adultery;
You shall not steal;
You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor;
You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or his maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Of the sins catalogued in the Ten Commandments, the first three have to do with our relationship to God, and the other seven with our relationship with the community. They are social sins, viz., they constitute sins against the community. When Jesus was asked by a teacher of the law what was the most important commandment, his answer was, “’Love the Lord your God with your whole heart, your whole soul and your whole mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself.’” That compresses everything in the Ten Commandments into two: Be right with God, and you’ll be right with your neighbor.

What happens when we fall down on the job, when we fail at carrying out our best intentions, when we sin against God and the community, the temple which is the Body of Christ, which is all of us together as one in Christ? Well, it’s a good idea to tell somebody about it. That happens most often informally with a trusted friend who can hear what a jerk we’ve been and not give up on us, which is the way Jesus is. The listening friend is in the place of Christ, of Jesus. We are Christ to and for one another.

I offer all this to you as a kind of question and invitation. The question? At this time of Lent, in terms of the first commandment, what does your strange or false god look like? If you ask, you will be shown. The invitation? To allow the Spirit of God to drive out, break down, free you from whatever that false god is to make way for the revelation that is your particular wider understanding-into- appreciation and adoration of what and /or who God is.

Your gaze and your listening, of eye and ear, might fall on fullness, emptiness, darkness, light, forest, water sounds, cats’ eyes, centers of blossoms, a child’s spontaneity, the beauty of a well-made book. God is everywhere in everything: that’s the point. And Jesus wants us to keep our temples and our acts clean, our hands clean, so that our lives can enjoy and reflect that infinitely faceted omnipresence of God and take the further step of embodying that understanding and acting out of it in the world. Amen.

A Question and an Invitation

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"Is Anything Too Hard for God?"

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Sheepscott Community Church March 8, 2009

Genesis 17: 1-7; 15-16; 18: 1-15
Romans 4: 13-25
Mark 9: 2-9

“Is Anything Too Hard for God?”

As the gospel tells this morning’s story, “Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led them up a high mountain, where they were all alone. There he was transfigured before them. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.” And if you knew my mother’s perfectionism in all matters having to do with laundry––washing, starching, drying, sprinkling, rolling and ironing my father’s white shirts––you’d appreciate how white Jesus’s raiment must have been if it was whiter than that. “And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus.”

Now that is an extraordinary event to be part of, to witness, as Peter, James and John did. And I can imagine that some of you might be thinking, If I ever saw something like that, then I could really believe. Then I’d have no doubts. If Jesus said, N., N., N., come with me. I am going to show you who I am. Now that would be a life-transforming experience, would it not?

Think again. This transfiguration of Jesus, coming cheek-by-jowl in the gospel of Mark with his first prediction of his death and resurrection, apparently happened not too long before that death, pointing the way toward what the apostles would later better understand Jesus was showing them in his transfigured self, at least part of what the resurrection meant. Why do I say think again about this being a life-transforming experience? It was––in that moment––but think about Peter especially. How long after that did he deny that he even knew this Jesus, this one he had been privileged to see transfigured?

Peter truly does stand in for us: one day up, the next day down, our faith solid as a rock one day, and the next day a pool of quicksand we flounder in. But this is good; it reminds us who we are, and who God is. It reminds us who is in charge, whom we need to turn in faith, with our empty hands and our not knowing.

I had an experience last week in this area of remembering who I am, and who I am not. We’re just over a week into Lent and I stumbled badly over my own personal work I had set myself for this season. In considering my shortcoming that night in prayer, ready to make yet another promise and declaration, I had a new and better thought: I’ll sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning.

