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My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Matthew 2: 13-23 - Following God's Direction

Tired. That is how I believe I would feel if I was Joseph. Joseph seems to get shafted in our telling of the Christmas story. At times it seems like we boil him down to be nothing more than a nice figurehead. Someone to stand next to Mary, looking down on the Christ child.

But Joseph had to be tired by this point. He found a woman he wanted to be wed to and had paid the bride price to her family for her hand. Only to find out a few months into their engagement that she was pregnant. And he knew that the child growing inside of her wasn’t his. Under Jewish law he had rights – the right to keep the bride price and not marry her. Shouldn’t the person she was intimate with take her as his wife (and under the custom of the time, make her family pay a second bride price). He also knew that he had the right to publicly shame her – in she could not prove that she was a virgin on her wedding night – at best he could send her back to her parent’s household, where she probably wouldn’t find another man to marry. At worst, he could ask for her to be stoned because of her deceit.

Because Joseph was not a cruel man, he decided to not publicly shame her, not even make a fuss about the fact that the child-to-be was not his. He would simply return her to her parents’ house, hoping that she could find a more suitable husband

Mary kept trying to tell him that the child was God’s, but God had never done anything like that before. It just seemed too far-fetched. But then an angel of the Lord came to him in a vision, telling him to stay with Mary. Was Joseph just getting wrapped up in Mary’s fantasy world?

But Joseph stuck with Mary, believing, or at least, faithfully acting as if, what the angel had said was true. This child growing inside of his fiancĂ© was God’s. Who could they tell who would actually believe them? He couldn’t leave Mary alone when he went to register in Bethlehem. He had seen the looks her very family gave her – looks of their own disbelief. So he gathered up Mary to make the 92-mile journey from Nazareth. The journey took so long, and just as they made it, it came time for Mary to deliver. There weren’t any midwives around to help her give birth, let alone knowledgeable family members. So Joseph helped deliver this child, a child who wasn’t his biologically.

And now. Now the angel of the Lord had appeared to Joseph once again, telling him to flee to Egypt. Another 75 miles or more. This time with an infant. Mary and Joseph did not know anyone in Egypt. Who would they stay with? In a society so built around the family, with generations upon generations living in the same dwelling, who would take this new family in? Further, this would involve leaving the Roman world. It just wasn’t logical. But what were Joseph’s options really. The Angel of the Lord said that Harod was out for this child’s blood.

Even with the distance between Bethlehem and Egypt news would only take a few mere weeks to reach between the areas. Even without the Internet or telephones. Surely, Mary and Joseph would have heard or the wreckage in Bethlehem. Of so many male infants under the age of 24 months, being slaughtered. All because the king was looking for their child. But they couldn’t speak up – couldn’t return to offer up their son, God’s chosen one. So Joseph kept his family in Egypt, while holding an ear cupped towards the cries of the mother’s rising from Bethlehem.

We live in an age where we are used to things being quick and easy. We microwave food. We put our dishes in the dishwasher. Many of us have Internet on our phones so we can receive information at any point in time, even when we are away from our desks. We drive cars instead of walk. The list goes on and on. But this quick and easy mentality of our society makes us miss the beauty of the message of Joseph. Following God is not going to be easy. Often God commands us to do things that seem utterly illogical. Things that can cause us to be estranged from our family and friends. Things that call us to be away from everything we know, be it a familiar city, our home that we built, or maybe even our very country. At least this is how God called Joseph. And for that he is even failed to be recognized outside of the gospels for the great person of faith he was.

Joseph also shows us that following God’s direction can literally cause you to put your own life on the line. And the life of others. Joseph may not have known the full ramifications of each step of faith he took, but he also could have turned back. His customs allowed him to do so. And yet, he believed this angel of God.

I can hear the rebuttal forming – but the angel spoke to Joseph directly and God doesn’t speak to us like that today. That’s why he could respond with such faith. But the first time, Joseph was asleep, dreaming. Haven’t we all had those dreams that we know aren’t real. Or dreams that seem so real, but that we would never act upon. Joseph had decisions to make each step along the way; whether to trust this crazy path God had put him on or to back out.

I think we’re really good at backing out today. Or at least I am. We want a plan that seems logical, and where we at least have some sense of the direction we are headed. Or we are at the opposite extreme – the side that denies that we are human – the part that states that faith has to be fearless and full of vigor. Yet, I truly believe, Joseph had to be tired. Tired of running. Tired of the unknown. Tired of being tired. Maybe even tired of the angel of the Lord showing up.

