Sermon for Easter Sunday, April 8, 2012 Mark 16:1-8 “Conservation of Energy”

Where does the energy come from to roll the stone from the tomb?

That is the question we just explored a bit with the children…we have figured out that the energy comes from God. How else might that heavy stone be moved from its position blocking the tomb?

But perhaps the more interesting question is where the energy goes…

I was no science whiz in school, but I vaguely recall from my high school physics class the first law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of conservation of energy. Here’s how it goes: energy cannot be created or destroyed. It simply changes form.

What does that look like in science? Take water, apply some heat, and it turns into a vapor. An even simpler example: Rubbing your hands together generates heat on your palms. This is not actually creating energy. The work of your muscles takes the chemical energy of your body, changes it to work energy in your muscles, and then into friction (heat) energy in your skin. You’ve actually moved energy from your body through your muscles and into your hands. There is a fixed amount of energy in a closed system, and while you can change its form, you cannot destroy it.

And there may be something there for us to explore on this beautiful day when we remember Jesus Christ risen from the dead.

Think about it: Jesus Christ, the son of God, killed on a cross just a few days ago, now conquering death and alive. He is alive! Is it a miracle or simply an expression of that first law of thermodynamics? He is God, after all, the purest form of energy that we might imagine. If God were not energy, could there have been a creation? And if God is energy, God cannot be killed. That primal energy can, however, be transformed, can’t it?

In a sense, this is what seems to be happening as we hear this story.

Jesus died. No one who witnessed it had any doubt about it. His lifeless body was placed in a tomb, washed and prepared as was the custom, wrapped in clean linen, and then the huge stone was put in place, blocking the opening, letting no light or air into that space. It seemed that all energy, all life force, had left him. That body was no more than an empty shell.

I suspect that his mother and his disciples asked the same question we ask, when we behold the body of one whom we loved who has died. Where did he go? His energy, his vibrancy, his soul was no longer there. They felt the absence of that life-energy deeply.

But if energy is neither created nor destroyed, but transformed, it had to go somewhere.

And this is where this idea gets really interesting.

Where did the Jesus that they knew, the teacher, the rabbi, the son, the friend, go?

We hear in the Nicene Creed that after Jesus was buried, he descended to the dead, and on the third day – today, Easter Day – he rose from the dead.

If you look at ancient Russian icons depicting the resurrection, you will see a triumphant Christ standing above Hell with the gates of Hell broken open. Why? Because, by his death, Jesus descends into the underworld to free the captive sinners from their sins. The icons show the broken chains and locks that had held the sinners in bondage. The energy of Jesus breaks the chains of the captives, the dead souls in Hell, and sets them free. In those Russian icons, it looks like he is exploding with an energy that could not be destroyed by death.

And yet we know he died.

This is where his power, his energy is transformed most remarkably.

Jesus Christ destroyed death – the death of those souls – by his own death. His own force of divine love and his sacrificial act infused the captives with his energy, saving them and us from eternal death.

What a powerful kind of energy! No wonder the disciples ran from that empty tomb…a tidal wave of divine energy was rolling toward them.

Now I know that this is pretty heavy going theologically. It is hard to imagine Jesus as a love-charged energy source. But bear with me, because it has a bearing on each and every one of us here today.

If you had a source of energy that could run your car without a trip to the Shell station, wouldn’t that get you excited?

If you had a source of energy that meant that you wouldn’t have to pay the oil company to fill up the tank to heat your home, wouldn’t that get you excited?

Well, imagine an energy source that is so boundless and so generous that you can never use it up. Imagine that its sole purpose is to build you up, to fill you with joy, to save you from the things you wish you hadn’t done, to draw you closer to the one who loves you most.

And now imagine that all that beautiful energy is absolutely free.

Astonishing, isn’t it?

That’s what you get today. The Jesus Christ who walked the paths of the Galilee and Jerusalem over two thousand years ago died on a cross, but his energy was not destroyed on that cross. In fact, in a way it was released. It was made available to all of us, to heal us and to strengthen us, to warm us and to comfort us, to challenge us and to applaud us.

God’s energy may have resided in the life force in a carpenter’s son, but it didn’t remain the same. It was transformed by the death of that carpenter’s son, into the spiritual force of the King of glory. His energy has not been created. It was not destroyed. It has always been and will always be. And it is available to us all, for the love of us by the one who made us.

So today we sing “Alleluia!” There is no better word of thanks for the gift of the energy that fills our hearts and souls and lungs than to say it loud: Alleluia!

Amen.

Sermon for Good Friday

If you're as dissatisfied as I am with the offerings on network television, you may spend some time channel surfing through the hundreds of strange shows on the cable channels. I came across one that caught my attention in the same way that a horrific crash on the highway. You know that moment, even if you find it hard to admit, when you see something like that and you just can't tear your eyes away.

