Sermon of the Week:
Again & Again: God Meets Us

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on February 21, 2021.

First Sunday in Lent

Keywords: Angels, Temptation, Baptism, Chesed, Mr. Rogers. #pcusa​​​​

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Genesis 9:8-17
and Mark 1:9-15

Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.

Again and Again, God Meets Us.

That’s the sermon theme for this first Sunday in Lent,
The first sermon in a new sermon series, Again and Again.

I’m grateful to call Denise Anderson a colleague and a friend.
She was co-moderator of the 222^nd General Assembly of our denomination
And works as the Coordinator for Racial and Intercultural Justice
With the Presbyterian Mission Agency now.

I’m mainly following her suggestions, exploring these Lenten stories
With an eye to God’s persistent, maybe even relentless grace.

Again and Again, God meets us.

Here’s how Denise talks about this passage before us this morning.[i]

My personal story is, though my family wasn’t very “churchy”
I somehow came to religion in my teens.
I came to my denomination in seminary
After learning more about the Reformed tradition.
Reformed theology emphasizes God’s initiative
Which is consistent with my own experience.
I can’t tell you if I ever really found God.
It was God who found me,
And kept finding me throughout my life.
Whether I was observant or indifferent about my faith,
God was always close by.

Mark’s Gospel (Denise Continues)
Serves as source material for both Matthew and Luke…
It’s the shortest and most perfunctory of all four Gospels.
In just seven verses, we learn of three significant events
In the life of Jesus
As he began his ministry.
The first is his baptism,
Where God claims him as God’s beloved son.
The second is his experience in the wilderness,
Where God sends angels to attend to him as he faces the Accuser.
Lastly, after John the Baptist’s arrest,
Jesus begins proclaiming God’s proximity and reign while calling for repentance.

The common thread in each account (Denise says)
Is God’s closeness.
In pivotal moments, God is extraordinarily present with Jesus
And those around him,
And for good reason.

In the Black church,
We sing of how God picks us up,
Turns us around,
And places our feet “on solid ground.”
God’s proximity informs our trajectory.
God approaches us to claim, equip, and send us to do God’s will.

Again and Again, God meets us where we are,
But doesn’t leave us there.
We shift from sinking sand to solid ground,
Navel-gazing to community,
Personal pietism to justice for all,
And away from behaviors, both personal and systemic,
That frustrate God’s vision for the world.

///
I particularly appreciate Rev. Anderson’s insight,
That Mark wants us to connect Jesus’ baptism with the temptation.

God met Jesus at the water before he is tempted in the wilderness.
That’s important.
Mark is so quick in his telling of the story,
that we need to take care not to blink and miss it…
if you are looking at what GOD is doing here, in the first chapter of Mark,
Jesus shows up on scene, God is there, blessing, empowering, supporting
This is my son, the Beloved…
And then, too, when he is pushed out into the wilderness,
God sends Angels to care for him, to minister to him.

God meets us where we are.
God met Jesus where he was, and stuck with him.
God’s covenant with all of creation…the rainbow in the heavens,
Reminds us that God meets us where we are…

///
Those Angels are easy to skim over, too.

The wild beasts might grab your attention,
So you just might let the Angels go unnoticed…

We have a bible study that meets every Friday morning,
by zoom, these days.
(If you want more info about it let me know and we’d love to have you).

It has been a chance for people to check in with each other
And we do that first, and then get to the bible study.

This week, one of the members really wanted to know about the Angels.
We had talked about those pesky demons just a few weeks before that,
And here Mark talks about Angels.
What is that all about, anyway.

I confess, I wasn’t ready for that question yet,
But I have been thinking about it since.

///
I’m not sure I’ve preached very much about angels
In all the years I’ve been fortunate enough to be a preacher.

Sure, maybe about Gabriel, around Christmas
Or even the Angel on the stone, near the tomb, at Easter.

But during the rest of the year, they’re not part of my ordinary repertoire.

One reason for that is that there really aren’t all that many references
to Angels in the New Testament.

Certainly not as many as Hallmark or Martel or even Hobby Lobby,
Bless their heart,
Would have you believe…
They’d love to sell you an angel figurine or nicknack.

But, if I’m honest,
its also because I’ve never been quite sure what to say about them.

An angel, traditionally, is a messenger for God.
The word ANGEL itself literally means that:
A celestial being acting as God’s divine intermediary.

On the other hand,
St. Augustine would argue that an Angel
is an office, a job,
Its what they do, not what they are.

What they ARE is a spirit, Augustine said
given purpose by God, to go DO something.
To share God’s story, God’s news.

I like that. A lot.
It helps me understand, and reframe,
what angels might mean for us
and for our day.

And just as our contemporary age has struggled to know what to do with
The different cosmology, the different worldview
we find in the scriptures—
this world of demons and spirits and Satan, the Tempter
the being who tests Jesus in the wilderness,
not to mention the angels…

Just as we aren’t quite sure what do to with all of that…
There are good ways in which people of faith
Have sought to better understand these cosmic creatures
In modern ways, with faithful reframing. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
When Things Just Look Different

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on February 14, 2021.

