sermon — Page 13

Sermon of the Week:
Good Grief

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on April 25, 2021.

Fourth Sunday of Easter

Keywords: The Good Shepherd, Psalm 23, Afflict the Comfortable, Comfort the Afflicted, Charlie Brown. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Psalm 23
and John 10:11-18

I was sitting around a firepit recently
talking with someone
Who was musing about
how they felt oddly between generations,
You know, a bit too old to be a Millennial, and yet too young to be Gen X.

Those generational distinctions we make aren’t really all that big a deal.
People are people, and we have so much more in common than we don’t
No matter our age.
But it is also true that we can make some generalizations, sweeping generalizations, sure,
About how a group of people who all experienced a lot of similar things
Engage the world in a similar way:

The Builders, or the Silent Generation, lived through the great depression
and the second great war, for example
and many from that era
understood their lives, lived their lives
through the sacrifice needed to survive that they experienced
living during those significant, global events.

Their children, the Boomers, came of age during the significant enthusiasm that followed
When the US emerged from that world war
as the world’s only remaining economic super power
While at the same time tied up in a cold war with the Soviet Union.

Then came my generation, Gen X:
We were born and raised during the civil rights era,
the post-Vietnam and Watergate years.

There used to be a tiny group called Gen Y,
that’s the window my friend was born in,
Though now she’s technically considered a Millennial,
The first group to experience the full power of computers and information technology,
Though the next group, Gen Z, which means almost everyone else who remains,
Don’t remember a time when cell phones weren’t everywhere,
Not to mention Facebook and Google and Spotify and Netflix.

Just describing these generations succinctly, like this,
Is almost breathtaking.
There’s so much change that’s happened in the last hundred years,
when you stop to think about it.

My friend, around the firepit,
Felt a bit adrift,
A touch too old to join her fellow millennials,
Insofar as she remembered actually using fax machines,
Not just fax machines, but that thermal paper that they used to use,
And a touch too young to join Gen X,
Because she didn’t remember a time before AOL.

Again, I’m not sure that the distinctions between the generations means too much.

While some point out various tendencies and dispositions
among the Builders or the Boomers or Gen X or what have you,
there are always exceptions in every group,
so you have to take it all with a grain of salt.

But I had reason this week to think about how I also felt
a bit sandwiched between generations, so to speak, from time to time.

I gave this sermon the title ‘Good Grief’ almost a month ago,
before I had written a word,
when I read through the post Easter stories in John and in Luke
and started seeing a few common threads in these Eastertide narratives.

I could have called these Easter sermons ‘Good’ Sermons,
Because each of them have Good in their title.

Last week’s sermon was: Good Food,
when we talked about the story in Luke
where Jesus shared a meal with the disciples
after he was once quite dead and then just showed up, alive and ready to get about living,
ready to start serving and loving and teaching again.

Next week, incidentally, the sermon is called ‘Good Company,’
And we’ll talk about how Jesus, the true vine, the one in whom we abide,
Knits us together into something bigger than any of us, individually.
It just so happens to be a communion Sunday,
And it is around the table, Jesus’ table, that we are all welcome,
that we’re all in good company.

But this week, the sermon title is Good Grief
And that led me to Charlie Brown.

I grew up in the generation that still read the comic section of the newspaper.
Oh I loved the comic section.
I remember running to grab the Sunday Des Moines Register when it arrived.
The Sunday paper was massive, all wrapped up in a plastic sleeve thicker than a football
And I pulled out the paper, tossing everything aside
Front page, sports section, all the weekly ads, to get to the comic section.

It was full color, and it was spectacular!

During the week, it would be at the back of the life section
or whatever it was called back then,
and every day I’d go look for Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, Dilbert maybe.
Family Circus.

And, of course, Peanuts,
Which by the time of my childhood was a far bigger deal than any of those others,
The stuff of Christmas specials on TV and little snoopy lunchboxes with their own thermos.

I think I got the tail end of the Charlie Brown phenomenon, and maybe comics in general.
Later they would move to the web, and I don’t think they’re much of a thing these days at all.

Charlie was responsible for establishing so many pop culture references
for Boomers and us Gen Xers: security blankets, Joe Cool,
Hang on Snoopy, The Great Pumpkin.

And then there was the one thing that I particularly remember,
Charlie’s exasperated sigh: Good Grief!
He’d say it all the time:
When the red-headed girl caused him to get all stressed out and flummoxed
When Lucy yanked the football away from him after PROMISING
that this time would be different.

Good Grief!

It became a summary, of sorts, for how Charlie worked his way through life.
Everything was a bit of a struggle.
This resonated for me, and I think a lot of kids, from any era:
Childhood is so full of vulnerabilities and challenges,
but it also provides an opportunity to learn the joy of friendship and relationship and purpose.

///
Sometimes, when I get annoyed by things, I’ll let out a ‘Good Grief!’ of my own.

