Continue the Journey   - Gratitude Sunday

 November 8, 2009           

 Thank God for the journey, the amazing, growing, wonderful journeys of our lives. Thank God for the journey. The theme of our stewardship campaign this year is “Continue the Journey.” We are grateful for the journey and gratitude makes the journey more fruitful and fulfilling.

(slide of hikers) Several important journeys of my life happened because of Boy Scouts. I’ll never forget hiking through the gorgeous mountains of New Mexico at Philmont Scout Ranch. I am grateful now, though I wasn’t then, even for the day when a group of us got lost. We must have taken a wrong turn from the rest of the group and we didn’t realize it for several miles. With big packs on our backs and only so much daylight left, our little group began to get worried. We headed back down the trail and we for a time we would run 50 paces and walk 50 paces, just to make sure we would make it.

 By the time we got back to the group, I had the biggest blister on my foot that I have ever had in my life. I even thank God for the blister. It was a symbol for me that I could hike farther than I ever thought I could, that I could persist on the journey and go farther than I ever thought. And we got to rest the next day before heading out on our next adventure.

(slide of three women) We have been showing a picture of Ruth and Naomi and Orpah for meditation for the last several weeks in our worship. The picture is called “The Journey.” It shows the three women together just before they had to make a decision that would send Orpah on a separate journey – back to her people in Moab. Ruth’s husband had also died, and with the drought they were experiencing, the three women – the widow Naomi and her two daughters-in-law were in a desperate situation. They could not count on help from anyone. Naomi decided that she had to go back to her people in Israel rather than stay in Moab, which was really like enemy territory for her, aside from Ruth and Orpah. There was a heavy injunction for men not to marry foreign women for just a situation such as this.

Naomi the widow, was going to end up just like the woman in the Jesus story, with nothing to live on and nothing to give. She encourages Ruth to go back to her people like Orpah, not to come with her to starve in Israel. As we read last week, however, Ruth sticks with her mother-in-law even when it seemed like there would be no future for her. She says, “where you go, I will go. Your people will be my people. Where you die, I will die.”

In the scandalous story Marilyn read today, we hear about how Boaz finally gives Ruth a future. In that society there were few safety nets for widows. If a woman’s husband died, she was supposed to marry that man’s brother. Boaz didn’t have to fulfill that role, but he was the nearest kin to Naomi, and Naomi manipulates the situation to get Boaz interested in Ruth.

Boaz acts with honor and hesed, loving kindness, and marries Ruth. They have a son, Obed, who according to tradition, was the grandfather of King David, the most honored ancestor of Jesus. This is why the story of Ruth receives such honor in the Christian tradition. The surprising loyalty of Ruth to Naomi leads to the surprising lineage of Jesus. He is descended from a poor foreign woman married to her second husband.

But maybe that shouldn’t be such a surprise. God is always working through the most unlikely people – outsiders, strangers, and outcasts. God is always acting with loyalty, fidelity and steadfast love toward God’s people, toward us.

Today we express our gratitude to God for the gifts we receive by pledging our loyalty, fidelity and steadfast love back to God in return. When we give a percentage of our income (tradition says a tenth of our income) off the top back to God, we are symbolizing how everything in our lives is God’s and we are expressing that in very real terms. People who have tried tithing in our congregation will tell you that the fruits of tithing are many. By deciding to set aside a rather large percentage of our income before we pay other bills, we are declaring our gratitude to God, but also we really create abundance in our life. Just as we create more time in our lives when we slow down and pray and spend time with God, so we create abundance when we give the first fruits of our lives to God. We are saying, “There is enough. There is more than enough.” And we are taking care of a part of God’s creation, giving to create a space for God’s Spirit to thrive, a place where we can teach and learn about the gifts God offers to us all – hospitality, loyalty, fidelity, and loving kindness.

 Not only is today Gratitude Sunday, but this month is Gratitude month and I want to invite you to a little spiritual discipline for the rest of the month. I invite you to create a gratitude journal. Research shows that people who live their lives in gratitude are significantly healthier and happier. If you like I can give you the results of the remarkable research, but for today, you can just take my word for it enough to try it for yourselves – between now and Thanksgiving, write down each day something for which you are grateful, something specific. We can even be grateful for the blisters of hard work and persistence. It will make you healthier and happier and more generous. Because it puts us all in touch with how our journey with God is filled with blessing, with abundance, and with opportunities to make this world the place God wants it to be. 

