The Spirit Speaks from February 25

Sermon from 1 Corinthians 2:1-16

Do you have a piece of paper in front of you? If you do, or better yet your cellphone, write this down: “God has given us his Spirit!”

Paul says in verse 12, “That’s why we don’t think the same way that the people of this world think. That’s also why we can recognize the blessings that God has given us.” Why?

Because, “…God has given us his Spirit.”

I want you to look around this room and see all the amazing people God has sent to worship with us today. I want you to notice their skin color, their age, their accent, their gender, their height (not their weight - thank you), I want you to notice their birth order in their families, where their family originated, their education, the neighborhood they live in, their life experiences, the places they have traveled, their greatest joys, their greatest sorrows, their wisdom, how they laugh, even the ways they have been hurt by life, by the failure of others to see how precious they are, other who couldn’t see past their age and color and nationality, who couldn’t see how wonderfully made, delicate and fragile, crafted by the master craftsman they are.

And I want you to say to them with all of your heart, Man, I am so glad you are here! And that God has given you his Spirit!”

If there is one way to grieve the Holy Spirit, one way to make God sad, one way to bring tears to God’s eyes - and there is - it is to not recognize God’s presence in one of his children.

Black Heritage Sunday, if nothing else, is an opportunity for us to remember. It is an opportunity to remember how awful we have been at treating other children of the most High God.

One of the commands given to the Jewish people was to remember. To remember things like the Holocaust of course, when 6 million Jewish lives were terminated by the Nazi’s and collaborators in World War 2.

But also commanded to remember in the Seder meal and at many other times where they have come from, who and whose they were, what they were to do and to be found doing, and to what destiny they had been fashioned.

In the Seder to remember that they were captives in Egypt, freed to go to a Promised Land to live for and serve God. Just as we are reminded in the Lord’s Supper, the sacrament of Communion that we are the Lord’s freed by his death and resurrection to live and serve God.

Remembering is essential.

Not forgetting is imperative!

Why? Because we do it so easily.

We forget the slave ships.

That slave owners were given payment for all the slaves freed from their farms, as if the people freed were property.

We forget that there were two Presbyterian Churches started in Middletown in part because one was pro abolition and the other wasn’t.

We forget that here in Otisville, King’s Lodge resort was a place top black entertainers could stay who worked at the Catskill Resorts because they couldn’t stay at those resorts because they were black.

We forget.

Or, we don’t even know.

Because we have not experienced life as a black man pulled over again because they looked suspicious, or groped, or whistled at, or leered at like I was a potential sexual conquest.

I have never been mocked because of my Buffalo/Midwestern/Canadian accent, well except in Boston, which was eye opening since it was by the people who “park their car in Harvard Yard!”

On the other hand, I have used unkind language, not having any idea what it meant to call another boy a faggot, because what it meant was unknown to me.

I have learned a lot because of the patient love of others who believed they saw God’s Spirit in me and were willing to take a risk to help me see the Spirit in them.

This church has been blessed again and again by folks who have stepped out of their comfort zones to share the Spirit in them with us.

In the 1950’s The U.S. Army hospital in Otisville that had become a Sanitorium, became a Boy’s Training School for young men who had gotten in trouble with the law.

The story goes and I may have some facts twisted, that the then Superintendent Benjamin Hill decided to recruit teachers from the All Black colleges in the South.

They came to Otisville not only to teach, but to mentor black young men who had gotten in trouble, believing that seeing and working with upstanding and successful leaders, they would, perhaps, choose a different future.

And when many of those college educated leaders came to Otisville, they were invited to and made welcome in the Otisville – Mt. Hope Presbyterian Church, who saw in them the Holy Spirit, not just the color of their skin.

Lest we forget, we choose to remember, to intentionally remember, to awaken in ourselves the reality that God has given us his Spirit, and lots of others too.

Did you know that in the Middle East, there are a great many Christians who speak Arabic. Somewhere between 10-12 million!

Coptic Christians in Egypt, Palestinian Christians in places like Nazareth, Christians in Turkey as well as other countries, while often small in numbers, all practice the Christian faith.

