Weekly Sermons

An Appropriate Guide: Psalm 22:25-31 & Acts 8:26-40; Easter 5 – May 6, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him

            About 25 years ago, I met two teenagers in a youth group I led that were siblings.  This brother and sister were very close and very caring towards one another. Though it might not have been than unusual among siblings who are weathering the ending of adolescence, it was marked enough for me to comment upon it to them.

They both, separately, told a story about when they were young, about kindergarten and first grade-aged children.  They said that their favorite game back then was something they called: “Can I help you, Buddy?”

The game was simple, they took turns playing the parts; one would ride their big wheel and purposely crash it off the sidewalk and turn it over and then lay on the ground.  The other would come along on their big wheel, stop and ask: “Can I help you, Buddy?”  Then the one on the ground would say: “Yes, I need your help,” and together they would right the over-turned big wheel and start the game over with roles reversed.

Those two older teenagers both pointed to this as somehow seminal in explaining why they had always been very close and concerned about each other since.  They had learned that they needed to take care of each other and did even during the more contentious period of adolescence and beyond.

I tell this story because it is the imagery that the passage from Acts 8 always conjures in my mind whenever I have read it since meeting those two amazing young people.  It is obvious from the story that the Ethiopian eunuch seeks and receives help and guidance from Philip.  This is an important factor in this wonderful tale of the early Church.

Philip, led by the Spirit, encounters this Ethiopian eunuch, one who is sort of one the boundaries of society, and is convinced that he can be of help to the man.

The eunuch, for his part, is reading scripture and in attempting to understand what he is reading, he realizes that he is need of some guidance, some assistance in order that he might understand.  In fact, the exchange between the two went like this:

So Philip ran up to [the chariot] and heard [the Ethiopian eunuch] reading the prophet Isaiah. [Philip] asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.

            Luke, the writer of the Book of Acts, appears to be suggesting something very important here about scripture, God’s Word to us, and our need for guidance along the way: in order to fully understand and comprehend God’s Word, we need each other.  It appears that simple to me; though we certainly should and do read the Bible for ourselves, we should never think that our comprehension in total isolation from others is an appropriate interpretation.  In order to more fully comprehend the grace of God and the purpose that God has for us, we need each other as guides and helpers along the way.  In short, to better understand what we are called to in following Jesus Christ, we need Christ’s church.

William Brosend, an American Baptist pastor, wrote about this in an article I read.  Here’s what he said:

“Somewhere along the way … we became convinced that the Bible should be as easy to understand as it is to buy.  It has been translated, paraphrased, life-amplified, annotated and illustrated.  That does not make it easily accessible.  An ongoing challenge for church and clergy is to sufficiently establish the significance of scriptures in the hearts and minds of believers so that they will attempt the hard work, the life’s work, of seeking to understand the Word made Book.  The Ethiopian knew this, for he was motivated to acquire an Isaiah scroll.  He was seeking faith and understanding, and Philip was privileged to be his guide – literally to show him the way.”

Brosend continues a little later in the article:

“There is something here for church and clergy – the use of the word ‘guide’ in translation. The Ethiopian did not ask for a teacher, he asked for a guide.  There is a big difference.  Teachers point and say, ‘Go there, do that.’ Guides reach out and say, ‘This is the road I traveled. You might want to try it, but whatever road you choose, I’d like to walk it with you.’”

This certainly is one of the reasons we need to be the church; so that we can help one another to better understand and comprehend the great grace that God in Jesus Christ is drawing us into.  This is why we need each other: to be guides to one another along the road of God’s way in this world.

Participation in the life to which God calls us in never, ever an isolating or private event; instead, it is the very thing that takes us from our sin-soaked isolation and throws us into a midst of a merry band of followers of the Christ.  We learn to be such a follower by allowing ourselves to be guided by God’s Word shared in community; shared and studied in the midst of God’s people.

This is illustrated and lived out in a most profound manner here when we share in the Lord’s Supper.  It is God in Jesus Christ who calls us and draws us to this table.  It is the Lord’s Supper that we share.  It is the Lord’s Table from which we are fed, but such nourishment, such revelation of God’s love and mercy in Jesus Christ is not appropriated by us without the help or assistance of others.

Think of the symbolism and imagery born out in practice, when we celebrate communion here in this way.  The minister may preside and offer the Words of the Institution of the supper, but there are other hands involved here.  Each time we take the plate and pass the cup, we are offering the presence of Jesus Christ to our neighbors in the pews.  We do not partake of this sacrament in isolation or only contemplative singleness … no, because we are called to care whether or not our neighbor in the pew receives the sacrament, our contemplation is interrupted by the duty and responsibility to pass the bread and the cup.

This is not an onerous or distracting interruption; no I believe it to be a “grounding interruption,” for when we do pass the bread and the cup, we remember that we are not alone here … this walk with Jesus is not just about some kind of “me and Jesus” thing … this is about the presence of Christ in the midst of his people … all of us TOGETHER.  We are therefore “grounded” in the presence of Christ in the midst of the congregation; both are needed to be fully attuned, fully engaged and fully nourished.

The truth of the situation came from an unusual place; from the words of an Ethiopian eunuch, struggling with scripture and wanting to be called from the boundaries of life and humiliation to the center of living in the light of God’s grace.  When asked if he understood, he said the honest, truthful and most profound thing:

“How can I, unless someone guides me?”

The Ethiopian eunuch speaks the truth for all of us as well.

Cornerstone: Psalm 23 & Acts 4:5-12; Easter 4 – April 29, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

This Jesus is “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.” There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.

            It really does matter what we believe.  I don’t think that I need to tell you that, but we all have need of being reminded of that from time to time.  In our culture, so filled with alternative ways of doing things, thinking things and believing things, it really does matter what we believe.

In the early 1990’s, a phrase arose out of one of the General Assemblies of our denomination that is profound in its simplicity: Theology matters!  This phrase was bandied about during the debate over some rather thorny issues before the assembly, and I have always been grateful for both its simplicity and its profundity.  Indeed, theology really does matter!

Take for instance a particular minor event that happened in my own ministry that bears out this terrific point about theology.  I was acting in my role with a presbytery to which I belonged, having been appointed as a representative of the presbytery to meet with the Session of a church that was greatly troubled and angered by the actions of the General Assembly some years past.

As the Session of that church discussed their concerns about just how the denomination was moving in a direction that was not to their liking, we began to enter into a discussion about theological beliefs.  I will never forget the look on one of the members of that Session as she said the following:

“I think that we’ve gotten away from the God of wrath.  I really like that god! Anyone can love Jesus; his love seems to be so mamby-pamby and offered to just about anyone … it’s that God of wrath that I love; He makes me feel like I’ve really accomplished something when I’m good!”

Wow!  What an incredible distortion of orthodox Christianity!  In this woman’s mind, the God of the Old Testament is the wrathful Father of Jesus Christ.  It is to him, this wrathful, hating God, that this woman was convinced that we should turn and offer our obedience, not this Jesus who, as she said, anyone could love; implying that there was no real effort in loving Jesus, just in loving a wrathful God.

I can’t begin to tell you what a corruption of the Christian gospel that woman’s beliefs were, but her theology really did matter.  Because of her theology, she found no place for grace in life; no place for love for another; only condemnation of sin and great and dire fear of God that led her not to really love God, but rather to live in abject horror of meeting the living God.  My friends, theology matters … what we believe really does matter for how we are called to live.

In the passage from the Book of Acts, Peter and his cohorts have been flung into prison for the night and then called upon by the authorities to answer for their preaching and healing ministries.  Peter’s response makes all the difference in the world … or at least should for us.

Peter, emboldened by the resurrection of Jesus Christ, makes it quite clear that Jesus is the only way to salvation.  In a culture, not unlike our own, pluralistic and somewhat secular, such affirmations were not necessarily readily accepted or understood.  This fact, however, did not sway Peter: he makes his confession as boldly and complete as had been his earlier denial of the Christ on the night before Jesus’ crucifixion.  Here, Peter is finally and fully rehabilitated!

But what an amazingly bold thing to say:

There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.

 That is a truly breath-taking assertion … it is singular in its commitment to the truth that Jesus is not only the Christ, he is THE Christ … the ONLY Christ … there is no salvation in any other name.

Now, I trust that this does not come as a surprise to you!  Sometimes we need to take our own spiritual inventory or own theological “gut check.”  Can we too, join with Peter, in making such a bald, affirmative statement that Jesus Christ IS the ONLY way to God?

I think that our answer must be, that is if theology really does matter for how we live, with an unequivocal and equally as empathetic: YES!  Yes, we believe that Jesus Christ is the ONLY way to God.

However, in our attempts to be truly clear, truly passionate and thoroughly convinced, we still must be careful about all the implications for how we live.

The Christian Church has much to answer for in just how we have lived out this statement, this affirmation.  We have not always offered this realization to the world with love and care for our neighbors in our hearts.  Sometimes, we have sought to lord this over others; attempting to force them to believe something that I am convinced only God can reveal to us.

I like what Walter Wink, former professor at Auburn Theological Seminary said about all this:

“That concluding triumphal statement has caused havoc in human history.  Christians armed with the certainty that they alone possessed God’s truth tore about the globe destroying religions and spiritualities … Let us apologize to the countless victims slaughtered by Christian conquistadors for refusing to convert; let us beg for mercy from God and humanity for the arrogance of Christianity in its scorched-earth-and-take-no-captives missionary juggernaut.”

I think that Dr. Wink has a point here that we should all consider: Should our belief that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation be an excuse to reject others or to treat followers of other religions with contempt and disregard?  Of course, we should not!  We should have all learned from our somewhat-checkered Christian past and come to full conviction that though we believe that Christ is the only way to salvation, this world is larger than ourselves and it all belongs to God.

For me, the claims that in no other name than Jesus Christ is salvation is something that liberates me not to condemn my neighbors who do not agree with me or follow some other path, but rather to adopt, as best as I can, the gentle attitude of love that our Savior exhibited, both in his life and even from the cross.  It was Jesus who would not allow the children to be kept from him or would turn away the sinner or the Samaritan, but rather sought to gather all into his kingdom of love.

Ultimately, for me, this affirmation that Jesus is the only way is a conviction that God’s love, mercy and grace IS the only way. And this way is not to be lorded over another or forced upon yet another, but rather lived out to its fullest and greatest implications.

I am firmly convinced that God does not call me to convert others to the truth that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation, but rather to live this truth. Conversion is the work of God’s spirit upon our neighbors and upon us; it is not our work.

Still, what we believe matters … it matters to how we live to know that Jesus is the Christ and that we can trust in him and no longer need to look for another.  It matters to know that God’s tremendous love and grace has been demonstrated in this Jesus of Nazareth and that God’s way of love and grace in Jesus is the way to be authentically and truly human, truly a child of God.  It matters … it matters indeed.

I really like what the late Donald Bloesch, a theology professor from Dubuque Theological Seminary wrote about this:

“In its witness the church should not press for a return to a monolithic society in which church and state work together to ensure a Christian civilization, for such an undertaking would only draw the church away from its redemptive message and blur the lines between church and world.  Neither should the church withdraw from society and cultivate little bastions of righteousness that strive to preserve the ethical and religious values handed down from the past.  Instead, the church should witness to the truth of the gospel in the very midst of society in the hope and expectation that this truth will work as the leaven that turns society toward a higher degree of justice and freedom.  The church cannot build the kingdom of righteousness, but it can serve this kingdom by reminding the world that there is a transcendent order that stands in judgment over every worldly achievement and that the proper attitude of leaders of nations is one of humility before a holy God and caring concern for the disinherited and the oppressed.”

And all this, because we believe and trust that Peter’s words are as true now as they were then:

This Jesus is “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.”
There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.

Community over Convenience – Psalm 133 & Acts 4:32-35; Easter 2-April 15, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

            All I really ever needed to know I learned here, from you.  Now, I know that sounds suspiciously like the title of a little book published in the last century that sought to simplify the more complex aspects of life, but I really mean it when I say that the most beautiful, profound and loveliest things about life I learned here, from you.

When I say that I learned these things here, I don’t necessarily mean in this one, singular location … in this one, singular and unique congregation.  I mean that I learned these things of great value and worth from the churches in which I have been a member.

And when I say that I have learned them from you, I don’t mean necessarily only from those of you gathered here in this place, in this lovely sanctuary this morning.  Of course, I mean that I have learned these valuable things about life from a long line of witnesses to the truth, people like you and, in fact, including you, but not inclusive of you.  What I mean simply is that the most important things about human life I learned from Christ’s church: way back in Marshalltown, Iowa; from churches in Central New Jersey and Southwestern Michigan and, of course, here in Greensburg.  It is from Christ’s church that I have learned the most important lessons about life!

I’m not the only one or the first to say such things … not by a long short.  One of the great witnesses to the truth, John Calvin, wrote of this in his voluminous Institutes of the Christian Religion.  He’s what he felt about the church:

“But as it is now our purpose to discourse of the visible Church, let us learn, from her single title of Mother, how useful, nay, how necessary the knowledge of her is, since there is no other means of entering into life unless she conceive us in the womb and give us birth, unless she nourish us at her breasts, and, in short, keep us under her charge and government, until, divested of mortal flesh, we become like the angels. For our weakness does not permit us to leave the school until we have spent our whole lives as scholars…”

The great reformer, John Calvin, was convinced that all things necessary to know was taught to him (and to all believers for that matter) by the church, to which he ascribed the ancient title of “Mother.”

Of course, Calvin was not the first to comment upon the need all of us have of the greater community of God’s faithful that the Bible calls the Church.  The New Testament is filled with admonitions to the gathering of Christ’s people to actually become the church; to, in essence, grow up out of the culture of individuality and individual pursuits and desires and become a collective for the sake of Jesus Christ and Christ’s mission in this world.

One of the most beautiful descriptions of what it can and does mean to be the church in this world, comes from Paul in his Letter to the Church at Ephesus:

“¹⁹So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, ²⁰built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. ^*21In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; ²²in whom you also are built together spiritually^* into a dwelling-place for God.”

Here is the beautiful and meaningful truth about Christ’s church: here, we who have been strangers and aliens both to God and to one another, have been brought together not by our merit or even by our good sense, but by the action of Jesus Christ in this world and in our lives.

The story we heard this morning from the Book of Acts, is a small snippet about the early Church.  Luke makes it clear that one of the early signs of the church was their collective life; that they shared life together.  Somehow, this was unique, different than the rest of the culture.  It was so startling that it brought Christ’s church both early converts, wanting the kind of life that they saw in others and it also brought persecution and notice of the authorities.  They just didn’t know what to make of these boisterous radicals who kept speaking and living like their leader, this Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, was actually alive, having been resurrected by the power of God.  The authorities of both temple and statehouse just didn’t know what to make of it.

And yet, this brave band of Christians were drawn together to share life in the light of God’s love for them in Jesus Christ.

The same, hopefully, can be said for us.  Though we are 2,000 years removed from the experience of the early Church, we still experience the love of God and the grace of Jesus Christ in a collective way here.  It is in the presence of Christ’s church that we have all learned what is good, right, beautiful and wondrous about human life.  It is here also that we have learned about the tragedy that life can be and the difficulties that rise when people really do commit themselves to being together rather than being separate in this world.

The older I have grown, the more I have experienced with Christ’s church in ministry and in practice of faith, the more I am convinced that it is not always convenient to be in community with others.  How about you?  Have you experienced that?

Of course, there are beautiful and lovely moments that we spend together as Christ’s church, but there are also moments of difficulty, tension and stress.  There are times when it just isn’t convenient to us to be a part of this community and we are faced with a decision: do we prefer our personal convenience over the life of community as God’s people?

If we have learned anything about the Christian life from our involvement with the church, it should at least be that God’s mercy in Jesus Christ, his grace spread abroad to this world, his mission of peace and love is not just about us!  This message that we have received from God through scripture and the witness of others should have taught us first and foremost, that this is really not just about us.

I like what Eugene Peterson, retired Presbyterian minister, says about this:

“The Christian life is too often treated in our culture as an extra, something we get involved in after we have the basic survival needs established and then realize that things aren’t yet quite complete. So we become a Christian. That is all well and good, but there is no B.C. in our lives, no “Before Christ.” Neither is there any B.C. in anyone else who is not a confessed Christ.  Christ is always present, for all of us.  Just because we have no awareness of the presence and action of God previous to our knowledge of it does not mean that God was absent. We must not naively assume that the Christian life begins with us. As long as we think in those terms, we are apt to judge everything and everyone else by our experience and circumstances.  That kind of thinking is understandable in adolescents. But we are called to grow up.”

Though what Peterson says is true, quite true, we will never learn this in isolation.  We can sit at home all we want with the Bible in our laps and read through the profound and meaningful witness of God’s word to us, but if we never encounter that Word embodied in community, embodied in the individual and collective lives of others, we will never really grow up, as both Paul and Peterson encourages us all to do.  No, we are all, always in need of the church, in need of one another, in need of putting community over our own convenience and personal agendas.

This brings me to the point of our great experiment with community and convenience.  Of course, it appears more convenient to have two worship services and contemporaneous Sunday school programs.  This schedule, that we have utilized, with variations, for over forty years, has had many advantages to us.  The early service has made it easy for us to bring our children for Sunday school and “take care” of our worship all within the same hour.  The later service has provided for a more traditional and time-proven rhythm of Sunday morning devotion that gives us time for a quiet Sunday morning, with reading of the paper and no rushing around before going off to worship and then out to lunch.  Of course, we have all enjoyed these rhythms and patterns to our life and to say that they aren’t important would be an outright deception.  Of course, our patterns and rhythms are important … precisely because they are, well, “ours.”

However, in some ways, the traditional system that we have enjoyed have left some things undone … adult education opportunities have not always been very well subscribed and the opportunities for our children to learn to worship have been slim at best.  It is for these very reasons and others that our Session determined to give this single, combined service, with a separate time for Sunday school for all ages, a try.  And this is exactly what this is … a try; a six-week experiment that will be evaluated by the leadership on a variety of points, but not the least of which will be the sense of community.  Are we building community by coming together in this way? Are we achieving a greater understanding of ourselves not just as individual followers of Jesus Christ, but as God’s great collective and community of hope that is the Church?

These are the things that we will be pondering over the next six weeks and I invite you to consider them as well.  What is convenient about the Christian life and where does our demand for convenience get in the way of the community that God is seeking to build in our lives?  What is the power and the purpose of such a community and where are we called to be take part in such a community?

We need to consider these things and think upon them as we seek to answer God’s call to be Christ’s church in this place.

Finally, let me leave with one of my favorite things that Eugene Peterson has written.  These little sentences help to keep me settled, centered and aware of the life of the church and what it means to me … I hope it means the same for you:

“Christ and church, church and Christ.  When we are dealing with church we are dealing with Christ. When we are dealing with Christ, we are dealing with church. We cannot have one without the other – no Christ without church, no church without Christ.”

Risen: Psalm 118 & John 20:1-18; Easter Sunday – April 8, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

Christ is risen! (He is risen, indeed!)

            In churches across this country and around the world, this call and response is being heard and bearing witness to the truth that Christ is alive!  This is more than mere opening words to a church service or rote and ritual; it is proclamation of God’s great work in Jesus Christ.  It is a beautiful and significant thing that we dare not pass over too quickly this morning, for this is our Easter affirmation as well.  We believe; we know; we have experienced that Christ has risen from the grave and that what appears to be “powerless love has vanquished loveless power,” to quote one of my favorite preachers.  This is our witness for it is the witness of Christ’s church … Jesus Christ is not to be found among the dead, but rather among the living – among us today!

We have heard the story of Easter morning once again.  We have heard it from the witness of St. John’s gospel; we have heard it ably and powerfully read by our brother and dear friend Doug Holben; we have heard it again and we will hear throughout this service. But, let us hear what one of the earliest witnesses to the resurrection has offered to this world as both comfort and challenge.

These words are the words of St. Paul, in fact, the earliest recorded resurrection claim, who wrote to the church in Corinth and had the audacity, fueled by faith in Christ, to say:

“¹⁷If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸Then those also who have died^* in Christ have perished. ¹⁹If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

That is what some have called, putting all your Easter eggs in one basket, is it not?  It takes some real faith, confidence, courage or chutzpah maybe to affirm that so baldly, but that is exactly what we are doing when we add our voices to the witness of Christ’s church that Jesus, who was crucified was dead, but is now risen!  That is the testimony today … as it should be every day.

Let us dwell upon Paul’s word for just a moment more … he puts everything about the Christian faith into the one basket of Easter morning — this morning.  We kid ourselves if we think that we can realistically prove the resurrection; others have tried and I think that they have failed.  This is not so much about concrete proof as much as it is about convinced faith in God’s work in Jesus Christ.

