Sermon

Heaven Can Wait

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Will

The novel and film The Color Purple is the story of a woman named Celie.
Celie grew up in a home without a mother;
in a home where she was abused physically and sexually,
eventually giving birth to two children fathered by her own dad,
who then gave them up for adoption.
Celie is then married off to Mr.,
who continues the abuse.

Aside from the love of her younger sister,
abuse is all that Celie knows in the first half of her life,
so it is not surprising that when her son-in-law Harpo complains about the uppity nature of his wife Sophia,
Celie tells him to beat her.
Harpo tries to do just that,
though he in fact gets the bigger beating from his wife.

Afterward Sophia confronts Celie:
“You told Harpo to beat me…
All my life I had to fight,
I had to fight my daddy.
I had to fight my uncles.
I had to fight my brothers.
A girlchild ain’t safe in a family of men,
But I ain’t never thought I had to to fight in my own house…
I loves Harpo, God knows I do,
but I’ll kill him dead for I let him beat me…
Now you want a dead son in law, Miss Celie?
You keep on advising him like you doing.”

Celie replies, “This side’ll be over soon; heaven lasts always.”

“Girl, you oughtta bash Mister’s head open,” Sophia says,
“and think about heaven later.”

This morning our primary scripture from Revelation (from chapter 21) talks about heaven.
All the hymns I chose for worship do the same.
I thought I would even preach about heaven today,
but given the events of the last week,
I think heaven can wait.

One of the criticisms of some forms of Christianity is that they concentrate too much on what may come after death and too little on what actually happens during life.
This is exactly the attitude that Miss Celie reflects when she says,
“This side’ll be over soon; heaven lasts always.”

The problem with such a view is captured perfectly in an old saying I heard years ago:
“He (or she) is too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good.”
And so, while it may be nice to contemplate what the new heaven and new earth may look like,
and while it is wonderful to think about the fact that one day there will be no more tears or sorrow or pain and that death itself will die,
the truth is that there is too much work for us to do in the here and now to spend much time contemplating what will be in another time and place. Read more »

Categories: Ordinary Time, Revelation, Sermon | 8 Comments

Osama bin Laden and Christian Maturity

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Will

In our epistle reading this morning,
Peter writes:
“Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice,
and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.
Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk,
so that by it you may grow into salvation—
if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.
For you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation,
God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

In so many words, Peter is telling his readers that he hopes that they grow up – to grow up into their salvation.
And for Peter this means some very specific kinds of growing.
Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.
And lest you are having a hard time taking this sentence in,
let me repeat it for a third time:
Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander.
Let me ask you:
How are you doing in these areas?

For many people this week, Christians included,
I’m afraid the answer is “Not very well.”
Pastor Dan Dick wrote about the power of malice a few days ago, saying:
I was listening to a young, self-proclaimed evangelical preacher talking about the Bin Laden situation on a Wisconsin radio station yesterday,
and the gist of his argument was this:
as Christians, we should have poured out into the streets singing and dancing Sunday evening when the news was announced,
and anyone who felt differently is both a questionable Christian and an unpatriotic American.
Real Christian-Americans hate what God hates and should rejoice at destroying any and all evil.

He further explained that Jesus taught us that it is not only okay to hate,
but that unless we hate we cannot be disciples (see Luke 14:25-35).
True holiness, the young reverend explained,
requires an all-out assault on all evil,
and he proceeded to list what constitutes evil and what God hates:
terrorism, liberals, gays, lesbians, democrats, the college-educated, scientists, women who think too highly of themselves, Lady Gaga (why her specifically, I am not sure — he didn’t say), the media, other faiths, foreigners who are jacking our gas prices up so high, and all who make fun of devout Christians.
There were more things in his rant,
but Pastor Dan says he couldn’t jot them all down.
But it became quickly apparent that anything and everything that went against this young preacher’s sense of values is evil,
and God wants him to hate these things —
not merely avoid them or judge them;
his instruction to his listening audience is that God put us here on earth to destroy these things.
We should do everything in our power to wipe these things out,
“so that the world might one day truly experience God’s love.”

Wow. Just wow.
If there is a more twisted logic out there, I am hard pressed to find it.

Categories: christian life, Easter, Sermon | Tags: 1 Peter 2, growing up, John 21, Jonah 2, Osama bin Laden | 4 Comments

True Freedom – A Sermon

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Will

This sermon is based on the following scripture passages, which can be read by clicking on the links: Genesis 8:13-22 and Genesis 9: 12-17, Galatians 5:1-26, and John 4:5-42.

I am in the process of developing a four year lectionary that features John’s gospel in Year D. I have plotted out much of this lectionary, but am filling in the details, so to speak, as I work my way through the years. Currently we are reading consecutively through Genesis, Galatians and John. If you want to know more about this lectionary, feel free to contact me by clicking the appropriate tab above.

True Freedom

Two police officers had stopped a car in downtown Milwaukee and ordered the driver to get out from behind the wheel.
The man was obviously very drunk and had a hard time standing up,
much less completing the field sobriety test.
The police were trying to get the man to turn,
lean over and put his hands on the hood of his car.
The man was screaming,
“Hey… I’m an American and I live in America and that means nobody can tell me what to do!”

One of the frustrated, but somewhat amused officers replied,
“Yea, sure buddy… If you can spell American, I’ll let you go.”
The drunk, offended by the reflection on his sobriety yelled back,
“Don’t make fun of me sir… I can spell it borwards and fackwards!”

If there is one thing we Americans love it is the idea of freedom.
But as the story about the drunk illustrates,
for many of us Freedom is just another way of saying that nobody can tell us what to do.
I’d want to suggest that freedom is so much more than that.

We start with Noah.
The flood has ended; the waters have receeded,
and for the first time in 190 days – over six months,
Noah, his family, and all the animals set foot on dry land.
To get how thrilling, how freeing that must have been,
you first have to imagine how horrible, in many ways,
those 190 days stuck on a boat with all those animals must have been.
Can you imagine the smell?
Can you imagine the noise?
One preacher has said that the only thing that helped Noah and his family
put up with all that noise and stench was the storm raging outside the ark.

But now Noah is free . . .free from the ark . . . free from the noise and smells,
and free from the responsibility to save the world.
It is a sweet, sweet feeling this freedom.
It is the freedom an inmate feels when getting out of prison,
the freedom immigrants felt when they arrived in the US and spotted the Statue of Liberty for the first time.
It’s a palpable, physical freedom.
That’s one type of freedom.