CHBC Sermon Blog Responses

Rather than reposting every sermon, this one post will be an area where those interested can respond to various sermons at CHBC. You can read the sermon online at http://www.crescenthillbaptistchurch.org under the sermon index area. When responding as a blog, reference the particular sermon to which you're responding.
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Feb 15, 2009 - "Healing Our Anxious Discontent"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Epiphany 6
February 15, 2009
W. Gregory Pope

Series: Healing

HEALING OUR ANXIOUS DISCONTENT

2 Kings 5:1-16; Psalm 30; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45

These are anxious times. You don’t need to hear the unemployment, stock market, and housing numbers again. You also know not many economists expect a turnaround for at least a couple of years. Such an atmosphere has its frightening hold on us. When we hear of people losing their homes, we begin to worry about losing our homes. When we hear of job losses, we begin to worry about our own jobs. I am so pleased with a group of people within our church who have gathered to begin a ministry of helping people find jobs. You can read all about it in your bulletin insert (after the sermon, of course). It is a timely ministry for these days. I hope you will spread the word and give the brochure to those you know who can benefit from it.

A few days ago as the bad economic news kept coming in, it was weighing heavy upon me, and I felt certain it was weighing rather heavily on you. And so I decided to turn the focus of today’s sermon away from the Gospel lesson on leprosy to the Hebrew lesson on leprosy. I find it to be a healing story of anxious discontent. Shakespeare wrote of “the winter of our discontent.” And indeed it is such a season for us. I pray this morning we find here a word from God for these anxious days.

It’s hard to know how to deal with disappointment, discontent, and anxiety about the future. What do we do when things don’t work out like we hoped they would, when we find ourselves unable to get what we want?

We are a people raised in a country told to expect to get what we want if we work for it. Some expect certain things as a matter of privilege. Part of what is making these difficult economic times so hard is that so many Americans have had it so good for so long. We’ve become spoiled. But as President Obama said this week, “That party’s over.”


We are tasting the anxiety that many people in our world live with all the time. Lifestyle adjustments are going to have to be required of almost all of us. Adjustments we might just find to be good for us. Someone relayed to me a quote this week from a seminary president who said, “Never waste a good recession.” Meaning, use such a time to simplify your life and do not go back to the collection of excess when times turn around. But many of us do not like the idea of not having what we want.

I

For the longest time Naaman didn’t get much practice dealing with disappointment, because he got everything he wanted. Naaman was a five-star general in the Syrian army welcomed in the oval office without even knocking on the door. He received every honor that military skill and good fortune can bring. As the leader in a string of victories, this Secretary of Defense was living every soldier’s dream.

Then the rug is pulled out from under him. They’re just a few white spots, but he has no way of knowing if or when it will get worse. He keeps his hands in his pockets, afraid that people will see what’s happening. He has to do something. He is desperate at the thought of contracting leprosy. Something dramatic needs to happen soon.

There just happens to be a Jewish girl who works in Naaman’s kitchen. And one day she mentions that there’s a prophet back home in Israel who can cure leprosy. At first Naaman says, “No, we’ve got doctors here in Syria,” but then he decides it’s time to see a specialist. And soon he’s on Air Force One with a blank check and a letter from his king asking the king of Israel to heal Naaman.

When Jehoram, the Israelite king reads the letter his hands begin to shake: “How am I supposed to cure leprosy?” So Jehoram begins pacing around the throne room about to fall apart when he gets word that Elisha, the court chaplain, wants to see Naaman.

Naaman leaves the palace in a parade that roars down the side streets - motorcycle escorts, flags fluttering from each vehicle, and the secret service running behind. Naaman’s confidence returns. Something big is about to happen. The procession comes to a halt in a cloud of dust in front of Elisha’s little cottage. And Naaman waits, expecting the prophet to be awed by his guests and to come out bowing and scraping. The dust begins to settle as he honks the horn with a long blast.

Finally the door of the cottage opens and someone walks out, but it’s not Elisha. It’s the houseboy with a stupid suggestion: “Go and wash in the Jordan seven times,: he tells Naaman, “and you’ll be fine.”

Naaman is beside himself. “Who does this prophet think he is? I just came from the palaces of two kings and this backwater charlatan sends out a kid. Why should I bathe in a filthy little ditch when there are beautiful clear streams back home in Damascus? If I needed a bath, I’d use one of the six bathrooms in my house. I can’t believe I came all this way for this.”

So here he is. He’s gone to a lot of trouble to get an appointment with a world famous skin specialist and now the doctor, who hasn’t even examined him, sends out a prescription through his PA that says to take seven dips in the Trinity River and don’t call me in the morning. Naaman cusses and scratches and tells the entourage “We’re going home!” Naaman didn’t get what he wanted, so he will sulk rather than take what falls short of his expectations.

One of his servants timidly speaks up. “Sir, as long as we’re here, I mean, if the prophet had said what you wanted him to say, then you would have done it, right? Isn’t it worth a try?”

So they go to the muddy water of the Jordan. And when Naaman comes up out of the water the seventh time, he looks like an ad for Palmolive soap. Naaman is so grateful he converts on the spot to Yahweh, the God of Israel. He reaches into his suit pocket for an inch of hundred-dollar bills, but Elisha says he’s a prophet, not a dermatologist, and refuses to take any money. Another prophet like Jesus would be refusing to benefit from another’s healing.

Do you see what almost happened? The simplicity of the directions almost kept Naaman from following them. To have to do something that he felt was beneath him almost caused him to miss out on a gift from God. It’s easy to turn down and to scoff at what seems ordinary when we’re hoping for something special. And when we’re not getting the treatment we think we deserve, when what we’re getting is less than what we hoped for, it’s easy to be disappointed.

II

We all have to deal with the disappointment of not getting exactly what we hope for, because we all want more, don’t we. There a few things we wish we could change and control.

Seven pastors were at a minister’s conference eating lunch. And one of them said, “Okay guys. We’re far from home. We’re all friends. What would you be if you could be anything in the world?”

