The Wesley Foundation at UVA

“Kingdom Come”

Luke 1: 68-79

When I lived in Appalachia one of my favorite places to go camping was a state park in southeastern Kentucky called “Kingdom Come.” Many a weekend I would drive over from Virginia and friends near Hazard, Kentucky, would drive down and we’d spend our nights beside camp fires, telling stories and watching the stars. But the best part of being a park visitor was in the telling – telling others where you were going or where you’d been. As in, “I’m going to Kingdom Come.” Or, “Yeah, we spent all last weekend in Kingdom Come.” Or, “Yep, I’ll be in Kingdom Come by dinner tonight.”

I never heard anyone use the full name: Kingdom Come State Park. Most people just say “Shenandoah,” when they mean Shenandoah National Park. Same thing with Kingdom Come. But of course it sounds a little different to our ears.

I loved that! I loved the folksy, insider way people would say “going to Kingdom Come.” I loved how out of place and poetically jarring that sounded. I loved the idea that God’s Kingdom Come to earth was as close as a drive over the mountain, a place I could get to in an afternoon.

I was thinking about my three years in Appalachia after I went to see the movie, Into the Wild. Christopher McCandless graduates from Emory University, gives his $24,000 life’s savings to Oxfam, and heads west with a backpack full of books by Thoreau, Byron, Sharon Olds, and Tolstoy. He wants to escape the fate he sees as Career Man. He doesn’t want possessions and money and societal status to be rulers in his life. And he is trying desperately to come to terms with his parents. He leaves his family and friends behind and travels for two years without word. He abandons his car in New Mexico, burns the money in his wallet, and re-names himself Alexander Supertramp. After several adventures in the Midwest and southwest, he heads for the Alaskan frontier. He wants to walk into the wild and see what he finds and who he becomes, alone.

As you may know if you’ve read the book or seen the movie, this true story ends harshly. McCandless makes a couple of severe miscalculations and dies alone in the wilderness. Though I felt sad at the movie’s end for this fascinating life gone too soon, I was also happy for him. He didn’t take the easy way, the prescribed way, the way everyone was urging him to take. He was captivated by callings things by their true names. He uses this metaphor several times and then, after two years calling himself Alexander Supertramp, reclaims Christopher McCandless just before he dies.

Watching the movie made me think of my years in Appalachia for a couple of reasons. McCandless and I were born about two weeks apart and graduated from college in the same summer. And while I wasn’t trying to escape my past or my family, I suppose my decision to live on a stipend in Appalachia and work with the poor was my way of calling things by their true names. I wanted to see what it would be like to live out the gospel imperatives of peace with justice. I wanted to see if we could create Christian community with each week’s volunteers and with the families we served. I wanted to see if I could live on $5000 a year and I wanted to explore the ways that, with my middle class upbringing, that sacrifice still didn’t make me “poor”.

There is reason to wish that Christopher McCandless had gotten some therapy for the dark family issues that plagued him. The combination of his energy, enthusiasm, idealism, and naiveté are part of what killed him. Maybe it is the 22-year-old Appalachia-living English major in me talking, but it seems that his hunger for the marrow of life is also part of what saved him. His uncompromising zeal delivered him to the life he had always wanted to live.

Today’s first text from Luke is Zechariah’s song, sometimes called the “Benedictus”. You’ll remember that Zechariah is John the Baptist’s father. Zechariah is very old and his wife Elizabeth is unable to have children when the angel visits to give him the unexpected and happy news. Zechariah has a hard time taking it in and asks how this is to happen. Gabriel, the angel sent to announce all this to Zechariah, punishes Zechariah’s questioning by making him mute – speechless – for the duration of his wife’s pregnancy. As soon as the baby is born and Elizabeth names him John folks start to ask why she has chosen that name, since no one in the family has that name. They go to check this out with Zechariah who writes down “His name is John,” at which point he is able to speak and immediately begins praising God. After this, people begin to ask what and who John will become. (Luke 1: 5-66)

And this song pours out of Zechariah in response, praising the God who turns the tables, the One who chooses to act through an old shriveled couple and to deliver to wayward people like us salvation wrapped in the vulnerable and improbable package of an infant.

Today is the final Sunday in the Christian year. We call it “Christ the King” Sunday or “Reign of Christ” Sunday. It’s a full circle moment for us as Christians, as we are about to plunge into Advent next week, and with it our next year. It’s the culmination of the liturgical year, where we start with promise and birth, move through life, death, and resurrection, and then spend a long season of Ordinary Time trying to embody it all. Reign of Christ is both a theological statement and a theological hope, just as it is when we pray together the Lord’s Prayer each week. “They kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This is that already-not yet character of God’s kingdom – the reign of God – that can be inspiring and frustrating at the same time. God’s reign is at hand, already happening, already redeeming and transforming all of creation into a new creation. There are moments when we perceive ourselves as new creatures….But there are others when we know we have not yet, as John Wesley would have said, “moved on to perfection”.

God’s reign is already here and is still to come it its fullness. We can taste it in moments feasting at the Table, in opening ourselves to relationships that challenge us and the status quo, in working for peace and justice.

We can also taste how much more of God’s reign we still need. We leave the table forgetting what we have just taken into our bodies and spirits, consumed again by the next thing on our “to do” list. We open up a little bit and then clamp shut on a relationship that may require too much of us. We bring cans for the food bank but get uncomfortable when someone asks why people are hungry in the first place.

Advent begins next week and, besides the incessant commercials and pleas to shop, shop, shop, you’ll be reminded of that humble manger and that unspectacular birth that brought the infant Jesus. With all the fuss, it may be harder to hear the words about Jesus’ second coming. But listen for them.

Maybe that’s why Reign of Christ Sunday comes just before Advent: to help us remember to look forward as well as back. And to look around us! Thy kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Where is that happening now?

What are you doing to bring about the kingdom in its fullness?

Where are you being called to call things by their true names?

How will you hear the Advent promises this year, especially in light of this Christ the King Sunday?

He’s not just the baby Jesus; he’s the Lord of Life. And he isn’t born into the fullness of time only in December. Every moment, every facet of your life is infused with this Presence. Can you feel it?

Living like this is as close as this moment, as real as this room, as abundant as this feast. You don’t have to live in Kentucky to make it to Kingdom Come.

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah Lewis

“Ordinary Time”

Isaiah 65: 17-25

Today marks our last Sunday in Ordinary Time. “Ordinary Time” is what the church calls the seasons in between the special liturgical seasons. The colors of paraments and vestments – green for ordinary time – help us keep track of where we find ourselves in the cycles of the Christian year. Next Sunday, Christ the King (or Reign of Christ) Sunday, the color is white. The Sunday after that Advent begins and we’ll have four purple Sundays before Christmas white. And on it goes.

The “juicy” parts of the Christian year begin with Advent and end with Pentecost. The story of Jesus from incarnation to resurrection is retold each year in that swath of time between Advent and Pentecost. It’s a good half of the calendar year and it starts with the incarnation cycle of Advent-Christmas-Epiphany, then there’s a small blip of green ordinary time in there sometime in January or February, depending upon the year. After that blip then it’s Transfiguration Sunday (white) and the transcendence cycle of Lent-Easter-Pentecost beings. We hit Ash Wednesday and it’s purple again all the way through Lent until we reach Holy Week, where we get black on Friday and then Easter white. The several Sundays of Easter are all white, too, and then it’s red for Pentecost.

At that point in the Christian year, except for an occasional day like All Saints when we pull out the white again or the occasion of someone’s baptism when we bring back the red, it’s green, green, green all the way to Christ the King. This coming liturgical year the Ordinary Time green starts on May 25^th and lasts through November 16^th.

The church also designates Ordinary Time by referring to how many Sundays a certain Sunday is after the preceding special season. So, for instance, today is also referred to as the 25^th Sunday after Pentecost. (And those blip Sundays in the winter are referred to as the 1^st Sunday after Epiphany, etc.)

But I like “Ordinary Time.” Actually, it may be my least favorite liturgical season, but I like calling it what it is: the ordinary, week in and week out, passage of time.

But we all know that there is nothing ordinary about this time, don’t we? The interesting, frustrating, soul-filling, confusing, holy thing about the church’s liturgical year is that it does not conform to any other version of the year. We don’t start with January 1^st and we don’t start on an exact date each year. We start four Sundays before Christmas. We start with waiting on a promise.

It might be nice if we could schedule Advent to being after exams are through or to never have spring break fall in the season of Lent. For those of us who hike up Humpback Rocks for our Easter Sunrise worship it would be convenient if the “spring forward” time change never happened on Easter weekend.