In fact, Coptic Christians can trace their faith community all the way back to the Apostles, with much greater assurance than any Northern European or American Christian. And do you know what the name for God is in Arabic? Allah. In fact, Allah was used by both Christmas and Jews for 500 years before Islam.

But we forget. We make assumptions. And we close the door on brothers and sisters in Christ, whose only fault is they are not exactly like us.

So, lest we forget…

We declare that:

On this ark, the door is open.

Around this manger, any can come and worship.

And at the foot of this cross, all are welcome.

May it be so. Amen and Amen.

The Spirit Moves: Jesus Sends

Sermon from John 16:5-15

So...

This past week there was another school shooting.

How do you feel about that? Scared? Frustrated? Angry? Hurt? Numb?

I’m not asking you to tell me about your sense of the political debate, your perception of who should have done what, or your well-considered solutions.

I am just asking about how you feel about what has happened.

Why? Because when anyone dies in senseless tragedy, not only do broken parents and siblings, and families, and communities grieve, but God grieves too. Our sins of omission and commission are very clear to God.

And as a people who are to grieve, our own sin, and with those who grieve this incredible loss of life, we need to be people who are well acquainted with grief, well prepared to deal with grief, comfortably able to navigate our own grief.

Because if we wish to offer solace, if we want to be accepted in the community of those who grieve, if we want to at some point want to be able to offer help and hope, we must be the ones who before we try to offer solutions to a tragedy that cannot be undone, be willing to sit in silence with those who mourn.

In the Jewish tradition of sitting Shiva, one of the practices is to put a stone in your shoe and live with it during the time of grieving. Why? So that you as one who has not suffered the loss can feel some of the pain of those who have.

Before you speak, feel the pain, the loss, the anger, the desperation, and then maybe you can earn the opportunity to speak. Those who have not suffered, should be very slow to speak.

Each of us, I suspect, have thought about a way of ending these tragedies, a solution to the crisis in our world of angry, broken people destroying others in seconds, without warning. But for many of us, what we have not done adequately is grieved.

In John 16, Jesus is trying to explain to his disciples what will happen after he is arrested, tried, crucified, and buried. He talks of resurrection, an idea the disciples can’t wrap their heads around because quite frankly, they can’t get past the grief.

They cannot imagine Jesus dead. They cannot be comforted.

The other day I went to the supermarket and ran into an old friend I hadn’t seen in a few years. And I was totally surprised. She who had always looked so young and vibrant to me, looked old. I was completely taken aback.

I knew mentally that she must be 80 years old at this point. But as before she had always looked closer to the 45 years of age when I had first met her (and even younger perhaps) now she looked a bit frail.

And I thought, what the heck happened to her! That is until later that day when I looked in the mirror and saw a 61-year-old grandfather to be, staring back.

Please turn to the person in the pew nearest you and say, “you look fabulous for being so old”!

Life is the number one cause of death in the world. And death, well it is inconceivable. The disciples were lost and were crushed, much like all those in Parkland Florida.

How could Messiah die? How could Jesus, the incarnate presence of God, die? How could Jesus their friend, their brother, their master die? How could any of them, so young, so alive die?

And they grieved.

So, Jesus told them something truly remarkable, that when he was gone, he would send another, the Holy Spirit, to be with them, to be a counselor and a comfort for them, and that unless he left, the counselor wouldn’t come.

The counselor would help them understand the big picture of Jesus life and death, about the ravages of sin, about the hope for redemption, about how they were to live, and how they were to think, and that through the Spirit, how they could make this world a truly remarkable and wonderfully different place.

It was all possible. But it all starts with grief.

Seventeen lives were brutally stolen in Parkland Florida this week. The gruesomeness of their death’s is beyond description and understanding. I am so glad there are no pictures to see their broken bodies. In God’s presence may they live beyond the suffering and fear of those last moments.

And for all those who loved them, may God’s presence come as the counselor and give them the help they need to survive the nightmares and grief.

And for us, may we sit quiet in grief with them, stones in our shoes, mouths shut, ears open to listen until the Spirit speaks.

Yes, something must be done. Not another child or adult should suffer as they did. But arguing isn’t working. Maybe it is time to listen, to the Spirit, to the families, and then to each other.

Amen.