One of them began: “When I was in college I wanted to be an architect, but I didn’t think that I could do the math. Now some days I think that I was smart enough after all.”

A second minister said: “My favorite part of being a pastor is visiting sick people. Every time I walk into a hospital I wish I was a doctor, instead of a pastor.

Another said: “Whenever I read a book by John Grisham or Anne Lamott I think, ‘You know, that’s the life.’ And the only thing that keeps me from being a famous writer is a complete lack of talent.”

The fourth minister said: “I dream of being a pastor, but I always dream of being the pastor of some other church.”

Then another said: “I just want to be a rich church member who calls the pastor on Monday morning to complain.” (That pastor just needs to take Mondays off like I do!)

They all went around the table admitting that every now and then, they all wish for something else.

It has been said that for every path taken there are ten not taken at which we glance over the shoulder. Most all of us have fantasies about living in different places, with different jobs, and different people. Perhaps you’ve thought about being a tycoon on Wall Street or a justice on the Supreme Court or a professor at a prestigious university or a lifeguard in Hawaii.

And when any of us see an old classmate who’s done well, how often the green-eyed monster rears her head. The other possibilities, the bigger dreams, what might have been, cross everyone’s mind. But preoccupation with the cards in someone else’s hand always leaves us dissatisfied with the cards we’ve been dealt.

Our dreams always exceed our grasp, so we get the mistaken impression that we’ve failed because our lives aren’t everything we imagine them being. Dwelling on who we are not causes us to doubt and denigrate who we are.

And especially in these anxious economic time, if we spend too much energy wishing for what we don’t have, then we won’t see what we do have. We will miss the small joys we’ve been given because we’re waiting for joys that probably aren’t coming. We overlook the people we should love because we’re dreaming of someone else more perfect who we’ll never get a chance to love.

Missionary doctor Albert Schweitzer said, “Plenty of people write to me in the hope of getting some spectacular work to do, and at the same time they fail to see the worthwhileness of the immediate duty God has given them.”

Some of the best gifts God gives aren’t wrapped like we think they should be wrapped. But we shouldn’t be so certain which are the best gifts until we open them.

Some of the most popular books in recent years have titles like “Life’s Little Instruction Book.” We might initially assume that they are filled with sage wisdom on the meaning of existence, but what we usually find are suggestions like:

compliment three people every day
watch the sunrise
remember other people’s birthdays
over tip the breakfast waitress
be good to your pastor

The small things in life are sacred. The keys to contentment and joy are simple truths that we already know. They won’t cure your economic woes, but they might bring healing to your soul and joy to others around you.

Fulfillment isn’t found in the places we’re not, but in the midst of everyday ordinary experiences that just might become extraordinary. How did those great philosophers of rock ‘n’ roll, the Rolling Stones, put it: “You can’t always get what you want, but you find sometimes, yea sometimes, you get what you need.” [1]

From time to time, we’ll think about the job, the family, the money, or the personality that we don’t have. But when we finish thinking about everything we don’t have, we need to see what we do have. From time to time, we’ll wish we were talented, rich, and famous, but at the end of the day God invites us to want more than anything else . . .

to be Christian
to be the person God wants us to be
to be good at what we have in us to be good at
to give thanks for the good gifts already in our hands
to love the people we’ve been given to love
to discover that God is not somewhere else, waiting for us to arrive,
but that God is with us in this place and in these people.

This is the hopeful perspective to which I would call us in these days. Because as that great spiritual guide John Claypool often said in this very room: “Despair is presumptuous.”

When we could worry about what might happen, or be disappointed in what has happened that we did not want, why not instead, look around at what we have and be grateful.

In this winter of our anxious discontent:

Let us lean on one another.
Let us share our anxious hearts with one another.
Let us share what we have with one another in our time of need.
Let us pray that world leaders will seek economic solutions that are just.
Let us listen to the simple words of servant-girls and house-boys.
Let us be faithful in the small things.

Let us turn our trust away from the American Dream and place our trust in the One Who Holds Us All in hands of divine care,
the One who cares more for our souls than our bank accounts.

Let us open our hearts to what new thing God may do in our lives and in our world. It might just be for our healing after all.

______________________

1. The Rolling Stones, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, Let It Bleed, 1969

December 24, 2008 - "The Gift of God's Self - The Gift of Your Self"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Christmas Eve
December 24, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

Series: Re-Gifting God’s Gifts
THE GIFT OF GOD’S SELF - THE GIFT OF YOUR SELF

Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96-98; Titus 2:11-14; Hebrews 1:1-4; Luke 2:1-20; John 1:1-14

This Advent season we have been Re-Gifting God’s Gifts.

When we think of re-gifting we usually think of giving to someone else those gifts we were given that we either did not care for or have more of than we need.

Just for curiosity’s sake: How many of you are re-gifting this year? Raise your hand. I know your family may be sitting beside you and you can’t tell them you’re re-gifting an old gift, but you may just want to raise your hand to make them wonder about their gift.

This season we’ve been talking about Re-Gifting God’s Gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love - not as gifts we do not care for or have too much of, but as gifts we simply cannot keep to ourselves.

We’ve been asking ourselves two questions each week:

One: Where have you found God’s hope, peace, joy, love?
and
Two: How can we re-gift God’s gifts to others and to the world?

God’s gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love can never be too plentiful and are gifts we care for deeply. And the wonderful thing about re-gifting God’s gifts is that you can share them and keep them at the same time.

Tonight as we remember and celebrate the gift of God’s self to us in Jesus Christ, let us also consider how we can re-gift by giving our selves to God, to others, and to the world.

The Gift of God’s Self

The gift of God’s self. In the Christ of Bethlehem, God entered the world in a way God had never done before.

Since the first light of creation and eternity past, the Spirit of God has covered the cosmos - every particle, every black hole, every galaxy. God has been present at the birth of every new star and gives us eyes to see and minds to learn of God’s ever-expanding universe. There is no place in the whole creation where God is not present.

God has walked through garden and wilderness, smiled in birthing rooms and wept in fields of war. There has never been a moment when God did not cradle the whole world in beloved hands. That includes your life and mine.

