Sermon of the Week:
No Insignificant Question-Significant Hymns: I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry

A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on October 10, 2021.

Part seven of a eight-week sermon series inspired by questions submitted by the Kirk community.

Special Music: Take My Life and Let it Be
Hymns: God of Grace and God of Glory
I Was There to Hear Your Borning Cry.

Keywords: Similarities and Uniqueness, Known, Baptism, Borning Cry  #pcusa​​​​​​

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Isaiah 46:3-4
and Psalm 139:1-18

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

There’s been a lot of concern,
rightly so, about Facebook lately,
but I had reason this week to be thankful for Facebook even so.
This week Facebook showed me
pictures from at least four different friends
Who were in different parts of the world,
Either because they live there or because they were travelling:
A pastor who relocated to France
A high school friend who now lives in England
A mission co-worker in Ghana
and some other friends vacationing in the Caribbean.

And I love that I could see those pictures
And their various locations all around the world.

Most of them were selfies of a sort
But you can see people and community and context behind their faces
People sitting at a Parisian café enjoying a cup of coffee on a fall afternoon,
the nurses in the birthing unit in a London Hospital
making sure everything is just right
for my high school friend and her partner and their newborn daughter…
various people walking and talking on a sidewalk in downtown Accra.

Facebook and Instagram are indeed under the microscope right now
For the corrosive effects of their algorithm
How they are driving us further and further apart
how they are damaging the self-image and self-respect of their users,
Particular teen instagrammers,
And these are worrisome things, for sure.
I don’t know if they can be fixed or not.
I hope they can be,
or we shouldn’t be using them the way that we are, uncritically.
I’m glad we’re looking into it.

But one thing I do appreciate about Facebook
Is that it gives me a way to connect
with these friends of mine,
all around the world.
And it was because of social media
that I was thinking this week about them,
about the specific places they were at,
what was happening there,
the life that was happening in those pictures…

It had me reflecting more deeply
about all those different places and people and locations,
in this instance, on three different continents.

Here’s one take away:
There’s so much that we share, you and I.
Human beings are remarkably similar.
We’re 99.9% genetically identical.
We’re all complicated mixtures of thoughts and emotions
And we are all wired to experience them one way or another:
Love, hunger, anxiety, hope, curiosity.
We all need water and food
and shelter and interpersonal connection,
among other things,
to thrive.

We are all gifted with some form
of memory and imagination,
of past and future
And so we develop a conscience and
Weigh delayed gratification over immediate needs.

And there’s so many similarities in how we do most things
All over the world.
We share meals together.
We protect and raise children, we build homes,
We go to work and put energy into creativity and games and hobbies.

And all that is true whether you live in KC or South Korea
Uruguay or Botswana.

And while human beings have certainly developed and changed
over time and space
This is also broadly true for our species
for as far back in time as we can look.

There is so much that we human beings share with one another.
This was evident in all of those Facebook pictures.

But there’s also, at the same time,
so much that makes each of us unique,
Individually, or groups of us, culturally.
Experiences, languages, opportunities, interests
Vary dramatically, right, from person to person.

The context in London isn’t the same as Ghana
Or Paris or the Caribbean.

There’s only one place to get Kansas City Barbeque
Or French wine for that matter
Or Ghanian Kokonte.

Music. Art. Clothing. All the things that make culture culture,
That mark particular places, people, communities.

I look around this room,
I imagine those of you who are watching along online
And each one of us is an individual.

You have a name, and a history.
You speak a distinct language, with a dialect,
You come from a particular family,
Prefer certain kinds of food,
Have personality traits that impact how you move in the world.
You have made choices, this and not that,
that have influenced who you are today.
You have acquired or cultivated certain skills,
And you have been shaped by your parents and your childhood.

Interestingly, some of you call soda pop or coke or some such thing.
Some of you laugh at the jokes and humor in my sermons,
Others of you are annoyed by them.

Here’s the point:
All of us, each and every one of you,
are indeed unique.
You are different, individual.
There is only one you,
Even as you are connected to every other person
By all the things that you share with them.

We are unique, all of us,
And we are all part of one human family,
Indeed one cosmos, one creation.

///
There are times when I am struck
by the enormity of existence,
And thinking about all of this
is one of those moments.

It is similar to when I’ve taken in
a meteor shower
Or stood at the edge of the grand canyon.

There is so much vastness,
so much beauty,
so much possibility.

It isn’t easy for our finite brains to grasp all of it.

Actually, we necessarily temper it, compartmentalize all of it
Because that’s the only way we can get a handle on all of it.

There are definitely a finite number of people, of course.
Currently there are about 7.75 billion of us right now,
and maybe about 105 billion people who have ever lived,
according to some studies,
but that’s a big enough number
for me to have trouble getting my head around it.