William Sloan Coffin, the late-great preacher from the Riverside Church in New York City, has written this about that:

“But if the resurrection cannot be proved, it can be known, experienced, and it can be trusted.  Faith anyhow is not believing without proof; it’s trusting without reservation. The resurrection faith is a willingness on the basis of all that we have heard, all that we have observed, all that we have thought deeply about, and experienced on a level far deeper than the mind ever comprehends – faith is a willingness to risk our lives on the conviction that while we human beings kill God’s love we can never keep it dead and buried.  Jesus Christ is risen, today, tomorrow, every day.”

To that I say, “Amen, Brother Bill, amen!” Resurrection is never about proof, it is solely and completely about conviction … we have become convinced that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.  If that was not the case, if Christ did not rise from the grave, then good old St. Paul was right: we are people above all to be pitied, for we have merely fooled ourselves, deceived ourselves and sought to deceive others, knowingly or otherwise, with a lie.

But you and I know, beyond any need for proof, that God’s love cannot stay buried and dead.  We know this because we have seen it, because we have learned it, because, quite frankly, we have experienced it.  We know about resurrection.

The challenge comes when we leave this pleasant and joyous sanctuary and go back out into that world and find that we are definitely in the minority.  The world is much more comfortable with a Good Friday world than an Easter morning world!  The world operates on the principle that loveless power is always greater than powerless love; that death wrings everything out of life; that the human spirit and soul can easily be bought with a promise and a wink of the eye and that real and lasting change, real and lasting resurrection and reconciliation is only pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking and fluffy cotton-tailed bunnies and brightly colored eggs hiding under the nearest bush.  Indeed, we live in a world that hasn’t come very far in the nearly 2,000 years that separate our current existence from that first glorious Easter morning.

It reminds me of a story that I heard recently from a preacher I greatly admire:

“Two old codgers go moose hunting up in the north woods of Maine and are flown into their remote camp on a small, little plane. As the pilot of the tiny seaplane let them off on the shore of the lake he reminded them, ‘Like I said, I’ll be back in three days. But remember, this is a small plane; there’s room for the two of you and ONE moose.’

“Three days later, the pilot returned and taxied up to the shoreline only to see the two old guys standing there grinning from ear-to-ear with two huge moose between them. The pilot was greatly agitated and irritated and jumped out of the plane and waded up to the shore.

“’Hey, I told you guys that I could take you two and only ONE moose back with me.  We’ll never make it with both moose in the plane!’

“The two old-timers looked at each other surprised and answered, ‘Funny that is exactly what the fellah last year said!’

“The fear of competition with another pilot getting the best of the man, the pilot of little sea craft relented.  He helped to load up the guys and their two moose and started out to the middle of the lake.  It took forever for them to gain enough speed for takeoff and when they finally left the water, there were just yards from the far shore.  They barely cleared the trees and then about a quarter of a mile out, they clipped a tall fir tree and crashed, sending pieces of plane and moose antlers in all directions.  Finally, one of the old codgers came to, pulled his head out of the moss, spied his companion a short way off and asked, ‘Where are we?’

“His companion replied, ‘Oh, about a hundred yards farther than last year.’”

Oh, we never learn do we?  The world has not learned since that first Easter morning! Our world is like those two old codgers, doing the same old Good Friday things and coming up all tangled and bruised in the crash that human life can become when we refuse to see the resurrection truth of God’s love vanquishing hate; the world of God’s in breaking grace through the veil of Good Friday’s death and silence.  Our old world is more comfortable with the thought that God is dead and out of our way rather than witnessing to the truth that God’s love can never stay buried.

No, the truth of Christ’s resurrection has implications for your life and my life.  It is not a matter of proving it or providing evidence that demands a verdict; it is the matter of actually living it; living like it matters that powerless love can defeat and does defeat loveless power.

So, how does the Easter world that we know to be the most true and perfect description of what life is and should be get communicated to a world that sees only Good Friday finality and defeat?  Only with your very lives … only with our commitment and witness of God’s resurrecting love and grace; only through our living a life that is more about Easter than Good Friday will they ever avoid the seemingly inevitable moose-laden crash of human life and defeat.

Or maybe it is better put in the words that William Sloan Coffin once used himself in an Easter sermon:

“Easter is a demand not for sympathy with the crucified Christ, but a demand for loyalty to the resurrected one.”

Christ is risen! (He is risen, indeed!)

Power, Palms and the Populace: Phil. 2:5-11 & Mark 11:1-11; Palm Sunday- April 1, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

“‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!¹⁰ Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!Hosanna in the highest heaven!’”

“Let the same mind be in you that was^* in Christ Jesus…”

            The great preacher and activist William Sloane Coffin, pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City, opened more than a couple Palm Sunday sermons with talk about his favorite Western serial: “The Lone Ranger.”

Admittedly, this is a strange topic with which to begin a Palm Sunday sermon, but the great preacher makes some good sense.  He says that the American populace loves a good Western predominately because the genre portrays good and evil in fairly simplistic and straightforward imagery.  The bad guys wear the black hats; the good guys often don white ones.  The bad guys are always thoroughly bad and the good guys are equally as easily defined through and through: they’re always just plain good.

The epitome of this principle is found in Coffin’s favorite television Western: “The Lone Ranger.”  Coffin describes it thusly:

“…[Westerns] nourish the great American myth of rugged individuality, suggesting as they do that society is but a figment of the socialist imagination.  I’m not joking, because in the average Western the structures of society fail: the telegraph lines snap, the sheriff gets drunk, the cavalry rides off in the wrong direction.  Then up speaks the Lone Ranger: ‘We’ll head ‘em off at Eagle Pass.’ The ‘we’ never includes more than a monosyllabic Indian, and sure enough, against overwhelming odds, they save the day.  It’s all very satisfactory.”

Indeed, Coffin has struck right to the heart of our own self-delusions as a people: we want a significantly simple solution to the great problems and challenges that face us.  We don’t like, really, too complex of a dialogue from our heroes and we don’t tolerate, hardly ever, heroes who demonstrate themselves to be, all in all, self-emptying slaves who care not one wit for power, glory or the accoutrements of sovereignty.  No, we don’t tolerate the foolish or the ironic in our heroes …

This could be what bothers us on a Palm Sunday when we really take the time to consider the text that is always a part of this morning of palm-waving, festivity and the promise of the dawning of the end of our Lenten sacrifices.  The image that we receive of Jesus Christ is not the Lone Ranger upon his mighty steed, Silver, but rather the more-than-prophetic holy man astride the humble, put peace-signifying ass.  It can be a hard image for we Americans, so drunk with power, opportunity, hero-worship, and good old fashioned rugged individualism to get our heads and hearts around.

But then, in these texts and on this day, we are confronted with this image of the self-emptying, power eschewing Christ.  In this, we are forced to consider a different view and approach to power.  We are called to consider a different answer to the question that Coffin infers: “What makes for a satisfactory solution?” Today, we must consider openly and honestly, the witness of Jesus Christ riding a donkey into the city of Jerusalem.

Contrast this Biblical event of entrance to a great city with a somewhat recent occurrence in our collective memory: the fall of Baghdad now some nine years ago.  You remember that rather significant day as well as any of the rest of us: the CNN cameras relaying the powerful push of Coalition troops into the heart of the city, the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein and that very memorable figure of the middle-aged Iraqi man, removing his shoe and beating the head of the statue with great ferocity and apparent relief.  To him and maybe to the rest of us watching, we all thought: “It’s over!”  “It’s done!” “We’re the victors and Hussein and his evil cronies are the losers!”

Indeed, that is exactly the way we like to conceive of victory and heroics: simple, quick and with no real trailing details or mopping up actions that cost lives and resources and appear to be more a trip down a rabbit hole rather than a victory parade.  No, we like our victories obvious, powerful and all-encompassing.  This is exactly what satisfies us! But, we are not called to self-satisfaction; we called by the texts and the day to ponder what satisfies Jesus … what is the solution that he seeks?

Look again at the witness of the Gospel of Mark: Jesus is not taking Jerusalem by storm.  He is not riding in on a mighty war horse, as military leaders of his time did to signify either great victories or the subjugation of the conquered city’s populace.  No, Jesus comes riding in on another symbol for the people of his time … Jesus comes riding in on an ass.

In Jesus’ time, this symbolism would not have been lost on the populace, on the crowds surrounding the gates to Jerusalem that sunny, beautiful morning.  They knew that when the prince or the general came to them on a donkey, this was the sign of peaceful intentions.  The one riding was not a conquering hero, but one who sought peace between his forces and the people of the city.  The crowd would have known this and were either elated by the prospect or personally disappointed.

Such disappointment amongst the people of the time turned to mockery later in the week, as the crowds would demand that this Jesus, welcomed by palms and sweet singing of little children, would be crucified.  Things turned quickly for the One who had come in peace for the purposes of peace with God and with one another.  We all know how this Holy Week draws to its dark conclusion; almost as if all creation was mocking the things that make for peace in our world.

That mockery of the people carried over past the resurrection and the establishment of Christ’s church in this world.  One of the first depictions of the crucifixion, found on the wall of some cave or home of the early first century, is the image of a man with the head of a donkey nailed upon the cross.  Scholars universally agree that this is a very early comment upon the faith of Jesus Christ; that someone, sometime early in that first century, already had made up his mind about the foolishness of Jesus Christ and the folly of believing that God would be crucified for anyone, let alone for the sake of the world.

Yet, this is at the very heart of our faith.  The apostle Paul quotes an early Christian hymn when he writes of Jesus Christ, the one crucified for you and for me:

“Let the same mind be in you that was^* in Christ Jesus,
⁶ who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
⁷ but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
⁸ he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.”

This is no heraldic poem with sweeping verses of grandeur and mythic accomplishments of the victor.  This is no victory song sung while pummeling the head of the statue of your foe with your right shoe in hand.  This is no jingoistic slogan of espousing one nation’s might over another … No, this is a simple, profound hymn of praise to the One who emptied himself on our behalf.  This is a poetic exposition of just who our King of Kings and Lord of Lords really is …

Likewise, this is not a defeatist dirge, but rather a proclamation of belief in the power of God to bring true and lasting victory from apparent and sordid defeat.  This is an opus to the One who gave his life so that we could live as God had intended all humankind to live.

Again, Coffin, I think said it very well in one of his Palm Sunday sermons:

“And listen to these words spoken in Jerusalem just before [Christ’s] death: ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify thy Son that the Son may glorify Thee, since thou has given him power over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom thou has given him.  And this is eternal life, that they know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent.”

“There it is — the whole goal of life: to know God as the only true God, and to know Him through Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey.”

So this is really the victory that has been won for us all and for the world; not that Jesus has taken Jerusalem by storm, but rather that we have been won to God by peace.  The victory of Jesus this day is that we might be drawn into relationship with the living God; that we might know God to be the only real or true God in the myriad of lesser gods that populate human life; and, I might add, learn to love God and the ways of God in this world more than our own flesh, more than our own ways.

This is not the kind of victory that the Lone Ranger brings to us; it does not seem immediately as satisfying as that.  This is not the kind of victory that we witnessed in the fall of Baghdad; it does not seem as total as that did at first.  This is the kind of victory that asks something deeper and more profound of us, for this victory that we are about to encounter is more a calling than a triumphal march into conquered and vanquished lands … this is the simple, but humble and perfect call … to pick up our cross and follow … to pick up our cross and to follow … to follow the one who has emptied himself for us and for the sake of the world.  It is the call that we are called to follow throughout this dark week … at least as far as we are able.

Re:Lent & Repent: John 12:20-33 & Psalm 51:1-12; Lent 5 – March 25, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.

            So, how has Lent been for you?  Or as our beloved Mike Pacelli often says to me when he sits in the chair opposite my desk for our morning coffee: “How is it with your soul?”

Seriously, how has this Lenten journey been with your soul?  Have you contemplated this path that is lead by the living Christ from death to life?  Have you considered the momentous sacrifice and gracious gift seen in Jesus Christ and his life, death and resurrection?

Well, after all, I am your pastor and I have a certain ecclesiastical right to ask such a highly personal and hopefully penetrating question: “How is it with your soul?”

But let’s start with an easier one: What has happened to your little Lenten token that you picked up out of the offering plate on either Ash Wednesday evening or the first two Sundays in the Lenten Season?  What has become of that little reminder of the journey from death to life?

For me, I’m on about my sixth one!  I’ve lost a couple and given away about four to my memory to folks I’ve either known or just met.  That little token has served its big purpose with me: I’ve had ample cause to consider and think about this Lenten journey each time I’ve picked it up off my nightstand and put it in my pocket at the opening of the day or fished it out of my pocket instead of change at the grocer’s.  Every time that I’ve touched that token, I’ve tried to remember … I’ve tried to recall Lent and repentance and, of course, God in my life.

Just this past week, I had a rather strange use for that little token.  I was playing golf with another Presbyterian pastor and a representative of our denomination when, on about the fifth hole, I realized I had lost my ball marker, used to mark your ball when you’re on the green so that you can get out another person’s way to the hole.  So, I quickly marked my ball with my Lenten token and it immediately drew the attention of my partners.

“What’s that,” they both said … I told them and for a brief moment, watching their faces, I knew that we were no longer thinking about scores, sliced drives or the slope of the green … we were all thinking about the very thing we are called to remember during Lent.

The 51^st Psalm started our Lenten journey on Ash Wednesday and we hear it again as Lent is drawing to a close.  The words of the psalmist reminds us that we are called to be honest before God; to open our hearts and admit the truth that seems so difficult for the rest of the world to admit: We are not God, but we are the children of God.  We are not God, but we belong to God, even when we have messed up, sinned and decided in our own hearts that we really should be God; the god of ourselves.

This wondrous psalm calls us to remember that we are still not the people that we should be and that God is always exactly who God claims to be … that we should turn from our own frustrated attempts to justify ourselves and appear righteous and turn to the hope that comes only from God.

Brian Erickson, a college chaplain, tells an illuminating story about the power of this psalm, repentance and new life:

“A young woman came up to me following a Bible study on the campus where I pastor. She introduced herself, told me a little about her relatively new Christian faith, and then thanked me for leading the Ash Wednesday service.  It was the middle of October at the time, and I assumed she had her novice liturgical wires crossed.  But sure enough, she was talking about Ash Wednesday, almost seven months after the fact.  Explaining herself, she said, ‘A friend made me go – I had never been to an Ash Wednesday service before.  My church back home never did anything like that, with the ashes and all, and at first I was pretty freaked out about it.  I was surprised at how ashamed and embarrassed those ashes made me feel.  I found myself avoiding public places – I almost did not go to class the rest of the day.

“‘But that whole day was so powerful for me, walking around with that big black mark on my forehead.  The more I thought about it, and still think about it, I began to feel so … hopeful.  I know that sounds strange, but that service felt so honest.  I am not the person I want to be, and deep down I know that, but most church services just feel like strung-out apologies.  But since that day, I just feel like God can change me.  That God wants to change me. And that feels hopeful.”

 

That young woman gets it, you might say.  The message of Ash Wednesday, repentance and the power of God to actually transform us into the people that he would have us be lasted beyond the service that day, beyond even the season of Lent to become a fixture in that young woman’s life.  In essence, she gets it; she understands the power and the meaning of repentance and the hope that comes from knowing that this journey of life is actually a journey from death to life.  She understands that now.

The question for us is do we?  Do we get it?  Does Ash Wednesday, the Lenten season, this reading of the 51^st Psalm, the little Lenten tokens that we have carried in our pockets and purses over the past week, help us to better comprehend the power of repentance and transformation at the hands of a loving God?  I hope so, I sincerely do hope so …

And, I believe that you do.  I sincerely believe that you do, as they say, get it!  I see it in your lives and in your work around this building, this church, this community of faith.  Your witness to the power of God’s love and transforming action in our lives is meaningful whenever it is honest and open.

You see, that is yet another thing that we can find in the wondrous psalm that was read earlier: we are called to be honest and open before God.  We cannot have a transformed life with God without actually calling upon God in our sin and corrupted path of life.  We have to get to the root of the problem … and not just once, but again and again and again.

An Episcopalian rector known to me, once wrote about this need for actual honesty and repentance:

“In addressing penitence, it may be useful to recall the story of discovering that your dog and your cat have recently finished eating the beef tenderloin that you had let stand on the kitchen counter for ten minutes.  When you discover the sin of your pets, you will be presented with dog repentance in the form of Fido approaching you with tail wagging, pleading, ‘Love me, love me, love me.”  Socks, on the other hand, will keep licking her paws and looking up occasionally as if to say, ‘Do we have a problem here?’ Neither dog nor cat really repents.  And humans emulate them on a regular basis.  Both dog and cat are attempting to restore good feelings to a relationship without addressing the real brokenness that has occurred.”

 

Do you remember what the young woman said about that college campus Ash Wednesday service? “I know that it sounds strange, but that service felt so honest …”  That is the attractiveness of repentance; we can actually be honest about ourselves and our distance from God. It is like a weight being lifted off heart and shoulder; a getting at the real brokenness rather than evasion or delusion.  We can only be that honest and open when we fully and completely trust the Lord to be merciful, gracious and loving.  But it doesn’t stop there, all of that is supposed to bubble up and over and leak out into our other relationships as well, or had you not noticed?

In Jesus Christ, we are called not just to individual repentance and personal relationship-making with God without consideration for the other relationships in this life.  In fact, in Jesus Christ, we are called to come out of our isolated sin and be born anew into a community of repentance, hope and grace. Of course, that community is called the church and it is here that we must always be open and honest … with God and with one another. For, hopefully, we have learned the lessons of repentance and trust, love and grace; the very lessons of Lent.  Hopefully, we have learned those lessons of life with God and applied them to life with others!

I’ve often wondered what folks think when they pass our magnificent collegiate gothic structure on the corners of Main and Third, here in downtown Greensburg.  Do they think about what this building represents: that God is here and present in the life of world; that God has come to us in Jesus Christ and given himself for our sakes and for the sake of the world; that they too can be called from death into life at any moment of their being? What do they think when they drive by?  It is if this building has the opportunity to be a giant Lenten token to call to remembrance our community and all who pass this way that God has sacrificed and journeyed from death to life on their behalf.

Well, you have the greatest opportunity to influence their contemplation, for you and I know that this is just a building and we are the actual church.  Your life in the midst of the lives of others is the greatest witness to this hope that we have labeled from death to life.  Your openness and honesty with others, your willingness to come to those you have offended and hurt and offer your repentance. In a like manner, your willingness to offer mercy to those who have offended you.  And all of this, are actual living Lenten tokens of life itself; lives transformed and changed by the workings of grace becoming, as it were, signs and wonders and witnesses in this world of God’s great love in Jesus Christ.

So, keep that Lenten token with you … remember even beyond Lent that you have been bought with a price, that your alienation with God is at an end, and that you are in the midst of traveling from death into life.  Keep that Lenten token with you and ask yourself that question that my good friend Mike Pacelli always asks me: “How is it with your soul?”

Cleansing Sacred Space: Psalm 19 & John 2:13-25; Lent 3-March 11, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money-changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, ‘Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a market-place!’ His disciples remembered that it was written,‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’

            Once upon a time, there was a young pastor, flush with excitement and zeal having been called to a new position as the solo pastor of a medium-sized church with a very active congregation.  The young pastor had all kinds of ideas about the systems of the church and how the people of God should treat one another and the world around them.

This young pastor observed that at every funeral luncheon the Funeral Luncheon Committee hosted, there was one woman there whose only purpose it appeared was to count the plates before and after the serving of the luncheon.

The congregation was known for being, let us say, a bit “tight” or cheap when it came to things around the church, so the young pastor naturally assumed that all this counting had to do with making sure that all the precious serving pieces and plates used by funeral luncheon, filled as they were with folks who were not members of the church, had to do with making sure that none of the church property walked out the door at the end of the day.

The young pastor was so convinced of his analysis of the situation, that he took the rather prophetic step, he thought, of bringing it to the attention of the Funeral Luncheon Committee.  He planned his approach well and laid it before the committee.

He explained to the gathered ladies of the committee that they ought to have a more charitable view of their neighbors and fellow children of God.  Plates could always be replaced, but their reputation for being less-than-trusting would tarnish the ministry of Jesus Christ and cause a scandal to the gospel of grace.

They listened intently, patiently with absolutely no rolling of their eyes.  After the young minister finished his diatribe, one of the more elderly of the committee spoke up and said:

“Martin, Mabel counts those plates at the luncheon only so that we have a count of how many people ate at any particular meal!”

Well, I learned a definite lesson that day: the systems by which the church does her work can be a bit mysterious and bewildering, but one ought to be a bit more reserved when offering criticism of something one does not fully understand.  I just didn’t understand it and drew my own conclusions before taking the time to fully comprehend the situation.