But here we are in our last Sunday of Ordinary Time, simultaneously getting ready to go home for Thanksgiving….and dreading all that looms on the other side of that holiday. It may be Ordinary Time but there is nothing ordinary about it!

Ordinary Time began in June this year and I suspect that, contrary to the season description, these months have been some of the most extraordinary of your life. Some of you have begun college and some began their final year of college. Some of us are struggling with sickness and loneliness. Others are wondering about sexuality and what it means to be attracted to someone else, to be really attracted to a certain someone else. You have experienced deaths this year during time called “ordinary.” You have wondered about your own usefulness in the world and where God is calling you to study or work or live. You have loved and struggled with your parents. You have stayed up all night for a good grade and you have wondered if grades matter as much as everyone says they do. You have probably felt ordinary a lot but there have even been some extraordinary moments. But these last few months, “ordinary”?

The words we read from Isaiah 65 were written about 2500 years ago for Israelites returning from the Babylonian exile. And they were written for us. But they can be hard to decipher. I can’t explain why God’s words “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth” seem to be taking a long time to come true (Isa. 65: 17). Does it make sense in 2007 to read that weeping and cries of distress won’t be heard in Jerusalem (Isa. 65: 19)? With prayers that seem to go unanswered, how can we read “before they call I will answer” (Isa. 65: 24)? “They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity” (Isa. 65: 23). Would you like to read that with the mother of a solider stationed in Iraq? These beautiful, inspiring, confusing, maddening, poetic, prophetic words were written 2500 years ago. And they were also written for us.

Gene Tucker, a biblical scholar and retired seminary professor, advises that the worst thing we can do in our biblical study is to reverse the miracle at Cana (New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 6, p. 27). You remember, that’s the one when the wine runs out at a wedding and Jesus helps the celebration continue by turning water into wine. Tucker says that when we read a passage of scripture – even as we are straining for its meaning and learning about its context – we must be careful not to turn wine into water. Let it be complex and hard to explain and poetic and enigmatic and alluring and frightening all at once! The wine of God’s Word is there for us to enjoy and drink from deeply, not to water down.

So I’m not going to try to explain away the hard places in today’s text. I’m not going to try to recast it all so that you can “really see” how all this prophecy has come true. All I’m going to do is try to imaginatively restate it, to help you hear this more as the exiles did, as God might speak to you today…

For I am setting out to create new heavens and a new earth. Completely new life for you! Transformed so that it barely resembles what you now know. All those things you want to forget you will no longer remember or be able to bring to mind. What you have done before is all in the past. What you have failed is over. Even now, don’t focus on those things, but know that I am setting out to create my people as a joy and a delight. Weeping and cries of distress will cease and no one will recognize their sounds. No longer will you grieve for those whose lives are over too soon. From now on, when hundred-year-old people die they will still be considered “young”! Parents, grandparents, family, and friends will live long lives of joy. No longer will you grieve over broken relationships, lost loves. No longer will you fear giving yourself to love. No longer will you fear the taste of Thanksgiving turkey because it reminds you of the end of the semester crunch. You will study for exams and pass them easily; you will pick the major you love and find fulfilling work in that field. You are my chosen and you will enjoy the work of your hands, the calling for which I made you. Your work, your love, and your life will not be in vain. From each one blessings will flow. Before you form a prayer in your mind or before you can call out my name, I will answer your prayer. The whole world is being created as new. The worst enemies – Hokies and Hoos, Israelis and Palestinians, American soldiers and Al Qaeda soldiers – these will break bread together and sit at my table like family. There is nothing you fear, nothing you flee, no place you have failed where I am not creating life and abundance. You are part of this creation that I am renewing and I take delight in you.

With God, no time is ordinary. The interesting, frustrating, soul-filling, confusing, holy thing about God is that God does not conform to our notions of time. The time is at hand and the kingdom is very near. We believe in the already-not yet of Christ’s reign. We’ll taste it here in a moment even as we long for the full feast to come. It’s both at once, it’s maddening and inspiring and it is the God who never changes working transformative, miraculous change in each of us and in the life of this world. All time is ordinary and extraordinary at once. And we start with waiting on a promise.

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah Lewis

“On Hating Family”

Luke 14: 25-33

Wesley Memorial UMC – Family Weekend @ UVA

This is a strange week for me to be preaching on this passage. Tuesday in the wee hours of the morning I got a call from a friend and colleague in Suffolk. Her water had just broken 2 weeks early and I was “on deck” to help in the delivery. I drove several hours that morning with a mixture of anticipation and fear, excitement and dread. Part of me had wanted to back out of my promise to be there, had wanted to say to her, like the famous character in “Gone with the Wind,” “I don’t know nothing ‘bout birthin’ no babies!”

Of course, it was one of the most wonder-filled experiences of my life. And when Eliana flew up and out into this world it was an awed moment of relief, release, joy, and thanksgiving. Tears ran down most of the faces in the room.

So it’s a strange week for me to choose a text that is not in this week’s lectionary readings. It’s a strange week to be working with Jesus’ hard-to-swallow words about hating our families.

It’s a strange time in my own life for this, too. I’ve recently become engaged and in a very short time Woody has become family to me. After waiting a long time for this part of my life to unfold, I certainly don’t have an “easy come, easy go” attitude about him. I’m supposed to hate him now in order to come to Jesus?

And most definitely, as I look out at the faces of students and their families who have come to town for Family Weekend, I know that it is a strange week for this text. Many of you are reuniting for the first time since the first year students moved into dorms in August. Others may be visiting for the final Family Weekend of your child’s college career. There have been deliveries of food and other familiar items from home. There have been long-awaited trips to Target. There have been parent-purchased meals on the town. It’s been a gorgeous weekend to relax into the familiar rhythms of being with your closest relatives.

It’s a strange Sunday for this text and these hard words from Jesus.

A campus ministry colleague in North Carolina once shared with me her understanding of the church’s commitment to campus ministry. She says that campus ministry is the church’s way of fulfilling the vows we make at baptism. When we baptize babies and small children there are vows for the parents and, you’ll remember, there are also vows for the congregation. We, the gathered family of God, promise to help raise up the sons and daughters who come into our family. We understand that children are not the responsibility of their parents alone but of the whole community. In the sacrament of baptism, we own up to that responsibility. And in that great transition to college and beyond, through campus ministry we say, “God is not done with you yet and neither are we.”

I love this theology and self-understanding of who the church is and of how campus ministry fits into the broader church picture. I love the move to root campus ministry in baptism, which is surely where it has been all along, but I hadn’t heard it spoken of that way until my colleague said this a couple of years ago.

In the last 30 years or so Americans have re-developed our notions of how a family looks. At UVA, we used to call this “Parents Weekend” and somewhere in the last 15 years that changed to “Family Weekend,” reflecting the diversity of students’ family backgrounds. I’m not sure, though, that we have refined our understanding of what it means to be God’s family. In fact, the loudest Christian voices on the topic of family often seem more interested in making an idol of family than in worshipping God. Have you noticed the “Family Christian Bookstores” where the word “family” is written in a font several times larger than the word “Christian”? This seems to be an odd construal of Christian values – especially when you confront Jesus’ own words in a passage like the one from Luke.

This is not a call for the lighthearted. Thank God our choice is not often a choice between following Jesus and loving our families. Jesus is not saying that family is bad or inherently worthy of hatred. He isn’t even talking about “hate” as anger or hostility. But he is giving us fair warning: when conflict arises – even between two “good” choices like family and discipleship – the “demands of discipleship must take precedence” (New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary Volume IX, Nashville: Abingdon, 1995, p. 292). There are as many ways to live this out as there are people and families, but one I can imagine is a civil rights advocate in the 1960s who, though she loved her family and had responsibilities to them, heard and responded to her calling to end oppression – even at the risk of her freedom or her life – even at the risk of leaving her family alone without her. That’s the kind of “hate” Jesus is talking about here.

Here’s where that baptismal imagery goes deeper. The waters of baptism require death. It’s a “watery grave” we enter when we approach that font. In order to experience new life in Jesus, we also have to die with Jesus.

Some people – some family members – hope that what campus ministry and the church can offer their sons and daughters is a safe place in the storm. This is true. It’s part of what we do. At the Wesley Foundation, we call ourselves “a place to be and become.” Many students find the safety and nurture they need to “be” in the midst of so much change and challenge at college.

But the other half of that phrase is just as important. We also offer a place to become. And, as you know, becoming can be hard work. Becoming, in a Christian context means challenge. It means learning how to be a disciple and how to follow where that leads you. It means learning how to live out of and up to our baptisms.

