Easter 4B 2012

“Companions of Jesus”,  A Sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, April 29, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark NY

8Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders, 9if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been healed, 10let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,*…(13)Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus. (Acts 4:8-9,13)

This past week a horrifying story broke in the news media concerning the treatment of an autistic boy in his New Jersey fourth grade classroom. Stuart Chaifetz, the father of ten year old Akian in Cherry Hill, New Jersey became concerned with reports he was getting from Akian’s teachers about alleged violent outbursts by his son in the classroom. Since these reports of violent behavior did not comport with Mr. Chaifetz’ experience of his son, he decided to send the child to school with a concealed digital audio recorder in his pocket.  He recorded seven hours of interactions in that classroom between the child and his teacher and several aides. The audio recording revealed abuse by the teachers and aides against the child, with one aide yelling at the child and calling him a bastard.  When the father released the recording to school officials a couple of the aides were fired while the teacher was transferred to another facility.  The outcry that this story has prompted has been impressive, with parents of special needs children hailing this father as a champion for the rights of disabled children.  The story has brought to light how difficult it is for parents of children with disabilities to ensure that their children get the appropriate care and education that they need in a safe and loving environment and how difficult it is for them to deal with school authorities and bureaucratic systems that protect people who perpetrate abuse on these innocent victims.

Last Sunday evening, the CBS program 60 Minutes ran a segment on the plight of Christians in Israeli occupied Palestine, reporting accurately on the effects of Israeli occupation on Palestinian Christians and on the impact the occupation is having on the Christian population in the Holy Land.  Christians have been leaving the Holy Land in significant numbers, with the percentage of Christians in Israel and the West Bank having dropped in the past decade from about 40% of the population to a mere 2%.  If the decline continues at its current rate, the Holy Land will soon have only museums representing the Christian faith, with no “living stones” still there.  The outcry that ensued in this country against 60 minutes and its anchor, Bob ______ has been incredible, although predictable.  The pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, some segments of the American Jewish Community and many Christian Zionists have excoriated 60 minutes and their reporters with a fury that is testament to how unnerving this honest and fair reporting of the real facts on the ground is to those who would obfuscate and filter the news that is reported in this country about the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, much of which is aided by US government funds and military aid. 

Both of these stories are examples of courageous people deciding that they will speak truth to power and expose the corruption and excesses and deceit of those who run various domination systems by revealing ugly truths that those in charge of the power systems do not want exposed.  In the story from Acts chapter four that we heard today, Peter and John do much the same thing in Jerusalem, as they speak truth to the religious powers of their day empowered by their faith in Jesus of Nazareth and their conviction that they are called as companions of Jesus to be about the ministry of healing in a world where powerful domination systems oppress and marginalize innocent people. 

The story of Peter and John begins in the previous chapter, where they are going to the temple to pray and see a lame man lying by the gate of the temple, called the Beautiful Gate, where he lay every day begging for alms from those who entered the temple.  Peter and John heal the lame man in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. Peter tells the assembled crowd in the temple that the healing has been done in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, reminding them of Jesus’ pedigree as the one sent by their God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  This healing unnerves the religious leaders in the Temple so Peter and John wind up spending a night in jail.  When they are released the next day, they again have to face the religious leaders who want to know by whose power they performed the healing the day before.  Peter testifies to them that the healing was done by the power of Jesus of Nazareth, “whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead.  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.”  (Acts 4:10-12)

Now there are a few points that must be clarified to understand this story in its context and to avoid some unfortunate Christian triumphalistic interpretations that have marred and distorted the message of this story for centuries.  First, we must note that Peter is talking to his own people, first century Jews, in the context of internal conflicts that were roiling within that community as it struggled to survive as a minority religion in the context of Roman occupation.  The Jewish people themselves at that time were not the ones in power, rather they were trying to maintain their own hallowed religious tradition in the face of the oppression of the Roman Empire. Crucifixion was a Roman form of execution and it was Roman authorities who killed Jesus., not Jewish authorities. 

Second, the word “salvation” is not the best translation, in this context, of the Greek word sodtzo which also means “to heal.”  Given that the event that landed Peter and John in jail was a healing event, a better translation of the Greek word in this context would be “there is healing by no one else” and “there is no other name…by which we must be healed.”  The word “salvation” has become a loaded term, by virtue of centuries of Christian theological interpretation. Moreover, as Christianity became the instrument of domination over other religious traditions, Peter’s words, taken out of context, were used as justifications for our own tradition’s abuse of its power. It is critical that as we read those words today, we be careful and intentional to understand their original context. Peter was not pronouncing judgment on people of other world religious traditions.  We have to read this passionate sermon of his with the understanding that he is talking to people of his own faith and calling them to live up to what he believes are the best and most exalted responsibilities of their covenant with God.  He was talking about healing, not as a cure for a physical malady, but as a process of integrating the marginalized people of the society back into the faith community and restoring their human dignity and the integrity of that community. For Peter, Jesus is the way he and his community would find healing. 

By his very witness, Peter modeled what it is to be a follower of the Resurrected Christ.  Verse 13, which was left out of our lectionary text tells us that Peter and John were  “ordinary and uneducated” men.  The Greek actually says idiotai which translates literally as “idiots” although the translation “uneducated” captures the meaning of the Greek at least as well and confers a bit more dignity to Peter and John! These ordinary and uneducated men stood up to the powers of their community, the religious leaders who questioned their authority to heal a lame man, calling upon the name of Jesus of Nazareth and proclaiming a healing mission in his name.  Jesus empowered these ordinary guys to speak up to the powers that be in their own community and later, to take on the Roman Empire as well.  As “companions of Jesus” in the 21st century, it behooves us to consider how we can speak up to the domination systems of our culture that oppress and dehumanize the weak and voiceless in our own day.  

Stuart Chaifetz and the 60 Minutes news anchors both modeled what it is to take on domination systems in our contemporary world.  CBS broke away from the code of silence in the mainstream media about the true effects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and bore witness and gave voice to those who’s story is never told in our media.   Stuart Chaifetz stood up to bureaucratic school authorities and bore witness for his autistic son thereby empowering not only his child but all children with special needs and their parents to claim their rights to be treated as whole and valuable members of the human community.  

It is easy for us middle class American Christians to become complacent and to forget that we are called as companions of Jesus to be about ministries of healing and reconciliation in a world that is chock full of conflict and polarization.   It is also easy to completely miss how we are manipulated and deceived by domination systems in our own culture, including the media, politicians, corporations and the entertainment industry all of which contribute to an overall culture that encourages us, often drives us to behave in ways and to condone behaviors that are antithetical to the gospel we purport to proclaim. 