The passage from Mark, however, is not one of confusion or misunderstanding.  Jesus comprehends exactly what is going on in the temple and the great misuse of the systems that had been developed by the people of Israel in order to offer adequate worship of God.  Jesus knew exactly what was going on and spoke out and even acted out against it.

Some have taken this passage and pointed to it as evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was a revolutionary; entering the Temple in Jerusalem and turning over the tables of the money changers and chasing out the sacrificial livestock as some kind of radical statement in service of a revolutionary cause.  I have come to believe that this is not the case at all: Jesus was more of a reformer than a revolutionary!

Jesus’ actions in the Temple that day spoke to his desire to reform the life and worship of the people of Israel.  The systems that had been put in place for the sake of sacred worship of God had become corrupted over time by the people’s desire for convenience and ease.

The selling of livestock for sacrifices and changing of money into the appropriate Temple currency had once been held away from the Temple, across the Kidron Valley in Jerusalem.  Over time, probably for reason of convenience and ease of access to the worshippers, this practice had moved from outside the Temple to the Court of Gentiles in the Temple grounds.

This should cause us to contemplate just what we do in ways of short-cuts or convenience when it comes to our worship and service of God and God’s church in this world. What are the systems that we employ as a congregation that make things easier on us and less strenuous when it comes to offering our worship to God?  What are the bargains that we strike when we seek to make our Christian faith easier, but lose the better part of meaning and purpose in the exchange?

Hulitt Goler, a professor at Truett Theological Seminary, comments on this truism of the church:

“The ways of the world invade the church gradually, subtly, never intentionally, always in service of the church and its mission.  Soon the church is full of cattle and sheep and turtledoves and moneychangers.”

I’m sure that the priests at the Temple thought they were doing something good, convenient and helpful when they cleared out the Court of the Gentiles to make room for the livestock and the moneychangers.  Jesus, of course, had a different view about that and acted to reform the practice.  You can imagine how happy that made the Temple officials, moneychangers and sellers of livestock!

When we make things convenient for us, we often make things more inconvenient for others.  This is exactly the case in point in John’s Gospel today.  Another reason for Jesus’ anger might very well have been who the Temple officials displaced in their placement of the moneychangers and livestock in the Temple.  This practice had been moved from outside the Temple to the Court of the Gentiles; this was the one place where the Gentiles could come to pray in the Temple grounds.  The actions of the Temple authorities were exclusive in the very place that had been maintained in order to be more inclusive.  This Court of the Gentiles had been established as a place to include the greater human family beyond the community of Israel; this was a place of outreach that had been subsumed for the convenience of the insiders …

This should cause all of us to consider the ways in which we exclude others for our own convenience when it comes to being the church.  What are the practices and the local customs of our church that tend to exclude rather than include?  Such consideration is a part of our call as God’s people and as Christ’s church in this world: how can we suffer a bit of inconvenience for the sake of others and for their possible inclusion in our community of faith?

Once when I was working with a presbytery committee in one of my former presbyteries, I was taken on a tour of a new Fellowship Hall of a rural, farming community congregation.  The elder of that church was so proud that the congregation had raised the funds to build this new building right next to their historic church building in order to provide greater access to the community.

The church held a blueberry festival for years in the basement of their original church building.  It was always over-subscribed and the basement had no handicap-accessible facilities, so they built the new building for that purpose.

The elder described the building and marveled over the fact that the dimensions of the new building were exactly the same dimensions of the old basement Fellowship Hall next door.

Puzzled over this, I asked if one of their concerns was the fact that the festivals were always over-subscribed, causing their neighbors and the community to stand in long lines outside the building, then why not build a larger structure?

The elder scratched his head, looked equally as puzzled and said:

“Well, we knew exactly how to fit the tables and chairs in that old basement … if we had a larger building we would need to buy more tables and chairs … it just wouldn’t have been convenient.”

Whenever we truly follow Jesus, we are going to be confronted with the same kinds of puzzles: how do we reach out to those we have formerly forgotten or neglected? What do we lose in the bargain of attempting to make our faith and life easier, more convenient?  How will we make room for others even if it inconveniences us?  Jesus sought to reform the Temple to allow for others, to make room for the broadening reach of God’s love; let us do the same in this great sanctuary AND in the sacred spaces of heart and soul!

Uncomfortable Things: Psalm 22:23-31 & Mark 8:31-38; Lent 2-March 4, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?

            It was late afternoon on a Sunday in the mid-80’s and I was very tired of driving.  I was returning to Princeton after a visit home to Iowa and was traveling east on Interstate 80 somewhere past State College.  I was very tired of driving and was just wishing that I knew a quicker way to central New Jersey, when low and behold a sign appeared.

The sign was not one from heaven complete with angels and trumpets, but it appeared to me as an answer to prayer.  The large green highway sign read: Exit to Jersey Shore in 2 miles.

Wow!  That’s just what I was looking for: a shortcut to New Jersey!  Knowing that the Jersey Shore was right on the Atlantic and that Princeton lay somewhere between where I was and the ocean, I surmised that this was the shortcut I needed.  Certainly, this route, on its way to the Jersey Shore would get me to Princeton!  Surely, I would pass something that looked like the New Jersey border just over the Delaware!

With great excitement and renewed energy, thinking that I would cut at least two hours off the trip, I turned at the exit and started making my way home … or so I thought.

Now, no one told me that Jersey Shore is actually a village on the banks of the Susquehanna!  Oh, it’s a nice little town, but it’s no shortcut to Princeton, I can tell you!  I was looking for a timesaving shortcut and wound up spending more time on the road, diverted as it were through Jersey Shore.

Shortcuts; we all want to find one to cut down on driving time or energy expended.  Sometimes, it’s not the geographical variety of expediency that we seek, but a shortcut in our business, or in our relationships are just as appealing.  Sometimes, what we want is an easy way through or around something; we’re avoiding something difficult or arduous; something uncomfortable and strenuous; we’re trying to be expedient.  We think that it’s helping us out to be expedient, to take the shortcut, but that just isn’t always the case.

Peter is trying to be helpful, I think, in this text from the Gospel of Mark; he’s looking for a way around something arduous and difficult; he really doesn’t want to face the uncomfortable realities about his association with Jesus.  He thinks that he knows better than Jesus how to be the Messiah.  He knows what is expected of the Messiah … he thinks he knows that is.  Death and suffering is not a part of Peter’s vision for what Jesus should be about and he has no problem telling Jesus just what he thinks.

Jesus response is quick and to the point: “Get thee behind me, Satan.”  In other words: “Peter, you’re not being helpful at all; your shortcut is nothing but a dead-end.”

Mary E. Hinkle, a New Testament professor at Luther Seminary, is illuminating about this when she writes:

“Maybe this is why Jesus becomes so angry with Peter. When Peter rejects Jesus’ teaching that the Messiah must be crucified, Peter is beginning to fashion a lie about God. Surely, Peter is suggesting, there must be an easier way.”

What Peter wants are easy victories and coronation programs and this, quite frankly, just isn’t the truth about God.  What Jesus knows is that the way to save a life is to lose it and that is the truth about life with God.  It doesn’t make sense to Peter and probably not to many of us … but it’s the very thing that Jesus is called to do and it’s the very thing he is calling us to do: to take up our cross and follow him, to be honest and open and obedient to the life of God within us.

There are no shortcuts here.  There is no way around this. This is the uncomfortable thing about being a follower of Jesus Christ; actually being a follower!  A follower is one who lays down his or her own preconceived notions of what the church should be about, of how God should act in this world, of what is the best or expedient thing to do and actually follows Jesus, not just his or her plans laid upon the Christ.

Most of the time, we want to be the trailblazers.  There’s nothing like independence and ego: we love it when we’re the ones that find that here-to-fore undiscovered shortcut or expediency in life.  We love it when we come in first rather than second, third or twenty-third.  We love to win; to blaze our own trail; to join in with old blue eyes and sing: “I did it my way!”  We love that.

Jesus tells us to divest ourselves of that thinking and pick up our cross and follow him.

I like what the good Rev. John Coleman, Lutheran pastor, says about it all:

“Gospel logic is the operating principle of the life of discipleship.  If I am to be a disciple, I have to accept that almost nothing is as I would expect it to be.  The way I think just doesn’t jibe with the way God operates, so either I’m off kilter or God is.  After trying to live life on my own terms and failing repeatedly, I’ve decided that God’s on kilter, and I’m off.  The standards by which I used to measure contentment and meaning make a lot of sense, but they’re actually nasty, gluttonous illusions.”

There is no shortcut for Jesus Christ and there is no expedient way to learn of him except to deny one’s self, pick up a cross and start following.  It may be an uncomfortable thing for us – but there it is.  We must learn to deny ourselves and pick up our cross and follow.

How that works out in your life and in my life might be as different as each one of us.  However, William Willimon tells a grand story about how these uncomfortable realities were met by a couple in one of his first congregations.

They were a couple who were waiting with Willimon in a hospital room to hear some results of testing on their just newly born infant.  It had been an easy birth, but not all was right with the baby.

The doctor told them that the baby had been afflicted with Down’s Syndrome.  He stated this compassionately, yet matter-of-factly, as if he knew what the parents would say.

The asked only if the child was healthy.  The doctor said that he was except that he suffered from a slight, common respiratory ailment, forcing the staff to put the baby on a respirator.  He advised the parents to allow him to take the baby off the respirator and, as he said “That might solve things for you … at least it’s a possibility.”

Willimon continues the story:

“’It’s not a possibility for us,’ they said together.

‘I know how you feel,’ responded the doctor. ‘But you need to think about what you’re doing.  You already have two beautiful kids.  Statistics show that people who keep these babies risk a higher incidence of marital stress and family problems.  Is it fair to do this to the children you already have? Is it right to bring this suffering into your family?’

At the mention of ‘suffering’ I saw her face brighten, as if the doctor were finally making sense.

‘Suffering?’ she said quietly. ‘We appreciate your concern, but we’re Christians. God suffered for us, and we will try to suffer for the baby, if we must.’

Being a Christian means following Jesus even when it is uncomfortable for us; even when it means suffering for us. Peter thought that there should be an easier way, but there just isn’t. The doctor thought he knew what was best and most expedient for that young family; he was wrong. There are not short-cuts with God. This is the way of life with God in this world and Jesus puts it quite well in three, short commands: Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Follow me.

*No Sermon for February 26 – Hymn & Anthem Festival in Worship*

Ash Wednesday Meditation: II Cor. 5:20b-6:10 & I Peter 1:13-2:3 – February 22, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

“…we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.”

“…but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written,

‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’”

            You have heard it famously said: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry!”  You’ve heard that said, but do you remember from whence that quote came?

After doing a little research, I found that the quote came from the novel and movie of the same name: “Love Story.”  The line appears once in the book, but twice in the famous movie starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal, including the final and concluding words uttered in the film.

Regardless from whence this particular line originates, we can all respond to its sentiments, I think, with the same remark that my dear wife made when I said it to her just the other day: “Baloney!”

Julie is actually quite an adept theologian and observer of human life and behavior.  She had the same immediate response that I think most of would have to such sentiments for we knew that real, enduring love requires of us a good deal of admission of failure, confession of our own inadequacies and a seeking of forgiveness from our beloved.  We experience in all kinds of human relationships; certainly we should experience in our relationship with God.

Ash Wednesday is precisely about having to say we are sorry.  It is about repentance and coming to grips with the truth that we are not the people that we should be and that God is exactly as God should be and is.

The text from I Peter, borrowing from an Old Testament statement, indicates that God calls his followers to be holy, as holy as he is.  It is a tall order indeed and it is a calling with which, if we are honest, we struggle.  The more closely we grow to Jesus, the more willing we must be to perceive and see that we are not always who we should be or rather, whom God is calling us to be.

Of course, this continued call to repentance is not new to us as Christians or to our practice as members of the great Reformation practices of the faith.  Each Lord’s day when we gather in worship, one of the first features of the worship service is a call to confession and an actual corporate prayer of confession.  This is so ingrained in us that we risk ritualistically stumbling past this great admission that even though we have been saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we still sin and fall short of the glory that we have inherited in Christ.

This is one of the reasons that Reformed Christianity in general and Presbyterianism specifically speaks to me and to my faith.  Here is an admission that though we are beneficiaries of the grace of Jesus Christ, we cannot maintain our relationship with God purely and simply by our effort and faith … we fail time and time again.  We are akin to Peter who, confident of his faith in Jesus of Nazareth, declares that he will never desert him only to hear the cock crow three times and realize that his desertion has been complete and total.

It is this very attitude that should be ours as we approach both Ash Wednesday and entire season of Lent: that we, like Peter, always stand in need of repentance and the assurance of pardon that we receive in Jesus Christ and not in our efforts or our abilities.

The Bible is filled with stories of great pioneers of the faith who, like us, had clay feet and stood in need of repentance.  Sometimes they realized this need and sometimes they completely ignored it.

That brings me to a point about repentance and evenings such as this and our great need for both.  Confident of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ, we can, from time to time, slip into believing that somehow we are no longer in need of repentance.  We might think that we have already done this; repented of our sins and received the gracious mercy of God and now walk freely and independently with our Savior.  There is much to be said for that, but like our communal response to that syrupy line from “The Love Story,” we sense that that is “baloney!”  If we consider sin seriously and look at our own lives honestly, we know we always stand in need of repentance.

One of those stories from the Bible that I mentioned is the rather infamous story of David and Bathsheba and Nathan … The first part of the story most Sunday school-trained Christians remember: King David, much beloved of the Lord and the most powerful king in the history of Israel, casts his gaze upon the beautiful Bathsheba sun-bathing on the roof of an adjoining building.  The King, in his lust and sharply honed self-esteem, decides that he must have her. The only thing he thinks that stands in his way is the fact that she is the wife of one of his generals!  After a rather complicated strategy that would make a writer of soap operas blush, David succeeds in eliminating his rival and taking Bathsheba as his own.

In his arrogance, David believes that nothing is out of bounds; that nothing is beyond his grasp.  He knows himself to be beloved of God, the apple of God’s eye, so to speak and it never registers on his mind that what he is doing is grievously and seriously wrong and hurtful to every party involved. He is just blinded by his perception of his rightness and I dare say righteousness!  It never enters his mind that he has something for which to repent and from which to turn.

Now, does that not sound familiar to us?!  Of course, it does!  We may not be the king and our sin may not be of the same texture or content of David’s lust for Bathsheba, but our sin is the same when we, like David, believe we have no need to repent; that we are somehow exempt from responding to God’s graciousness with a holy life and following a holy way.  Whenever we take the rightness of our course or the righteousness of our nature so seriously that we can hurt others and grieve the heart of God, then we need to think twice about what we are doing.

Sometimes it takes an external push to get us to repentance as it did with David.  If you remember, I said this was the story of David and Bathsheba AND Nathan!  Nathan is included here as the catalyst for the repentance of David.  The great prophet, having heard of David’s rather public sin, comes to him with a parable about a rich man taking advantage over a poor man.  David is greatly angered by the story and perceives that the rich man is in the wrong.  When he begins to offer solutions of how the rich man should be made to set things right, Nathan jumps in with those famous words: “Thou art the man!”

David is convicted immediately within his heart of his error and he repents.  It took an outside catalyst to get the great King, the one beloved of God, to see his own very real sin and repent.  The same is true for us.  Sometimes such catalysts include others in our life that tell us the truth, or a particular scripture reading that convicts our heart, or, as in this case, a whole season and a contemplation of ashes on a Wednesday evening.

It has been famously said: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” but, if we are wise, we see that statement for what it is … false and without merit.  If we are serious about our relationship with God in Jesus Christ, we might do better to take the surprising advice of the late, well-known critic of religion and famous celebrity, John Lennon, who countered that statement with the much wiser slogan: “Love means having to say you’re sorry every five minutes.”  And I think that just about says it all!

What Can We Say?: Psalm 50:1-6 & Mark 9:2-9; Transfiguration – February 19, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

“As they were coming down the mountain, [Jesus] ordered them to tell no one about what they

had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”

            There are times when I am disturbed by the seeming ease with which faith in Jesus Christ and a relationship with God is described in our culture.  Some describe relationship with Jesus Christ as something as simple as following a recipe or executing a chemical formula: “Read this, pray that, say that Jesus is Lord and you’re in; you have faith!”

It reminds me of those bumper stickers that you see on the cars of well-meaning, well-intentioned Christians that read: “The Bible said it; I believe; that settles it!”

Oh, if were really that easy indeed … if a relationship with Jesus Christ, faith and trust in our good God were that easy.  But, I’m convinced it is not.

There is much about faith in Christ that is, well, a mystery.  Not the kind of mystery that one reads about in detective stories or watches on “NCIS” or “Law and Order,” but something deeper and more profound.  Faith is something more in the way of awe-inspired wonder and response; something that touches upon the very core of human existence and, of course, divine presence, rather than mere detective story.

This passage on Transfiguration Sunday from the Gospel of Mark is case in point: Jesus and a select few of his disciples are on a mountaintop and are confronted with a spectacular vision of holiness and revelation.  In fact, it is on this mountaintop that Jesus is revealed to his disciples for just who he is or, maybe better put, who he will be.

It is a dazzling spectacle that leaves the closest disciple, Peter, sputtering all kinds of suggestions that just don’t seem to fit the event.  He wants to stay there, build shelters and remain.  He doesn’t quite grasp what is going on; it is a mystery to him, but he keeps trying … a good follower of Jesus Christ, he keeps trying to comprehend, to appropriate what he is experiencing of God to his life.

Rodney Hunter, a former theology professor at Emory University, commented on this in helpful way:

“Today noisy evangelical movements – and the mainline churches as well – often make claims for Jesus’ divinity as if it were a public truth that anyone might see and grasp.  However, the knowledge of Jesus as the divine Son is a matter of revelation that comes in God’s own way and time – as a gift.  It is not a possession on the basis of which we can claim spiritual status and institutional or personal power, as if to make little gods of ourselves by ruling the world in his name as many have sought to do.”

But getting back to mystery, I also think that the late Peter Gome’s comment upon it is most fitting as we attempt to say something about this mysterious event that Mark lays before us this Transfiguration Sunday:

“Mystery is not an argument for the existence of God; mystery is an experience of the existence of God.”

He further heightens this intensity by quoting Diogenes Allen, a former professor at Princeton Theological Seminary:

“Mysteries to be known must be entered into … For we do not solve mysteries; we enter into them. The deeper we enter into them, the more illumination we get. Still greater depths are revealed the further we go.”

This mysterious revelation we encounter in this morning’s gospel text is one of those moments in which the Gospel is inviting us into the mystery of life with God.  We cannot explain exactly what happened on that mountaintop to Jesus nor should we attempt to do so; for what can we say?  Even more, can we hope to explain the effects of the Transfiguration upon the select few disciples who were witnesses to the event?  No, we must admit that there is mystery in life and especially life with God!  Yet, we can see the results of the Transfiguration in both the life of Jesus and in the lives of the disciples.

I remind you that we are just on the cusp of Lent.  What comes next in the Christian calendar is Ash Wednesday; the start of our journey with Jesus to his cross.  Something about this moment recorded in Mark supplies Jesus and his disciples with enough faith, trust, hope, love and whatever else to walk that way to the cross.  The disciples follow at a safe distance, mind you, but Jesus sets his face like flint to Jerusalem and determinedly follows that way of God all the way to the cross.

The Gospel witness also provides the story of the disciples’ attempts to follow Jesus on his way to the cross.  They all try, but ultimately they all fall away.  Yet, something has propelled them down Jesus’ path at least as far as they were able to go; they too have been transfigured by the event.

One of the temptations we might face in comprehending the Transfiguration is our desire to place the event on a pedestal as it were and contemplate it from a safe, objective distance.  We tell ourselves that this happened to Jesus and thus is worthy of our study and contemplation, but we inwardly warn ourselves not to expect such events for our own lives; this is, after all, we think, only about Jesus.  If we do that we forget that his followers were there and were witnesses; they too were transfigured in this event.

These moments of transfiguration, where the divine graciously touches our profane lives and alters us, are all around us.  At least, I am convinced of that.  It is a matter of being aware, taking stock, being observant of this great mystery encountering us and enveloping us, here in worship and IN the midst of our lives.

Two brief stories tell the tale of such transfigurations for me.  Both involve worship and both involve a change, one dramatic and one much more commonplace, but transforming presences of God all the same.