Unfortunately, for some anxious family members, this does not always entail the kind of safety you might have been expecting. We can’t promise to return your student to you with a pre-med ranking. We can’t promise that, if they are involved in campus ministry, they will go into the family business. We can’t promise that they will finish in 4 years. We can’t promise that they won’t become philosophy majors!

We can promise that we will be God’s family for them. We can promise that we will be asking questions, nurturing, challenging, listening, serving alongside them. We can promise open doors, study breaks, good meals, weekly worship and dinners. We can promise that we will live up to all those baptismal vows we have made.

Listen, families of students: we can promise that in those impossible choices that come around from time to time, we will help your children hear God’s call above all others.

Listen, students: this Wesley block is a place where you can bring your whole self to God and to this family of God’s. This is a place to be and become, to wonder and worry and reflect and dream. It’s a place for break ups and switching your majors 3 times. It’s a place to find family.

And listen, church members: Remember the many times you have said those baptismal vows when one of our children has been presented here. We didn’t say those words lightly. And just as other Christians are doing this for Jonathon this year in Colorado, we are being called to fulfill those promises with the students here.

All of you: Look around and see your brothers and sisters in Christ!

Thanks be to God!

2007 © Deborah Lewis

“Casual Fans Need Not Apply”
Luke 14: 25-33

Have you ever had that experience of loving a musician or a band – particularly if you discovered them in an out of the way venue or small tour – and you follow them for years, loving all their stuff and telling all your friends about them? And generally your friends don’t listen, because it’s just some small band no one except you has ever heard of – but you keep telling them, and forcing other people to listen to them on iTunes, and including them in CD mixes you give to people, and playing them pretty much whenever you can. And they are just the best band because no one has that sound and, before you heard them, you didn’t even quite know that that sound could exist. And, on top of all that, you probably heard them for the very first time with someone really important to you or at a significant time in your life, when their music itself felt like hope and promise. Or maybe it felt like rage and rebellion. Or independence and true love. Do you know what I mean?
If you’ve had an experience like this then you may also have had the experience of uttering the following phrase: “I like their old stuff.” That’s when, after years of faithful listening and purchasing and concert-going and musical evangelism you suddenly realize that you are not the only one plugging this band anymore. And isn’t that them you just heard on the radio? (And not on WNRN, which has, of course, like you, been playing them all along. No, not on WNRN, but on some cheesy commercial schlock of a station owned by Clear Channel. The nerve!) And, if you’ve had this experience, then you probably also recognize that sometime around the time you start hearing them on the radio, friends of yours – friends you’ve nagged for years about this band – are now coming up to you to tell you how great their new song or CD is!
And maybe it is still great then, but at some point not long after the whole world discovers your long-loved band, their sound starts to go. It’s always hard to tell if success really changes the band or just the way you hear the band, but you can’t rouse the same feelings for them anymore and it seems like they might be selling out. In any case, all those things you discovered about the band long ago, those things that made you want the whole world to know them, too, all those things seem to be distorted or missing or caricatures now. The just don’t sound the same. And that’s usually about the time you find yourself saying, with a fair amount of disdain, when asked if you like them: “I like their old stuff.”
One of the many take-aways from this sort of experience is that not everything is better or improved with more. More fans does not necessarily equate to a better band. Bigger is not always better.

This is a hard lesson for us and a hard lesson for the church. When I go to clergy gatherings the first question they always ask me, upon finding out I’m the director of the Wesley Foundation, is, “How many students do you have?” It never fails.
Now I say this with all respect and love, but the people who ask me this are always the same people who have no idea, really, what a Wesley Foundation is. They usually call college students “youth” and think of us as an overgrown youth group. But this is their question and, Lord knows what they think the answer will tell them, but it seems that, like with the rest of America, they think “bigger is better.” They are waiting for a large number, like 100. They are waiting for me to say there are so many I can’t count them. They are waiting for some answer from me that will justify the United Methodist Church spending money on and supporting campus ministries, as if this could be proven by numbers.
By now you may be wondering what any of this has to do with the scripture text from Luke. Here it is in a nutshell: With Jesus, it’s not a numbers game, it’s a commitment thing.

This passage details an interesting point in Jesus’ ministry. It’s a point where he looks back for a moment and doesn’t like what he sees.
For the better part of five chapters he has been traveling around, healing people and telling parables, one after another. Last week we heard a parable from earlier in this chapter about where to sit and who to invite to wedding banquets. Just after that passage and before this one, Jesus tells the parable of the great dinner. That’s the one where the host invites a group of people who all come up with perfectly plausible excuses for turning down the invitation, like “I have to take care of these oxen,” “I just got married,” “I have a paper due tomorrow.” Hearing these excuses, the host then invites “the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame” (you remember that description from last week), in short, everyone from out in the streets and the surrounding countryside (Luke 14: 18-21).
Then we arrive directly afterwards at this passage, our passage for today, which starts off, “Now large crowds were traveling with him; and he turned and said to them…” (Luke 14: 25). We’ll get to what he said in a minute but let’s stop here. “Now large crowds were traveling with him.” This isn’t an occasion like the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus and his 12 disciples are traveling around together and crowds arrive at the place where he is teaching in order to hear and to ask for healing (Lk. 6: 12 – 49). These are large crowds who have left home, too, and have been following along for a while, with the disciples and Jesus.
And when Jesus turns around and takes in the scene, he doesn’t like what he sees. The large crowds are the whole reason for the admonitions he gives in our passage today.
But what’s not to like? Large crowds following a preacher and his entourage would probably sound good to the kind of folks who ask me how many students we have at the Wesley Foundation. They usually sound good to the evangelism committee and to the finance committee in a church. But Jesus knows that the message he’s delivering is not a crowd pleaser. What is being asked of Jesus’ disciples is not for the casual fan. If the kind of radical discipleship – and the inherent cost of that discipleship – sounds immediately good to that many people, they either haven’t heard the message or they have jumped in without thinking it through. They may, quite possibly, be Clear Channel, Johnny-come-lately-I love-that-new-single kind of fans…rather than disciples.
And what is it that Jesus says, once he’s seen the crowds and turned around? He says that you cannot be his disciple unless you hate your parents, spouse, children, siblings, and life itself. He says you cannot be his disciple unless you carry the cross and follow him. He says you cannot be his disciple unless you give up all of your possessions (Lk. 14: 26-27, 33). This is not crowd pleasing stuff. It isn’t easy. There are a lot of family-idolizing modern day Christians who would say that this is not even Christian. You can start to see now why – if this is the sort of message he was preaching – Jesus was surprised to see that there were so many in the crowds.
There is no way I can soften this passage, but I may be able to open up a little more meaning for you. Let’s take family first. The word “hate” in this context, rather than describing anger or hostility, means that when conflict arises – even between two “good” choices like family and discipleship – the “demands of discipleship must take precedence” (New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary Volume IX, Nashville: Abingdon, 1995, p. 292). There are as many ways to live this out as there are people and families, but one I can imagine is a civil rights advocate in the 1960s who, though she loved her family and had responsibilities to them, heard and responded to her calling to end oppression – even at the risk of her freedom or her life – even at the risk of leaving her family alone without her. That’s the kind of “hate” Jesus is talking about here.
The saying “that’s just my cross to bear” is not what Jesus is getting at with his second warning. When people say this it is always in reference to something completely beyond their control or choosing, like developing cancer or being bad in math or suffering through a thorny relationship. Carrying the cross is just the opposite. It “is what we do voluntarily as a consequence of our discipleship…deliberate sacrifice and exposure to risk and ridicule” (NIB Commentary, p. 293). This sort of cross-carrying happens when we choose to live outside of our comfort zones, extending ourselves in love and hospitality to strangers, the blind, and the lame.
Then there are the possessions. You must give up all of your possessions. This one might be harder for most of us than the other two. We live in a country where “middle class” has come to mean families who have plenty to eat and to wear and to drive, who take elaborate vacations every year, who don’t struggle too much to send their children to college, who see eating out 2 or 3 times a week as normal and necessary, who throw weddings for their children worth tens of thousands of dollars, and who still manage to retire in their 60s. But, just like Jesus with the rich young man, Jesus says that to follow him, you have to give up all that you own (Mark 10: 17-22). This new life isn’t about owning or possessing, it’s about yielding and giving and dying in order to live. It’s about following with nothing in your hands, nothing to hold you back. Nothing that, in the owning, starts to own you. What is required is all that you have (NIB Commentary, p. 292).