And then I might think
about how Charlie Brown taught me to get in touch with those feelings of mine,
feelings of fatigue and exasperation and annoyance.

Getting in touch with our feelings is a good thing,
An essential thing. A healthy thing. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
Again & Again: The Sun Rises

An online sermon preached with The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on April 4, 2021.

Easter Sunday ~ Resurrection of the Lord

Keywords: Day of Resurrection, Mark, Empty Tomb, Sunrise, Esau McCulley. #pcusa

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
and Mark 16:1-8

There is a line, in a Psalm,
That rings through my ears
Whenever I read Mark’s Resurrection story.

Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning…

Typical for Mark, the details are scarce:
The scene opens with three women,
on the first day of the week
walking to the place where Jesus’ body lay.
They were preoccupied with their task, their duty,
wondering if they’d find someone to help them roll away that stone…

Mark tells us it was early, so very early,
Quote, “when the sun had risen.”

So it was dark. Then it was sunrise.

These women, focused, on their way to the tomb…
Do you think they noticed the sunrise, peeking up over the horizon?
Did they see it?

Weeping may linger for the night,
But joy comes with the morning…

///
Mark doesn’t tell us whether they noticed or not,
But they had a lot weighing them down, surely.

They’d be forgiven if they paid it no mind.
It had been quite a week.

They had important work to do, as well.
The preparation of a body for a proper burial isn’t a simple thing.
There was a process, handed down over the centuries,
An act of love for the dearly departed…
All of that would have been weighing on them,
Along with everything else from the crazy, stressful, chaotic week that just concluded.

Maybe they were paying attention
To the reality that it was not all that safe for them to be out and about
On the streets of Jerusalem
For those who were close to Jesus.
There was a crowd, demanding his death, just two days ago.
So there was that, too.
That must have been disconcerting, causing them to move cautiously, deliberately.
This wasn’t a leisurely stroll to the tomb.

And then, of course, there was the simple fact
That someone they loved, their friend, was dead.
In other words, had THEIR weeping lingered through the night
Everyone would understand.
Maybe they were weeping as they walked together that Easter morning.

///
Did they notice the sunrise?
They had a lot on their mind.
I’m guessing the sun rose without a second thought.

That would make it like most sunrises for most people.

Most people don’t notice the sunrise.
Same for me, I confess.
Whenever I’m up that early,
unless it is the most spectacular of sunrises
I rarely, if ever, pay much attention to it.

All of this prompted me to research
The mechanics of a sunrise.
It is simply astonishing, the physics of it all.

A sunrise is the result of the Earth spinning at nearly a thousand miles per hour,[i]
Travelling an orbit of 584 million miles,
Around a star that’s a million times the size of our planet…

Taking in the magnitude of all that is dizzying.
Thinking about it fills me with a sense of awe, of gratitude, of amazement.

But most of the time I barely give the rising sun a thought at all.

I’m a night person,
So I get up begrudgingly,
And if I have my way I often sleep right through the day’s sunrise.

Lately, though, I’ve been up getting up early.
We have new pups who need a morning walk.
And sometimes, sure, Brook and I make note of the rising sun
Maybe if it is extra,
purple and pink, or if the clouds fall just right…
But that’s the exception that proves the rule:
Most of the time the sunrise just happens,
Without fanfare, without any notice given,
This incredible, breathtaking moment
When night gives way to day
And tomorrow is finally here…

It usually comes and goes, unnoticed,
As I’m just doing everyday things,
Like walking my dogs, looking out for squirrels to avoid
Thinking about my to-do list and the start of my day….

Denise Anderson suggests that,
Because we’ve come to expect sunrises every day,
we’re not always impressed by them….
That doesn’t make them any less awesome, or miraculous.[ii]

And there’s significant truth to that.
The things we experience over and over again,
That we come to expect, like the sunrise,
they don’t stand out without effort.
We often don’t pay them no nevermind.

This is one reason we put such focus on remembering,
On intentionality, on doing things together
Like sharing a common meal, sharing the Lord’s supper,
which we’ll do a bit later this morning.
These practices help us name things
Important things, that we might otherwise let pass by, unawares.

And what I love about Mark,
What I love about his telling of the Easter Gospel
Is that it is so different;
it helps shake us from this tendency within us to let important things pass by,
if we can but listen, and let Mark’s Gospel shake us.

It is possible, don’t you think,
That Easter can be as familiar to us as the Sunrise.

Something that returns to us, rhythmically, like clockwork,
Year after year,
So repetitively that we barely notice a world spinning so fast
Barely notice the transition from yesterday to today,
Barely notice that everything, suddenly, is different?
Like night and day.

///
We know the Easter story, most of us do, I imagine,
And even if you’re new to the Christian faith, or checking it out again after a while,
You probably have the broad details down. [Read more…]

Sermon: Good Grief

Sermon: Again and Again, The Sun Rises