On this precious speck of dust called earth, God has made God’s self known to us.

The book of Hebrews recounts for us how in times past God has spoken through creation and prophets, but now in Christ God speaks through a Son.

“A child has been born, a son is given. He is Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Prince, Everlasting Father, Mighty God.”

In the mystery of Incarnation, the Word God has been speaking since Day One, the Word through whom God created the world, that Word has become flesh. The Mighty God has taken on skin and bone, blood and human limitation and come to live among us. The Mighty God has come to save us, to be the light in our darkness.

In the New Testament letter of Titus, we read that the scope of this act is universal in its redemption: God’s grace has appeared in Christ bringing salvation to all.

If your mind cannot wrap itself around this miracle of Incarnation, that means you understand. In humility and wonder, you stand under the great mystery and the generous love that is beyond all telling.

The Re-Gifting of Ourselves

But you know what? The miracle of Incarnation continues with you and me and every stranger you meet. Every human face - old and young, brown and white, male and female - bears the face of God in Christ.

Sometimes it takes the tiny face of a Harley Grace to see the miracle of Christmas. Maybe that is why, without our fully knowing, we say Christmas is about children.

Just this week I read a BBC news story with the headline “Child bishop takes on church role.” The story reports that in the southern English county of Hampshire, a nine-year-old girl named Ophelia Wells is serving as bishop at an Anglican cathedral during most of December.

She is preaching every Sunday. And she has made some new rules, including one allowing children to ring the church bells, and another declaring that a free glass of wine will be given to those who go to church for two weeks in a row.

Ophelia is very pleased to occupy the position. She said, “It’s going to be fun. Because I get to boss people around.”

Ophelia’s not the only one. Children have also been appointed bishops at cathedrals in Hereford and Winchester and who knows where else. Each of them is serving from December 6 to December 28.

It’s the revival of a tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages, and it has to do with St. Nicholas. He lived in the 4th century in Turkey, and was himself a bishop. He is the patron saint of sailors and, more famously, of children. His feast day is December 6, and he has been known in some parts of the world to bring presents to children on that day.

As part of the celebration of his feast day, medieval English cathedrals and some of the parish churches would appoint a child, the smallest singer in the choir, to act as bishop for the rest of the month. Other children joined in taking charge. The clergy were dismissed and the kids took over. When the Reformation came, the practice was ended; but now in some quarters it is making a happy comeback. Sounds like fun.

There is a text often read in Advent from the prophet Isaiah that says, “a little child shall lead them.” It is read in this season because we gather around a manger to adore a child who is Emmanuel, God-with-us.

What I want us to see tonight is that you and I are the child-bishop, God’s priest, called not to boss other people around, but called to embody the holy presence of Christ to the world. To continue the Incarnation, to be God’s Word made flesh, led by Bethlehem’s Child.

In particular, it is the church, those bound together in the baptized following of Jesus, who are the Body of Christ, the hands and feet and face of Christ to one another and to the world.

God has come to us in Christ. Christ gave himself up for us all. So we give ourselves to one another, to the world, and to God.

Like the shepherds we tell what we have seen and heard - how the presence of God has come near to us in Jesus Christ, sharing the hope and peace and joy and love of God.

You may not have been able this year to afford the gifts you wanted for those you love. So why don’t you just give the gift of your precious self.

Conclusion

The greatest gift of all awaits us this night in a stable under a cross-shaped star. It is the gift of new life wrapped in blankets of hope and peace, joy and love. It is Emmanuel, God-with-us. The gift of God’s very self is offered you this night. Open your hands, open your heart, and take into yourself eternal life.

And then, in light of God’s generous love and grace, offer yourself back to God in holy living, compassionate generosity, grateful worship, and sacrificial love.

We give ourselves to God by taking care of this world God has made and all who live within it. Giving ourselves for the well-being of others. Giving ourselves as Christ to the world with abandon and great love.

Welcome the Christ. Be the Christ. Give the Christ away.

God has come to live among us.

December 21, 2008 - "Re-gifting Love"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 21, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

Series: Re-Gifting God’s Gifts

RE-GIFTING LOVE
A Pastoral Meditation

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Luke 1:47-55; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

This Advent season we are re-gifting. We are opening our hearts to receive God’s gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love and then re-gifting them to the world around us.

Today we take a moment to ponder the gift of love.

God’s Love For Us

The psalmist says, “I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord.”

God’s love for each us is forever faithful.

Though our specific calling is different than that of Mary’s, God would want us to hear the same words Mary heard from the angel: “You have found favor with God.” God’s love and grace are here for each of us to receive.

For God so loved the world God gave us Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, through whom we receive the gift of eternal life. For God so loved the world, God gave.

Giving is what love does. Giving is how love expresses itself. The heart of love is giving, therefore giving is at the heart of God.

What we learn about God at Christmas is that God is not a taker, but a giver.

The biblical story teaches us that God has been giving from the very beginning.

The God of scripture is a God who creates with beauty and generosity and creativity.

In the book of James we are told that every good and perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of light.

In the book of Lamentations the writer proclaims of God: “Your mercies are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.” Every morning God is saying, “Did you like that sunrise yesterday? Here’s another one. Here is food for your body. Here is air for your lungs. Here is beauty for your eyes. Here is music for your ears. Here is strength for your needs. Here are friends for your heart. Here is a purpose for your day. God is giving and giving and giving all the time.

And that first Christmas, God finally got to give the best gift of all. It’s like God had been giving and giving since the beginning of creation, but he had this one gift he had been saving up all these years. For God so loved the world he gave his only Son so that you and I might know once and for all that we are God’s Beloved, that God’s love is forever ours.

The Re-gifting of Our Love to God and God’s Love to the World

We are all of us called to receive God’s love and then re-gift that love to God and to the world.

God has loved us and is faithful toward us, therefore, we love God and others and embody God’s faithfulness for the world to see.

We re-gift love to God like Mary - in obedience and in the willingness to do what God asks of us.

