New Shoots of Perspective

                        When I was about seven, I was busily writing the “Further Adventures of Winnie the Pooh” stories, which my younger sister illustrated with crayon drawings. We’d sell our books on the sidewalk to whomever passed by us. Most children had a lemonade stand; I had a small publishing enterprise. Often grown-ups would stop to look at the books and they would ask me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  I said, “I want to write stories and I want to tell stories.” They would say, “That’s nice.”

When I was twelve they began saying to me, “That’s a nice dream, but it’s too hard making a living writing stories” then off they’d go with a barrage of facts, making writing stories sound like an utterly ridiculous goal.

           Invariably, they finished up by saying, “It’s nice to have big dreams, but you need to face the facts of life. You need to get a real job with a real income like everybody else. This is, after all, the 20th Century.”

          The way they said it made it sound as if the mere fact of living in that century settled the issue for all time.  It was as though they agreed with Clifton Fadiman’s statement, “All of life is an earnest search for the right manila folder in which we get filed away.”  As if they lived in the grip of fatalism that believes everything is as it has always been and forever will be. As though life proceeds like clockwork. As if something need to have happened only a couple of times in the past three years for our minds to declare it “inevitable” and “irrevocable.” As if a leaf is green because it could be nothing else. The poor are poor because they are poor. Everything is as it is due to routine, predictability, and given enough time and government research grants, everything shall be explained and demystified.

          “The world is as it is. It can’t be changed,” they seemed to be saying. 

          Yet, when I hear God speaking through the prophet Isaiah, “And a child shall lead them” I wonder why will it be that a child shall lead humanity into the incredible beauty of God’s vision for our lives that is poetically described by Isaiah? After all, children in the ancient near east and even today are among the most vulnerable and least powerful persons in a community. On their own, children do not create legislation, pass laws, or even have their voices taken seriously by those who do make laws. Greta Thune is a great example. Children depend upon others to keep them safe and provide for them. I mean, just look at the news reports and magazine articles about child labor in India, Pakistan and throughout Southeast Asia, not to mention the plight of children in refugee camps in Turkey or Lebanon, or the young girls sold as brides to men old enough to be their grandfathers.

 Also, children depend upon adult leaders to mentor them into lives of creativity and vitality.

  So, why does God tell us through the prophet Isaiah that in God’s peaceable kingdom a child will be the leader?  What is it about a child that will make them the best choice for leadership?

          Well, take a look at the painting of the peaceable kingdom.. What is it that you adults see? Do you see all the animals just hanging out together, predators and prey standing next to each other? Do you see their faces and do you detect the smiles on their faces as if the painter Edward Hicks said, “Now, everyone say cheese?”  Do you wonder why it is that they are smiling? Is it because the prey is no longer fearful? Or maybe they are calm because they are in a forest with such an abundance of water and plants to eat, that hunger isn’t an issue for any of the animals, so the predators have decided it’s good to be a vegan. Do you see the children in the painting? Why they are the age the painter has depicted? And, did you notice that one is a male and one is a female? Do you see the angel? Can you see far into the background and see William Penn, the Quaker, affirming a peace treaty with Delaware peoples? Yet, what does this have to do with the peaceable kingdom and Isaiah 11?

          Well, let’s think about it through the eyes of a child. What does a child see in this painting? Does the child see the peaceable kingdom as perhaps really the Garden of Eden? I wonder if children would see the picture divided between the animals’ peaceable kingdom and the humans’ peaceable kingdom. I wonder if children might see more than we see. 

Several years ago, Tina and I and two of our children went to see the movie “August Rush.” It is a marvelous movie not only for the music that runs like a thread throughout the story connecting each of the people together and drawing them together, but also for the story of a young not quite twelve year old boy who hears music in all the sounds of the world around him whether he is standing in the middle of a corn field as the wind blows the stalks in amazing swirling and flowing patterns or he is standing in the middle of New York City listening to music being created by the interplay of car engines, horns, shoes scrapping across pavement, water bubbling in a fountain, and people’s voices echoing in the air of the city. Each of these is its own symphony playing notes of music that is his life, which is creating the music of his long lost mother and father’s lives, so mother, father and son might be reunited and made whole.

