Trinitarian Physics
By Craig Hunter (preached on 22nd May, 2005)
1 John 4:7-12

Less than two weeks ago, I returned to Japan from a two week vacation back in the United States with my family. It was my first trip back to the United States since my ordination a year and a half ago. My return from abroad has almost become a routine experience for my family over the last several years, as it seems that every year I return once or twice from Europe or the Middle East or some other far-flung land.

These periodic returns to St. Augustine give me a sort of time-lapse photographic view of my home town, as I see the changes that have taken place once or twice a year. My home county is about the fourth fastest growing county in the entire United States, so needless to say there are a lot of changes that have been occurring. The dentist’s office near the corner of my street has now become a bank. The Eckerd’s pharmacy has now become a CVS pharmacy and one of the manager’s was my former boss at Domino’s pizza. More trees have been torn down for housing developments, storage units, or strip malls. As I see all the changes, I am reminded of how it used to be. I begin to feel a bit old, a bit out of place.
 
These changes in my hometown have their counterpart in the changes among my family members. I visited with my grandmother in her new apartment in a retirement village. Since I have been here in Tokyo, she has sold her home in Ohio to move to this retirement village to be close to my parents. It is strange to see the things that I was so familiar with in her Ohio home now in the strange environment of this small apartment.
 
My mother has retired from her job as a kindergarten teacher since I came here, and the school equipment that she refuses to part with now sits in the space under my desk and between my bookshelves. She now spends some of her free time doing water color painting – I was pleasantly surprised by her talent. My father retired this last Sunday, and during my time home I went through his books to take what I would like. My sister in Rhode Island gave birth to a new daughter about 6 weeks ago, and when I wasn’t playing with my other two and half year old niece, I was holding my new niece in my arms. My aunt in New Jersey has struggled with leukemia while I have been away, and we spent much time talking about how she was affected by that struggle.

As I journeyed between the various members of my family, as I interacted with them and saw the changes in their lives, I could not help but feel that I have changed, I could not help but feel a sense of separation between their lives and my own. They don’t have access to my experience in Japan, it doesn’t connect with them, there isn’t any traction there, I live a different life here. Sure, I can show them some pictures and share some stories, but so much of who I am here cannot be captured in pictures or stories. Of course, that has been true so many times before. One doesn’t even have to go abroad for that to happen. I suppose it happens anytime we change. It’s a part of life.

Sitting on the train from Rhode Island to New Jersey, near the end of my time in the US, thinking about my past and my future, I felt more alone than I have in a long time. This happens to me every time I come back from abroad, indeed, any time I travel at all. I feel that I am in some in-between space, I don’t quite belong, and I am aware of a kind of spiritual journey into myself even as the physical landscape passes by outside my window.

Have you ever felt like that? Do you feel like that now, from time to time?
 
I am reminded of one thing I said in the speech I gave at my high school graduation. I talked about how each of us is on a separate, yet parallel road. The trajectories of our lives are like parallel lines that extend off into infinity. I have my life to live and you have yours. There is a space, a gap, a separation between us. It is not that your life has no relevance for me, we can certainly learn something from each other, but rather that in the end, my life, my choices, my identity, are up to me. I must choose my own path. Each of us as individuals must choose our own individual paths.

We come into this world alone. It often seems that we spend much of our lives alone. We pass each other at work, on the train, in the grocery store, but how often do we really connect? Many of us feel alone even when we are together. Have you ever felt alone when surrounded by people, at a party for example – that is one of the deepest feelings of being alone there is. Some feel alone even in their marriages. And moments when we feel that we bond with someone else, how often do they really last? At the end of the day, we die, like we for the most part live, alone.

The human community, in this view, is a collection of individuals. Its purpose is to serve each of us in our individual journeys. Given that these journeys are something that we can only undertake alone, the best way to equip ourselves for the journeys is to know ourselves. Know thyself. What makes you tick? What are the passions that move you, what are the influences upon you? The more that you know yourself, the more empowered you will be, the more control you can take over your own life.
 
It’s almost as though life is game of billiard balls, and each of us is a ball. We have our own separate identities, sometimes we collide with each other, sometimes we pass each other in the night. Sometimes it seems that if we just had more information, if we just knew a bit more about the forces acting upon us, if we just had a better understanding of brain chemistry and family relations or science in general, if we just had a big enough supercomputer to do our calculations for us, we could do a better job of predicting what would occur, and we wouldn’t have to be so anxious.
 
I use the billiard ball analogy because I think it highlights the connection between this understanding of the human condition and Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of physics. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most famous physicists of all time, developed rules for how different objects interact with each other – rules of gravity and of motion. As with a game of billiard balls, if you know the velocity and mass of two billiard balls and the force of friction, you can calculate if they will collide with each other, and what will happen if they do. It requires no great leap to see us as these billiard balls. Just as the starting point of the view of the human condition that I have expressed is our existence as individuals, so is the starting place for Newtonian physics the stuff of existence upon which various forces act, in other words, matter. In other words, just as what makes us who we are is that we are each separate individuals, similarly, what makes the universe what it is is the existence of various bodies of matter. There is a parallel between our lives as individuals and the physics of the universe of matter, how we see ourselves affects and is affected by, how we see the world, even the science that we do.

I would wager that most of you have heard of Isaac Newton, but I bet most of you don’t know that he was a Unitarian. In other words, he believed that God is basically one. This belief is consistent with his science. Just as the starting point for our lives is our own individual existence, just as the starting point for physics is the existence of matter, so is the starting point for God’s relationship with anyone or anything else the fact that God is one. God’s oneness defines God. Any relationship that God has is secondary to who God is, to what makes God God. God is defined not by relationship, but by Godself.
What I have been trying to do so far in this sermon is to draw a connection between how we see ourselves, how we see the universe in which we live, and how we see God. Because whether we realize it or not, that connection exists, indeed it is always there. This way of looking at life that I have described sees relationships as secondary –relationships between ourselves as individuals, between the matter of the universe, and between God and everything else. These relationships are secondary to who we are, what the universe is, and who God is. Unless I miss my guess, this, for the most part, is how we often see things.

But having made these connections, we would do well to remember that today is Trinity Sunday. Trinity Sunday, the day on which we remember and celebrate the Trinity. The Trinity is the uniquely Christian way of speaking about God. It is not some obscure theological doctrine of real interest only to theologians, rather it speaks to the heart of who we understand God to be, what we understand the universe to be, who we understand ourselves to be. The doctrine of the Trinity is radically different, it challenges everything I have been saying up to this point. According to the doctrine of the Trinity, to say that God is one is false, or at least it does not tell enough of the truth. For as Trinitarians, what we believe is that God is one AND God is three, God is three AND God is one. Both are equally true. How God can be one and three at the same time doesn’t seem to make sense, it is a paradox, but we nevertheless affirm that it is true. We are called to hold the threeness of God in tension with the oneness of God. All too often, however, I think we tend to over-emphasize God’s oneness at the expense of God’s threeness. We are functional Unitarians.
Who cares? What difference does it make?
It makes a difference because the doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that the three persons of the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer, are in such complete relationship with each other that they become one. It is like a marriage, where the two become one, only taken to the infinite degree. There is a word for this relationship, and that word is love. We read in First John this morning, that God is love. In other words, what makes God God is not God’s oneness, to which relationships are secondary, rather in the Trinity we see that’s God’s loving relationships are the essence of who God is, God’s loving relationships between the persons of the Trinity and between God and creation.
 
To repeat: what I am saying is that relationships are not secondary to who God is, God’s relationship with us, God’s love for us, is not just a bonus. Rather, God is God because of God’s relationships, because of God’s love, for Godself and for us. Being in relationship is at the very heart of existence. Indeed, the doctrine of the Trinity means that it is impossible to be at all without being in relationship. It is relationship, it is love, that makes God who God is.

This challenges all those connections that I made before. If relationship, if love is at the heart of who God is, if it is at the heart of existence, then it is relationships that make us who we are. Above all, it is God’s relationship with us, God’s love for us that gives us identity. This means that we are really ourselves only when we are in God, which is to say, only when we love, only when we are in relationship with others. If it seems that so much of our lives is characterized by aloneness, by separation, by alienation from others, and connections of love with others are the exception rather than the rule, then that is because of our sin as individuals and as a world, it is not who we really are, it is not the way the world really is. In other words, because of our sin, most of our lives we are not who we really are. Rather those moments when we are conscious of our relationships with others, when we do love each other and connect with each other, as rare as those moments may be, those are the true moments, the real moments in which we are who we really are. It’s a matter of changing our perspective, of flipping it upside down. It is not that the glass is 90 percent empty, to pick a random number, it is that it is 10 percent full, but in that 10 percent in which we are in relationships of love, that 10 percent is what gives us our identity, not the 90 percent. Now we see in a mirror dimly, now our identity is only a part of what it really is, what it will be again.

Our lives may seem like they run on parallel tracks, not essentially related to each other, extending off into infinity, but what the doctrine of the Trinity tells us is that we live in a non-Euclidean world, a world in which the impossible is true, a world in which parallel lines meet at infinity, and we have a name for that infinity, we call it love. It makes the impossible happen, it takes us each from our separate lives and brings us together, it restores us to who we are. We see this from time to time in redemptive moments in our own lives.**

But not only do we see it in our own lives, we see it in the very structure of the universe, in the very fabric of existence. Science has moved on since Newton, physics has changed. 20th century advances in quantum theory and in the theory of relativity have challenged and changed much of what we thought we knew. Just as we are not individuals who happen to be in relationships, so is the universe not just matter that happens to interact with each other by laws of energy and motion. Rather, to be is to be in relationship, and as Einstein showed, matter is energy. Relationship is not secondary for us or for the universe. Quantum physics tells us that to observe something is to change what we observe, the interaction, the relationship with the object changes the object itself, relationship determines what is, relationship is not secondary. The theory of relativity tells us how, on a sufficient scale, gravity bends the space-time continuum, it can bring together even parallel lines. Love is like spiritual gravity, it brings us together in relationship with each other, making us who we really are. In a way, God is the ultimate black hole, sucking us all to Godself, changing us under the power of God’s love, bringing us together from all of our different trajectories, except that to be sucked into God is not to be destroyed, it is to be re-created, to become again who God intends us to be. Just as we don’t know what wormholes or different universes lie on the other side of black holes, so can we only begin to imagine what we will look like when we pass into the purifying, gravitational field of God’s love.