If you’re looking for a way out, here’s your opening. Jesus turns, sees the throngs, and says, This way you’re following is not going to be easy or fun or admirable. It won’t win you any civic awards or scholarships or Most Likely to Succeed awards – or, if it does, you should take a look and make sure you’re still on the right path. I know just where this is going and just how hard it will be. Here’s your chance to decide, because I want you to know the full cost before you make the journey with me. If you’re looking for a way out, a harsh God, or a reason not to give up your life in order to keep it, here’s your chance.
So what does it mean if you don’t take the out? If you decide to be a disciple and not just a casual fan? It might mean you have to make some changes in your personal relationships, or in how you spend your time. It might mean you give up the E-school for an environmental science major – or vice versa. It might mean that you begin to look at your choice of major or career as a way to answer God’s call. It might mean correcting your parents’ vision for your life – or yours – and claiming God’s.

What does it mean if you are standing in the crowd, see Jesus turn around, hear the plain truth about this journey and you still don’t take the out? If you stay among the crowd, learn to be a disciple, follow him into the desert and all the way to the cross? What Jesus doesn’t promise is that you’ll do a spectacular job or that you’ll never want to turn around or that you’ll always be the picture perfect disciple. None of that comes with the deal. (Just look at Peter, the one on whom God builds the church, who can’t stop himself denying three times that he even knows Jesus.) Success is not promised or guaranteed.
But we are promised that God, like the builder of the tower or the king planning for war, has measured all the angles, counted the costs, and is prepared to see this whole thing through with us. Like the host who invites in the street people and the poor and outcast from the countryside, our God issues a personal invitation to all people to join this feast. No one is left off the invite list. How are you going to RSVP?

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah E. Lewis
9 September 2007
Wesley Foundation at UVA

“Table Manners”
Luke 14: 1, 7-14

You know how, at many wedding receptions, there is a special table for the wedding party? Lots of people long to be at that table, close to the bride and groom, hearing the inside stories, captured in the background of all the pictures. As Elizabeth was saying this morning at Wesley Memorial, some folks even switch their place cards so they can “trade up” to a table closer to the special one.

I am not one of these people. Not, as Elizabeth was noting, because it is so incredibly rude. Nope. In fact, I am someone who would often rather sit at another table even when I am in the wedding! I prefer to be around the edges, rather than smack in the middle of the picture. I’m not looking for the so-called best seat.

So, in some ways I am probably not the best person to be preaching on this text. At least, not if we think it is about table manners of this sort. Where to sit, how to behave, which fork to use. I’m probably not even the best person to be preaching on this text if we think it’s about how to get what you want without seeming to want it. Since I want the best seat, I’ll take the worst one and then oh-so-graciously accept an upgrade. Trust me, I really don’t want to be at the special table!

But is that what we really think Jesus is talking about here? One-up-manship and false humility?

I just finished reading an excellent book by Sara Miles, entitled Take This Bread Take (This Bread: A Radical Conversion, Sara Miles (New York: Ballantine, 2007). It’s her conversion story and it is centered on what happens at this table. Much to her surprise, after a lifetime of living as an atheist, Sara walks into an Episcopal church in Sans Francisco in the 1990s and joins in the worship. The table was open and when it came time to celebrate Communion, she opened her mouth and took in Jesus. “[T]hat impossible word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb,” she writes, “…the word was indisputably in my body now, as if I’d swallowed a radioactive pellet that would outlive my own flesh” (Miles, p. 59).

She felt the meal, the communion, that community, God working on her as she continued to wander in each week, hungry, to the table. At some point she began to see a vision. She saw the abundance of the Eucharistic meal spilling over the table and into the lives of the poor and hungry who were outside the doors of the church. The table of plenty for all God’s children.

Around this time she also saw an advertisement for the area’s food bank, which was expanding into new areas of the city and needed volunteers to launch the new sites. This is the vision I’ve been having, she thought. Why not serve the hungry, the poor, and the homeless right from this very table? Sara was adamant that the new food pantry take place in the sanctuary and right on the very altar table. Rather than being a program of the church, operated out of the fellowship hall, she envisioned it as one more way of being church, another act of worship, an extension of the table fellowship they celebrated each week. As we’ve been fed by God, now we share the abundance with our neighbors.

This sounds great. Inspiring. Uplifting. Something practically any Christian could get behind, right? Well. It’s amazing what happens when you invite everyone and when you make all who come to your table welcome.

In addition to the inspiring, uplifting moments Sara and the other volunteers had, they also experienced frustration. They worked all day on Fridays in order to service the 3-hour food pantry. Their hungry neighbors showed up early in the morning to stand in line. Some of their hungry neighbors urinated in the yards of other neighbors. Some didn’t smell clean. Some fought or used drugs. One woman carried a weapon into the church, in order to defend herself from the man who beat her. One little girl showed up scared, pointing to the baptismal font, and asked if the water would protect her. One recovering alcoholic stood in line for a few weeks, then offered to come in and help the volunteers. Some would wait in line all day, only to find that the bread or some other item they needed had run out before they got their turn. Some would try to sneak in early and snatch a little extra for themselves.

When you invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” this is the kind of scene you get (Lk.14: 13). There are no place cards but there is a place for everyone.

It is interesting that Jesus gives instructions for both the guests and the host in the story from Luke. It is likely there are times when you are on one side of that relationship and other times when you are on the other. In the church it seems we too often make the mistake of seeing ourselves only as the host, inviting and welcoming others into the fold. But strange and beautiful things happen when true hospitality unfolds. Roles become more fluid; giver and receiver are harder to discern.

Sara Miles describes this phenomenon as she writes about the transformation occurring at the food pantry as the great variety of people began brushing up against one another in community around the table (pp.138-9):

“They [guests turned volunteers] were people who, like me, had come to get fed and stayed to help out. Who, like me, took that bread and got changed. We were all converting: turning into new people as we rubbed up against one another. The transformation amazed me. I’d think about it as I unpacked the food: blushing red potatoes and curly spinach and ripe peaches that grocers had discarded, and that instead of being trash were feeding people. Once I picked up a huge grapefruit and showed it to a volunteer from St. Gregory’s. ‘That’s the stone the builders rejected,’ I said, quoting Scripture aloud with only a twinge of embarrassment. I could see, now, how we were like that, too: the volunteers, and the families who came for groceries. Each of us, at some point, might have been rejected for being too young, too poor, too queer, too old, too crazy or difficult or sick; in one way or another, cracked, broken, not right. But gathered around the Table in this work, we were becoming right together, converted into the cornerstone of something God was building.”

Real hospitality happens when the first choose the last place, knowingly giving up power and privilege for someone else. Real hospitality happens not just when we revise our guest lists but when we make room for the stranger even when we don’t feel like it – when we didn’t even have a party or a meal planned.

The remarkable thing is that Jesus does not choose sides. We often mention that Jesus “ate with sinners” – and rightly so, because for many of us that is the harder pill to swallow. But Jesus – read the story again – also ate with Pharisees (The People’s New Testament Commentary, p. 234). He doesn’t accept the invitation in order to condemn them, but to invite and include them at the table, in the kingdom. There are instructions for everyone. There is a place for everyone – if they are willing to take their places.

So what about you? What place will you take around God’s table? Grad student teaching and taking classes simultaneously, fourth-year anxious about the next year, first-year still finding your way around Grounds – doesn’t matter, these instructions are for you. Sometimes you will be the guest, other times, the host. Sometimes you will not be able to tell which one you are.

Some weeks when we gather round this table you will be lonesome, nervous, unprepared, overworked, behind in every class. Some weeks you will be gregarious, joyful, forward-thinking. No matter, there is a place for you.

But this place is bigger than it looks and this table can feed more than we think. Religious leaders and prostitutes can all fit around this table. So what does that look like in the UVA context? What would it look like to invite more of our neighbors in to the feast? And to be served by them?

What if fraternity and sorority members ate here with computer geeks? What if students from NOVA were the guests of those from Danville? What if the O-Hill cafeteria workers and the Cabell Hall custodians came to satisfy their hunger? What if this table became one of the few places on Grounds that is truly racially integrated?

What if the taste of heaven we receive in a few minutes transforms us so that we live now like we are already there? What would that look like? Where would you sit? Whom would you invite? Whom would you allow to serve you?

Because this isn’t a “memory meal” to make us feel good about Jesus. It’s the bread of life and the cup of salvation! It’s God breaking into the details of our lives through ordinary things like bread and wine. This is God’s feast and our opportunity to “becom[e] right together, converted into the cornerstone of something God [is] building.”

