Advent: Remembering Stories of Hope

1 Advent Cycle b      November 30, 2014

Is. 64:1-9     Psalm 80:1-7

1 Cor.1:1-9   Mark 13:24-37

 Lectionary Link

Priya: Do you know what the prophet Isaiah sounded like in our reading for today?

Hailey: He writes as though he is a perfect older brother or sister living in a house that has been trashed by all of the younger siblings.

Catherine: I can identify with that, I'm the oldest.

Priya: So am I.

Hailey: And so am I.

Priya: Yes, it is such a burden to be so mature.

Catherine: You go girl! Preach it sister!

Priya: The prophet is like an oldest sister complaining to mom and dad about how misbehaved all of her other younger siblings have been.

Hailey: But the prophets then offers a bargaining prayer.  Remember Father, you are our Dad.  So what are you going to do with us?  Don't be angry with us.  We need forgiveness.

Catherine: Sometimes bad things happen in life because they just happen.  And at other times bad things happen because we do things which result in bad things happening to us.

Priya: The people who wrote the Bible often were trying to figure out why bad things happened to them and why they had to suffer.

Hailey: The writer of  Psalm 80 was very discouraged and asked, "How long O, God will you be angry with us?"

Priya: When things are going bad it can seem like God is angry.  But sometimes the writers of the Bible treated God too much like us human beings?

Catherine: What do you mean?

Priya: Well, we human beings get our feelings hurt and we get angry and we may want to correct the behavior of people by punishing them.  And because we are like that sometimes we think that God must be like a parent who is disciplining us by forcing us to go through hard times.

Catherine: Why do you think people would think God is angry?

Hailey: I think we like to think that we can discover a reason for everything that happens.  And when we can't we just say things like, "God must be angry at us."  One of the reason we say that the Bible is true is because it includes the honest reactions of people just like us.

Priya: I think that we like to believe that there is a concerned and caring personality who still is with us no matter what happens.

Hailey: Well, a lot of the Bible was written in very difficult times for the writers and for their families and their community.

Catherine: What do you mean?

Hailey: The people of Israel only had a few years of actual success and freedom.  So much of the writing of the Bible happened in bad times.  And they were always trying to understand why the times were bad and they wondered about when the bad times would end.

Priya: How do people survive during difficult times?

Catherine: I think that people survive through having hope.

Hailey: And how can we learn to have hope?

Priya: People need leaders who can inspire hope and comfort in difficult times.

Catherine: Jesus was a person of hope and he told stories of hope.

Hailey: But did Jesus live on this earth when life was good or bad for his friends and family?

Priya: When Jesus came, his homeland was occupied by the Roman soldiers.  Life was good for the Roman Caesar.  Life was good for those who had conquered Palestine.

Hailey: But life was difficult for people in Palestine.

Catherine: It was hard to be hopeful when times were so difficult.

Priya: But Jesus had studied the prophets of Israel.  And he lived in a community which had stories of hope.

Hailey: What were these stories of hope about? 

Priya: They were like our super hero stories.  The super hero stories were stories about a Messiah.  The Messiah would be someone greater than King David. So it was a hopeful comfort for people to hear a story about a new king like David.  It helped them continue believe that when life wasn't fair, they could still believe that fairness was normal.   The belief in the Messiah meant that they believed that someday someone would be able make life fair and equal for everyone again.

Catherine: Was the Messiah the only super hero?

Hailey: No, there was another super hero called the Son of Man.  And the Son of Man was one who was like a really good and powerful judge who someday would establish justice on earth.

Priya: The Gospel writers thought that Jesus was such a wonderful prophet, teacher and worker of miracles, they were comforted by his stories about a future hope.

Catherine: How did Jesus encourage people to be hopeful?

Priya: Jesus encouraged everyone to be prepared and be ready because at any time a new day of hope could happen.

Hailey: And what about for us today?  What about the superheroes Messiah and Son of Man?

Catherine: We still have a season of the church year for the stories about the coming Messiah and the Son of Man.

Priya: We began this season of Advent today on the First Sunday of Advent.  This is the first day of the new Christian Year.  So Happy New Year.

Hailey: Well, thank you.  I wish I had known so I could have partied until midnight last night.

Priya: Advent is a season of the stories of hope.  Advent is a season when we need to be reassured that justice and fairness, love and kindness are normal.  And when injustice, hatred and cruelty are present, we need to reassert our hope that these things will end.