In the morning I was full of peace and balance and was able to go into Sunday service remembering , as I say, who was finally in charge. Whose business is this anyway? We must make it our own, as God’s business in the world is our own, but we must cultivate perspective. Mistakes? Stumbles? Backsliding? Actually denying the Christ by denying what is the reality of our own sinful humanity that needs our cooperation in being re-redeemed as it were again and again? Sure, regrettably but understandably we do stumble often. Paradoxically it is that thorn-in-the-flesh that Paul speaks of, the habit we cannot seem to break, the sin itself that humbles us and moves us to call on God. Like Peter, forgetting the power of what he saw on the top of the Mount of Transfiguration and focused only on his fear of what might happen to him if he were indeed associated with Jesus in the eyes of Roman law or in the gossip of the neighborhood. Although we might be impressed permanently by the effect of seeing such a transfiguration, we are still fully human, and fear for our own well-being, or that of those we love in this world, might obscure the memory for a period of time.

Then I would ask, if Jesus is transfigured and we are one with him in the Body of Christ, then might not we too be transfigured, perhaps in a less dramatic way? I think this month of March is the wildest month of the year, predictable only for its unpredictability. Howling winds and snow like we had last Monday, and yesterday it was 53 degrees at noon. From 13 below on Wednesday morning to 53 at Saturday noon, a 66-degree span within a week in North Whitefield. Let’s hear it for the month of March.

The snow-covered landscape and the weather are an appropriate backdrop and metaphor for our own lives as we approach Easter. It’s a cliché that life is stirring under the ground even now in every crocus bulb, every tulip, every daffodil. We have faith that they will grow again in our fields and gardens because we’ve see it happen every year, but fulfillment of the bulbs’ destiny, from bulb to bloom to seed, and our expectation out of experience doesn’t diminish the sense of wonder and gratitude we feel in the face of this annual resurrection; it enhances it.

How much more our sense of wonder in the face of the resurrection of Jesus toward which we are inexorably moving in our liturgical celebrations? Jesus was transfigured atop the mount and it foreshadowed his later fuller resurrection. Can we, observing the natural landscape and believing in the resurrection insofar as we are able, can we expect to be transformed like plants? Like Jesus? Why not? We are not separate from the natural world or the supernatural world. We are part and parcel of the whole package. We have as much potential in us for change and transfiguration as any flowering bulb. We are budding with possibility even now in the form of good intentions. And although we fall down in trying to fulfill some of them, like the lilac bush where some of the buds are shriveled by late killing frost, still others come to full bud and blossom and beauty, and then go to seed to produce more beauty, more change, more participation in this landscape of life.

How can God work with a sinner like me, you might ask. Maybe you’re one of the apostles who didn’t get invited up the mountain with Peter, James and John. Sure, they’re the special ones Jesus is always singling out for attention and the special moments. But you? You’re still out on the Sea of Galilee fishing and trying to figure out how you’re going to get everything done today you’re supposed to do, including keeping your wife happy when she’s been complaining about all the time you’ve been spending with Jesus and the boys. And then you have to get done whatever it is Jesus needs you to do. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and so on. Discouragement, resentment out of jealousy... the track a person’s thoughts can take.

Can that person, can you, can I be transformed, transfigured as Jesus was? As Peter, James and John saw happen? I remind you that the title of this message is right out of Genesis, “Is anything too hard for God?” One of the three visitors whom Abraham addresses as Lord––and who is understood to be Lord––asks that rhetorically of Abraham. The answer is understood to be, No, nothing is too hard for the Lord. In this case it is conception taking place in the womb of a woman who is menopausal with a man who is no longer fertile. Here there would be no question that the product of such a conception would be God’s person, God’s doing. That’s the point. He would be named yishaq, Isaac, which means “he laughed,” which is just what Abraham did when the Lord told him about the son of the promise. He fell on his face and laughed. Sarah laughed as well, at the seeming impossibility of it. The difference with Sarah was that when she was accused of laughing, she dissembled and denied it. How foolish we are to think that anything we think, plan, act on or laugh at is hidden from God. Back to the question, “Is anything too hard for God?”