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah Lewis

Not Just for Writers and Prophets
Jeremiah 1: 4-10
Wesley Memorial UMC

Whenever I get to a place where I am unsure of the rules and where there is no one around to model behavior for me, I think of Alice Walker. Whenever I have to make a decision between turning back and giving up versus forging ahead into unknown territory with no guide, I think of Alice Walker. I am not always pleased to have Alice Walker come to mind at these pivotal moments because I know then what I’m in for.
Alice Walker, writer of The Color Purple, says that she became a writer because she couldn’t find the books she wanted to read. At the time she was growing up, the established literary canon didn’t have much in the way of self-recognition to offer an African-American girl from the South. Walker craved characters she could relate to and she ended up writing them herself.
When I first read Walker’s essay in which she describes this dilemma, I was thankful. Thankful to see I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten to such a lonely place in the road. Thankful for her example of how to keep going. But there are times when I am tired and want an easier path and I’m sick of being the first one to get to the overgrown part of the path with my machete. There are times when I think Alice Walker! as if not knowing her story would have made mine easier.
Annie Dillard, in her book called The Writing Life, asks why it is we never find anything written about those odd ideas we have and keep to ourselves or those things that fascinate us beyond reason. Isn’t anyone else out there thinking these things? Her task in the book is to shed light on the mysterious creative process of writing, to encourage people who feel called to a life of words and nuance and long nights clicking or scribbling away. Like Walker, she says we never find those books we are looking for because it is up to us to write them. But it isn’t just up to us because we want to read them; it is up to us, she claims, because it’s the very reason we’re here. She says, “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment” (p. 68). This raises the stakes a bit.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jer. 1: 5). That’s all well and good for Jeremiah, right? There are a lot of curious notions and miraculous events in the Bible and even when we believe they happened exactly as written, we don’t really go around expecting the same thing in our own lives. Do we? () I can go along with that when it comes to Mary’s virgin birth or Noah’s ark, but I don’t think we get a pass when it comes to Jeremiah. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” That sounds like it could have happened to us – could be happening to us. That sounds like a call to discipleship. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
I can hear the wheels of your brains now, Wait a minute, here! I’m no prophet! And I don’t like to write, either! How long is this sermon going to be anyway – doesn’t she know we students have more orientation sessions to go to this afternoon? This is just what Jeremiah was thinking (except the orientation part). When God comes out with this audacious statement – “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” – when God says this, Jeremiah responds, “Ah, Lord God! () Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”
But I’m only a boy! God gets this response all the time. But I’m only a virgin, a fisherman, a tax collector, a shepherd (Lk. 1:26-56; Mt. 4:18-22; Mt. 9:9; Lk. 2:8-19). I can’t speak to Israel because I stutter (Ex. 2:23-4:17). Ha! Am I supposed to have a baby at my age? (Gen. 18:12). But I don’t want to go to Nineveh (Jon. 1:3)! Disputing God’s call is par for the biblical course. God is frequently making audacious statements like the one Jeremiah hears and then God is just as often waiting out the protests. It seems that more often than not, God’s call is met with overwhelming feelings of inadequacy or incapacity. God has the wrong gal, the wrong guy. I’m not cut out for this mission. But this doesn’t just sound like biblical whining and protestation. We’ve heard it; we’ve said it. Ah, God! But I’m only a boy, a girl, a college student, a retiree, an engineer, a Southerner, a photographer, a sister, a grandchild, a first year.
We somehow seem to have latched onto the notion that God’s call is interrupting our “normal” lives. What a notion! There’s nothing normal about our lives and there never has been. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” For Jeremiah and for us, there has never been a moment in our whole lives – womb to death and beyond – that God isn’t knowing and forming us. God’s call is not interrupting a sane and normal life we’ve built for ourselves. It’s the echo of the first time God said your name, saw who you were, before you were even microscopically visible. Before I was born, before my parents gave me a name, before I decided I like purple and chocolate. Before we knew God, God knew us. We are known and formed to live out the reverberations of that first call. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment. ( ) It’s the first call that’s the doozy.

In the movie The Matrix I kept chuckling. I don’t think the audience was meant to snicker, but I couldn’t help it. I felt in on the joke. In The Matrix the “good guys” have figured out that the world they’ve been living in is only a computer-generated screen for true reality. With the help of a John the Baptist character they learn to see the world as it truly is, and this band of visionaries take on the “bad guys” who are pulling the cyber wool over the eyes of the world. If you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve probably seen ads for it with Keanu Reeves slicked down in shades and yards of black leather. He and the band of rebels look like hellions; they’re bad. Whenever they leave reality to go back into the unreal Matrix to fight the bad guys, they are slicked down, leathered up, tough fighters with attitude. When they are in non-Matrix reality, they look homeless. They eat food that can only be described as gruel, their clothes are dirty and torn, their hair isn’t coiffed. What made me laugh is that Laurence Fishburne’s John the Baptist character tells Keanu Reeves that the way they look in the Matrix is their self-perception, the way they want to look. The Matrix is all too obliging. I laughed because on screen they look hip and cool in the Matrix but it’s all a mind game played on them and one they play into. They really look like gruel-eating drifters, but they psyche themselves up with mind costumes. Every time I saw the slow motion camera work and choreographed fight scenes and the ever-present leather I giggled because it’s all in their minds. Until they first wake up out of the Matrix, they don’t know what earth and they themselves actually look like. They don’t know what their lives are.
We might not be wearing leather and doing Asian-style fighting in mid-air, but we think we know the color and texture and shape of our lives. We keeping forgetting that we are drifters who God claimed before our births. Just like Keanu and friends, the fancy clothes and well-preserved images we have of ourselves and our ideas about what our lives should look like don’t say anything about who we really are. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” God’s call is not interrupting real life, it is real life.
Maybe you’re still wondering about the whole prophet thing. Good thought. I’m claiming that this call isn’t just for Jeremiah but for all of us. Are we all supposed to be prophets? No. And yes.
Here’s something else writers and prophets have in common. They can come off as kind of eccentric. They see things that we don’t and they don’t seem to mind that we notice how they don’t fit in. Balzac reportedly drank over 90 cups of coffee a day. At the edge of his garden, George Bernard Shaw built a writing hut on a large lazy Susan contraption so that he could rotate it with the sun, to always have natural light pouring in no matter the time of day. Emily Dickinson rarely left her home. Jack London rigged his alarm clock to drop a heavy weight on his head so he wouldn’t oversleep. Israel’s prophets undertook the unwelcome task of righting the community, reminding them when they forgot and reprimanding them when they flagrantly ignored God’s commandments. It’s hard to be a popular prophet. It’s hard to sit in a room with only your thoughts and a burning urge to get them on paper. Neither profession is the type you’d take up if you had any choice in the matter. It’s a different thing altogether if “you were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
When Jeremiah protests that he doesn’t know how to speak, God reaches out to touch his mouth and says, “Now I have put my words in your mouth” (v. 9). And God says something else important while sending Jeremiah on his way, “Do not be afraid…for I am with you to deliver you” (v.8).
It takes self-confidence to be eccentric. Maybe this writerly, prophet-like self-confidence – literally, “with faith in oneself” – comes from that singleness of purpose, from knowing yourself the way God knows you, from having the faith in yourself that God has in you. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Maybe the eccentricities come with the territory. Maybe that’s what life looks like when the Word of God breaks in. Maybe that’s what our lives are meant to look like. God doesn’t call Jeremiah to be a prophet alone in the desert. God doesn’t ask Jeremiah to speak in hushed tones for only Israel to hear. God sends Jeremiah to speak to nations and kingdoms. And God promises to give him the words and to go along with him.
When you’re standing on that kind of promise, you’re bound to look a little odd in this world. As the body of Christ we make an impression: kooks and eccentrics of all sorts bending our lives to the shape of God’s Word and refusing to keep it to ourselves. We who are known, formed, and consecrated are appointed to “pluck up and pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” for God in the world (v.10).
See if you can hear God calling. Listen for the echoes of the time when God first knew you and formed you and consecrated you. Throw off the leather and shades and join us drifters! This crazy, life-giving call is not just for writers and prophets. It’s for each of us. “You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.”
Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah E. Lewis

“Only the Beginning”

John 20: 1-18

She had considered waking Salome or James’ mother, but she quit the house quietly and on her own. She wanted to clear her head, hold her hands to that huge cold stone, and then figure out what to do next.

She hadn’t slept much for two nights now and she couldn’t stay away any longer. This was the longest Mary Magdalene had gone without being near Jesus since they had met. It’s not as if she was expecting the tomb to feel like him, but she couldn’t think of any other place to be.

The walk didn’t take long. The garden was dewy at this time of the morning and the dim light was soft and bluish. She felt herself slowing her pace as she approached the tomb. Why was she here? What answers was this rock going to provide? She came around the bushes and saw it. Gaping, black as Friday.