Hailey: It is a strong truth for people to want to have hope about love, justice and kindness.  And we especially need the truth of hope during difficult times.  And so we use the entire season of Advent to assert that in the end, love, justice and kindness will win out.

Catherine:We need the story of the Messiah and the Son of Man to give us hope about the truth and triumph of justice.

Priya: Advent is a season of preparation.  We need to be prepared for the victory of justice even as we also need to be prepared to respond to any hard times and suffering.

Hailey: So what good news do you have to give to the people of St. John's on this First Sunday of Advent?

Catherine: Well, we should tell them to be prepared...like good Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.

Hailey: And we should remind them that justice, love, kindness and freedom from pain are what is normal in life and they should always have hope to believe this.

Priya: And we should remind them that they can heartily believe in Jesus as Messiah and Son of Man as a past, present and future superhero.  Why should we so easily entertain ourselves with all of the Movie superheroes and forget about the Messiah and the Son of Man.

Hailey: Happy Christian New Year to all of you.  And please give yourself permission to believe in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of Man as a very worthy superhero of the past, the present and the future.  Amen.

The Tetragrammaton Is Not a New Video Game

12 Pentecost, Cycle A  Proper 17, August31, 2014

Exodus 3:1-15  Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c

Romans 12:9-21  Matthew 16:21-28

Lectionary Link

Priya: Are you familiar with the Tetragrammaton?

Chike: No, is that the latest video game?  Should I buy a copy today?

Priya: No, it is not a video game.  It is the unpronounceable name of God Almighty?

Arinze: But you just said God Almighty.  So you pronounced the name of God.

Priya: Well, yes I did but God Almighty are English words for God, but the ancient Hebrews did not pronounce a particular written form of the name of God.

Chike: Is that like the rock star Prince, who decided not to have a name any longer and so he became just a symbol?

Arinze: Well, people still had to talk about him; a symbol is only written and so people began to say "The artist formerly known as Prince."

Priya: Well, God's name came to be written in the Hebrew language.    And it is written with four Hebrew consonants.  Tetragrammaton means "four letters" which in English would be YHWH.  And if you added vowel sounds to the consonants, you might say, "Yahweh."  But of course, when we say Yahweh, we offend devout Jews because we are presuming to speak the holy and special name of God which cannot be pronounced.

Chike: But don't we still use the word Jehovah to refer to God in the English language?

Arinze: When they started to try to say Hebrew words and names in English they used to replace the Y sound with the hard J sound.  So, the old Jehovah is the new Yahweh.

Priya: So Yahweh is the pronounced name of the Holy God formerly pronounced as Jehovah.

Chike: How did it come that God's name should not be pronounced?

Arinze:  The story of the calling of Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt began with a fire which all firefighters would like?

Priya:  Why?

Arinze: Because it gave the special effects of a bush being on fire, but the bush did not burn and the fire did not spread.

Chike: Well, that some special effects!  Why do you think God appeared to Moses in such a spectacular way?

Priya: I think it was because God needed to get Moses attention.  Moses had run away from his people in Egypt.  He had gone to the land of Midian and got married and settled down.  He wanted to forget about his failure in his first attempt to lead his people.  But God would not let him forget about his responsibility to lead his people to freedom.

Arinze: Well, Moses was only human.  Sometimes it is very hard to deal with failure.

Chike: Sometimes when we fail, we just want to give up.  We just want to run away.  I think Moses gave up when he had a failure.  He doubted himself.  He did not believe that he had the ability to be the leader of the people of Israel.

Priya: I think that this story about Moses is important for us because we can get very disappointed when we experience failure.  Failure hurts even more when it involves the rejection by the people we are trying to help.

Arinze:  Yes, it was a real blow to the pride of Moses.  He wanted to help lead his people to freedom and in his first effort, he angered both the Egyptians and also his fellow Israelites.

Chike:  Moses was thinking, "What's a use?    I'll just run far away and start a new life somewhere else."  And that's what Moses did.

Priya:  This story tells us someone wonderful about God.

Arinze: What's that?

Priya: It tells us that God does not give up on anyone.  It tells us that we look at failure differently than God does.

Chike: How does God look at failure?

Priya: I think that God looks at failure as simply training and practice to live our lives better.

Arinze: Priya, do you think that you would believe God if you saw a burning bush and heard a voice from God speak to you.

Priya: Well, I don't always hear or listen when my brothers or parents are speaking to me, but I think if I saw these special effects, I would believe.

Chike: Even when Moses saw the burning bush and heard the voice, he asked God to tell him the Divine Name.