And what does God ask of us? To love one another and to share God’s love in acts of compassion.

Who do you know in need of God’s love this Christmas season?

What gift of love can you share?

As we ponder the gift of God’s love to us this Christmas, may we also consider how that love can be re-gifted through us.

December 14, 2008 - "Re-Gifting Joy"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
Advent III
December 14, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

Series: Re-Gifting God’s Gifts
RE-GIFTING JOY

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126 or Luke 1:47-55
1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28

When Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman get together on film I have to see it. (My oldest daughter thinks Jack Nicholson is just too creepy. And as far as I know, she hasn’t even seen “The Shining.”)

Nicholson and Freeman recently teamed up in “The Bucket List” as two guys who meet in the hospital and learn about the same time that they are both terminally ill. Nicholson is a spoiled wealthy old man miserable with his existence. Freeman is a middle class auto mechanic who can answer every question on the game show Jeopardy.

Having just gotten the news of his illness, Freeman spends the night writing a “bucket list,” things he wants to do before he “kicks the bucket.” Have you ever thought about what would be on your bucket list? Perhaps Freeman’s list could help you. He includes such things as:

Witness something truly majestic
Help a complete stranger for a common good
Laugh till I cry
Drive a Shelby Mustang
Get a tattoo
Visit Stonehenge
Go skydiving
See the pyramids

Not intended for anyone else’s eyes, Nicholson finds the list crumpled on the floor and reads it, then convinces Freeman to travel with him and do the very things on that list.

More than half-way through fulfilling the list, sitting on a mountain viewing the pyramids, Freeman tells Nicholson about a philosophy that says: When you get to heaven’s gates, there are two questions to be asked of you:

First, Have you found your joy?
And second, Has your life brought joy to someone else?

It was this scene and these two questions that led me toward our Advent theme this year of Re-Gifting God’s Gifts - receiving from God and sharing with others the gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love.

Today, the gift of joy.

As we look at our scripture lessons for this week we hear Paul’s call to “rejoice always.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve not mastered that one yet.

The psalmist sings a song celebrating the day when Israel returned from exile. Mindful of the great things God had done for them, their mouths were filled with laughter and shouts of joy were upon their tongues. And prayers that those who have sown tears will reap great joy.

The prophet Isaiah gave those returning from exile a reason for joy and a way to share joy. He was writing of God’s servant Israel. A few centuries later Jesus picked up Isaiah’s message for Israel as his own mission. Recorded in Luke’s Gospel is the moment where Jesus stands in the synagogue and reads the beginning words from Isaiah 61.

Isaiah describes a quality of life here and now on earth that reflects God’s desire for human community: good news, healing, freedom, release, justice, comfort, and joy. Jesus called it the kingdom of God.

And so the Christ of Bethlehem, full of the Spirit of God and inspired by Isaiah’s vision, comes with joy:

bringing good news to the oppressed - the rich and powerful oppressors of our world who make millions on the backs of poor laborers and Burmese military powers who drive people by force from their land will be brought to justice.

He comes binding up the brokenhearted (61:1) - your heart and mine broken by the world and by our own sin. Christ is coming to heal us.

He comes proclaiming freedom to captives and release to prisoners (61:1). Whether bound by the prison chains of our own making, or prisoners held in exile from their land, or imprisoned illegally by unjust governments, Christ is coming to bring freedom and release. Though faithful Christians have often found themselves behind bars for living their faith, there has always been a freedom even in prison that their captors could not take away. Christ is coming to free us from our prisons.

And he comes proclaiming the year of Jubilee (61:2). This was an event described in the book of Leviticus to occur every 50 years. A time when debts are wiped away, slaves are freed, fields are allowed to rest for a year, and land is returned to its original owners. This is so that property is not just owned by the few and so that the masses will not remain oppressed in debt and slavery. It is so that wealth is not passed along to those who do not work, and so that families do not remain in cycles of poverty. It is a call to social and economic justice, when the restoration of equality becomes the new order of the day. This is the world-changing word of justice Jesus comes preaching.

Jesus also comes to comfort those who mourn (61:2-3), replacing the ashes of our lives with garlands of beauty, bringing gladness where is sadness, strengthening the faint spirit, filling our mouth with praise. Yes, your tears of sorrow will turn one day return to songs of praise.

Jesus comes to repair ruined cities (61:4) - our own city where poverty and homelessness and hopelessness walk the streets, and war-torn cities across the world where joy has been crushed by the stench of death and destruction. Christ comes to heal ruined nations, ours and others, that have forgotten their way in the world.

But first we have to mourn. To know joy we first have to mourn the oppressive and violent condition of our hearts and lives, community and world. And welcome the Christ who is coming to restore and make new.

Isaiah says we receive joy by being clothed with the garment of salvation and covered in the robe of righteousness, receiving the bridegroom’s garland and the bride’s jewels (61:10). This is the joy of a wedding. When lives are brought together and the celebration of love is in the air. This is the joy Jesus comes to bring.

And as followers of Jesus, his mission becomes our own. It is a message and mission of joy that we are to receive and then share with the world as witnesses to the light of God’s love.

In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians he writes, “Do not despise the words of the prophet.” These words of the prophets Isaiah and Jesus we must be careful not to despise or ignore.

This is the gospel of joy that we receive and then share. God’s work in our world is a partnership, a covenant between God and God’s people, where we continue the work of Christ in the world through the power of the Holy Spirit, realizing that God’s special concern is for the lowest and the weakest.

Joy does not come by insulating ourselves from the pain of the world. As a missional community, we turn our attention toward the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the captives, the prisoners, and the mournful. Joy comes by entering what Miguel Unamuno calls “the common weeping” of the world, and in the power of the Holy Spirit we continue the mission of Jesus:

working on behalf of the oppressed,
tending to the brokenhearted,

proclaiming release on behalf of those held captive unjustly in prisons around the world, and helping free those held captive in a prison of their own making,
comforting those who mourn: the grieving, the refugee, the lonely, the unemployed,
helping rebuild ruined cities and nations with the materials of hope and peace, joy and love, through the giving of ourselves and our resources.

