Saturday, May 23, 2015

Great and Famous

Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church
For Sabbath, May 23, 2015
Texts: 1 King 17:8-16, Luke 9:46-50

[Luk 9:46-50 NLT] 46 Then his disciples began arguing about which of them was the greatest. 47 But Jesus knew their thoughts, so he brought a little child to his side. 48 Then he said to them, "Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me also welcomes my Father who sent me. Whoever is the least among you is the greatest."

49 John said to Jesus, "Master, we saw someone using your name to cast out demons, but we told him to stop because he isn't in our group." 50 But Jesus said, "Don't stop him! Anyone who is not against you is for you."



Many of you have already heard the news: In May of 2012, scientists from UW were checking out ammonite fossils on Sucia Island in the San Juans. Someone came across a chunk of fossilized bone. It was interesting, but not exactly front page news. It was interesting enough that the scientists got a permit to cut the bone out of the native rock and haul it off to the lab at the Burke Museum for further examination.

When the bone had been completely separated from the surrounding matrix, things got really exciting. It was a dinosaur! More specifically, it was in the group of dinosaurs called therapods. Finally, it was newsworthy and made the front page of the Seattle Times on Thursday.

Finding a dinosaur bone in Washington was so unlikely that when the scientists first saw the bone, they didn't even think “dinosaur.” They just thought big bone. A big bone is interesting, but it's not exactly front page news. Then two years of tedious work revealed that the big bone was, in fact, a genuine dinosaur bone, the very first dinosaur fossil ever found in Washington state.

Other recent items from the news. One of our TV stations posted a series of photos in connection with the 35th anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. In one of those photos who should show up front and center but Marlene Land and one of her granddaughters.

Twice in the last six months or so, Scott Callender has been quoted in the business section of the Seattle Times.

Last week, Marlan Kay filled an eight-minute segment on King TV as part of their Stroke Awareness programming.

We have famous people sitting here with us. Fame is a quirky thing. It's easy to equate fame and greatness. Famous people are great and great people are famous. But we know that's an artificial connection. Marleen was laughing about her “fifteen minutes of fame” which resulted from standing on the deck at the Johnson Volcano Observatory at just the right moment when a photographer was snapping pictures. And this weekend dramatically reminds us that tens of thousands of American veterans of offered great service while remaining unknown and unrecognized.

Fame is an accident. Greatness is not.

In our New Testament reading today (Luke 9:46-48), the disciples of Jesus were arguing about which of them was “the greatest.”

In Luke 9, Jesus over hears his disciples—the twelve men who served as his inner circle—arguing about which of them was the greatest. It was probably inevitable that in a group of twelve guys who made up the inner circle of a rabbi who is drawing crowds of thousands, there would be some jockeying for position. More than one of them would imagine he would make the best prime minister, the smartest senior vice president, the most reliable senior adviser.

On this particular occasion the subtle maneuvering had come into the open.

Can you get inside the story? Can you imagine what it would be like to be one of the twelve disciples? Part of the reason they were disciples, part of the inner circle, was their strong drive to be involved in ministry. They admired Jesus and they wanted to play a major role in advancing his cause. Most of them were sure they would do the best job.

Imagine they did the modern thing and called in a consultant to help them figure out which of them was the greatest. Imagine you are the consultant. They ask you, as the wise, outside consultant to evaluate the team and make recommendations for ranking the twelve. Who should be in first place, who in second and third?

If you were given this assignment, what kind of criteria would you use to assess the disciples and their relative greatness?

Of course, in real life they did not call in an outside consultant. Jesus, himself, stuck his nose into their argument.

First, he gets their attention by calling a kid over. “Hey young man, come over here for a minute, okay?” (It could have been a young woman, but given the culture of the time, I'm guessing it was a boy.)

The kid comes over, smiling. Jesus has him (or her) stand in the center of the group. That certainly gets the attention of the group. They don't do kids. They are important people, involved in an important mission.

Besides, in that society, kids in general did not have the kind of status they do in our society. They were truly nobodies. But here, the disciples have been debating who was the greatest among them, and Jesus calls a kid into the center of the conversation.

“See this kid? He's a nobody, right? But listen, if you receive this kid in my name—as a representative of me—then when you receive the kid you are receiving me. And if you receive me, you are also receiving God who sent me. Do you get that?”

The disciples were arguing about which of them had the highest qualifications. Jesus turns their questions of greatness upside down. Instead of measuring your greatness, let me ask you a different question: How good are you at detecting greatness? If a great person came into your neighborhood, would realize it?