          While no one believes him or understands him, the boy refuses to give up on this vision and he finds imaginative ways to make the music of his life spread far out into New York City knowing that his mother and father will hear it and will be drawn to him and to each other.

Perhaps, that is the reason God chooses a child to lead humanity to the peaceable kingdom. Maybe, it is because children see life as amazing. A child makes no rigid distinction between the tales of wizards and fairies and the tales of historians as G. K. Chesterton notes, there was a reason why Cinderella was younger than her ugly sisters. “A child, “he writes,”of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened the door and saw a dragon.”

          I think this is the reason children picked up Harry Potter books and couldn’t put them down.  I think they became enmeshed and awed to wonder by a world that is beyond our predictable, everyday routine. Where there are brooms to ride in games played high above our heads, invisibility cloaks and maps that show people moving about a castle school where the pictures talk to you. At least, I know this is why I couldn’t put them down. The Harry Potter books and books about knights of the round tables, princes and princesses and others like them invite us to open our minds and imagine there is more to life than what we see.

          In imaginative literature, music, plays and art, we are invited to look beyond the surface of life and see that a leaf is green for a reason that has nothing to do with rational science.

In many ways, Isaiah is, also, reminding us to look beyond the surface of this life to see that a leaf is green because God meant it to be. Every leaf that is green or red or yellow and not beige is so because of God’s choice to color it that specific color. The world is something, which has been meant, designed, brought into being by God’s choice. And, it is here for our wonder, our surprise and our enjoyment. Even the repetition of cycles and routines is meant for us to wonder about than to see them as dull, pointless, or seasons to dread. Maybe, we are supposed to be looking at the grass as a signal to us. Maybe the stars are trying to get us to understand some message they have for us, maybe the rising of the sun each day is making a point we will discover only if we pay close attention to it.

 Perhaps, the point it is making is that God has chosen the order of the world and the repetition within creation as a way to speak to us about its vitality and health. Like the child who laughs at a joke and says, “Daddy tell it again and again and again, laughing each time as though it was the first time. Or, like the child who falls in love with swinging on a swing and says, “Mommy, do it again. Do it again!” I wonder if God says to the irises each spring and apples and oranges in summer and fall “do it again. Do it again.” So, we might wonder at the continual renewal of life and be surprised at the first blooms of flowers popping up from the wintry ground, reminding us how God creates life anew each day.

          Maybe, the shoot that springs forth from the tree stump is God’s way of reminding us that God is the God of green life. That God is the one who brings forth greenness when we have felt as if we were dry as summer dust as Hildegard of Bingen wrote in the 12^th Century about the veriditas or the healing, greening power of God, “God through Christ is bringing the lush greenness of God’s kingdom to a shriveled and wilted humanity.”

Even, Paul’s word to the Roman church in chapter 15:13 of his epistle might be translated as Eugene Peterson has, “Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope!”

          Maybe we need a child to lead us in becoming God’s children, so we might see the new heaven and the new earth coming into being as God intends it to come into being with a shoot coming out from the stump of Jesse and a wolf living with a lamb, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a child leading us to hear God’s music of life creating the symphony which draws all people and creation together into God’s peaceable kingdom.

          I pray this may be your vision and your hope for this Advent and Christmas, as surely as it is mine.