There are so many people in our world oppressed, brokenhearted, captive, or imprisoned in some way, wondering when God’s transformation will come. Advent is a time of waiting and preparation for God to transform the world through Jesus Christ.

God sent Christ to light up our world with joy. And Christ sends us to share joy by bearing witness to the light of the world.

Where have you found joy? I had a moment of surprising joy during our first summer in Louisville when Louie and June Bailey took Cindy and me to the Smith-Berry Winery for a night of bluegrass music and good farm-fresh eating. If I had had a bucket list it would have been one item shorter after that night having met Wendell Berry who for 15 years has been one of my favorite writers. He is one of the wisest and most courageous voices in our world today, a prophet whose words we need not despise, and one whose beautiful fiction brings great delight.

That night I also met Wendell’s grand-daughter, Emily, who is a student here at the Highland Latin School. She was handing out tickets for door prizes. I asked her if she was going to make sure I won. Undeterred by my request, she boldly asked me what she would get in return. Nonchalantly I said, “$100.00.” And wouldn’t you know it - for the first time in my life I won a door prize - four very nice Smith-Berry wine glasses! Joy!

For the past three years I have seen Emily in the hallways numerous times. And each time she says with a great big smile, “You owe me $100.00.” And I say unconvincingly to her, “It’s coming.”

Well, having received a small gift of joy three years ago, I would like to announce that today I am re-gifting with this check of $100.00 to Emily’s favorite charity or cause in the hopes of bringing joy to her and to the people her charity might help.

What about you? Where have you found joy? and
How has your life brought joy to someone else?

Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw wrote a poem entitled “True Joy of Life.”

This is the true joy of life.
The being used for a purpose
Recognized by yourself as a mighty one.
The being a force of nature
Instead of a feverish, selfish
Little clod of ailments and grievances

Complaining that the world will not
Devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life
belongs to the whole community
And as long as I live,
It is my privilege to do for it
Whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly
Used up when I die,
For the harder I work the more I live.
I rejoice in life for its own sake.
Life is no brief candle to me.
It is a sort of splendid torch
Which I’ve got hold of
For the moment
And I want to make it burn
As brightly as possible before
Handing it on to future generations.

If you are this day in search of joy, I invite you to join this Advent journey toward Bethlehem and experience the God who has come near to us in the Christ Child. People all around him are rejoicing. His mother Mary rejoices that she has found favor with God. Angels are sharing good news of great joy for all people, including you. And shepherds are glorifying and praising God for what they have seen and heard. Christmas joy can be yours.

If you have known God’s joy, consider for a moment: Who brought the news of joy to you? What have you seen and heard and experienced that brought joy to you that you can share with others?

True joy, everlasting joy, a joy much deeper than happiness, is found in a relationship with the God who gave us life and loved us so much he came to live among us in Jesus Christ, teaching us God’s way and God’s truth, whose words and deeds are full of life. And he calls us all to live in God’s grace and forgiveness, and to give ourselves for the sake of the world, to live a life burning as a “splendid torch” with God’s fire of justice and joy.

Every year at Christmas we see the transformation of homes, churches and places of business with bright lights and Christmas pageantry. But what other than hanging of the green and the singing of Christmas carols are we, God’s people, doing in the world to bring the good news of great joy of God’s transformation? What will we do this year to bring joy to someone perhaps we don’t even know: the oppressed, the brokenhearted, the imprisoned, those in mourning? Where will we bring joy to this frightened, anxious, violent city and nation of ours?

I invite you in the silence to sit on the mountain, as did Nicholson and Freeman, and ask yourself: Have you found your joy? And if so, offer a prayer of thanks. And then ask God how your life can bring joy to someone else. Perhaps we can “rejoice always” after all. If joy is not something we’re receiving at the moment, it can be something we are re-gifting. Let us prayerfully reflect in the silence.

December 7, 2008 - "Re-Gifting Peace"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
December 7, 2008
Advent II
Jason W. Crosby

Re-Gifting Peace

Isaiah 40:1-11; Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13; II Peter 3:8-15a; Mark 1:1-8

Just beneath the comfortable trappings of this season lurks a vexing problem. Distractions abound to keep us occupied these days. Lights which bring a sensation of warmth to cold dark nights. Trees with smells that quickly flood our minds with good memories of the past. Songs like Jingle Bells make us smile. Profound, poignant, inspiring worship services. Enough diversions exist to entrance us, so that we do not have to deal with our problem. For us to discuss peace and regifting peace, however, we must wrestle this conundrum.

Not that we don’t anticipate problems this time of year. The holidays put our lives and our relationships under a microscope. Inner tensions and familial rifts are magnified greatly at Christmas, so much so that many people find themselves depressed and families find themselves fighting with one another.

What followers of Christ may not expect this time of year is having to deal with a problem rooted in the birth of Christ. The apostle Paul wrote, “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23). Christ’s death and resurrection presents those who are religious and those who are not with a whole slew of problematic questions. Why would a good God put Christ to death on a cross is one such question circulating at Easter. “He could as well have written,” according to Frederick Buechner, “We preach Christ born’ or ‘We preach Christmas,’ because the birth presents no fewer problems than the death does.” [1]

One problem, of many, that stems from Christmas is that now we live in an in-between time. God incarnate came, continues to dwell with us, but is not yet fully manifest. With the birth came a “foretaste of God’s glory divine” says Fanny J. Crosby in her hymn “Blessed Assurance.” Still, we only caught a glimpse of what we hope is to come. Christ’s birth put us on a bridge between two great chasms. Behind us, on one side sits the world as it was prior to the birth of Christ. Those touched by Christ’s love and grace cannot return to that place. We are different now. Yet, we can’t see what lies ahead. We hope we possess an idea as to what that promised land will be like. Our vision of that place, however, is murky at best. So, here we are, on a bridge, where we possess hearts of generosity and greediness, where we love one another and hate one another, care for one another and kill one another. The double lives we lead during this in-between time, lives both beautiful and repulsive, can lead us into frustration and uneasiness. Here is our Chistmas problem – When will we move beyond the foretaste of God’s glory given to us at Christ birth and be able to sit down for the full meal? How much longer will we have to live with the greed, hate, and killing around us?

