Pharisees and Green Monsters, Oh My...

Let me begin with this disclaimer; I’m a huge Boston Red Sox fan and have been my entire life, even following their Triple A farm team, the Pawtucket Red Sox, since I was seven.  (Sorry Rochester friends, when the PawSox come to town, they’re still my team).  My being a fan may have something to do with my New England origins.  Or it may be due in part to the fact that when my dad’s brother was dying from Leukemia in the 1950s, the great Ted Williams made regular trips to Mass General just to visit him.  Then again there’s the iconic Citgo sign parked out beyond left centerfield which has been a Boston landmark longer than I’ve been alive.

But as I think about it, my love for the Sox is probably due more than anything else to the great Fenway Park with its 37’ 2” high left field wall, affectionately known as the “Green Monster”; the highest wall of any major league baseball stadium; towering over left fielders since 1912. 

So imagine my surprise and subsequent outrage when in the 2002-03 off-season, the Green Monster was renovated with the installation of 274 seats, with even more added in 2005.  I realize Fenway Park has one of the smallest seating capacities and with players’ salaries skyrocketing, it takes more fans to generate more revenue, but really guys, the Green Monster?  You had to desecrate the holiest ground at Fenway Park by installing seats on her?  Have you no decency?  Is nothing sacred?

I wonder if these were the questions on the minds and hearts of the Scribes and Pharisees in Sunday morning’s gospel reading from Mark.  Is nothing sacred?  Jesus’ followers have not only been associating with all kinds of unclean people, but they don’t even wash their hands before eating as the religious tradition dictates.  How can they call themselves followers of God and not abide by God’s traditions?  From the Pharisees’ perspective, Jesus’ followers are not simply neglecting God’s statutes, they are spitting on the holiness of God.  They are threatening the very fabric of Israelite existence with their cavalier ways.  So yeah, the good religious folks are a bit upset.  They’ve drawn their line in the sand.

Before we launch off on some tirade against the Pharisees and their apparent close-mindedness, maybe we should look at the lines we draw in the sand.  Make no mistake about it, when it comes to life in the church, we all have them; we all have those lines you better not cross.

 

What if we cut the Congregation Council in half while at the same time eliminating Core Groups and their subcommittees in favor of a more agile congregation?  What if we were to move the altar table around the sanctuary on a seasonal basis?  What if we removed all the pews in order to make our worship space more flexible on Sunday, while creating a daily dining space for the homeless?  Do you see where I’m going here?  We all have buttons to be pushed.  We all have traditions we are unable or unwilling to forsake.

It’s taken all these years for me to finally accept what the Red Sox owners did to my beloved “Green Monster”.  I see now that their motives were not malevolent. As much as I may hate to admit it, they may have had the well-being of both the team and the park in mind.   And if I’m honest with myself, I have to acknowledge that my precious Green Monster wasn’t always green.

Once again this week, I’m not entirely sure where my sermon will end up on Sunday.  But my guess is that it’s going to have something to do with being open to the Spirit; being open to God working in new ways; trusting that God’s not going to lead us into bad places.

Join me on Sunday and let’s see where God takes us.

Peace and Love,

Pastor Doug

Another Shooting in Rochester

There’s been another shooting in Rochester.  Though every shooting and every death is tragic and there have been way too many of them this year, this particular event last night seemed even more cruel than usual.  In front of the Boys and Girls Club on Genesee Street, a place of refuge and empowerment, seven people were shot resulting in three deaths.  At this point two of the three have been identified; Raekwon, 19 years old and Jonah 17.  I know neither their stories, nor the circumstances that led to the violence perpetrated against them, but I do know that they were too young to die.

I cannot begin to imagine the devastating heart break overwhelming Raekwon’s and Jonah’s parents right now.  As a parent who has children of similar ages, my heart aches for their families.  Children aren’t supposed to die before their parents; especially children so young.  Sure, our kids get older and with every passing day they seem more and more adult-like, but they never stop being our kids.  We never stop worrying about them.  We never forget the days of diapers and bottles; cut knees, scraped elbows and the occasional bruised feelings.   We never forget the super-hero promises we made of keeping them out of harm's way.