 We don’t have to be perfect to do this work. We only need to be grateful.

Honor to Ancestors and to God’s Vision

Revelations 21:1-6a I saw Heaven and earth new-created. Gone the first Heaven, gone the first earth, gone the sea. ²I saw Holy Jerusalem, new-created, descending resplendent out of Heaven, as ready for God as a bride for her husband. ^3-5I heard a voice thunder from the Throne: "Look! Look! God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women! They're his people, he's their God. He'll wipe every tear from their eyes. Death is gone for good—tears gone, crying gone, pain gone—all the first order of things gone." The Enthroned continued, "Look! I'm making everything new. Write it all down—each word dependable and accurate."

 ^6-8Then he said, "It's happened. I'm A to Z. I'm the Beginning, I'm the Conclusion. From Water-of-Life Well I give freely to the thirsty. Conquerors inherit all this. I'll be God to them, they'll be sons and daughters to me. But for the rest—the feckless and faithless, degenerates and murderers, sex peddlers and sorcerers, idolaters and all liars—for them it's Lake Fire and Brimstone. Second death!"

Honor to Ancestors and to God’s Vision

All Saints Sunday November 1, 2009 

 Charlotte Ferguson always welcomed me to Simpson House with a smile and a kind word. “How’s everybody at St. Luke?” she would ask, and I could tell she really wanted to know. She cared about people here and cared about what was happening here. She probably felt as though she had limited abilities and influence to make the world a better place from her little room in that senior citizen’s center, but the truth is that she made the world a better place just by her everyday caring.

 Bobby Nash was not supposed to live past 20 years old, but when he died he was 74 years old! Living with Down Syndrome meant he was limited in his abilities, but anyone who experienced his smile and his loving spirit would say that despite his limitations, he too made the world a better place.

 Ginger Myers sang and cooked and e-mailed her way into hundreds of hearts. Even when it was hard for her to breathe or hard for her to walk, she came to sing and to let people know that some folks couldn’t stand their perfume or deodorant. 

 These were people, and we can certainly include Kathy Jones, Walt Sheets, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and others who have been mentioned today in their number; these were people who made our world a little more heavenly. If you look carefully at the Revelations passage today, you’ll notice that early Christians did not conceive of heaven as someplace we go to when we die. Heaven, they understood was coming here. “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

 The Message goes on to put it “God has moved into the neighborhood, making his home with men and women!” God has moved into the neighborhood! As a bumpersticker in my neighborhood puts it, “Heaven is a mixed neighborhood.” This scripture also corrects our misunderstanding of heaven as a place for individuals. Heaven is a place for community, for our imperfect communities and institutions to become places that welcome the Living God into our midst.

 I have always loved thinking about what the ideal world would be like. I have read every book about Utopian societies I can put my hands on. Some novels, like Brave New World, imagine a future world which tries to get rid of tears and sorrow by getting rid of troublesome institutions like families, and by giving people drugs to stay artificially happy. That sounds more like hell, don’t you think.

 Other novels, like Walden Two, actually try to imagine what a heavenly world would be like. I would disagree with Revelations image of that perfect world as a world without tears. I think that heavenly world would have more free emotional expression than ours. I also imagine that world as one which would be more attentive to people who have died. Most societies in world history have had some way to honor their ancestors. Most societies are much more concerned than ours is with keeping in touch with the ancestors.

 The fact that we don’t honor our ancestors leads to nostalgia and unrealistic thinking. Honoring the ancestors does not mean that we would do everything the way they would. When you relate to ancestors and hold them close, you argue with them, you differentiate yourself from them and love them, but you don’t have to like them or be like them. Honoring our ancestors allows us to hear God for ourselves and form our own vision for the future and work to carry out that vision.

 As we come to the table, as we eat together, we express and enact God’s presence with our community this morning. We repent of how often we forget that God is present with us and among us now. We envision God with us and what our world could be like if we would live as if God is present with us here and now in everything we do. It is true. It is true. God knows it is true.