When Peter and John named Jesus of Nazareth as the source of their authority for healing the lame man, they spoke words of identity.  Their ability to heal and their sense of personal identity derived from Jesus, the one who empowers and heals.  We too have to live in our world and speak to our own culture as companions of Jesus, claiming our identity as baptized members of Jesus’ community, with a mission to respect the dignity of every human being and to work for justice and peace, reconciliation and healing.  We ordinary folk, like Peter and John, are called to speak courageously against systems of domination and oppression when we see them at work in our world.    When a father protects his autistic son or a media giant finally breaks the unwritten silence on a serious matter of oppression in which our government is implicit, the kingdom that Jesus came to proclaim is born in our midst. The writer of the epistle of First John says it well: 7How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? 18Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.  May we live our lives in such as way that others will look at us and see ordinary people who are companions of Jesus bringing healing into a broken world.  Amen.  

Lent 4B, 2012

“God did it for Love,”A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 18, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. 17Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. (John 3:16-17)

This past Tuesday, I had the pleasure of being a panelist at two workshops at the Global Citizenship Conference held at Nazareth College for high school students in the greater Rochester area. 435 high school students from 21 different high schools and representing many different religious traditions – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Bahai, Mormon, Agnostic/Atheist - converged on Nazareth College’s campus to learn about world religions and to receive training in techniques for interfaith dialogue, conflict transformation, peacemaking, restorative justice and nonviolence. To see hundreds of young people enthusiastically engaged in learning about one another and developing the skills to build bridges of understanding and compassion where there has so often been discord and mistrust, offered all of us a vision of a very hopeful, redemptive future for our country and world. Then, while still in the glow of that mountaintop experience, I began to reflect on our lectionary texts for this week and what do I find when I open the Newer Testament but the famous passage from John’s gospel that is both a beloved and beautiful Christian proclamation of faith but at the same time what I call a “clobber text” from the perspective of interfaith dialogue and interreligious relations.

The Bible is full of clobber texts. There are those verses in Leviticus and Romans that people have used for centuries to condemn and excoriate the gay and lesbian community, there are passages from the pastoral epistles, particularly the letter to Timothy that have been used to silence women and prevent them from serving in leadership capacities in churches, there are many references in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian testament that condone slavery and were used by slave owners and their advocates against abolitionists during the 19th century controversies over the abolition of slavery. If you know your Bible well and look hard enough you can almost always find some text to justify treating another person or group of persons with contempt, ridicule, judgmentalism or violence if you so choose, particularly if you lift the text out of its context to suit your own needs. Ironic, isn’t it, that these sacred scriptures, that the Episcopal church believes to be the Word of God containing all things necessary to salvation and to which we look for moral and ethical and spiritual wisdom and guidance, these scriptures that teach us that all humankind is created in the image of God and that our God is a God of love who reaches out to embrace all of God’s creation, extending grace and reconciliation to all, should be used as the basis for exclusion and judgmentalism and condemnation of millions of God’s beloved children?

This particular section of John’s gospel is one of those texts that many Christians use as a justification for some of the most arrogant prejudice against people of other world religions, and for formulating a theological position that excludes all non Christians from the embrace of God’s love and salvation. “John 3:16” appears on bumper stickers, signs and banners, t-shirts, sweatshirts and aprons and bracelets, all of which are typically worn by Christians who are quick to suggest that only those who believe in Jesus are “saved.” Notwithstanding that the text also says unequivocally, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world” many Christians use this line to do just exactly that. The justification, of course, is the next few verses, where the author writes, “Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” This is one of those Biblical texts that contradicts itself as it moves from one verse to the next. First it says God did not want to condemn, then it says that those who believe in Jesus are not condemned while those who do not, are. How do we responsibly interpret this section of John’s gospel in our pluralistic and multi-religious society in a way that does not condemn our co-religionists from other traditions to some place beyond where God is?

First of all, we have to understand the context of this fourth gospel. This gospel was the last of the four canonical gospels, written around the year 110 CE for an emerging Jewish Christian sect that was in conflict with the existing Judaisms of the early 2nd century none of which accepted the idea of Jesus as incarnate Word of God. As these very early Christians wrestled to establish themselves, a minority sect within a minority religion in the oppressive Roman Empire, they struggled to justify their own existence and to define themselves against the other religious options of their culture and particularly against other branches of Judaism. The language of “condemnation” needs to be understood in light of this tense and conflicted context. In the midst of the sometimes caustic turf battles between this emerging Jewish sect and the established Judaisms of the times, these early Jewish Christians wanted to set themselves apart and make an argument for the veracity and superiority of their own position. For 21st century Christians, living in a context where our religion has risen to world prominence and has been a religion of empire and colonialism and domination for centuries, with a rather bloody history for which we must take responsibility, the kind of exclusivist and judgmental rhetoric that is so much a part of John’s gospel must not be perpetuated in our very different cultural context. To do otherwise runs completely contrary to the heart of the gospel we purport to proclaim.

The overarching image in the gospel of John, the image with which the gospel begins, is that of Jesus as incarnate Word of God. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” This concept of incarnation is central to the theology of John’s gospel and later became central to Christian religious doctrine. The idea that the divine would choose to enter human existence was not entirely new with the advent of Christianity. Hinduism teaches that periodically God has entered human history when necessary to get the attention of human beings who have strayed from the path of righteousness. There are several Hindu stories of God becoming incarnate in human existence at different points in human history. Indeed, it is because of this tradition that Hindus have no problem at all accepting the idea that Jesus was both human and divine. Their only problem with Christians on that issue is our claim that it only happened in Jesus.

As I wrestled with this difficult text, I consulted an extensive commentary on the New Testament written by a Hindu swami, Paramahansa Yogananda. Sometimes it is enriching to see what religious thinkers outside of our own tradition have to say about our texts because these writers are not burdened by centuries of theological tradition and interpretation of these texts and are therefore able to come at them with a truly fresh eye. Yogananda has this to say about this gospel passage:

Recognition of the immanence of God can begin as simply as expanding one’s love in an ever-widening circle. Humankind condemns itself to limitation whenever we think solely of our own little selves, our own family, our own nation. Inherent in the evolution of nature and humankind back to God is the process of expansion. The exclusivity of family consciousness – ‘us four and no more’ – is wrong. To shut out the larger family of humanity is to shut out the infinite Christ. One who disconnects himself from the happiness and welfare of others has already condemned himself by isolation from the Spirit that pervades all souls, for she who does not extend herself in love and service to God in others disregards the redeeming power of connection with the universality of Christ….Pure love in human hearts radiates the universal Christ-love. (Yogananda, The Second Coming of Christ, Vol. 1, Discourse 14, p. 276-77)

Our Hindu friend here gets the point of the gospel passage better than many a Christian commentator. He echoes a basic tenet of the Benedictine Rule that counsels monks to see the face of Christ in every stranger they encounter. The universality of God’s love for all of humankind, for the whole world (Greek – “cosmos”) is central to John’s gospel and to this problematic passage. Sadly our Christian tradition has too often chosen over the centuries to act on the condemnation language in this gospel, while paying mere lip service to the love language.