The author of 2 Peter provides a response to these very questions. The community to whom this epistle was written lived a few generations after Christ. Some believed that the Savior who came, would have already returned by their time. As they contemplated their in-between existence, discontentment began to swell within them. When, they wondered, would the God who came once, come again?

I imagine the author’s answer was unsatisfactory to many then. It certainly is not likely to be kindly received these days. The writer tells those living on the bridge to wait.

Most people don’t like waiting. Especially these days, when we live in an immediate gratification world. The internet enables us to communicate with people on the other side of the globe instantaneously. All we have to do is turn on the television and the 24 hour a day, seven day a week, 365 day a year news channels tell us what happening in any place at that very moment. Consequently, many of us become agitated when we have to wait for an appointment, in traffic, or for our food to arrive at a restaurant. These are relatively petty issues compared to the serious injustices around us. The author’s plea to wait seems particularly unsettling and anachronistic when people live in a world where families find themselves on the streets because of others greed, where addiction suffocates hopes and dreams, where betrayal breaks the bonds of relationship, where the deaths of innocent children are explained away as collateral damage.

During advent, however, we wait. Consciously waiting is what sets advent apart from others times of the year. Like a lot of children, Christmas morning was my promised land. I wanted it to arrive as soon as possible. No matter how much I wished December 25th would come more quickly, I lacked the ability to alter the flow of time. Instead of wallowing in my frustration, each advent season I would make a chain of loops of red and green construction paper. Each day, as Christmas drew closer, I would remove a loop from the chain, and wait. I wasn’t just sitting around my room with my chain made of construction paper waiting, however. In retrospect, I realize that in waiting something happened to me. Rather that existing in a state of high anxiety, my advent chain gave me a greater sense of contentment. I say a greater sense of contentment because I’m sure that my mother, who is here today, will readily attest to the fact that I was still very anxious in the days leading up to Christmas. But, waiting with that chain settled me, at least somewhat.

Each year, when we wait during advent, we wait in the expectation that something more will happen. As we wait to mark the birthday of Jesus, don’t we do so expecting that we will reencounter the gifts given to us when God became incarnate? Advent waiting is good practice for us, since 52 weeks of the year we are waiting on that bridge in-between what was and what will be. Just as when we consciously wait during advent we expect something more to happen, perhaps we should expect something more to happen when consciously waiting the remaining days of the year.

What is that something more that might happen to us if we engage in conscious waiting year round? For one, a commitment to waiting will breed greater attentiveness. Waiting for the new heaven and the new earth is not like waiting for a casserole to bake. Waiting for a casserole demands passive waiting. Once the dish is in the oven, there is not much more a person can do to change that composition of that casserole. You can clean up the kitchen or work on another dish, but as for the casserole, all you can do is wait. Waiting while we journey to the other side of the great divide is a very different act. We’re not sure what the outcome will be. We’re not sure how we will get there. We don’t have a recipe to follow. So, we must listen very carefully while waiting. We must be very attune to the present moment in which we find ourselves. Henri Nouwen wrote, “Waiting, then, is not passive. It involves nurturing the moment, as a mother nurtures the child that is growing in her. Zechariah, Elizabeth, and Mary were very present to the moment. That is why they could hear the angel. They were alert, attentive to the voice that spoke to them and said, ‘Don’t be afraid. Something is happening to you. Pay attention.” [2] If we are attentive, we may sense that God is doing something to us while we wait. We may also become more adventurous. Active, attentive waiting leads us to places we never imagined we go. The Magi practiced active, attentive waiting and they ended up at the manager. This congregation has practiced active, attentive waiting that has repeatedly set it on a course impossible to predict.

Actively waiting for God, which enables us to better hear God when God speaks, and better move when God says go, might just be the best path to peace available for us amid the duality of these in between times. Waiting in this fashion brings us closer to God’s peace. The community to whom Isaiah 40 addressed found themselves waiting in exile in Babylon. Waiting in oppression to return home. Yet, in waiting God’s comfort and God’s peace was revealed. It’s waiting, actively and attentively, for God’s peace that may very well be our only hope of survival in this time. Without it, our greed may overcome our generosity, our hate may overtake our love.

This idea that the path to peace follows the way of waiting may sound absurd to some. The final poem written by Dietrich Bonheoffer suggests that at least for him, this notion that waiting for God might bring about peace has traction. Bonheoffer, the German Christian minister who plotted to bring down Hitler’s Nazi regime, was put in prison in November of 1943. 1944 proved to be his last Christmas. In the cellar of a Nazi prison on December 19, 1944 with death creeping near, he wrote a letter to his fiancé. He closed that letter with his final poem, which in part, reads:

By kindly powers surrounded, peaceful and true,
Wonderfully protected with consolation dear,
Safely, I dwell with you this whole day through
And surely into another year.

Though from the old our hearts are still in pain,
While evil days oppress with burdens still,
Lord, give to our frightened souls again,
Salvation, and thy promises fulfill.

And should thou offer us the bitter cup, resembling
Sorrow, filled to the brim and overflowing,
We will receive it thankfully, without trembling,
From thy hand so good and ever-loving.

But, if it be thy will again to give
Joy of this world and bright sunshine,
Then in our minds we will past times relive
And all our days be wholly thine.

When we are wrapped in silence most profound,
May we hear that song most fully raised
From all the unseen world that lies around
And thou art by all thy children praised.

By kindly powers protected wonderfully,
Confident, we wait for come what may,
Night and morning, God is by us, faithfully
And surely at each new born day. [3]

He was killed April 9, 1945. Bonhoeffer lived in the worst conditions this in-between time has arguably ever seen. Yet, in his waiting, he had little else to do in his Nazi prison cell; he found a gift, of peace, that only God can offer.