The first comes from Tom Long, a former preaching professor of mine who tells of a lonely, small Episcopalian parish in Vermont:

In his memoir A Dresser of Sycamore Trees, lay Episcopal minister Garret Keizer describes a Holy Saturday vigil held in his tiny Vermont parish. When Keizer arrived at the church, he found that only two other people, a husband and wife, had come for the service. As the three of them huddled together in the old church, Keizer lit the Paschal candle and extinguished the other lights, a symbol of hearing God’s great promise of hope “in darkness, longing to hear it in the light of day.”

Together they prayed: “Grant that in this Paschal feast we may so burn with heavenly desires, that with pure minds we may attain to the festival of everlasting light.”

The Paschal candle sputtered in the dimness. As they prayed, the worshipers could hear cars passing by outside, travelers in a secular age oblivious to the ancient hopes being spoken in the little chapel. “There we are,” Keizer wrote, “three people and a flickering light.” This act of worship was, he said, “so ambiguous because its terms are so extreme: the Lord is with us, or we are pathetic fools.”

And from the oft-quoted William Willimon, United Methodist Bishop, this story of change and transfiguration:

“I once had a church member who was faced with the horribly difficult task of forgiving a person who had deeply, most unjustly wronged her.  He was her ex-husband.  She did not want to forgive him, resented and hated him with all her being, but her hatred for him and for what he had done to her and her family was ruining her life.

“I met with her and counseled her.  I prayed with her for the power to forgive and to go on with her life, but she just couldn’t. I had great sympathy for her because I knew that if I were her, I probably couldn’t bring myself to forgive either.

“The one Sunday she emerged from church just beaming. I could see on her face that she had just had wonderful experience of worship.

“She said to me, as I stood at the church door, ‘I can do it!  That last hymn has given me everything I needed to do what God wants me to do.’

“A hymn enables someone to forgive her worst enemy? I think in that moment an epiphany enabled someone to take up her cross and follow Jesus into Lent.”

Life with God is not a formula or a recipe; it is a living relationship that transforms the moments of life that otherwise appears mundane and ordinary into something sacred and truly extraordinary.  The call upon our lives is to keep alert, do as the voice at the Transfiguration commands: “Listen to him,” and watch for the transforming power of grace and hope in our own lives.

The Lord’s Choice: Psalm 30 & Mark 1:40-45; Epiphany 6 – February 12, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ ⁴¹Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ ⁴²Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

Sometimes there are moments in life when a choice must be made and we are completely aware of it!  It is a clear demarcation in our vision of life that we realize with great clarity.  For instance, we approach our wedding day and we realize, after this coming Saturday, we will no longer be single; we will be a married man or woman.  Or, we have been offered a position at a higher pay scale and great benefits, but it requires a move across country.  We are faced with a decision then: do we stay in our current comfortable surroundings or do we move to a new place, where we know no one, but our family will be more secure financially?

But then there are the small choices in life that are not as clear cut or are as obvious to us in the moment of the choosing.  These are moments where we are usually confronted with the right thing to do in our mind in a minor decision, but realize that there are consequences that will be drawn or realized from that choice.  Those little, day-to-day choices are the ones that really mark us and define our characters as people and, honestly, as the children of God.

Today, Jesus is faced with just such a choice: should he do what is the right and compassionate thing and risk losing his ability to fulfill his call or should he ignore this one person’s plea and continue on, unfettered and unimpeded with his vision for ministry to the people of the Galilean villages?  That is the choice that Jesus faces in this text, this great little story from the Gospel of Mark.  What will be the Lord’s choice?  What will he do?!

For us, the hearers of this pericope from Mark, the choice is obvious: Jesus can either heal this man with leprosy or ignore him and move on.  That sounds like an incredibly obvious choice … of course, Jesus should heal the man, isn’t that what is Jesus is here for after all?  Hasn’t he healed others?  Won’t we stumbled across other examples of such healings as we press further in the gospels found in those opening pages of the New Testament?  “Of course,” we say to ourselves, “Jesus should heal this guy … he just wouldn’t be Jesus if he didn’t.”

The choice is obvious, but the risk is hidden or at least implied in this text today.  We don’t see the risk, but the disciples, the crowds, the people and the priests of Jesus’ time would understand and comprehend the risk immediately: If Jesus deems to touch this man, this man who the righteous and upright have identified as an “unclean” individual because of his disease, then Jesus himself will become unclean, ritually impure and unable to proceed into any body of people, any crowd in any village or city, and preach the good news.  If Jesus heals this unclean man, he gives up his calling to preach and heal others … the religion and society of the time would just put a stop to it.

Don’t just take my word for this; here is what other, more authoritative commentators on scripture have written about it!  George Telford, Presbyterian minister and articulate preacher, says this:

“The leper confronts Jesus with a challenge: ‘If you will, you can make me clean.’ If you will. But if he accepts the challenge and is drawn into this farthest outpost of the profane, if he touches this untouchable, then he will, at least for a while, be disqualified for preaching in those towns where it is known what he has done. And perhaps not just for a while, for more is at stake here than becoming ceremonially unclean. For Jesus … touching and healing a sinner, [is] breaking a major taboo …”

In answering the question of just why Jesus might have been angered or frustrated with this choice, as some of the manuscripts and translations of this passage indicate, Dr. Ortega of the Evangelical Theological Seminary, posits this:

“Because [the crowds] look for him too much? Because he wants to visit the people? No! Because he has become himself impure.  He has touched the leper. [Jesus] is polluted, he is an unclean man, according to the sacral vision of priests and scribes.  There has been a reversal of religious conditions: the leper is clean; Jesus is unclean.”

Maybe that helps us to put this story and the choice that Jesus made into a little sharper contrast for us.  If he touches and heals the leper, he gives up his opportunity to go into the villages, to be a part of the culture and society to which God has so obviously called him.  If however, he ignores the pleas of this diseased and hopeless man, he can continue, unstained and righteous in the eyes of his people, in the eyes of his culture, in the eyes of his religious tradition and continue.  This is an awesome and serious choice set before him!

Now, do you perceive the risk?  Do you perceive rightly the choice that is so obviously set before our loving Lord?  AND do we, (here’s the real question!), do we perceive what this means for us as followers of Jesus Christ?  Should we be expected to do something different than what Christ has done and still attempt to call ourselves “Christians”?

Being a follower of this healer, this gracious man/God, Jesus is a risky business.  The choices we are called to make are fraught with just as much risk and trepidation as this one placed before our Lord this day.  It is risky business in which we are engaged as the church; as the called gathering of the Body of Christ.

One of the strongest statements or admissions of this could be found in our own Presbyterian Book of Order for many years:

“The Church is called to undertake this mission even at the risk of losing its life, trusting in God alone as the author and giver of life, sharing the gospel, and doing those deeds in the world that point beyond themselves to the new reality in Christ.”

I cannot find anywhere else, a more courageous statement issued by an institution … we freely admit that the claim of the gospel and the mission, to which we have been graciously set by Jesus Christ, is greater than the institutional drive for self-preservation.  In short, if fail to undertake this mission, this risky business with which Jesus involves himself, we fail to be the church anymore.  It really is as plain and simple as all that.

What is not plain and simple is locating the leper in our midst and in our lives.  This is a more personal question; a more intimate inquiry.  Who is it that we are automatically excluding from our lives because of what our culture or our drive to appear righteous rather than to be actually gracious, is telling us to ignore, to pass by and pass over, those whom we are told we should have nothing with which to do?

I’ll leave you to answer that question to your own satisfaction for I am convinced those answers are different for each one of us.  The question we must answer however is what will we do?  We know the Lord’s choice; what will be our choice?

Wonderfully, these are the same questions that a favorite hymn that Mr. Highberger often includes in our worship asks of us.  The hymn is called simply; The Summons and the questions asked are directed from our Savior to us:

“Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?

Will go where you don’t know and never the same? …

“Will you leave yourself behind if I but call your name?

Will you care for cruel and kind and never be the same?

Will you risk the hostile stare, should your life attract or scare?

Will you let me answer prayer in you and you in me?

AND finally, a most appropriate refrain:

“Will you kiss the leper clean, and do such as this unseen

And admit to what I mean in you and you in me?”

This day, in the gospel of Mark, a serious choice is laid before our Lord.  We know the choice he has made; the risk he has willingly accepted.  The question remains for us about all the lepers and outcasts in our own lives: what will we choose?  What will we do?

Widening the Scope: Psalm 147:1-11,20c & Mark 1:29-39, Epiphany 5-February 5, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I have noticed that it is a natural human temptation to narrow our scope of friends and acquaintances as we grow older.  One would think that just the opposite would be true: the older we grow, the more people we will have met and included in our “inner circle” of friends, neighbors and the natural support systems that develop merely in living.  But, I have found that the case is actually different than that: we have a tendency to narrow our scope and winnow away at our list of “Facebook” friends.

Back in seminary, during my Middler year, I was required for a class to write a brief paragraph describing my perspective of the Kingdom of Heaven using a contemporary analogy.  I think it was a class on the parables of Jesus for that is precisely what Jesus describes in his then-contemporaneous vision of what the Kingdom of Heaven could mean.

Anyway, my description went something like this:

“It’s Friday afternoon and I’m on a wide veranda of a house in the middle of a neighborhood.  In one corner of the porch sits a keg of beer, on ice, with enough plastic cups for a party of some size.  People stream out of the street up onto the porch all afternoon, coming and going, taking a cup of beer, chatting and laughing and spending time with one another.”

My professor was not as impressed as I thought he might have been.

That vision, though we might get distracted by the mention of beer, is really focused upon the wideness of the event: in my vision, people were coming and going and ALL were invited.  That was at least how I viewed the Kingdom of Heaven in contemporary terms then.  I wanted to have a Friday afternoon where friends and neighbors, strangers and family alike would drop by my porch and fill the fading day with friendship and the presence of one another.

It is a shame and a scandal in some ways that I never enacted that vision.  Nowadays, I find myself contemplating how to keep people and visitors off my porch!  I find myself sometimes tempted to consider elaborate ways that I might avoid the interruption of the presence of others in my life … and that my friends, that feeling of just wanting to be left alone … is the real affront and scandal to the gospel claims upon my life!  The presence of the Kingdom of Heaven (the presence of Jesus Christ) in my life, should lead me towards others and not away from them!

This short little passage from the Gospel of Mark relates something so important, so vital about life with God and life in Christ’s church that we risk much if we fail to hear it or overlook it wedged in the midst of everything else that is happening in the pericope.

This vital element, this fundamental understanding appears at the very end of the passage, after the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law and after the mass gathering of those ill and demon-possessed seeking attention from Jesus.  This all-important element occurs right at the end of the passage:

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

            Here’s the scene: Jesus has been busy the day before with all the healing and teaching and early on the next morning, he is out in a secluded spot in prayer.  The disciples, led by Simon Peter are desperately searching for him; like the handlers of some political candidate who want their man to keep on schedule and not delay the buses, the disciples are desperate to find him.

Once Jesus is found, his response to their entreaties is to rise off his knees and remind them of his purpose.  He tells them that they won’t be staying here anymore, but will widen the scope of the message he brings to the surrounding villages and the hillsides of the Galilee.  In the midst of Jesus’ isolation and seclusion, the world comes crashing in and he determines to go out to meet it, doing the very thing to which he has been called by God.

Sometimes, we are tempted as a church and as a people, to seek and desire seclusion and quiet meditation over the call of God to be with and for this world in meaningful and purposeful ways.  It is a great and common temptation for the church to do just that: satisfy our own spiritual needs and neglect the call that is upon our lives to live out the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a world so badly in need of the healing touch of the living Christ.

Not too many years ago, I visited with a church in our presbytery that sought to leave our denomination.  I listened, along with other colleagues sent for the purpose of listening, to all their woes and tales of how the denomination had deserted them and had neglected the real Gospel of Jesus Christ.  They related that the PC(USA) had done this and had done that which had caused them scandal and offense and now they wanted only to break ties from this heretical organization and be left alone to pursue being a church in their community, unfettered with ties to the outside world.

Though I understood their complaints, I came to realize that there was something else that was at the heart of their concern: their anger with the Presbyterian Church was only the presenting problem, as counselors are trained to say.  It was only the surface issue and not the real heart of the matter.  This church that I visited on behalf of our presbytery wanted to retreat fully and completely into an enclave of like-minded individuals who always agreed with one another and agreed with each other about what the church should be and do.  They just didn’t want to get mixed up with “external concerns,” as one of their own elders named it.

Yet, this passage, with its honest representation of Jesus Christ’s desire to widen the scope of the gospel and reach out to the world in which he lived should be our by word, as it were, when we consider to what we are being called as a church and as a people of God.  If the Gospel of Jesus Christ does not propel you out into the wider world of your fellow humanity, then it is not the gospel of Christ that you are hearing … or at least you do not understand it. Of that, I am convinced.

The temptation for the American church is to become exactly what that little church I visited became: an enclave of like-minded people, intent upon seeing to each other’s needs or their own spiritual desires rather than widening their scope to reach out to the world.  This is possibly the most dangerous and fruitless temptation that we all face as a church in this culture: to wall ourselves up into something that makes us comfortable, while the rest of the world goes on without the gracious and loving influence of Christ’s church.

I really like what John Buchanan, pastor of the great Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago says about this:

“I have thought like this.  I have to be convinced that thinking like this, understandable and logical as it is, is in fact part of what is wrong with us. We are not called to simply exist.  We are not called to just survive. We are not even called to be successful.  We are called, as churches, to be faithful to Jesus Christ and to serve the world as he served it, to love the world as he loved it, to give our lives away to the world as he gave his life away.  The resources to live, to exist, and to survive are given to us by God, not so much as we become more efficient, more economical, more astute at raising funds and conserving our resources (as important as that is), but precisely as we discover that the reason for the church’s being is simply mission.”

As well, here are the words of one of our denomination’s statements of faith, the Confession of 1967, which reads:

“The life, death, resurrection, and promised coming of Jesus Christ has set the pattern for the church’s mission.  His life as man involves the church in the common life of men. His service to men commits the church to work for every form of human well-being.”

In this passage from Mark, we see clearly that the model for discipleship that we receive from Jesus Christ is one that embraces God’s call to reach out to this world, not to form an closed enclave of like-minded individuals, but to follow our Lord out into this world and offer the grace and love that we have received in Christ to a world badly in need of this healing message.

So, let us rise from our knees and our prayerful devotion to God and follow the living Christ out into a world that he has already embraced in his life, death and resurrection; let us widen our scope just as he did in Galilee and beyond those borders and boundaries.  Let us do so for the sake of Jesus Christ and for the sake of love … and maybe, just maybe, if your porch is large enough and strong enough, you ought to think about buying a keg of beer this coming Friday afternoon!

The Transforming Word:  Psalm 111 & Mark 1:21-28; Epiphany 4-January 29, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

“They went to Capernaum; and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. … They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.’”

            When I was a seminarian, I worked briefly in a homeless shelter in the city of Trenton, New Jersey.  Gathered there were the folks who had nowhere else to go; most had been turned out of the local mental institution due to the federal budget cuts of the mid-1980’s.  They all seemed to show up at our little, store-front, Presbyterian-funded and inspired, make-shift shelter.

One particular Sunday morning, the minister in charge of the shelter, Neil, was leading worship and celebrating communion with me assisting him.  Into the back of the worship space, near the end of the service, shuffled one of the regulars; let’s call him “Ted.”

Ted had many issues, mainly an overwhelming sense of paranoia that led him to question everything anyone ever tried to do for him or with him.  He would consistently feel threatened by just about anything that the minister or I offered him and he was constantly in some form of disagreement with all the other residents of the shelter.  To say it succinctly: Ted was a handful!

Ted entered the worship space and I could see on his face that he was greatly troubled.  The communion was finishing and Neil was about to begin the prayer following communion, when Ted cried out in a loud and plaintive voice:

“Oh my God, I missed the blood of Christ!  I ain’t got the blood! You passed over me; you forgot me!  I ain’t got the blood!”

With that, Ted dissolved into a heap on one of the old folding chairs set up in the last row and began to sob in the most heart-wrenching manner you can imagine.

I was stunned, shocked, paralyzed and began to avoid the gaze of Neil for I knew … I just knew … that he would want me to do something as he continued with the service!  And sure enough, he pantomimed for me to take a small piece of bread and the table chalice of grape juice to Ted.

Now, with great shame, I can tell you that I probably rolled me eyes and let out a quiet: “Oh geez…” but I went to the back with the elements and offered them to the sobbing Ted.

I tapped him on the shoulder and he looked up with eyes wet from his own tears and his great fear.  He grabbed the crumb of bread off the small plate and took the entire cup and drank down its contents, with the grape juice pouring down his cheeks and chin onto the tiled floor.

Ted then became … well, transformed: he thanked me quietly and sat up in his chair and listened intently and sat calmly for the remaining five minutes of the service.

In the world of the miraculous, I know that this may seem like “small potatoes,” but in Ted’s world, this changed everything … at least for that moment.  In Ted’s world, the presence of Jesus Christ had transformed him once again into the person that he had been at some point before the demons of his own fears and paranoia consumed him.  And that, my friends, is miraculous enough for me.

I am convinced that it is the presence of God’s transforming word in Jesus Christ that makes our worship meaningful and matter in this world.  It is here, that we are met and confronted by the truth of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ and by God’s great desire for us to be who God has intended us to be.  It is in worship, just as surely as Mark displays it in today’s gospel reading, that real transformation of heart and soul, life and work can overtake us and remake us into the people that God has intended us to be.  That is why worship is so vital, so important to us or at least should be.

William Willimon speaks of this truth when he writes:

“True worship of a true and living God only begins when Jesus appears.  And when he appears among us, his presence can be disruptive.  We come to worship on Sunday not simply for peace, consolation, strength to go on, or any other human good.  We come first and foremost to be with the living God, no matter what … There are those within this congregation this morning who could tell the world the truth: church is not where we come to get what we want out of God.  Church is where God gets what God wants out of us.”

Maybe that is why Ted came to worship: underneath that paranoia and fear that plagued his life, he knew that church, that confrontation with the living God, was really not about him, but was about God … it was and is about what God wants out of us, rather than what we want to get somehow from God!  And for a moment, for a blessed moment, Ted was rid of that paranoia and sat calmly before God in prayer and contemplation; he was the Ted God had intended him to be.

Finally, in closing, and only because I couldn’t resist it: another quote from Willimon … a good and true story that sets the importance of worship in the incredibly real context of our lives:

“[Willimon] asked a group of suburban pastors what was their most formidable competitor for getting their people to Sunday morning worship.

‘Soccer,’ they answered.

‘Do you mean to tell me that the trinity is losing out to a black and white ball?’ [Willimon] asked.

‘Our people,’ one pastor said, ‘would rather raise children who can gain power and prestige in this society by knowing how to play [a game] than to raise children who know how to find the Gospel of Mark in the Bible.’

Luther says that whatever you’d sacrifice your daughter to, that’s your God.”

It is really that important.  Grace and peace to you as you listen for the transforming word in your own life and as we listen together as the people of God.

Lawful Things?: Ps. 139:1-6,13-18 & I Cor. 6:12-20 – Epiphany 2 -January 15, 2012

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything

            On a sunny Saturday winter morning some years back, I was sitting at my desk in the office of one of my former churches.  I was trying desperately to write a sermon for the next day and clearly experiencing a form of “writer’s block.”  So, I looked out my window …

That office happened to be on the ground floor of the church and looked out over a beautiful little courtyard of green grass, brick walls and a few small trees.  I noticed an incredible amount of tiny birds perched on the trees and flying about the courtyard.  It was a scene of both constant motion and dreamy rest … as some birds were in flight, flying little patterns around the courtyard; others were perched in a resting position on the limbs of the little trees.  As some would land on the limbs others would take off and fill in the patterns of flight.

I watched the birds for some time, locked in an interest beyond the natural desire to be distracted from an unusually difficult task. There was something appealing about the manner with which those birds engaged each other and linked themselves together in some kind of swirling, moving and then resting, community of like-feathered creatures.  Each one looked like a variation on the other.  I don’t know what species or breed of bird they were, but they appeared all to be of the same family; they all seemed to be connected to one another.

The birds moved with collective purpose.  As I said, some rested while others flew; they were involved in a collective aerial ballet that I alone witnessed that day.  Though each bird was an individual demonstration of the whole, none of them seemed isolated or detached completely from the complicated dance or from the others.  It was apparent that they all belonged together.

For me, that real-life, naturalistic experience became a metaphor for the church.  Indeed, we are all individuals, called by Jesus Christ to follow him; to fulfill our calling from God to live as witnesses to Jesus Christ, but we do not perform this great ballet of relatedness in Christ alone … we are certainly called to be the church of Jesus Christ together … we need each other.