If pressed for details on how God can be three and one at the same time, I can give no theory explaining everything, just as neither I nor anyone else can give a theory explaining all of physics, just as none of us can explain in detail the mystery of what it is to be human. The doctrine of the Trinity, the physics of the universe, our understanding of ourselves – there will always be a mystery at the heart of each of these, a mystery that should keep us humble and in awe. It is the mystery of love.

I have been thinking a lot about my father recently. While I was at home, he was preparing for retirement. Last Sunday was his last Sunday at the Presbyterian church in St. Augustine. He had been there for 16 years. I wish that I could have been there to honor his ministry to the church, to honor his ministry to me.
From time to time, during my work here, someone compliments me on a kind word said, or a powerful sermon delivered. And I think, if you only knew my father. So much of how I minister, so much of who I am is from him, and not only from him, but from my mother, my family, my friends, my teachers, from all those who stand behind me, invisible, all those whose love has made me who I am, to the extent that I am anybody. Thank them, I think. Thank them, don’t thank me. Or better yet, thank God, who loves me through their love, whose love gives me identity, and not only me, but all of us. God’s love makes us who we are.

God's Call
by Pastor Craig Hunter (preached on 17 April 2005)
1 Samuel 3:1-21

9:30 p.m, last Sunday evening. The day is over, the week is over. I have had dinner, and I have just finished watching a video that I rented. The overhead lights are turned off, and the muted light of the small lamp matches my mood. The wind blows through the open window, billowing the curtain – it holds the promise of change in the air. A rain front is coming. From time to time I hear the faint sound of a car passing by on the street outside. I imagine looking down on myself from a million feet up, seeing this young man alone in a dark room at night in a foreign city. I feel an invisible pull towards all the things I could do in the few hours remaining before I go to bed. I should clean up my apartment. Or there are those books that I want to read, and the Japanese I want to study. But I don’t clean my apartment, I don’t pick up a book, and I don’t start studying Japanese. Instead, I do something I don’t do nearly often enough, something I haven’t done in a while.

I just sit there. I just sit there and watch the wind blow through the curtain. I open myself up to the presence of God. It is almost painful, to override this drive to do something, to be productive. Forcing myself to be still does not come easily. It is not that the other things I feel pulled to do are urgent – far from it. Rather, it is that I am not in the habit of sitting still, it feels foreign to me, and uncomfortable. It feels like subjecting myself to spiritual whiplash, being suddenly yanked to a halt. Yet after a while, in the stillness of those moments, my soul is restored and my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.

If you are like me, these moments are all too rare. If you are like me, listening to God and listening for God do not come easily. Most of us live busy lives in this city. On the one hand, we work long hours. I hear so many stories of late nights and early mornings at the office that I hardly raise an eyebrow anymore. A friend recently complained to me about having too much free time on her hands. Too much free time – I had to restrain myself from exploding in a fit of jealousy. On the other hand, we have the time that we spend with our families. These days we often need an appointment calendar to keep up with all the activities of our children. There are the plays, the sports teams, the sicknesses, the cram schools. Then of course on the one hand there is the time we seek to spend with friends. And I shouldn’t forget to mention that on the other hand there is the time that we give to the church and to our own spiritual lives. In case you haven’t noticed, I have already talked about more hands than we have. It is too bad that we were not trained as professional jugglers, because such training could only be useful as we juggle the many parts of our lives.
This busyness makes it hard for us to find the time to listen to God. Even when we have the time, we are out of practice and it makes us uncomfortable. And if we succeed in finding the time to pray to God, it seems that all too often we focus on what we have to say to God rather than what God has to say to us. How much time do we really spend listening?
 
It is hard not to avoid the conclusion that the word of the Lord is rare these days. Or at least it is rare for us to listen to it.
Such a situation is certainly not new. The biblical text from First Samuel today says much the same thing – “The word of the Lord was rare in those days.”
It doesn’t say why. Maybe God was not speaking to the people, because God was disgusted by the activities of Eli’s sons, the priests, about whom the text says that they were scoundrels who had no regard for the Lord. Or maybe God was speaking and the people just weren’t listening. But in any case, the story does not end there. It goes on to tell about Samuel, the young boy whose mother Hannah had dedicated to God. Samuel was lying down in the temple when the Lord called him. “Samuel! Samuel!” Samuel, thinking that it was Eli who was calling him, ran to Eli. This happened several times.
The passage tells us that “Samuel did not yet know the Lord.” Thus, even after the Lord calls him by name, Samuel is confused. He doesn’t know that it is God who is speaking to him.
One of the things that strikes me about this passage is that the Lord calls Samuel by name. It is hard to overestimate the importance of that. God calls us by name, as individuals and as communities. It is not as though God sends a message in a bottle to any person who happens to pick it up. Nor is it as though God speaks some abstract, timeless, eternal truth. Rather, God calls us by name to be in relationship. This challenges modern spiritualities that see the spiritual life as one of piecing together eternal truths from different sources. Instead, a God who calls us by name, as individuals and as communities, is a God who takes the first step, a God who is not indifferent to us, a God who cares for and loves us. Thus, as we install the elders today, we trust that their election is not a matter of chance. We recognize and celebrate that God has called them by name to service.

When Samuel heard God’s voice, he didn’t recognize it. All too often, that is the case for us today as well. Like Samuel, we don’t recognize God’s voice or else we run away from it. Indeed, we have become experts at running away from God’s voice. We see someone with whom we have an unresolved conflict or a bad history, and we feel uncomfortable inside, yet we convince ourselves that God is not calling us to reconciliation. We hear the Stewardship ministry team encouraging us to be transformed through sharing our time and our money, and we convince ourselves that God is speaking to others, not to us. We are unfulfilled in our work or in our relationships, yet we let fear persuade us that God is not calling us to change. We see a world in which violence and greed are all too present, yet we tell ourselves that God’s call to change the systems of our world is not meant for us now, rather it is meant for people with more power, people other than ourselves. In these and other ways, we become deaf to God’s voice in our lives. We sometimes pray that God will speak to us, but all too often, we don’t want to hear what God has to say.

When Samuel mistook God’s voice, he went to Eli. After Samuel kept returning, Eli eventually realized that it was God who was calling Samuel. He told Samuel to go back to the temple and to respond when God called again.

As I read this story, I cannot help but feel compassion for Eli. Elsewhere in First Samuel, we learn that Eli faithfully served the Lord as a priest. Aware of the sin and corruption of his sons, he speaks to them and urges them to repent and change their ways. But his sons do not change. Therefore the Eli that I imagine must have had a bit of a broken heart. God and his sons, presumably two of the greatest loves in Eli’s life, remained estranged from each other, and Eli seemed powerless to heal the relationship. In those days, and to a lesser extent even now, there was the assumption that naughty children who go astray are the product of bad parenting. Presumably the writer of First Samuel therefore attributes divine sanction to Eli’s punishment.

Given Eli’s disappointment with his sons, I therefore imagine that on some level Eli may have wished that his sons could have been like Samuel, or that Samuel could have been his own son. I am sure loving yet troubled parents sometimes wish their children could have turned out differently. Why did it have to turn out like this? To then learn that God was speaking to Samuel must have felt like rubbing salt in the wound. Eli could have reacted out of that pain, he could have said to Samuel, “Just ignore that voice, I made a mistake. Stay here, don’t go back into the temple.” The story, perhaps, could have turned out differently

But he didn’t say that. Instead, he served God by letting go, by accepting that God was speaking not to him, not to his sons, but to someone else. In other words, perhaps God was speaking to Eli through silence. And Eli, at least for the moment, accepted that. He accepted that he was not in control, that God had chosen to make someone else the star of the ongoing story. He sent Samuel back to God with instructions to listen and reply. It was an act of love.
Unlike Eli, we have a hard time letting go. We want God to speak to us on our own terms. We want the story to center on ourselves. It is hard for us to bless good things that happen to those around us, when those good things don’t happen to us. A co-worker gets a job promotion that you had been hoping for. Yet another friend gets married while you remain single. Your young adult child makes a choice that you would not make but that you must respect. In these examples and others, God calls us to be like Eli, to bless those around us in spite of the heartache it may cause us. Indeed, perhaps the heartache is a sign of the blessing.

If you are like me, then you have known some Elis in your own life. People who have listened to you without their own agendas, people who send you back to hear God’s voice when you run away, people who may have small roles in your life, but certainly not minor ones. You are richer for their role in your life. Without them, perhaps, your story would have turned out differently.
As we celebrate the installation of elders this day, God is calling the elders to be Elis for this congregation. God is calling them to bless the members of this congregation, God is calling them to recognize that they are not in control, God is, God is calling them to send us back to hear God’s voice when we, like Samuel, get confused and go in the wrong direction.

If this text challenges us to have the love of Eli, it also challenges us to have the courage of Samuel. Samuel, a young boy, perhaps like some other young boys a bit afraid of the dark, has the courage to go into the dimly lit temple, to lay down, and to wait for the unknown. Pitter patter goes his heart. How long he lay there, his heart pumped full of excitement and fear, the text does not say. The fact that he stayed there testifies to his trust in Eli, and by extension, to his trust in God. When God finally comes and speaks, Samuel responds faithfully as Eli told him. “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
“Speak, for your servant is listening.” That should be the cry of all of us. If part of our task as Christians and as elders is to be Elis, then another part is to be Samuels. Sometimes we must go into the darkness, and wait there, but this text calls us to trust that God will speak. And when God speaks, our response should be to listen, and to surrender ourselves to what God has to say.