That program, that train wreck moment, for me was a program called "Hoarders."

Some of you may have seen it. The focus of the show is on the efforts of friends, family and professionals to help people whose homes have become crammed to the rafters with stuff. Broken things that they think they will someday fix and sell. Newspapers and magazines that they might want to go back and reread one day. Canned goods years past their expiration date. And all these things are useless and unusable, either because they are past an expiration date, or have been nibbled on by vermin, or because they really have no commercial value any more. Even if they did have value, how would the hoarder find them in the mess?

So there is usually an intervention, because the city is about to condemn the home or because the family is so concerned about their loved one that they know that some of this excess has to be removed for the person to stay in their home.

The hoarders struggle with this - they have saved these items for quite some time and look upon the loss of those 8-track Earth Wind and Fire tapes or old National Geographics as a painful amputation. But slowly, and with help from mental health professionals, they start to strip away the things that weigh them down and cause them so much psychic and physical harm. This process is not without pain and stress, but the result - if the hoarder is willing to fight their way through it - is so much better.

Stripping away the excess that weighs us down - isn't this the very process that we seek to follow in Lent?

We do it in small ways when we "give something up for Lent." Usually it's drinking or chocolate or something small - lately, I've had friends who gave up FaceBook or playing video games for Lent. The common theme, whether what we give up is small or large, is this: strip away the things that are extraneous to our lives, the things that are really unimportant but loom large in our own minds, the things that keep us from being fully who God has made us to be. If you're spending hours glued to FarmVille of BeJeweled Blitz, you're not living into your full potential as a child of God, and you certainly are not doing the work of God in the world. If you're more worried about when you're going to go get your next caramel macchiato (hold the whipped cream, because it's Lent, after all), you are not that fully realized child of God. If you're spending time thinking about that box of chocolates that's in the pantry, calling your name, you're not listening for God's voice.

And so we strip away those things for Lent, partly because we expect to sacrifice something dear to us during this season of self-examination, but also because we realize that the things that loom large in our minds are not about God, they are about our own petty needs.

We realize we need an intervention to remove the extraneous wants and musts that clutter our souls and get in the way of our relationship with God.

Lent gives us the excuse and the tools to do just such a thing, and it also gives us the ultimate model of stripping away.

It is Jesus, of course. He is in this, as in all things, the perfect model.

He has been traveling light throughout his active ministry, and has been advising his followers to do the same (Go, and take nothing with you, not even a second tunic…sell your belongings and give them to the poor). And in this final part of the story, what little he has is stripped away as well.

His companions abandon him. His sense of physical privacy is torn from him as his garments are torn by the whip with which he is flogged. His appearance, always so riveting to those who have witnessed his teaching, is marred by deep scratches from the crown of thorns and bruises from rough handling. The final indignity is the removal of his robes, so that as he is nailed to the cross, he wears only a linen undergarment. Everything is gone, stripped away: the adulation of the crowds as he rode into Jerusalem the prior week, the fellowship and love of his followers at that last supper, the voice of his heavenly father like thunder proclaiming him as his son, the hope for a better life in the hearts of the oppressed Jews of Roman-occupied Israel.

And in his last moments, when he cries out, it seems he wonders if his heavenly Father has abandoned him: “Eloi, eloi, lama, sabachthani! My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The anguished cry of a dying man with nothing left….

…and yet there was something left – that divine spark of love, of willingness to allow it all to be stripped away so that we might be redeemed from our sins.

It was a moment that came back to me as I recently re-read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Papers and Letters from Prison.” Bonhoeffer, was, as our Lutheran friends know so well, a Lutheran pastor whose opposition to Hitler’s regime led to his arrest and subsequent execution. While he was in prison awaiting his death, he wrote, and in the latter letters, he stripped away from himself the extraneous things that he no longer needed. He sent letters to his parents instructing them to give away his clothes. He grieved what was coming – the wish to have a child so that he might not die without leaving a trace of himself – but he faced it. He knew that what he had done, and what was about to happen to him, was what was necessary and right.

And so, the prison doctor said, before he went to the gallows Bonhoeffer removed his prison clothes and knelt in prayer.

Did he ask if the cup could be passed from him? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t doubt it. No one goes to their death without wishing for a little more time. But his process of stripping away that which he no longer needed was the purest expression of his acceptance that only God’s love really mattered.

On this Good Friday, we see Jesus stripped of all except his love. He needed nothing more to complete his work. For us, who sometimes think we can be defined only by what we want to have, by our material possessions, it might serve us better to remember what we really need. Just God’s love, nothing more, nothing less.

Everything else can be stripped away.