The streets of our city have become a killing field.  The cemeteries of our city are swallowing up our children.  Rochester’s reality reflects the reality of the larger culture in which we live: A culture addicted to gun violence.  Add to that the systemic cycle of poverty and a powder keg emerges. 

At every homicide location, we’ve been gathering in prayer and sadly our prayer vigils have been occurring almost weekly.  At these vigils we pray for peace, understanding, and healing.  We pray that God will hallow the ground desecrated by the spilling of blood.  And yet the violence continues.  Shootings remain at epidemic levels.  As people of faith we can’t help but ask the questions, “Where is God in all of this?”  “Does God hear our prayers and laments?”  “Does God even care?”  These questions are not only fair, but they are faithful.  I ask these questions myself. Come on God, can’t you stop this insanity?  You could part the Red Sea, can’t you part the violence?  If only we had magic wands to make the violence disappear.

We don’t have wands, but here’s who we do have.  We have Jesus.  I’m not talking about Jesus walking and talking with me alone in some remote garden.  (Sorry, that old hymn gets it wrong.)  No, the Jesus we have is the one who knows about systemic poverty, because he was born and lived his entire life in it.  The Jesus we have is the one who himself was an innocent victim of violence as his tortured body hung dying on a cross.  The Jesus we have is the one who cried out in anguish on the cross to a God whom he thought had abandoned him.  The Jesus we have is the one who didn’t stay dead; who was raised by God thereby putting death itself to death.

And yet our children still die.  With blood stains fresh on our streets, Good Friday death still casts its ominous shadow.  Oh sure, we know that Sunday’s coming; that an empty Easter tomb awaits us; that God promises a future of healing, reconciliation, and life, but we can’t entirely dismiss the fear and discouragement of the present.  That Holy Saturday tomb looks so huge. 

Here’s the deal: In the midst of my doubts and fears; in the midst of tears that come way too easily; I will continue to keep Easter vigils on street corners and I invite you to join me.  Who knows?  Maybe our presence on street corners is the presence of God for which we’ve been praying.  Maybe our tears of Good Friday anguish are God’s tears.  Maybe our vigils, in which prayers for shattered tombs are offered, will give Easter hope to one sibling, one parent, one child.

Peace and Love,

Pastor Doug

God's Scandalous Church

“’I am the living bread that came down from heaven.  Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’” (John 6:51).

Though I’m not preaching on Sunday, this verse from the gospel reading has been haunting me all week.  On the surface Jesus’ words seem fairly harmless.  “I am the bread of life”.  I can preach that and maybe even do a fairly adequate job of it.  I mean how hard is it to talk about getting nourishment from Jesus?  I could stand up in the pulpit and point out the differences between God’s nourishment and the hollow nourishment of the world.  I could point to the times in Scripture when God has miraculously fed God’s people on their long and arduous journeys of faith.  Or I could use this text as an opportunity to talk about the importance of being fed weekly at the altar table of God’s love with a piece of bread and a sip of wine.  I could go to all these places and probably offend no one; At least no one who has made the “journey” to church on Sunday morning.   But I can’t go there.  Not this week.

For some reason the radicalness of Jesus’ words won’t let me go.  They won’t let me tame Jesus and his scandalous call to follow.  These words won’t even let me preach a sermon on the “whys” of Eucharist.  Sure I could preach a barn burner of a sermon about our need to be fed daily with the body and blood of Christ.  But I can’t go there. Not this week.

“The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh”.  How in the world can the religious folks of Jesus’ day even stomach such a shock jock phrase?  A good religious person of Jesus’ day knows that any talk of flesh is unclean.  It is not kosher.  So, who does this Jesus think he is claiming that it is his flesh and blood that truly nourishes?  Jesus’ declaration turns everything upside down.  Every faith truth ever told; every faith assumption ever held is undone by this one sentence.  In Jesus’ day, flesh and blood are ritually unclean.  If contact is made with either, folks are cast out of community.  Without community survival is almost impossible.