The Spirit Moves in Clouds

Sermon for February 11 

So...

When you think of God, when you pray for example, what images comes to mind?

In the transfiguration story, God comes to Jesus who is talking with Moses and Elijah, in a cloud with a voice, but with no obvious embodiment. In other biblical stories God comes as a dove or a fire or a whirlwind. But God only comes as a person in human form in Jesus.

But remarkably that’s not usually what most of us think of when we think of God, especially when we pray.

Our minds it turns out, are wired for things concrete. We are very, very visual, and we are human, corporeal, made of flesh and blood, and so want at some level God to be corporeal too.

We want God to be “real”, that is something with substance and heft, solidity, and well humanness, though we would want it on a Godlike scale I would think.

Which is why in movies, TV, the internet, paintings, stained glass windows, and statues, when God is portrayed, God is usually visualized as humanish, sometimes on a colossal scale, herculean as it were, like the Greek and Romans gods; but oddly, not like the God of the bible.

Movies and pictures imagine God for us. You would think that would be good, but images are a funny thing. While they enable us to picture something we maybe haven’t before, they also lock out our imagination!

They tell us what God looks like, or at least their version of what they think God looks like. But inevitably they tell a story that is much different than scripture because scripture never really describes God in a way that leads to images.

Why not?

Because God is a spirit. A spirit with personality and consciousness, with the ability to communicate, with values - but not with a physical presence, except as revealed in Jesus’ human form.

The second commandment given to Moses was “Do not make idols that look like anything in the sky or on earth or in the ocean under the earth.  Don’t bow down and worship idols. I am the Lord your God, and I demand all your love.”

It turns out that images of God head us in the wrong direction it seems, looking at creation for inspiration, our brains and hearts focused on what God has made, not God, the one who made it.

So, it’s both crazy and fascinating how many of us walk around with some image of God burned into our heads.

The old man with a long beard, choir robe and sandals of the comics. The God in the painting by Michelangelo, the big white dude surrounded by cherubs reaching down and touching Adam.

Or, depending on your generation, actors who played God like John Huston, George Burns, Morgan Freeman, Whoopi Goldberg, Alanis Morrissette and most recently Octavia Spenser in The Shack.

All of them meant to invoke in us some picture of what God might be liked based on what God’s creation looks like, and none of them adequate. Because as scripture reminds us early and often, God is a spirit, and all who wish to worship God must do so in spirit and truth.

Which is why the story of the transfiguration is so amazing, so powerful and so filled with possibility. If we could only listen to what it tells us, that when God came to be with Jesus, God came as a spirit, as a cloud, as the Shekinah, the divine visitation, the spiritual presence of God on earth.

Much like the fire at Pentecost, and the dove at baptism, the glory cloud is God at work not in limited physical form, but as presence.

Jesus, who is about to begin on his pathway to glory, is fortified by this presence of God, and his disciples get to see the evidence that Jesus is who he says he is. They know all the stories of God’s visits to Israel, and they understand what they are seeing.

God comes to us as a spirit, as a comfort and hope, as love and joy and peace, as strength in times of weakness and gentleness in our times of distress. God comes as no human can with the power of creation and the awesomeness of eternity, the one made personal in the very breath of life.

In that moment, in the glory cloud, Peter, James and John saw God as God is, spirit; the spirit that lives in us each day as we stop to breathe in the love and grace of Jesus Christ and his gift to us of God’s indwelling.

The transfiguration pulls it all together. God is spirit, and the Spirit is in us!

The Breastplate of St. Patrick, a prayer attributed to the missionary to Ireland says in part:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me,
Christ beside me, Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

We the people of God, live in God’s presence, in the midst of the glory cloud.

Think about that, and remember…

God is with us, always!

Amen.

The Spirit and the Eagles

Sermon from 1 Kings 11:1-13 for February 4, 2018

So...

It’s not really that I hate the Patriots. And it’s not that I love the “iggles” as my Philadelphia relatives call them. It’s just that I can’t find it in my heart to love a team that seems so mechanical, so calculating.

What I really love down deep in my heart, is the sloppiness of a team that is just in it on the basis of passion and love of the game. That has serious skills and abilities but that ones that perhaps aren’t really honed and made perfect.