Without getting any closer or looking into all that black, she turned and ran back to the house. She was running at least twice as fast as she had walked but the distance seemed to have doubled going in this direction.

Her thoughts raced as she ran. Who was behind this despicable theft? Why wouldn’t they at least give him peace now? What could they possibly want with him after all that he’d already given?

At the house she flung the door open and ran to the back bedroom where Peter and the disciple Jesus loved where sleeping. She was panting and had a hard time getting the words out…Jesus…gone…no stone…taken him. They understood enough to follow her back out into the street, where the light was stronger than before and the air warmer.

They didn’t follow her for long. The three were all running together and then Peter and the beloved took off in a sprint. Like schoolboys, it seemed to her, they were jostling one another the whole way, kicking up dust in their wake, until the beloved pushed ahead in the final steps to beat Peter to the tomb.

Even from here, the beloved could see. The linen wrappings they had put on him two days ago were lying in piles inside the tomb. No body. No Lord.

He was still standing there, facing that cool dark hole, when Peter caught up and rushed straight into the tomb. Peter turned around in the tomb, scanning it all with his eyes. Look how the body wrappings are there in that pile and there is another pile here, for the head cloth.

The disciple Jesus loved stepped inside too, now. Mary could see them both from where she stood by the cypress tree a few feet away in the garden. She was weeping now, silent tears pooling in her eyes and making tracks through the dust on her cheeks. She was hoping they would come out and tell her it was all ok, that their Lord was still there where he should be.

The two men stayed in the tomb for several minutes, saying nothing to one another. Peter was thinking. This isn’t anything like when he raised Lazarus. Lazarus came out of the tomb still wrapped up as when he went in. But here are our Lord’s burial clothes…

Quietly, beside Peter in the empty tomb, the disciple whom Jesus loved was also thinking. Death has been defeated. I’m not quite sure how this is happening, but it truly is. He tried to tell us about this but we couldn’t listen then…Now, I believe.

After several moments they came out of the tomb, looking sober and calm. They weren’t speaking and they walked right past her towards home. She edged closer to tomb and peered into the dark hole for the first time. There were angels! Angels, sitting one where his head had been and one where his feed had lain.

Mary was crying in huge, heaving sobs now. Terrified, she could not turn away. And the angels began talking to her, asking her why she was crying. What kind of angels are these, anyway? They aren’t acting like the angels I’ve heard about. First and foremost, they’re supposed to tell me not to be afraid – and the fact that they haven’t done that, on top of all the rest of this, is absolutely terrifying!

Weeping and angry at the same time, she blurted out, “They have taken away my Lord and I don’t know where they have put him!”

Jesus was standing in the garden now and she turned away from the tomb when she heard a slight noise behind her.

Mary saw a man standing there watching her and she was relieved. The men had been no help, running ahead without her and then leaving her at the tomb without a word. The angels were exasperating and useless. Certainly this gardener will be able to help her figure out what’s happened.

Before she could ask him anything, he said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?”

She was willing to do offer anything to make this right again. Since no once else was taking this seriously, she would have to take care of it herself. “Sir, if you’ve taken him away somewhere, tell me where, and I’ll go and get him and take him away for you.” She was crying and pleading and desperate and hopeful.

And then she heard it.

“Mary!”

The sound of her own name in his voice and on his lips. The most soothing sound she had ever known and one she thought she had lost forever.

My God, he is here! She recognized him at once and called his name.

“Rabbouni!”

Immediately, her mind began to race. He’s back and things can be as they were. I want to hold on to him this time, hold onto this moment. I want to understand what all this means, start making some sense and stop all this crying.

His words cut through her jumbled and grasping thoughts.

“Don’t hold onto me, Mary. It doesn’t end here. Just wait, it gets even better than defeating death. Remember what I said about returning to the Father? Don’t hold onto this, Mary. You have to let it all keep unfolding. Trust me.”

She looked at him, mind calm, eyes dry.

“Now, go and tell my brothers and sisters. Tell them I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God. You can believe all that I’ve been saying. This is only the beginning.”

Back at the house, she opened the door, and– just in case anyone was still asleep – she shouted out, “I have seen the Lord!”

Thanks be to God!

© 2007 Deborah Lewis

Thanks to UVA PhD candidate, Brantley Craig (cbc4f), who offered our sermon tonight!

“The Jesus Reality Show”
(Transfiguration Sunday: Feb.18, 2007; Wesley Foundation UVA)

Luke 9:28-43

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2

Because surely he would have had one, if TV had existed in his day. If any one had a reality show in ancient Judea, surely it would have been Jesus of Nazareth. After all, he obviously had the charisma, with those crowds following him everywhere. He had a ready-made supporting cast, given the wacky antics of his 12 best friends. He even had catch phrases. And while “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” and “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand” may not be quite as punchy as Emeril’s “Let’s kick it up a notch!” or the “Survivor” motto of “Outwit, Outlast, Outplay,” they could still fit on a well-made t-shirt. Plus, he had opinions about everything, all the hot-button issues: church and state, taxes, marriage, wars and rumors of wars. And he gave most people the benefit of the doubt. Wouldn’t he have been perfect on the panel of judges for Jerusalem Idol, playing the affable Randy Jackson part to John the Baptist’s critical Simon Cowell?

And my, oh my! If only the cameras could have been there to catch this moment, the moment we read about in Luke, where Jesus took just a couple of his closest pals up to the top of a mountain. There, far from the maddening crowds, he is transfigured. In the middle of an ordinary moment of prayer (if there is such a thing), his face changes into radiance, and his clothes, dusty from travel, burn shining white. Suddenly it is not just him and his disciples, but Moses is there and Elijah, also shining like the sun, debating the deep matters of the universe with Jesus the carpenter’s son. And that voice—of course, that voice—from above the sky and below the mountain proclaiming, “This is my Son, my Chosen, my Beloved; listen to him!”

Now that’s good TV! And it’s the perfect reality show moment. Because reality shows—from the first season of “The Real World” (which I actually remember) all the way down to our current crop of “Dancing with the Stars who want to be the Top Chef in Grease on the Runway” talent shows—all trade on the idea that they are showing us what people are really like. They’re all about the Big Secret, the so-called Real Deal. They push for those moments when we learn that Mr. X is gay, or that Miss Y is a racist, or that Mr. A and Miss B have really been sleeping together all this time or that tough-acting Mr. D has really only ever wanted—since he was very young—to sing Barry Manilow songs to an audience of millions. And so this moment seems to be, this thing we call, with capital letters, The Transfiguration. Here Peter, James, and John (and we the hearers of their stories) learn what Jesus is really like. Here is a Big Secret to end all Big Secrets. Now they know better. Now they can take the abuse. Can’t you just see it, the next time some stuck-up scribes and Pharisees go on about how Jesus is only “some workman from the country,” James and John elbowing each other and pulling faces? “Ho, ho—if only they knew!! We’ve seen who he really is!” He is the Son of God, the Chosen, the Beloved, to whom those who would follow the God of Israel are called to listen.

Which is great as far as revealing Bible (and reality TV) moments go, but, as this is, after all, Sunday, and is, after all, a Christian worship service, I’m guessing that few if any of us here are really very surprised by any of this. Nor am I suspecting that James, Peter, and John, who had, let’s remember, found Jesus compelling enough to leave all they had and follow him, were really all that surprised, or that even Luke, who liked Jesus enough to write two books about him and his teachings, didn’t somehow see this coming back at the part with the angels and shepherds. Which makes this rather an odd story to fixate upon. The story itself warns against it. Peter, for example, thinks this is such a neat occurrence that it needs to be made permanent. “Wow, Lord,” he says. “It’s good we’re here; we can make booths for you and Moses and Elijah.” I have no idea what exactly Peter had in mind. I’ve always pictured the booths like those little stands Lucy would set up in Peanuts comics: rectangular boxes with signs on top offering “Revelations” and a friendly sign below saying “The Divine Messenger is in.” Silly Peter. Luke tells us he didn’t know what he was saying. Whatever the Transfiguration is meant to be, a tourist attraction is not it. Jesus himself, Luke tells us, warns his companions not to say a word about this to anybody.

And yet here we are, on “Transfiguration Sunday,” having given the story its own special day, and having grown up in churches where booths are few, but stained-glass pictures of this scene are many. And why? Why make such a big deal out of a secret that is not such a secret? Why get excited about a scene that shows us something about Jesus that we already know?