Those who know peace, naturally will re-gift it. Peace is not something that belongs to us that we own or possess. Peace is not something we can manufacture for ourselves. It is not a tool, a building, or even a career. It is a gift that we can prepare ourselves to receive or reject. Really, it is impossible to hoard peace. If we keep peace to ourselves like wealth, we will lose it. That is because there is a communal element to knowing inner-peace while waiting in these in-between times. Isaiah and the epistle were written to communities. Living in community and loving others while attentively waiting is another ingredient necessary for us to know peace. Those we know peace, naturally, will regift it as a way of demonstrating love to others with whom we wait.

“Indian giver” is considered to be a pejorative term. It shouldn’t be. It is customary in Native American cultures that whenever a gift is given to someone, that gift is shared with the entire community. Peace knowers will be Indian givers.

We may regift peace by heeding Isaiah’s words, “preparing the way, by making straight a highway in the desert for our Lord.” In others words, by using our voices to stand non-violently in opposition to violence, or by using our feet to march in protest to injustice in any form, we regift peace. Today let us also remember, those who know peace, may give it away, by being instruments of peace, who make sweet, warm melodies - melodies that call others to wait with them, in between what was and what, by God’s grace, will be.

___________________________________________
1. Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons, HarperCollins, 90.
2. Henri Nouwen, Watch for the Light: Reading for Advent and Christmas, Plough, 2001, 32.
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons, edited and translated by Edwin Robertson, Zondervan, 2005, 180-181.

Nov 30, 2008 - "Re-Gifting Hope"

Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, Kentucky
The First Sunday of Advent
November 30, 2008
W. Gregory Pope

Series: Re-Gifting God’s Gifts

RE-GIFTING HOPE

Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19;
1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37

Our theme for Advent this year is Re-gifting God’s Gifts - the gifts of hope, peace, joy, love, and the gift of God’s self.

We will be asking ourselves two questions:

1. Where do you find hope, peace, joy, love?

and

2. How do you share God’s hope, peace, joy, and love with others?

We will ponder receiving God’s gifts and then re-gifting them, sharing them with the world.

When we think of re-gifting we usually think of giving away those gifts we were given that we either did not care for or have more of than we need.

God’s gifts of hope, peace, joy, and love can never be too plentiful and are gifts we care for deeply. And the wonderful thing about re-gifting God’s gifts is that you can share them and keep them for yourself at the same time.

At the Advent wreath you are going to hear stories of how people have received and given the gifts of hope, peace, joy and love.

So I invite you to open your hearts this Advent season to the great gifts of God.

And then to open your hands to share those gifts with the world.

The Cry for Hope

It has been said that human beings can live without anything except hope. When hope dies, we die. We can live for brief periods of time without love, but we cannot live without the hope of love soon coming our way. We can live in desperate times if have the hope of a better tomorrow.

In her novel Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler describes a middle-aged character named Maggie as one who “viewed her life as circular; it forever repeated itself and was entirely lacking in hope.” [1]

Some people view their lives and history itself as a treadmill that goes round and round in monotonous cycles, no hope of anything new. To feel as if we are without hope is to live at the bottom of the bottom.

How do we get so low?

The prophet Isaiah points to our sin as one cause of such hopelessness, choices we have made that harm ourselves and others and have a way of hiding God’s face from us. To be hidden from God’s face, blocked from the light of God’s love, to feel out of the reach of God’s gracious hand, is to indeed feel hopeless.

Are there ways of living your life that keep God’s face hidden from you? Are there choices you are making that are turning your life away from God?

The hiddenness of God is a mystery. It’s hard to know if God does indeed turn away from us for a season or if it is only perception. Reality or perception, if we do not feel God’s presence, or believe God is present, our lives can become blinded to hope.

Isaiah puts some of the blame on God for not being more visibly and powerfully present to Israel in their return from exile. Isaiah cries out to God, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” - do what you did in the past, bring fire and earthquake, make our enemies tremble. Three times he asks for God’s presence, but it seems to Isaiah that God has hidden God’s self from the people.

Scott Bader-Saye believes this divine inaction tells us something about the way God has chosen to relate to the world. The hidden God of Isaiah 64 is the God who refuses to act powerfully and dramatically to rescue.

And in many ways this understanding makes more sense to us. The frustration Isaiah feels is the frustration we often feel. It is the struggle to reconcile the ancient stories of God’s powerful presence with our present experience where God doesn’t seem to act so powerfully. We have these biblical stories of God’s grand intervention and wonder why God doesn’t do the same today. Why would God deliver Israel from Egypt but not deliver six million Jews from Hitler’s death camps? [2]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a German concentration camp in 1944, offered this perspective. He said “God lets himself be pushed out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which God is with us and helps us.” [3]

For Bonhoeffer this realization was not a denial of faith but a retrieval of faith in the God of the cross, whose power is suffering, whose omnipotence is vulnerability, who relates to the world through the vulnerable path of non-coercive love and suffering service rather than through domination and force.

God’s refusal to replicate a Red Sea-type deliverance does not mean that God has abandoned God’s people. Our hope does not rely on God’s acting today in the same ways God acted in the ancient stories, but it does rely on God’s being the same God yesterday, today, and tomorrow - a God who hears our cries, a God who does not abandon us, a God that will finally redeem all that is lost in a new heaven and a new earth (Isa 65:17). [4]

What has been the testimony of scripture and saints down through the centuries is that the absence of God is a very real experience, but that God’s absence is never permanent. Hope is never completely lost.

While Isaiah says God has hidden God’s self from us, the psalmist cries for God to shine God’s face upon us that we may be saved.

We are like the people of Israel - waiting, wanting, expecting to see the face of God.

Even though the people of God had sinned and felt God had hidden God’s face from them, they still trusted God in their spiritual exile.

Our hope is in God’s restoration: Restore us, O God, the psalmist prays.

Where God’s Hope is Found

How does restoration come? Where can we see God’s face shine upon us? Where do we find God’s hope in the world?

