Imagine There's a Heaven

Thinking about a dream-like poem from today's scripture text (Isaiah 65:17-25), I remember a monument in Manhattan. It's near the corner of 72^nd Street and Central Park West. The peaceful spot is shaped as a teardrop, set among a grove of elm trees. At the intersection of three paths is a mosaic of black and white stones imported from Italy. In the center of the mosaic is a single word: “Imagine.”

Visitors come from around the world. They sit quietly, and often leave behind flowers in the shape of a peace sign. Sometimes they use strawberries rather than flowers. It is called, in fact, the Strawberry Fields memorial – and it is right across the street from the apartment building where musician John Lennon lived.

John Lennon is the one who wrote a song called “Imagine.” It was a defining song for my generation. I grew up among 1960's dreamers, among a generation that tried to imagine a world of unity and peace. We had parents and ministers who heard the first line (“Imagine there’s no heaven”) and stopped listening to the rest of the tune. What they missed is what John Lennon was trying to envision, in his irreverent way. He could imagine a time and place when religious people stopped killing one another, countries gave up on war, and rich and poor were no longer divided.

Ironically this peace song stirred up death threats against the composer. John Lennon was gunned down at forty years old, right across the street from where the Central Park memorial announces the word: “Imagine.”

As for me, I’m not ready to give up on heaven. I want to imagine as faithfully as I can that there is such a place, and I imagine you do, too. It taps into the great hopes of the human race, both of this life and the life to come. If we believe that God is perfectly good, it’s not a far reach to imagine that wherever God dwells is a place of perfect goodness.

Isaiah draws such a picture in chapter 65 of his book. No more weeping, no more crying. Children grow up in safety to a ripe old age. There is a continuity of generations. No more of the disruption of exile: if you build a house, you get to live in it. If you plant a vineyard, you will enjoy its wine. People will be rooted. They will flourish in well-being. This is one of the great pictures of peace in the Hebrew Bible, perhaps the clearest picture after the Garden of Eden.

No more hurt, no more destruction. God’s children live in complete delight, to the delight of their Maker. Can you imagine something like that?

Matthew, Blow Your Horn

That's my tall nephew Matt tooting on a trombone. He is a really fine musician. In one of God's little ironies, he loves jazz - - which drives his mother (my sister) crazy.

We went to hear him play a gig on a recent Friday night. It was a group of high school students, and they were rocking out on old R&B hits. I knew all the words, mostly because they were tunes that I used to play when I wore a blue ruffled shirt with a Top 40 band back in the early '80's.

You know, as in, "She's a Brick...House."

Matt's high school music teacher is Dan Fabricius, a great soul who believes that music is best learned on the band stand. Dan put together this teenage band - without pay, off the clock - because he loves music and wants the world to have more musicians.

May the tribe increase.

Everybody has a shelf life

So I went into a religious bookstore yesterday, and immediately saw a sale rack. I never pass them up. I found a bargain or two and tucked them under my arm.

And then I saw two copies of my book of stewardship sermons. They have been marked down to "half off," which is cheaper than I can buy them from the publisher.

I take them to the sales clerk, who points out that they are close outs. "These are old books," she notes, "and they don't sell any more. It's time to take them off the shelves."

"Ah yes," I say, "but in a used book store, we often pay top dollar for valuable books."

"Well, that's the problem," she says. "There are too many religious books published, and a lot of them don't have any lasting value. So we need to clear them off our shelves on a regular basis." Touche.

As I mulled over whether I should say anything more, she noticed the name on my credit card. "You have the same name as the author!" she exclaimed, as I smiled silently and waited for her to make the connection. She didn't. I suppose she's not accustomed to having a has-been author in her store.

Meanwhile, let me make this invitation: If you want to buy a copy, click here. You'll notice that Amazon has a lot of used copies, some of them for only a couple of bucks. Curiously, some are also for sale at more than the original price. Hmm...

One can draw a number of lessons from this:

• Some people value your work, some do not.
• Some people once valued your work, but don't any longer.
• Sometimes people value you only if your name is the same as the author of the book you're buying (even if it's you).
• Somebody else may inflate your value if they think that they can get additional money out of unsuspecting fools.
  
• Those who sell books often don't have a sufficient regard for the labor that it took to write them.
• Just because your book is marked down or overpriced doesn't mean that you are less or more valuable in the sight of God.
  
• The thrill of getting in your name in print will not last forever; somebody has to make room for Joel Osteen.
• Everybody has a shelf life, including Joel Osteen. Here today, gone tomorrow, but the Word of our God will stand forever.