God so loved the world says the writer of John’s gospel. God came into the world as a human being because God loved the world and did not want to condemn it but to embrace it and heal it. The message is unequivocally universal. Believing in Jesus in this context does not mean having certain intellectual ideas about him, but rather, giving our hearts to him, loving him and trusting in him as our access point to God. In all his humanity, Jesus embodied the divine in a way we could see, touch, hear and taste. He came to witness to all people, Jews, Gentiles, all nations, not just a chosen few. Love, not condemnation is the message. Love for all the world, not just for Christians. If we choose to emphasize the love message in this passage rather than the condemnation language I suspect we come closer to living out the will of God for all God’s beloved creation.

Much religious language, particularly the language of faith is “love language” meaning that it makes hyperbolic claims about exclusivity that are really more about exclusivity of love and commitment than exclusivity of salvation in any absolute sense. The intimate, personal relationship that Jesus invites us into, like any love relationship, lends itself to language of exclusivity. When one spouse tells the other, “You are the only person in the world for me” he or she is not stating an absolute objective truth. It is a true statement about one person’s love and commitment to another. This is what we who follow Jesus say about him when we affirm that we believe in Jesus. And when we talk about what God has done in Jesus, it is all about love, not condemnation. It is about inclusive and all embracing love, not judgmental and exclusive favoritism. It is a love story between us and God that does not suggest that God’s love for people who approach God differently is any less than God’s love for us. We are invited, as our Hindu Swami suggests, to expand our love out beyond our own little corner of the world. It was witnessing that love incarnate in our world amongst those eager and excited 400+ teenagers at Nazareth this week that touched me so deeply and gave me hope that we can create a future where the love principle reigns and the condemnation and exclusion principles become artifacts of history.

God so loved the world. God still loves the world, all of it, in its diversity and color and beauty. We honor God and show our love for God when we live our lives as reflections of that love in the world and for all the world in its religious, racial, ethnic and cultural diversity. Why has God done anything that God has done? Because, “God so loved the world…” Amen.

Lent 3B, 2012

“Saved from Religion”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 11, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

15Making 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. 16He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

One early spring evening, a priest in an urban area was returning to her rectory after a meeting, when a robber, brandishing a gun at her, demanded “Your money or your life.” The priest had very little money on her but as she was reaching into her purse to get her wallet, the robber noticed her clerical collar and dropped the gun, saying, “Oh, you’re a Reverend! Never mind, you can go.” The priest was a bit taken aback by this display of respect for her religious position and offered the robber a candy bar from her purse. “No thanks, Reverend,” the thief replied, “I gave up chocolate for Lent.”

This amusing little story might make us chuckle, but it is also a pointed reminder about the place of religion in human life as it directs our attention away from institutional or outward religious practice and towards an examination of how our religious faith affects the way we actually live in the world. It is the sort of misplaced religious piety exemplified by the thief in the story that Jesus so abhors and it is against that kind of superficial adherence to institutional religious rules that he directs his rage and fury in the scene in the Temple in Jerusalem that we heard in today’s gospel.

Today’s story of Jesus having a temper tantrum in the Temple in Jerusalem is a famous one and is told in all four gospels. In John’s gospel this incident takes place right at the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry, a full three years before his crucifixion. The synoptic gospel writers place the incident during the week before he died, and imply that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back and got him in trouble with the authorities, which ultimately led to his execution. In John’s gospel, this story comes right at the beginning of his ministry, after the story of the wedding at Cana where Jesus turned water to wine. For the author of John’s gospel, this story is yet another incident, like the miracle at Cana that points to Jesus’ identity in a bold and unambiguous way. Jesus’ identity as God’s incarnate Word is explained by the author’s description of Jesus as the new temple of God on earth.

When talking about this particular story, Christians have a tendency to see it as a story in which Jesus is angry because the Temple had degenerated from a place of worship into a marketplace where money was defiling the true worship of God, or religious authorities were extorting the faithful with mercenary and ungodly practices. Scholars believe that what was going on in the Temple on the day Jesus threw his fit was not at all unusual, nor was it necessarily sacrilegious or inappropriate. The Judaism of Jesus’ day was a religion centered in the cultic worship of the Jerusalem Temple. It was customary in the religion of the Temple for priests to offer animal sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish people during major religious holidays. There were several pilgrimage holidays each year, during which time Jews from miles around made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the holiday and while there, were expected to offer sacrifices in the Temple. Passover was one such holiday.

Since Jerusalem was a major urban center and the pilgrims who came for the Passover were often traveling miles to get there, they could not always bring animals with them for the priests to sacrifice. So, in the outer court of the Temple, religious officials would sell animals to pilgrims so that they could make the sacrifice while they were in Jerusalem. Furthermore, since the Jews worshipped only Yahweh and were forbidden by the Ten Commandments and the Torah from worshipping foreign gods or graven images, coins with the face of the Roman Caesar engraved on them were forbidden in the Temple. Therefore, booths were set up so that religious Jews could exchange their secular currency for religious coinage to be used to purchase the animals for the sacrifices.

It was not the buying and selling of animals in the Temple, nor the exchanging of currency in the Temple that upset Jesus. His rage was directed more fundamentally at the entire structure of Temple worship, at the very institutionalization of religion that the Temple exemplified. When he makes reference to himself as the temple that will be destroyed and then raised again in three days, he is making a profoundly radical statement. He suggests that God comes to humankind in him, Jesus of Nazareth, a person who seeks relationship, not through a complex corporate and cultic structure with hierarchies and rules and regulations and rituals and fancy buildings. His action in overturning the tables and driving out the animals was desperately radical because it challenged the very institution that was believed to witness to God and to be God’s residence on earth. Jesus was angry and frustrated because concern for the necessities of institutional life had blinded the people to the presence of the living God in their midst.

Jesus issued a wake-up call to the religious folk of his day, which is as important for us to listen to in the 21st century as it was in the first. When we invite others to join us in our institutional faith we need to be mindful of what they will find here when they come. Will they encounter the living God here, or will they see a corporate entity, more concerned with its own survival than with spreading the love of God to everyone around it? Will they meet people like the robber who gives up chocolate for Lent but steals from people, or will they meet people who are alive with the love of God in their own lives and eager and willing to spread that love around to anyone who comes through the door? In our modern day we have many people, particularly the younger generation, who refuse to affiliate with institutional religion because they consider themselves to be “spiritual but not religious” which often is a code phrase that signifies mistrust in the integrity of religious institutions to be places where people can encounter the sacred. Many of those who so designate themselves have been hurt or turned off by the institutional church because it has failed to meet their spiritual hunger or to connect them in any meaningful way with the sacred.