As I was driving this week, a commercial came on the radio that stated that babies are a gift from God. I think the commercial was trying to capture the potential that is in each new birth, each new life. But I wondered if Joseph and Mary thought the same thing about this child – a child who was to be the Messiah. For they were only human parents, caught in their own pain of leaving everything they knew and held dear to get to this point, and parents whose hearts ached at the cries of the slaughtered in Bethlehem. Because of Harod’s view of the male king to come – their very son.

Mary and Joseph had to have doubts. They had to be tired and maybe even angry with God. But they still followed God’s direction – no matter how heart breaking and confusing it may have been. Do we have that type of faith – the faith that names our doubts, but walks on any way? The type of faith that knows that we might get it wrong along the way, but still move on? The faith that we know will cost us, even if we don’t know how great the cost exactly, but we take it one step at a time? May we be a people of God who alters the belief in our world that faith, like everything else, should be simple. May we live more like Joseph, offering everything we have, and even some that we didn’t know we have, trusting bit by bit in God’s confusing plan for our lives, the lives of other, maybe even this very world. Amen.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

The Creative Community - Isaiah 43: 14-28

My friend, Catherine, and I are Broadway junkies. We’ll never to get to see as many shows as we would like to, but there is a wonderful organization in New York City that lets students go to shows (and get good seats) for little money. To celebrate the approaching end of our semester, we went to go see American Idiot a few weeks ago. While many would consider it to be crass, all Catherine and I could talk about on the train back to New Jersey after the show was about how the musical brought to light all of the dark areas of our generation that no one wants to talk about.

Catherine and I were both part of a dissertation project last school year about our generation, Generation M, that focused on how girls ages 18 to 27 formed friendships. We are the generation whose formative years were marked by Columbine and September 11th. Some people in the group grew up as latchkey kids, and most came from homes of divorced parents. The thesis of the project we were a part of asks how these events conditioned us around areas of trust in friendship.

But we never talked about the things American Idiot touched on – how most of us have had friends who experimented with drugs, and we are lucky if we don’t know at least one person close to us who has a serious addiction to drugs or alcohol. Many of us know someone who had an unplanned pregnancy as a teenager that lead to some radical decisions. We have friends who have ran off to cities to find themselves, often coming back to our home towns with broken dreams. We all have at least one friend close to us who was sent to Afghanistan or Iraq over the past few years. And we carry dark secrets of friends who have contemplated suicide, some of whom even carried their contemplations into reality. We are the generation that has so much potential, yet so many obstacles in our way, mostly ourselves. We are the generation that is content waiting, yet we often don’t know what we are waiting for.

This is our last week talking about the Israelites in the portion of the prophetic scriptures known as Second Isaiah. We have been discussing what it means to be in exile and under oppression of a dictator. And what it might have felt like to have hope perched on the horizon. But what we haven’t discussed much is God’s character in these passages. God has a lot of repetition through arguments in this section of scripture. God is exercising one of the oldest and most eloquent rhetorical skills throughout history – the art of persuasion.

How do you go about persuading someone to do or believe something? Do you state your argument once and hope they catch your vision? Or do you repeat it over and over again? Do you talk dispassionately or with vigor and life?

God has a pretty big obstacle in this passage of scripture, throughout the entire book of Isaiah really. God is trying to convince a people to return to a land they had never seen that was over a three-month journey away. And God is trying to coax the people back into the realization that they are loved by the Divine, who they had only been told was a punisher. Maybe even a tyrant. No wonder God is trying to persuade the Israelites.

God starts off today’s scripture with a reminder about just who he is – the redeemer, the Holy One of this given people. The one who is going to bring an end to Babylon down to the point where all of the people in the surrounding regions will cry for the city? God is Israel’s king, the Creator of Israel and the world.

Let’s pause. God has just given the Israelites a pretty amazing depiction of who he is; a description that can evade us in our modern context. God is the redeemer. A redeemer was a close family member who paid off the debt of one they loved in order to save them from going to debtors’ prison. It was expected that family member’s and clans people would extend this grace to a person is need, no questions asked and nothing expected in return. God is talking about redeeming Israel – the family member to the Divine who is deeply loved, no questions asked and nothing expected in return. God is also King. We don’t really understand kingships as they were in ancient times. A King has absolute authority, whatever the King commands, people do. And God is about to make a pretty demanding command. And God is the Creator. All that the Israelites see God has created; now God is about to invite them to be part of Holy re-creation.