Can we even begin to grasp the radical nature of Jesus’ words?  Surely these ancient kosher laws don’t apply to our lives, but in what scandalous ways does Jesus call us to follow?  In what scandalous ways does Jesus call us out of our safety zones?  In what scandalous ways does Jesus call us to abandon our theological certitudes?  In this post-modern world in which the church no longer finds itself at the center of society’s norms and mores, what is Jesus calling us to do and to be?  How open are we to God acting in new and creative ways?   How open are we to God’s reforming word re-defining all that we have taken for granted in the last 500 years?  How open are we to God changing the very definition of church?  The scriptural canon is certainly closed, but is it possible that God is still speaking?

Jesus’ words are radical both for his day and for ours.  But they are also filled with good news.  In keeping with the Hebrew notion of flesh and blood containing one’s total being, when Jesus talks about giving his flesh and blood, he is promising nothing less than the giving of his entire self.  I don’t know about you, but I can’t begin to get my head around that kind of love; that kind of love that holds nothing back.  And yet it is precisely that abiding love which not only nourishes and sustains us, but sends us back out into the world to feed God’s sheep.   How will we feed God’s sheep in the weeks, months, and years to come holding nothing back?  Join me in worship; in that place where the crucified and risen Christ has promised to be.  And let us discern together where God is calling us to travel and who God is calling us to be; no matter how radical and scandalous the call.

Peace and Love,

Pastor Doug

Incarnate Word - Come Out!

“They were saying, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?  How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (John 6:42).

Surely by now, you grumbling religious leaders know who Jesus is.  He’s the Son of God.  Haven’t you been listening?  Haven’t you seen what he’s done?  Surely that wedding at Cana where he turned 180 gallons of water into the finest wine must have convinced someone.  Missed the Cana gig? Well, certainly you religious experts saw how Jesus healed the paralytic on the steps of the Temple in Jerusalem.  You groused enough about it; Something about it being unlawful to heal on the Sabbath.  Really guys? What about the stilling of the storm?  Or the feeding of the 5,000?  Haven’t you figured out who Jesus is yet?  Maybe you should have been with me back in second grade when the most incredible Sunday School teacher ever, Mrs. Barnes, told us what it meant that God put on our flesh in Jesus; That God took his love for us to a whole new level in becoming one of us.  You quote chapter and verse of scripture looking for God and can’t see that God is already here and has found you.  Jesus is God’s Word spoken at Creation made flesh; God’s Word of prophetic faithfulness made flesh; God’s Word of healing made flesh.  And still you can’t see beyond appearances? 

Truth be told, I too have a hard time seeing beyond appearances. I’m ordained.  I’ve been to seminary, studied Greek, learned how to dissect Scripture and put it back together again, all the while learning how to teach and preach this stuff.  But when push comes to shove I have doubts.  I have times when my holy imagination has run dry.  We clergy stake our entire lives on gospel proclamation and still we see churches dying before our very eyes; haunted hulks of once vibrant church buildings, now shabby specters of bygone glory.  We see dwindling numbers of people in church and the fear that evokes, experiencing that fear first hand in personal attacks and in some instances firings.   We see what the church could be and still feel the shackles of congregational anxiety holding us back from adapting to the culture’s needs around us.  We see budgets shrink and programs go unfunded and still have to explain why folks aren’t beating down the doors of our churches on a Sunday morning.   By all appearances, God at times seems absent.  Little wonder that so many clergy are lonesome, weary, depressed, and end up leaving the ministry after just a few short years.

But here’s the deal, God has never been stopped by appearances.  Our white mainline Protestant churches may, like Lazarus, have the stench of death in their garments, appearing to be dead, but when the Word made flesh utters the words “come out”, death’s defeat has begun.  Old ways of being the church may be dead or dying and our congregations may seem lifeless, but when Jesus issues that same “Lazarus call” to us, new life has begun and the church is literally pregnant with possibility.

 

“Come out!”  Jesus’ words to Lazarus and to us.  Come out!  In the face of decline, come out!  Unwrap the grave clothes.  Breathe deep and step into the light.  Come out and be the church – be the Beloved Community God has called you to be; doing justice and loving mercy; not ecclesiastical entrepreneurs but God’s holy fools proclaiming life and hope in the midst of death and despair. Be the Beloved Community God has called you to be in the waters of Baptism; no longer fearing appearances of scarcity but trusting the promises of God’s abundance; trusting that God is not yet done with us and won’t be for a very long time.  Come out.  Dear friends in Christ, come out!

Peace and Love,

Pastor Doug