For God so Loved the Church

Before I say another word, let me say that last night’s “Simple Gifts” concert at Richmond’s First Baptist Church was a musical love feast.  I sat there in my pew glowing like a light bulb, so joyful, so grateful, so proud of every person who participated.  As I wrote in my prayer journal this morning, “I think I fell in love with my congregation last night.”  Every man, woman, and child who sang or played became precious to me in a whole new way. 

I remember hearing one of my seminary professors say that you don’t become a pastor on the day you are installed at a new church.  You become the preacher, but not the pastor.  That can take months or years, and it doesn’t always happen.  But it happened for me last night.  I thought about those traditions where the minister is referred to as “Father.”  That’s how I felt: like a proud papa.

But now the concert is over, and all that’s left is those delicious memories and the sound of music still ringing in my ears.  Sunday’s coming, and this Sunday is the Day of Pentecost.  I was looking through some of my old files for inspiration and found these thoughts in a sermon preached in 2005 called, “For God so Loved the Church.”

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On the Day of Pentecost, God gave the gift of the Holy Spirit.  And here’s the wonderful thing about a spirit:  you can’t abuse it.  You can’t steal it, you can’t break it, you can’t nail it to a tree.  For God so loved the church he gave us something we couldn’t damage or destroy. He had learned that if you give people the Ten Commandments, they will break them; if you give them the Promised Land, they will fight and kill each other over it; if you give them your one and only son, they will crucify him.  So on the Day of Pentecost God gave us a spirit—an unbreakable, un-ownable, un-killable Holy Spirit—and for two thousand years now that gift has survived unscathed.  Not that we don’t try to scathe it.  As I was working on this sermon I had a vision of people chasing after the Holy Spirit with brooms, baseball bats, butterfly nets, wooden boxes, running up and down the aisles of the church, jumping over pews in the balconies, trying to catch it, kill it, shut it up.  But it’s a spirit, not a thing.  You can’t contain it.  It got loose in the church on the Day of Pentecost and it’s still loose. 

Sometimes it gets into the preacher and he says things that make the church gasp.  Sometimes it gets into parishioners and they do things that are shockingly new.  No wonder people thought those first disciples were drunk when they saw the way they behaved, but Peter said, “No, this is just what the prophet Joel was talking about, that time when God’s spirit will be poured out on all people and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.  Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy.”  Do you hear what Peter is saying?  You can’t control this spirit.  You can’t shut it up in the Ark of the Covenant.  You can’t contain it behind a curtain in the Holy of Holies.  You can’t confine it to the rigid lines of the Apostle’s Creed.  You can’t limit it to the conclusions of the Council of Nicaea.  You can’t bind it between the leather covers of the Bible.  You can’t chain it to the pulpit of the medieval church.  You can’t sell it to get a single soul out of Purgatory.  You can’t nail it to the door of the Wittenberg Church.  You can’t close it up in the Westminster Confession.  You can’t shut it up in the Constitution and Bylaws.  This spirit is loose in the church.  It’s loose in the world!  It can get hold of almost anybody and cause them to do unusual things.

It got hold of Stephen in a way that eventually cost him his life.  It got hold of Philip in a way that led him to baptize an Ethiopian eunuch.  It got hold of Paul on the road to Damascus in a way that turned his life around.  It got hold of Peter on that rooftop in Joppa in a way that changed his mind about the Gentiles.  Read the whole of the Book of Acts and you will see the Holy Spirit smashing through one barrier after another—race, religion, nationality, geography—as the kingdom comes, God’s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven.  It begins with the rush of a mighty wind and builds from there, until it begins twisting across the religious landscape like a tornado, smashing against the coastline of convention like a holy hurricane.  For God so loved the church he gave us something we couldn’t contain, and can’t contain still.  Who knows where this spirit will lead us in the days ahead?  Who knows where that mighty wind will blow?  I only know that on this day, the Day of Pentecost, as I draw a breath to blow out the candle on the birthday cake of the church, I make a wish that the wind of God will blow where it will, and that you and I will find the courage to follow.

 

Ellie Somerville McNevin

My daughter Ellie was married on May 5, 2012, in an intimate ceremony at a historic home on the Rappahannock River.  I’m thrilled for her and happy to have Nick McNevin–an extremely talented chef from Australia–in the family. 