Communion hymn: 2221 In Unity We Lift Our Song

October 25, 2009   A Human Distraction

 Jesus is on the final leg of his journey to Jerusalem and the tension builds in the gospel of Mark as he nears the time when he will make the final entrance and the last walk to the cross. The moment could hardly be more significant - nothing compared with the urgency of this journey, and yet a blind beggar attempts to stop the whole thing in order to make his request. Being blind, most people counted him less than human; a tiny ant in the glorious scheme of things that were unfolding. Yet Jesus stops the entire procession so that he could hear what this person wanted. Jesus interrupted the course of world events in order to answer the cry of a beggar. Listen for the word of God for you today:

Mark 10:46-52 They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!" 48Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" 49Jesus stood still and said, "Call him here." And they called the blind man, saying to him, "Take heart; get up, he is calling you." 50 So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51Then Jesus said to him, "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind man said to him, "My teacher, let me see again." 52Jesus said to him, "Go; your faith has made you well." Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way. 

October 25, 2009   A Human Distraction            

This is such a simple passage, and yet it is so profound. It is as simple as Jesus meeting yet another person in need and helping them, meeting a blind beggar on the road and healing him. Yet this is the last healing in the Gospel of Mark and it gains power and significance by that fact and by the fact that we are in on the story of where Jesus is going. Even if the disciples have trouble understanding or accepting it, Jesus has told them over and over that they are heading to Jerusalem not for glory and triumph, but toward pain and death, a pain and death that will somehow conquer death.

Nothing can stop them now it would seem, and the disciples are impatient and try to quiet the beggar by the side of the road. But Bartimaeus cries out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” His persistence and desperation catches Jesus’ attention and he calls to him. The disciples finally give him a little room and say, “Take heart, he’s calling you.” And Bartimaeus leaps to his feet, throwing off his cloak, which was all he had, the tool of his trade in which he collected coins. He throws them aside to kneel in front of Jesus.

Jesus asks him, “What do you want me to do for you?” It is exactly the same question he asked the disciples. We talked about it last week. Do you remember what the disciples answered when he asked “What do you want me to do for you?” They said, “We want to sit one at your right hand and one at your left.” Well, this blind man is not likely to be so grandiose. In fact, one might expect him to ask for a quarter – or at most a dollar.” I can remember being so surprised one time when a person was bold enough on the street to ask me for 5 dollars.

 But Bartimaeus asks for his sight. “Let me see again,” he says. The gospels –especially Mark and John - often use blindness and sight as metaphors for understanding of Jesus mission. So when they bring a blind person into the story, that person, even while they are blind, often can see better than the disciples or the other people around Jesus.

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks. And what do we answer? Please make my life more comfortable. Please be with my sister or brother in the hospital and make them better. Please help me with this problem or that problem. Somehow, Bartimaeus is a model for going deeper, being willing to risk more and ask for more. He says,,,, “Please teacher, let me see again.”

We are not inclined to want to see. We like to be blind. We are afraid to look a blind person in the eye, or to take in the pain of someone who is hungry or in need. I know I find it easy to ignore so much and just go about my business. I’d rather not see.

From time to time, I realize that when I shut my eyes to the pain of the world, I can’t see the beauty either. When I refuse to notice how painful life is for the people of Haiti for instance, I also miss the depth of their hope and the joy in the real possibilities for change in our world. If we live our lives on the surface and avoid challenges, difficulties, and hard truths, then we often also fail to see the full beauty of the world, the wonder of God’s creation, the full power of God’s hope.

When Jesus healed Bartimaeus, told him his faith, his desperate faith had made him well, he told Bart to “go on his way.” But the passage states clearly that Bartimaeus regained his sight and immediately followed Jesus on the way.

Again, it seems like such a profound way to tell the truth of the gospel. Here Bartimaeus goes to follow Jesus on the way, but this is the last healing story in the gospel of Mark. From here on, Mark moves into the passion story – the final journey of Jesus to the cross. So we are to imagine, Bartimaeus walking with Jesus on the road, taking in all these sights for the first time, or for the first time in a long time – looking at the wonder of a sunset, or a sunrise, seeing how gorgeous it can be to look at leaves on a tree. And yet at the same time he is confronted with seeing the pain of the world, watching as the one who healed him is cruelly crucified on a cross.