Arinze: And God said, "I am that I am or I shall be that I shall be."  The special Holy Name of God may be a form of the verb "to be." And so when God told Moses that the divine name was "I am that I am," it could be that Yahweh is a form of the verb "to be."

Priya: Since God is the greatest and best Being, it means that God always was, is now, and will always be in the future.  So the name of God could mean that God is more everlasting than anyone or anything else.

Chike: God is always going to be around.  Perhaps God was trying to tell Moses to keep trying because even our failure cannot make God go away or stop being God.

Priya: Well, I am glad that God doesn't have to speak through burning bushes and thundering voices.

Arinze: Why not?

Priya:  It seems a little scary and not very personal.

Chike: That is why Jesus Christ is important.

Arinze:  How so?

Chike: Jesus Christ is God in a human person.  Since God came to us in the form of a human person, we can know and feel treated by God in very personal ways.

Priya: Jesus was a teacher for his friends and students.  He needed to remind them about the true nature of the messiah.  He told that education and learning is like dying to an old state of ignorance so that one could learn new things.

Arinze: Taking up one's cross and following Jesus became an important phrase in the early church.  It did not mean that people wanted to be crucified like Jesus.  It meant that they were die to the things which are bad and be born to the things which are good.

Chike: Well I glad that we have learned some lessons today.

Priya: What have we learned?

Arinze: We learned that God does not give up on us when we think that we have failed.

Chike: Yes, failure is simply a teaching method to get better.

Priya:  And if God does not give up on us, we should not give up on ourselves and each other.

Arinze: We also learned that God does many things to get our attention, even dreams and visions and voices.

Chike:  But God has spoken to us best by sending Jesus Christ to this world.

Priya: And Jesus remains with us through the words of the Bible and through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Arinze: The words of Jesus remind us that we never graduate from the school of life where God is always trying to teach us new lessons.  We die to old ignorance to take on new knowledge.  This is the educational process of life.

Chike: Moses learned it.

Priya: The disciples of Jesus finally learned the lessons of God in their lives.

Arinze: Let us remember that God is always trying to get our attention so that we might learn to become better people.

Chike:  Amen to that.

Priya:  And can everyone say "Amen?"

Amen.

Commencement in the School of Jesus

Youth Sunday Sermon, June 29, 2014

2 Pentecost, ap8, June 29, 2014 

Jeremiah 28:5-9 Psalm 89:1-4,15-18

Rom. 6:1b-11    Matt. 10:24-39

 Lectionary Link

(Connor begins by serving pouring cups of water and serving them to the people in the front.)

Kalum:  Connor, what are you doing?  And could it not wait until after the service?

James:  I know what Connor is doing.  I give him credit for reading today’s Gospel.  But will his shameless showboating really get him extra brownie points in heaven?

Connor: You talking head preachers can preach the Gospel; some of us actually do the Gospel.  Jesus said whoever gives a cup of water to these little ones will not lose their reward.

Kalum: Well, excuse me, Saint Connor; I did not know I lived so close to a holy one!

James: Saint Connor, please could I get your autograph before you become a relic? 

Connor: Are you being ironic or just plain mocking? 

Kalum: We are sincere……..in our mocking, that is.  But you have initiated a very worthy topic for discussion.

Connor: I have? Accidents do happen.  What worthy topic do we have to talk about?

James:  Well, you are right about the importance of doing the Gospel rather than just talking about it.

Kalum: Yes, actions do speak louder than words.

Connor: That’s a cliché which happens to be true.  But what else can we learn from the Gospel?

James: Well, we have just graduated from high school.  And we now have a diploma which is an official record of our achievement.  And it is a piece of paper which represents more than just being piece of paper.

Kalum: What do you mean?

Connor: I think that he means it stands for 12 years of blood, sweat and tears of all of the work and study that we had to do to get it.

James: When we present our diploma, grade average and test scores, we are able to gain admittance into colleges and universities.

Kalum: The Gospel lesson is about accreditation and the credibility of the disciples of Jesus.

Connor:  Once Jesus was gone, his disciples worried about their credibility.  They worried about whether people would accept their teaching.  They did not have seminary diplomas and official ordinations so how could they be sure that people would accept their teaching as valid?

James: What it shows us is that authority and respect comes from one’s wisdom, learning, character and the reputation that one gets from studying with good teachers.

Kalum:  I guess if you studied physics and you had Albert Einstein as one of your professor, you might get a little more attention for your resume than if you just studied with Joe Blow.