Ellie met Nick when he was an exchange student at her high school in DC.  They never went out, but apparently he never forgot her.  A couple of years ago, when he was thinking of moving to New York, he got in touch.  They began to correspond regularly, and then began to call each other.  Eventually he invited her to visit him in Sydney where she met his family.  As she was leaving he asked, “If I come to New York, do you reckon you could be my girlfriend?” 

She reckoned she could.

I like to tell people that Ellie fell in love with Nick two years ago, but I fell in love with him the first time he cooked for me.  Wow.  I can still remember every detail of that meal, including the way my tastebuds began to celebrate with the first bite.  Nick has been cooking at Jean Georges in New York, a Michelin Three-Star restaurant, one of only five in the city and only forty in the world. 

As I said…he is extremely talented. 

The last time he cooked for me in New York he said he’d had a busy day at the restaurant, that they’d even had to turn away some A-list celebrities.  “Really?” I asked.  “Like who?”  “Like, um, Scarlett Johansson,” he said.  I said, “Do you mean to say you didn’t cook for Scarlett, but you’re cooking for me?” I have to say: that makes a guy feel pretty special.

Welcome to the family, Nick. 

Take good care of my little girl. 

Feed her well.

Rewind the Tape

I just shared my Easter sermon from 2002 with the Wednesday night crowd at church and some of them asked that I post it online.  It was the first Easter after September 11, 2001, and for that reason it seemed all the more important to talk about resurrection.  Enjoy.

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Rewind the Tape
First Baptist Church,Washington, DC
March 31, 2002, Easter Sunday
Matthew 28:1-10 

Today is Easter Sunday, a day when we pull out all the organ stops, bring in the trumpets and timpani, and celebrate with everything that is in us.  Although it may appear to those outside the church that our celebration is arbitrary—falling on one day this year and another day next year—it is not arbitrary at all.  We celebrate a specific event in history: we celebrate that day on which Jesus broke the bony back of death and opened up for us the way that leads to life.  Because of what he did death no longer has dominion over us.  Our last and worst enemy has been decisively defeated.  Even if you didn’t feel the need to throw a party it would be a good reason to throw one. 

But sometimes you do feel the need.

My friend Stan Hastey, who read the Gospel lesson for us this morning, remembers a sermon he heard just a few days after Easter, 1968.  He was a student at Southern Seminary inLouisville,Kentucky.  Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated two weeks before.  Race riots had broken out inMemphis, and in this city, and in others.  A dark shadow had fallen across the American landscape.  The students who gathered for chapel on that April day needed to hear an encouraging word.  They looked up hopefully as the Reverend Charles Boddie, an African-American preacher fromNashville,Tennessee, made his way to the pulpit.  They shifted in their pews and then waited, expectantly, for Boddie to speak.  When he did, his voice was little more than a whisper.   Pointing back to the Sunday before he said, “Easter, this year, came just in the nick of time.”

Although it has been more than six months since September 11^th I have that same feeling about this year, that Easter has come just in the nick of time.  On that day I was watching the news as that second airplane slammed into theWorldTradeCenter.  I couldn’t believe what I had just seen.  Neither could the anchorman.  He said to the engineer, “Rewind the tape,” and because the engineer was as shocked as we were he forgot to turn off the monitor first, so right there on the screen we saw the image freeze and then begin to do a jerky little dance as it went backward.  We saw that huge orange ball of flame being sucked back into the building.  We saw shattered pieces of concrete, steel, and glass defy gravity, and leap back up to their proper places.  We saw that airplane backing out of the building tail first and the hole it had punched in the side repairing itself until building and plane and passengers were all intact again.  And then the image froze again, and the engineer pushed the “play’ button, and the whole tragic scene unfolded before us once more: the plane smashing into the building; the ball of flame erupting from the other side; the shattered pieces of concrete, steel, and glass falling toward the ground and all those people . . . gone.