So we are called to open our eyes, and not to minimize the pain and suffering around us, but to open our eyes to see. It may seem like a paradox, but that is when we really begin to see the whole spectrum – the beauty and love, as well as the pain and ugliness. And when we realize how blind we have been, and how blind we continue to be, that is when we really experience the beauty of God’s grace.

I know people sometimes go away from a sermon and tell a friend what it was about. And I imagine people saying sometimes, “Oh, the preacher told us we should be good. Or the preacher said today we should open our eyes and look around at the hard and beautiful parts of the world.” Well, that doesn’t sound so far off, does it?

 But the gospel is never about what we should do, or what it would take for us to be good. The gospel is about what God has done, and how God loves us, no matter how blind we have been, no matter how stuck or lonely we have acted. The gospel is about the beauty of God’s grace and the wonder of God’s love, that makes it possible for us to ask for our sight even though we know we may see some hard things and be called to respond to God’s love in ways that change who we thought we were.

 God loves us even when we don’t want to see, even when we are happy in our shell of blindness, even as we pretend to see when we don’t have a clue, God loves us and calls to us, even now, “What would you have me do for you?” “What do you really need?”

October 18, 2009  Great Service  

 Jim and I have received a lot of attention over the last couple of months for our stand against gun violence. We are pretty pleased with ourselves. In fact, you may be able to see little halos starting to form over our heads. It is not easy to keep everything in perspective. Newspaper articles and interviews – even if we try to resist it, we’re finding it difficult to think that we actually did something to deserve the attention and the little bit of success.

 When I thought about it relation to this passage, I recalled the reaction of Dorothy Hull when she brought the newspaper article into my office. She said, “Look what God has done!” That puts it a little more into perspective. And if that doesn’t, we have been slapped down enough times to know that every little victory has its own difficulties tied right in. Those halos won’t last for long.

 They didn’t for James and John Zebedee, who were also trying to sit at the right and left hand of God. The gospel of Mark seems to be trying to show them in the worst possible light. Right after Mark portrays Jesus predicting his death for the third time (by now you don’t expect the disciples to get it, but you think they might have a glimmer of understanding, but no…), James and John ask Jesus to let them sit at his right and left hand when he comes to power.

 They seem to know that what they are asking is outrageous. At first they don’t even say it outright – just “We want you to do whatever we ask of you.” But then they show that they weren’t listening and haven’t been listening to anything Jesus has said, when they still expect him to be the conquering hero, the winning Messiah, and ask to sit on his right hand –with or without halos.

 It shows outrageous insensitivity to Jesus and to the other disciples, but the other disciples, when they hear about it are just as dense, angry at James and John only because they tried to jump the line for the benefits they all expect to reap.

 Jesus tries to bring them down a notch by saying to them, you don’t know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, to be baptized by the baptism with which I am baptized? Again, Mark is just brilliant here. When he talks about baptism, he reminds us of the very beginning of the story, Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist. And when he talks about the cup, he reminds us of the cup of communion. These are the two sacraments we celebrate in the Methodist Church, baptism and communion.

 Both sacraments, both images resonate with joy and with challenge; the joy of a baby baptized, of new life, of a refreshing drink, a table set, and the challenge of the baptism into death and rebirth, the challenge of the cup of Christ’s blood, the challenge of the last supper, the challenge of the cross.

 The disciples only hear the joyful, sunnier, less challenging implications and say “sure we can drink that cup. Yes, we are able.” Little do they know… Jesus gives them the benefit of the doubt though, and implies, “whether you know it or not, you will taste the cup and go through the water.”

 And then he emphasizes again that this path is not about recognition and glory, about halos and admiration. This path is about love and service. It’s about facing into the flood and the storm. (Pictures of the results of Hurricane Katrina and the work done by our congregation.) You will become great, he says, only by becoming a servant, by living for others, and serving God’s community.

 We may well ask ourselves whether we truly want to be disciples of this servant king – whether we really want to be a faithful church, when the demands are so high. Can we admit our self-obsession and our fear? Can we live with insecurity rather than strive in our fears for a secure future, a comfortable life?