Let’s appropriate that question for ourselves. We have a situation in our lives that has been draining us for years, whether it’s a habit, a difficult child, a burdensome relative whose care we have, depression, chronic pain, unrelieved sadness, sheer orneriness that we wish we didn’t have but don’t know how to come out from under. “Is anything too hard for God?” Think of Sarah’s barren womb; think of Abraham’s infertility. Think of Jesus actually buried inside a cave, as dead as dead can be.

There’s a wonderful line in this morning’s reading from Romans, characterizing God as the One “...who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.”
And God credits Abraham with righteousness because “he was fully persuaded that God had the power to do what he had promised,” indeed to call things that are not as though they were, and so into being. The fact of Isaac as the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham, and the fact of Jesus’s resurrection argue for a negative answer to the question: “Is anything too hard for God?” No. Nothing is too hard for God. We and our problems are a piece of cake next to these earthshaking situations, which brings me back to the transfiguration, a kind of shaking of the earth before the dreadful last week of Jesus’s life.

Another feature of that event is God speaking to those assembled––Peter, James and John––from a cloud. He is confirming the rightness of Jesus’s choices and life here at the near-end of his earthly life in some of the same words used in Matthew’s gospel at the baptism by John, at the beginning of Jesus’s public life, and which I quoted last week: “This is my Son whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” The difference in today’s gospel of Mark is that the voice exhorts those present to, “Listen to him.”

In Jewish thought the presence of God is regularly connected with the cloud. It was in the cloud that Moses met God. Listen to Exodus 19: 9: “The Lord also told [Moses], ‘I am coming to you in a dense cloud, so that when the people hear me speaking with you, they may always have faith in you also.’” It was the cloud which filled the Temple when it was dedicated after Solomon had built it. 1 Kings 8: 10: “When the priests left the holy place, the cloud filled the Temple of the Lord, so that the priests could no longer minister because of the cloud, since the Lord’s glory had filled the Temple of the Lord.” And the Jews believed that when the Messiah came, the cloud of God’s presence would return to the Temple. Elijah, the prophet of prophets, and Moses the lawgiver appeared with Jesus in his transfigured state and thereby at the very least represented the fulfillment of the messianic tradition and the expectations of the people Israel. Here we have these three good Jews atop Mount Hermon hearing the voice of God speaking to them from a cloud, and the figure would have been very familiar to them and identifiable as associated with the Messiah.

It is not so familiar to us, except as we read about it in scripture. However, it’s a very useful figure and one I would like to appropriate to finish up on these thoughts about transfiguration. It is out of the cloud that God speaks and once again identifies Jesus as his Son with the new directive: Listen to him.

In our lives, it is much more likely that we will learn the lessons of those lives from the dark clouds that inevitably come into them. We are merry and bright and ready to party on sunny days, and we are grateful for them. Those days teach their lessons of the joys of life. But it is on those cloudy days, those days the weatherman in March has not necessarily predicted, when anything can happen, it is on those days that we need to remember the voice of God speaking to our apostolic stand-ins, Peter, James and John, reminding us that Jesus is the one with the answers and that we would do well to listen to him.

If Jesus could say yes, and he did, to what was before him, trusting the Father and the experience he had on Mount Hermon, especially including the validating and vindicating voice of God again, he can enable us to say yes to whatever the circumstances of our lives are, especially in those areas where we are trying to be better people. He can help us by his Spirit to be more responsive to God directly and more responsive to those around us in whom God lives.

We are all on pilgrimage up that holy mountain and we have our glimpses of God along the way, whether in nature by ourselves, in communion with others in this church, in the workplace where we see the best and worst in people, in random encounters on the street. We meet God, and we are transfigured by those encounters in small ways. What we don’t register fully with the mind is impressed on the spirit, where we listen with an acuity of hearing our bodily ears cannot even dream of.

In these remaining weeks of Lent may we recognize the transfigured and transfiguring Christ in one another and in our circumstances, where God is always at work sharpening his tools so that his purposes can be better accomplished, so that the work of art that is the unfolding of universes may be truer and more beautiful for our having lived. Amen.