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Sermon 1/31: “All We Need Is Love”

January 31, 2010 by piperchick

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast,* but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers* in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

-Luke 4: 14-30

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Sermon 1/24: “It’s all in the (con)text”

January 24, 2010 by piperchick

My parents gave me a Flip video for Christmas with the promise that I would put my sermons on the internet for them to “check in” on me occasionally.  A month later, my husband and I decided to try it out, so below represents my very first attempt at sharing my own videos online… forgive the quality–we have not got a tripod yet!

Sermon Title:  Unity

Text:  1 Corinthians 12

What I want to talk about now is the various ways God’s Spirit gets worked into our lives. This is complex and often mis-understood, but I want you to be informed and knowledgeable. Remember how you were when you didn’t know God, led from one phony god to another, never knowing what you were doing, just doing it because everybody else did it? It’s different in this life. God wants us to use our intelligence, to seek to understand as well as we can. For instance, by using your heads, you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say “Jesus be damned!” Nor would anyone be inclined to say “Jesus is Master!” without the insight of the Holy Spirit.

God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:

wise counsel

clear understanding

simple trust

healing the sick

miraculous acts

proclamation

distinguishing between spirits

tongues

interpretation of tongues.

All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when.

You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?

The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.

You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything. You’re familiar with some of the parts that God has formed in his church, which is his “body”:

apostles
prophets
teachers
miracle workers
healers
helpers
organizers
those who pray in tongues.
But it’s obvious by now, isn’t it, that Christ’s church is a complete Body and not a gigantic, unidimensional Part? It’s not all Apostle, not all Prophet, not all Miracle Worker, not all Healer, not all Prayer in Tongues, not all Interpreter of Tongues. And yet some of you keep competing for so-called “important” parts.

But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.

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People like this make the internet worthwhile.

January 23, 2010 by piperchick

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Discipleship and Haiti

January 16, 2010 by piperchick

When he finally arrives, blazing in beauty and all his angels with him, the Son of Man will take his place on his glorious throne. Then all the nations will be arranged before him and he will sort the people out, much as a shepherd sorts out sheep and goats, putting sheep to his right and goats to his left.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Enter, you who are blessed by my Father! Take what’s coming to you in this kingdom. It’s been ready for you since the world’s foundation. And here’s why:

I was hungry and you fed me,
I was thirsty and you gave me a drink,
I was homeless and you gave me a room,
I was shivering and you gave me clothes,
I was sick and you stopped to visit,
I was in prison and you came to me.’

“Then those ’sheep’ are going to say, ‘Master, what are you talking about? When did we ever see you hungry and feed you, thirsty and give you a drink? And when did we ever see you sick or in prison and come to you?’ Then the King will say, ‘I’m telling the solemn truth: Whenever you did one of these things to someone overlooked or ignored, that was me—you did it to me.’

Matthew 25: 31-40

Last week I was driving into town and I noticed a church sign that said the following “ Even the demons tremble and believe.”  Now, I thought to myself, that must be one exciting church… I could just imagine the potential for hell-fire and brimstone on that sign-post, and I lost myself in visions of what sort of sermon that sign might be speaking of.

But for all my fascination and surprise—Presbyterians don’t often get the demons into their sermons, much less their church signs—I also found that, over the course of this week, my mind has gone back again and again to those words… “even the demons tremble and believe.”  The quote is from the book of James, and the author’s main agenda is to remind his readers that there is so much more to faith than what a person says with his tongue—what she says with her feet, and her hands, and her hearts, is equally important, if not more so, because it is with hands and feet and hearts that Christians demonstrate the character of belief in God.

And it was as I entertained these thoughts in my mind that the news began to filter in about the earthquake in Haiti.  News reports and images of overwhelming devastation flooded international and local news service, stories of thousands dead and more injured, of families torn apart and of the glaring need for a concerted response to the tragedy.

I began to wonder, what is it that we are called to be when things like this happen?  And so I turned to scripture, and to the church for answers.  I turned to Matthew 25 and it was there that I began to find an answer to my question.  In this story, Christ, is speaking to his disciples when he tells them a story about sheep and goats.  The word disciple is a latin translation of the word μαθητεύω, which means to follow.  The book of Matthew, then, could be understood as the book of “following,” of discipleship, for that is what the name Matthew means.

The story of the sheep and the goats, then, is a story about discipleship to disciples, people like us who have committed their lives to Christ and who are trying to learn how to live faithfully in to that commitment.  In it, Christ tells a parable about sheep and goats in order to illustrate a central point of discipleship;  That our actions matter.