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Joy Begins Now

Darkness falls fast in these autumn days, and we know the darkness will continue to grow in the days ahead of us as we venture into the freezing days and nights of winter. Yet, many people feel darkness has been falling upon them for longer than a season. Whether it is the news of the high infant mortality rate in Rochester, the continuing struggle to solve the education issues plaguing city schools, the rise in the suicide rate of middle age white males and veterans or the year-long election cycle that has been filled with hatred, lies, and misinformation spewing forth on a daily basis with threats of jailing political opponents, journalists, and deporting millions of people, scandal after scandal in a drip-drip-drip leaking of documents by a group caught in their own brand of self-righteousness or encouraging violence against people who are different as the answer to the frustration and despair of an economic prosperity that has become nearly unreachable for many people in this country regardless of skin color or ethnicity as has the myth of an American Dream created out of a model of unending consumerism fueled as Wendell Berry writes by a commerce of violence, or voter suppression by the government or public institutions being assailed as useless and cracked cisterns incapable of holding water let alone our society; all have contributed to the weariness and darkness many have experienced and may experience as fear of the future imprisons people.

This darkness seems to deepen with the images Jesus describes for his followers in this morning’s reading from Luke. The image of armies surrounding us, the need to become refugees to escape the violence of war, being hated because we are followers of Christ, the woe to women who are pregnant or who are new mothers, the enslavement of one people by another people, even creation will shake, rattle, and roll as the Jerusalem Temple is destroyed.

Yet, all of us gathered here this morning like the gatherings of other communities of faith in Baldwinsville, Syracuse, New York State, America, The Northern Hemisphere and around the world know the darkness will be driven away by the light. Darkness, despair, fear, and hopelessness cannot overwhelm and imprison us because God’s light will not allow it to do so. This is the starting place of joy and hope that dispels fear because God promises to be doing an entirely and completely “new thing” that will not resemble the old or grow out from the old.

This is the promise uttered by the prophets and the psalmists, particularly during Israel’s exile when the promise from God was that even exile will be transformed into a viable place for life. “This promise,” as Walter Brueggemann wrote in his book “Theology of the Old Testament,” “which defies every logic, but which could not be devised by those who reiterated the oath, assures Israel that its life and eventually all the historical process, is not a cold, hard enactment of power and brutality.” Rather, it is God’s powerful intention for well-being, abundance, justice, and compassion to bring into reality a newness of life that cannot be extrapolated from the present but is an utterly new life. The words of God the prophet Isaiah speaks tell of God’s promise to overcome all that is amiss whether caused by Israel’s disobedience or the untamed forces of fear and death. The newness of God’s new creation will touch every aspect and phase of life as every portion of life is re-created by the positive, life-giving power of God’s love enacting wholeness, abundance, and restorative justice for all human communities as hostilities at every level and in every dimension of creation will be overcome. In this extraordinary new creation, the light of God’s love will drive out fear and darkness.

Perhaps this is the reason doctors without borders and nurses without borders risk their lives to tend to the wounds and disease of patients in places where medical services and medicines themselves are in short supply, but too often where the violence of war is abundant. Perhaps this is the reason for the Red Cross to bring food, clothing, toiletries, and blankets to places like Haiti, Syria, and Louisiana. Perhaps this is the reason Hope Fellowship travels to re-build homes and communities in the aftermath of hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Perhaps this is the reason mission teams travel to communities to repair, re-build homes and lives each year. Perhaps this is the reason community gardens have nearly doubled in size and may grow larger next year. Could it be they want to live in a world where babies are not born for sudden death, but live long full lives; where no more shall the sound of weeping or cry of distress be heard in the world because of hunger, disease or violence; where an adult lives a long full life filled with meaning and where people shall build houses to live within and will plant vineyards and vegetable gardens, whose produce the gardeners will eat and enjoy because no one will take it from them or force them to work for those who oppress them; where the shalom-the peace of predator prey living together in harmony and where violence no longer exists?

Could it be that the hope of God’s new heaven and new earth where peoples, habitations and nature are all woven into a complex relationship of wholeness has been heard as an invitation to take part in God’s creative transforming mission-Missio Dei- to the world? Could it be that when they have heard the prophet Isaiah proclaiming God’s intention to create an entirely new world where heaven and earth are to be one unified creation, they were reminded of God’s creative capacity to create life anew because God’s creative word speaks a vision that comes to realization. This Missio Dei vision of a new heaven and new earth does not come out of nothing nor does it come out of the ashes of a destroyed creation, instead it is the creation out of the chaos of human endeavors, of a spoiled and polluted nature and of everything in between. In this Missio Dei, God is transforming creation so thoroughly that the former things will not be remembered and will no longer influence or effect the present or the future.