Amen.

The Marathon

Done:

Maundy Thursday Renewal of Vows for Clergy
Maundy Thursday Evening Service
Pastoral Visit/Memorial Service Planning
Picking up gray fabric for our human "rocks that sealed the tomb"
Good Friday Noon Service

To Come:

Good Friday Interfaith Stations of the Cross at the neighboring Catholic Church
Pastoral Visit
Good Friday Interfaith Evening Service at the neighboring Lutheran Church
Easter Vigil Saturday night service
Easter Sunday 8:15
Easter Sunday 10:30
Pastoral Visit

Eating Wheaties and Taking Vitamins...

Sermon for Maundy Thursday I Cor 11:23-26

Family meals. They can be transformative experiences, can’t they?

Many years ago, I hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family. This included my mother, who was a formidable woman with strong opinions about everything, and my mother-in-law, who was equally formidable and had equally strong opinions. Although such a big-family Thanksgiving meal was traditional, frankly I dreaded it, because I feared I’d be caught in between these two women, both of whom I wanted to please. All this in the midst of cooking a meal for thirty or so people.

I did the usual massive grocery buying and stuffed every corner of the refrigerator with the supplies for the feast. And I arose early on Thanksgiving morning, and realized that I was sick. Dreadfully, awfully, nastily sick, with some sort of flu. Perhaps it was a wee bit psychosomatic, more likely something that the kids brought home from school. And it was eight in the morning, and I was standing at the kitchen sink wrestling the innards out of the defrosted twenty-eight pound turkey, weeping silently because I was so miserable. I knew I had to get the stuffing prepared and into the bird, and the bird into the oven, if we were going to have the meal at the right time. I was not feeling particularly thankful.

I could hear my mother talking to the kids out on the back porch. She was drinking coffee and smoking the ubiquitous cigarette – she never quite forgave me for making her smoke outside – and then I heard the creak of the chair as she rose to come into the kitchen and refill her coffee cup. She wandered in, nearly bumping into my mother-in-law, who was coming into the kitchen from the living room with the same agenda, another cup of coffee, and saw me at the sink.

“What’s wrong with you? Why are you crying?”

I blubbered, “I’m sick with the flu, and this bird is enormous, and I’m never going to get it stuffed and into the oven on time, and…” …and I dissolved into another fit of tears.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, move over. I’ll do it,” she said.

My mother-in-law, who did NOT get along with my mother at all, stood to one side, head cocked, and then said, “Yes, go back to bed. Your mother and I will get the dinner on the table. Take some tea upstairs with you and go back to bed, and we will take care of this. Between the two of us, we’ve put many a Thanksgiving meal on the table, haven’t we, Ann?” And my mother growled her agreement.

And I went up to bed. I half expected that I would hear arguments and slamming of doors and pots from the kitchen which was right below my bedroom, but I heard nothing. And so I dozed off, and awake several hours later feeling somewhat better. What was that I smelled? Roasting turkey, vegetables, pie, the coffee maker continuing to perk away.

I washed my face and dressed and came downstairs to the meal just about ready to put on the beautifully set table (my mother-in-law was famous for setting a pretty table). The two women were sitting at the kitchen table, having yet another cup of coffee, and they smiled as they saw me come down the stairs. “Feel better?” they chorused. “We’ve got it all under control. Just call the children inside and we’ll be ready to serve.”

You would have thought that they were friends of decades’ duration. But they were not. They still didn’t particularly like one another or agree about things. But they came together, and we had a meal that was a particularly poignant gift, since one of them would be dead by the next Thanksgiving.

They were transformed, at least briefly, by the need to share a meal full of love and care.

On this evening, we too share such a meal. It is Maundy Thursday, traditionally thought of as the time when Jesus instituted the meal which we are about to celebrate, the Lord’s Supper, as a part of the Passover celebration.

Who knows if Mary and Martha, those notoriously feuding sisters, had made the food, or if it was a catered affair? Who knows if the disciples knew that this might be their last meal with the Lord, despite all his comments in the time before this night? Who knows if Judas knew that Jesus would mention what was going to happen next?

What we do know is that they came together as a family – a sometimes tense and argumentative family, but a family nonetheless – to share a meal over which their beloved teacher and Lord would preside. The disciples were surprised that Jesus decided to wash their feet, a sign of humility and service, as a part of the meal. It seemed out of the right order of things to them, but he did it for a reason – to teach them once again that the work they did together was not about who was the leader and who was the follower, but that they all should do it for each other, just as they should continue to share meals together, no matter what happened. That they should follow his lead and love and serve each other just as he was, putting aside rivalries and struggles as to what they should do next.