Connor: So if the disciples were worried about whether they would be accepted, Jesus reminded them that he had taught them well.  He had taught them not just to preach the Gospel but to live Gospel.  So if people did not accept the teaching of the disciples then they probably would not of Jesus either.

James: Did you know that the church had its own way of issuing graduation diplomas?

Kalum: What would that be?

James: It is called apostolic succession.  It is an unbroken record of church leadership which has lasted these two thousand years.

Connor: Is that why we have bishops?

Kalum:  Each bishop is ordained by three bishops who were ordained by three other bishops and so the Gospel has been passed down in an unbroken chain.

James:  I don’t think that this means only bishops can do valid ministry.   I think that a bishop represents that the basic message of Jesus Christ has been transmitted from one generation to the next over these many years.

Connor: Because we have this unbroken tradition from Jesus, it means that we can believe and trust that Christ is still present in the life and ministry of the church. 

Kalum: We have the example of Christ which has been preserved in the writings of the New Testament but we have 2000 years of people who have tried to follow the teaching of Jesus.

James: Even though we have bishops and priest and official ordinations, the proof of the authority of the Spirit of Christ is to be found in how we live.

Connor:  And how are we supposed to live?

Kalum: We are supposed to live without sin.

Connor: How can we do that?

James:  St. Paul wrote that living without sin is about learning impulse control.

Kalum: I have impulse control; I choose chocolate over strawberry all of the time.

Connor:  Bravo Kalum!    How did you manage to set the bar so high?

James:  I think that St. Paul was trying to teach his students about the goodness of our lives but also about the responsibility that we have because of freedom.

Kalum: It is like he’s saying that life and the energy and desire is good; but it still needs to be directed.

James:  If we get too fixated on idols or things which are not worthy we can become enslaved to bad habits.

Connor:  So sin is not about being bad or despising ourselves; it is about understanding that we can always be better.  Sin is like pain.  Pain sends us a message about doing something about what is causing us discomfort.  Sin is the awareness and we need to and can always do better than we have done before.

Kalum:  So, being a sinner is not such a bad thing.

James:  Well, we don’t have to be proud of our sin but always learning from the condition of feeling inadequate.  Being a sinner is good, if it means were always looking to amend and improve our lives.

Connor:  The character of Christ comes from learning the power and freedom of impulse control.

Kalum:  I don’t think that we will ever graduate from the School of Sinners.

James:  Well, you really don’t want a diploma for sin; not really the life achievement that one wants to be proud of.   But the goodness of Christ is like knowledge and learning.  In the field of learning we are ignorant of what we have not yet learned.

Connor:  So we are always sinners because there is always more goodness to achieve.

Kalum: Well, now we know how baptism is like commencement; we are always ending something in order to begin something else.

James: At baptism we all have received our diploma in the school of Jesus.  And it is an important diploma.

Connor:  But it also means that we have to choose each day to live up to the standards of love and kindness that we’ve learned from Jesus Christ.

Kalum: We sure have our work cut out for us.

James:  Just think of it in this way; we will never be unemployed Christians, because there will always be more Christian things to do.

Connor:  Let us thank God today for our baptismal diplomas today!

Kalum: We are now guaranteed a life time of much more Christian work!  Let’s get to work!  Amen.

Spiritual Seeing, Spiritual Blindness, a youth dialogue sermon

4 Lent a        March 30, 2014

1 Sam. 16:1-13   Ps. 23 

Eph. 5:1-14     John 9:1-38      

Lectionary Link

Parker: In the Name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Please do not be seated.  I want us to be completely current in our church practices.

Kalum:  How are you going to do that?

Parker:  I want all of the congregation to move to the center aisle and I am going to take a selfie of us.

James:  I guess if the president can do it; and Ellen can do it at the Oscar and his Holiness, Pope Francis can do it, surely we can be St. Relevant’s Episcopal Church and do our own selfie.

Parker: Okay everyone get ready for the selfie.  Good I’m glad that we did this.

Kalum: Why are you glad?

Parker: Well, for one I have infallible photographic proof that I was in church during Lent.

James: Are you saying that you need all of the proof that you can get?

Parker:  Well, maybe but it will be proof for others too.

Kalum:  So what else do you suggest that we do to be relevant today?

James: I’ve got an idea.  We are at the height of March Madness.  The National championship will be decided a week from tomorrow.  Today the Final Four will be decided.

Kalum: Well, I think that Parker has been reading his holy bracket more than the Bible during last few weeks.