It is easy to feel lost in it all.

Which is one reason we lean on our uniqueness,
Our particular communities,
Our family, our clan, our nation, our religion, our tribe,
To help us nurture our identities and our sense of self.

We hold all of this in tension, all the time,
The vastness of existence, and my own little world,
The things that I share with everyone, and the things that set me apart:
My own self, my own understanding of things,
While respecting that you have your own perspective too.

///
One of the things that we all share is a desire to belong,
To be valued, and respected, and even loved.
Maybe not by everyone, of course,
but by some.
To be seen, in all that vastness,
To be known.
To have someone listen to us with genuine interest
To have someone want to talk with us too.

We are social, rational creatures, as Aristotle once said,
And we need to be in relationship with other people. [Read more…]

Sermon of the Week:
No Insignificant Question-Significant Hymns: For Everyone Born

A sermon preached for The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on October 3, 2021.

Part six of a eight-week sermon series inspired by questions submitted by the Kirk community.

Special Music: I Thank You Lord
Hymns: O Splendor of God’s Glory Bright
For Everyone Born.

Keywords: Hymns, World Communion Sunday, Mystery, Science, For Everyone Born #pcusa​​​​​​

Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
Mark 10:13-16
and Galatians 3:23-29

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

Life is full of mystery.

This doesn’t mean that, every day,
we don’t learn something new.
One of the amazing things about human beings
Is how much we have been able to learn
About how life works,
Science, medicine, history, art, engineering, social welfare.

We give thanks for every insight,
Every life-saving vaccine developed,
Every new theory tested and substantiated,
Every observation replicated.

But the deepest, most complex theories
That our rational capabilities can formulate,
That science helps us to understand,
Also highlights the fact
That there is still a depth of mystery
That goes way beyond it all, even so.

For example,
You can study biology, or human genetics,
And know everything there is to know
About, say, reproduction and fertilization,
About pregnancy, birth, and childhood;
But when you see a newborn child, for that first time
And those two eyes meet yours
with a look that seems to say “hey there new person”
You glimpse a mystery
that no physical explanation can ever fully explore.

It is the same with music.
The physicist can, in principle,
Explain what happens when a particular instrument is played.
Sound waves. String tension. Aperture.
But why Mozart makes us want to laugh and cry and dance,
Why you just start singing along to Don McLean’s American Pie
Or the Indigo Girls’ Closer to Fine
Or Bon Jovi’s Livin on a Prayer
Or Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You…
When you hear it….
We know it is sound waves, hitting our ears…
And yet, it is MORE than that.

We can’t quite fully explain
Why some music is deeply consoling
and some is deeply disturbing…
That all remains in the realm of mystery.

We can understand, rationally, what life is,
You learn that in Biology 101,
But we can’t quite fully explain the why. Mystery.

We can explore, with granular detail,
DNA, Cells, organs, bodies, communities, nations, entire species,
And realize as we do so
that there is so much more to know, to learn, to explore,
the more we know the more we realize we don’t quite know.

And the deepest mysteries of human life—
love, death, joy, beauty,
take your pick—
have, for eons and eons,
pointed human beings toward the deepest mystery of them all
the mystery of God.[i]

///
What are some of your experiences with the mystery of God?

Some of the earliest moments I remember, in church
Were communion moments.

That’s not surprising.
Food has this ability to stick in our memory.
Think your mother’s go-to casserole,
Or what you were eating on that important first-date. Do you remember?

I remember, as a kid, sitting through another worship service
Doodling on my bulletin,
Trying not to make the oak pew creek
as I fidgeted next to my mother
And look: someone put into my hand these little cups of juice,
wedges of doughy bread
And I thought, hey, I could get used to this.

We used to go up to the communion table, after worship
To get the extras, you know.
I think my father frowned at this.

Years later, as I learned about Christ and him Crucified,
as the Apostle Paul puts it
As I learned about agape—
that’s the word the Bible uses for love,
for love that gives all it has for another person,
for the very love of God
and that story of deep compassion and ultimate betrayal and
unexpected resurrection
and life overcoming death
all because God loves you and loves me
and there ain’t nothing you can do about it
When I learned all that,
and they passed the juice and the doughy bread
and remembered the body and blood of Jesus…
that mystery…
I wept.

So much mystery.
So much I didn’t understand:
why me?
Why all this?
And even as an adult, so much
I know
that I really never will fully understand…

Now, there’s a science to making bread:
just enough wheat and water, and yeast too
If, unlike the Hebrews in Egypt, you’ve got time for the yeast…

Get the oven hot enough, but not too hot
The yeast eats the sugar in the mixture
Produces carbon dioxide, it rises
And voila: you’ve got bread.
And if you pull it out of the oven at the right time
And you leave it to cool..
it smells so, so, so good.