Of course, listening is not easy. Unlike Samuel, few of us have heard God speak so directly. Yet we believe and trust that God does speak. As Frederic Buechner writes in a beautiful passage in his book, The Sacred Journey, “[God] speaks not just through the sounds we hear, of course, but through events in all their complexity and variety, through the harmonies and disharmonies and counterpoint of all that happens. As to the meaning of what he says, there are times that we are apt to think we know. Adolph Hitler dies a suicide in his bunker with the Third Reich going up in flames all around him, and what God is saying about the wages of sin seems clear enough. Or Albert Schweitzer renounces fame as a theologian and musician for a medical mission in Africa, where he ends up even more famous still as one of the great near-saints of Protestantism; and again we are tempted to see God’s meaning as clarity itself. But what is God saying through a good man’s suicide? . . . What about sin itself as a means of grace? What about grace, when misappropriated and misunderstood, becoming an occasion for sin? To try and express in even the most insightful and theological sophisticated terms the meaning of what God speaks through the events of our lives is as precarious a business as to try to express the meaning of the sound of rain on the roof or the spectacle of the setting sun. But I choose to believe that he speaks nonetheless, and the reason that his words are impossible to capture in human language is of course that they are ultimately always incarnate words. They are words fleshed out in the everydayness no less than the crises of our own experience.”
He goes on to write, “life itself can be thought of as an alphabet by which God graciously makes known his presence and purpose and power among us. Like the Hebrew alphabet [in which the Old Testament was written], the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels, for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves.”

To put what Buechner says in others words, if the bad news is that God does not speak clearly to us in an unmistakable voice in the darkness, the even better news is that God speaks to us everywhere. There is no place or event or person that God cannot use to speak to us. We are therefore challenged to see God’s purpose working itself out even in the sometimes apparent purposelessness of our lives.
The story of Samuel does not end with him listening to God’s voice. Indeed, that is only the beginning. He goes on to become one of the most important and faithful leaders of God’s people. As we read in verse 19, “As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground.” Upon Samuel’s death “all Israel assembled and mourned for him.” (25:1)

Similarly, our stories do not end with listening to God. That is only the beginning, the beginning of a transformation that we cannot even fully imagine. As we read in verse 11, “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.” So, too, the promise to us is that if you listen for God, if you hear of what God is already now doing, your ears too will tingle. God is even now working out God’s divine purpose in each of our lives, God is even now shepherding us and restoring our souls. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”
 

Soft Power
Preached by Pastor Craig Hunter on 20 March 2005

Matthew 21:1-11
Philippians 2:5-11

During the time that my friend Derek was here a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of playing several games together. We played Caesar and Cleopatra three times, Labyrinth, a German maze game once, several hands of double solitaire, two long war games recreating World War II in Europe, and two games of Axis and Allies, a complicated game also involving World War II, this time around the world. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time playing games.
Unfortunately for Derek, I won every single game we played. Part of that was no doubt due to luck. But, as I know even Derek would admit, much of my success could be attributed to the intensity with which I play. I think most of those who have attended one of my Games Nights here could attest to that. I make a point of knowing the rules, of plotting out my strategy. My mathematical background comes out as I carefully calculate the risks, maximize my resources, consolidate my power, and wait for the right moment to strike. When I play games, even complicated ones, I rarely make mistakes. I hate making mistakes. When others make mistakes during the course of the game, if they overextend themselves, or leave part of their forces exposed, I do not hesitate to crush them. Some might think that I should occasionally let my opponent win, at least so that they won’t tire of playing me – you know, throw them a bone every now and then. But no, not me. I’m not sure I would know how to do that, even if I wanted to. As I’ve said to my opponents before while playing games, if you want mercy, go to church, you aren’t getting it here.
In other words, when I play games, I play to win. It feels good, it feeds my ego, I’m addicted to winning, I suppose.
I would like to think that this almost ruthless desire to win is something that I could turn on and off before and after I play games. I would like to think that I could compartmentalize it, that it exists on the surface of my personality but doesn’t come from someplace deeper down. I would like to think that I am in control of my desire to win. But the truth is otherwise. The truth is, I live much of my life the way that I play games. Rather than controlling my desire to win, my desire to win controls me. I live to win, to be successful. This desire was the driving engine behind my academic success over the years. This desire still drives me today. I carefully calculate the risks in my life, I maximize my resources, I feed my ego with success. The converse of that is that I hate making mistakes. I don’t cope well with situations of powerlessness – when I was struggling with my knee problems for example, when I feel trapped by life’s possibilities, or when I have to be patient. And in my desire to win, sometimes I inflict violence on myself and others. During discussions and arguments with other people, for example, I am sometimes so focused on winning the argument that I lose something more important, I damage the relationship. It is as though sometimes I can’t see clearly, as though my desire to win somehow skews my perspective. It is no accident that at the end of my six months as a part-time chaplain, when I was being evaluated by my peers, one of the two things I remember that they said that I should work on, was that I should work on my desire to win.

The other thing that they said is that they thought I had some unresolved pain from my past that I needed to work through. Of course, they were right. And the two are related. You see, I want so desperately to be a winner, because I’ve known what it’s like to be a loser, I’ve known what it’s like to be on the outside, to have my ego crushed, to be in pain. Indeed, from time to time I know it still. And I don’t want to be a loser, I don’t want to know that pain, again. Therefore I long for a god to take away my pain, to make me a winner, and to give me the strength to overcome my weaknesses.
Don’t you? I tell so much of my story because I think it is to some extent the story of all of us. Maybe you don’t share my intensity to the same degree, maybe you do, but on some level haven’t you also known the pain of being a loser, don’t you also long for much the same thing as I, to have the pain go away, to be a winner, and to overcome your weaknesses? Surely you aren’t entirely immune to winning, to the way it makes you feel good, the way it feeds your ego? Isn’t there a part of you longs that for, perhaps even implicitly worships, a god of power that will make you strong?
Just as we desire to win in our own individual lives, this desire is also reflected in the lives of our communities. Consider the nations of our world. Reading the newspapers today, I cannot help but think that the nations of our world often act as though they are players in one of my war games. They consolidate their power, they maximize their resources, they carefully consider the risks, and wait for the right moment to act. Sometimes they act with violence towards themselves and others. They are willing to kill for what they believe in. The goal of this game of world politics is of course to win, to be strong and to increase in power. Weakness is unacceptable and failure unforgivable. Rarely does a nation admit that it makes mistakes, or if it does, then the mistakes are dismissed as a surface problem, rather than confessed as indicative of something more profoundly wrong. All too often, it seems, this pursuit of power is in control of the communities rather than they being in control of it. Winning is seen as a goal in and of itself, it feeds the ego of the nation’s citizens. We are so caught up in the game that we even forget to ask why we are playing. The winner changes over time, of course, but the pursuit of power, the game itself, goes on and on. Like us as individuals, all too often, we as nations worship a god of power.
Unfortunately, all too often our addictions as individuals and as communities to winning, to being strong and victorious, and to overcoming our weaknesses, are blessed and endorsed by the church. All too often, the god that is preached in the church is a god whose primary attribute is some form of objective power, a god that almost magically makes our pain go away, a god that makes us strong and successful. All too often, we seek to re-make ourselves in the image of that god. As a result, drunk with our own false sense of power, we rely on the intellectual strength of our argument to seek to convert others to Christianity, forgetting that it is God that converts, not us, and that much more important than the strength of our argument is the quality of our witness. We speak about what it cost God to give us grace, but ignore what it costs us to receive it. We rush through the crucifixion to get to the resurrection, and as a result the grace that we witness to is a cheap grace, a grace that doesn’t do justice to the name.
If we today often long for a god of power, then today’s biblical texts suggest that that is not something new. I think the people on that Palm Sunday so long ago must have shared much of our desire to win, to be strong and victorious. After all, they were living under foreign occupation – their rulers were under the thumb of the Romans. Except for those who had good connections with the Romans, such as the priests, the lives of many of the people were characterized by hardship. They longed for deliverance, for a better life, for a change to the corrupt and oppressive system that exploited them. They longed to have someone take away their pain, to make them winners, and to give them strength.
Hearing the news of Jesus, their hopes rose. At last, someone to deliver them! At last, someone to take the place of the Romans and their lackeys! Their hope overflowed, they had a big party outside the gates of the city, people dropped what they were doing to join in the festivities. Cloaks and branches were spread, enthusiastic chants were raised. “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” Finally, their expectations would be fulfilled.
But of course, Jesus did not fulfill their expectations. Jesus did indeed challenge the corrupt system and its rulers, but not as the people expected. Not with power, not by killing, not by playing the game or taking the place of the Romans. Jesus didn’t deliver them from their pain, he didn’t make them strong, he didn’t make them winners, and before the end of the week, many of these same people would be crying out for his crucifixion for letting them down.
But what Jesus did do was much more important, much more profound, and much more difficult. Jesus witnessed to a different kind of power, a soft power, a power that doesn’t fit into the game, a power that is not based on control, a power that doesn’t impose its will. It is, of course, the power of love.
The second Scripture lesson from Philippians is about this different understanding of power. Most biblical scholars agree that these verses in Philippians were not written by Paul, rather Paul is quoting a Christian hymn that was written and sung even earlier. They are therefore among the oldest verses in the New Testament. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.”
These verses fly in the face of our world’s understanding of power. Another translation I have seen reads that Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped. Something to be grasped -- how different from us, from our grasping ways, from the ways in reach and hold on to power. In contrast, Jesus let it go. God shows God’s power in this – God is willing to let it go, for our sake, for the sake of love.
The love that Jesus embodied does not make the people winners, rather it is a power that accepts us as we are. It is a power that wants to be with us, no matter what. If part of the cost of being with us and loving us is sharing our pain, then so be it. Paul says, “we preach Christ, and Christ crucified,” which is another way of saying, that the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ were not just events that happened two thousand years ago, rather those events tell us something about who God is, they reveal God’s identity. It is not just that God suffered and died in the past tense, rather that in and through Christ God knows what’s it’s like to suffer and die, God knows what’s like to be a slave, as we read in Philippians, God knows what’s like to be a loser, God still knows what its like, suffering and death are in God. As one theologian wrote, “There was a cross in the heart of God long before a cross appeared on Calvary.” (C.S. Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life, p. 232, as quoted in Douglas John Hall, God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross, Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1986, p. 140.)
Christ didn’t take away the people’s pain, he entered into it to be with them in it, and somehow, impossibly, miraculously, Christ’s presence made the pain okay. Christ’s presence made the pain okay because he witnessed to something more powerful, he knew that pain doesn’t have the last word, that there is something more real, more lasting, more true than pain -- love. The power of this love is not threatened by weakness. And unlike the power in our world, it does not come in limited quantities, one does not have it at the expense of someone else, rather it is infinite, it is a gift to everyone. Rather than being willing to kill to achieve its ends, it is willing to suffer and die. As Christians therefore, we believe that if you want to speak about God’s power, you have to speak about God’s love. You have to. God’s love is the source of the only real power that matters, the power that saves us.
At the time of Christ, the world needed to learn about the power of love. We still need to learn about that same power today. The way that we learn about the power of love is not by reading about it, not even by hearing sermons about it, but by doing and being what God calls us to do and be – by having the same mind in us that was in Christ Jesus, as the Philippians hymn states, by doing what Christ did, what Christ called the disciples to do then, and what Christ still calls us to do today – by picking up our crosses and following him, for the sake of our neighbors and even our enemies – for the sake of everyone. Not by avoiding pain and suffering, but by going deeper into it. Not by trying to make ourselves and others into winners, but by accepting people as they are. Not by trying to win the power game, but by breaking the cycle of addiction to winning, by recognizing that our worth does not come from our victories. We too need to follow God into the pain of others and witness to a presence and a power that is larger than our own. Witnessing to the power of love will hurt. Some may even die. Christ did.
But the good news that we know in Christ is that the power of love will not, it does not, it cannot, stay dead. It rises again. “Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
Even as God raised Christ, the promise is that we too will know love’s resurrection power. For the resurrection means that the power of love cannot be stopped. It therefore puts all the other powers of the world to shame. It makes all other strengths look weak. It makes the power games that we play look stupid and insignificant. It breaks our cycle of addiction to winning, and frees us to stop feeding the bottomless pits of our egos. The resurrecting power of this love is not just for life after death, it is for this life, through Christ it is available to us even now. By its transforming power, we become a new creation.