God goes on to retell a story, the story of Israel’s creation. The exodus. God only has to speak of the parting of the seas and the Israelites would know the reference. It was described to them from their birth, because it is their story, their inheritance. Lest anyone has become confused and things that Moses did any of the spectacular feats – God reminds the people that he parted the sea, and he destroyed the Egyptian chariots and horses. God is persuading the people by retelling a story, and telling it with the correct agent of action at the center – God’s very self.

But as amazing as that Exodus of old is, God is about to do a new thing – a new Exodus out of Babylon, back to the holy city of Jerusalem. The animals will obey God’s voice, and areas that have never seen water, will be filled with life. And with these springs of water, God is going to lead the Israelites back to Jerusalem by an entirely new path, one that no one ever deemed possible, through the desert.

God wants something more then what the Israelites thought was expected – the same worship week in and week out. Further, they had no idea who this God was that they worshiped or why they gathered. But all the while God wants something fresh, something different, something creative.

When I think about the issues surrounding my generation, I see so many comparisons to the Israelites – we have lost our hope, we have grown content, the center of our world is more about punishment then love, worst of all we have lost our faith in creativity.

Sometimes I wonder if these are just marks of my generation, however. The entire world seems to have lost a bit of its creativity. Sure, we can create a lot of new things and technology is advancing, but what do we hope for? What are we waiting for? And how does all of this engage our creativity and connect us to the wholly creative God?

Maybe the best place this lackluster creativity is seen is the church. How many times have we heard the phrases, “well we do it this way” or “don’t fix what isn’t broken” or my favorite “we’ve never done it that way before”. Is God persuading us to be creative or content? Do we know what we are waiting for? Does what we do express God’s absolute and amazing love? Or are we still waiting for God to show up (and maybe some more people along the way as well)? Does our worship encourage us to be creative and do we embrace creative ideas? Do we come up with creative ideas?

The season of Advent is described as one of waiting, but it can also be summed up in the idea that “love came down at Christmas”. God did a new thing, just as he did with the liberation of the Israelites. God did the most creative and beautiful thing, in coming down to a manger in the person of Jesus. Advent is about waiting to see what creative thing we can partner to do with this babe in the manger. It is about opening our senses to perceive this new thing. We know what we are waiting for, and we are creatively engaging this wonderful gift we were given.

There is another Broadway show that I am eagerly anticipating returning to the stage this summer, Rent. One of the better-known songs from this musical is “Seasons of Love”. “Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes. How do you measure a year in the life? How about love?”

I truly believe that God’s creativity is all about finding ways to reach our hearts and to love us deeply. I also firmly hold to the idea that this is a model for how we should treat each other as well. Maybe this Advent season is a good time to ask each of ourselves what we are doing with the 525,600 minutes we are given each year. And for the Church universal to ask if we are creatively showing God’s love to those who we encounter each day, or if we are our own biggest obstacle.

Saturday, December 18, 2010

The Marks of Community - Isaiah 11: 1-10

Community. It’s the buzzword that businesses seem to be capitalizing on these days. In a nation where we are so disconnect from one another and in a period of time when meaningful human contact can be limited, companies are actually marketing the notion of coming together. But like all good buzzwords, community seems to be this nebulous area, not quite definable, or at least not in an all-encompassing way. I attended a college that asked the tour guides to focus on our community, but when potential students asked about what that meant, the answers were inconsistent at best. Untruths at worst.

The church also strives to define itself as a place of community. However, unlike corporations, coming together is built into our history. Maybe even our DNA. We gather together each week to worship. We come together and confess this radical notion that Jesus, the risen Lord, ties us together in a way that defines who we are.

But community is more than just gathering. It is gathering with a vision, with a purpose. Today’s scripture passage is a story of re-defining, re-forming community. We have spoken over the course of the last two weeks about the exiles in Babylon. Let us continue the telling of their story this morning.

Isaiah is a book written over several decades and probably is a combination of at least three different prophets. The past two weeks we have been discussing second Isaiah, a portion of the prophesy that speaks of God planning on doing a new thing, re-creating the people of Israel by leading them back on an unbelievable journey to restore the place where the holy temple resides. Today we are looking at first Isaiah. The theology is a bit different in this part of the book. Unlike the last few weeks, where God is doing away with retributive punishment, first Isaiah still firmly believes that God is punishing the people because they have sinned. And instead of speaking about going back and rebuilding Jerusalem, this portion focuses on the idea that all the Israelites are evil, and thus God is going to destroy them. God is not going to separate the good from the bad, but instead just wipe out the majority indiscriminately and only preserve a remnant. And out of that remnant God is going to try this whole concept of the chosen people over again.