We humans need our institutionalized forms of religion as containers for God, the living God who is so far beyond our comprehension. For this reason, from the dawn of time, across cultures and traditions, human beings have erected religious structures and engaged in religious rituals and handed down religious stories and practices from generaton to generation. But when the container becomes a substitute for God, then we are in trouble.

God in Christ calls us into a personal and loving relationship with the living God which relationship has no need of buildings or liturgies or priests, or bishops even though those things can be helpful to us. The lively and dynamic faith to which Jesus calls us is not one that gets stuck in rigid moralistic or bureaucratic systems. None of the trappings of our religious tradition or any other will save anyone’s soul or bring anyone closer to God simply by being there. God’s love, God’s grace alone is what brings us from loneliness, isolation, and despair into abundant life. As Christians we experience that grace in the person of Jesus the Christ. Today, Jesus reminds us to be careful not to become so embedded in a given religious system with its rituals and practices that we are no longer open to a fresh revelation from God, which revelation may come from outside that institutional system, through people or events which are unusual, unexpected or downright unorthodox or even shocking. I personally have found my interreligious work to be spiritually enriching for exactly these reasons. I have been wonderfully fed and surprised when I have encountered the sacred in rituals and stories and practices that are very different from my own Christian tradition. God is much broader, deeper and expansive than any one religious tradition can contain.

The Episcopal Church as a national institutional body is beginning to grapple with just this dynamic concerning the appropriate role and function of the institutional church. At this summer’s General Convention in Indianapolis there will be considerable discussion surrounding some proposals to radically restructure the national church, moving away from putting resources into a church bureaucracy and buildings and committees. The Presiding Bishop and her senior staff are inviting the whole church into a conversation that could result in a special convention in 2015, prior to our regular General Convention that year, to completely restructure the national church in such a way as to preference ministry at the local, congregational level and to encourage resources to flow towards mission in local communities, shifting the focus towards nurturing spiritual growth and away from supporting buildings and institutional systems. This entire discussion is fueled by the recognition that our institutional churches are in decline in part because they have preferenced the needs of the institution over the spiritual needs of people in our modern culture. Jesus was on to something in the first century, and apparently, we could use him here to overturn some desks in our modern day churches, both locally and nationally as well.

Jesus calls us Christians to a personal and intimate relationship with God, through him, and in so doing he saves us from religion. In him we are free to live abundantly and love with abandon, making wise use of religious institutions for the wisdom, community, rituals and traditions that they do offer and which do promote spiritual growth and maturity, while not elevating the institution and its rituals to divine status. Jesus focuses us on that important first commandment – I am the Lord your God you shall have no other gods beside me. In Christ we are free – free to live and love God eternally. And that is very good news indeed. Amen.

Lent 2B, 2012

“Divine Priorities in a Human World”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, March 4, 2012 at Grace Church, Lyons, New York

But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mark 8:33)

This week the scenes of the devastation in Harrisburg, Illinois in the wake of the powerful tornadoes that struck that city, tore at my heart. While I have not ever lost a home to a tornado, I did lose one to a devastating fire three years ago and when I view scenes like those on the news this week, my heart goes out to the people who’s lives have been so radically changed in a matter of moments. Those Harrisburg residents went to bed in their comfortable middle class homes, and awoke in the wee hours of the morning to sirens, high winds and then found themselves clinging for dear life to door frames or anything else they could get their arms around. The stories of folks being sucked right out of their houses and deposited hundreds of yards away were mind boggling. And, sadly, some people didn’t make it through the storm. Those that did have spent this week sifting through the rubble, trying to salvage some fragments of the lives they had before the storm, knowing viscerally that life has changed irrevocably for them.

Life is often like that, as we all know. A biopsy shows cancer, the pink slip shows up in the pay envelope at the factory, a spouse walks out the door, and all the careful planning of our lives suddenly comes to naught. The fragility of human life and of the material things we create to buffer ourselves from that vulnerability drives much of how we manage our lives and of the activities we engage in as we go through our daily routine. At some point, however, we all hit the wall of some crisis that tosses all our plans into the air and leaves us breathless and disoriented. Our priorities are suddenly re-directed and what once seemed important often pales in the light of the trauma. Divine priorities in a human world are a challenge for us, but we are forced to confront them whether we want to or not.

Being a disciple of Jesus is like that. Today’s scene from the gospel of Mark is an example of the challenges and opportunities of discipleship, and of the full bodied commitment that being a disciple of Jesus brings with it. Discipleship is not about comfort and serenity and predictability in life. Quite the contrary. The life of a disciple is as filled with unexpected and disorienting surprises as were the lives of those in the path of the tornado this week. And unlike the tornado victims, who did not choose to put themselves in the path of the cyclone, a disciple of Jesus takes up her cross voluntarily, willingly subjecting herself to the unknown, becoming vulnerable and available to God in ways that might not feel comfortable or even rewarding in the moment.

Our lectionary reading today begins at the point in the exchange between Peter and Jesus that occurs just after Jesus has been quizzing his disciples about what they hear other people saying about him. They tell him that some people think that he is Elijah, others that he is John the Baptist, still others that he is one of the prophets. He asks them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, “you are the Messiah” at which point, Mark tells us, Jesus strongly ordered them not to tell anyone about him. Having done that Jesus then proceeds to predict his passion and does so quite openly, which unnerves Peter who quickly grasps that Jesus is walking on thin ice with the religious authorities and this kind of talk could get him in big trouble with those authorities and the officials of the Roman Empire for whom they worked. It is in the wake of that understandable warning to him to be careful, that Jesus rebukes Peter and accuses him of setting his mind on human things rather than divine things.

Now one could ask, in Peter’s defense, what on earth is wrong with having one’s mind set on human things? And how is being concerned for Jesus’ safety a human concern and not a divine one? Hasn’t Jesus’ ministry to this point been a study in caring about human things? He has cast out demons, healed sick people, given sight to the blind and fed hungry thousands. Sounds like a lot of ministry focused on this worldly things like food and physical health and housing and mental health. Isn’t it possible that Peter is simply concerned that if Jesus gets on the wrong side of the Roman authorities his ministry will come to a grinding halt and that of his disciples with it? Isn’t Peter just being practical and realistic and savvy to the ways of the world? Is that a bad thing?