Parker: Well, bracketology is an official subject for school now, isn’t it?  How’s your bracket going James?  I hope you didn’t bet the family farm on your predictions.

James: My brackets are going fine but I’m also involved in Madness, it’s called Lent Madness.  They have their own bracketology where the saints are pitted against each other and at the end of Lent, one of the saints will win the Golden Halo award.

Kalum: Wow James, I didn’t know that you were so “spiritual.”

James: It does not hurt to have “spiritual” on one’s resume.  But seriously how’s your bracket going?

Kalum: Okay, but I had Duke going further than they did.  They ran into a “giant killer” when they played Mercer.  It was quite an upset.

Parker:  It is kind of like the biggest upset in the history of warfare.

James:  What was that?

Parker:  The most famous giant killer and the most famous upset in history is the story of David and Goliath.  David was a scrawny, tough little shepherd boy who fought with wolves and lions to protect his sheep.  He went up against the great Philistine giant Goliath and he won by using his sling shot to hit him with a stone right on his forehead.  Size isn’t everything; wit and wisdom also counts for something.  David’s father Jesse had many sons who were older than David but David ended up being chosen as the King of Israel.

Kalum:  The famous Judge Samuel thought that all of David’s brothers would be suitable to be anointed as King of Israel and David was not the obvious choice but Samuel came to know that God sees differently than humans see.  God taught Samuel to see David as the person to anoint as King, because David had something that others could not see.

James:  The Gospel story today is all about seeing too.  The religious leaders were supposed to be people who could see the obvious.  And the blind man was the one who didn’t see.

Parker:  The Gospel presents this irony of seeing and not seeing.

James: The disciples of Jesus were blind about cause and effects.

Kalum: What do you mean?

James:  They asked Jesus if the man was blind because of his sins or his parents’ sins.

Parker:  How could anyone presume to know such cause and effects?

Kalum:  Well, I know why Duke lost to Mercer in the NCAA tournament?

James: Why?

Kalum:  I read that some loyal Duke fan had a lucky unwashed Duke T-shirt that he wore and when he wore it to the games, Duke always won.  His mother inadvertently washed the T-shirt and this Duke fan swears it caused his Duke team to be upset.

Parker: Why are people so superstitious about cause and effect?

James:  It probably gives people a sense of power of being in control by presuming to know things which really can’t be known.

Kalum: Some times religious people believe that natural disasters are connected with the people whom they think are sinful.

Parker:  Such thinking can be very prejudicial; it can make people into victims and religious people often do play the blame game.

James:  I think Jesus came to show people how to see things differently.  He was not interested in presuming to know the reason why the man was blind; he just wanted the blind man to know that God’s help was with him.

Kalum:  In the Gospel of John the writer is trying to get us to see things differently.  The writer wants us to see from the heart.  The Gospel of John shows us that presence of Christ is with us in all situations even the trivial situations.

Parker: What do you mean?

Kalum:  Jesus was present to help solve the wine shortage problem at a wedding; that’s pretty trivial in the big scheme of things.

James:  But Christ was present when the multitude needed food to eat; he was present with his disciples when there was a storm on the sea.  He was present with a parent who had a sick child. He was present when a man was unable to walk.  He was present to the blind man and his family.  He was present with the family of Lazarus after he died.

Parker:  So the Gospel of John is about the presence of Christ being with us in all of the times of our lives.

Kalum:  And the faith and the new birth that is promised by Jesus mean that we have the ability to see the presence of Christ in the small events, the big events and the events of sadness and loss.

James: So in the story about the healing of the blind the man, the blind man who was made to see is really all Disciples of Christ who are learning to see the wonderful presence of Christ in all of the events of life

.

Parker:  So, today we need to learn not to think that we know the cause of why lots of bad things happen to people.  Because we may be wrongly blaming people who are already hurting.

Kalum:  And we need to know that our life of faith is about learning how to see better; to see from the heart.

James: And we need to learn how to see the presence of Christ in all of the events of our life.

Parker:  Does that mean if I win the bracketology contest for March Madness that I am a genius.

Kalum:  No, it just means you’re lucky.

James:  Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Kalum: With God, it is better to know God’s grace even as we are always trying to be as good as we can and to see things as God’s Spirit teaches us to see things.

Parker:  I see.

James: I see, too.

Kalum: Can everyone say: God, open our eyes so that we can see!    

Everyone: God, open our eyes so that we can see.

Kalum: Amen.