What if there were some way to rewind not only the tape, but also time?  Imagine God himself giving the command, and some heavenly engineer pushing the button, and time beginning to flow backward instead of forward.  So that the suicide bombing in the port city of Haifa, Israel, this morning would miraculously undo itself as shrapnel came flying back into the bomb, as chairs and tables, plates and glasses, returned to their usual places, as friends greeted one another in that crowded restaurant, sat down, chatted and smiled.  Last Monday night the destruction caused by an earthquake in Afghanistanwould be reversed.  Ruined houses and buildings would put themselves back together again.  Children who had been crushed by falling debris minutes earlier would resume their peaceful sleep.  Mothers would stroke their hair, kiss their cheeks, and wish them sweet dreams.  And as time continued to flow backward, as September 13^th lapsed into September 12^th, people from all over the country would begin making their way to New York City, hoping to be as close to Ground Zero as possible on the 11^th, when the twin towers of the World Trade Center would heave themselves up out of the rubble to stand tall and proud again.  The crowds would cheer when firefighters and policemen came running out of the buildings unharmed.  They would cheer again when they saw those two airplanes fly backward out of the buildings and back toward the airports.  But their loudest cheers would be reserved for those thousands of people who came out, alive and well and more than a little surprised by all the attention they were getting.

But suppose we didn’t stop there?  Suppose we just kept going?  Suppose we watched Martin Luther King get up off the balcony of thatMemphishotel and adjust his tie?  Suppose John F. Kennedy stepped out of that convertible inDallas, waved to the crowds, and got back on Air Force One?  Imagine Japanese airplanes flying away fromPearl Harborwith their bombs undelivered.  Or the Titanic floating up off the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean and bobbing like a cork on the surface before steaming back toEngland.  Imagine Civil War soldiers—both Union and Confederate—getting up from the battlefield, brushing themselves off, and embracing before heading home.  And then suppose we kept going, back through the centuries, watching one tragedy after another undo itself until we stood with Jesus’ disciples and watched as life came back into that crucified body, as the Roman soldiers lowered the cross and un-hammered the nails, as he staggered back before Pontius Pilate, back before the Sanhedrin, back to the Garden of Gethsemane, back to the table where he and his disciples had shared their last supper.  Wouldn’t they cheer?  Wouldn’t it be good to have Jesus back with them again, safe and sound?   Or would even those dense disciples understand that there is a difference between restoration and resurrection.  Would they recognize that if time kept moving in that direction there would come a time when they hadn’t met Jesus, hadn’t been called, hadn’t begun to follow, and would they recognize that it would have been better to have known him and lost him than never to have known him at all?

In an extraordinary little book called Einstein’s Dreams Alan Lightman imagines all the impossible permutations of time.  In one chapter he describes a world like the one I have been describing to you, in which time flows backward.  A woman who was near death begins to get younger and stronger.  The deep lines disappear from her face.  Her hearing comes back.  Her eyesight comes back.  And then one day her husband is carried back into her house.  “In hours, his cheeks become pink, he stands stooped over, straightens out, speaks to her.  Her house becomes their house.  They eat meals together, tell jokes, laugh.  They travel through the country, visit friends.  Her white hair darkens with brown streaks, her voice resonates with new tones.  She goes to a retirement party at the local high school, begins teaching history.  She loves her students, argues with them after class.  She reads during her lunch hour and at night.  She meets friends and discusses history and current events.  She helps her husband with the accounts at his drugstore, walks with him to the foot of the mountains, makes love to him.  Her skin becomes soft and smooth, her hair long and brown.”[1]

It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it, this reversal of time?  Don’t we wish we could make it so?  Don’t we wish we could reverse the aging process at least, so that our own skin would become younger and smoother, our bodies stronger, our eyesight clearer?  Imagine celebrating your 80^th birthday knowing that next year you would be 79.  Imagine making plans to run a marathon 40 years from now, when your body would be in better shape.  It all sounds good up to a point, but only up to a point.  Listen to how Lightman continues his story:  “The woman sees her husband for the first time in the library of the university, returns his glances.  She attends classes.  She graduates from high school with her parents and sister crying tears of happiness.  She lives at home with her parents, spends hours with her mother walking through the woods by their house, helps with the dishes.  She tells stories to her younger sister, is read to at night before bed, grows smaller.  She crawls.  She nurses.”[2]  Lightman stops the story right there but if he had continued you know that this woman who had become a girl who had become a baby would next become a fetus, then an embryo, then an egg, and then nothing at all.  She would disappear completely if time flowed backward. 