Jesus’ response to Peter, directed at the disciples and the crowd around them, is so well known and well worn in our Christian tradition that I suspect it’s lost it punch. The phrases about “take up your cross and follow me” and “those who lose their life for my sake will save it” and the challenge to those who gain the whole world and forfeit their life have been so often repeated and lifted up in our tradition that I fear we simply don’t grasp the spiritual wisdom about ourselves and our God that are embedded in them. What does Jesus invite us to in these stern words directed to the crowd, the disciples and impetuous Peter?

Often I hear folks talk about the crosses they have to bear in terms of having to deal with some kind of affliction or suffering that is completely not of their making, like a serious illness or disability, or the loss of a loved one or a catastrophic loss of home or job or property. But as I reflect on Jesus’ life and ministry, I don’t see his suffering on the cross as something that just happened to him and that he had to simply bear up under. He chose to go to the cross. He chose to engage in ministry to the outcast and marginalized and he chose to speak truth to the powers of the Roman Empire that were oppressing his people, knowing that such actions could and probably would get him into big trouble. He provoked those authorities with statements like the one he makes in today’s reading that gets Peter so unnerved. Maybe he rebukes Peter because he senses that Peter is more concerned with human measures of “success” and “power” as they continue their ministry than he is with divine values of compassion and love and reconciliation.

So taking up one’s cross is not so much about the fact that we suffer, often due to things beyond our control, but about how we react when the events that cause suffering hit us. And how we react will be a product of the extent to which we have trained ourselves in the ways of “divine things” like the love of God, and compassion for ourselves and others whom we encounter in our daily life. The extent to which we can maintain a commitment to divine priorities in a human world will determine how well we weather the suffering that life sends our way. Jesus summed up the Torah as “love God and love your neighbor as yourself.” When that kind of love is the foundation of all we do in our lives, then the material losses that we may endure, and even the emotional pain of grief, illness and broken relationships can be weathered because of the solid foundation we have in our loving relationship with God and neighbor. And if we have a solid relationship with the loving God whom Jesus called “Abba” we are far more likely to be capable of the love of neighbor that Jesus modeled so completely in his life and ministry.

When Jesus calls us to deny ourselves he calls us to a radical process of self-examination and self-awareness. He asks us to take responsibility for ourselves and our desires and to grow into mature adults of God able to put our own needs aside in order to serve others. In our tradition this has often been described as the virtue of humility, which is not self-denigration or self-loathing or low self esteem, but rather a mature and sincere appreciation of our own gifts and those of others and a willingness to share our gifts for the good of others. Our Christian monastic and contemplative tradition has long advocated regular self-examination, prayer and confession for the purpose of growing in our capacity to give ourselves away for the sake of others, out of genuine compassion that grows in the course of an intentional, prayerful life.

Jesus calls us to follow him not to believe in him. This is a call to a life of active contemplation modeled on Jesus’ own life. Jesus is pretty clear in today’s passage that if we make our life all about gaining the whole world in a material sense we will forfeit our life because nothing material endures for eternity. When he rails on about the “adulterous and sinful generation” he places himself in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets, calling God’s people back from their love of material comforts and worldly riches and earthly power to love of God and God’s call to them to be a light to the nations, living righteously by caring for their neighbors. Jesus was not against worldly human comforts, as his willingness to heal and feed and shelter the downtrodden repeatedly shows. But he is quite clear that how we use and how we value the human things matters greatly to God and to the health of our souls.

As I listened to the news reports from Harrisburg, one story caught my attention. The CNN reporter said she had just come from the local McDonald’s, where she had stopped for coffee, and in that McDonald’s there was a prayer meeting going on. She described a circle of men, several of them pastors from local congregations and the rest neighbors, friends and concerned citizens who were on their way to the scene of the devastation to help victims. For twenty minutes they prayed together, as she described it, heads bowed in silent prayer in a circle around the tables at McDonald’s. That, my friends, is what it is to take up one’s cross and follow Jesus and to be about divine things not merely human things. I suspect those men knew that in order to help the neighbors they had come to help and in order to bear what they would see that day and the pain they would have to carry with and for the victims, they needed that time in the presence of their loving God to ground them in the divine things so they could help folks cope with the loss of so many human things. The invitation to discipleship comes in the most unlikely of places at the most unexpected times….even in a McDonald’s in Harrisburg, Illinois on a windy Thursday in March.

Amen.

Playing with the Wild Things - Lent 1 2012

“Playing with the Wild Things”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, February 26, 2012 at St. Mark’s, Newark, NY

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:12-13)

When my children were little one of their favorite books for me to read to them was Maurice Sendak’s classic tale, “Where the Wild Things Are.” In that story, a little boy named Max is sent to his room without his supper by his mother who loses patience one day with his “wild” behavior. As Max sits alone in his room, cut off from family and friends, with no supper to eat, his room becomes at first a forest and then the walls become “the world all around.” Then “an ocean tumbled by with a private boat for Max and he sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.” When Max gets to the place where the wild things are he is confronted with strange creatures who “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.” At first Max is frightened by these creatures, but then he shouts at them “BE STILL” and he tames them with a “magic trick of staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all wild things.” I could not help but think of Sendak’s wild things when I read Mark’s gospel account of Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. “He was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him.”

In Mark’s gospel, the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness follows immediately after the story of his baptism in the River Jordan by John the Baptist, where, upon coming up out of the water, Jesus sees the Holy Spirit descending like a dove upon him and hears the heavenly voice proclaim, “You are my son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” Mark tells us that “immediately” after that voice came from heaven the Spirit “drove” him out to the wilderness where for forty days he was tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him. Mark’s rendition of this story is spare yet powerful. Where Matthew and Luke tell us that the Spirit led Jesus to the wilderness, Mark says he was driven there. Where Matthew and Luke tell us specifically how Satan tempted Jesus Mark tells us only that he was in the wilderness forty days with the wild beasts and angels. We have no idea what that experience was like for Jesus but we do know that he was alone, in a place filled with wild things. Mark gives us a different angle on the wilderness experience and one that bears reflection as we begin another Lent.

Our Old Testament reading today from Genesis takes us again to the place of chaos and wild things. When the waters of the great flood covered the earth, Noah and his family survived that watery holocaust closed in the ark along with the wild beasts of every kind, clean and unclean. One can only imagine what that voyage must have felt like to its human passengers, encased in that ark, tossed about on the stormy waters of the flood accompanied by all the beasts, birds and creatures of every kind. Talk about confronting wild things! Noah and family had no choice but to look into the eyes of the wild beasts of creation and learn to live with them. Somehow they managed to survive living cheek to jowl with mountain lions and grizzly bears, rabbits and iguanas. And when that perilous journey was over, they emerged into the open air to the resplendence of the rainbow in the sky, the sign of God’s covenant with them.

