Sermon of the Week
How Might God Get Your Attention?
A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on May 5, 2019.
#pcusa
Keywords: Rachel Held Evans, Authentic Faith, Saul, Lakeshore, Sent a Boat
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
John 21:1-3b, 9-14
and Acts 9:1-20
Rachel Held Evans died yesterday
after complications following the flu
and an adverse reaction to antibiotics.
She was 37.
Among my pastor friends and those who follow churchy things online
she was a well-liked and much sought after author and speaker
having spent most of her life in the evangelical community
and then publicly and somewhat painfully leaving it
due to her movement toward a more inclusive and loving theology.
She particularly wrote about her love for God.
I learned about her through publicity for her 2012 book
A Year of Biblical Womanhood
where she attempted to live
by a so-called literal reading of women’s familial roles
in the Old and New Testaments.
Rachel loved God. She loved Jesus.
And through the words of the Bible, she sought after the divine
and it was that experience, perhaps
of trying to thoroughly live-out what she was being taught
in her self-described narrow-minded corner of our own religious neighborhood
that led her to begin standing up for the broader themes of scripture:
welcome
hospitality
the image of God being planted in all of us in equal measure.
These things led her to search deeper for God,
not to turn away from her.
I admired Rachel.
Over the past three weeks, since she fell ill
and into a medically induced coma
various friends and colleagues have been lifting up
little prayers to her online
with the hashtag #prayforRHE.
Today, when she died,
many of them posted pictures they had of her
selfies taken at one of many public speaking engagements she had.
And since I’ve nurtured friendships with a lot of churchy types on line,
there were literally hundreds of selfies with Rachel
that I found myself looking at yesterday.
Hers was a rather public form of spiritual searching.
She wrote a few books about it.
She coalesced around a few simple but profound values
and sought to engage the world with them.
Once, she said:
“I am a Christian
because the story of Jesus
is still the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”[1]
Because of this, she cared about what was being said about Jesus
and she spoke up about it, not really combative, but assured.
She did what many of us think is folly:
she got into twitter arguments
mainly with people who told her to be quiet,
mainly as her effort to speak up for people who
couldn’t speak up for themselves.
She wrote pieces that showed up in USA Today and Newsweek
a public voice for a generous, welcoming, benevolent and loving God.
I confess I was a little surprised
to see even the New York Times publish an obituary for her today.[2]
Not many 37 year old religious leaders have that sort of caché,
but I was glad to see that they saw it in her.
The Times wrote this:
Her work became the hub for a diaspora.
She brought together once-disparate progressive,
post-evangelical groups,
and hosted conferences to try to include nonwhite and sexual minorities,
many of whom felt ostracized by the churches of their youth…
her upcoming conference, called Evolving Faith,
to be held in Denver in October,
describes itself as “a gathering for wanderers,
wanderers and spiritual refugees to help you discover…you are not alone.”
Maybe particularly poignant to me
was a report of her last public writing
shared on her blog back in March
on Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent.[3]
She was healthy then
optimistic showing unwavering trust in the goodness of God.
Here’s what she wrote, on that day we reflect on our mortality:
It strikes me today that the liturgy of Ash Wednesday
teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on.
Whether you are part of a church or not,
whether you believe today or [you] doubt,
whether you are a Christian
or an atheist
or an agnostic
or a so-called “none”
(whose faith experiences far transcend the limits of that label)
you know this truth deep in your bones:
“Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”
Death is a part of life.
My prayer for you this season
is that you make time to celebrate that reality,
and to grieve that reality,
and that you will know you are not alone.
///
When I was working on a sermon about God grabbing our attention,
mine, yesterday, was preoccupied with Rachel,
and her profound witness to how to be a faithful Christian
in the modern age.
God grabbed me yesterday, and I’ve not been able to let it go.
Rachel looked around for God with her eyes wide open.
And God got her attention, everywhere she looked,
even if it took her to some challenging places.
She studied
She prayed.
She talked with people, and when she did, she listened to them.
She loved them.
And through her, so many people felt the love and the peace of God,
in life, and in death.