Some would say that’s what happens to all of us anyway.  In a world where time flows forward we grow old, we die, we are buried, our bodies decay, and in the end there is nothing but the memory of us left in the world and soon not even that.  And this is where the testimony of the disciples is most helpful.  They saw Jesus die.  They saw him buried.  But they also saw something else.  Three days after his death they saw him alive again.  And this was no studio special effect:  this was real.  In Matthew’s version of the story it is the women, running back from the tomb to tell his disciples the good news, who encounter the risen Jesus on the way.  “Greetings,” he says, and they fall at his feet to worship him, trembling with fear and joy. 

At first they must have thought that he had been brought back to life like Lazarus, that God had caused time to flow backward and Jesus had been restored.  But eventually they came to see that this was not restoration, but resurrection.  Jesus had not retreated from death, but marched forward to meet it, smashed through it, and emerged on the other side alive.  It wasn’t as if someone had rewound the tape of his life, but fast-forwarded to that time when God will raise up all who believe.  If you can forgive the expression it was a “preview of coming attractions,” and it changed everything.  It gave those early Christians a confidence in the resurrection that made it possible for them to live their everyday lives with extraordinary courage.  Death no longer had dominion over them.  They no longer had to be afraid.  Paul who had been knocked off his high horse by the risen Jesus, who had seen the future and lost his fear, could thrust his chin forward and say, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.” 

But what about you? 

Push the “pause” button on your life for a moment.  Stop everything right here where you are, on Easter Sunday, 2002, in a pew at FirstBaptistChurch.  If you had the power to reach out and push “rewind” would you do it?  For some of you it would be wonderful to feel life and strength flowing back into tired bodies.  For others there are tragedies that have marked your life that you would love to see undone.  For others there are missed opportunities that you would like to go back and seize.  For others harsh words spoken that you have always wished you could take back.  If you had the power, you might be tempted to push the “rewind” button.  But I believe that God raised Jesus.  And I believe that he will raise me too.  And it is my confidence in the resurrection that gives me the courage to reach out and push “play,” even today, even after September 11^th, and weeks of Anthrax threats, and months of war inAfghanistan, on a day when the situation in theMiddle East seems ready to explode.

This year and every year, Easter comes just in the nick of time.

 

—Jim Somerville, 2002

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[1] Alan Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams (New York: Warner Books, Inc., 1993), pp. 103-104.

[2] Ibid., p. 104.

 

 

Too busy to blog!

Dear Readers: Just wanted you to know that I haven’t given up on blogging, it’s just that ever since I got back from India I’ve been too busy to blog. Hoping for a reprieve after Easter, and a chance to catch up with you. I’ve got stories to tell!

Full Disclosure

At the end of Sunday’s sermon, the one about Jesus cleansing a leper, I referred to my tenth grade yearbook picture. Several people have asked to see it, and although it pains me to post it (I’ve saved it under the file name “Yikes!”) here it is, along with the last few paragraphs of the sermon. Be gentle.

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Last week some of my old classmates from Sherman High School in Seth, West Virginia, caught up with me on Facebook.  They were happy to find me.  They didn’t know what had happened to me.  And they have been very, very kind.  But as I looked through some of the yearbook pictures they had posted on that site I began to realize why they hadn’t heard from me: those two years at Sherman were some of the most painful in my memory. 

My dad, as I’ve told you, was a kind of missionary to the desperately poor in that county and I felt like a missionary kid.  We lived in a house with no running water and no indoor plumbing, which meant that I went to school most days looking kind of rumpled and smelling sort of…unwashed.  And I was a little kid!  I went to high school a year early and didn’t get my growth spurt until two years later.  I was about five feet two with teeth that seemed way too big for my mouth and the worst haircut I’ve ever had in my life.  When I looked through those yearbook pictures I remembered those tall, handsome, confident boys, and those pretty, outgoing, giggly girls, and suddenly there I was, looking like a scared rabbit, trying to hide my face under my crooked bangs when the photographer took the picture.     

When I look closely I can almost see the pain in those eyes. 