What we just heard from I Corinthians, speaks to this very issue.  The great Apostle Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth in the midst of a crisis.  That church, in a great diverse city, was beginning to come apart due to the great divisions within its membership.  Paul’s intention was to call them back to an elemental and foundational understanding that God had called them to live together as the church and to just get over their differences.  God’s call was for them to concentrate upon the things that united them in Christ rather those things that separated them.

This is still a struggle for us in the church even today.  Here, in this great community of faith in which God has planted us, we find diverse and different viewpoints.  Sometimes we wonder, like the people of Corinth, what is “lawful” for us and what is “beneficial”, as Paul put it to the Corinthians with this letter.  Sometimes we find ourselves tempted to demand that others in the church act and think exactly as we do.  We sometimes concentrate upon what we perceive others are doing rather than subjecting ourselves to consider how we might better be of service to others rather than stand in judgment of them.  That is as true for us as it is for just about any other church.

I look back over my twenty-five years of ordained ministry and find all kinds of things that have divided the people of God; some of them considerable issues, while others seem a bit fringe to me.  I’ve had folks in my various churches where I have served threaten to leave or actually leave over all kinds of things:

One fellow, a funeral director who was a deacon of the church, felt that there was too many funeral homes in the town where I served previously and left the church because I had actually lead a funeral service at his competitor’s!

Another left a large church I served because the Senior Pastor commandeered the Presbyterian Women’s Lounge for his temporary office while his new office was being prepared; apparently the Presbyterian Women were not as appreciative of his need for new digs as he thought they should have been!

Some have left because the church stopped using the old china and bought new, stopped using the old hymnal and bought new, stopped handing out communion tokens, started reaching out to folks who didn’t wear ties on Sundays or on Mondays for that matter … the stories abound of how it is that we separate ourselves from one another and from Christ’s church for crazy reasons.

I can’t help but think about those birds again … individually beautiful and different in their own ways, they seemed to be bound together by something beyond them … there appeared no particular “lead bird,” but they all seemed to know their own part of the aerial ballet they performed.  Some rested while others flew, seamlessly taking the others place when the right time came, flying and resting, flying and resting and bearing a testimony to an unseen Creator to whose tune they seemed mighty obedient.

William Willimon, a great Methodist bishop that I quote a lot, once wrote:

“Christians are those who, in obedience to Christ, bend our lives toward the needs and limitations of others.  For us, to be moral not only means to live righteously ourselves but also to live in a way that the lives of others might be blessed by our living.”

As followers of the One who gave his life for the many, we freely limit ourselves so that others might be blessed.

Is any of this making sense?  It might not, actually! The culture in which we live does not necessarily promote this self-limitation for the sake of others.  In fact, Willimon has something to say about that:

“Our whole society seems to be built on the promise that the purpose of our country is to give you the maximum amount of freedom to get whatever you want, as long as you don’t bump into me while I’m getting what I want.”

Well said!  Thanks be to God that Paul does not promote what our culture values … instead Paul would advocate, most simply, profoundly and beautifully, that we make room for others in our lives and in our life as Christ’s body in this world.

I can’t emphasize this enough for this is certainly one of those core values of being a Christian … making room for others, even those with whom we disagree.

Paul seems to be telling the Corinthians just that when he wrote:

“All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are beneficial. “All things are lawful for me,”

but I will not be dominated by anything

Later on in his letter, Paul will make an impassioned plea for the Corinthians to limit themselves for the sake of others.  He will intimate strongly to them that part of their witness as Christians is living in community and not in isolation from others.  He will encourage them, for the sake of Christ and for the sake of the witness of God’s love and grace, to figure out a way that they can live together in the peace and community of God’s grace.  It is still good advice for any church, anywhere.

Clyde Fant, a retired professor from Stetson University echoes this in an article about our passage:

“Individualism in the Western world has created liberty and opportunity.  But individualism has been raised to the level of divinity in this country, along with nationalism and the wallet.  College students are deeply committed to a laissez-faire life: it may not be your way, but it is my way. Yet is that not also the mantra of the modern church? Are we willing to stand beneath the word of God, to bow down in humility at the feet of the Christ? Are we willing to obey anything beyond our own whims — particularly if something important is involved? Or do we not believe it has nothing to do with our faith and is nobody’s business but ours — least of all, the church’s?”

Fant is right … the church is more about collectivism than it is about individualists.  Jesus is no individualist; he calls us to be together as his Church.  Christ calls us to express the freedom and liberty we have found in God’s grace by willing binding ourselves together in mutual obedience to him.  In short, Christ calls us to serve one another and this world; to make room for others as some of us rest on the branch while others fly, and then take off in flight while others find opportunity to rest.

There was something about those birds on that snowy wintry day … something beautiful about just how they all, as individuals, worked together to be a flock … it is a lesson that the church would do well to never forget.

The Heart of the Lord: John 1:6-8, 19-28 & Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Advent 3-December 11, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

            I’ve heard countless television evangelists target this or that as what is at the very heart of the Lord.  Sometimes it the material success of the believer that the evangelist isolates, such as in the purveyors of what is called the “prosperity gospel.”  Sometimes it is more political in nature, such as one Texas evangelist who is convinced that the only thing that lies at the heart of the God of the universe is the ultimate preservation of the American way and the United States as the only God-fearing nation … the new Israel, he calls it.

Whatever it is that they say is at the heart of the Lord, I would advise them and all of us here present this day to examine most closely the words from the 61^st chapter of Isaiah.  Here is a strong statement of what is at the very heart of the Lord; the very desire and hope of the Almighty … that justice might be done; that liberty might be proclaimed to the captives; the brokenhearted will be made glad …

The passage from Isaiah comes from the third and final portion of the great prophecy, the portion that is concerned with the returning children of Israel from their captivity in Babylon.  In Palestine, they find devastation and disaster all around them; downtrodden and brokenhearted refugees from their own captivity are welcomed home to find their once beautiful city, Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside, in utter ruin.  And yet, this is the vision that they receive … the hope in God’s work of restoration right in their midst … the vision of what can and will happen in their lives.

At the heart of the Lord is a vision that we name the Advent hope: that which is broken and devastated about our world and our lives will be put to right and will be set to restoration.  What appears as the parched and dry land of our hearts will be replenished with the fertile soil of a great, divine garden, where, as Isaiah puts it, “the Lord God will cause righteousness and praised to spring up …”

Sometimes it is only the vision of that for which we hope that keeps us going.  We have an idea, a goal, a vision of what life can be or has been or will be again and that seems to lend a hand in our getting through this recent or long-lasting personal desert we face.

William Willimon, once the chaplain at Duke University, tells a story about a college student he knows that keeps such a vision before her.  He wrote this:

“She had a miserable time the second semester of her sophomore year.  She had unwisely signed up for a couple of killer courses.  She was flunking both them, in way over her head.  Then, her mother had a heart attack and was reduced to being an invalid.  To top it all off, her boyfriend of three years unceremoniously dumped her.

‘How on earth do you keep going,’ [Willimon] asked her.

‘I think of May 14, 2012,’ she responded.

‘May 14, 2012? What’s that?’ [He] asked.

‘It’s the day of my graduation.  Sometimes I picture myself in my cap and gown.  I can hear the music of the orchestra.  In my mind’s eye I can see myself processing down that long row of graduates, see myself receiving my diploma from the hands of the President. That dream, that vision of the future, keeps me going.’”

The value of visions of restoration and redemption should never be discounted.  They are important not only to our lives, but to the very life of God; that kind of vision of restoration and redemption for all creation, all humankind, is what is right at the heart of God.  Therefore, it should be right at the heart not only of our Advent celebrations, but at our very actions and work as Christians and as a congregation of followers of Jesus Christ.

The call both of the Advent season and the witness of Isaiah is for our full participation in the acts that might bring justice, righteousness and kindness to this earth.  Saying that, I realize, it is nothing revolutionary or radical or new for you folks; however, as well as we know this about our Christian faith and the call from the very heart of God, it is good for us to be reminded of it from time to time.  This is the duty of the text and of those who interpret the text on a weekly basis in the setting of worship: to remind us all of the call upon our lives.

As some of you know, I’m an avid golfer … Now; I said “avid” not necessarily good! I love to play the game and I love to watch others play it.  It is a grand game, developed, of course, by wise Scots who would come to perfect Calvinism into something we call Presbyterianism.  Those Scots knew something about the hard lessons of golf and life; about the way that both playing the game and living life can teach a good dose of humility to each of us.

I was watching a few holes of a recent professional match on television and was taken by the contrast between the reactions of some of the pros as they made exceptionally good shots.  Some of the pros, after hitting a particularly great putt or a clutch sand shot, pumped their fists, shouted short, loud acclamations and nearly thumped their chests.  Others, had more restrained responses, which I like.

One, in particular, a slight, Irish youth, hit a clutch chip around the green, out of thick rough, over a bunker, down the slope of the putting surface and nearly holed it.  He was in danger of slipping out of the frontrunners if he muffed the chip.  Instead of chest thumping or fist pumping, he merely ducked his head and one hand pulled at the brim of his cap, as if to say: “Ah shucks, anyone could have done that.”  Or maybe, more likely, he thought as most of us do when we hit a good shot: “That could have gone a lot worse!”

Golfers are told by the experts that not only is it really a mental game, it is a game where you best remember or envision your good shots rather than the ones of which you made a major mess and pulled a double or triple bogey, or in my case, much worse. The golfer is often exhorted to envision the ball landing on the green or going in the hole long before the approach shot is struck or the putt aligned.  The golfer is encouraged to remember the good shots and shake off the bad.

I think that this is excellent advice for living out what is at the heart of the Lord.  It would be best for the Christian to remember the times when we have really got it; when we have really done well by others, reaching out our hearts and hands and offering ourselves as part of the solution.  We have had more than enough experiences of not doing what is right; we all know that if we are honest.  And sometimes, the remembrance of those times and acts threaten to bury us in either massive guilt or anxious inactivity, afraid we will repeat the bad rather than pioneer in the good.

The season of Advent and the call of Isaiah should convince us that God’s redemption is coming and we all have a part to play.  We don’t all have to be Joan of Arcs, Albert Schweitzers, Mother Teresas or Rory McIlroys. We can all be ourselves, the selves that God has made, the selves that do, from time to time, summon up enough passion, courage and conviction to actual do the good, work for justice, righteousness and wholeness in this world, and actually follow the very heart of the Lord.

William Willimon reminds us all that we are not alone at this work; that the golf course is not empty aside from us and our slight abilities to hit the ball:

“…to believe in God is to believe that your actions are not the only actions that are occurring.  In the present moment, there is a story working itself out beyond the present.  Your circumstances, as bleak as they may be at the moment, are not the only circumstance.  It is not all left up to us. We do not have the whole world in our hands. There is a good, gracious presence moving behind the circumstances of life.”

Anyone who has stood on the tee and watched your ball land squarely in the fairway knows that there is more going on there than you can muster on your own … anyone of us who have actually done the good, sought justice, promoted righteousness, knows that there is One who really deserves the credit.

Build It Where You Are: Mark 1:1-8(9-15) & Isaiah 40:1-11- Advent 2: December 4, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. ¹¹And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ The Temptation of Jesus 12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. The Beginning of the Galilean Ministry 14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

Those are the words that follow immediately after the First Lesson for this day.  It was not a part of the lectionary pericope, but, as you can tell, it needs to be read along with it … at least I think it does.

For it is here that the intersection of our Advent texts for today actually takes place: The opening to the second part of Isaiah and the opening to the Gospel (good news) of Jesus Christ as related by Mark.

The author of Mark takes his readers back before he propels them forward … he takes us back to the Old Testament promises and hopes before he spends the rest of the gospel demonstrating just how those promises and hopes have been fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth.  No elongated birth narrative or genealogical survey opens the Gospel of Mark … just this whiplash between what we have hoped for and the beginning of our hope’s fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

In short, the words from Isaiah and John the Baptist remind us that this world and our lives are not what they should be, but in the coming of Jesus Christ, a light has dawned and that fulfillment is coming … not yet here, but yet is coming.

The Rev. William Goettler, a Presbyterian pastor in New Haven, Connecticut, tells a story about a sometimes-homeless man in New Haven named Danny.  He has known Danny for years and provided him with all kinds of assistance when asked by the man.  Whenever Rev. Goettler sees Danny on the streets of New Haven, the conversation always ends with Danny asking: “Reverend is this the way it is supposed to be?”

Of course, it really isn’t a question for which Danny is expecting an answer in response.  It is more of a statement, or a mini-sermon as Rev. Goettler calls it. However, it is the very thing that John the Baptist and the Second Isaiah is crying out in the wilderness … it is a way of preparing the way of the Lord right in the midst of life.  It is a modern-day proclamation of the very thing that has been in the hearts of the ancients and in our hearts as well: “This is not the way the world should be …”

This is the message of Advent: God is coming to us not to say how wonderful and perfect we are, but coming to us in judgment of how the world is and how our own little individual worlds are.  God is coming in the King of kings and Lord of lords in mercy and grace AND in judgment.

Yet, sometimes we see visions … we get glimpses of what could be and that is a judgment on how things are in this world and our little worlds.  In this rather extended illustration, allow me to share what that great Presbyterian author and minister, Frederick Buechner saw once:

“It was a couple of springs ago.  I was driving into New York City from New Jersey on one of those crowded, fast-moving turnpikes you enter it by.  It was very warm.  There was brilliant sunshine, and the cars glittered in it as they went tearing by.  The sky was cloudless and blue. Around Newark a huge silver plane traveling in the same direction as I was made its descent in a slow diagonal and touched down soft as a bird on the airstrip just a few hundred yards away from me as I was driving by.  I had music on the radio, but I didn’t need it.  The day made its own music – the hot spring sun and the hum of the road, the roar of the great trucks passing and of my own engine, the hum of my own thoughts.  When I came out of the Lincoln Tunnel, the city was snarled and seething with traffic as usual; but at the same time there was something about it that was not usual.

“It was gorgeous traffic, it was beautiful traffic – that’s what was not usual.  It was a beauty to see, to hear, to smell, even to be part of.  It was so dazzlingly alive it all but took my breath away.  It rattled and honked and chattered with life – the people, the colors of their clothes, the marvelous hodgepodge of their faces, all of it; the taxis, the shops, the blinding sidewalks.  The spring day made everybody a celebrity – blacks, whites, Hispanics, every last one of them.  It made even the litter and clamor and turmoil of it a kind of miracle.

“There was construction going on as I inched my way east along Fifty-Fourth Street, and some wino, some bum, was stretched out on his back in the sun on a pile of lumber as if it was an alpine meadow he was stretched out on and he was made of money.  From the garage where I left the car, I continued my way on foot.  In the high-ceilinged public atrium on the ground floor of a large office building there were people on benches eating their sandwiches.  Some of them dressed to kill. Some of them were in jeans and sneakers.  There were young ones and old ones. Daylight was flooding in on them, and there were green plants growing and a sense of deep peace as they at their lunches mostly in silence. A big man in a clown costume and whiteface took out a tubular yellow balloon big around as a noodle, blew it up, and twisted it squeakily into a dove of peace, which he handed to the bug-eyed child watching him.  I am not making this up. It all happened.

“In some ways it was like a dream and in other ways as if I had woken up from a dream. I had the feeling that I had never seen the city so real before in all my life. I was walking along Central Park South near Columbus Circle at the foot of the park when a middle-aged black woman came toward me going the other way.  Just as she passed me, she spoke.  What she said was, ‘Jesus loves you.’ That is what she said: ‘Jesus loves you,’ just like that.  She said it in as everyday a voice as if she had been saying good morning, and I was so caught off guard that it wasn’t till she was lost in the crowd that I realized what she had said and wondered if I could possibly ever find her again and thank her, if I could ever catch up with her and say, ‘Yes, if I believe anything worth believing in this whole world, I believe that.  He loves me.  He loves you. He loves the whole doomed, damned pack of us.’

“For the rest of the way I was going, the streets I walked on were paved with gold.  Nothing was different. Everything was different. The city was transfigured. I was transfigured. It was a new New York coming down out of heaven adorned like a bride prepared for her husband. ‘The dwelling of God is with men.  He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people …. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away’ (Rev. 21:3-4). That is the city that for a moment I say.

“For a moment it was not the world as it is that I saw but the world as it might be, as something deep with the world wants to be and is preparing to be, the way in darkness a seed prepares for growth, the way leaven works in bread.”

 

Wow! What a phenomenally unusual but everyday experience of the divine that Buechner was privy to in his trip into the city.  This is the very essence of Advent; seeing beyond the moment; beyond the dirt and grime of this world and the human traffic jams we make of our own lives, to what is really coming into the world.  Here is the answer to Danny’s question / sermon: “Reverend is this the way it is supposed to be?”  This is the call of hope that is at the every center not only of this Advent season, but the Christian life itself.  This is where we must build the kingdom of heaven … right where we are … and yet, … as Buechner concludes his sermon, I conclude mine:

“We cannot make the Kingdom of God happen, but we can put out leaves as it draws near.  We can be kind to each other.  We can be kind to ourselves. We can drive back the darkness a little. We can make green places within ourselves and among ourselves where God can make his Kingdom happen. That transfigured city. Those people of every color, class, condition, eating their sandwiches together in that quiet place.  The clown and the child. The sunlight that made everybody in those teeming streets a super-star.  The bum napping like a millionaire on his pile of two-by-fours.  The beautiful traffic surging all around me and the beautiful things that I could feel surging inside myself, in that holy place that is inside all of us. Turn that way.  Everybody.  While there is still time. Pray for the Kingdom.  Watch for signs of it.  Live as though it is here already because there are moments when it almost is …”

God-Chasers? – Mark 13:24-37 & Isaiah 64:1-9 – Advent 1: November 27, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

“O that you would tear open the heavens and come down …”

            Today marks the opening of the season of Advent.  It is the beginning of a new liturgical year in the Christian church.  The Christian year does not begin with New Year’s Day or with Christmas Eve festivities nor even with the American holiday of Thanksgiving; the Christian year begins not with a holiday, but a holy season: Advent.

Yet, we confuse Advent and Christmas in our society and sometimes in the church.  Advent is a season of preparation and expectation, not looking toward Christmas celebrations necessarily; but looking beyond this time to the final days of culmination or judgment in God’s kingdom.

If there is anything that you take away from today’s service, it is my hope that you take away an expectation for the future … a future that is definitely not owned or possessed by us, but a future that is fully and completely in the hands of God.  The texts for today speak of this expectation that it is God who holds all of our futures; that the future is actually beyond our manipulation or possession … a future that is surely and safely in the hands of the God whom we have known in the past and who abides with us even now, in our present.

But now, about the past … The people of Israel have been in captivity and bondage in Babylon.  They have been released from that captivity and have returned home to Jerusalem to find a horrible mess … the temple is in ruins, the streets are overrun and the people who have been left to inhabit the once great city are a dispirited and hopeless muddle of humanity.

It is here, in this condition and situation, that the great prophet Isaiah, the Third Isaiah as the scholars call him, writes this wondrous lament … this great appeal to God bidding God to intervene, to rend the heavens and come down. The people of Israel and Third Isaiah himself, have learned that though they can remember the past and inhabit the present, the future belongs solely to their God.  This is the very same lesson that the holy season of Advent bids to teach us … the God of our past and present owns the future.

Jesus adds much to this understanding when we hear the passage from Mark.  The passage from the Gospel as well as the lament from Isaiah can rightly be called apocalyptic.  Some would define apocalyptic literature and the apocalypse as being about that which is to come in devastating power and a world-turned-upside-down finality.  That is surely one definition of the passages we receive this day and Advent itself.

However, I like very much the explanation offered by Kathleen Norris, a Christian writer whom Wikipedia says currently divides her time between South Dakota and Hawaii … apparently it is good work if you can get it!  Anyway, here’s what Norris wrote:

The word apocalypse simply means to reveal, to uncover, and if facing reality brings us despair, we need to ask why. Above all, we must reject the literalist notion that apocalyptic literature is about a future pie in the sky. It is a command to come to full attention in the here and now. And that is hard to do.

“I think that Ms. Norris is on to something important about our texts this morning: the coming future of God’s reign that Advent celebrates and points towards is something that is to be lived in the here and now rather than in the sweet-by-and-by!”

Jesus’ words and the even more ancient sentiments of Isaiah call us to do the very thing directed by Ms. Norris: to come to full attention here and now and anticipate in our very living, the way that God will set to right this old world in the final judgment, in the final consummation.

Not too terribly long ago, I was talking with a member of our congregation about optimism and hope.  This person had great optimism for the way things could be set right, made better for others and for our community.  She had mentioned that there had been phone calls in her work that had indicated the opposite of that: fears expressed that if things were changed in some ways, if the patterns of the past weren’t repeated, things would go awry.  This did not dissuade her or her colleagues: instead, she chose to look upon the future with an optimism not based in naiveté, but rather in hope.