 None of us wish our children to have to face death, and yet when we baptize them, when we teach them to drink the cup given by Jesus, we honor them; we dedicate them to service; we say, yes, you will be baptized, you will drink. You will not always be ruled and driven by your fears and your need for security. Despite our own shortcomings and our own fears, dear children, you will live the life the Christ calls you to live.

 May it be so. Amen.

 Responsive hymn: 2027 Now Praise the Hidden God of Love

October 4, 2009 A Special Fondness         

 Anybody who knows me knows that my favorite flower is Sweet William, the Pentecost carnation. I love the smell, the beautiful lacy patterns on the flowers, the connection to my favorite holiday of the year, Pentecost, and the lovely purples, pinks, and reds of the flowers.

 When I see portulaca, or moss roses, like these in front of my house, I often remark, “Oh, my favorite flower.” It is a very weak joke, but I can say it about most any flower really. I am especially fond of these coleus this year, that Cathy planted in front of our house, and the bright red ones up the street. Or these gorgeous impatiens on our block. I’m especially fond of them as well. Azaleas are my favorite and Lilies of the Valley, and purple tulips.

 As I say it is a weak kind of joke, but I felt a bit vindicated by the novel The Shack that a few of us read this summer. The same joke runs all through that book as Papa, the God figure in the book, repeatedly talks about one character or another and says, “Oh yes, I am especially fond of her.” Or “I am especially fond of that boy.” I always knew my joke had theological significance.

 We Christians like to claim that God is especially fond of our children. Our pictures are full of Jesus holding children in his arms. I’m sure it is one accurate portrayal of the character of Jesus.

 I was meditating on our passage from Hebrews earlier this week and I kind of asked God inside me about this paradox, and I thought I heard God laugh and say, “Oh yes, I am especially fond of my Jewish children. I have chosen them and I love them especially.”

 Now, I have Jewish friends who have struggled with that claim, and how it has sometimes made them feel isolated, or superior. So I had to ask a little deeper, and sure enough I heard God chuckle some more and say, “Oh yes, I am especially fond of Muslim children as well, and Buddhist children and children of atheists and secular humanists, even Unitarians.”

 Christians have at times become confused by scripture passages that say there is only one way to God, and that is through Jesus. It is true that Jesus is the one way to God for Christians, but God has a special fondness for children of all kinds. So it is accurate for people to portray that fondness wherever we are, to understand Jesus as one of us, wherever we are – in Africa, or Asia, or Philadelphia, or Bryn Mawr, There are many ways to God and God loves many ways.

 Not that God loves all religions or religious expressions the same, but we know God is big enough to encompass many different expressions. We celebrate a God of paradox and variety. This Hebrews text talks about God’s great love for all of humanity, starting with the one who bears “the exact imprint of God’s very being.” That’s a beautiful description.

 Neither the passage nor our communion service is naïve in its understanding of the paradoxes of Christ’s participation in the lives of God’s beloved children. In the reading and in the communion meal, Christ’s death, Christ’s participation in the worst of human suffering is the vehicle by which God’s special favoritism for every human group is shown. We are given a Jesus who embodies glory and humiliation, power and suffering, authority and servant-hood, radical grace and radical obedience, duty and delight. God is able to bring all of these contradictions together in this one meal.

 So we eat and drink with Christians all around the world today, and pray for peace for them all, and we dare to include all God’s children in our prayer. Amen.

Communion hymn: 2238 In the Midst of New Dimensions

September 27, 2009 A Courageous Woman 

 I have known a few courageous women in my time. Ginger Myers was a courageous woman in her way. She faced death with real courage and dignity. She knew she was very sick and she let us know. She let us know so gently though that it was not easy to understand how serious her situation was. She knew though. She knew how dangerous her combination of immune deficiency and medicine allergies was. And yet she sang. The last words she said to me, in the midst of a serious reaction to her medicine was “I love to sing.” She was a courageous woman.

 Another friend of mine died this week, Kathy Jones, the lay-leader of my former congregation, and another courageous woman. Kathy Jones was a tall, statuesque, African American woman, who wore dashikis and wore her hair at times in a big afro. She worked as a high school teacher at West Philadelphia high and often when a young man died in violence in the community, she would let me know that she had taught him. She was a strong advocate for peace and justice, even when people around her thought she was off her rocker. She was a courageous woman.