I love a bunch of big, goofy players, full of heart and spit and vinegar, completely filled with the spirit as it were, that are only doing their best, hoping to win even if winning is a really distant possibility. Winning on a hope and a prayer, when all the realities are against them.

I know that isn’t logical. Rather it is a deeply emotional and sometimes deeply flawed approach to life. But passion is much more important to me than raw calculation.

Which is why I can understand God’s amazing love for David, who seems to me to be much more of an Eagle, passionate, skilled, but wonderfully flawed, not only able to admit defeat with true sadness, but victory with wild and crazy joy.

David was in it because of his heart, and his heart belong to God.

Solomon was in it too, but it seemed his heart belonged to his wives.

The story here 1 Kings is a scary one. Not because it is the only one about God withdrawing his spirit from one of his “servants” because it’s not. It’s scary because it points out clearly how and why God would withdraw.

It turns out God can really get frosted with you! Especially if you choose to do what the first commandment admonishes Gods’ people to never do, have another God before Yahweh!

David, for all of his faults never even considered another God other than Yahweh. But as the little slogan goes, faith is only one generation deep. For people of faith there are no children, no grandchildren, not even brothers or sisters or grandparents. And Solomon it appears was one who never got the faith!

When Jesus admonished his disciples to leave the relatives behind, and suggested to one young man that he let others bury his family so he could follow Jesus, he was only stating the obvious – faith is individual.

Either you believe or you don’t. There is no giving your faith to another.

It’s not like the flu: one kiss, one handshake, one cough won’t do it. Faith is something that each individual must make up their own mind about, and that decision must be followed by a heart set on God and a will that that determines that no matter what happens in the fiery furnace, you remember that story from Daniel, that you will believe.

And Solomon wasn’t there.

He acknowledged Yahweh was God. But he was prepared to have a pantheon of Gods. He loved his wives enough to take them seriously and to provide comfort and care for them, even though most of them weren’t wives in the traditional sense, just political pawns used by families to secure trade and political security.

Solomon wasn’t a bad man, or a mean one. He was in fact wise, a man given a wonderful gift by God to guide and lead Israel. He had an open heart, but he also had an open heart in the wrong direction.

Instead of being asset on loving God with his whole heart and mind and will, and because of it loving others - he was instead a man who loved others and then as an afterthought considered Yahweh’s claims on him, which left him open to a failure of the worst order.

His heart was open to other Gods who were not about love and mercy and walking humbly, but rather God’s of conquest, the using of others, even sacrificing innocents to pave a way for personal success. To be clear, Yahweh’s way is never about personal success, it is always about the Kingdom of God, and stewardship in the care of God’s people.

David had learned the hard way that sacrificing others, specifically Uriah in war in order to marry his wife Bathsheba, was completely contrary to Yahweh’s insistence on holiness, mercy, justice, love, and faith.

David lost a son because of his failure to understand God’s greatest desires.

But Solomon had no understanding of God’s willingness to withdraw his spirit, even after having been told time and again that he was on the wrong path.

For him to understand would have required Solomon’s heart to be set on Yahweh and it just wasn’t.

We pray, “Our father, who are’t in heaven. Hallowed be thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

In the prayer we remind ourselves that we are God’s, that we are God’s children, his faithful servants, and that our lives are all about making this world and our own lives God’s kingdom.

That requires putting first things first, and the first thing is God! Otherwise our spiritual lives fade as the Spirit simply withdraws.

The story is told of an old Scots Presbyterian elder who had not been to church in a long time. The pastor went calling and after a greeting at the door both sat silently in front of a fire in the fireplace. Soon the pastor rose and with a fireplace tool, dragged a coal out of the red-hot middle of the fire.

As it sat by itself on the hearth, the coal cooled and turned ashen gray. Soon again the pastor rose and pushed the coal back into the center of the fire where it quickly began again to glow red-hot.

As the pastor rose to leave, the elder turned to him and said, “Ack, I will be in worship Sunday!”

Though faith is only one generation deep, there is a community of faith where brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren gather in faith.

Be sure you are there where the spirit glows red-hot, where passion is alive, and where our faith, sloppy & crazy, leads to all of us making a difference in this world on behalf of Jesus Christ our Lord.