The conversation got me thinking about the hope we have as Christians, as followers of Jesus Christ.  We should never feel compelled to apologize for our optimism or maybe better put the hope that is based in God’s future.  Pessimism, however, should be challenged to offer a defense for its banal predictions of failing or status quo based on their “sure” view of a future that will always be like the past.  No, hope in God’s future should never have to apologize; we should just live it. For, as Christians, influenced by both passages of scripture that we’ve heard today, we realize and know that each day is both a gift and a judgment, thus signifying our great need for the grace that we are given by God. This too is the message of Advent.

Maybe it’s better to hear William Willimon’s take on this rather than mine:

“When we come to church and are exposed to such speech from Isaiah … we are beckoned out beyond the world of predictability into another world of thought and risk and gift, in which divine intervention enables new life to break our prosaic reductions, to subvert our tamed expectations, and to evoke fresh faith. One reason why the world doesn’t want you to believe in apocalyptic poetry is that the world knows that dangerous hope for the future leads to daring resistance in the now. It’s hard to be docile when you believe that tomorrow may be better today … Our actions may not be the sum of all actions in the world.  Tomorrow may not be exclusively in our hands, and knowing that can make a huge difference in how we live today.”

I believe that.  I believe that is right at the heart of the lessons of this holy season of Advent: trusting that God alone holds the future, and living courageously and faithfully into that future by acting today as if it were tomorrow already.

Thomas Long, my preaching professor, tells a great story about such things:

A minister friend of mine in Atlanta at a downtown church planned one evening to go out to eat with his wife to celebrate their anniversary. His wife met him at the church, and the two of them headed out to the parking lot to take the car to the restaurant. But when they got outside they encountered a crisis. An elderly woman, a desperate look on her face, was kneeling on the sidewalk beside a man, her husband as it turns out, who was lying on his back in pain clutching his chest. My friend’s wife ran quickly back into the church to call an ambulance, and my friend leaned over to comfort the man. “We have called for some help and they will be here soon . . . ,” he began, but the man interrupted him.

“Charlie, forgive me,” the man said.

“I’m not Charlie,” my friend said. “My name is Sam.” What Sam did not know until later is that Charlie was the man’s son, and years before the man had, in a rage over something, disowned Charlie, and the two had not spoken in years.

The man looked up at Sam and reached out and touched his hand. “Charlie, please, forgive me.”

“Just relax,” Sam said. “Somebody will be here soon to get you to the hospital.”

But the man suddenly clutched in terrible pain, and it was now clear that he would not make it to the hospital. With his last gasping energy he pulled on Sam’s arm and begged, “Charlie, please, forgive me.”

Sam followed his faithful instinct, reached out and put his hand on the man’s forehead as a blessing and said, “I do forgive you. I do forgive you.” Those were the last words the man ever heard in this life.

Later, when he learned what the circumstances were, Sam wondered if he had done the right thing. “I am not his son. The relationship was still broken. What right did I have to grant forgiveness,” Sam wondered. Then it came to him that his whole ministry was about this, that the whole Christian faith is about this. We have been given in Christ a restoration and a reconciliation that is already true, already whole, and we are beckoned from God’s fullness to live into God’s future and toward what has already been given as a gift.

Charlie’s father had failed to live today as if it were tomorrow; consequently hope for the future was beyond his ability to see.  Advent points us squarely towards a future that already is shining brightly into the present: a future that God owns and we are called to “live into …”

Royalty – Matthew 25:31-46 & Psalm 100 – Christ the King: November 20, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

There is an old legend about a monastery that had fallen on hard times and great disrepair.  The monks quarreled amongst themselves, the work around the monastery just didn’t get done, and the place was a total mess.  The new Abbot didn’t quite know how he could change things.  He ventured out into the forest to speak with a Jewish mystic who had a small community of followers gathered around him.

When he asked the mystic what he could do to restore order, the mystic seemed a bit shocked.  “Don’t you know … I’ve been watching your men for some time and I have seen in a vision that one of them is the incarnation of the Messiah!”  The Abbot was greatly impressed by this news, having much faith in the perception of the mystic.

When he returned to the monastery, the Abbot gathered the monks and related the story.  The men were shocked and began to wonder to themselves just who was the incarnation.  In the days that followed, things changed.  Everyone was cordial to each other.  Each was eager to help and comfort the other.  All the work got done without bickering.  The village around the monastery sensed the change and began to picnic on the now lovely grounds of the institution.  The people in the village themselves began to reflect the kind actions of the monks and treated each other with greater respect and reverence.

Not only was the monastery saved, but all the village and the surrounding lands were transformed, all because the monks began to treat one another as if one of them were the living Christ …

Our ability and response to seeing the living Christ in the lives of those around appears to be the only criterion of the Last Judgment portrayed by the parable that we just heard read from Matthew’s Gospel.  This section of the Gospel of Matthew is the only New Testament representation of what the Last Judgment will be like.  There is no other description in the Gospels, Epistles or any other part of the New Testament: this is it … so if we want to know what the criterion is for us in judgment, these words of Jesus are the only ones we can go by.

John Buchanan, my favorite preacher in Chicago, wrote this about that:

“Students of the New Testament know that the only description of the last judgment is in Matthew 25.  There is nothing in it about ecclesiastical connections or religious practices.  There is not a word in this parable about theology, creeds, orthodoxies. There is only one criterion here, and that is whether or not you saw Jesus Christ in the face of the needy and whether or not you gave yourself away in love in his name.”

We hear all kinds of criterion for either ultimate blissfulness in Jesus or ways in which to live a Christian life faithful to the One who was and is faithful to us.  But here is offered the ONE criterion that Jesus gives for judgment at the Last Judgment … have we considered the plight of others and have we recognized the presence of Jesus Christ with those in need?  That’s it.  That is what is said here by Jesus.  Consequently, it seems pretty plain to me.

But, do we really do it?  Of course, that is the question that the parable is designed to elicit from each of us … do we really take the time and energy to reach out and give ourselves away in love of Jesus’ name?  That’s really it.  Do we allow God the room in our life to take time for others or do we fill up our life with only the stuff we want to do and the people we want to see? I’m not saying that any of this is easy; that’s why it is called discipleship!  It requires something of us!  I’m not saying it is simple; I’m merely saying that the criterion appears pretty plain to me.

Allow me to share with you another story; this one not a legend, but a reporting of something that happened in a specific place and at a specific time that is actually repeated throughout Christian congregations wherever they may be found and of course, here at First Church.  The story comes from Anthony Robinson, former minister to the Plymouth Congregational Church in Seattle:

The clothing bank was open from 10:00 to 4:00 every Wednesday in the church basement. The “bank” was actually a large closet with a section for hanging clothes and drawers underneath for boots and shoes. Piled high atop the closet were cardboard boxes stuffed with folded clothes.

On Wednesdays at about 9:30 Gertrude and Vernet came up the church walk. Even though Vernet, who had spent most of his life as a logger, was in his late 70s, he was still tall and lean. These days he tilted forward a little as he walked or stood, like a tree leaning with the weight of the years. His wife, Gertrude, by contrast, seemed almost as wide as she was tall. She was not, however, fat. She was simply a farm wife who had settled.

In the basement Vernet would climb a chair and pull down the cardboard boxes. Gertrude would carefully put the contents out on the tables. It always surprised me to see how many tables were filled. Boots and shoes would be pulled out and the closet doors opened to reveal heavy wool suits and long raincoats. As the day went on, anywhere between two and ten people would follow Gertrude and Vernet down the stairs into the basement. Often late in the day, when it was starting to grow dark on winter days, a mother followed by two or three children would descend the stairs. Gertrude would play with the children in a grandmotherly way while Vernet helped the mother find what she was looking for.

Gertrude and Vernet were not always in perfect spirits about the labor they had chosen. People would donate huge bags of unsorted, even unwashed clothes, and all manner of odds and ends for which Vernet could never find space. This irritated him. It also irritated him that some people made such a mess of the clothes as they looked through them.

Some of us wondered, more often in our thoughts than out loud, if this faithfully tended clothing bank did any real good. After all, the Northwest had major economic problems. Could a few boxes of clothing make a difference? It seemed that more large-scale efforts, such as government intervention, were needed. But on Wednesdays Gertrude and Vernet came, and so did those who needed what was stuffed in the big closet.

If I understand that parable that Jesus told about the sheep and the goats and the coming judgment, our faith requires us to see Jesus in the least of our brothers and sisters and actually do something about their suffering, their hunger, their lack, their need.  For all of us wanting to see the face of God, desiring to draw close to the source of love and grace and meaning, we know what we must do to actually see God and been drawn closer …

John Buchanan again, puts it very well:

“The God of Jesus, the God of the Bible, is not a remote supreme being on a throne up there above the clouds or out there somewhere in the mysterious reaches of the universe.  Jesus said, God is here, in the messiness and ambiguity of human life.  God is here, particularly in your neighbor, the one who needs you.  You want to see the face of God?  Look into the face of one of the least of these, the vulnerable, the weak, the children.”

No surer case exists for what we have been called to do in Jesus Christ.  It seems to me to be as plain as the nose on my face … now, the question remains to me and to you, as followers of the living Christ, as children of royalty, Christ the King, what will WE do?

“On Wednesday evenings, Vernet pulled his coat on and went down the walk. The year was heading toward its end and night was coming on, even though it was only a quarter past four. Into their old station wagon he and Gertrude climbed and headed back down the road. But even as darkness fell and a cold wind blew down off the hills, there seemed to be a light around that station wagon, and the world was a warmer place.”

To You I Lift My Eyes – Ps. 123 & Mt. 25:14-30 – Ordinary 33- November 13, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

“To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens!”

            There’s a phenomenon that I’ve mentioned before that I’ve observed around weddings.  Have you noticed?  This most often occurs with non-member weddings, where the invited guests have no real relationship to our church or congregation other than a place where their two friends or beloved relatives are being married.

This phenomenon is observable if you are in the sanctuary fifteen minutes prior to the service.  Usually, there’s hardly anyone present that early.  Most of the guests wait until almost the last minute to find a place in the pews.  I don’t think that it is necessarily unfamiliarity with our church building or the location; rather I believe that is a fear that something might just happen to them if they hang around a church sanctuary too long.

Folks who are not members of a church, but members of our culture, get the idea that something important happens here; that some kind of communication with the divine occurs; that there is the awesome possibility of being confronted by God if you hang around a sanctuary too long.  It is a dread or a fear that seizes folks and helps to keep out of the sanctuary as long as they possibly can stand.  For if it is true; if this is the place where the human meets the divine, what just might be asked of them?

Maybe better put are the words of the Presbyterian author Annie Dillard, who as a child, attended Shadyside Presbyterian Church in nearby Pittsburgh.  Here’s what she wrote about attendance at even a staid sanctuary like Shadyside’s:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Maybe that is the fear: risking our comfortable lives for something a little more God-infused; something that might just lead us out into unchartered waters; something (or better put: Someone) who will lead us out of our satisfied, but troubled existence into a new life of risk and a call to trust in the One to whom we are called to lift our eyes?

The Parable of the Talents as the writing from Matthew is often called is about just such risk-taking on behalf of the living Christ.  Jesus tells his disciples and followers a couple of parables here in Matthew all in succession that imply that something more than the status quo is expected of them.  The parables detail a division in the human race between those who hear God’s call and faithfully risk everything on behalf of it and those who do nothing or ignore the call.

Too often, this parable has been connected in preaching with the ordinary, annual stewardship drives of churches.  I suppose I’ve done that myself at some point in my ministry.  However, there is much more involved here than mere money or wealth: this parable is really about the things that we cannot fold, or jingle in our pockets or place in our checking accounts.  This parable is about our very souls and our response to God’s call to become involved in our life in God’s kingdom.

John Buchanan, great preacher at the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, puts it this way:

“The point here is not really about doubling your money and accumulating wealth.  It is about living. It is about investing. It is about taking risks. It is about Jesus himself and what he has done and what is about to happen to him. Mostly it is about what he hopes and expects of [his followers] after he is gone. It is about being a follower of Jesus and what it means to be faithful to him, and so, finally, it is about you and me.”

Buchanan goes on to say:

“The greatest risk of all, it turns out, is not to risk anything, not to care deeply and profoundly enough about anything to invest deeply, to give your heart away and in the process risk everything.  The greatest risk of all, it turns out, is to play it safe, to live cautiously and prudently. Orthodox, conventional theology identifies sin as pride and egotism.  However, there is an entire other lens through which to view the human condition.  It is called sloth, one of the ancient church’s seven deadly sins.  Sloth means not caring, not loving, not rejoicing, not living up to the full potential of our humanity, playing it safe, investing nothing, being cautious and prudent, digging a hole and burying the money in the ground.”

Wow!  Now that is the greatest sin for any of us who claim to be followers of the One who risked everything for the sake of humankind … not doing anything … not risking anything, but rather being smug and content in our own righteousness and faithfulness.  No, as followers of Jesus Christ, we can never faithfully choose to follow the example of the third slave in his parable; the one who dug a hole and buried his life in it!

That’s the way I see it: it is a kin to a form of practical or self-defensive atheism: believing that our life belongs solely to ourselves and that God, if there is a God, is so wrathful, judgmental and harsh, that it would be best not to get ourselves involved in life itself for the risk of losing it.  It is akin to burying what we have received from God and thinking that somehow the preservation of what we have received will guarantee our justification or salvation.  Somehow, we believe that if we just give back to God what he has given us, that that is somehow the safest bet.  This parable demonstrates just the opposite indeed.

As faithful followers of Jesus Christ, we are called to so much more than just the preservation of what we have received.  We are called to follow this One who, as Annie Dillard said so well, “may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Lindsay Armstrong, Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Atlanta, has commented upon this:

“Faithful living is not static; yet, like this third slave, we are good at knowing without doing.  We are adept at holding on to a talent entrusted, knowing what we should do with it, but not doing so. We know what faithful living looks like, but we hesitate to live it. We bury too much goodness, time, love, treasure, and talent in the ground.”

This is one reason why I’m proud to be a Minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA).  Our denomination has taken risks all along that have not always been popular with the the standing culture, our Christians brothers and sisters of other denominations or our own membership.  We have taken those risks not because we felt it the popular thing to do, or the prevalent course of the culture, but because we have believed what we have read in scripture.  We advocated for the abolishment of slavery when it was not considered the most prudent course.  We ordained women to the ordered ministries of the church when the rest of the Christian church held its breath and counseled otherwise.

Our denomination has recently undergone great inner turmoil in providing a place of respect and full acceptance to folks within our congregations regardless of sexual orientation.  Our church has done all these things and more because we have refused to bury our talents and return to God nothing on God’s investment in us.  For this, I am proud of our denomination.

In a like manner, I am very proud of members of our congregation who have recently stood for elected office in our community.  These folks have risked much to seek election to office, not for personal gain, but to place themselves at the service of the public.  They have not buried their talents, but have offered them for the service of others.

Our history as a church and a congregation points up to me the merits of not burying our talents, our gifts from God, but actually risking them in their use.  This seems to me to be the point of this parable: that we are called by God to risk what we have been given, what we possess, for the sake of God’s kingdom; for the sake of reaching out to others and actually living the gospel.

Again, remember the words of that great preacher from Chicago:

“The greatest risk of all, it turns out, is not to risk anything, not to care deeply and profoundly enough about anything to invest deeply, to give your heart away and in the process risk everything. The greatest risk of all, it turns out, is to play it safe …”

We are at our best when we refuse to “play it safe” or bury what we have received from God.  We are at our best in following Jesus Christ when we take what has been entrusted to us and share with this world: whether it financial resources or the even more important treasure we have received: our very lives.  We are at our best when respond faithfully to God’s gift of life by actually risking it all in extending the grace and love we have received.

The greatest risk of all, or so it is said, is not to risk anything … just ask the third servant!

A Present Immediacy: Psalm 78:1-7 & Matthew 25:1-13 – November 6, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, “Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.” But the wise replied, “No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.”

            Brothers and sisters in Christ: you have chosen well! On this beautiful, fall morning, you have chosen to be present in worship rather than the myriad of other places you could be, doing a multitude of different things.  You have chosen to be present in worship and indeed, you have chosen well.

Still, I am a Calvinist … the ultimate decision is not something that you have chosen.  Scripture assures us that God chooses us and not the other way round. I know that left to our own devices, when it comes to the ultimate decision, we would probably choose poorly!  Remember, I am a Calvinist after all!

However, like the parable indicates, we can be either wise or foolish and still be bridesmaids.  We can be either wise or foolish and still be a part of the party.  You have shown yourselves to be wise: you have sought to find oil for your lamps here, in worship, in association with Christ’s body, today.

The young couple was completely distraught and with good reason.  They had lost their child to an incredibly quick illness that baffled the medical professionals.  No one had any real answer for them: their child seemed healthy one minute and then was gone the next.  Even an autopsy had not given them any confirmation to the question of “Why?”

They were not members of any church and had no real religious attachments or expressed faith.  One of their friends was a member of my church and asked me if I would meet with the grieving parents and officiate at the funeral.  Of course I did.

Now, the death of a child is devastating to any set of parents, but this young couple, it struck me, had nothing to draw upon in their grief.  Their grieving was abject misery and nothing that I shared with them could touch the depth of the hurt and loss.

I expressed my concern about them to their friend who was the member of my church and he said something to me that I will never forget: “Well, I tried Martin to get them to come to church with me; maybe if they had a bit of faith they would have some hope.”

At first I thought this a callous statement from a well-meaning and well-intentioned younger member of my church.  I quietly hoped that he hadn’t said that to the couple and I’m pretty sure that he didn’t. However, after many years removed from the situation, I think what the man said to me was true.

Now, no one would have been prepared for such a tragic and miserable loss, but that poor couple just had no reserve of faith or belief to draw upon in the midst of their personal tragedy. It seemed to make their suffering ten times worse, I suppose in some ways.  I had a faith and a hope in Jesus Christ that I shared with them as the minister praying with them and planning and officiating at the sad little funeral, but I couldn’t give them my faith.  I could share what I knew to be the truth of God’s great love for us, but I couldn’t give them any confidence of that.  That was something that needed to be there in their lives beforehand.

It is not unlike what is going in this quizzical little parable delivered by Jesus to his disciples.  The ten bridesmaids are divided between those who had appropriately prepared and those who had not.  At first, one might be a bit bothered by the presentation of the five wise bridegrooms refusing to share with the five foolish some of their own oil for their lamps.  But then again, it might just be that they couldn’t.

It’s not that we have a limited amount of faith and to share it would endanger our own reserves of trust in God, rather it is like speaking a wholly different language to one who just doesn’t have the requisite preparation to understand.  Faith is something that is a gift from God and also something that we develop; something for which we prepare.  Our faith cannot be given away, just as the five wise bridesmaids could not give away their preparations: it just isn’t possible.

You folks have chosen well: by your presence in worship and your other associations with the Christ’s body in this world (the church), you are preparing yourselves for the time when a reserve of faith may need to be drawn upon in your life.

It doesn’t have to be major tragic moments like the young couple I described in the opening of the sermon.  There are enough challenges and events in our daily life to ensure that our faith and trust in God will be needed by us.

This is exactly why attendance to worship; attendance to service of Jesus Christ; attendance to the fellowship of Christ’s church is vitally important.  In all those little moments of participating in worship; serving Christ; fellowshipping with our brothers and sisters in Christ, we are being prepared to go back out into the world and be informed and strengthened by our faith and trust in God.  It is like added oil to the lamps of faith.

I say this is an encouragement because you are here.  Whether this is the first time you’ve crossed the threshold of this sanctuary or you’ve been here so much you might be mistaken as part of the furnishings (that’s a good thing); you’ve made a good decision.  You’ve placed yourself in the position of having oil added to your lamp that you might be ready and prepared when the call comes; the faith that has been developed and nurtured inside you comes to full maturity.

This is why, our faith, our attendance to the things that make for being Christian should never be taken for granted.  Like a muscle, faith must be exercised in order to remain strong and useful to God and informative to our living.  It really is that important.

William Willimon, great Methodist bishop, wrote of such ordinary, everyday preparations of faith being drawn upon in a present immediacy:

I remember preaching a series of sermons in which I talked about death and eternal life. One Monday morning I got the call. “Fred has collapsed. Mary says that she thinks he has died. She has called the ambulance.” I put down the phone and raced out to their farmhouse. I got there just as the ambulance was arriving.

Mary met me at the door and asked me, “Tell me again what you said in your sermon last Sunday about eternal life? I want to be sure I got it right.”

Though she didn’t know it, when she was listening to my sermon she was preparing herself, she was obtaining oil for her lamp, getting ready for night. She would be able to go into that dark with her lamp shining.