Imagine a totally new beginning for Baldwinsville and Syracuse where everyone has a place to live in safe and decent homes, where everyone can freely move about without fear of violence or the fear of driving through dangerous neighborhoods, where a person isn’t stopped by police simply because of the color of their skin or because they fit a certain profile, where no one is a stranger and where everyone has meaningful work and a living wage. Imagine buying your home and knowing you can keep it forever – no one threatening to take it from you because they want it, or because you’ve been laid off, or made redundant, or had your job shipped overseas. People can breathe again – really breathe – without fear that life will be snatched away from them.

Last year, I asked you to imagine this congregation being a totally new congregation, designing and planning its organization in new ways, finding new ways of getting things done,  discerning new ways for us to worship God, designing a new way of welcoming visitors by first getting to know them as friends, and discerning the way we reach out into the wider community around us based solely on Missio Dei-God’s creative transforming vision of a new heaven and new earth. Letting the past be the past without any power to control, determine or define the future. Letting go of all the ways we compare ourselves to other congregations because we are focusing on being authentically who we are. Letting go of the old paradigms and schemes for growing the church by focusing our life together on God’s mission for this community and for the world.

 I challenged you to join the Israelites who came back to Judah from Babylonian exile and to respond to your situation the way they did as recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Their response was to rebuild the city and the Temple and to rebuild their community by once again committing themselves to centering their lives in God and God’s way of being a community where well-being, health, and growing and sustaining life was for every person. This is the hope contained within the promise of God’s new heaven and new earth, a hope inviting people to live today in God’s new heaven and new earth.

Interestingly enough,  this is the invitation to living the golden rule “do unto others as you would have them do to you” and being mindful that the yardstick by which we measure others will be yardstick by which we ourselves will be judged. Both of these are simply calls to “love your neighbor as yourself.” It is the hope of the sacredness of life at every moment of life, of welcoming the stranger either the migrant or the refugee as sisters and brothers whose desire for a life of stability, of health and well-being and peace is the same as our own, of ending poverty and the immorality of homelessness, of encouraging all people to dream the vision of God’s new heaven and new earth then act on that vision.

We have made good beginnings in meeting this challenge of participating in God’s mission to the world through the continued support of our missions, the community garden that grows community by growing relationships, and the new opportunities of joining with other Presbyterian churches.

While God will bring this new heaven and new earth to fullness as Jesus taught us that God will do, the call to be Christ’s body here in this place at this time challenges us to fully participate in Missio Dei- God’s creative transformation of the world, it challenges us to consider how to best use our increased financial and human resources in reaching out beyond ourselves into the community of Baldwinsville, Syracuse, and the world, so whatever we do reflects God’s expansive and inclusive will for the world and not our limited vision of what is possible, challenges us to be an entirely new First Presbyterian Church focused on creatively thriving knowing that as Paul reminds us that if God is for us, which God is, who can be against us, who can hold us back from living in God’s new heaven and new earth today?

The answer is simple: No one.

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Alive in God

Gotcha is a slang term derived from the phrase “I got you” and usually refers to an unexpected capture or discovery of something. I learned about this term 51 years ago when I began working as a reporter for a small weekly in California. The editor wanted me to know that asking questions that will make someone look either foolish or guilty about something without having facts (you remember those) to support the question was a no-no.  Typically, the “gotcha” question is aimed at celebrities or politicians, it creates quite a stir, and any simple answer will make a person being asked the question look either foolish or guilty or both.

          Gotcha, however, is not a new game. It is the same game the Sadducees were playing with Jesus when they asked him their long, convoluted question about levirate marriage. Whose wife, they asked, would a woman be in the resurrection after she had married a man with seven brothers. Levirate marriage is the tradition where a woman marries a man and if he dies then she marries his brother. When the brother dies, she marries another brother, and so on, one after another. So, they ask Jesus, “Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?