 

Lazarus’ Eulogy – by Lazarus
John 11:1-53
Preached by Pastor Craig Hunter on 13 March 2005

I do not know all the details of what happened. Like you, much of what I know I learned later, long after Jesus had gone, long after He, too, was sealed inside a tomb and then raised to life again.

So I do not pretend to know the how of it. It will simply stand as a miracle as far as I am concerned. But if it’s the “who” you want to know about, if it’s renewal and resurrection of your own dead and empty soul with which you are concerned, if it’s something . . . someone . . . greater than your life, someone everlasting and eternal and forever capable of raising you, then I have someone I would like for you to meet . . . then I want you to hear what He did for me . . . then I invite you to listen and see what He already offers you.

I am Lazarus, the one of whom the Scripture speaks, the one who Jesus raised. I know most of you have heard of me before, but few of you, I’ll venture, have heard my point of view. You have read the story or heard it preached. But seldom do I get to tell my side. Seldom does one get a chance to give his or her own eulogy. But since you invited me I would like to give you my version of the story – “Lazarus’ eulogy – by Lazarus” it might be called.

If that sounds preposterous, please forgive me. But my suspicion is that if you hear the story as I experienced it, if you know the Christ as I have come to know Him, you will come to understand that my eulogy is the eulogy of every struggling Christian.

For days, weeks really, I had been ill, with what I don’t know. I do know that I could feel myself slowly . . . gradually . . becoming very, very weak. But even more than my failing physical condition, I also knew that my life, my soul, was sick and failing, too, failing not so much by the world’s standards, but failing, sinful, sick in my own eyes and in the eyes of God. Maybe you’ve not had the disease that some would call the “sickness of the soul.”

Maybe you’ve been spared the death of the spirit, the lack of purpose, the sense of the meaningless of it all. If so, count yourself among the lucky ones. But that was not the way it was for me. For me, life lacked a sense of purpose; it was devoid of meaning. Off I went to work each day to do the job for which I had been well-schooled; faithfully, dutifully, I brought the paycheck home. But why? For what? For whom? Did the drudgery of it, the shallow pleasures it would buy, the small success I sometimes had really add up to anything of value in the end?

Did they count for anything. . . for anyone . . . when all was said and done? (Were they worth the hopelessness, the futility, that I felt?) I guess you could say I was having a midlife crisis. That is where I was long before my physical health began to fail, that is who I was before I met the one they call the Christ; that is, what I mean when I say that my soul . . . my life . . . was dead. Indeed, I find it rather amazing now to hear how my sister, Martha, cautioned Jesus as He opened my tomb. “By this tine he stinks,” she said, and though she was describing the condition of my body, she could have just as well been describing the condition of my soul.

Then I met Jesus. Really, it was my sisters, Mary and Martha, who knew Him first. It was they who introduced Him to me. I don’t remember exactly when or how the meeting happened, for there was nothing particularly remarkable about Him, I thought at first. But gradually He and I and the four of us became the best of friends. He would visit us in our house in Bethany and make Himself a kind of home away from home.

We talked a lot and I came to both respect and fear Him, respect because He seemed so in touch with God, it was so clear to me that He was living, doing, being what and who He was meant to live and be. And yet fear because I saw in Him all that I knew that I was not, fear because I heard Him talk about going to Jerusalem and about the cross, fear because I wondered what it would mean to me if I were to follow Him. I think in some way he was calling me to grow, to trust, to risk stepping out of my comfort zone to become who I was created to be. And I was afraid.

I have known many people not unlike myself . . . people who have heard of Jesus as they’ve grown up in Sunday School, know of Him in a casual, abstract, curious sort of way – from a distance, so to speak – but who do not know Him close up. Perhaps they prefer it that way, they would rather keep Jesus at a distance, so they can stay in control, so they don’t have to change. People think of Him as a good teacher or a moral person or an interesting character to learn about but not someone to relate to as a friend . . . not as one to rescue them from the tombs in which they live . . . not as one with the power to renew and to bring new life to them. “I am the resurrection and the life,” I heard Jesus say many, many times. But I did not really fathom what He meant; I did not know what Easter means. Not until He became my friend . . not until He resurrected me****. . . not until He reached inside my tomb and brought me new life in Him. Now He is not just the resurrection and the life, He is my resurrection and my life, the one who has rescued me.

But perhaps I am getting ahead of my story. Please excuse me if I do. But it is hard to remember now how it was before Jesus came to me. My life stunk, that much I know. Then we became friends and I came to respect Him and to care for Him very much. And yet, still, I did not fully comprehend who He was and how much He cared for me; I did not appreciate that His love had the power to penetrate my tomb, the dark prison of my soul. And I think in a lot of ways that is how many people are. They think of Jesus in the abstract but not as someone meant for them; they think of Him as someone to learn about but not as one to rescue them.

When I died, body and soul, all of me, I was laid inside a tomb, a hollow hole of rock carved inside the hill. Today, tourists visit where they put me and for a few dollars they crawl inside the tomb. They joke and laugh and take pictures of each other peeking out. Enterprising Palestinians sell Coca-Cola across the street. But back then, when I was laid to rest, that’s not the way it was. Back then, Mary and Martha were quite upset. They grieved and mourned and carried on, as did my friends in the neighborhood.

When word reached Jesus of my death, I am told, He delayed two days before He came to me and over the years, people have made much of that fact that He did not come right away. What they don’t realize, though, is that Jesus’ decision to come to Bethany was a decision that meant His death, His decision to bring new life to me was a decision that cost Him His. After all, those in power were out to get Him, and to come to Bethany, as close to Jerusalem as it was, was to walk to His own sure and certain grave; it was to step closer to the cross.

No wonder He delayed. No wonder He thought twice before He came to rescue me. He know the cost of bringing life to me was to yield His own and yet He was prepared to pay the price. Is it any wonder I have come to love Him so?

At my death, I learned later, Jesus wept. Real tears rolled down His eyes. Imagine Almighty God Himself wrapped in human flesh, grieving . . crying for me. . . His own heart broken by my death. Imagine that! Imagine Him as a friend who cries with you, who surrounds you with His love, and whose love knows no bounds . . . and will not let you go. Imagine Him as enduring death for your sake and for mine so that we might be raised to life again. Is it any wonder He is my resurrection and my life?

I hesitate now to give you the final installment of my eulogy because I do not want you to misunderstand. I would call it: “I believe. Help my unbelief.” It really comes from my sisters’ response to Jesus question: “Do you believe this?” What would you say now if I asked you that? “Do you believe this? Do you believe that my friend Jesus raised me to new life and that He will do the same for you?” In her response, Martha confesses Jesus as Lord. “Yes, Lord, I believe you are the Christ, the Son of God,” she said.

And maybe her response can be a response for us. For too many people have read my story or heard it preached and gotten hung up on how it happened. They want some evidence, some proof, that I was brought to life again, proof that will take their doubts away. But, of course, proof, evidence, of the sort they want, is not something I can give.

All I can give is the witness of my own life; all I can offer is the testimony that I was once dead and Jesus raised me up. Yet none of that, I realize, counts as proof for you. None of that can take your doubts away. None of that will do for you. But what will do . . . or rather who . . who I can offer is my friend. He is here now, even in this place. As a community, we are his body. I can urge you to get to know Him. Besides, that’s what or rather He’s who . . . my story . . my eulogy . . . is all about.

It is not about how what happened happened.
Like I said at the beginning, it will simply stand as a miracle as far as I’m concerned. Nor is it really about me. I’m not the important character in the story. Jesus is. He is who the story is about. He is the one who my sisters and I came to know and trust. “I believe in Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God.” That is who I believe in. This one conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead, and buried, who rose to life again – this one made my life worthwhile. This one set me on a sacred course. In and by His presence I was filled with life again.

So it is not in creeds and formulas, but in Him that I place my trust. It is not proof or explanation, but Him, I offer you. To be with Christ --- to be in Him and He in you – is life, everlasting life. That is who I offer you.

