Sermon of the Week
Courage for Lent: Waiting in the Valley

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on March 29, 2020.

The fifth of a five part sermon series for Lent. #pcusa

Keywords:  Valley of Dry Bones, Out of the Depths, Waiting for the Morning, Resilience, Day of the Dead.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Psalm 130
and Ezekiel 37:1-14

How has this week been for you?

I remember thinking, way back in January,
how fast life has been going
and wondering if it was ever going to slow down.

There were the normal things, the expected things:
my kids are growing up way too fast, for instance.
That’s normal. Kids always grow up too fast, it seems.
For us it was watching them tackle geometry and guitar and lacrosse
with maturity and skill,
remembering the time, not all that long ago
when they were trying to master subtraction and tying shoes…
What is happening? I thought.

If I blink, they might be off at college, you know?

There was that,
and then there was the incessant national stress
that just kept getting faster and faster, wilder and wilder.
Two months ago,
Impeachment and missiles in Iran and Koby Bryant and the Iowa Caucuses
were the headlines in the New York Times.

These things seem to add on to the anxieties of our everyday lives,
and the friends I know
whose job it is to observe and report these sorts of things
were exhausted by all of it.

The smart ones learned long ago about the practice of sabbath
of taking breaks
and it has made them better at their work because of it.

And to add to all of that,
for those of us who chronicle time not just by the secular calendar
but who also follow a liturgical calendar,
a way for us to look for God, moving in the world in a different way,
for us, the movement from Christmas through January as you head toward Lent,
this season of reflection and introspection that we’re in right now
on our way to Holy Week and Good Friday and … maybe … hopefully
the faint promise of resurrection that lies beyond,
suffice it to say these months have been full, and fast.

Add it all together,
and every day has been feeling like a week.
Every week feels like a month.

That’s what it felt like just a couple of weeks ago.

But if you were to ask me how THIS week has been,
I’d probably describe it as something like
trying to lay track while conducting a train,
not only is the train going faster and faster
but we’re in new and uncharted territory,
trying to ensure that the train has a place to go
as we’re rushing along.

That’s hard, man.
None of us have experience with such sweeping cultural change as this.

Maybe that’s a sign of the stability and good fortune we’ve had in this country
largely free of warfare and famine and chaos and the like,
stressors that aren’t-so-foreign elsewhere, unfortunately,
conditions which could maybe mirror some of this that we’re feeling.

It certainly has me feeling more empathy for those
refugees fleeing violent places
or for countries that don’t regularly have enough toilet paper on the shelves.
It has me feeling more grateful for what we all have
as tentative and as tenuous as it has felt of late.

We’re all trying to figure all this out as we go, and nothing very sophisticated:
What do we do about work?
How do we explain all of this to our kids?
Do we have a way to get food? Do we have enough soap?
Do I have a plan for my hair when it grows down to my shoulders?
Ok, maybe that’s not really on my mind these days
and I really should just be glad that I still have my hair.

It isn’t so much that we’re all in a wait-and-see-mode,
because we are all having to do so much to adapt
and then it feels like every change we make gets preempted by something
and we have to adapt yet again.

It’s a lot.

So if my own experience describes you at all, I see you.
I wish I could say that I thought it would all be over soon,
that we could just get back to our lives,
to seeing our friends
to checking in with our loved ones
to rescheduling our dentist appointments and so-called elective surgeries
and letting our kids play on the playground equipment and all the rest
though I think I’ll always try to wash my hands for 20 seconds now, no matter what.

But it doesn’t look like we’re anywhere close yet. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week
Courage for Lent: The One with Heart

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on March 22, 2020.
The fourth of a five part sermon series for Lent. #pcusa

Keywords:  King David, Man Born Blind, Literary Analysis, Brene Brown, Fred Rogers, Heart, Coronavirus.

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
John 9:1-12
and 1 Samuel 16:1-13

Like their parents, my daughters aren’t quite sure what to make of the fact
that there will not be any more in-person classes at school this academic year.