          Couple of things to remember about the Sadducees. First, the Sadducees came out of the priestly cast in ancient Israel, and over time gained control over the rituals in the Jerusalem temple, a position which also made them power brokers in affairs of state during the Roman rule of the ancient near east. From their perspective God was intricately tied to the Temple and the rituals and liturgies of the Temple and without the Temple the people could not worship God or be God’s people. Also, they did not rely on the oral tradition like the Pharisees did for their interpretation of scripture. Indeed, the Sadducees considered only the five books of Torah-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy- the real scripture unlike the Pharisees who included the prophets and psalms as scripture. In addition, they rejected much of the Pharisees’ teaching, including the resurrection. They did not believe in resurrection. They thought resurrection was at best a lot of nonsense. That’s why, when they ask Jesus the question, they don’t care about his answer. All they wanted to do was to win the debate, embarrass, discredit, or destroy Jesus, so the crowds would stop following him. That’s the reason they ask this clincher question, “Whose wife will she be?” with an unmistakable sneer just waiting to shout “gotcha!” For the Sadducees, “gotcha” is not a game, it is a weapon designed to destroy the opposition.

Jesus, of course, answers their question by simply pointing out the inappropriateness of the question, given the difference between life in this age and the age to come. In this age, the fact of death makes marriage and perpetuation of life essential. However, in the age to come there is no death and the earthbound nature of marriage will give way to the greater life promised to the children of the resurrection. Then, Jesus follows that with a wonderful example of Midrash or interpretation, by adding testimony from Moses, who in the presence of the burning bush confessed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the living, “to whom all of them are alive.”  This is who God is, Jesus says, the One in whom and for whom death has lost its sting forever. God is God of the living, now and in the resurrection.

This, of course left the Sadducees speechless. They clearly had lost the game of “gotcha.” But they had lost more than this because what they failed to realize is they were playing this game with God. The Sadducees were so certain of their own perspective about God that they had become blind and had become overly focused on the small stuff of life that is unimportant, rather than the big stuff of life that is important. Their blindness and focus on the small stuff led them to disregard the significance of the Temple as a place of worship. This wonderful building with massive stones and the appearance of stability and long lasting traditions was important for the Israelites because it was the symbol pointing the people of God beyond themselves, beyond the power structures of the world around them-the kings or emperors and the wealthy who benefited from power as well as beyond the peoples’ own limited vision of all God was doing in the world by pointing the people to the God, who takes an unformed mass of lifeless chaos then molds and shapes it to create life, creating a world capable of sustaining life through God’s ordered and intricate interconnections and interdependencies with a rhythm of work and rest, and by pointing to the God who commits God’s own being to an intimate relationship with a particular people as the way to demonstrate to all people how wondrous and marvelous God’s love is and how God’s intention is for all creation to have life in abundance within the tranquility of the wholeness of peace.

The Sadducees were so caught up in the small stuff of life they had forgotten why the Lord prompted the prophet Haggai to call the people to rebuild the Temple after they returned from exile in Babylon.  When the Israelites returned from Babylonian exile and met those who had never left Judah and they discovered they had to rebuild their community. The returnees had to build homes, rebuild social structures, and rebuild relationships. They also began to rebuild the Temple, but somewhere between planting and harvesting and trying to rebuild their economic life along with their community life, they focused on the small stuff and stopped rebuilding the Temple. Eighteen years later, the prophet Haggai calls the Israelites back to complete the rebuilding project.  After all, they had finished homes, shouldn’t God have a finished home?

But that’s not why God wanted them to rebuild the Temple. The Israelites need to rebuild the Temple because they have sowed much but harvested little.  They move from work to home and back to work then back to home in a routine like a hamster running on a wheel, moving fast, but getting nowhere because they were centering their life on the small unimportant stuff of life and not on the big important stuff of life such as where their life is centered or in whom their life is centered.