We begin our Lenten observance with two powerful stories that offer us a vivid metaphor for our Lenten journey. Learning to live with the chaos and to befriend the “wild things” in our culture and our own personal lives is a worthy endeavor for this special season. With Mark’s version of the wilderness sojourn and the story of Noah and the ark as models for our Lenten observance we could take these forty days of Lent to go alone into our own personal wildernesses and spend time with the wild beasts and the angels that await us there. Perhaps life has already driven you to the wilderness, in which case your Lenten observance is right at your fingertips. If you’re not in a personal desert time right now, Lent is an opportunity to make the time for some serious introspection and self-examination, to go deep and find the wild beasts who challenge you in your life so that you can befriend them and go to Easter strengthened by the serenity that befriending the wild things brings with it.

In our comfortable middle class American way of life, we rarely allow the chaos and wildness of God’s creation to invade our reality. We live in heated and air conditioned homes, with electric lights to see by, and refrigerators to keep food cool and stoves to cook it on without serious effort on our part. We live in a well ordered society and those of us in this area have the luxury of being able to live in a place that is safe and where we can walk streets and neighborhoods without fear. We don’t really want to confront “wild things” whether they be in the form of external realities that are scary like people who are different from us or who challenge us, or diseases that grip our mortal bodies and do their relentless destruction, or whether they be internal wild things like our own fears, frustrations, anger, grief, loneliness or even despair. During Lent, however, we are invited to walk into the wilderness and live with the wild things for awhile.

What is compelling about the two Biblical stories of spending time with the wild things is that both Noah and his family, and Jesus appear to have been able to somehow befriend and co-exist with the wild beasts. Noah and his family were living through a time of complete destruction and chaos as the entire world was awash in the raging waters of the flood, and somehow in the midst of that chaos, they managed to survive along with the wild things God had also created and wanted to save. Notice that God did not want the wild things to be destroyed – indeed God went to great lengths to be sure they survived. In the wilderness, Jesus had to survive in a place without shelter, subjected to the intense heat of the day and the deep cold of desert nights, where flash floods and winds can erupt at any time, with no warning. This is not a climate hospitable to human habitation, so Jesus had to survive using his own inner resources and, presumably learning from the wild beasts how to weather the desert climate. There is no suggestion in Mark’s account that the wild beasts were necessarily dangerous for Jesus, simply that he had to co-exist with them.

Lent is a time for us to go to the wilderness of our own lives and live with the wild beasts that reside there. Each of us has a different version of the wilderness. For some it is depression, for some grief, for others anxiety or stress, still others fear for themselves or loved ones. For some the wilderness is a place where they are trying desperately to keep the wind and elements from blowing away the precariously built sand castle of their lives. These are folks who have so denied the pain and struggles of their own existence that they have completely shut themselves off emotionally from their families, friends, and neighbors and their own inner selves. For some the wilderness is loneliness, for others the diminished capacity of advancing years. Whatever form your wilderness takes, Lent is a time to consider befriending the beasts that reside there because those beasts are not going anywhere and you will find more peace by learning to live with them than by fighting them.

In the Sendak story, little Max first stares the wild things into submission, then becomes their king. Once he has put himself in a place where the wild things are not ruling him but he rules them, he is able to let them be wild. He plays with them. “Let the wild rumpus start!” he shouts and the book shows pictures of Max and the beasts living it up. When we truly confront the wild beasts of our own wilderness, we too can befriend them and then let them have their day. It’s when we try to avoid those beasts, when we try to deny their existence that we remain captive. One cannot get over grief, one has to live through it, embrace it even. Anyone who has ever been through the twelve-step process will tell you that you don’t overcome addiction by pretending it isn’t there. It’s only when the addict looks it in the face and embraces it as a destructive reality that it begins to lose its power over the person. A troubled or difficult relationship is rarely strengthened by avoiding the real issues between people. It’s only when those issues are brought into the open and stared down, through painful hard work sometimes, that they lose their ability to corrode the relationship and love between two people.

The important thing to remember about this sometimes painful wilderness sojourn to which we are called in Lent is that although it may be a solitary journey it does not have to be a lonely one. Each of us must do our own interior work to confront and befriend our own wild beasts. In the Sendak tale, Max doesn’t get to the place of the wild things until he is sent away by himself into his room. While he’s busy playing, he doesn’t find the wild things. We do not do that interior work alone, however. Each one of us is God’s beloved child in whom God is well pleased. When we embrace that foundation of love on which we rest, we enter the wilderness confident that angels will be there to care for us amidst the beasts. God protected Noah and his family even as God ensured the continued existence of the “wild things” and then God sent the rainbow as a symbol of God’s never-failing love and commitment to all God’s creatures. In the Sendak story, after Max cavorts with the wild things, he gets in his ship and sails back into “the night of his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him.”

When we return from our Lenten wilderness sojourn, supper will be waiting for us in the paschal feast on Easter Day. In the meantime, let us journey this Lent to “where the wild things are.”

Epiphany 4B, 2012

“No Stumbling Blocks in Church” , A Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Newark, NY

But take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak. (1 Cor. 8:9)

It is a busy weekday in the Greek city of Corinth circa 54 CE. In the temples of Apollo and Mithras, and of the Emperor and his family, devotees bring animals to be sacrificed ritually upon the altars, an offering to the gods in thanksgiving for blessings bestowed or for healing or for prosperity and good fortune. In the synagogues the Jews gather three times a day for their daily prayers. In the Jewish sections of the city, the market teems with stalls selling fruit, vegetables and meat butchered according to the dietary laws of the Jewish Torah. The Jewish Christians gather for daily prayers before going to their respective jobs, and on Sundays gather early in the homes of some of the more prominent of their members to share a meal, and enact the ritual of the Lord’s Supper, breaking bread and blessing wine and “sharing in the Lord’s death until he comes” before dispersing to their varied occupations. Paul is a tentmaker, and when he’s not preaching or spreading the gospel of the Risen Christ to any who will listen, he is busy making and selling tents to keep himself afloat.

The Christians are a growing sect within Judaism in this busy metropolitan Greek city under Roman rule. Paul is an effective evangelist, pulling in many new converts from those devotees of Apollo or Mithras or the Emperor. Word has it that the Christian community is suffering from some internal discord and Paul is kept busy instructing them in appropriate behavior towards one another, particularly those who are new to the Christian faith. Apparently, many Christians in Corinth routinely buy and consume the meat leftover from the sacrifices at the temples of Apollo and Mithras and the Emperor, as that meat is plentiful and tasty and readily available in the town market. Some among the Christian sect seem offended by this practice, while others see no reason not to eat the perfectly good meat especially as it is affordable and easily procured on a daily basis. They could care less that it was offered on some so-called “religious” altar, since they are so firm in their commitment to the One God whom they worship and the Lord Jesus Christ from whom they take their name. To them the meat is simply food, not something with any religious significance whatsoever.