He says:  when God comes, how you LIVED your faith will matter.  Your membership in God’s Kingdom will in some way depend on how you responded to God’s grace.  And in case there are questions about the nature of response, Jesus makes it simple:  he says, when I was hungry, you fed me, when was thirsty you gave me drink, when I was homeless you gave me room, when I was shivering you gave me clothes, when I was sick you visited, and when I was in prison you offered companionship. And that you did this when you acted in such a way to those around you, the overlooked and ignored.”

There is a story about a desert monk who once posed a question  to an elder: There are two brothers, one of whom remains praying in his cell, fasting six days at a time and doing a great deal of penance. The other one takes care of the sick. Which one’s work is more pleasing to God? The elder replied: If that brother who fasts six days were to hang himself up by the nose, he could not equal the one who takes care of the sick.

Do you see what I am getting at here?  Christ offers us in this parable of the sheep and the goats something critical about what it means to have faith.  He says, If you believe, you will respond to suffering in others.  In fact, he says even more.  He says, your salvation, your citizenship in the Kingdom of God, depends in some way on the nature of our response to God.

Now, some of you may be wondering, doesn’t our faith teach us that it is by grace alone that we are saved?  Certainly, it is true that Calvin observed long ago that nothing we can do will overcome the chasm that separates us from God, and that Christ alone provides a means to salvation.  But even Christ teaches us that he did not die for nothing… As Paul says, do we sin so that Grace may abound?  By no means!  Rather, we are justified by grace THROUGH faith… in other words, we respond with compassion and with action BECAUSE we are saved, and that is one way by which God’s Kingdom is made manifest in the world.

Now, I don’t need to tell you for you to know that there are hungry, thirsty, homeless, shivering, sick and imprisoned people suffering in Haiti right now.  Thousands are homeless because their homes have collapsed in Port-au-Prince.  Drinking quality water has and continues to be a problem in Haiti.  They have NEVER had enough food.  Hospitals cannot handle the need, and there are still people imprisoned in the rubble and trapped by conditions of poverty on that tiny island.

And friends, our faith demands that we respond.  Ours is a faith that finds its center in a  yearning for justice, a yearning that is not our own but is shared by God in the figure of Christ who suffered and continues to suffer that all might be made well in this world.  Our Lord suffers with the people of Haiti, and is grieved when we choose to turn a blind eye to the suffering that lies before us.

I saw a billboard on my way up to Belvidere this week—it was for the Marines and had a picture of a well-dressed young man, very clean-cut, saluting off to the front of him and next him were the following words:  ‘Commitment to something greater than oneself.’  That is what faith in God is like.  Many churches have chosen to downplay songs and hymns that imply militaristic images with respect to our relationship with God, but in this case the analogy is apt.  Discipleship to God demands that we commit ourselves to something greater than us:  we commit ourselves to God, and to God’s plan for the world.  This means that we are sometimes called to respond with love and compassion to the tragedies that beset the world, whether they happen in our back yard or not.

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Gratitude: A Christmas Eve Reflection on the Lukan Story

December 23, 2009 by piperchick

It doesn’t start off sounding like a particularly special or noteworthy story—“In those days, a decree went out from Emperor Augustus, that all the world should be registered.”  No warning that this story is THE story, just information, a setting, a time and a place.  A map, if you will, of the various pieces and parts that make up the landscape of this particular tale.  No warning that this story, of nothing notably “God-centered,” but rather a political requirement for registration, one likely to result in a greater tax burden for the people, is the context into which God breaks into the world.

And yet, here we are, listening to this tale of God’s working in a decidedly political world.  Of a man and woman, Joseph and Mary, who are compelled to travel from their home in Nazareth to Joseph’s ancestral home of Bethlehem, a trip somewhere on the scale of 100 miles.  A trip made more dangerous because it required that they detour Samaria, a country with tense relations to Israel at the time, all in order to fulfill the requirements of a foreign occupying state during the final term of an unplanned pregnancy.

To take this trip must have been a frightening prospect in the final weeks leading up to Christ’s birth.  I wonder how Mary must have felt, knowing that her child might very well decide to be born during a journey far from the safety of home and family.  How scared she must have been to realize that her time had come in a foreign town where her and Joseph were strangers.  To realize they had no friends, no familiar faces to help them in the uncharted territory of this new birth.

What courage it must have taken to persevere through the realities of a birth that the Scriptures describe in all of two verses—“While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child.  And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”  To be so desperate to protect their young child that Scripture tells us they welcomed their first child in the darkness amidst barn animals.

How alone they must have felt in those hours, fearing the immanency of parenthood coupled with the knowledge of this child’s Otherness.  The expectation of how drastically their lives would change with this life.  To wonder if they would ever find welcome in such extraordinary circumstances.