Well, look at what Luke does next. When Jesus, James, John, and Peter come back down, they find a scene of confusion. A man had brought his son, afflicted by an “unclean spirit,” to the remaining disciples, to get them to cast it out. The results were, shall we say, less than spectacular. This one, it turns out, takes the touch of the Master himself. “Ugh,” Jesus says. “You faithless and messed-up bunch of folks…I don’t think I can take you people much longer. But never mind, bring him here.” And the man does. And the bad spirit convulses the boy. And Jesus rebukes the spirit, and it leaves the boy, who goes back to his dad safe and sound. And then Luke notes something curious. “And all,” he writes, “were astounded at the greatness of God.”

“All were astounded at the greatness of God.” This sounds like something we just read. Wasn’t it just yesterday in Luke’s telling of it that Peter, James and John were astounded at the greatness of God revealed on top of that mountain? Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story of the Transfiguration. All three follow it up with a healing story. But leave it to Luke, the one called “the Beloved Physician,” to connect the two. There, right in a row, are two instances where people are astounded at the greatness of God revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And don’t you go thinking that’s just a coincidence. Why is it that Jesus can cast out this evil spirit that his disciples cannot? Exactly because he is the one the voice proclaimed him to be: the Son of God, the Chosen, the Beloved—the Christ. Which is not just a matter of having clean clothes and a shiny face. It is a matter of being the One who reveals the greatness of God, and who does so by healing the world. What Peter, James, and John saw in that glorious, glowing mountaintop vision, the crowd below saw in the touch of a caring hand and in a boy standing, peaceful and whole again, with his family. What they all saw was something they thought they recognized—a man, a touch, a child—transfigured, and made to shine with the glory of God. What they saw was reality.

For if the story of the Transfiguration is just a story that shows us what Jesus is really like, in a sort of backstage, reality TV way, then it seems, at best, redundant—especially by the time we get to Easter and that empty tomb. But what if the story shows us something else? What if the story doesn’t show us some reality about Jesus himself, but shows us that Jesus himself shows us reality? For haven’t you noticed that the “reality” revealed by reality TV is usually pretty unsavory? Simon’s rude remarks, the backbiting on “The Apprentice,” the skeletons in politicians’ or athletes’ closets, the revolving bedroom doors of this or that set of MTV housemates—these are what are supposed to be real. When these shows promise to show us what people are “really like,” that usually means, the ways in which they are faithless, perverse, and generally possessed of unclean mouths and unclean spirits. But Luke’s Transfiguration story tells us something different. His story tells us that a faithless and perverse generation—whether it be James and John’s generation or my generation or yours—will not have the last word. Christ will have the last word, for what is real is God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Creation is not founded on doubt and pain and dirty little secrets; creation is founded on the power and the love of God, the light that shines in the darkness, the touch that brings peace and reconciliation and healing. “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen,” said C. S. Lewis, “not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Luke’s Transfiguration story invites us to believe in Christ in just that way: not just as the most wonderful thing we see, but as that by which we see that everything else is, in reality, wonderful.

This “everything,” of course, also contains us—and that brings me to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. Because it sounds like Paul is himself up to some reality-show-style nastiness here, claiming that his brothers and sisters of the people of Israel have a veil over their hearts and minds. But while the letter of his message may lack some tact (not surprising for Paul), the spirit of it is right in line with Luke: by Christ, Christians see things that other people do not. Paul really doesn’t care that much about what it is that his former people do not see. What matters is what he and others who see in the light of Christ do see: the glory of the Lord, the greatness of God. But here’s the amazing thing: Christians, Paul claims, don’t just see this light and this glory, they reflect it. In other words, it is not only Jesus who is transfigured. We, too, are being transformed into the image of God, “from one degree of glory to another.” God does not intend for Jesus to be the only real person, with a bunch of faithless, messed-up folk trailing in his wake. God wants reality to break through to each of us—all of us, as Paul says, with the veil lifted off our faces, seeing, knowing, and living what is real.

We are called, that is, to be a part of the reality that Jesus shows. We are. We, gathered here, the people who sing these songs and pray these prayers and eat this bread and drink this cup—we are invited to feel and to share the transfiguring touch of the Lord. For our calling is not just to be nice. Anyone can be nice. Not is our calling to point out just how faithless and perverse a generation we are surrounded by. Believe me when I say that’s rather obvious on its own. Nor is our calling to build safe little booths for our divine messengers to relax in. Believe me again when I say that they have far comfier quarters waiting back where they came from. No, our calling is quite simply to live as people astounded at the greatness of God in Jesus Christ, to live as people astounded by that greatness because we have felt it, and have known it, and have been changed by it. Our calling is to be ordinary people transfigured, to do what we can, each in our own small way, to direct attention to the Beloved Son by which we see everything else, and in whose light we know that all of it, even ourselves, is, as was said by Someone long ago, back at the beginning, very good.

(c) 2007 by Brantley Craig

“Be Here Now”
Jeremiah 33: 14-16
Luke 21: 25 -36

There’s a phrase seminary students learn in public worship courses. It is: “Every Sunday is a little Easter.” If you’ve been hanging out with seminarians or reading theological and liturgical books, or if you’ve ever helped plan worship at the Wesley Foundation, you might know this one, too. It means that no matter what the season of the Christian year, Sunday commemorates and celebrates the Sunday - Easter - that makes sense of the whole rest of the year. At the liturgical level, it means that even in a penitential season like Advent or Lent, Sunday is a day for celebration and for savoring a taste of that feast for which we long.

It’s a good reminder for us of that “already-not yet” orientation Christians live by. Christ has come, inaugurating the Reign of God. And yet we are still waiting to witness that Reign come in its fullness. The days are surely coming (Jeremiah 33:14)…Thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven. To give you another theological term, it is what we call an eschatological expectation. Eschatology is the study of “last things.” It’s “the expectation and the assurance that in the end God and God’s love will prevail.” Easter is the defining event that makes this clear to us. Where, O Death, is now thy sting? It’s safe to count on this, to live by this.

Bill Mallard, a retired clergy person from our conference and one of my seminary professors at Candler, is quite the wacky theologian and professor. In addition to teaching us about church history, he felt that part of his role was to arm us with impressive phrases to pull out at parties. “Eschatological expectation” was one of those and he would stop in the middle of a lecture, wave everyone to their feet, and have us rehearse the phrase with gusto. Even today, it’s hard for me to say the words without the gusto.

Maybe that is as it should be. This basic Christian orientation of ours packs some gusto. Eschatological expectation!

I recently heard Will Ferrell being interviewed on Fresh Air and the host played a snippet from one of his movies I haven’t seen. I think it’s the one about race car driving. His character prays before each meal and he always prays to “Baby Jesus.” All the time, every mention, all through the prayer. Apparently his wife finds this a little strange or annoying because in this particular scene she mentions to him that, well, Jesus did actually grow up and that he doesn’t have to pray only to the manger. Ferrell’s character immediately responds that she can pray to whatever age Jesus she wants to, but he prefers the Baby Jesus.

It was a hilarious scene but it also got me to thinking. Does it matter? Is this focus on Jesus as infant necessarily a bad thing, theologically?

It seems like a timely question. I had a 45-minute conversation with several other pastors this week about the struggle to keep Advent and Christmas as distinct seasons. Sometimes it seems it is a struggle to keep Advent at all. I think I saw some nativity scenes last weekend - a few days after Thanksgiving and an entire week before Advent begins!

The thing about Christmas is that we need preparation to get there. We forget that sometimes. Sure, the Baby Jesus is sweet and the crèche scenes are nostalgic and warm. Sure, it is pleasant to have a few days vacation and to give and receive gifts. But are we really ready to give birth to Christ, here in the midst of these lives? If I’m just remembering a sweet baby from a while ago, fine. But what if God is asking to be borne through me into every corner of my life and the life of this world? What if that is the coming we are preparing for? Doesn’t Advent seem a bit more necessary in that case?

When we do step back a few inches from Christmas to make room for a time of Advent, most often we are still using that preparatory time to get ready for Christmas in all the same ways. Presents, travel, time off, Christmas cantatas. Most often we make room for ritual and tradition. What would it be like if we made room for more?

Advent means “coming” and we usually focus on that arrival at Christmas. But Advent is also a season when we look forward to Christ coming again, to the Reign of God in its fullness. Advent is a time for exploring our eschatological expectation.

There is a fancier word for that “already-not yet” stance I spoke of earlier. It is called “prolepsis, which means acting as if what you expect to happen has already happened.” I can not think of a better definition of what it means to live in this already-not yet time, to live with an eschatological expectation. Acting as if what you expect to happen has already happened.

If, when we are praying Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven - we are praying that with our whole lives, what difference would it make? What if, when we are praying that prayer, we are not so much asking God to fix up this world so it looks like the kingdom? What if, instead, we are asking God to fix us up to be better kingdom builders?