It remains one of the most challenging questions. Can you detect greatness?

Especially, are you sensitive to the greatness that comes from human connections rather than human accomplishment?

When you receive this kid, Jesus said, you are receiving God. If you invite this kid to your house, God will show up in your kitchen. If you take this kid to the playground, God will be sitting in the adjacent swing. Do you realize THAT? Can you see that?

What does it mean to “receive” a kid? Does it mean to pay attention? To listen? To support with a scholarship? To believe in? To see their potential? When you receive a kid, you receive God. You enter into contact with greatness, superlative greatness, supreme greatness.

The disciple, John, hearing immediately, gets what Jesus is saying and asks about a particular practical application of this truth.

“We saw someone working in your name, but he wasn't part of our group. We ordered him to stop. Was that the right thing to do?”

This person we saw, he wasn't authorized. He didn't have permission. We weren't monitoring his work so we figured that was not a good idea, but now I'm wondering.

It's pretty easy to see that this applies to the world of religion. Every denomination imagines it is the authorized representative of God. We don't trust people who speak for God but are not part of our system, not under our control. Jesus blithely dismisses such concerns. It the person is not against us, he must be for us. Trust God to manage his people. You don't have to do that.


Now, back to dinosaurs.

I was running along the Hop Valley Trail in the Kolob Terrace section of Zion National Park. The first few miles of the trail ran across a broad, flat valley. Then the trail dropped steeply into a narrow valley where a bit of moisture occasionally showed above the sand and rock in a creek bed. On both sides of the creek bed, the ground sloped steeply upward toward impressive cliffs of red rock.

I left the trail and clambered up to check out the rocks along the base of the cliff. The cliffs were formed of sandstone and all along the cliff face were the beautiful, regular lines of crossbedded sandstone. I admired the lines and shapes then began working my way back down the slope toward the trail on the floor of the canyon. Just before I got down to creek bed I climbed around a huge, pickup-truck size rock that had tumbled down from the cliff. And there on the west facing side of the rock I saw a curious distortion in the regular patterns of the sandstone. I moved closer to the rock for a better look. Sure enough, I spotted other distortions in the regularity, wrinkles and wiggles where there should have been smooth straight, parallel lines.

Could it be? Had I found dinosaur tracks? I took pictures and when got back to St. George a couple of days later, I showed the pictures to Dr. Bryant, who is an expert on that area. He immediately confirmed my find. Yes, those were dinosaur tracks.

Naturally, I posted pictures of my find on Facebook. A bunch of people looked at the pictures and then commented, “Those don't look like tracks to me. How did you know those were dinosaur tracks?”

It's true, they don't look like animal tracks to me. But Dr. Bryant had taught me last year how to see tracks in those curious squiggles and wiggles in the sandstone. Under Dr. Bryant's tutelage I had acquired “new eyes.” His teaching was good enough, that when I came across the characteristic marks in that remote canyon in the Kolob region of the park, I thought dinosaur tracks instead of wiggles and squiggles.

Jesus is our teacher. He is training us to see greatness. He is training us to see every person in light of their connection with God.




Saturday, May 9, 2015

Called to the Table

Called to the Table
Sermon manuscript for Green Lake Church
May 16, 2015, International Sabbath


Imagine I have in my hand an avocado. Your fingers can feel the hint through the skin of just-right ripeness. You take a knife, slice it, then pull apart the halves. It looks as beautiful as it felt. You smell it. Again, perfection. You finish peeling it. You slice it onto a plate, then glance around the kitchen. No one is watching. You pull a fork from the drawer, skewer a slice and then . . .

Then you do something unthinkable. You add an alien chemical to this organic perfection. The chemical itself is a combination of a toxic gas and an explosive metal. NaCl. Salt.

You sprinkle salt across the slice on your fork, then put it in your mouth. It is so yummy, you consider eating the entire half before anyone else comes into the kitchen. It is supreme gustatory bliss.

Curious, the way God made the world. Salt and avocado. Baking soda and chocolate chips. Vinegar and cucumbers. Lemon and sugar.

Perfection is the fruit of combination, the union of stark disparities.

This beauty of combination shows up in theology as well.

The Bible is the story of God's work among the Jewish people. The story of creation leads directly to the story of Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people. The story moves to the establishment of the temple and priesthood among the Jews. We read about the Jewish kings and the grand messages of the Jewish prophets.