And as they experienced these fears, these questions, the reality of Christ’s birth, Scripture tells us that God was working to provide them welcome and hospitality in this strange and foreign place.  The angels of the Lord, who came to Mary and to Joseph, come to strangers in a field, proclaim the birth of Christ much as the birth of Kings was proclaimed in that time, but in the upside-down Kingdom of God these words are proclaimed not to nobles and dignitaries, but to shepherds at work in the field, shepherds whom we are told drop everything, leave their flocks in the fields and go “with haste” to find the family, to see what God has done in the world and to offer hospitality and welcome company in the midst of all that has happened.

Much is silent in this story—the details are left unsaid.  But at the end we know one thing, and that is this:  That ultimately, this is a story of gratitude and joy—the gratitude of Mary and Joseph when ONE PERSON was found who was willing to make room for them to welcome their child, their gratitude to be in a warm and safe space in those vulnerable and scary moments of new birth and new parenthood, joyful gratitude to God when their child arrives safely into this world, for a manger in which to lie his head.  Gratitude for the strength to persevere through the fear and unknowing, for strangers, shepherds who come seeking to welcome them and offer hospitality in a strange town.   Mary and Josephs’ gratitude that the improbable truth of their Son’s origin is known of and marveled at by others.  And the gratitude and joyful amazement of the nameless angels on this earth—the shepherds and other lowly, ordinary people, who find themselves welcomed into God’s presence by no less than God’s messengers and a holy family.

And it is a story of our gratitude, as well.

Our gratitude Christ is born in Bethlehem, that he was born in the midst of love and thanksgiving, that angels sang and shepherds rejoiced, that light conquered the darkness of those moments, that we too can add our voices to the song as we proclaim, “Christ is born!” in this season and in this place.   That we are welcomed to Mary’s side to behold the Child of God, and that this child is for all of humankind.  Gratitude, that this tiny, new child will one day grow up and change everything, will change us, if we would but make room for him to do so.   That on this silent, holy, and strange night, “Christ, our savior is born.”

May we, as did the nameless innkeepers and shepherds, Mary and Josephs, make room for this child, this savior, to change our lives this Christmas season.  Amen.

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Very Funny

October 16, 2009 by piperchick

Adam posted this on Facebook…. couldn’t resist:

 

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:)

September 22, 2009 by piperchick

Life is most decidedly good right now.  Wild on the edges, but good as God made it.

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A blog about (not) blogging, and other experiences that take my breath away

July 19, 2009 by piperchick

I posted the following to presbymergent’s website and it should, pending review, show up sometime over the course of the next week.  I spent a little time working on it, so I didn’t quite have the time to write something for here this week, so I thought I would post it here as well.  Enjoy!

 

For all of my twittering, facebooking, g-mailing, blogging and blackberrying, and so forth, the truth is that I most often find myself in sacred space, in the presence of God Himself, when I dare to put that all away, step away from my techno-centered routines, and simply be.  At the risk of sounding like a Luddite, I most often see God when I stop texting and start looking around at the world God made with the eyes God blessed me with, tasting the air on my tongue and taking in the world around me rather than confining my experience of the world to that which appears on a small, digital screen.

           

* * * * *

 

Most recently, it has been the reality of the summer—a warm breeze picking through the branches and leaves of the live oaks, the whirring of bugs and beetles high above me, the taste of honeysuckle and thyme in the air—that has brought me back to myself.  There isn’t much cell phone service worth using on the streets near my parent’s northern California home, so I have been forced to set down my phone and amuse myself with my surroundings instead, packing away the email, facebook, or catch-up calls that are so often a feature of my more urban hiking adventures in Philadelphia.  As I walk down the dusty trail that lines highway 130, my ears prick to the gentle rustle of oleander and wild turkey, and I find myself reeling with the recognition that I am a part of something bigger than myself, that the signs of life around me are small reminders of something deeper and grander than anything I could imagine, something that could so easily go unnoticed and then suddenly bowl me over in a instant of blazing clarity. 

            When John Calvin wrote of the glory of and specialness of creation, I heard what he was saying.  And I recognized myself in his remark that we too often fail to see the beauty that is before us.  Every once in a while, however, a thin space, as the Celts called it, opens before our eyes, and the truth of the world and God’s presence in it is clear to us.  As Calvin would put it, we find that in God we are given spectacles to see the sacred quality of all things, which hide in plain sight before me.

            So what are the things that stun me back to the recognition of the Sacred?  There is no pattern that I can discern, no perfect formula for figuring it out.  While I am often bowled over by that which is natural, I also find that God can strip me of my ignorance of the sacred around me in the most mundane or even complicated of circumstances.  I see it in the pattern of a quilt made by my own hands and a well-written poem, or even in the midst of the fray as much as the beauty of a mountain range.  And I could argue that it takes practice to see the sacred with more clarity, and yet even that isn’t always the case.  I have learned that the world will surprise my fuzzy eyes into focus as shockingly when I am looking for the sacred as it will when I am doing everything but.