So say not about Lazarus that he was a good man. Say only that he was loved by Jesus. Say not about Lazarus that “if there is a heaven, he deserves to be there.” Say only that by himself his life had a stench to it. Say not about Lazarus that his faith saved him. Say only about him that Jesus, his Savior, did, and say it is that same Savior that he offers you.”        

Wrestling With God

Preached by Pastor Craig on Sunday 6th February, 2005

It was the climax of my wrestling career. All of my previous matches had led to this one. There I stood in one corner, in shorts and a T-shirt, weighing in at about 140 pounds. In the other corner stood my big brother in the fraternity, Michael. If you have trouble picturing it, I have it on videotape. We’d wrestled many times before, but this was the climax. This was the big time, people were watching. This was videotaped Jell-O wrestling. For those of you who don’t know, Jell-O is a kind of gelatin, and wrestling in it is like wrestling in a huge put of jelly.
Well, shortly after the match started, I was reminded of certain important facts concerning Michael. Number one, he weighs fifty pounds more than I do. Number two, when he graduated from high school, he was second in his state in wrestling. Undaunted, however, I quickly settled into my own particular wrestling pattern, which I like to call the “hang on for dear life as your body is abused in the warm, slimy Jell-O” technique. I don’t remember how exactly the match turned out. I’m sure we both were covered in red Jell-O – but the image I have in my brain is of clutching tightly to Michael’s back as he repeatedly shoved me into the Jell-O. Like I said, I have it on videotape for anyone who wants to see.
Now, Michael isn’t God (though in my mind, he may as well have been for the purposes of that match) and I am not Jacob, and my translation of the Hebrew text doesn’t mention any Jell-O, but I wonder if in today’s Biblical text Jacob didn’t experience something of what I experienced. Rolling around in the dust, facing a superior and dominating opponent, every muscle of his body aching, using who knows what tactics as he refused to give up, probably just holding on out of sheer desperation, and after the fatigue set in, maybe just holding on out of habit. This was the most important wrestling match of his life, the wrestling match to end all wrestling matches, and if he couldn’t win, then at least, by God, he wasn’t about to lose.

I had looked forward to my wrestling match. I had known it was coming and I had mentally prepared for it. Jacob, on the other hand, was not afforded the luxury of any prior preparation. Jacob was planning to meet his brother Esau the next day and that thoughts dominated his mind. He hadn’t seen Esau since he had tricked Esau and stolen his father Isaac’s blessing. Esau had been planning to kill him when they had last parted, and for all Jacob knew, Esau might try to kill him tomorrow. Jacob had sent gifts ahead to appease Esau, but would they have any effect?
Needless to say, Jacob had other things on his mind when he sent his family and possessions ahead of him and settled down alone by the Jabbok River.
And suddenly, without any warning, God was there. There were no introductions, no “In this corner, weighing 210 pounds . . . ,” – no, there were no words spoken, they were just suddenly wrestling.
Now, part of me thinks Jacob was a fool – why did he send everyone ahead so that he would be by himself? I mean, coming from the guy who tricked his brother out of a blessing and pulled the wool over Laban’s eyes, you would think that Jacob would have had more sense than to leave himself alone and vulnerable like that. It’s as though he was asking to be jumped. I know if it were me, I would have surrounded myself with any source of security I could find – my family, my possessions, whatever.
Isn’t that what most of us do? We surround ourselves with relationships and possessions and activities to avoid the Jabboks of our lives, those spots where God might meet us and wrestle with us. And yet, the real Jabboks are within us, in the dark and scary spots of vulnerability in our lives that we try so hard to cover up. Even as God encountered Jacob in the midst of his fear about his upcoming meeting with Esau, God encounters us in the midst of our fears, in the dark and scary nights within ourselves. WE don’t initiate the encounter – we may not even want it – but we don’t have any choice in the matter. Something happens to us, our lives are disrupted, and suddenly we find ourselves wrestling with God.

Our wrestling matches with God take many forms. Someone we know dies and we are confronted by the scary thought of our mortality. A relationship breaks apart and we wonder how we can go on. We read a certain book that fundamentally challenges our way of looking at the world and suddenly we feel lost and alone as we begin to question everything we have previously believed. Our carefully formulated plans for the future crash into a wall, and we wonder where to turn.
Something happens, and suddenly we are wrestling with God.

In my own life, I think back to the spring and summer of 1998. I injured my knee playing soccer that spring, and what should have been a routine arthroscopic surgery turned into a nightmare. Suddenly my life was no longer the same. After two surgeries, my leg would not straighten. My doctor said that the worst case scenario was that I would never walk again. Most likely I would never be able to straighten my leg again. I would walk with a limp – no more running, no more dancing, no more sports. I felt like I was losing a huge part of myself. How could I go on in the face of such loss?

How did Jacob manage to go on, how did he manage to hold on to God? Where did he find the strength? The passage doesn’t say. It doesn’t mention Jacob’s strength at all. Perhaps it wasn’t a matter of physical strength, perhaps it was more a matter of desperation. Perhaps Jacob didn’t know what else to do. Jacob was tired, he had been wrestling all night – but somehow he held on. Even when he experienced the pain of having his hip pulled out of socket, he managed to hold on. Why? I suppose because he had nothing to lose, he needed to hold on to something, and if that something was merely the hope that some goodness might come from the blessing of a strange man – well, that was at still something.
What does it mean for us to hold on? I suppose it means maintaining our relationship with God – even when the night is dark, even when we are in pain, even when we foresee no hope of victory.
Because we all have a unique relationship with God, holding on, maintaining that relationship will look different for each of us.
For victims of racism and oppression, it means not giving in to hate but affirming that God loves even their oppressors.
For those who struggle with their appearance, it means looking in the mirror and affirming that they are fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image.
For people who are unemployed and who struggle with their own sense of worth, it means getting out of bed in the morning with the hope that their life still has a purpose.

For Christ, it meant crying out to God from the cross even when it seemed that God was nowhere to be found.
What does it holding on to God mean for you? What does it mean for you now, here, in this time and place?

This story of Jacob wrestling with God explains where Israel got its name. According to the story, Israel means “the one who strives with God.” Notice that the word ‘Israel’ does not mean, “God’s chosen people” or “people who worship God.” Rather, Israel, the people of God, are the people who strive with God, the people who wrestle with God. Perhaps we best worship God when we strive with God, when we hold on and struggle and don’t let go, when we refuse to accept easy answers that don’t do justice to the questions.
As the church, we are called to be a community where wrestlers are welcome. And we are all wrestlers, whether we know it or not. There is no indication in the beginning of the story that Jacob knew that he was wrestling God, and many of us, both inside and outside the church, do not know when we wrestle God. We often only recognize it after the fact, when the night is over and a new day has dawned.

Jacob managed to hold on to God but the story invites us to look to the nation of Israel, named after Jacob. Unlike Jacob, Israel repeatedly let go of God. It let go of God and turned its back on God, looking instead to other idols. Not once, not twice, but again and again and again.
Like Israel, we, too let go of God – when we don’t pray for our enemies and people we don’t like, when we shut out our own pain and the pain of the world, when we justify our complacency, when we box people into black and white categories and fail to respect the image of God in them, when we fail to love our neighbors and ourselves. It is hard to hold on to God, it hurts, it crucifies even, and I would be lying to you if I told you otherwise.
And sometimes we let go.
I know I did. I did not have the strength of Jacob. It was just too hard, I was just too weak. A third surgery for which I had high hopes was unsuccessful. The staff infection spread to my bone, where it might remain for the rest of my life. I experienced the worst insomnia of my life. I couldn’t walk on the beach, I was cut off from my community of friends, I stopped writing in my journal. After not writing for a month and a half, I managed to write one day, “A part of me is scared to write in here, because I see this journal and the writing process itself as a journey into the self, and for now at least I am scared of what I will find inside myself. Darkness – the darkness of pain, fear, and uncertainty.”
Those were without doubt the darkest days of my life. I will never forget walking through the house on my crutches one day, alone, as I thought to myself, my God, my God, this is a mistake, a terrible mistake, this trial is too much for me, I don’t have the strength to survive it, it was meant for someone else, this is too hard for me.
I could not face the probability that I would have a major limp for the rest of my life. Instead I laid in bed all day, not wanting to face a future in which I couldn’t walk, not having the faith that God could provide meaning and joy even in the seeming darkness of that future. Some days I let go of God and gave in to despair, not wanting to be alive but wanting to be numb, just wanting it to be over, not having the strength to fight anymore.
And what happened? What happened when Israel let go of God, turning to false idols and breaking the covenant? What happens when our strength fails us, when we too let go of God?
What happened was that God never forgot them – again and again, God raised up a judge, a prophet, a king. God would not let them go.
And that is what happens with us – God does not let us go, God holds on to us. This is the good news – that when we don’t have the strength to hold on to God, God holds on to us. That is the only reason any of us are here today. And that is what it means to be a Christian – it means to look to Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion and to hear God saying through them, “I will not let you go, I will never let you go, even if I have to die, even if I have to be crucified, even if I have to descend into hell. My love for you is stronger than that and I will never let you go.”
Looking back, I know that God did not let go of me. Even now, years later, I cannot but be humbled when I think of the support I received. The countless people who visited me in the hospital, the churches that prayed for me, old friends that I hadn’t seen in years who called me – in some way, I could not have survived without them.
I remember one day in particular, a few weeks after the third surgery, as my father and I waited in the office of the fourth doctor that I saw. I would eventually see six. And as we sat there and waited, each moment feeling like an eternity, waiting with what seemed like my life held in the balance, I remember my father breaking the heavy silence to say, “I know that this is hard for you. It is hard for me too. But I want you to know that whatever happens, we will get through this. I don’t care how long it takes. But we are not going to let this thing define you, there is more to you than this.”
Perhaps what was most powerful about that statement was his use of the word, “we.” It is amazing that such a small, two-letter word could have such power to heal, reminding me, as did all of the visits and prayers and calls of others, that I was not alone. Whether they knew it or not, my family and friends witnessed to a presence that was greater than their own, the very presence of God, a God that was there holding on to me, giving me strength when I had none of my own. And I was humbled, for I have never felt to blessed in my life.