Just as my mother and my mother-in-law stepped out of the natural order of our Thanksgiving meal – that I as the host would prepare it – so too did Jesus step out of the natural order by washing the feet of his disciples at the meal. Just as I relinquished control of my kitchen, so too did Jesus relinquish control by kneeling before these disciples.

Family meals have the power to do that. They have the power to shake us up, to give us the opportunity to show the best of ourselves, to put aside the things that are irrelevant so that the important things are attended to, in love and in life.

I did not know that my mother-in-law was in the early stages of cancer that weekend, that she would go home to God within the year, just as the disciples did not understand what Jesus was telling them, that he would die soon. If I had, perhaps I would have worried less about my mother-in-law's annoying tendency to tell me how to raise my children and worried more about thanking her for caring about me and the children. If the disciples had really understood that Jesus was about to die, perhaps they would have worried less about who sat closest to Jesus at the table or how they wanted to appear holier than they really felt. Perhaps they would have asked more of the right questions, or helped him more, or they would have stood by him rather than running away when Jesus was arrested.

But at that meal, in that very human moment of family aaround the table, Jesus knew what he faced and what they faced. So he gave them something to remember him by, just as we all hold memories of family meals in our past.

He gave them these words: This is my body. This is my blood. When you get together again, and you drink the wine and eat the bread, remember me.

We do not know the gifts that we take from our familly meals. Sometimes they are recipes, sometimes they are memories. Sometimes they are the bittersweet knowledge that we missed the opportunity to say thank you, or to give something back. But what we do around this table continues, even when our family meals do not. The memory of what Jesus did stays with us, and energizes us to share him and what he did with others.

We may not get a second chance with our families, but we do with Jesus, because he is the Lord of second and third and fourth chances. He tells us to share this family meal each week, to remember him and to remember the love he bids us to share with the world.

So come to the table and be fed, and then feed the world with it.

Amen.

Sermon for Palm Sunday 2012

This is a long story, and a difficult one, that we’ve just heard. It is, as always, a little surprising to hear this saga, which extends all the way to the death of Jesus, on Palm Sunday. After all, didn’t we just do a triumphant march into church with our palms? Aren’t we supposed to be celebrating Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem?

The answer is a resounding “Yes, but.”

Yes, we celebrate Jesus coming into Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowds. But we cannot not appreciate the exquisite irony of that ride into the city with the crowds cheering and strewing palm branches on the ground if we didn’t know how the story was going to end. It’s a feeling of the world turned upside down when we move so quickly from cheers and adulation to arrest, trial, torture, and death. And the telling of the whole story is necessary for us to understand what this week is about.

We are not used to this: when we go to the movies, we see brief trailers that give us a glimpse of movies that are coming soon, tempting us to come back to the theatre in another week or month to see what they have teased us with. The producers give us the hottest moments of the greatest excitement or pathos to draw us in.

But what do we do today? Not teasers – what will happen to the Lord next, after he gets to the city for Passover – but the whole story, every bit of it. The dinner. The praying. The fear. The arrest. The ridiculous trial, with its foreordained conclusion. The jeering. The pain. The screams of the crowd. The blood. The nails. The sour wine. The weeping mother. The sigh of death.

The whole story. Not just a sneak preview. Because we need to hear it.

Cynics will say that we read the entire Passion on Palm Sunday because it is unlikely that you will be here during the week. But I think it is something different. We read it because we have to know what we are facing in this hard, hard week.

Jesus knew that – the past few Sundays, the Gospel readings have been full of Jesus telling his disciples that what was to come was his death, before his rising in glory. That message so disturbed the disciples that Peter said, “Don’t say that!” But Jesus knew that they needed to be prepared for what was in his and their future, to brace themselves.

We, too, need to be prepared. We hear the entire passion today so that we can face what we live with this week. Not that we can become inured to it – no one could – but so that we can bear to hear it and be present to it. So that we can witness the experience of Jesus’ passion and walk with him in his pain. So that we can force ourselves to keep looking, not to cover our eyes. So that we can feel his agony as he always feels ours.

We know what will come next Sunday. We will be with Mary Magdalene and the disciples as they discover that Jesus is not in the tomb, that he is risen gloriously from the dead.

But we do not get to next Sunday directly from the palm-waving cheering crowds welcoming him to the city. First we have to remember the whole story, and relive it in all its ugliness. We have to own how we human beings failed Jesus, and how we continue to fail Jesus, and how he still was willing to carry that cross to Golgotha.

We have to earn the right to witness the empty tomb.

So we listen to the story again, from cheers to curses to the death-rattle. We force ourselves to pay attention. Only then can we see the final part of the story, not a clip from a preview, but the culmination of the most glorious of stories. Only then do we deserve what Jesus has given us. Only then can we sing songs of joy anew. Amen.