The Bible story reaches its grand climax with the stories of Jesus, the Messiah. Jesus was born to a Jewish mother in the quintessential Jewish town of Bethlehem. Christians understand the significance of Jesus through the lenses of the Jewish temple service and the Jewish monarchy and the Jewish prophets.

Those of us who grew up hearing and reading the Bible stories, are used to thinking of the Jews as the good guys and their enemies as the bad guys. When Moses goes to Egypt to deliver the people of Israel from slavery, we know that Moses is the good guy and Pharoah, the king of Egypt is the bad guy. When David goes out to fight Goliath, the Philistine giant, we instinctively cheer for David. When Sennacharib, the king of Assyria, invades Israel and an angel slaughters his army, we—or at least the boys—cheer. Our side, “our team,” is —the Jewish people. That's the natural effect of reading the Bible. The Jews are God's people. Their enemies are the enemies of God.

Then you read more closely and you see another truth. All of the people are God's people. The prophets insist that God's ultimate dream is not the obliteration of the enemies of God's people, but the transformation of all people into the people of God.

Isaiah the prophet describes God's vision of the end of time in these words:

18 In that day five of Egypt's cities will follow the LORD of Heaven's Armies. They will even begin to speak Hebrew, the language of Canaan. One of these cities will be Heliopolis, the City of the Sun. ... 20 It will be a sign and a witness that the LORD of Heaven's Armies is worshiped in the land of Egypt. When the people cry to the LORD for help against those who oppress them, he will send them a savior who will rescue them. 21 The LORD will make himself known to the Egyptians. Yes, they will know the LORD and will give their sacrifices and offerings to him. They will make a vow to the LORD and will keep it. 22 The LORD will strike Egypt, and then he will bring healing. For the Egyptians will turn to the LORD, and he will listen to their pleas and heal them. 23 In that day Egypt and Assyria will be connected by a highway. The Egyptians and Assyrians will move freely between their lands, and they will both worship God. 24 And Israel will be their ally. The three will be together, and Israel will be a blessing to them. 25 For the LORD of Heaven's Armies will say, "Blessed be Egypt, my people. Blessed be Assyria, the land I have made. Blessed be Israel, my special possession!" [Isa 19:18, 20-25 NLT] Accessed through Blue Letter Bible.com.

God looks toward Egypt, toward the city that is devoted to the worship of the Sun God, and declares that that city of false worship will learn to worship the true Light of the World. Those people, the nation famous for having enslaved the Jewish people will find themselves at home in Jerusalem.

Then God looks north toward Assyria. The Assyrians are the baddest of the bad boys in the Bible. They were ruthless, ferocious. Enemies of Israel and even of Egypt. God looks at Assyria and says, those people, too, will be my people.

And how does God describe Israel's role is this fantastic vision of the end? Israel will become the host. Israel will set the table at which all people from everywhere will discover their shared privilege as children of the Most High God.

Here is a picture of our work. Let's look to the north as far as we can see and invite them to come to the table God has planted among us. Let's look as far to the south and to the east and west. Let's welcome all to the table. Let's make peace.

Democrats and Republicans. Blacks and Asians, Rednecks and intellectuals, devotees of Hillary and fans of Ben Carson, people whose imaginations have been captured by ISIS and people who imagine being born in the Saudi royal family entitles them to power and privilege. Let's scout the world for the unlikeliest guests and extend the welcome.

Come to the table. God invites you. We invite you. Let's sit and feast together, then together seek to live out God's vision of peace and justice.

Some of us may wonder about our own place at the table. We are haunted by guilt or shame. We have done wrong and doubt whether God would actually welcome us. The prophet Isaiah insists that yes, you are welcome. God would be disappointed to look around his table and not see your face.

Some of us may have been told by significant other people—parents, boyfriends, church leaders, teachers—that we don't belong, that we are not right, that there is no place for us in a perfect world. God disagrees with that rejection. God invites you to his table.


We enjoy the sweetest, richest communion with God when we join God in welcoming one another. This is our privilege. This is our glory.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

Daughters of God

I'm preaching today in St. Geroge, Utah. I think I will preach the sermon titled "Daughters of God." It is the same sermon I preached at Green Lake on March 20 of this year.

Reading through, I find myself cheering. Cheering the beautiful daughters of God who work at Aurora Commons. Cheering God who sees in every woman a precious daughter.

May you, too, come to see yourself with the eyes of God. May you have some sense of how precious you are to him. And may you in turn learn to see one another with the eyes of God.