In that context we find today’s scripture passage. God is speaking of the stump of Jesse as what is left of Israel. All twelve tribes of Israel identified themselves as being of Jesse, even if their exact linage did not trace back to him, because of David. King David. The last Israelite king. Because of this affiliation of heart with David, the stump of Jesse would be those who are not killed by God’s smite. Out of those who that remain, those who start again, God will cause a new people, a new community to grow. That group will be truly God’s and be marked by Divine qualities. They will be blessed with a spirit of wisdom and insight, counsel and valor, and they will be true to God. In starting over again, they will be defined by those areas where Israel had failed in the past. While people once sought to protect only their own, this community would bring justice and equity for the marginalized. They will not skew their justice to accommodate the rich, but be just for those who are in need of justice the most, the poor. Those of the land who do not have a voice that is respected and heard. They will not act off of their human perceptions and senses, but instead seek God’s ideals – those that are beyond what the eye can see and the ear can hear. They will speak truth that cuts the heart of the wicked. And in this new community, relationships will be redefined. Those once thought to be enemies will come together in peace, eat with each other, protect each other. This is the new standard of community. God’s community.

What a vision of community. What a task the people of Israel were charged with. While they may never have achieved such peace or justice, they were charged with God with something to work towards. Which leads me to ask, what is the task of our community today? What defines those who gather together and call themselves the church?

Well we hope to be marked by wisdom and insight, counsel and valor, and as one’s who are true to God. As United Methodists we believe that we strive towards this is four ways. First we look towards the scriptures. We believe them to be a living word that can meet us where we are. But scriptures cannot be interpreted alone. They are looked at against the backdrop of tradition, of our collective history. Not just the history of the UMC, but of this particular UMC. Not just the history of the church as a whole, but the history of our experience with each of the churches we attended before. When we bring our traditions together, we have a richer understanding of who we are. We also believe that everyone’s experiences matters. We each have personal stories to tell, and we gather together to share those. God did not create human beings to be in a vacuum. No, we need to honor our past as we look towards our future. And out of our experiences, we derive wisdom. And reason. We are intelligent beings and church is not a place to throw that out the window. We gather together to help each other grow in reason and discernment.

Next, the church is about the marginalized first and foremost. This is not charity. This does not mean giving people handouts. It means sitting with people who have suffered various forms of oppression and creating a space where their story can be heard. It is asking them how they want to change what has been done to them, either personally or systemically, and seeing how we can match our gifts with theirs to make that happen. In a world that seems to have justice only for those who can afford it, this may be a charge that makes the church unpopular in the eyes of those who don’t understand this mission, but that does not excuse us from the charge.

And lastly, we are about redefining relationships. Instead of asking what can the church do for me, we gather together to ask how we can serve each other and those we come into contact with each day. We say that each and every one of our relationships – no matter their level of depth – is important. And we exhibit this principle every week when we gather. Those around us in worship matter. The very presence of another human being affects our physiological responses. We need each other to be present around us in this space, because we are incomplete without each and every person. We are the body of Christ – with each of the members being vital. When we are not present, we cause the body to be less than what it could be.

These are huge visions for our community, for the church. But God does not give us tasks that are impossible. No, God gives us Divine sized visions that help us grow in holiness. May it be so, here at Albright- Bethune.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

The Suffering Community - Is 53: 1-12

Is this piece of scripture familiar to you? If so, who have you been taught to think that it’s about? Jesus right! Who else “bore the sins of many and made intercessions for their transgressors?” Who “Bore our suffering, though we thought the person was being punished by God?” Who else could it be?

But we have a problem with prophetic pieces of scripture in the Hebrew Bible. We tend to only look at it with Christocentric eyes, which can cause us to over look the reality that prophetic texts are usually not just fulfilled one time. They are made timeless by the fact that the point to truths that manifest themselves time and time again.