Isaiah points us to the past. God did awesome deeds we did not expect. God may not have given us a Red Sea deliverance, but God did carry us through some stormy waters: the death of someone we did not think we could live without, the time our family fell apart, or when the dream of a career came crashing down around us, or when we made the decision to leave home and move to the other side of the world in the hope of a better life. And we were given a new home and a new family. We were held by a strength beyond our own. God has done things we did not expect.

There is no God like our God, Isaiah says. With our God there is always hope. God is our Father, and we are God’s children. God is the potter, and we are the clay, the work of God’s hands. And God is not finished with us yet. God is always making of us a new creation.

We are not defined by our past. God does not remember our iniquity forever.

Isaiah and the psalmist call for God to bring hope and salvation into a troubled present: to give ear, to shine forth, to stir up might, and save. They point us toward a future when God did “give ear” to our cry Indeed, the Shepherd of Israel gave much more. God gave God’s whole self. The Lord God of hosts left the throne of the cherubim and in Christ joined the rest of us who knows what it is like to feel that God has forsaken you. God answered the demand, “Let your face shine upon us that we may be saved,” though not as anyone expected: it was in the light of a Child born in Bethlehem, the light the darkness has never overcome.

God did not end political and military oppression. God’s might was expressed in the vulnerability of a baby who grew up to die at the hands of oppressors. And that first advent we relive each year sustains us until that second advent that we anticipate each year when God will act fully and completely for our salvation.

History does not go round and round in monotonous cycles. History has a goal. And that goal is the kingdom of God where the world will be redeemed and re-created by God. The Christian story is a salvation story.

Yes, we live in a world full of wars and rumors of wars, corruption, greed, and injustice. But’s that’s only one side of it.

The Christian story reveals another side where, in the words of Eugene Peterson, “with every sunrise, grace spills across the horizon in acts of healing and words of truth. . . . Jesus opens our eyes to the world of grace and commands us to pay attention. That means we don’t go into the world each day desperately trying to hold on to things or people, panicked at everything that might weaken our grasp on those things or those people.” [5]

Rather, we open our lives in hope to the Christ who is with us, keeping awake, waiting expectantly for those times and places, great and small, where Christ breaks into our lives and our world.

Paul discovered that in Christ God is doing what Isaiah and the psalmist asked God to do, breaking into our world through the gathered community of faith, strengthened by our fellowship with Jesus, not lacking in any spiritual gift, full of hope rooted in the faithfulness of God who will see us through to the very end.

Hope is what is left when your worst fears have been realized and the future looks like a never-ending bleak mid-winter. In Advent, God’s people summon the courage and the spiritual strength to remember that the holy breaks into the daily. And that in small ways we can open our broken hearts to the healing grace of God with a willingness to be mended.

We do not lose heart; rather, we live with our hearts broken open so that compassion, caring, and reckless love of God can find a way into our hearts and the heart of the world.

Sharing Hope

This first Sunday in Advent corresponds as it often does with the celebration of Thanksgiving. In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he invites us to offer thanks to God, not for material gifts, but for spiritual gifts found in the church. A reminder that we are the gathered body of Christ “intended to be a feast of abundance laid out for the sake of the world.” [6]

We have gifts to share - God’s gifts of hope and peace, joy and love. We enter the darkness of our world with whatever hope we have, sometimes hoping against hope that we can shed the light of hope.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

It was 4:00 pm on May 27th, 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, that several mortar shells struck a group of a hundred starving people waiting in a long line in front of the only bakery in town that still had enough flour to make bread. Twenty-two people were killed and at least seventy were wounded.

The next day hungry people lined up again to beg for bread - certain they would die if they didn’t come to the bakery and convinced they could die if they did. Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, had been standing at his window the day before and saw the whole thing happen. That next day, as the people lined up again, he dressed in the black suit and white tie in which he had played every night until the opera theater was destroyed. He walked into the street carrying his cello and a chair.

Smailovic sat down in the square and, surrounded by debris and the remainders of death and the despair of the living, he began to play the mournful Albinoni’s Adagio (which you will hear in just a moment), the one music manuscript that had been found whole in the city after the carpet bombing of Dresden.

For the next 21 days (one day for each of his friends and neighbors that had died), shelling or no shelling, he came back to the square to play the Adagio in honor of the dead.

His actions inspired the novel by Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo. [7]

Galloway says he played until he felt his hope return. And most days, by the time the last few notes had faded, he was able to feel the music somehow restore his hope.

Today, where he sat, there is a monument of a man in a chair playing a cello. A monument to his refusal to surrender the hope that beauty could be reborn in the midst of a living hell.

What the cellist wanted, says Galloway, was to stop things from getting worse. And perhaps the only thing that will stop things from getting worse is people doing the things they know how to do.

What is it you know how to do that can stop things from getting worse and shed a little light of hope?

Play music.
Sit with a child.
Visit someone who is lonely.
Teach someone English or math or science.
Install clean water in a village without clean water.
Pray with someone.
Work for justice.
Be a peacemaker.

Christ: The Cellist of the World

Galloway says of one of his characters who serves as a resident of the city that he would often sit “inhaling more pain than he knew the world could hold.”

In the midst of our cities filled with violence and loneliness and fear, the Christ of Bethlehem comes as the cellist of Sarajevo and Iraq and Mumbai and Louisville. His arms are spread on a piece of carved wood, inhaling all the pain the world can hold, and he plays the music of the world’s salvation, singing hope through his tears, refusing to despair that God is shaping a new creation.

Christ, the cellist of the whole world, brings hope where there is no hope. Can you hear his music?

(Cellist plays Albinoni’s Adagio)
________________


1. Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons, Knoff, 1988, 315
2. Scott Bader-Saye, in David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, editors, Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary, Year B, Vol.1, Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, 4
3. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, Macmillan, 1971, 360
4. Bader-Saye, 6
5. Eugene H. Peterson, Conversations: The Message Bible with its Translator, NavPress, 2007, p.1568
6. Martin B. Copenhaver, in Bartlett and Taylor, Feasting on the Word, 18
7. Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo, Riverhead, 2008