Know, then, that God will not let us go. Let this knowledge sit with you. The knowledge that God holds onto us gives us the strength to hold on to each other, and to God. Our experience of God’s love empowers us to love. And because we know that God will not let us go, we don’t have to be afraid anymore – there are no places, no Jabboks, there is nothing that can separate us from God. Our vulnerabilities and weaknesses no longer have to be something we run away from, something we try to hide from ourselves, from each other, and from God, rather they can be something we love and accept because of God’s love and acceptance that we taste through them. You see, it is through our wounds that we know the healing power of God’s love. Indeed, by the grace of God, perhaps someday we will be able to see wrestling with God not merely as a means to a blessing, but as a blessing in and of itself, for it brings contact with the love of God, even the painful, crucifying love of God that pulls our hip out of socket.
Jacob walked away from his encounter as a changed man – he had a limp and he would never be the same. Wrestling with God leaves its mark on us. We all have some form of limp that we carry around within us and we will never be the same. My knee will never be what it once was, but I praise God for it, not because of the knee itself, but because of the love of God that I have known through it, a love that has burned me and scarred me and yet healed me more powerfully than anything I have ever known.
 

Enough!

Preached by Pastor Craig on Sunday 14th November, 2004

Tabgha.  Tabgha.  I doubt many of you have ever heard of it, and I probably wouldn’t have either if I hadn’t been there.  It is the spot where, according to church tradition, the events of today’s Biblical passage in Mark took place.  I have been there a few times, most recently when I was in Israel in April of this year.  It is on the northern side of the Sea of Galilee, in the area where Jesus began his ministry.  The guidebook says, “Generally considered to be the most appropriately beautiful and serene of the Christian holy places in the country (Lonely Planet, 1996)” an observation certainly confirmed by my experience there.  Nearby, a bit further set back from the sea, is the mount of beatitudes, where it is believed Jesus gave the Sermon on the Mount – a mount from which on a clear day, you can see almost all of the Sea of Galilee, and the rolling hills of the Golan besides.  From Tabgha itself, set lower down, the close proximity of the sea, with its small waves lapping against the shore through the small bushes in the water, gives a feeling of peace. 

            Today there is a church there, a church that, unlike some of the other holy sites in Israel and Palestine, actually seems pregnant with the spirit of God.  Tourists wander in and quickly become silent, wandering forward to the altar to see the famous mosaic.  The well-preserved mosaic is probably the most beautiful in the country.  It dates back to the 5^th century – its most famous part depicts two fish and a basket of loaves.  The discovery of the mosaic tells archeologists that from an early date this was the celebrated site of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, as the church is called.

            I imagine that on that day, almost two thousand years ago, Jesus felt a bit what I have been feeling lately, a bit of what we all feel from time to time – the need to get away.  Mark writes that the apostles and Jesus “went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.”  But just as the worries of life so often seem to follow us, so did the people follow Jesus.  And in what is certainly one of the most heart-warming passages of the Bible, Mark writes that Jesus, “had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

            Jesus proceeds to teach them and apparently they were so engrossed in his message that the time flew by before they even realized it – I’m sure it was just like during the sermons here at Tokyo Union Church, when you hang on every word the pastor says.  Hah!

The disciples realize that they have a major crowd control problem on their hands.  This was before the days of outdoor hotdog or takoyaki stands, and obviously the crowd had forgotten to bring their o-bento boxes.  As a typical day in that climate, I imagine it had been quite hot as well.  So what do you do with thousands of hungry people sitting outside?  Having fed the spirit, how would they feed the body?

Well, upon the orders of Jesus, the disciples went to see how many loaves they had.  Mark’s gospel doesn’t tell us exactly where the food came from, but I imagine the disciples going out into the crowd to gather what food they could find.  I imagine them fanning out in all directions, gingerly stepping over and through the people, crying out in parched voices, “Does anybody have something to eat?”  It is sort of the opposite of what you might encounter in a modern day sporting event, where the vendors cry out, “Get your hot dogs, hamburgers.  Ice cold beer!”  Rather, instead of selling food, the disciples are gathering it.  “Does anybody have some bread?  Fish?  Anyone?  We need more folks, don’t hold back!  Come on, don’t be shy, give more!  Yes, I’m talking to you – you, do you have anything you can give – cough it up!”

You can hear the tremor of anxiety in the disciples’ voices as they increasingly realized how little food was available.  It was obvious to them that five loaves and two fishes were not going to solve the crowd control problem, and they were worried about what to do.  Maybe they went out into the crowd another time, thinking perhaps that there was somehow some food that they had missed, thinking perhaps that some people were holding out and secretly keeping food to themselves.

In this stewardship season here at Tokyo Union Church, I imagine that the church is somewhat like the disciples, going out amidst the members and friends of the congregation, calling on them to share what they have.  For us, the issue is not so much finding food to feed our bellies, but finding other resources to meet our perceived needs.  Those needs are many.  We need people to lead Worship Child Care, even if for only one Sunday.  We need people to come to and to pray for and to participate in the new Celebration worship service that we started again last week.  We need encouragers, who say to a Sunday school teacher, “I appreciate you teaching my child,” or to the choir members, “Thank you for the time, the gifts, and the joy that you share with us faithfully.”  We need people to give money so that we can afford to buy new curriculum for our various Christian education programs, so that we can support outreach projects in this city and around the world, and so that we can pay the salaries of the office staff, and yes, even the pastors.  We need leaders who have a passion for youth to help plan and lead youth programs.  We need people who have a burning for social justice to prevent us from becoming too focused on ourselves.  We need people to help us identify and communicate our needs.  We need people to pray for our world, for this church, and for the people in it.

In my mind’s eye, I see Paul Fukuda and the Stewardship Ministry Team fanning out through the congregation, crying out, “Does anybody have something they can share?  Time?  Talent?  Money?  Anyone?  You there – yes, you --  can you be a substitute Sunday school teacher?  And you – can you share more of your money with the church ot help pay for the material for the home groups we will be starting soon? 

Unlike the disciples who presumably used baskets to collect the loaves and fish, Tokyo Union Church uses pledge sheets to gather and organize the gifts of time, talent, and money that the congregation shares with us.  That is why it is important for us to look closely at the stewardship packet, to read about the needs of the congregation, and to consider the gifts that we have to share.

Even as I imagine the disciples calling out for more, I cannot help but be conscious that for some of us, perhaps even for all of us at times, we don’t seem to have much more to give.  We have already handed over the loaves that we have, and when we hear a call to give more, it sounds and feels suspiciously like a call to burn-out.  Perhaps at such times, the best gift we can give is the gift of discernment, the gift of knowing when to say “no,” the gift of letting go and recognizing that it is not all up to us. 

But for many of us, and probably all of us at times, the greater problem is that we hold back, we don’t share, we keep to ourselves.  Our ears have almost become deaf to calls to share what we have.  Consciously or unconsciously, we cling to the bread and fish that we think belong to us.  It is as though this selfishness is a virus, and we are all infected.

Why?  To the extent that we have and don’t share, whether here in the church or elsewhere, why do we keep to ourselves?  Where does this virus come from?

We call this virus “sin” and I suppose we are infected from many sources.  We get it from the society in which we live, where we learn that if you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself, an ideal that in its extreme idolizes individualism at the expense of the community.  Personal independence must always be held in tension with community values, and the community suffers whenever independence becomes an idol.  When we see ourselves primarily as individuals instead of members of a community, we tend to measure our actions primarily in terms of personal gain.  Why should I share my bread?  What do I have to gain from it?  Don’t I just end up with less bread?

The irony here is that the more we hold on to what we have, the less we end up with.  The rich man has to spend so much time and energy guarding his castle and his treasure, that in some deeper sense, the riches have made him poorer.  Sometimes I feel that I spend so much energy defending the boundaries of my personal time, that I end up being less able to enjoy that time.  Do you ever feel that way?

This individualism and impulse to hoard that we get from our society would not have such power over us if it didn’t resonate deeply with something already within us, with our own personal sin.  At the heart I think the problem is our anxiety over the future, which is a manifestation of our lack of trust in God.  The “If you want to do something right, do it yourself” ideology breeds self-reliance, not a reliance on God.  Much of our identity as a community and as individuals is built on fear.  Faster than the growth of our prosperity is the growth of our fear that we will not have enough.  We feel we need more and more things to guard against the uncertainties of the future in an uncertain world, more time to ourselves to recharge our energy and to always keep our options open.  Too much is not enough, our fear saps our strength, and our lives are spiritually impoverished.

It is hard to cast out that fear.  The disciples must have felt a bit of that anxiety as they looked at the little food that they had and compared it with the great need to feed thousands of people.  I confess that I often feel that in my own life.  And in this stewardship season, I confess that I think it is also present in the church as well.  We look at the great needs of this church, and compare that with resources that often do not seem to be adequate, and it is hard to stop that fear and anxiety from creeping in.  Yes, the church, even this church is an imperfect place, a broken institution. 

I think most of us are aware of that.  I think most of us see the ways that this church doesn’t function quite the way we would hope.  It is not just that this church is filled with imperfect individuals, rather the church community itself is imperfect, the whole structure in which we as individuals relate to each other in this place is imperfect.  Not only this church, but the entire history of the church – look at all the times throughout church history in which the church has been inactive, or too self-absorbed, or complicit in injustices in our society and our world. Indeed, this continues to this day, even in this place. From one perspective, then, one could say that the history of the church is a history of falling short, a history of not living up to its promise.

Perhaps because of the broken nature of the church, I think on some level it is difficult for us to see this place as much different from a charity, or a school, or a social institution.  We therefore see the church as something external to ourselves.  Sometimes I wonder if we don’t see this church as a fill-up station, where we come to have our own particular needs and desires met – a desire to see some other foreigners, a desire to hear more English, a desire to provide our children with good moral instruction, and so on.  I am not saying these desires are bad in and of themselves, quite the contrary, but if that is all that we see in this place, I think we are missing something – we are missing the forest for the trees.  We are failing to see that something deeper is at stake here, something that touches upon us existentially.  To the extent that this understanding underlies our relationship with the church, it is no wonder that we ask, “Why should I give to this place?  Why should I hand over my bread, whether that be my time, my talents, or my money?