///
We’re looking this morning at two classic Easter texts,
one from the Gospel of John, and the other from the Acts of the Apostles,
both of which explore a few ways that God might grab our attention.
John is just about to wrap up his account of the life of Jesus
but decided that he can’t quite bring himself to finish
with that story we considered last week,
the story of the disciples locked up in that room.
It’s now several days later,
and the disciples are trying to figure out
what to do with all that they’ve seen.
Empty Tomb. Mary rushing to tell everyone about it.
Huddled in confusion and worry.
Jesus appears through closed doors.
Peace be with you. Do not fear.
Touch and see and believe and trust that it will all work out all right.
Jesus, the leader of their movement, is no longer the same.
He died, yes.
And he is no longer dead, also yes.
But he is also not doing the same things he did before.
He’s not their leader in the same way he was, before.
Then, he was the organizer.
Now, he seems to be coming in and out, mainly he’s not there with them all the time,
and they’re muddling through
finding their way in this new reality
when all that was,
is no longer what is.
What do you do, in those situations,
when everything in your world has been turned upside down?
We go through those situations.
Lose a job. Lose a spouse.
Natural disaster. Life altering medical diagnosis.
What do you do when everything in your world turns upside down?
One answer is that you try to return to the people and the things
and the practices that you know, that help you feel grounded
that can calm you down so you can think things through.
If you have family that is still living and you’re close,
maybe you go see them, or they come be with you.
Maybe you pray, or go seek God’s presence in communities such as this.
If you work, sometimes you seek to get back to work
less because you’re worried about not working
but because the routine is comforting, and familiar,
and that helps us deal with the pain of our mourning.
That’s something of what is going on here,
in John, with these seven or eight disciples
who we find fishing in the opening scene
of the 21st chapter.
Why would they be back on the lake trying to fish
after all that mess back in Jerusalem?
Good question.
The answer, I like to think, is that this is what we do
when we’re trying to keep moving on.
We try to get things behind us
by getting back to work
by going back home
by looking for normal again.
Where else would they go?
Where else should they go,
if no one quite spelled it out for them before-hand
if, as sometimes happens,
nothing is quite right anymore.
So they went to what was most comfortable for them:
they went back to fishin’.
There are a lot of interesting facets to this story
and we cut out some back and forth to save a little time
where they’re out on that lake,
about a football field away from shore
it actually says that—200 cubits, or about 100 yards—
and someone is yelling at them from the lakeshore.
They’ve been fishing, but haven’t caught anything yet
and the guy says to try again, on the other side of the boat
and they do, and man, there’s a lot of fish.
Soon they recognize that it’s Jesus,
back again from wherever he’s been.
Simon Peter, as usual, can’t quite wait
so he jumps in the water to swim ashore
and lets the others haul the now weighted boat back in.
Then the story picks back up
with Jesus there, on the beach
with a nice warm fire
and a beautiful loaf or three of soft, hearty bread
and some grilled fish.
Jesus is there with breakfast,
showing us, once again, the importance of a good meal.
And they all gathered around
and took some fish and tore some bread
and, at least in my minds eye,
sat down around that campfire and relaxed again
there in the presence of their old friend and leader and lord
a refuge from the stormy blast
a mighty fortress from the vicissitudes of their life
reminding them that they aren’t alone in these moments…
///
There’s more to this story.
We’ll look at it again soon,
Jesus talking to Peter and telling him
to feed the sheep and tend the lambs
and all the other sorts of things that John likes to throw in
right when the story has hit its sweet spot.
But for now, linger for a moment on that scene at the lakeshore
the warmth of the fire
the taste of the meal
the banter of friends after a long night’s work
once futile, now overflowing.
Jesus made that happen.
It isn’t just in our locked rooms.
When we come out from under the shadows
and return to life as we know it,
Jesus comes to meet us there, too.
Sometimes Jesus shouts at us from afar,
and sometimes Jesus gathers us close
but Jesus is there for us to see
if our eyes are open for it
if we turn our attention to Jesus’ efforts at getting our attention.
I confess I really like this story.
It is a comfort.
It reminds me that sometimes Jesus grabs our attention
with a gesture of warmth and welcome and comfort
just when we need it the most.