            Ultimately, these moments of recognition are both a mystery and a gift, for like God they are beyond my ability to grasp them, and filled with grace and wisdom.  They surpass knowledge and understanding and are filled with Truth.  They bring me closer to God, to myself, and to my fellow inhabitants on this great, sacred sphere that we call home.  For that, I am thankful.

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Ethical Health Care?

July 17, 2009 by piperchick

This afternoon I came across Peter Singer’s NYT Magazine article on rationing and health care.  Now, as a philosophy major in undergrad, I was required to read Singer’s book entitled “One World” for Dallas Willard’s class on the history of Ethics.  If you haven’t read him, I recommend it, because he certainly pushes the boundaries of what many would consider comfortable in the realm of ethics.  As I understand him, he considers and explores the realm of corporate or universal ethical challenges.  In One World, he explored the costs associated with dealing with world poverty and, if my memory serves me, concluded that those of us in the developed world have the capability to solve the problem if only we are willing to part with a small fraction of the comfortable lifestyle we are accustomed to.  He also was made infamous by his arguments on abortion, euthanasia and infanticide, in which his ethical positions centered around the question of whether it is in fact wrong to take the life of those who are old, insane, or unborn. 

He’s basically an ethicist with a whole lot of balls and a thick skin, because most of his thinking has been, shall we say, difficult to swallow for many people.

But I have to admit, I like him.  The old Princeton prof is one smart guy, and while his arguments are challenging to me on certain personal levels, I have to admit that much of what he has to say is compelling, and certainly has the power to refocus conversation around significant issues like poverty, life, and death.

Back to the article.  So I stumbled across Singer’s piece on health care reform, and I must recommend it as worth reading.  In the article, he deals with the problematic ethical concern of valuing life and rationing health care, both of which are visible concerns in the current health care reform debate.  Singer argues that, while most people decry the attempt to put a value on a human life, it is still the case that it happens.  He cites various instances in which human life has long had a price tag roughly equivalent to $5 million dollars, and that despite our uncomfortableness with the concept, it is one that drives insurance concerns. 

What is interesting about his article for me, however, is how he uses this information to argue that we need to ration health care.  Most people don’t like the concept of rationing, and Singer certainly acknowledges that when folks are deathly sick, they resent the notion that their insurance might not cover expensive live-extending treatments.  That said, these treatments often do not save lives, but merely draw them out, often at the cost of failing to save the lives of the non-insured, which he illustrates with a provocative study of health care received by insured and non-insured auto-collision victims. 

Ultimately, Singer argues for a rationing sytem for health care that operates along the lines of live-years saved and QALY, or quality-adjusted life years.  These measures of value are both interesting and worth consideration, and I certainly found his article worth a good ponder.

There are some questions that I came away with, as I read this article.  First of all, I was surprised to discover that I agreed strongly with Singer’s evaluation of prohibitively expensive life-extending drug treatments.  Basically, he noted that when insurance covers treatments that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year while extending lives by small increments, they aren’t worth it because they drive up costs for everyone else.  I have to say that I agreed with him.  Perhaps I don’t find death as frightening as I should, but I tend to believe that if your body is shutting down and you are going to die for certain, it is most important to spend your remaining time coming to terms with that and loving those moments you have left rather than frantically scrambling for a few more months.  But that’s just me.

Another issue of Singer’s that always seems to get him in trouble is his logically sound argument that saving a teenager’s life is worth more than an 85-year old because you are saving more life-years.  I have a hard time with this concept, but at the same time I have a difficult time disputing his claims. 

Ultimately, all my rambling amounts to the suggestion that you go and read him yourself.  I don’t expect everybody to agree with what I say, or even see the same things I do, but I do think that it is a valuable exercise to participate in the conversation, and I appreciate Singer’s bravery in entering the dialogue.

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I couldn’t resist…

June 27, 2009 by piperchick

The beginnings of a delicious BBQ creation

The beginnings of a delicious BBQ creation

I couldn’t help it; mom my and I are making BBQ for dinner tonight, and the recipe for the sauce called for a delicious bundle of thyme to be bound in bacon and cooked into the sauce.  We went ahead and borrowed from my mother’s monster thyme plan, and here we are…. my kind of barbeque, if you ask me!

 

To come, some awesome photos of my foray into fruit preserves, basically a second installment, given last year’s experimentation with loquat.  Also, some of my own observations and reflections regarding God, etc.; long overdue.

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