But I would guess that I’m not the only one in this room who had that kind of experience in high school.  In fact, there may be a third of you who don’t have your yearbook picture hanging on the wall at home.  Those are such vulnerable years, and we feel so tender; one unkind word can cut us to the quick.  “If you want to you can make me clean,” the leper says to Jesus, and maybe all he really means is, “If you want to you can save me from being a social outcast, you can bring me into the community, you can help me find a place.”  And Jesus says, “I want to,” and then he reaches out and touches the leper.  Who knows how long it had been since anyone offered to do that?  But in that moment, in that action, his leprosy is cured.  He is made clean.  Jesus told him not to say anything about it but he couldn’t help himself. 

It was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Think about those people, not only in high school but in every church, who have trouble fitting in, who are almost terrified to visit a Sunday school class where everybody already knows everybody, and where there aren’t any available seats.  Think about how hard it is for some people to walk up the front steps of this church for the first time, not knowing if they will be made to feel welcome or turned away at the door.  Think about those people who have failed at life, who have lost a job, who have been divorced; people who are struggling hard and who need a home; people who have been pushed to the fringes of society because in one way or another they have become “unclean.” In this first chapter of his Gospel I think Mark is being very deliberate in showing us three different things that have no place in God’s kingdom: 1) evil, 2) illness, and 3) exclusion.  Jesus takes his stand against all of these.  He drives out the unclean spirits (vss. 21-28), he cures those who are sick (vss. 29-39), and he welcomes the outcasts (vss. 40-45).  And when he does those things God’s kingdom comes, and God’s will is done,

On earth as it is in heaven.

My Faith: What people talk about before they die

Reblogged from CNN Belief Blog:

Editor’s Note: Kerry Egan is a hospice chaplain in Massachusetts and the author of “Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago.”

By Kerry Egan, Special to CNN

As a divinity school student, I had just started working as a student chaplain at a cancer hospital when my professor asked me about my work. 

Read more… 1,119 more words

A Prayer for Your Wedding Night

I have one of those big study Bibles that includes the Apocrypha, although we Baptists don’t read that part of the Bible very often.  It’s more of a Catholic thing, since Catholics include those books in the canon of Holy Scripture.  Us?  If we look at them at all it’s often only to marvel at the strange things you can find in there (not that there aren’t a lot of strange things in the 66 books we include in our canon.  Just take a look at Ezekiel sometime).  But since I probably bought the big study Bible to impress people, and since it looks more impressive with the added bulk of the Apocrypha, well…there it is.

But this morning when I was finishing up my devotional reading I thumbed through that part of the book, and stumbled on this interesting wedding night prayer.  It’s from the Book of Tobit, chapter 8, verses 4b-7, and it’s offered in unusual circumstances. Tobias wants to marry this girl named Sarah, see?  She is “sensible, brave, and very beautiful.”  There’s only one problem: she has married seven men and each of them died in the bridal chamber.  Things don’t look good for Tobit.  But he asks for her hand anyway, brave lad that he is, and when he goes into the bridal chamber he puts the heart and liver of a fish on the glowing embers of the incense in the room.  It gives off such a stink that it drives the evil spirit (the one that was killing all of Sarah’s husbands) to the remotest parts of Egypt, but Tobias’ guardian angel–Raphael–follows and binds the demon hand and foot, just so it won’t do any more mischief.

Now, you would think that this would be the end of it, but Tobias isn’t taking any chances.  Before he gets into bed with his new bride, Sarah, he invites her to join him in prayer.  I’ve printed the prayer below, and I think it’s one of those things every couple could pray on their wedding night, and maybe should, just to keep the evil spirits away (wink). 

Tobias began by saying:
‘Blessed are you, O God of our ancestors,
   and blessed is your name in all generations for ever.
Let the heavens and the whole creation bless you for ever.
You made Adam, and for him you made his wife Eve
   as a helper and support.
   From the two of them the human race has sprung.
You said, “It is not good that the man should be alone;
   let us make a helper for him like himself.”
I now am taking this kinswoman of mine,
   not because of lust,
   but with sincerity.
Grant that she and I may find mercy
   and that we may grow old together.’
And they both said, ‘Amen, Amen.’
Then they went to sleep for the night.

And when they woke up the next morning, they were both still alive.  How’s that for the power of prayer?