What if this Advent we each expected God to come into ever corner of our lives? What if, before we are even sure we understand the prayer, we start living it anyway?

I was in ALC Copies a few weeks ago. Do you know the place? It’s the bright yellow building on the corner across from Barracks Road shopping center and it is run by two of the families in this church. I love place. They are known to barter for services and it is so very un-Kinko’s-like. I was in several weeks ago and Shane insisted on showing me a funky new video game about the second coming of Christ. While I was there, an older man came in, one Shane and John greeted by name. After he placed his order and left, Shane told me that the man had been in World War II and organizes reunions of fellow soldiers. When’s the last time you were in Kinko’s and they even asked your name?

I’m telling you all this because we can start where we are. John used to work at a Kinko’s and then struck out on his own to open ALC with the family. He used what he knew, his talents and experience, and created a different sort of place. What if we did that?

What if Mallory decides to read that Jeffrey Sachs book on ending world poverty and chooses to use her economy major to envision a new world? What if Geoff learns all he can in the Commerce school and then does business with a new bottom line? What if Leigha runs for office and chooses to do politics in such a way that people stop thinking of it as a dirty word? What if we build relationships, structure careers and lives, spend time, spend money, and live like what we firmly expect to happen has already happened? No excuses or “reality checks” - but living fully out of the reality.

What if what we envision - what God envisions for us - starts to happen because of how we live? What if right here and now, this Advent, we begin living like all of God’s deepest longings for our lives and this world have already come true?

Blessed be the already-not yet of this season full of tension and hope! And God bless us as we struggle to be here now, fully in this place and fully hopeful .

Thanks be to God!
(c) 2006 Deborah Lewis

“Sitting Down to Watch”

Mark 12: 38-44

My second year of college I lived with 3 roommates in a cramped basement apartment on Grady Avenue. The apartment had a galley kitchen with a little nook at one end where there was a small flat space resembling a tale. There was one living room, 2 bedrooms, and 1 bathroom. At some point that year I had written a letter – do y’all do that or is it all IMs, email, and cell calls? Anyway, I had written down words on paper, folded the paper, put it in an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, and sent it to my parents. For some reason I no longer remember – though I can guess it was because I was asking for money – instead of writing my name in the return address, I wrote “Poor College Student.”

The next week, the mail carrier knocked on the door and, as it happened, I think all 4 of us were home at the time, sitting around the living room and studying. When we opened the door the he said, “I’m looking for a ‘Poor College Student.’” At which point all 4 of us said simultaneously, “Which one?”

When we figured out that I was the “poor college student” in question, the mail carrier said, “Well, apparently they didn’t think you were that poor, because you owe me $.11!” As it turns out, my mom had not put enough postage on her return letter so there was postage due for delivery.

This story is a favorite in my family and is always good for a few laughs. I thought of it when I first read over today’s lectionary text from Mark. But it sometimes makes me wince a little, because in those days, I thought that no having much cash at my disposal entitled me to call myself “poor.”

I love this story from Mark about the poor widow giving all she has to God. When I was little I had a children’s Bible in which this story was illustrated, old, hunched-over woman reaching her aged hand over the offering plate, two small but beautiful coins plunking in. I liked contemplating the simultaneous smallness and grandeur of this gift.

With my college story and my children’s Bible in mind, I thought when I started working on this sermon, that I would talk about solidarity with the poor. About giving out of the poor – weak, vulnerable, hidden – places in our lives. About the difference between an offering made from the excess of abundance and the offering made from the place where you think you have nothing to offer. Maybe some of that will still surface tonight. Maybe not.

But what I want to talk about now is watching. What strikes me most about this story is how Jesus sat down to watch. This passage of scripture shows up in the other two synoptic gospels – Matthew and Luke – but it’s told slightly differently. In Matthew, Jesus spends 39 verses pronouncing woe on religious hypocrites (like the first part of our reading) and then skips the poor widow altogether. The emphasis here is clearly on the full extent of their hypocrisy and Jesus does not hold back for those full 39 verses. In Luke, Jesus looks up and sees rich people and the widow, all in on sentence, then in the next sentence he immediately tells the disciples what he has observed (Luke 21: 1-4). The basic facts of the story are the same as in Mark, but the feel of the story is completely different.

In Mark, Jesus sits down opposite the spot in the temple where people were coming to give money. Maybe he had been planning a visit there for a time; maybe he was passing by and wondered what he would see if he stayed for a while. In any case, he does not seem to be watching the proceedings incidentally. He seems to have nothing else on his mind, nowhere else to be, nothing else to consider. He picks out a spot and settles in.

Time passes. Unlike Luke’s version, Mark lets us know that Jesus is there for a while. And he is watching the whole while. It is not as if Jesus is doing a sudoku puzzle and just looks up occasionally. He is observing the proceedings. He sits down and watches. Many people come. Many rich people putting in a lot of money. He probably recognizes some of them, wonders about some. He can tell by the way they are dressed what each does for a living. He can tell by the way they hold themselves and by the looks on their faces who is doing this “for show.” So many seem to glance around just before stepping away from the treasury box, making sure they are seen doing this good deed.

When the poor widow comes, Jesus has been there long enough to notice that she stands out from the others. She is obviously not rich and her clothes announce to everyone that she is a widow. Someone to be taken care of. Someone who is often taken advantage of, even by the religious leaders, as Jesus has just said a few verses back. Nothing about this woman is impressive by the cultural standards of the day. Until Jesus sees her at the temple, approaching the treasury. Though the community is supposed to be taking care of her, she has made the trek into town for this gift. When she reaches her hand out to drop her offering, Jesus can see only two small coins, hardly worth anything. But that is not the way he sees it.

After watching her and reflecting on all that he has seen from his perch, Jesus calls the disciples to him. Once they gather, he tells them what he’s been observing, how riches can deceive and how poverty can too. This woman has given more than anyone else I have seen all day (Mark 12:43).

Even in Mark, this story only lasts for 4 verses. But, here in Mark, it captures that sense of time passing, of Jesus spending time here. In the gospel often marked by how “immediately” Jesus does this or that, it is significant that here he takes his time. He does not notice this while making his own offering or while passing by the temple on this way somewhere else. He sits down to watch, not knowing who or what he will see, possibly with no plan to enact or any hypothesis to test.

He sits down to watch. He sits there and watches for some time. No hurry, just observing. After a while, when he has seen enough, he keeps on sitting there but asks the disciples to come over and see what he sees. He points out the view and what has been happening. Then he offers them a different take on the events of the day.

So why do I care about this? Why do I want you to care about this? Why didn’t I write another sermon on stewardship, since most preachers see this story as a ready-made sermon on pledging money?

In sitting down with this story this week, here’s what I’ve seen: Jesus was surely familiar with the temple, but he takes the time to pay attention anyway – and for no apparent reason. He lets the world in in a way that informs his understanding. There is nothing to suggest that Jesus goes looking for a sermon illustration. There is nothing to suggest that Jesus has anything in particular in mind, other than watching. He has no role in the temple that day. We do not read that he is making his own offering. He is not in a hurry – he sits down and watches, and he takes some time doing so. And he is not looking for something, but rather, watching.

It is true that we are called to make offerings to God from the “first fruits” of our lives. It is true that we are called into solidarity with the poor and suffering, the orphans and the widows. It is true that we are called to give even when we don’t think we have anything to offer. That’s all true.

But what if the truth we here at UVA, at this busy time of year, are called to is the simple but profound act of watching? Just watching. Not “being on the lookout for” anything, but opening our eyes and minds and hearts to watch what appears. What if?

When is the last time you watched anything or anyone with this sort of attention, but without expecting anything in particular? What if you picked a spot on the Lawn or at Starbucks or in the library and decided to watch for half an hour? What would you see? Do you think you would notice things you have been missing?

Would you see that the work study student at the desk in Alderman greets everyone with a smile, while most walk by barely acknowledging her as they plop books for return on her counter? In the dining halls or the PAV, would you see the students and faculty, annoyed with the long lines, or would you notice the workers serving the meals? What would you see? Who would you see differently?

This is your mission, should you choose to accept it: Go out, sit down for a while, and watch. Pay attention to who and what you see.

We are groomed to be people who go out and do, people who have opinions and issues and candidates and platforms and theses and grad school applications and life plans. We know our place. We can wax on eloquently about the society in which we live.

But can we let go of the opinions and issues and all the rest, long enough to sit in the midst of this grand, created order and pay attention, really pay attention? Can we let the world in in a way that informs our understanding? If we did this, what would we see and how would that alter all those plans and opinions?

This could be the most counter-cultural thing you do…and possibly the most Christ-like.

Thanks be to God!

© 2006 Deborah Lewis