Rebuilding the Temple will guide the people to center their lives once again in God and their relationship with God, the relationship that is foundational for the rebuilding of their community.

Yet, the Sadducees were also blind to really seeing God. God doesn’t need to live in a building, nor will God somehow vanish if the building is destroyed. To suggest that any of that is true is absurd. God is present with us in the middle of lives as the psalmist in our reading this morning reminds us, but God also transcends creation. God is not caught within the creation God brought into existence, which is in part the reason God created humankind.

  We are supposed to represent God within creation by acting in the way God acts with compassion, patience, steadfast and self-giving love. Now, the Temple, like church buildings, is simply the place where the people of God gather together to acknowledge the big stuff of life, which is that God is the one who gives them life, God is the one who sustains life and it is God who can be counted upon to save life by transforming the circumstances of life in ways we may not always see or appreciate except in hindsight.

  Unfortunately, as the centuries pass blindness and a focus on small stuff become hardened like concrete among some of God’s people and they no longer see the way God is at work in the world to change the world. All they see is a building and they mistake the building for God, and they begin worshipping the building and the rituals conducted inside of it instead of worshipping God. It is of like worshipping the organ, instead of using the organ as one more way of praising God through sung or instrumental prayer or worshipping the layout of the sanctuary instead of using it to creatively worship God.

It is the same when people instead of worshipping God, worship the rules of piety, particularly rules about who is ritually pure enough to be included in the community and those who are ritually impure and must be kept outside the community. Or, the way some folks will hide themselves away in a small, isolated community thinking they are the only “true people” of God. The result of all this is that those who are supposed to be God’s representatives and witnesses to the world actually separate themselves from God just the way Adam and Eve did in the garden. And, with the same result.

So much so that when God comes to be with us in Jesus, they ask foolish questions about the resurrection as if the God who creates life out of a lifeless mass of chaos cannot resurrect life from death, betraying both their foolishness and their disdain for God and for God’s people. Also, they fail to do what God calls his people to do – live here and now in the joy and the anticipation of the fulfillment of God’s promises of life by living today as the people God calls them to be and, in the way, God calls them to live.

This is Luke’s lesson for us who are gathered here this morning. It is an invitation to open wide our eyes and our ears, so we might not fall prey to the mistakes the Sadducees make nor be as, Calvin tells us, “Foolish and rash by being focused on rearranging the furniture of heaven and taking the temperature of hell.” For when we do so, we focus on the small stuff and forget the big stuff, as the psalmist reminds us. We forget we are called to be the generation “that lauds the works of God to younger generations and to declare God’s mighty acts and the glorious splendor of God’s majesty to the next generation, so all might sing aloud of God’s righteousness and abundant goodness.”

          We forget that we do not need to worry about our future because our future and the world’s future is in the hands of God who in Jesus Christ has triumphed and will triumph over all the powers of suffering, sin, injustice, and death. We forget that God in Christ has freed us to live today in the joyful anticipation of the fulfillment of God’s promises of life as God’s servant church, empowered by the Holy Spirit to do what Christ commissioned us to do- Go out into the world teaching everything that Christ has taught us.

As Julian Hartt reminds us, “We and the world have a great and desperate need for the gospel. The power of that word is not in utterance but in concrete life. The power of the word is that a real, transcendently righteous and creative love is within the God, who is comprehensively and decisively in charge of all life and God willing shares this righteous and creative love with all creation in its life now and with humankind in the resurrection life lived with God. 

Hence, while the church has an utterance to make, sermons to preach, hymns to sing, and prayers to offer, above all it has a life-giving, life sustaining compassionate, abundant love to share, which is the big stuff of life lived from the inside out, as Richard Carlson writes, “Something wonderful begins to happen with the simple revelation that life, like an automobile, is driven from the inside out, not the other way around. As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you would rather be, you begin to find peace right now, in the present.”

May we live today and all days in the light of God’s presence where the fullness of joy and the tranquility of wholeness dwells.

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