It reminds me to offer those gestures to others,
when I can, because, who knows,
maybe those gestures are Jesus to them.
///
Our other story is a bit more disruptive.
The Acts of the Apostles takes us through some key events
in the history of the early church
in the time following Jesus death.
The key figure in that time is the Apostle Paul
who didn’t start out as a follower, or as a disciple.
He was a persecutor, one whose zeal for the way things are
gave him meaning and purpose and direction
until, apparently, one day he had his own moment of interaction with Jesus.
In his personal letters, Paul often only briefly talked about this experience.
He says Jesus appeared to him after all the other disciples
kind of his own Thomas moment:
Jesus “appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve…
then to more than 500 brothers and sisters at one time…
then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,
last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me…”[4]
In our telling of the story today, we get a sense of how disruptive this was for him.
Knocking him to the ground, losing his sight,
disorienting his travelling companions.
When Ananias comes and relieves him of these afflictions
and he starts to piece all of it back together
he is a changed man.
He even has a different name: no longer going by Saul, but as Paul,
ready to serve God along the Way
just as those he once persecuted were doing.
I confess, I don’t know many people who have such profound moments of change
as Paul had, or maybe as Rachel Held Evans had, for that matter.
But these experiences tell me
that God sometimes goes to great lengths to reach us
and that sometimes those efforts change us quite dramatically.
I’m still working through the implications of that.
But I’m struck by the bravery of people who have so profoundly been focused
on what God is doing
and how God is loving
and where God is moving
that they cannot help but follow.
///
How might God get your attention?
Might it be through the generous word of a friend?
the warm gentle strength of a witness to the love of God?
a welcome to a meal, or a campfire, or a time of rest?
a knock upside the head to stop carrying on
with vile behavior?
God seems to use all of these things
depending on where we are,
and what we need,
and how we’re paying attention.
God wants to break through the patterns and the stresses of our lives
so that we can hear her calling to us
with words that we need to hear…
///
There’s an old story, about God trying to get our attention.
I couldn’t find the original source to give it credit
but it talks about a man who was caught in his home in rising floodwaters.
He was worried, but he prayed and gathered supplies.
Soon the waters were above his porch, and he moved to the upper floor.
A neighbor came by in a canoe.
“Howdy neighbor. The waters will soon be too high.
Hop in, and we’ll paddle to safety…”
“No thanks,” they said.
“I’ve prayed to God, and we’re sure that God will save me…”
A little bit later,
the police came by in a boat.
“The waters will soon be above your house,” they said,
Hop in our boat, and we’ll get you out of here.”
“No thanks,” they said.
“I’ve prayed to God, and we’re sure that God will save me…”
The waters rose, and they got up on the roof,
and rescue services sent a helicopter
and they were spotted.
The crew let down a rope ladder
and yelled down for him to climb aboard.
“No thanks,” they said.
“I’ve prayed to God, and we’re sure that God will save me…”
The waters kept rising, and he was lost.
Later, he barged in and demanded an audience with God:
Lord, why am I here in heaven?
I prayed for you to save me.
I trusted you to save me from that flood.
Yes you did, my beloved one,
and I sent you a canoe, a boat, and a helicopter.
But you never got in.
///
How is God trying to get your attention
and will you see it, and claim it, and let it change you?
I’m grateful for those places where God grabs my attention
and for the people who reveal it to me
who give me a chance to imagine
how my life might be profoundly changed
by confronting a God
who tackles my more base impulses
and who, instead, opens me up to the amazing grace and love
that we see in our risen savior Jesus Christ.
May we keep our eyes open for that
wherever it may be found
and not let them pass us by
so that we can receive God’s comfort and God’s challenge
and set about to be God’s people
for every day God gives us on this beautiful world.
May it be so.
Amen.
——–
[1] Shared by MaryAnn McKibben Dana on facebook, May 4th, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/mdana/posts/10157138057348164 (accessed 5/4/19)
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/04/us/rachel-held-evans.html
[3] https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/lent-for-the-lamenting
[4] 1 Corinthians 15: 5-8
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