Transfiguration of the Lord

Keywords: Hamilton, Skeptical, Artistic Imagination, Elijah and Elisha, Transfiguration, Principle. #pcusa​​​​

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Mark 9:2-9
and 2 Kings 2:1-12

Permission to podcast / stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-733469. All rights reserved.

I re-watched Hamilton the Musical this week.

One of the central themes of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breathtaking masterpiece
Is a call to pay attention to our defining moments:
Those moments in our lives, and in our country.

Can we talk about Hamilton yet?

For a while there, it was too soon to talk about Hamilton,
Because everyone I knew wanted to go see it.

It has been six years now, and a movie version came out last year
So it is probably safe to reflect on it a bit this morning.
If you’ve not seen it yet, my apologies.

I loved the musical,
But I wasn’t sure that I was going to.

Whenever powerful or widely-known historical moments
become the focus of artistic reflection
years even centuries later
I tend to approach them with a sort of skepticism
about how moving the experience is really going to be.

Oh, look. It’s a movie called Titanic…about the Titanic.
Boy, I wonder how THAT one is going to end…?

Oh, Saving Private Ryan is a war epic about storming the beaches at Normandy.
It is going to be a massacre.
What can it really convey that we don’t more-or-less already understand?

So, Skepticism.

But when really powerful, gifted works of art, like these,
Start unpacking some of the context, the emotions, the texture of the scene…
You can begin to feel the panic caused by the icy waters
as it starts to fill the lower decks
Where the poorer passengers were seeking refuge…
You hear, you shudder at the gunshots whizzing by
As you watch the sacrifice of wave after wave of America’s bravest…
teens mainly, and young adults, the average age was 20…
Someone’s son, someone’s partner, someone’s parent…
Push toward the French coast, in spite of all odds…
And you realize that your skepticism was misplaced
And you’ve been changed by this encounter.
You understand differently. You get it, just a bit more than before.

So, if I’m honest, I wondered, when I first saw Hamilton,
what I was going to get out of it, really.
Some catchy music. Innovative choreography.
A symbolic representation
through its amazing cast
of the blessedly diverse America
that our originally slavery-cursed country would become…
Sure, I was expecting all of that.

I read the reviews.
I heard what people were celebrating about the Musical. And I was glad for all of that.

But maybe not much else beyond that.

Alexander Hamilton, the person, the historical figure,
wasn’t anywhere near my very top tier of the most influential Americans.
Sure, I knew he was important,
he’s the ten-dollar founding father without a father, after all
but I could probably get through 100 names that came to my mind before his,
if you had pressed me to name Americans of importance.

But the musical was riveting, it is riveting.
From the first note about his impoverished upbringing on St Kitts and Nevis
To his military career as an attaché to George Washington
To his influence on the Constitutional Convention,
early American financial systems,
his fall from grace,
The powerful experiences of loss and mourning
upon the death of his son, and the fissures he caused in his marriage,
and finally, of course, his dueling death at the hands of Mr. Aaron Burr, Sir.

And when I was done watching it,
Like the best works of the human artistic spirit,
I came away with a much deeper understanding, and a far greater appreciation,
Of Hamiliton specifically,
and of the tensions and the challenges
of that moment in our history more generally.

Throughout the musical, Miranda wants those of us who are watching
to reflect on the way that HUGE, important moments
Are experienced in real time,
the preparation for them, the context, the circumstances, the relationships
And then, when the moment comes, how the key people act:
How they operate out of principle, or out of self-interest,
How they choose a greater good, or personal reward…
And then how those choices reverberate afterward,
sometimes in ways that cannot always be anticipated at the time,
but ways which, with the benefit of a bit of hindsight, seem obvious enough.

In Hamilton, these moments are pivotal decisions during the War of Independence,
Decisions made by the first US Congress about the Banking System of the United States,
A gentle kiss and assurance to a spouse that you’ll be back soon
As you slip off to New Jersey to meet your lieutenant for a pistol showdown over honor.

Each of these moments, and others, loom large,
And would have such monumental consequence for today, for this nation of ours.
It is amazing how the choices before you can ripple out so far, so powerfully.

Miranda draws attention to these themes, for example, through the music itself,
Songs like Not Gonna throw away My Shot
and Room Where it Happens
and History Has its Eyes on You
where each song shows us these larger-than-life figures reflecting on these things
On their legacy, their decisions, their convictions, their compromises
“how the sausage gets made,” as it were.

When George Washington invites Hamilton to help him write his Farewell Address
After deciding not to run for a third term,
Thereby setting an incredible and almost unheard-of precedent
Of the voluntary abdication of power to the next leader,
and you see actor Christopher Jackson playing Washington
plead with Hamilton, citing scripture,[i]
that he is ready to go sit under his own vine,
his own fig tree, that he had done enough,
you marvel that such a thing actually happened,
setting off such an important part of this nation’s strength,
peaceful governance,
and if you’re like me, you’re moved to tears at the thought of it all.

It is incredibly powerful.
And when you take it in, and you consider the importance of someone like Hamilton
You can appreciate the power of a story to help you dive just a bit deeper,
To help you place these important people and events within our common history,
And you can’t help but see their plain importance for what we’re living through
in days like ours.

///
As I thought more about it
I was impressed by some of the similarities
between my experience with Hamilton
the founding father,
and these two readings that are before us today. [Read more…]