There’s a science to baking bread,
but none of that explains to me why the smell of bread
Reminds me of those early communions
The feel of the pew
The joy of knowing I am loved unconditionally
The tears of thinking about Jesus’ betrayal and death
Ultimately, the comfort of knowing that I belong to God.

And yes I also smile every time I taste the juice of concord grapes.

///
For me, it was around communion
that I first experienced the mystery of God as a comfort.

It might be different for you,
and maybe it’s not primarily mystery
that characterizes what’s going on
when God peeks into your life.
Maybe its comfort, or challenge, or disruption.

But even so, we gather this day for World Communion Sunday.

There is no more sweeping theological expression
of the diverse family of Christ
than World Communion Sunday.

In one sense, this is a uniquely Presbyterian celebration,
because World Communion Sunday began 88 years ago
at Shadyside Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh
before being adopted by the United Presbyterian Church in the USA
and soon thereafter by the Federated Council of Churches
and then by Christians all over the place.[ii]

But even as we note its Presbyterian roots
we can say that the celebration hopes to erode any attention
to creedal differences among believers in Christ.
That’s because today
we, in particular,
celebrate how people of every hue and tongue
men and women on every continent, and our continent
Pentecostal and Structured
Catholic and Orthodox and Protestant
Republican and Democrat, Green and Reform
Liberal and Conservative and Moderate
Mizzou Tiger and Jayhawk and Wildcat
(ooh, dangerous territory now)
Emergent and Stuck-in-the-Fifties
Gay, Straight, Transgender, non-Binary,
living on a dollar a day,
and living in a ward-parkway mansion
today we celebrate how ALL people are made ONE at this table.

World Communion Sunday: the radical invitation of God
the radical love of God poured out for you and for you and for you, and for me.

///
Now that is a mystery.
There is no small amount of irony
that a religion as fractious and as divisive as ours has been
finds a way to stop and celebrate our unity.

Some have said that you get three Christians in a room
and you’ll get four different denominations out of it.
Maybe five.

But I believe, in my heart,
that most of us mourn this human tendency.
It’s not just a Christian thing, though we certainly are good at it.

And it’s not, at its core, part of what our faith teaches,
not if we’re being true to the Gospel, to the message of Jesus.

We need to say so.
And we need to put words to what causes this division:
Sometimes we disagree about what’s important.
We elevate this. You elevate that.
This feeds me. That feeds you.
Ok. Maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world,
Until we start saying that other people are not as faithful or good or true as I am.

Then there is the fact that
The things that divide us
Are the very things that allow some people to thrive,
People who use division to keep themselves in power
Rather than to add extra seats to the table, to allow other voices to be heard.
That’s part of it.

And then there’s this tendency to elevate
our people, our community, our team, our tribe…
And it becomes so easy, thereafter,
to denigrate people those who are different.

But then we remember
That it was Jesus who served those who were being excluded,
those who were being outcast and sent to the margins…
Jesus called THEM to participate fully in the faith community.

And it was Paul who reminded us that
there is no longer Jew nor Greek,
Slave nor Free,
Male and Female
for all of us are one in Christ Jesus our Lord.

And while we Presbyterians aren’t immune, certainly,
from this us-vs-them tendency,
as we said last week,
our founding documents clearly see us
not as THE faithful expression of the faith
but as A faithful church,
one part of several faithful parts
that make up the body of Christ.

///
Indeed, it is particularly because we are Christians
that we should mourn this tendency of human beings
to break apart, to judge one another, to assume MY way is THE way
and your way is most certainly not,
thank you very much.

And this is because we look to Jesus Christ himself
and see what Christ has done
and who he has loved
and HOW he has loved
and are AMAZED that WE, too, are invited, called, welcomed.

Christ doesn’t look to which jersey we wear
(how’s that for a corny sports analogy,
but it’s true, though we all know
God’s a Royals fan.)

Christ doesn’t look to which church we belong to
or what position on transubstantiation we believe in
or even whether our heart is loving enough, faithful enough,
generous enough.
Christ welcomes us anyway.
Christ welcomes THEM anyway…
to this table, the table of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That’s world communion Sunday in a nutshell:
our UNITY in Christ despite our worldly differences.

///
The reason for that is that
This table isn’t about us, it is about God.
If it were about us, we’d all probably fall just a little bit short
And maybe some of us more than others.

But this table is about God
A God who is the source of love and of value and of beauty.
We human beings get to participate in that love,
Imperfectly, mysteriously,
Always seeking to do better. [Read more…]