On the other hand, there are some new Christians, recently converted from the Greco-Roman religions, who are reluctant to eat this meat because they recognize it as meat that has religious significance in the traditions of Apollo and others. Now that they have converted to the new Christian religion they find themselves feeling confused and torn as they remember with some fondness the religious rituals and practices of their youth, even as they embrace this new religion and its ritual of the bread and wine. The growing Christian community has had to contend with a number of issues with respect to converts. It has been decided that non-Jews who convert to this sect don’t have to undergo circumcision, but the issue of what to do about food offered to the Greco-Roman gods in the holy temples continues to cause considerable controversy. Apparently, members of this new sect have nearly come to blows on this thorny issue. Paul is twisting himself into a pretzel to try to bring the warring sides of this controversy to the table in some amicable fashion. On some days he’s more successful than on others. The Corinthian Christians are a conflict-ridden bunch and they don’t seem particularly eager to come to the dialogue table and resolve their differences. Those who see no problem with eating the meat sacrificed to Apollo do not see any reason to incur extra expense or go to greater lengths to acquire kosher meat, just to appease the new converts who are uncomfortable with the ritually slaughtered meat. They either don’t care or don’t recognize that their cavalier attitude to the ritual meat is causing significant pain to others in their Christian community.

Fast forward 2000+ years: The Christian community in the Northern Hemisphere is now the majority religion in a pluralistic environment where there are people from many different religious traditions living side by side in a bustling 21st century society. In the United States, a recent Gallup poll finds that fully 82% of people call themselves Christian, although a huge percentage of those people do not actively practice the religion. The numbers of people who designate themselves as “unaffiliated” has risen dramatically in the past 50 years, and secularism pervades the culture. Materialism and nationalism are heavy influences on the value systems by which most people live and the spirit of rugged individualism is pervasive in American culture.

While the Christian religious tradition is the religion of the empire, Christianity itself is now widely diverse, having split into hundreds of different denominations as conflicts like that early one in Corinth ultimately led to separation and division when warring factions simply could not come to agreement on the many issues that divided them. The older, “mainline” Christian denominations are in decline, struggling to retain members and desperate to determine how to attract new members. By and large, the younger generation of adults, those in their 20s and 30s are absent from Christian churches, particularly those in the mainline traditions. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity has become a significant political force in the United States in the past thirty years, and many of those churches are thriving, often buying into the cultural embrace of materialism and nationalism, preaching a “prosperity gospel” that encourages the quest for wealth and affluence as signs of God’s favor.

In Corinth the controversy over food sacrificed to idols tore the community apart. In 21st century America Christian communities struggle over different issues of inclusion and religious practice, such as:
 Should the church help undocumented immigrants working in the local community when they are threatened with arrest or deportation and should Christians work for immigration law reform to protect those undocumented workers?;
 How can the Christian community atone for centuries of complicity in racism and become an active force in eradicating racism within its own ranks and in the communities where the churches do their ministry?
 Should the church exercise its tradition of radical hospitality by reaching out in friendship to Muslim brothers and sisters at a time when Islamophobia is rampant in the culture and popular media, creating a climate of hate and mistrust that is damaging to the larger community and to national security?
 Should gay and lesbian people be ordained and should their relationships be blessed by the church?;
 Is it permissible to offer communion to unbaptized people, is it permissible to offer grape juice along with wine at communion, how can we introduce inclusive language for God into our liturgy?

In the church at Corinth, Paul confronted a controversy that at its core was about behaviors and attitudes among those in the Christian community that were likely to tear at the fabric of Christian community and that might get in the way of some believers being able to maintain their connection with God. Paul encouraged the Corinthian Christians to behave in ways that provided a safety net for the weakest among them, admonishing those who were more mature in the faith to make space for those who needed more help to live into their Christian faith with integrity. Paul reminded them that “knowledge puffs up but love builds up” encouraging them to act first out of love and not to get too hung up on what they thought they knew, or understood or believed. Paul firmly believed that love would be the glue that would hold the diverse body of believers together, not agreement on doctrine or theological propositions of one kind or other. For Paul, it was more important that Christians be loving than that they prove to themselves or anyone else that they were right.

Paul begins his preaching on love in this part of the letter, and he goes on to write an outstanding hymn to love a few chapters later. The love of which Paul speaks is not a sticky sweet, fuzzy Hallmark card kind of love by any means. Love, as Paul understands it, is love that takes us to the cross, that calls us to sacrifice our own ego, our own impulses, needs and desires for the good of God’s kingdom, so that we become compassionate lovers of humanity in our broken world. We are called to love even those we dislike, those who repulse us, those who push our buttons and drive us crazy. When human conflicts erupt it is important for each of us to remember “it’s not about you” and then to take the conflict into our prayer time, offering ourselves and our adversaries to God’s grace and wisdom. In Christian community rugged individualism has no place. Personal freedom and liberty is tempered by the command to love the neighbor.

In Christian community and in the world beyond our church we are called to take people as we find them, to love and nurture them as whole people of God, respecting the dignity of every human being in their full humanity. Paul is quite clear with the Corinthians that believers in Christ are to bend over backwards not to become a stumbling block to the weak. If something we say or do gets in the way of someone else’s relationship with God, we need to think twice about what we’re doing. My guess is that if Christians throughout the ages had listened to Paul’s advice more closely we might not be suffering the decline in attendance that we are seeing in our modern church. Our contemplative tradition is full of spiritual practices that we can each take on, practices like meditation, contemplative prayer, intercessory prayer, regular self-examination and confession, the Jesus prayer, that help us become the kind of loving Christians that Paul envisioned. Sadly, Christians have all too often become stumbling blocks to others and to themselves and the result is fractured community and declining participation.

Life in Christian community will always be fraught with controversies and conflicts. It is inherent in our humanity. How we handle conflict and controversy is what marks us as faithful disciples of the Risen Christ. Paul gives us a good measuring rod – “Take care that this liberty of yours does not become a stumbling block to the weak.” The highways of life’s journey are full of stumbling blocks. Our baptism calls us to get out on the road and join the crew removing as many of those barriers as we can so the love of God in Christ can flow freely into our broken world through us and through our way of loving in the world. Amen.