 Esther was a courageous woman. Celebrated in our first reading this morning, Esther is the heroine of the Jewish festival of Purim. It’s good for us to know about the holiday of Purim, a holiday not as big as Passover or the high holy days that are happening now, but a fun holiday of gift giving – more appropriate for gift giving that Hanukah in fact, a fun time for dressing up and acting out the story of a courageous woman.

 Esther was a Jewish woman who, because of her beauty, became the queen of the king of Persia. She had become assimilated into Persian society, and that’s how she became queen, but when the evil Haman convinced the king to commit genocide, to exterminate the Jewish people, Esther’s uncle Mordechai convinced her she had to act. In the most famous line from the book of Esther, Mordechai suggests to Esther, “Perhaps you attained royalty for just such a time as this.’

 Indeed when she gets the chance she takes a great risk with the king, saying “if I perish, I perish,” and reveals that she is herself a Jew, and stands up for herself and her people, challenging Haman’s plan to exterminate her people and cleverly hinting that the plan undermines the king’s authority (even though he had approved of the plan.) The king had prepared a gallows for Mordechai and other Jews, but when he sees his wife’s courage, he orders Haman to be hanged instead and the Jewish people are spared.

 Some modern feminists have had trouble with Esther since her power resides in her relationship to the power of the king and the tradition of her beauty, but she is clearly celebrated in the tradition as a courageous woman in her own right. And we can understand that her courage is part of her real beauty. As the late John Donahue observed, we get confused in our culture between beauty and glamour. Not all beauty is glamorous. Some beauty is courageous – a standing against the culture around us rather than assimilating with the culture around us.

 As an aside at this point, I want to talk to you for a minute about the beauty of the music at St. Luke. I notice lately that we having a little tension around applauding for the choir and for the soloists. When we start to applaud for one, it starts to feel like we should applaud for all of them or they will feel unappreciated. But the music in this place is worship, not performance. It’s not like other places. It’s beautiful, not glamorous. Sometimes, the best appreciation of the music is silence – or a quiet amen. When we have a rousing anthem like the one this morning, applause can be a great response, and I love that we appreciate Clyde at the end of the service, but a sensitive silence after a thoughtful solo like the one coming up may be just the thing, if we can manage it.

 Back to Esther though, we may think that this lovely little story about a courageous Jewish woman standing up for her people seems pretty far away from us today. When do we ever stand up and say who we are, come out and claim our identity as Christians, as people of God? These days, holidays provide the only opportunity for us to claim our religion, be it Christian, Jewish or Muslim. The rest of the time we want to all be the same. What emergency would have to happen to make us stand up for who we are, to make us claim our identity as followers of the way? We manage to live comfortably with so many contradictions to our faith in a culture obsessed with materialism, sports, patriotism, and militarism. What would make us stand aside from the cultural norms around us to follow the one who called us to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek, or to sell all we have and give it to the poor? What is the emergency occasion that would force us to claim who we are as children of God, as courageous women and men ready to

 The Heart of a Parent   

Mark 9:30–37 Leaving there, they went through Galilee. He didn't want anyone to know their whereabouts, 31 for he wanted to teach his disciples. He told them, "The Son of Man is about to be betrayed to some people who want nothing to do with God. They will murder him. Three days after his murder, he will rise, alive." 32 They didn't know what he was talking about, but were afraid to ask him about it. 33 They came to Capernaum. When he was safe at home, he asked them, "What were you discussing on the road?" 34 The silence was deafening—they had been arguing with one another over who among them was greatest. 35 He sat down and summoned the Twelve. "So you want first place? Then take the last place. Be the servant of all." 36 He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, he said, 37 "Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me."

September 20, 2009             The Heart of a Parent          

 So very few of us are Phillies or Eagles material after all; so many of us have memories of being chosen last for the team, of being left off or left out. We all know what it was like to be a child, an adolescent in a world not really set up for us. This passage about people near us arguing about who’s the greatest, while we feel like lint in a bellybutton, resonates with some deep part of many of us, and we say ‘yes. I’ve been last. I know what it’s like to be last. So now it’s my turn to be first.’ We can turn it around that way 100 times and still do it again the next time. 