Thank God for Her

Last Wednesday, it didn’t seem the same. I was leading a communion service at Abington Manor, as I’ve done each month for the past ten years or so. Mary Clark wasn’t there to assist me. She had passed away after a long illness.

Mary was one of the very first residents of that local nursing home, living there for twenty years. A number of years ago, my friend Bob London observed her compassionate care for the other residents. Knowing her to be a Presbyterian, he said, “I’ll bet you were ordained a deacon in your church.”

“Oh no,” she replied. “And I could never be a deacon either, since I live in a nursing home.”

It was the kind of challenge that Bob always rises to meet. After a conversation with her pastor and a congregational vote, Mary was elected a Presbyterian deacon, with the understanding that her ministry would be in residence at Abington Manor. She was ordained there in the activity room, served with distinction, and I pause to honor her life and ministry.

Mary worked the hallways, offering words of encouragement wherever they were needed. Rarely to be found in her own room, she would “drop by” and be a friendly presence to the residents, with particular care shown to those who had difficulty adjusting to institutional life. She was an advocate for fellow residents, their rights, and their abilities. By all accounts, she was also the best Presbyterian bingo caller they ever had, and she saved all her bingo winnings to donate to her church.

For me, she was the Bread Lady, holding the tray each month and gently encouraging all to take in the Body of Christ. She would not distinguish between Protestant and Catholic, able or disabled. Sometimes she would wake up a worshiper and say, “It’s Holy Communion; take it, because we need it.” That remains about the best invitation to the Lord’s Table that I know.

We are called to serve Christ wherever we are – that’s one of the lessons Mary lived and taught by example. While I mourn her absence, I entrust her to the power of Christ’s resurrection. That little piece of bread that she took at communion was the appetizer for the heavenly banquet she now enjoys.

“Sometimes God drops a handkerchief,” Frederick Buechner writes, “and these people are called saints.” On the brink of All Saints’ Day, let us give thanks for the faithful folks we have known and live by their example.

The Punchline

Just finished reading Harper Lee's classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird. I can’t remember if I read it as I was supposed to in eighth grade, but I did read it recently. Six-year old Scout is not sure about living in Maycomb, Alabama. It’s a scary place. There’s a cranky lady who judges the world from her front porch. A black man named Tom Robinson is falsely condemned for a crime he didn’t commit. The school kids pick fights when Scout’s attorney father defends Tom in court. At the end of their street is a spooky neighbor named Boo. The whole novel is about Scout coming to terms with the neighborhood. On the very last page of the book is the moral of the story. Scout is talking to her daddy Atticus at bed time, and complaining that people around town are accusing a neighbor kid of something he didn’t do. She says:

“An’ they chased him ‘n’ never could catch him ‘cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things…Atticus, he was real nice.”

Her father bent down, tucked in her covers, and said, “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.” (page 281)

Song of the Lonely City: a World Communion Sermon

Song of the Lonely City

Lamentations 1:1-11

27^th Sunday in Ordinary Time

“How lonely sits the city that once was full of people!

How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations!” (1:1)

This is a day when we imagine a world-wide community. We gather under the promise that “people shall gather from east and west, from north and south,” to sit at Table in the Kingdom of God.

How ironic that we are given a poem about a city that fell apart! Once it was a great city, a “princess among the provinces.” Now the streets are empty. The playful laughter of children is replaced by bitter weeping. The once-busy city is described as a lonely woman, a widow who cannot be consoled. The dream of community has been fractured. Today it’s worth reflecting on how this happens. A community is an interactive series of human relationships. How can it become a shadow of what it once was?

Some time back, I tried to take a shortcut from on the way from Harrisburg to Bloomsburg. The map suggested Route 61 north, somewhere around Frackville. I took the exit, went over the hill, and found myself in a strange site. The road I was traveled took an abrupt detour, with an ominous sign: “Warning - Danger! Underground Mine Fire.” Just beyond it, there was another sign: “Welcome to Centralia, Pennsylvania.”

I had heard about this place, but was not prepared for what I saw. There were sections where the asphalt road had melted and pulled apart. White smoke billowed out of gashes in the ground. The grass was burned yellow. Trees still standing had no leaves. Stovepipes spew steam and carbon monoxide from beneath the soil. At St. Ignatius Cemetery there was a freshly dug grave – the grim joke among the locals is that you can be buried and cremated at the same time, no extra charge.

The most haunting sight was how empty that community had become. Centralia is nearly a ghost town – just a handful of houses remaining, inhabited by seven survivors who can’t afford to buy another or are too proud to move. The coal mine fire has burned underground for forty-five years. Most of the row homes that once stood together are were plowed under or hauled away, although a few solitary places stand all alone.