I must confess that I wonder that myself sometimes.  Indeed, I have been wondering that a lot lately.  I feel that I know the church unusually well.  I grew up in the church, my father was and is a pastor, and now I work for the church full-time.  Yet, in spite of, or perhaps even because of that, I too have my doubts about the church.  Indeed, of all of my friends from seminary who went into the ordained ministry, I was the most reluctant.  Sometimes I wonder if I will be in the ministry 20 years from now, or even five.  One of the things that I have learned here during my first year of ministry, or rather re-learned at a deeper level, is that the church is a broken place.  That realization breaks my heart. 

Sometimes when the disappointment lays heavily upon me, the spirit of God works within me and makes me turn to God.  This week, as it has on a few occasions in the past, that took the form of me going back to listen once again to the tape of my ordination service.  I asked the questions, “Why am I here?  What am I doing?  Why are we here?  What are we as a church doing in this place?”

And the answer that I got, the voice that I heard was God saying, “My grace is sufficient.  My love is enough.”

That is the message of today’s Biblical text.  Jesus blesses the small amount of food, and when they spread it around among the thousands of people there, it is somehow

enough.  Indeed, it is more than enough, for there were 12 basketfuls of food left over.  This miracle witnesses to the power of grace to sustain us, to provide us nourishment, the most important nourishment there is.  God’s grace is enough – it was enough for thousands of people that afternoon in Tabgha, and it is enough for us today. 

            God is saying to us today, as individuals and as a community, “My grace is sufficient.  My love is enough.”  In a world that makes us feel needy, in a world in which we never seem to have enough time or enough money, God answers the biggest need that we have – the need for unconditional love.  Recognizing that God answers that need removes any cause for anxiety.  Perfect love casts out fear.

            Sometimes we are reminded of that in places when we least expect it.  Spending time with people who are dying with dignity can teach us that we have enough time because that all life is a gift.  Spending time with people much poorer than ourselves can teach us that we have enough stuff and that it is relationships, not things, that give our lives meaning.  I pray especially this day for the members of the Philippines mission trip, that their experience would renew within them the conviction that God’s love is enough, and that they would inspire us upon their return.

            In answer to our questions of why we are here, what we are doing, and why we should give to the church, God says, My grace is sufficient, which is another way of saying, “It’s not about you, it is about something that is so much bigger and more blessed than you, it is about love.”  The problem with our questions is that they start in the wrong place, with ourselves, and in that sense the questions reflect our self-centeredness. 

            Before it is about anything else, stewardship is not about what we give or what we don’t give.  Nor is stewardship at its heart about what the church is or is not, or what it does or doesn’t need.  Rather, at its heart, stewardship is about the recognition that God’s grace is enough.  And if the story of the church is to some extent the story of an imperfect institution that is constantly falling short, then it is much more the story of a God who is nevertheless faithful, a God who even and in spite of ourselves, has sustained us throughout the eons and is still sustaining us now, a story of a God whose love is so big that it feeds everyone and still overflows. 

            During the next week, as you take home the stewardship packet and pray over it, I am asking you to do one thing.  One thing.  Spend some time meditating on the fact that God’s love is enough.  Let that knowledge infuse you, let it seep into you, breathe it in.  I don’t know what each of you individually faces in your lives, nor do I know all of what our church faces, but I do know that God’s grace is sufficient.  God’s love relieves anxiety and casts out fear. 

            When I meditate on that fact, and I mean really spend some time feeling that truth, I cannot help but feel that a feeling of joy starts to well up within me.  I feel blessfully humbled and moved to tears, good tears. And as my father said to me when he commissioned me at my ordination service, “The world needs your joy, so give it to them.”  That is true for all of us as well – we are all ministers of Christ, and more than anything else, more than it needs your time or your talent or your money, this church and our world need your joy, the joy that comes from knowing God’s love.  This stewardship season is a time to remember that joy.  If you feel that you have lost that joy, then take some time, and look for it, and pray to God, and wait.  God will give it to you again.  God will feed you to overflowing.

The  Gravity of Grace

Preached by Pastor Craig Hunter at TUC on October 17^th, 2004

I spend a lot of time listening to music, as I walk from home to work, or ride the subway, or at home while cooking or cleaning.  I spend that time thinking about all sorts of things – sometimes I think about what I need to do, sometimes I pray, sometimes I think about the sermon I need to write, sometimes I am too numb or tired to think about much of anything.  Well, recently I was listening to some classical music on my stereo.  And strangely enough, by some weird idiosyncrasy perhaps peculiar to preachers’ minds, I thought of the Ephesians text for today. 

            If this text were a piece of classical music, I wondered, how would it sound?

            “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived,”  this is dark, heavy music, you will listen in vain for a melody here, this sounds more like a dirge. As someone who played the cello as a youth, this is music played heavily on the lower-pitched G and C strings.  Listen as the tone just keeps descending, going deeper and deeper.  “following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient.”   And then the music hits bottom, I imagine only a few, slow, monotonously repetitive notes of the bass as Paul concludes, “All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else.”  The music, like the lives of the people Paul is describing, has become all too lifeless, it is a dreary funeral song.  Do you hear it?

            You see, Paul was not pulling any punches as he summed up the condition of people’s lives in the absence of God’s grace.  They were not just spiritually sick, they were spiritually dead.  This death had been brought about by the usual human cause – sin.  Without a living relationship with God, these men and women had simply “followed the course of the world.”  In other words, given the way the world works, it is all too natural to be caught in the web of sin that slowly sucks the life out of us.  Indeed, no one is immune.  Paul writes, “All of us once lived” as captives to evil, living for “the passions of our flesh, following the desires of the flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath.”  Do not read this merely as a condemnation of sexual appetites and physical pleasures.  Paul here is condemning an entire way of life, a self-indulgent way of life in which body and mind are completely absorbed, a life in which one does whatever one wants without regard for anyone or anything else.

            Paul would know.  After all, I suspect Paul is speaking a bit from personal experience here.  Reading between the lines of Acts and Paul’s own writings, before his conversion, Paul was a self-righteous man.  He had fed his ego by the power he had acquired by persecuting the relatively powerless bands of Christians that had arisen in the years after Christ’s resurrection. 

            Nor do we have to look a few thousand years in the past to find examples of self-absorbent lifestyles.  Look at the lives of many of the rich and powerful in our world.  Look at how the salaries of corporate CEOs, professional athletes, and movie stars have gotten out of hand, and look at how few of them exhibit any kind of lasting commitment to any deeper cause.  Or look at ourselves.  Look at how wasteful we are. Look at how the those of us in industrialized countries consume far more than our proportion of the world’s resources.  Look at how I can go to the store tonight and eat almost anything I want, probably without giving a moment’s thought to the 2 billion people on this earth, one-third of the world’s population, who live on less than two dollars a day.  Look at how our society is increasingly becoming one in which we are taught to expect low-cost, instantaneous happiness.  This sentiment is well-expressed in a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip in which Calvin exclaims “Happiness isn’t good enough for me!  I demand euphoria!”

            The self-absorbent person is always reaching for the next thing to satisfy him or her, he or she is engaged in a never-ending search for instantaneous euphoria, it is almost like a drug addict looking for the next high.  And as one constantly reaches for the that next hit, one loses touch with the loving relationships that ground us.  It makes me think of someone who reaches out so much, that they lose touch with the earth, they start to float off into space.  They enter into an environment in which the force of gravity grows weaker and weaker.  And while there is the initial thrill of finding oneself capable of flying and floating freely in three dimensions, the increasing absence of gravity makes it more and more difficult to complete a host of tasks.

            Think of astronauts in space.  Everything has to be nailed down, self-contained, and sealed shut or else it will drift away.  Even basic items such as pens had to be re-designed so that they don’t depend on gravity to deliver their ink.  And even the most simple tasks become difficult – how do you get the toothpaste to stay on the toothbrush?  The atmosphere of zero gravity is one in which astronauts have to re-learn even the most basic of tasks, it is an atmosphere in which nothing can be taken for granted.

            Our society is in danger of becoming more and more an atmosphere of zero morality, an atmosphere in which everything is permissible, an atmosphere in which we are forced to re-learn how to relate to each other in the absence of moral norms.  Family structures break down.  Economic boundaries expand for the platinum-card set, while they contract for those who see their pensions cut.  In my home country of the United States, basic health insurance becomes a luxury that over 40 million Americans cannot afford, while the rising cost of drugs becomes almost too much for many of the elderly.  Here in Japan, a latent racism exists against foreigners, particularly poor immigrants, and the effectiveness of Japanese foreign aid ranks last in a survey last year of the world’s 23 richest countries.  We turn a blind eye to the injustices in our society and our world.  We focus on ourselves instead.  We strive to be free from regret, free from the claim of anyone or anything upon them.  Sometimes we assert our rights so forcefully that we ignore our responsibilities.  We achieve self-sufficiency only to find that we are lonely.  In an atmosphere of zero morality, like one of zero gravity, there is nothing to count on, nothing to hold onto, nothing to keep you from floating away. 

            For the astronaut, one of the most dangerous moments is the space walk when they step outside of the safety of the shuttle.  If the astronaut’s tether breaks, they drift away into the limitless of space, with nothing holding them back.  Similarly, in our pursuit of our self-absorbent lifestyles, nothing holds us back from the abyss of despair and nothingness.

            The greatest lie perpetuated by those who are adrift in this zero-morality atmosphere is that they are “free.”  Yet freedom is not the ability to do anything you want.  Does the freedom to never establish a loving, committed relationship bring happiness?  Does the freedom to destroy one’s mind with alcohol and drugs bring contentment?  Does the freedom to turn our backs on the problems of our neighbors give us joy?