May the “iggles” win. But much more importantly, may God’s kingdom come.

Amen.

"The Spirit Moves: in Individuals"

January 28, 2018

Luke 2:22-32

Web: www.otisvillepres.org, Twitter: Otisvillepres

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Sermon 

So...

Every once in a while things in life go awry, off the rails, and life gets difficult!

Everything we do only seems to results in only more challenges. We try to shovel the snow and we hurt our back. We go to wash the car and don’t notice the window is open. We take down a bit of loose wallpaper only to notice the paint behind it isn’t the same faded color as the rest of the room!

And it can be much worse. A few years ago a friend started a new job as a teacher where you have the option of getting your year’s salary paid  to you every two weeks over the course of a year (with more in each check) or every two weeks over the course of 10 months (with less in each check but none in the summer).

She opted (she thought) for it to paid out over a year, only to discover, much to her consternation and distress, that she had marked the form wrong and had been getting paid more each month and would get nothing in July and August!

It’s easy and quite understandable in those circumstances to get a little stressed out, maybe even a little depressed! You might lose some hope and even stall out. It happens to the best of us, in our work lives, in our family life; it even happens sometimes in our spiritual life.

We want to pray. We don’t! We know we should give. We miss a Sunday or two, and then instead of the $20 bucks we normally put in the offering baskets, we should put $60, but can’t.

We want to study the bible, help our neighbors, go to Texas, sing in the choir. Get our kids to Empower Kids or Empower Teens. But we fall short.

Even with the best of intentions, we fall short and miss the mark. It happens! A lot!

As one who is committed to trying to get healthy, I decided to exercise using an app on my iphone. The idea is to over a 12 week period; end up doing 100 pushups, 100 sit ups and 100 squats.

Three days a week you are supposed to do three or four sets of like 3-4 reps of each and the app then challenges you the next time to do one more rep in each of the sets every time you come back.

I started two weeks ago, Monday. I am planning on doing the second day sometime this week.

Failure is an option, it seems.

So what do we do? We could consider of the famous words of Sue Farley to poor Sue Maney Eggleton on the Appalachian Trail hike of 2015, “Suck it up buttercup”. Or we can take heart in the good news given to Simeon!

Even when it seems darkest, God is in the process of sending a natal star. Doing as God always does, a new thing! We just need to remember: the Spirit continues to move! – even in individuals!

There was nothing special about Simeon. Yet Simeon is one of the great biblical characters. Not because he was famous or powerful or even very significant. He was not. But what he was it turns out, was one of us.

He was simply a person of faith in touch circumstances wait for God to do his thing! To do what God always does, what he has promised! And then Simeon did what each of us is invited to do; to rejoice when we sees God act work with our own eyes.

Think about the context in which Simeon lived.  Even though he stood just outside the Great Temple in Jerusalem the symbol of the power and authority of God, his life, his city and his country were under Roman rule and authority.

In a few weeks we will celebrate Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem on a donkey to the cheering crowds; but we must not forget that at the same time the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate would also be riding in another of Jerusalem’s gates astride a glorious Roman war horse with all the pageantry and power of Rome!

To Simeon it must have seemed hopeless. The values that every faithful Jew held most precious were being challenged and stripped away. God had made great promises to come and save his people and to send a Messiah, but that hope was fading, seemed distant, and most unlikely.

Yet Simeon like most of God’s common people, becomes the symbol, the reminder that God can come in many ways to us! The Spirit can come as great power in a time of need! But the Spirit can also come as a quiet comfort, an assurance, a still small voice that calms our nerves and gives us hope to see beyond hope the glimmer of God at work.

Even when life is precarious and we feel frail, God is there, aware of our need, and ready to act.

And sometimes the help God sends comes in most unlikely ways, in the most unlikely packages; even in the presence of a tiny little baby boy with his mother: he getting circumcised, she making offerings for being of all things, unclean!

To Simeon was given the gift of a child, who was not yet King, but still a token of God’s peace and grace to come, and Simeon rejoiced!

The Spirit continues to move – in individuals like you! So take, note, be of good hope, and rejoice, for the spirit is here!

Amen.