We got the word last week when we were out of town,
in Florida, trying to take a much-needed rest from school and work and life
and, instead, finding that this novel coronavirus
was more dangerous than anyone quite had thought
and so we needed to come home early, and we did,
home to self-quarantine and shelter in place orders,
checking in with our family and our friends and our neighbors,
and, for our kids, trying to come to grips with the fact that
they won’t be going back to middle school.

All of us are feeling disoriented. Disrupted.
I know I am.

Mixtures of emotions, for sure: happy for some time at home with family,
quite sad that we’re not able to see our friends in person again for a while,
maybe a long while,
not so sure how we feel
about not diving into the stress of school work right away,
but absolutely sure that the stress of these current moments is enough,
thank you very much.

I’ve been talking with them about their school work lately,
even before all of this.
I don’t want to go too deeply into this,
I don’t really mean to bring them into the middle of a sermon,
but they said something lately about school
that has impacted how I’ve been reacting
to these two stories from the bible that are before us today.

In 8^th grade English, apparently, you learn a lot about how to study a story.

You explore metaphor, symbolism,
figurative vs literal speech,
foreshadowing and allusion,
all great things to think about,
all topics that are in a modern preacher’s toolbox
when we sit down to try to understand a passage of scripture
like the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Man Born Blind
or the ancient story of the selection of David to be the new King of Israel
a new King because God had decided that the existing King, King Saul,
wasn’t the right kind of King for that moment.

I spent a lot of time in Seminary working on some of those very techniques
so I could try to understand these Biblical stories better too….
and they’re important, because John uses a lot of symbols to get his point across:
elements like light and water–for-washing and even the faculty of sight,
because the guy who wrote the book we call the gospel of John
is trying to get the reader to see
that this Jesus is someone unique, someone important…
someone sent by God to heal and to bring compassion to a hurting world.

He literally says that phrase a lot in his Gospel: “come and see.”

So the writer of John likes to use metaphor and symbol to point to Jesus.

There’s a lot of symbolism in the other reading too,
the story of the selection of David:

there’s a flask of oil, which is the traditional way a King would be made the king,
someone duly appointed would anoint them with it,
literally pour the oil over their head like a crown,
so the flask of oil has a lot of meaning, foreshadowing at the start of the story;

then there’s the familiar motif in the Hebrew Bible of the selection of the youngest
an inversion of the traditional way that power was conveyed, right,
we expect responsibility to be handed down to the oldest, to the first born,
but time and time again, in the Hebrew Bible,
it is the unexpected one, the youngest, who steps up, who is called:
so it was for Isaac, not his brother Esau
and for Joseph, and that amazing technicolor dreamcoat,
not one of his 11 older brothers,
and so it will be for King David.

So David fits into a biblical motif, a trope, that we could explore,
noting how David was not even included by his father,
because he was tasked to be working in the fields…
there’s no way Samuel would want David to be a part of the dinner party,
let him tend the sheep.

It is the same sort of motif you get in our modern-day stories
like Cinderella or Rey from the more recent Star Wars movies,
where the one seen as the least plausible, most unlikely, most marginalized
that person becomes the central figure of the story.

All of these are great things to analyze in an English class,
or in a sermon, for sure.
And this helps us understand the God that these stories are trying to describe for us,
the same God that loves the Samaritan woman at the well,
and the pharisee Nicodemus,
the two central characters of the last few weeks,
implausible, unlikely people
through whom the love and the compassion of God would be made real.

There is a time and a place for that kind of reflection,
and it helps us dig deeper, sometimes.
And I kind of love doing that sort of work.

But sometimes it makes sense to just look at the story as a story, too,
to not feel like you have to go too deep underneath it to learn something from it.

Yesterday, when we were talking with our kids
about all of this stuff going on and about school and quarantines and
and about trying to give ourselves permission to adapt to the circumstances
and to not put too much pressure on ourselves to have everything worked out just yet,
one of my daughters said something like,
“Yeah, it feels so good to read a book right now
without having to analyze it for a class.”
To read it and just take the story in and try to get its point from the narrative. [Read more…]