So who else could this text be about? In our discussion last week we talked about some of the history of this portion of the book of Isaiah. Let us start answering this question of who else by resuming our discussion there. The elite people of Israel had been captured when the city of Jerusalem fell and were carted off on a three month long trek, by foot, to Babylon. While there, the people were subject to foreign rule and didn’t have a place to worship. Over time, the people who were originally brought to Babylon began to have children of their own. They settled in for the long hull. And they died off, leaving only their children. Their children’s children. And their children’s children’s children. All of these generations of children were born in captivity, in Babylon. They never saw the city of Jerusalem. Yes, they may have heard legends and tales, but they were just that to them – stories. The reality is that their home was in captivity to them. That is all they ever knew. While they might have discounted some of the tales of the grandeur and splendor of Jerusalem, they did hear one message loud and clear from their elders – the Israelites are in captivity because God is punishing them. God is punishing them for the sins of their ancestors. The divine is casting judgment for their own inability to follow the covenant. They deserved whatever God had to dole out because generation after generation they had been wicked people.

So who could this person who bore the suffering of others be? It could be the entire nation of Israel. All of those people in captivity who never knew the city of God. People who truly believed that they were being punished for the sins of their ancestors. Banished from a city they had never set eyes upon, because of a God who punishes them for the sins of people they had never met. They were a people who didn’t look special, but were marked by this oppressive degree of suffering, not for their own inequities but for others. The funny part of their captivity that they would not have known is that they were part of a movement in history that would eventually lead to peace; a peace unlike any other that had ever been experienced.

Which leads us to a second possibility – maybe this scripture was not just communally fulfilled but also by one person. That person being the Persian king during this time period, Cyrus. Cyrus is specifically mentioned during this part of the scripture as the one who is coming from the north to rescue the people. His reign would prove to be one that was totally different then Babylonians. While the Babylonians believed themselves to be the best in all possible ways, Cyrus appreciated the unique gifts each culture he experienced had. While the Babylonians tried to make everyone like them, Cyrus allowed culture to cultivate their own gifts. He returned the foreign Gods who had been captured as a sign of domination by the Babylonians to be returned. He gave money to rebuild buildings that had fallen at the hands of the Babylonians. He let the people of Israel return to Jerusalem for the expressed purpose of rebuilding the city, the temple, and its walls. This was a new type of leadership. His plan was not one of power and majesty, like other empires. Most of the nations he went on to absorb into Persian rule, didn’t even feel threatened by the fact that he could be coming. It took a while for people to recognize exactly what he was doing – exactly why his plan was strategic instead of shameful. And in each new city he took on not only the gifts of the people, but their particular sufferings. He worked to make right what others had marred. He led the crusade and did all of the hard work, and people just rode on the success of the peace Cyrus brought with him.

Another individual who could have been this suffering servant was the prophet himself. Here is a person who is being ruled by the Babylonians and speaking against them. This was not a democracy. For crying out the message of God he would have been put to death. He also was despised by his own people. The majority of the people would not leave Babylon when given the chance by Cyrus a few years later. They didn’t think being captives was so bad, because they knew nothing else. Ever. Here is a prophet who had to fear the foreign government and his own people, and surly suffered for the radical nature of what he was saying. And yet he said it anyway. Abiding by God’s call to speak a radical message caused him to suffer – one could say that God caused him to suffer. But through his suffering something was accomplished – some Israelites caught the vision and decided to return when given the chance. They found truth and hope in what the prophet declared.

Three ways the prophet’s words could have been manifested during the time immediately surrounding when they were spoken. Fast-forward and we believe they were fulfilled in the life and death of our savior, Jesus Christ. The question then becomes could they be fulfilled today? If so, who fulfilled them?

The thought that has flooded my mind this week is how certain people and groups in society are paying for the sins of all of us. We live in a country that still, years later, can’t get its act together enough to acknowledge and fix the problem it exacerbated by a lack of aid and poor structure. The gulf coast is another example of a people who have suffered over the past year because of the greed and lack of accountability surrounding oil. The people of Haiti might have been hit by a natural disaster, but if the rest of the world weren’t ignoring the people’s plight of poverty before and after, maybe things wouldn’t have been as bad.

But the group of people that I see in today’s scripture in light of world aids day, celebrated this Wednesday, are those suffering from HIV and AIDS. The statistic lifted up this past week is that half a million babies were born last year HIV positive. Most of those children will not live beyond the age of two. And yet, we blame the victims of HIV and AIDS. We live in a society that rejects those who suffer. We are scared by the disease they have and have made them into our version of the modern day leaper. We considered those who suffer to be punished by God – if not for their own sin then at least for the sin of someone close to them, dead or alive. One group of people is bearing the weight of our sin of ignorance and fear. And the prophet’s words become fulfilled yet again today. When will people cease to bear the weight of the transgressions of others? When we begin to realize that we a re a community, and we never sin or suffer alone?