Now the reason I describe all of this is to tell you how Centralia got this way. Two things happened: a mistake and the poison. The mistake was when somebody burned some garbage in 1962, and it was a little close to the coal vein. Nobody intended it to catch fire, but it did. It hasn’t gone out. And then the poison got in the soil and in the air. That’s when everybody began to move away. The community came unglued.

There are mistakes. There is poison. This is what somebody like Jeremiah is lamenting in the poem we heard today. The mistakes – the human errors – are the things that start the fire. The poison is what keeps being generated. As Jeremiah describes a lonely city, smoldering and steaming after invaders destroyed it, he can’t help but remember all the mistakes and bad decisions that brought the city to this point. As he considers the wreckage and the desolation of what is still their home, he sniffs the poison in the air: all the blaming, the denial of responsibility, the warlike tendencies.

This is not, of course, what God wants for us. God wants people to live together in peace, to dwell in unity as sisters and brothers, to live without division or destruction. God wants the one community of human beings to get along.

At times, God allows us to live with the consequences of our actions. Surely that’s what the poet means by saying, “the Lord makes us to suffer for the multitude of transgressions.” God did not make the mess; people did, and they have to live with the consequences of what they've done or left undone. It’s just that simple.

Nobody can blame God for the mistakes we make or the poisons we manufacture. Historian David McCullough talks about the Johnstown Flood, another Pennsylvania disaster that destroyed a city. After the flood, some preachers on higher ground declared it was God’s judgment on a guilty land. McCullough says slyly, “If that’s the case, God should have better aim; the flood blasted into churches and missed most of the bordellos.”

No, don’t blame God for that one. The Johnstown Flood happened because wealthy Presbyterians up in a hunting camp didn’t take care of a dam, showing little regard for the peasants downstream. Maybe you noticed: God doesn’t usually fish us out of our blunders or our short-sightedness.

What God does provide, however, is forgiveness for our mistakes and fumigation for our poisons. That’s what happens in the cross of Jesus. It was the mistake of humanity to nail him there, yet he took that – and all the poison that surrounded it – he took it away.

In the words of one early preacher, “In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has … broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us… that he might create in himself one new humanity… reconciling people to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.” (Ephesians 2:13-16)

This is what gathers people from east and west, from north and south, to sit at one Table in God’s kingdom. It’s the promise that nothing needs to have the power to divide us. Thanks to Jesus Christ we are brought together - - one to another, all of us to God. The pains and poisons of the world never need to break us apart.

As we come to God’s Table, we have the opportunity to leave our mistakes behind, to let God’s love cancel them, and then to begin living toward God’s dream of “one humanity.” The promise of the Gospel is that every ghost town is haunted by the Holy Ghost. Every painful ending has the promise of a new beginning. Every divided family and destroyed home can be rebuilt somewhere by the God who wishes us all to be rebuilt.

These are the promises of broken bread and poured-out wine. And they are available to every last one of us – taste and see!

A sermon: "Can't Shut Him Up"

On the brink of my 22nd anniversary as a minister of Word and Sacrament, here's a sermon that hints at the crazy work that I do...

Can’t Shut Him Up

Jeremiah 20:7-13

September 30, 2007

We have been working through the poems and prayers of Jeremiah. That’s how the prophets of Bible speak: in super-charged language, through poems and prayers. The poems are addressed to people; the prayers are addressed to God. Today it’s a prayer - - and it happens right after Jeremiah is beaten by a priest named Pashhur. After being struck, he is locked in the stocks. It’s a restraining device, and it doesn’t restrain Jeremiah at all. After he condemns Pashhur the priest with a poem, he turns to God with a prayer. It goes like this:

⁷ O LORD, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed.I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me. ⁸ For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. ⁹ If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. 10 For I hear many whispering: “Terror is all around! Denounce him! Let us denounce him!” All my close friends are watching for me to stumble. “Perhaps he can be enticed, and we can prevail against him, and take our revenge on him.” ¹¹ But the LORD is with me like a dread warrior ; therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail. They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten. ¹² O LORD of hosts, you test the righteous, you see the heart and the mind; let me see your retribution upon them, for to you I have committed my cause. ¹³ Sing to the LORD; praise the LORD! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.

Sooner or later in the Christian life, you may find yourself saying, “This is not what I signed up for…” Jesus said one time, “Take my yoke upon you . . . for my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-29). But it is still a yoke on your shoulder. It’s still a burden. And you might think that you’ve been conned.