You have chosen wisely … you have availed yourselves of opportunity to fill your lamps … now, let us go out into this world with our lamps burning brightly into any darkness that we might face; let us learn to count on the reserves that God has given us this day and each day.

A Generous Undertaking: Psalm 107:1-9, 33-43 & II Corinthians 9:1-15 – October 30, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

            As you are well aware, this morning is Commitment Sunday; the day in which we collect the pledges for the ministry of the church in the coming year.  It is an important day; not because the financial secretary will spend the better part of next week tallying and the Stewardship Committee worrying until the results are announced, it is an important day because this is one of those days in which we are called as a congregation to respond to the grace of God.

This is an important day, because it is the day that we, for sure, get to ask ourselves the question: “How will I respond to the grace of God?”  Now, we should be asking ourselves that question all through our life of response to God’s grace, but today, we ask it both personally and collectively. How will we respond?  What will we give in response to the mercy and grace that we have received from God?

            Now, let me be clear about this: there will be no extortion offered here in order to get you to do something that you don’t want to do.  If you pledge in a grudging manner or because that is what is expected of you, don’t bother; I’m not sure if God can make use of such a gift.  So, take a breath; breathe easy … no one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.

            To this point, let me share with you something I read this past week in a commentary on this passage from II Corinthians, written by the biblical scholar, J. Paul Sampley:

“If we think about how hard we worked to arrive where we are, we are likely to become stingy, because there is something innately programmed into us to have us think either that by our hard work we deserve what we have or that we have been shortchanged and do not have enough.  If, on the other hand, we think about how many doors have opened to us, about how we have gotten where we are by the way things have surprisingly opened to or ‘broken for’ us (by God’s grace and the working of the Spirit), then we are more likely to think more generously.  No doubt some truth resides on both sides of those arguments. The issue is how we keep perspective. Paul may help us here.  God graces. God sows. We do not deserve God’s favor, but we receive it.  Such beneficence, especially when we know we do not deserve it, takes away some of our control of our lives and places us in a response mode. Grace received demands a response. The grace that comes from God finds it fruition as it flows through us to others.”

I think Dr. Sampley said that very well, don’t you?

I receive, via email, an alumni publication from my seminary.  It very often, as I’m sure your alumni publications do, features some former graduate who has done well by the seminary.  That is, this featured alumnus is someone who has done something significant with the education they received and then given back to the institution as a donor.

This past month, the featured alumnus was a retired Presbyterian minister; a man by the name of Thomas Fisher.  The Rev. Dr. Fisher graduated from Princeton Seminary in 1958 and then enjoyed a long and well-travelled career.

In interviewing the good reverend, the author commented that Dr. Fisher had “come to understand the blessed paradox that is at the heart of service.”  What Dr. Fisher said to enjoin that response from the author was this:

“Everything in life is about mutuality and reciprocity – you receive as you give, and you give as you receive.”

That sounds down-right biblical!  In fact, it sounds very much like the scripture that we just heard from II Corinthians:

“The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully.”

I’m pretty sure that this is a scripture with which Dr. Fisher is very familiar.  I’m confident that he, in his fifty year career, has had ample opportunity to reflect upon it, puzzle over it and even deliver a sermon or two on it!

The television evangelists love this passage.  They seem to never tire of preaching to their congregations present in their sanctuaries or out over the air waves, that if only they will give, God will return their gifts five-fold, ten-fold, even hundred-fold.

As a child, I remember my grandmother being devoted to Oral Roberts, one particular tele-evangelist notorious for preaching the “success gospel” as it is called.  She would sit in front of that old black and white television and call me to come and sit on the floor and together we would watch the telecast from Tulsa.

As an early adolescent, I attempted an experiment based on Dr. Roberts’ preaching: I sent in ten dollars to his ministry, the only ten dollars I had and then waited by the mailbox for the return on my divine investment.  It never came … or at least it never came in the manner in which I perceived it would be returned to me or in the manner that Dr. Roberts spoke so confidently about.

I guess that I was expecting a hundred dollar check or even a thousand dollar check from Oral Roberts Ministry.  It never came; but then Dr. Roberts never promised that HE would personally see to the fulfillment of a hundred-fold return.

No, what I learned from that, and many other experiences with giving since then, is to not actually look for a return.  When Julie and I decide upon our stewardship of what God has given us; when we consider the pledge card or the tithe, we count that as money gone … I’m not looking for any checks from Oral Roberts or even from First Presbyterian in response to my personal giving to God’s work.

The response that I do look for is in something that can’t be banked, traded or stolen.  I guess the response I look for and seek earnestly now is a freedom from my wallet and bank account.  Disciplined stewardship’s reward is freedom … freedom from thinking that I am validated by the amount that is tallied in the net gain column or some personal holdings statement.  Giving frees me from putting a number on my validity as a human being; as a child of a living, giving, gracious God.

I think that something like this was behind both Dr. Fisher’s statement and Paul’s.  Giving as freely as we have received from God liberates us to trust not in what we give or even in what we receive, but rather to trust ultimately in God.  Ultimately, my giving, my decisions, my commitment, my discipleship is a reflection of the trust that I have in God.  I’m not saying that the amounts or the dedication or the energy put forth is a barometric-type measure of that trust … I’m merely saying that the more I give, the more I am given to trust in God.  I hope that you find the same about your giving …

As a follow up to one of the illustrations I just offered, I have this … I shared with the elders and deacons at the Leadership Retreat a couple weeks ago that story about my adolescent donation to Oral Roberts’ ministry.  I told them about the ten dollars and expecting to find a letter and a check from Oral with my ten-fold return.  Well, one of them responded.

The week following the Leadership Retreat, I received in the mail an envelope with no return address other than simply the name: “Oral.”  I opened the envelope, not connecting it with the illustration and found a handwritten note which read simply: “Your faithfulness has paid off TENFOLD after all these years.”  As I opened the note, a crisp $100 bill floated down onto my desk.  It took me just a moment to realize what had happened; that this really wasn’t from “Oral,” but from one of you folks!

I want this anonymous respondent to know two things: First thank you for your response.  This is truly what giving is all about: simply responding.  And secondly, I did give that $100 bill to LuAnn to be put toward retiring the budget deficit; I didn’t keep it … I was tempted, but instead of seeing it as MY money, I saw it for what it really was: the Lord’s!

How will you respond to God’s grace in your life?  This is really what Commitment Sunday is about … what kind of relationship do we have with God and what will be our response?  It’s not so much about meeting a budget or gathering enough financial support to continue for just one more year … it is about God’s grace in our life and our response to God.  Paul said it best:

Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work.

Eagerness and Earnestness – II Corinthians 8 – Ordinary 30 – October 23, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

            I stumbled across something this past week that I thought important enough to pass along to you.  I received as a gift last year an old Book of Common Worship from the Presbyterian Church in the USA; a predecessor denomination to our own. The book was published in 1932, but the quote I want to share with you was actually a reproduction from the Minutes of the General Assembly of 1831. This is what I read:

“A particular Presbyterian church, so far as adults are concerned, is constituted and organized as such, by a number of individuals, professing to walk together as the disciples of Jesus Christ …”

What an absolutely appropriate and accurate definition of what it means to be a church!  That definition applied to the church in 1932 as well as 1831 and it applies to us still to this day: we are still “a number of individuals, professing to walk together as the disciples of Jesus Christ.”

That kind of definition would have applied to the folks who originally received the letter from Paul that we’ve heard in worship this morning.  We’re not that much different than the folks to whom Paul addressed himself in the First Century Corinth.  They were a number of individuals who were professing to walk together as disciples of Jesus Christ … just the same as we are.

Now, a lot has changed since that time.  The world has grown older, the church has grown wealthier, wider and more influential … and then we have receded from those halcyon days when the church was at its heights of influence and importance … and yet, down deep inside, we are not that much different than those believers in Corinth who were professing to walk together as disciples of Christ.  At the end of any discussion about similarities or differences, stand surely the truth that we share more with the Corinthians than we differ from them, precisely because we profess to walk together as followers of Jesus Christ.

Paul wrote to them about a collection the entire church at the time was supporting for the poor in Jerusalem.  It was the main focus of Paul’s ministry and he traveled about from city to city, visiting and collecting from the early Christians for the sake of others.  This is the collection that Paul is challenging the Corinthians with in this Eighth chapter of his Second Letter.  Here’s what he writes:

“Now as you excel in everything – in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you – so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking.  I do not say this as a command, but I am testing the genuineness of your love against the earnestness of others.  For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.”  AND …

“For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has – not according to what one does not have.  I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.”

Paul asks of the Corinthians about both their eagerness and their earnestness.  He sets those two elements not in opposition to each other, but rather as a way of making a judgment: One’s eagerness to do God’s will is judged by their earnestness to actually fulfill it.

How did the Corinthian respond to Paul’s pleas?  How did they answer the challenge that had placed before them?  I don’t know exactly how, but we do know that they did.  They responded to Paul’s call and supported the collection. Now no scholar, no church historian, no expert on the New Testament, can tell us exactly how much was collected at Corinth or whether the church made their goal or not.  No archeologist has yet produced a plaque that continues the individual names of the donors in Corinth, thanking the ones who answered the call of God and the challenge of Paul.  No, those names and those figures are unknown to us, but we are the beneficiaries of their response; we are, in essence, the plaque that witnesses to their faithfulness!

Indeed, just as Paul had alluded to, their abundance has been an answer to our scarcity; their response in faith with lives lived in the faith of Jesus Christ, has lead to our relationship with God.  Without them, without all the saints of the Lord who have gone before us, we would not have the abundance of the Christian life: the abundance of faith, hope and love that we have found in Jesus Christ.  We would have had none of this, if others had not provided for us.

That is the challenge that is set before us in our Stewardship Campaign.  We are called upon by the leaders of our church to prayerfully rededicate ourselves towards generous support of the church.

We are faced with many challenges here at First Church, not unlike other churches of our ilk: the culture is not what it used to be; the sanctuary is not filled as it might have once been; the people of the community do not seem as willing to hear God’s call to come alongside of us and follow Jesus Christ … and yet, the challenge remains and is even now still before us.

We are in the same position as the Corinthians: called by God to give of ourselves for the sake of the ministry of Jesus Christ in the world.  We are called from our abundance to provide for others in their scarcity.  Certainly, those who have gone before us have provided for us! Consider: Who among us was present when the cornerstone of this great edifice for Christ was laid?  Who among us raised the rafters and set them into place?  Who secured the pews in their places?  None of us!  Yet, all this has occurred because those saints of the Lord who came before us answer the challenge, heard the call and committed themselves to the work of Christ!

The question today is: will we do it?  Will we respond with the kind of faith that inspires others, provides for from our abundance for the scarcity of others and represents a real sacrifice for us?  Will we do it?

Charles Hodge was a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary in the 19^th century.  He was well-known for being proud that “no new idea” ever came from a Princetonian; he was that entrenched in tradition and the past … he was, in short, a good Presbyterian.  Anyway, Hodges wrote a commentary on II Corinthians in which he commented upon the subject of genuine response to a call for generosity.  He wrote:

“The real test of the genuineness of any inward affection is not so much the character of the feeling as it reveals itself in our consciousness, as the course of action to which it leads.  Many persons, if they judged themselves by their feelings, would regard themselves as truly compassionate; but a judgment founded on the acts would lead to the opposite conclusion.  So many suppose they really love God because they are conscious of feelings which they dignify with that name; yet they do not obey him.  It is thereby by the fruits of feeling we must judge its genuineness both in ourselves and others.”

Dr. Hodge echoes the sentiments of Paul: it is a case of judging one’s eagerness by placing it alongside one’s earnestness.  To put it more succinctly: Genuine response to God’s call is not so much how we feel about it, but rather what we do about it.  What counts then is not so much the feeling, but the doing something about the challenge placed before us.

It is important here to revisit and expand that opening quotation I offered from the 1932 Book of Common Worship:

“A particular Presbyterian church, so far as adults are concerned, is constituted and organized as such, by a number of individuals, professing to walk together as the disciples of Jesus Christ, on the principles of the Confession of Faith and Form of Government of the Presbyterian Church, and the election and ordination of one or more ruling elders, who, by the ordination service, become the spiritual rulers of the persons voluntarily submitting themselves to their authority in the Lord.”

You will be glad to know that our spiritual leaders, the elders and deacons of our church, have answered the challenge that our current financial situation has placed before us.  As part of our Stewardship campaign this year, the Stewardship Committee held a Leadership Challenge Retreat to which the elders and the deacons were invited.  We met together, prayed together, discussed the church together, and worshipped together.  It was a wonderful morning and when the leaders were asked to make their pledges first, before the congregation, they did.  As you can see in the First View, the results were inspiring … The average pledge card came to just under $4,000 for next year’s budget.  The average increase from their pledge last year was just over 10%.  Now, that is leadership; that’s really doing something about the challenge that has been set before us for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Just as Paul gave the Corinthians an example in the Macedonians, so too have we received an example of leadership from our elders and deacons.  Is a ten percent increase appropriate for your answer to the challenge?  Would increasing your pledge to meet the average of your church’s leadership, at $4,000 be the appropriate answer for you?  I don’t know; you’ll have to answer that between yourself and God.

What I do know is this: We may not remember the names or the amounts of the donors and their pledges in Corinth, but we know that their answer to Paul’s challenge has provided for us. Because of them, we have learned of God’s love in Jesus Christ; we have come to be included in this great divine endeavor that we call church; we have had the scarcity of our lives in sin replaced with the abundance of God’s grace in Christ.  We know all of this because they answered the call … Now, what will we do?

A Simple Question – Matthew 22:15-22 -Ordinary 29 – October 16, 2011

 Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

            Soren Kierkegaard, great Danish philosopher of the early 19^th century, wrote a little treatise entitled: “Purity of the heart is to will one thing.”  I’ve thought of that title often over my years of ministry and I think that its sentiment is akin to what Jesus is saying in this passage we hear today from Matthew.  It’s an unfamiliar concept for most of us in this postmodern world, but Kierkegaard advocated that true discipleship of Jesus Christ included willing one thing amongst the many things that could be willed by the human soul.  Just as Jesus implied that there were competing claims for our allegiance (i.e. Caesar and God), Kierkegaard saw that only one allegiance was worth the will of the human soul: God.

I read an article this past week written by a Protestant minister that began with this story:

“I was emphasizing to parents of confirmands that the young people should be with their families in worship as part of their preparation for membership. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have time for worship,’ one mother told me after the meeting. Her words were soothing and gentle, yet they sounded condescending, as if she were explaining something to a not-very-bright child. ‘We’ve committed to soccer and cheerleading for my youngest on Sunday mornings. We have a full plate. Maybe in a few years.’  This same woman had been adamant that her children be baptized and confirmed. Although she and her family could fit in brief forays into religious rites, other activities were more important than a steady commitment to the church.

Not to sound too preachy here, but it is obvious that that woman has already answered the question that has been placed before Jesus to her own satisfaction whether she realized it or not.

Such compartmentalization of our faith and our faithful response to God is not that uncommon.  We all have competing claims upon our lives; just like those to whom Jesus directed his response to the question.  The people of Israel definitely had plainly defined and also insidious claims upon them, just as we do … and the most powerful of those claims came not from external sources, but rather from internal.

Remember, it was Kierkegaard who said: “Purity of the heart is to will one thing …”

In the same article that began with the story about the confirmands and the parents, Dr. Thomas Kelly, Quaker missionary and scholar is quoted:

“We are trying to be several selves at once, without all of our selves being organized by a single, mastering Life within us.  Each of us tends to be, not a single self, but a whole committee of selves …”

When I read this I was nearly panicked … a committee of selves within the one?  Oh my, not another committee!  I don’t know if I can take being on yet another committee!

            Studies have shown that a fair amount of folks drop out of participation in church when they have served on a committee.  Isn’t that strange?  Is committee work that wrangled, boring or inept that it causes us to drop out of activity or participation because we just can’t take it?

            I remember once hearing a story about a church in conflict.  One-third of the membership had stopped participating and were withholding funds.  A committee of five members of the Session was drafted to interview the disgruntled third and report back.  They did and they themselves resigned from the board and the church!  Amazing what a little committee work can do …

            Anyway, back to what Dr. Kelly has to say:

“Each of us tends to be, not a single self, but a whole committee of selves … And each of our selves is in turn a rank individualist, not cooperative but shouting out his vote loudly for himself when the voting time comes … It is as if we have a chairman of our committee of many selves within us who does not integrate the many into one but who merely counts the votes at each decision, and leaves disgruntled minorities … We are not integrated.  We are distraught.  We feel honestly the pull of many obligations and try to fulfill them all … Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine Center … Most of us, I fear, have not surrendered all else, in order to attend to the Holy Within.”

Haven’t you felt just like that … tugged and pulled internally in so many different ways that you don’t know where to turn?  The pace of our culture and the activities of our children and those that attract us; the speed of media dissemination of news and the call to service of fellow humanity and neighbor; the pressures of work, familiar relationships and all else weighing down upon us.  Of course we have bifurcated souls; of course we have a committee of many selves in our heads: we are a divided people.  We don’t know with what we should align ourselves, pledge ourselves, and give ourselves.

As Kelly said, life is meant to be lived from the Center, a divine center.  Kierkegaard put it more succinctly: “Purity of the heart is to will one thing!”

Here’s the golden moment that Jesus’ words leap out at us from the pages of the Gospel of Matthew.  Asked whether or not it was okay to pay taxes, Jesus requests a coin be produced and after seeing the likeness of Caesar upon it proclaims that well-known, but little understood line: “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

I say that it is little understood because it has been used to bolster the idea of the bifurcated soul.  That is, folks have pointed to this and have added in Aristotle’s: “All things in moderation” and come up with some kind of justification for a sacrifice free way of living out the Christian faith.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this is NOT what Christ is saying.

Dorothy Day, great Catholic advocate for the poor, has said this about the Matthew passage: “If we gave God all that belongs to God, there would be nothing left for Caesar.”  Amen?  I say Amen!

Or how about this little aphorism from William Sloan Coffin, former chaplain of Yale University and advocate in his own right:

“Then I saw another thing: that a broken pride does not make for passivity as I had thought.  ‘The world owes me a living’— that’s passive. ‘I owe the world and God a life’ – that’s active.”

Wow!  Now I like that!  I think that might be right at the point that Christ is speaking to his listeners in the Gospel of Matthew.  We owe God a life of service and devotion.  God owes us nothing.  We owe God.

I think that this particular feeling is rather foreign to our little self-committee holdings it’s raucous and noisy board meeting in our heart and our head.  It’s foreign to us to think that we really owe anything to God.  Isn’t everything from God free?  If it isn’t, where do I send the check?  To whom do I make it out?

Again, if that’s our response, and it’s sometimes mine I’ll admit, then we’ve missed the point.  It’s the life we owe to God.

Think about it.  What a wondrous and rare gift life is.  We all know that life can be gone in a shockingly brief amount of time.  The one who walked out of the door of the house with keys in hand confident that she would return by supper-time may be gone in an instant.  Life is precious and it is a gift from God.  Our lives must be lived then in response to God.

Here’s the point that Christ is making with his eloquent turn of the phrase and the flip of a coin: give to God what is God’s … your heart and soul … your loving devotion and thanksgiving … your work and your service … your whole self, without excuse.  Remember that you belong to God when you make decisions about what to do with your time on Sunday mornings and Tuesday afternoons.  Remember that you belong to God when you fill you that cards sent from the Stewardship Committee, including and most poignantly, the pledge card that is yet to come.

Remember that you have been called to a higher calling … to make a difference for Jesus Christ in this world … you … yes you with your little committee of selves already lobbying the chair of heart and head with all kinds of objections over the demand that Christ is obviously put on you.  Yes, you heard right: demands … the way of Christ in this world does make demands of us.  In Jesus Christ, God is loudly making his demands known …

So what in your life (or how much of your life) belongs to God?  Is it not your whole life, your whole committee of selves in that bifurcated soul of yours?  Of course it is.  It all belongs to God.  Now, let us, you and I, live our lives as if we believed that: Render to Caesar what is his, and to God … everything!

Proper Attire?  Psalm 106:1-6, 19-23 & Matthew 22:1-14 Ordinary 28 – October 9, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, ¹²and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he was speechless.

            Mark Twain, great American author and humorist of the 19^th century, rather famously said: “Clothes make the man. Naked people rarely have much influence on world history.”

Today’s parable from Jesus has much to say about having the proper attire at the right event.  It is a parable that is often misunderstood and, I believe, misinterpreted.  Yet, it is a difficult word from Jesus that we receive this morning.  We, however, should be getting used to that … Jesus seems to always be saying something difficult!