            To live in this atmosphere is not to be free, rather it is to drift away from the relationships with God and each other that ground us and give our lives meaning.  The tragedy of this drifting existence is compounded by the fact that those who realize that they are drifting away all too often reach for the wrong tethers.  They reach for possessions – they tell themselves that they will feel better when they have the newest car, a freshly remodeled kitchen, or whatever device the newest technology brings down the pipe.  And while it may be true that money can improve the quality of your misery, it cannot bring happiness.  Others reach for new knowledge, thinking that if they just knew more, if they just had deeper insight into the human condition, contentment would inevitably follow.  Think of all the self-help books, think of the rise of New Age religion. 

Others reach for power, thinking that once they get the next promotion, everything will be perfect, that will solve all of their important problems, they will feel good about themselves.

            In such a context, the task of the church is not to sit on the sidelines bemoaning the thinning of the moral air, or to watch as we drift further and further away.  Rather, first of all, our task is to say that these other tethers don’t work, wealth, knowledge and power aren’t grounded in anything that is life-giving.  The words of a Christmas card put it well in saying, “If our greatest need had been information, God would have sent us an educator.  If our greatest need had been technology, God would have sent us a scientist.  If our greatest need had been money, God would have sent us an economist.  But since our greatest need was for love, God sent God’s own self, even Jesus Christ.”

            That is the church’s greatest task – to witness to God’s grace in Jesus Christ.  Paul talks about this in verse 4.  “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” 

            Those two little words, “but God,” they symbolize a revolution, God breaks into our condition, introducing new life, new love, a different way of being in the world.  Listen to some of the other “But Gods” in the Bible:

“The patriarchs, jealous of Joseph, sold him into Egypt;  but God was with him.” (Acts 7:9)

“As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good.” (Gen 50:20)

“My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:26)

“But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Rom 5:8)

In many ways, the Bible is a collection of “But God” stories, stories of how a God who is rich, not so much in knowledge or in power as in mercy or love, how this rich God saves us and makes us alive, even when we are dead, even when we don’t deserve it, or rather, especially when we are dead and do not deserve it.  Why? Because that is who God is, out of the great love with which he loved us, that is the gospel right there. 

Remember the dark music of death that ended verse 3?  Suddenly, you can hear a new note here in this verse, it is introduced with those two small words, “But God,”  it is like the lone sound of an oboe coming out of nowhere with a high note, a melody, and leading the rest of the orchestra as it rises.  Listen to it rise, hear the introduction of the melody, hear the whole orchestra joining in as Paul continues, “so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”  Now comes the crescendo, the whole room resonates to the sound of the orchestra’s melody, if you surrender yourself to the music, maybe like the other half of a tuning fork, your soul will resonate with it as well, listen to the notes of Paul’s words as he writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one may boast.  For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” 

            “by grace.”   By grace you have been saved.  God’s grace is the only lifeline that saves, it is the gravitational pull that snags us back from the edge of the abyss and grounds us firmly in loving relationships with God and each other.  As Paul says, this is not the result of works – in other words, we cannot save ourselves.  Indeed, sometimes we have to do the most difficult thing of all, which is to resist the impulse to reach out for all the other false lifelines of this world, and to just let go and let God’s gravity of grace pull us back to a gravitational field for the human spirit that is God-breathed, Christ-centered, and Spirit-driven.  To open oneself up to this gravity of grace is not to subject oneself to a restriction of one’s freedoms.  Rather, it is to discover the only real freedom that exists.  Only when we have been brought back by the gravity of grace can we experience the levity of life lived in the Spirit.  Only then can we breathe the fresh, joy-filled air of a life lived out of love for others. 

This is the way God created us, so that when we seek joy for only ourselves, the joy always eludes us, while in seeking to bring joy to those around us, we often end up becoming full of joy ourselves.  Hans Seyle, in Stress and Distress, talks about the self-satisfaction and personal pleasure that comes from a life lived for others.  A life where the orientation is toward “Is there anything I can do for you” and “Is there anything I can do to be helpful?” is paradoxically the most selfishly satisfying life one can imagine. Think for example about being in love, about how when you are in love, you get the greatest pleasure by doing something that pleases your lover. 

To put it one way, “Those who seek to save their life will lose it, but those who surrender their life for the sake of love will save it.

Or to put it another way, “To have a heart you have to give it away.”

Of course, that is easier said than done.  Loving hurts.  I’ve seen the pain of love in the hospital in the tears of a daughter who didn’t want her dying mother to be in physical or emotional pain, because her mother’s pain hurt her.  Loving hurts.  It got Christ crucified.  But there is no other way, there is no other lifeline, and in the end, the pain of love tells us how much our loved one matters, and the promise of the resurrection is that the love will never die.

God gave us God’s heart in Jesus Christ.  Do we have the courage to listen and respond to the music of God’s grace, to let go and let God’s gravity pull us in, and to live lives filled with love for ourselves, our neighbors, and even our enemies?

“Building Houses”

Preached by Pastor Craig Hunter at TUC on October 10^th, 2004

            It was my first week living in Palestine five years ago.  The other Presbyterian volunteers and myself had spent that week visiting different programs in different parts of the country as a part of our orientation process.  At the end of such an intense week, we were grateful for an invitation to an American style barbecue at the Lutheran World Federation compound at the top of the Mount of Olives.  It was an opportunity to meet some new people, to enjoy the wonderful view over the Old City of Jerusalem, and to indulge ourselves in lots and lots of wonderful food.  I definitely had enough to eat that night.

            About an hour or so after the start of the barbecue was when it happened.  Three tall, beautiful Danish women joined the barbecue.  Holy smokes!  Did they know how to make an entrance!  My two American buddies and I were utterly unprepared – it was an experience I don’t think any of us will ever forget.  I mean, these women were smart, funny, self-assured, you name it.  We were in awe of these Danish women – it was practically a religious expereince. They put Denmark on my mental map in a way it had never been before. 

            Over the course of the next few months, I got to know the Danish women better. My American friends and I would go on trips or have dinners or parties together with them.  In addition to studying German, Hebrew, and Arabic, I also ordered a Teach Yourself Danish book.  Everyone thought I was insane – maybe I was, but in all my language study experience, there is no better motivator for learning a foreign language than a beautiful woman. 

            One night during that time, I was walking in Bethlehem and pondering whether I should ask one of them out on a date and pursue a romantic relationship.  And I remember thinking to myself, What am I doing?  What am I doing?  Do I really want to run the risk of rejection, or perhaps much worse, entanglement?  After all, even if something positive were to happen, the Danes would only be there for about two more months, and I certainly wasn’t likely to visit Denmark anytime soon.  Why should I consider investing in what would at most be a short relationship that almost certainly wouldn’t last?  I had enough other things to do, enough other people and things to which to devote my attention.  Why bother?

Why bother?

Unless I miss my guess, most of us are not confronted with whether to ask out Danish woman on dates, but I suspect most of us ask this question at one time or another, particularly given who and where we are.  Many of us are here as short term ex-pats, we know we will only be here for a year or two or three, so why should we invest our time and energy in people and places that are so transitory?  I suppose there are those who go to the extreme of jumping so much into Japanese life that they sort of become more Japanese than the Japanese, but I think for most of us the opposite tendency is stronger.  We are drawn to the familiar in an unfamiliar environment, and we find it a challenge to make Japan our home.  We spend our time and energy on our work and with our families, and we don’t have much left over, so to overcome differences in culture often requires more energy than many of us can muster.  As a result, in our short time here, many of us never even really try to make a home here.  We don’t study the language or learn about the history or the politics.  We see the places and people of this country as something incidental, as something with which we have no deep connection.  It is all too easy to live in a bubble here, especially if one is a member of a large ex-pat community.  We speak English all the time, we buy our food at Kinokuniya and Costco, our friends are mostly or exclusively from more familiar cultures.   Many foreigners will leave Japan without having ever really been here at all. 

What makes matters worse is that in our global culture, many people such as myself move so often that it is all too easy not to have roots in any place, and thus to think that roots themselves are unimportant.

Of course, not all of us are here as short-term ex-pats.  But even if you are Japanese or have otherwise made your home in this culture, the question of Why Bother is still an important one.  In the last few months, I have spoken with more than one person who has good friends that have moved away, not just once, but again and again, Even if you are not moving yourself, many of those around you move, so the question or struggle of investing in new relationships is ongoing.  That is particularly true in this church.  For those who are here for the longer term, I expect it is all too easy to relatively ignore short term visitors and focus one’s energies on others that have also settled here long term. 

Lately I wonder if we face a related problem as a church, as Tokyo Union Church.  I wonder if many of us don’t see this place and this community as somewhat foreign,.  Maybe you are new to church and don’t really know what to expect.  Or maybe this church is very different from other churches with which you are familiar.  As a result, you don’t quite feel comfortable, and thus you hesitate to invest our time and energy.  To invest your time and energy in this church is to risk feeling uncomfortable, or perhaps worse yet, to risk entanglement.  It is safer to sit back.  It is easier to see this church as belonging to people other than yourself.

Of course, the issues surrounding being in a foreign land, literally or figuratively, and wondering why one should bother to invest in other people and places, are not new, as today’s Biblical text makes clear.  Today’s passage from Jeremiah is set near the beginning of the sixth century before Christ.  To refresh your memory, the united kingdom of Israel divided into a northern and a southern kingdom after the death of Solomon.  The northern kingdom was destroyed by the Assyrians in the 8^th century before Christ, but the southern kingdom survived for almost another 150 years before it was destroyed by the Babylonians.  The destruction of the southern kingdom, and of Solomon’s temple, was one of the most traumatic events ever in Judeo-Christian history.  The book of Lamentations, for example, on which Pastor Bruce recently gave a sermon, was written in response to these events. 

After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Babylonians took the upper crust of the Judean society into exile, and brought them to Babylon, what was known as the Babylonian Captivity.  They would spend about 50 years in the heart of the empire that had destroyed their homes and livelihoods.  This is the context in which today’s Biblical passage from Jeremiah is set.  I imagine the Jews in exile were suffering from more than one kind of shock.  I am sure they were wondering what their future would hold, what the destruction of the temple meant for their r