I’ve seen it happen with volunteers: they join the church with great delight. There is laughter and joy. They agree to do anything. They plug in coffee pots, make phone calls, work with groups – and sometimes later they appear at my door to say, “This is not what I expected.” It could be for any number of reasons.

Often it’s because people will let you down. When I worked with a middle school youth group years ago in New Jersey, two young women volunteered to help put on a picnic. We set up a soccer field, hauled in three charcoal grills. The kids told us they wanted to do this, so we planned a wonderful afternoon. Everything was ready at four o’clock. The grills were smoking. The music was playing. We expected forty kids, and one showed up – and he didn’t stick around. After an hour of waiting, we’re packing up six tubes of mustard, and one of the women said, “I don’t want to do this again.”

Or a few years ago, a group of teenagers were heading back to the mountains to do a week of mission work. They were really excited, because they were going back to the same place where they worked the previous year. They had worked hard – painting houses, nailing down roofs, cleaning up refuse. And they remembered how grateful everybody was when they finished the week – “Come on back, y’all,” the people said. So they did, and they found themselves assigned to some of the same houses – painting the same walls, repairing the same rooftops, cleaning up the junk blowing around same yards. And one of the kids said, “Rev, I don’t want to come back here again.”

You jump into the joy of Christian discipleship - - and you discover that some of the other disciples aren’t as Christian as you thought. Or that the redeemed of the world aren’t acting very redeemed. Or that the mission field is not a playground. People can let you down.

We heard it in Jeremiah’s prayer: he preaches his heart out, and people laugh at him. According to the nuances of the Hebrew words, it sounds like they are mocking his message, poking fun at his words, standing with their arms crossed and saying, “He’s really an idiot.” Oh, Jeremiah knows it is hard to be God’s servant in a world that ignores you. He knows people will let him down.

But his real complaint is with God. “God, you enticed me to do this, and I was enticed. You overpowered me, and I gave in. I speak your word, I do your work - - and it makes me the laughingstock of Jerusalem.” He has a complaint against God.

Remember Mother Teresa of Calcutta, that tiny saint who died about ten years ago? She spent fifty years on the streets, tending to those who had fallen in the gutters. They were hungry, and she fed them. They had no voice, and she spoke for them. They had no home, and she took them in. They had nobody else, and she loved them.

And when her personal journals were published this last month, they revealed she was full of doubts and fears. She confessed that she doubted if God really exists. She held her hands to receive communion, silently questioning if Christ was really there.

It didn’t start that way. Back in 1946, Mother Teresa has a series of visions, calling her to serve the poor of Calcutta. She said, “I heard the Voice calling me to serve the destitute and the dying.” In those early moments, she was flooded with holy light. But as she engaged in her work, she describes a “heavy darkness” that covered her soul. It remained for years and years.

Jeremiah’s prayer is shaped like some of the psalms. As you know, there are about eighty psalms that complain and cry for help. The most famous is the one Jesus quotes on the cross, Psalm 22. It begins with the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” If Jesus quotes it, we need to take it seriously. The God who calls us doesn’t always live up to our expectations. Notice I said “our expectations.” And I’m not telling you something that hasn’t, at some time or another, crossed your mind.

I met a woman in Greek class on the first day of seminary. Sally was in her mid-fifties. She heard God calling her away from a desk job and into a pulpit. She gave up everything and went back to school. It was humiliating, hanging around with young pups like me, half her age. About the only thing we had in common is that we were both pretty poor at Greek. But Sally struggled, got through, and got ordained as a Presbyterian minister when she was fifty-four.

She served only one church, for about six years. Her occasional forgetfulness became more regular. They said it was Alzheimer’s. After a year of struggling, she resigned her pulpit and went on disability. The last time we spoke, she said, “So why did God go to all that trouble, calling me, teaching me, ordaining me – but not shielding me from this damned disease?” I did not know. Last year, after suffering for many years with Alzheimer’s Disease, Sally slipped away in her sleep. I still don’t have an answer for her question.

You can understand why Jeremiah is so upset, can’t you? On the day God called him to be a servant, he said, “I’m only a child,” and God said, “Don’t be afraid; I am with you.”

Jeremiah said, “But I don’t know what to say.” So God touched his lips and said, “I’ll put my words in your mouth.”