 We want to be the best, the first - if not the best ball-player, then the best dresser, or the best singer, or the best friend; the best dad, the best musician, the funniest or the wisest. Failing one of those, how about the best loser? I always appreciate the ones who can lose graciously. So, what’s wrong with wanting to be the greatest!!?? 

‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’

 Lenora wrote poetry, intense, vivid, painful, smart poetry. Lenora spoke her mind and was never afraid to name the truth that nobody else would dare to express. Lenora did not follow the rules, but followed her own heart. Lenora was young, blind, and sometimes psychotic - and she didn’t like to take her medicine because the meds dulled her brilliance and her manic energy. 

 The medicine made life easier for everybody around her, and for Lenora, but she didn’t seem to care about making life easier. Lenora was one of several mentally ill people in her congregation, one that I served as pastor. There seemed to be a special attraction in that congregation for people who were disturbed. Worship was sometimes interrupted by their calls for attention. They felt free to speak, some like children, some with anger, some with undirected passion. Some came by during the week for coffee or conversation. They were sometimes a blessing and sometimes a curse. Someone along the line invited me to think of them as the Treasured Ones.

 Lenora would come by when she needed help the most, when her demons were raging and she had exhausted all the other people who usually helped her. She came when she needed someone to set a limit, to say ‘no, you can’t do that.’ We were not good at setting limits or saying ‘no,’ but we had to learn. One time I had to call the police and testify against her to get her committed against her will to a psychiatric center. It felt like a betrayal, and at the same time, the only thing to do.

 Our society’s care for these folks of great need leaves much to be desired. In our confusion about what to do, many of the mentally ill now end up in jail instead of getting any kind of help. Families and caregivers are left alone to cope with terrible situations, and often do heroic work.

 Our fear of mental illness is a great difficulty, pointed to by our desire to be the best, to be the greatest. Sometimes we open our service with hand gestures or body movements along with the call to worship. Our liturgists are really good at leading them, but I notice sometimes we are a little embarrassed to follow. It seems silly to raise our hands in the air or cross our arms. It seems childish at best, crazy at worst. We are all children and we are all part crazy on this bus and terrified to show the delicate, vulnerable, broken side of ourselves. We are taught to look good at all costs, to be in charge and nice and efficient, to be first; we don’t do childish and we don’t handle mental difference and disabilities well at all.

 God does not have our world set up for maximum efficiency, and we who want to be efficient have a terrible uphill battle on our hands. We cannot leave people behind because they are inconvenient and it feels inefficient in our lives to deal with their difficulties. And we lose so much when we can’t find the help to take it on in some way or another. We need to insist that we support each other and that our culture do more for the Treasured Ones.

 Life in this beautiful world is not so much like a game of baseball or football, where one side wins and one side loses. Life in God’s world is more like a ‘non-zero-sum game’ where we all have to assist each other to get to the finish line, where nobody wins unless we all do. We may need to gather in circles rather than straight lines sometimes.

 What’s wrong with wanting to be the best? What’s wrong is when our best is trying to make someone else less than us, worse than us. What’s wrong is when our quest for greatness and efficiency, leaves behind the foolish, forlorn, and forgotten, the lonely, lost, and least. What’s wrong is when we forget our own children, and other people’s children and the child within ourselves wanting to be invited to play.

 God wants us to do our best, to win, even to be first. ‘Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.’ There’s a difference between doing our best, and being the greatest. God calls us first to servant-hood. The servant, the one who inefficiently pays attention and brings along the others, who cares for the disabled, and brings along the mentally ill, who takes the time and lives bravely enough to challenge the insanity of our prison system. Those are the real winners in God’s realm, those are the great ones - the ones who care for all God’s children.

 One of the other Treasured Ones in one of my congregations was a woman named Gladys. She was a 60 year old child, absolutely simple and child-like. Week after week she would ask me if she could sing in the service and I would put her off. Finally, I made a place for her to sing in the service, and she came forward and sang in her child-like, off key, 60 year old voice, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong. They are weak but he is strong. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.’

 May we all be so confident in God’s love. Amen.

Responsive hymn: 2236 Gather Us In