A Time to Dream

“A Time to Dream”, A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, December 11, 2011 at NPEM, New York

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, then were we like those who dream.
Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy. (Psalm 126)

“The dreamers are the saviors of the world.” So writes spiritual author James Allen in his book entitled, As A Man Thinketh. Dreaming is Advent work. As we prepare for the coming of God into our hearts, as we prepare in the wilderness a highway for our God we are invited to dream, to reach for the stars, to envision a whole new world, a new creation. This is after all, what the biblical writers are talking about when they talk of the second coming of Christ. This is what the waiting and expectation of Advent is all about.

Dreams are funny things. Fantastic and uncontrolled, often weird, always uninhibited, dreams carry a power many of us would like to discount if only we could. The Bible consistently maintains that God speaks to humans through their dreams, and the insights of depth psychology, particularly Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung confirm that dreams connect human beings with a dimension and realm of reality with which we are often out of touch in our waking lives. Carl Jung believes that when we dream, many of the images that come to us are part of what he called the collective unconscious, that is, they come not only from our own personal life experiences, but actually originate in the collective memory and experience of all of humanity. Archetype is his word for the fundamental images that speak to all human beings throughout history and that actually connect humans to the divine realm. There are a number of archetypal images that appear in human dreams and a Jungian analysis of a dream would include reference to those archetypes and what they mean, not only for the individual but for the individual in his or her social context. The spiritual realm where God resides becomes available to us when we dream, when our unconscious is able to tap into the stream of energy flowing from God without the filter of our conscious inhibitions and fears.

Then there are those waking dreams, those flights of imagination and creativity that have spurred humankind on, that have led peoples and civilizations into new and exciting futures. Where would the world be without the dreamers? Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers, Beethoven, Mozart, Michaelangelo…all the composers, sculptors, poets, prophets, sages, scientists, politicians throughout history whose genius and creativity turned the world around. James Allen describes these people as “the architects of heaven, the makers of the after-world. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them laboring humanity would perish.”

The prophet Isaiah was a dreamer of this sort. In Isaiah 61 he speaks to a people returning from exile, a people returning to a home that has been ravaged and destroyed, that is in ruins. The Israelites returned to Jerusalem after their exile in Babylon but their homes, their temple, their city had been destroyed. The prophet speaks words of vision to them, he paints a picture of a future in which their city will be rebuilt, their temple restored and the righteousness decreed in their covenant with Yahweh will be seen by all nations, for whom they will be a guiding light. To an oppressed people these were visions of hope and glory that must have been hard to believe, even though they were welcome pictures of what might be, of the future that could be theirs.

John the Baptist was another of these visionary dreamers who point the way to the future that God is making for God’s people. The author of John’s gospel tells us that he was sent to “testify to the light” – the light of God that was to come after him. His words were words not only of repentance, calling people to turn around and live their lives differently, but they were also words of hope. Dreamers always talk like that – they have hope even in the face of hopelessness and despair. I think of all those years that Nelson Mandela languished in prison, never losing sight of the dream that someday apartheid would end in South Africa. I think of all those rebuilding lives in the Joplin, Mississippi, or Japan or Turkey, after this year’s spate of natural disasters. Those who can see a future in the midst of rubble and destruction are the ones infused with the dreams of God. Today we are paying tribute to the first responders in our community – police, ambulance, firefighters, EMTs - those who rush to the scene of disaster and mayhem and immediately begin to live the dream that out of the pain and chaos of accident, crime, disease or disaster, new life and new creation can indeed emerge. First responders are their own special kind of dreamers without whom our communities could not weather the travails of human life.

Those who dream dreams are those who cling to hope, even when the facts before them suggest that their hope is futile. Those who dream dreams are willing to try something new, to take risks, to experiment and be unconventional. They are willing to be ridiculed and laughed at, derided and put down, because they are tuned into a different frequency from the rest of the world –they are tuned into what God is doing to make the new creation that God so wants for the world and so they act accordingly. Without the dreamers, humankind would still be living in caves.

In our world today we desperately need dreamers. We need those who are willing to say that violence and war are not the answer to aggression and terrorism, that preferencing the wealthy over the poor and the middle class is not the way to bolster the economy and put millions of unemployed back to work, those who say that all people in our nation are deserving of quality health care, education and safe neighborhoods. We need the dreamers to help us find environmentally sustainable ways to live on this earth. It is the dreamers of history who have always been especially attuned to the whispers of the Holy Spirit. The dreamers of the world are those who understand the old adage that declares insanity to be doing things the same way and expecting a different result.

Being one who dreams also means being someone who does not fall prey to cynicism. Jesus reminded us that to enter the kingdom of heaven one needs to approach it like a child. The childlike ability to be open to the twists and turns of imagination and fantasy is an important quality to nurture as part of a mature spirituality. The story we celebrate in two weeks is not a story of a God who cares much about how things have always been done. God is always calling us forward to new things, a new creation, a brighter vision.

Being a dreamer is important for all of us who are people of faith, even if we are not called to invent the next light bulb, or discover the cure for cancer, or find the secret to achieving peace in the Middle East and even when we don’t actually live in exile or find ourselves imprisoned. To live abundantly as Christ calls us to do requires that we be willing to dream. When we’re stuck in a rut, or weighed down by life’s travails, it is the ability to dream that will connect us with God and impel us into a brighter future. Whether we’re struggling to find a job in this tough economy, or trying to work through problems in a marriage or with a child, or fighting a chronic illness, it is the ability to envision a different future, a brighter future and to believe deep down in the reality of that dream that keeps us going and enables us to endure and thrive.

Dreaming is an important part of congregational life too. Vibrant and healthy churches are communities that dare to dream, to take risks, go out on a limb, to reach out to their world in new ways. Nothing that is alive and thriving fails to dream. Dreaming is crucial for staying connected with God, and with the ever moving Holy Spirit that enlivens us for doing God’s will in our world. The visions of the prophet Isaiah could only be achieved when the Israelites took hold of the dream and worked to make it a reality. We need the dreamers of the world to tell us their visions, and then we all need to jump at those visions and work to make them reality.

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing…do not quench the spirit” writes Paul to the church of Thessalonica. He urges them to stay attuned to God’s spirit as that spirit informs and enlivens their daily lives. Do not quench the spirit. Those are good words to remember in this holy season as we approach the festive celebration of the birth of God into the world.

“To desire is to obtain; to aspire is to achieve….Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil. The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of reality.” (James Allen, As A Man Thinketh)

Dreams are the seedlings of reality. Advent is a time of waiting and a time for dreaming, a time for envisioning a new future that is within our grasp. As the psalmist says, “then were we like those who dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongues with shouts of joy.” In these last two weeks of Advent 2011 what dreams will we dream? What new reality will we envision for ourselves, our families, this church community and our nation as we enter a new year together? Advent is the season for dreamers, it is a time to dream. Between now and Christmas, on these long, cold winter nights, I wish you sweet dreams.

Amen.