Then Jeremiah heard the message he was appointed to speak: God would pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, and only then build and plant.” He felt frightened because he was speak against the status quo, and his own people would turn against him. And God said, “Now, don’t you worry; I am with you; they won’t prevail against you…”

Today we hear Jeremiah pray, “Lord, they are prevailing…They are prevailing because you prevailed over me.” He says, “Lord, you enticed me.” Actually the English translation is a bit weak: in Hebrew it says, “You conned me.” “You deceived me.” Or even, “You seduced me.” To think: God sweet-talks you into something, and then you find out what it really is.

In Jeremiah’s case, he is a preacher – he speaks on behalf of God. When he speaks, it gets him into trouble. So one day he decides to stop speaking – if preaching stirs up trouble, just shut your mouth – but that causes another kind of trouble. It gives him heartburn. He says, “The Word of God is inside me; it’s like a fire in my bones. I have to let it out. I hate to do it, because it stirs up trouble. But if I keep the Word in, it burns up my bones. I have to preach… it’s hard work to keep it in, but it’s hard work if I let it out.”

I don’t know if you know what that’s like, but I do. I love to preach and I hate to preach. I love to stick my nose in scripture and sniff out something to say, but it never comes easily for me. Some of you know my routine: I start working on a year’s worth of sermons during the third week of January; I need a long runway to get each one off the ground. But most of my sermons don’t get finished until midnight or so the night before they’re preached – and even then, they’re not finished until we hear them and digest them. In twenty-two years, I’ve never been able to speed up the process – just ask my family. For me, it’s just bloody hard work.

And then there’s the popularity factor. The preacher is often a Minor League Celebrity, or more accurately the congregation’s Big Mouth. Everything the preacher says or does is amplified. If you like a lot of attention, oh, you’ll get it. You get anonymous letters, quoting you for saying things you didn’t actually say. Or people make big decisions in their lives on the basis of something that accidentally dribbled out of the side of your mouth that you didn’t think of much at the time. Or they get angry about what they think you’re implying.

Or they test you: seventeen years ago today, on my very first Sunday here, a man stopped me in the hallway after the first service to tell me that he didn’t like something I said, and if I would be inclined to change it at the second service, he might be inclined to vote for me as his pastor. I didn’t change it, because I figured if I gave in to him on my very first day, there was no telling what he might want me to change a few weeks later.

I’m convinced there is no crazier job, and no more important job, than to preach the Gospel. Everybody who speaks up for God should have a sign on the desk that quotes the words of Jesus: “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets” (Luke 6:26).

Or to put the same thought another way, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5:11-12). Just remember: the person who said that was reviled, persecuted, falsely accused, and nailed to a cross. You think they crucified Jesus for being nice? No, they crucified him for telling the truth.

And what’s true for preachers like me is also true for Real Christians like all of you:

• You know what it’s like to speak up for God when people around you want you to hush.
• You know what it’s like to tell the truth to a family full of lies.
• You know what it’s like to treat the wounded neighbor as a Child of God, and you catch some flak for it.
• You know what it’s like to forgive somebody when others think you’re foolish.
• You know what it’s like to feed the hungry in a town where a lot of full dinner plates are scraped into the garbage can.
• You know what it’s like to dig deep and give generously when others are looking to upgrade their luxuries.
• You know what it’s like to commit a Sunday morning to the Lord of your life while others are preoccupied with their own aimlessness.

If you keep standing up and speaking up for God, someone out there will want to muzzle you and knock you down. You’ll be tempted to be quiet and blend in. And maybe you will…for a while. Until something happens, and the fire of God’s Spirit burns in your bones. And it’s burning inside you, and you can’t put it out.

That’s the moment you realize that living out your faith has actually changed you. And there’s no going back. God enticed you into the Kingdom of Heaven, and there’s no going back.

For all of her well-published doubts, Mother Teresa never backed off from her public charity. She may have felt like God disappeared or evaporated, but she never felt the need to reveal her doubts to the millions of people who admired her faith. The story of her journal caught the attention of a reporter out in Detroit last week, who read and pondered it. She saw in Mother Teresa “an intimate sharing of the cross of Christ.”

In the end, she said, Mother Teresa embraced the questions and accepted the darkness of God’s will. “God cannot fill what is full,” Teresa wrote. “God can fill only emptiness. It is not how much we really ‘have’ to give – but how empty we are - so that we can receive fully in our life, and let (God) live (eternal) life in us.”[1]

God’s life is a crucified life. God bears the world’s suffering, and transforms it through endurance and self-sacrifice. God may get quiet, but the fire of the Holy Spirit never goes out.

But I’m not telling you something that you don’t already know. “Come, Holy Spirit.” Burn, baby, burn…

[1] http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070929/OPINION03/709290308