“Clothes make the man …” that’s how the old saying goes and that’s been a byword with me.  I learned early in my ministry that folks really do judge you as a pastor by the manner of your dress.  If the event calls for something formal, wear something formal; if the event calls for a robe, make sure that you have your robe handy.  These were lessons that I learned about my calling and the realities of living out that calling in our culture.

The Parable of the Wedding Guests echoes the sentiment of proper attire appropriate to the event.  The parable entails the treatment of the messengers who are sent out to collect the guest of the wedding.  They are beaten, abused and killed.  What a guest list!!!  The parable borders upon implausibility, for who, in their right mind, kills their mail carrier for delivering a wedding invitation?  Who would assault the limo driver who pulls up into your driveway to convey you to your boss’s daughter’s wedding service?  No, it just doesn’t seem right that the approved guest treated the servants of the king in such low and mean ways.

However, if you think of it this way, it comes a bit clearer:  What about all the folks who are invited to various events and find that on the appointed day they have other more attractive plans?  Folks who find that the Saturday morning tail-gating is more important to them than their own niece’s wedding?  Or people who find a trip to the mall as more compelling than cleaning up the highway; a day spent idling with their own concerns as more appealing than joining in a family reunion? Now, it sounds more plausible and more common to our own experience of the demands that are placed on our time and the decisions that we must make.  All of us, every one of us, have competing claims for our time, our talents and our treasure.

Of the many activities that my wife and I do together, one is the prioritization of our giving.  Sometimes we sit down and talk about weighty commitments that we make: the annual giving to the church or a pledge for a capital campaign of one of those institutions that we support. Other times, it’s a local push for a Day of Giving by many of the civic-minded organizations we support.  We’re bombarded with requests to give on that particular day so that our gifts might be more generous with the assistance of matching grants.  When those days come around, we sit down and decide what we will give to which institution and which of us will actually visit the website.  Regardless, it takes some time and commitment and decision-making … it is akin to donning the proper attire for the appropriate event … you have to think about it a bit and maybe even prayer about it a touch!

Some time ago, I was mortified by my own lack of preparation and appropriate consideration.  I was called on a dreary Tuesday morning by a funeral director wanting to know if I was coming to the do the service at their funeral home or not.  When I asked when, he said: “NOW!”

That’s right, I had done the one thing that no minister should ever do: I forget about a funeral service I was called to do.

I was not dressed appropriately: certainly, I had on a tie and shirt, but wore only a sports jacket and slacks, not a sincere, gray, pin-striped Presbyterian Pastor’s suit!  I couldn’t appear before those doubly grieved people in that manner. I say doubly-grieved because my forgetfulness and insensitivity in not showing up further added to the grief they were already enduring … I just couldn’t I appear to them in only a jacket and slacks.  So this is what I did: I took my robe with me.  I put that robe on and made my way through the service in the funeral home.  That robe covered, you might say, a multitude of sins, but it couldn’t cover my lack of attention to that family.  I could provide the proper attire by covering what I had on under my robe, but I couldn’t hide my insensitivity in letting other concerns that had been on my mind crowd out remembering my responsibilities to the family. I was mortified about it and am still to this day.

The man who is not dressed appropriately at the end of the parable is a man who has been thoughtless at best and arrogant at worst.  This becomes clearer when you consider the cultural context of Jesus’ parable. The man had to sidestep the offer of a robe that would have been provided for him as he entered the wedding space.  The tradition of the time and culture was that the host, the king in this case, provided wedding garments at the door for their guest.  This one, preferred to appear on his merit as it were, rather than to accept being covered by the gracious provision of the king.

Now, maybe it is getting even clearer: in Jesus Christ, we have not only been included in the great banquet of God’s kingdom, we have been clothed appropriately in his sacrifice for us.  We have been robed in Christ’s mercy rather than standing on our merits before God.  Any one of us who refuses to respond to God’s grace may find ourselves in the same predicament of the poorly attired guest.  But, then, who would refuse mercy and grace?

Andrew Purves, a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, wrote this about our passage:

“…the parable carries us into the subtle relation between the grace of election (all were invited) and the obligations of the obedience (to be clothed with Christ, to live in Christ).  Grace is freely given, situating us in God’s company by an act of loving election.  As a consequence, we are obliged to live as God’s people, according to God’s will for our lives.  To do so is to give honor to the king, to God, and to live in terms of God’s claim upon us. The failure to do so is to scorn God’s love, God’s choice of us.  It is to assert our autonomy, to live in pride, which means that we are found clothed with ourselves rather than with Christ.”

So, the proper kingdom attire is really being clothed not with our own achievements, but rather to be clothed in Jesus Christ.

This means trusting in God’s love and mercy in Christ more than in our own abilities to fulfill the law or be good people in and of ourselves.  It means accepting Christ’s work on our behalf as more valuable than our own work in this world.  It is a hard learning … a difficult parable … but finally, and completely, it really is the only proper attire … the very attire of grace in Christ.  Thanks be to God!

Who Owns the Church? Psalm 19 & Matthew 21:33-46; Ordinary 27 –October 2, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

              Early in my ministry, a long time ago now, I was sent to visit a man in the hospital who had miraculously survived a very serious accident.  He was a former member of my church at the time and I expected to find him grateful for having been preserved in the face of death.

Instead, I found the man angry.  He told me of all the clubs and jobs and institutions of which he had once been a part and then left.  He left one country club because they didn’t manage the putting greens well; he left the one that he joined after that because the wait staff didn’t show him suitable respect … “they didn’t know their place …”  He married and had children and then left those relationships to form new ones.  He had been a Methodist until they held a building campaign and then left them to become a Presbyterian.  I never learned why he had left the Presbyterian Church, but I don’t think it very much mattered.

What amazed me was this man’s self-consuming anger that just completely blotted out any realization that his life had been spared and that it might have been appropriate for him to be grateful.  His life, such as it was, was indeed a gift of God and therefore something good … why did he appear to hate it so?

How can anyone hate what is good?  It is a kind of philosophical question I suppose, but in the context of this morning’s readings from scripture, it is much more a theological queston: “How can anyone hate what is good?”

The workers in the vineyard of Jesus’ parable for this morning hate what is good.  They do not want to be reminded that they owe the fruit of the vineyard to the owner of that vineyard.  They would rather react violently to efforts of that same owner to collect upon what was duly and rightfully his than to actually acknowledge their dependence and need for that owner.  They do not want to acknowledge the good; they rather turn to the dark side and stake their own claims for that which is not really theirs.

Too many commentators have, over the years, resorted to making this simple parable an allegorical statement of condemnation of the Jewish people.  In their eyes, it is simple: God is the owner, the people of Israel are the workers, the slaves sent who are battered and beaten are the prophets and, of course, finally, the son who is sent and killed is obviously Jesus.  The logic runs: the people of Israel not only mistreated the prophets but they killed the Son of God, Jesus Christ and are therefore, deserving of all the condemnation that we can heap upon them.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

The parable is about recognizing that we are all dependent upon God and are therefore accountable to God for the gifts of life.  The parable is about the vineyard of life and about the workers who are given so much and so much is expected from them.  The parable is about how we, the workers, are called to care for the vineyard and be receptive to the visitations and expectations of the owner of the same vineyard, God himself.

You see, the problem in the parable is that the workers within that vineyard began to see that they owed nothing to the owner of the vineyard.  They had worked long and hard in amongst the vines and they felt that they deserved ultimate sway, ultimate say and ultimate choice over what was and what wasn’t theirs.  They came to believe that they actually owned the vineyards themselves and they offered only ridicule and violence to those who were sent by the owner to tell them otherwise.

If we are honest, this may be our very stance when it comes to our lives.  We conveniently forget that we had no hand in the making of our lives.  We did not decide when we would be born or to whom or where.  This is where I agree with the Christian Existentialists who say that we have “thrust into being.”  None of us decided when or where we first saw the light of day; all of us understand innately that life is a gift and if it is a gift, there is certainly a Giver: God.

No, we understand that, but we continue to believe that our lives are just that: OUR lives.  We believe that we can do with them as we wish and that we will be the ones who have to face any consequences from the common, ordinary course of life.  We, sometimes, forget that there are consequences beyond just what we might face in this world for poor life-decisions … there is the ultimate consequence that comes from denying to God what really is God’s.

This is why there are some moments in our lives when we might catch ourselves actually hating what is good.  We don’t like to be reminded of the ultimate goodness of God because we know that to acknowledge that means that we must acknowledge we are NOT gods ourselves! We are not the masters of our ultimate fate, only God is!  We are not self-made men and women; we are made by God and, most importantly, we are made FOR God.

The chief priests and scribes did not like to hear this parable; not in the least.  There are parts of our own heart that causes us to shrink from the import of Jesus’ worlds and scramble to offer a different, alternative interpretation, such as saying it was the fault of the Jews or it was the fault of the religious leaders.  All the while, we know the truth in our own hearts: it is us.  We are the people who have refused to listen when it has mattered most and preferred our ways to God’s new and living way in Jesus Christ.

This is why communion is so very important to us.  Here is a reminder that we cannot claim to be divinity; that we cannot claim to have ultimate sway over our own lives.  We belong to the Lord … the only legitimate response for us is gratitude!  In Jesus Christ, God has reached out to us and provided us with a vineyard called life.  God has set table in the kingdom of heaven and transferred it to here in our midst and bid us to come, partake of these gifts of God and acknowledge that we, the church, belong not to ourselves but to our God.

I am reminded of the opening lines of the old Heidelberg Catechism that seems almost a direct response or antidote for the behavior of the workers in the parable of today:

Q. 1. What is your only comfort, in life and in death?

A. That I belong—body and soul, in life and in death—not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil; that he protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation. Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

And so, as the old confession says, let us be made wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

Lessons in the Way: Romans 9:1-5 & Matthew 14:13-21; Ordinary 18-July 31, 2011

Rev. Martin R. Ankrum

21   ¹⁵When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ ¹⁶Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ ¹⁷

            Right now, the balance between scarcity and abundance appears to be sharply defined.  We live in the wealthiest society in the history of humankind and yet our elected representatives are engaged in a much publicized struggle in order to save the nation from bankruptcy.  The whole nation appears to be holding our collective breath over what might just happen between now and the deadline of two days from now.

Into this milieu of panic and concern enters our text for this 18^th Sunday of Ordinary Time: the story of “The Feeding of the Five Thousand.”  I believe that this story says so much to we who profess belief in a generous and loving God; those who profess belief in a compassionate and wise Savior, Jesus Christ; those who have faith and trust that the world is not really just about what is tallied and counted, but rather about what is given and received and the abundance of life in the midst of a persistent tendency in the human heart to take scarcity of resources and scarcity of love as the norm.  This little story speaks volumes to us in our need and in our hope.

So, in composing this sermon, I decided to do something a little differently.  This sermon is not so much my commentary on the text as much as it is a compilation of some of the abundance of illustrations that others have used to shine a light on this old story.  So, without any further ado, hear now from others … others who have either contemplated this text or have illustrated it without even knowing it.

Gandhi, the great Indian mystic and activist has said: “There is enough for our need, but not for our greed.”¹

From a sermon entitled, “You Provide the Bread,” delivered by the Rev. Dr. William J. Carl, III, President of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary hear these two fascinating stories:

There was once a missionary in the Philippines who worked in the gold-mining communities of Bagio. He led many worship services in little huts that had been put up on stilts because of the monsoon rains. One Sunday he went up into a little hut only to find it packed with people. It was communion Sunday. In the front was a little table covered to the floor with white cloth. On it were a little piece of bread and a tiny Dixie cup filled with grape juice. He wondered whether these elements would be enough for this large group huddled together. But he forged ahead. He said the words over the bread and passed it around. Somehow, miraculously, a small corner of it came back. Then he took the little cup in his hand as he had held that silver chalice many times back in the states and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Drink ye all of it.” He passed it around. It made it through the first two rows and came back. It was set on the table in front of him, empty. They looked at him smiling as if to say, “Produce some more now.” He looked about frantically for a bottle of grape juice. There was none in sight. He prayed, “Lord, help me” and suddenly a little brown arm came up from under the table and snatched the cup off. The missionary smiled at the people nervously and then pulled up the cloth only to see a little Filipino man with a pitcher of water and four packages of grape fizzies! Dropping the cloth quickly, the missionary looked back at the crowd smiling confidently. Pretty soon a little brown arm came up and placed a full cup of grape juice on top of the table. And off they went with the rest of the service. “You provide the bread; let me take care of the miracle.”

And …

What preacher who has spent a lifetime preaching in a pulpit has not known the frustration of a sermon that seemed limp on Saturday night, but soared Sunday morning by the power of the Spirit? “You provide the bread. Let me take care of the miracle,” says the Lord.

And so it happened with a little man in North Carolina named Mr. Beam. He was a minister for a while in small country churches. Oh, how he loved to preach the Word, to stand before a little huddle of God’s people and preach the Word from the Book. He considered it the greatest honor and privilege a person could ever have. But then he developed a problem with his throat. And that was the end of his preaching. It nearly broke his heart — the man who loved preaching so much.

When he died, he left all he had to a church in Charlotte for “purposes of evangelism” he said. What he left grew and grew and now, single-handedly supports the weekly television ministry. And it is said around Charlotte that in a single service on any given Sunday, more people hear the message of Christ than Mr. Beam ever preached to in a whole lifetime. “You provide the bread. Let God take care of the miracle.”²

As a kind of homiletics bridge hear this commentary about the Feeding of the Five Thousand from Amy B. Hunter, Episcopalian poet and minister:

Jesus insists that his disciples make such compassion their own work as well. This feeding is not a razzle-dazzle spectacle to boost Jesus’ image with the crowd. It begins with the insistence that the disciples themselves give the people something to eat. This story is not one of a wonder worker and his astonished onlookers, but the much bigger one of Jesus charging those who follow him to be agents of God’s compassion and power.

I have a friend who has been described as, among many other things, “a Buddhist, Anglican sympathizer, and an-tirealist about God.” Although he’s not a Christian, he loves chapels and likes to kneel quietly beneath stained glass. He imagines that others perceive him to be trespassing in “our space” and in “our story.” Paul and Jesus challenge me to see that there can be no possibility of trespass, because the story is always larger than we imagine. Paul claims that no one is “out,” neither the people of Israel for not accepting the Christian story nor the non-Jewish people for not being part of Israel’s story. God’s story is a far greater story, one able to hold all the stories and characters.

Even more, Jesus insists that the story is one of enveloping compassion. All that the people have to do to be fed is be hungry and in need. No creeds, no spiritual or cultural pedigrees, no vows of loyalty are required. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus charges his disciples then and today. To all who come, whether to be healed, to be fed, to doubt or simply to kneel beneath stained glass, Jesus insists that the church claim a story big enough to hold them all.

They need not go away.³

Rev. Hunter has a great point … we, the church, has been called upon, like those disciples in the story, to help be the conduit for God’s abundance in a world dominated by impossibilities and scarcity.

William Willimon, the United Methodist bishop, has a story made to order:

I know a church in the heart of one of our large cities. It once was a large, thriving downtown church. Over the past two decades it has shrunk to nearly nothing. A young woman went to be the pastor at the church. In a sermon one Sunday she noted how impressed she was by all of the children who walked past the church each afternoon after school, all of the children who played in the church playground in the afternoons.

“Few of those children have parents at home in the afternoon. That means that most of them go home to an empty house or else hang out on the streets on their own, and you know what that can lead to,” she told the congregation. “I wonder if God is calling somebody here, this morning, to respond to this. I look out and I see experienced, wise people who, in their day, were masters at raising children. Is this your day to step up and raise someone else’s child?”

That next week six of her members, among them one of the oldest people in the congregation, volunteered to begin an after school ministry at the church. They were soon joined by a dozen others who provided recreation, homework tutoring, and refreshments for the children every afternoon from four until six.

Out of that ministry there has arisen a new church. That congregation is now thriving with an influx of families and people from the neighborhood.

“You don’t have to be a great church to have a great ministry,” the pastor commented. “The American family is in such lousy shape, there are so many kids out there who are forced to fend for themselves, all you need is a surplus of older people. God had already given us all we needed to have a future as a church.”⁴

Or more to the point, a story about this abundance of love which originates from God between two persons and the sharing of that abundance totally overcoming the scarcity that one person has been experiencing:

In her memoir, The Whisper Test, Mary Ann Bird, tells of the power of words of acceptance in her own life.  She was born with multiple birth defects: deaf in one ear, a cleft palate, a disfigured face, a crooked nose, lopsided feet.  As a child, Mary Ann suffered not only physical impairments but also the emotional damage inflicted by other children. “Oh, Mary Ann,” her classmates would say, “what happened to your lip?”

“I cut it on a piece of glass,” she would lie

One of the worst experiences at school, she reported, was the day of the annual hearing test.  The teacher would call each child to her desk, and the child would cover first one ear, and then the other.  The teacher would whisper something to the child like, “The sky is blue” or “You have new shoes.” This was “the whisper test”; if the teacher’s phrase was heard and repeated, the child passed the test.  To avoid the humiliation of failure, Mary Ann would always cheat on the test, secretly cupping her hand over her one good ear so that she still hear what the teacher said.

One year Mary Ann was in the class of Miss Leonard, one of the most beloved teachers in the school.  Every student, including Mary Ann, wanted to be noticed by her, wanted to be her pet.  Then came the day of the dreaded hearing test.  When her turn came, Mary Ann was called to the teacher’s desk.  As Mary Ann cupped her hand over her good ear, Miss Leonard leaned forward to whisper.  “I waited for those words,” Mary Ann wrote, “which God must have put into her mouth, those seven words which changed my life.” Miss Leonard did not say “The sky is blue” or “You have new shoes.” What she whispered was “I wish you were my little girl.” Mary Ann went on to become a teacher herself, a person of inner beauty and great kindness.⁵

Finally, I close with the inspiring words of Charles Allen from a sermon delivered in 2002 about that original story we heard about The Feeding of the Five Thousand:

This story invites us to see that what’s most true about it is what we can’t explain. It means to break open our chronic tendency to shrink God’s generosity down to the limits of whatever we happen to think is possible. No doubt miracle stories grow in the telling. And I’m not about to suggest adding a prayer for multiplication to the Prayer Book – we probably all agree on how well that one would work. But we do tend to shrink God’s generosity to fit our versions of the world.

And that shrinking tendency lies behind most of the rotten things the church has done to people in Christ’s name over the past two thousand years. Just last week, Boston’s Cardinal Law, speaking at a youth gathering in Canada, tried to shift attention from his own scandals in the time-honored Christian practice of attacking somebody else.

First, he said that Catholics shouldn’t even attend gay union celebrations. (So don’t bother sending him an invitation.) And then he promised that women would never be ordained as priests. These are his words: “It’s one of those things that I don’t think about, because it can’t change … Just rest comfortably in the faith, and understand that this has nothing to do [with] equality.”Right.

It can’t change … Just rest comfortably in the faith … I don’t think about it. Those are pretty revealing phrases. And it wasn’t that long ago that most Episcopal bishops said things like that too, though our current bishop takes a different view. But do you hear that shrinkage at work? God’s generosity only works this way, not that way. It can’t change – no women priests, to say nothing of bishops, and no union celebrations. They’re just not possible.

When Jesus’ disciples said certain things just weren’t possible, he had a different response. He took their stingy little worlds, then he blessed them, then he broke them open, and then he gave them out. And the impossible happened.

He took, he blessed, he broke, he gave. That’s not the only time he performed those four actions. And we’re about to perform them too. Now we call them the Offertory, the Great Thanksgiving, the Fraction, and the Communion. We take, we bless, we break, we give. And then, we’re promised, impossible things can happen.

Maybe you’ll find you can afford to forgive somebody after all. Maybe you’ll get forgiven. … Maybe we can make more of a difference around here than we ever dreamed. Maybe you’ll find that you still have more faith than you know what to do with, just when you thought it had run dry. If you listen to people’s stories here, you know that impossible things like these happen every week, every day. The limits of our world break open, and we’re awash in God’s generosity.⁶

1.             Summers, Charles A., Interpretation, 59, No. 3, July 2005, p. 298.

2.             Carl, William J, III, “You Provide the Bread,” from Church People Beware! Sermons for Sundays After Pentecost (Middle Third).

3.             Hunter, Amy B., “Living by the Word,” Christian Century, July 26, 2005, p. 18.

4.             Willimon, William H., Pulpit Resource, Vol. 39, No. 3, p. 23.
5.             Long, Thomas G., Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004, p. 86 – I am indebted to William Willimon for this resource.

6.             Allen, Charles W., “A Sermon: When Worlds Break Open,” Encounter, 65, No. 1, Winter 2004, pp. 75-76.