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Jesus! Now with extra-bonus wisdom action

Posted on July 5, 2011 by megancastellan

I’m not dead, in case you were curious. Last week was the week between my two weeks at camp, and contained all the things that needed to get done between being away from regularly-scheduled work for nearly all of July. Meetings, meetings and more meetings. And an ordination (yay!) and More meetings.

So Sunday was nearly a relief. I was back again at the Friendly Local ELCA parish, where I forgot no major portion of the liturgy, and actually recognized the setting! (they have 10 in the new book. This seems excessive to me, especially since they aren’t really mix-and-match, like ours).
Here’s what I said.

July 3, 2011
Proper 9, Ordinary Time. Year A
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30

What is the wisest thing you’ve ever heard? Do you think of catchy needlepoint sampler sayings, or sentiments from greeting cards? Or quips from bumper stickers? Quotes from sermons, dare I hope?
Or do you remember the voice of your mother, your grandfather, your neighbor down the street, making some sage comment about life?
What is it that catches our ear, makes us stop and say, “that right there, that’s worth listening to. That’s wisdom.”?

For the people of Jesus’s day, wisdom meant something pretty specific. It wasn’t just something someone says that sounded halfway smart. Wisdom was an entire theological tradition within Israelite religion, wherein it was believed that by studying the world, nature, people, the sun, the moon, etc, you could learn to understand God, since God set all these things in motion in the first place. Wisdom wasn’t just being smart– it was coming close to God through understanding.
It’s this wisdom tradition within Judaism that gives us several books in the OT: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and several in the Apocrypha. In these books, the idea of wisdom, this powerful understanding, is personified. Wisdom is depicted as a woman who beckons and encourages seekers to look for her, and find her, so that she might lead them to God. Check out Proverbs 8: wisdom personified says, “to you, oh people, I call, and my call is to all who live…the Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago.
30 then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
31 rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.
35 For whoever finds me finds life
and obtains favor from the Lord;
Some gorgeous stuff in the murky corners of the Old Testament, huh?

So this is wisdom. The joyous wisdom that delights in the creation of God, and the human race, and gleefully brings humanity closer to God.

I mention all this, because in the gospel for today, Jesus begins by disparaging the crowd for refusing to listen to either John the Baptist or himself, no matter what they do. And he uses the image of children playing games in the marketplace– first playing wedding, and then funeral. (this is common in lots of different parts of the world for kids to act out wedding ceremonies as a game, as well as act out funerals. People died a lot back then).
No matter what we did, he says, you wouldn’t play along. John was too strict, so he has a demon. Jesus is too lax, so he must be a glutton and drunkard, and all of you should be sure to remember this passage, because it sure comes in handy the next time you have to have a proof-txt battle with someone.
No matter what we did, he says, you couldn’t join the game.
But it’s ok, because wisdom is justified by her fruits.
There’s wisdom!

And throughout the prayer that follows, Jesus, the Son, becomes the one who can show best what the Father is up to. Jesus becomes that embodiment of joyful, freeing, knowledge. For the hearers, Jesus becomes that sought-after wisdom.

Which causes me to wonder: in our lives as Christians, is this the picture of Jesus that we present to the world? Is the Jesus that we tell the world about a Jesus of figure of joy, of comfort, someone who can talk freely about the games of children,
who, we can picture, rejoices in the inhabited world, and delights in the human race? Is our Jesus a figure of wisdom?

I came home the other day to find a tract on my front door from one of the local storefront churches. On it was a question: “if you died right now, can you be sure you’re going to heaven?”. Below that was the classic, dante’s inferno type picture of hell burning away, as if to suggest that the writers of this pamphlet did not share my confidence.
Inside was the usual– we’ve all sinned, which made God mad, so you should say the sinner’s prayer, and then you too can go to heaven. Oh, and please come to church on Sunday!

And it made me wonder, what sort of Jesus, what sort of God does this sort of thing show people?
We are in the business of the gospel, we are in the business of good news. And good news should sound….good. It should sound joyful. Good news should sound like Jesus does– come to me all who are heavy laden and I will refresh you.

But good news is hard to hear, if not impossible, when it comes with a threat. When it comes presented with anger and condemnation. When it comes stripped of comfort and joy and wisdom at all. We in the church so frequently forget that our news is good. That Jesus is joyful. And delights in humanity, And comes to give us comfort. Anything that detracts from that central truth of who Christ is needs to take a back seat.

From somewhere, maybe, we got the impression that more people would listen if we just scared them out of their wits. But this isn’t working, and what’s worse, it clouds the good news. It’s hard to believe that Jesus wants to comfort and console if he’s depicted as a scary bouncer at the gates of heaven.

We’ve spent years selling ourselves short. We’ve spent a long time telling ourselves and the rest of the world that Christianity is an extremely scary, and serious business, with little room for joy, and mirth and delight.

Whether the world admits it or not, it has a hunger for good news. Too long, it has only heard of a God of anger, wrath and fear. Our world longs for exactly what we already know, the good news we have to share.
The world needs to hear of the Jesus who calls us to sing and dance, and who calls to bring us comfort from our burdens, not to add to them.

So remember the good news you have to share. Remember that it is good news, not frightening, not angry, not hateful. This is the news the world so longs for.
So in everything you do, and say, and are, remember to do it in the name of the Jesus of comfort and love and wisdom, who came to share our burdens. Maybe you’ll get called names, get called a glutton, a drunkard, a weirdo. But someone needs to hear words of comfort and love and grace, and you’re just the one to speak them.
Amen.

This week: back at Chapel Rock, for an actual camp session with actual campers, opposed to training the counselors.
I do promise, though, another Rob Bell post before the week is over, however. I promise, I promise.

And one final note: one thing among many I learned this week: it is significantly harder to preach on Wisdom when you are speaking to a congregation that does not consider the Apocrypha to be canon. (imagine the NBC PSA music playing).

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What kind of day has it been?

Posted on June 12, 2011 by megancastellan

So.
This week I was back at Lakeside. If you’ve been watching/reading/ listening to any national news, then you’ve heard about Lakeside this week. Lakeside is on the western edge of the Wallow wildfire that’s currently incinerating eastern Arizona, and now moving into New Mexico. Lakeside is where the evacuees, around 10,000 people, are being sheltered. Pretty terrifying. I’ve gotten used to snowstorms, and am learning to deal with WIND instead of spring, but ongoing forest fires are still scary.

Besides being an object lesson in Why You Never Leave Campfires Unattended (aka, You Idiot, Did You Want to Burn Down Half the Southwest?!?), they could probably make a pretty awesome GOE question out of this one.
“On Pentecost, you are called to supply for a small rural parish on the edge of the second-largest ongoing forest fire in the history of the state. What do you say to them?”
Here’s what I said.

June 12, 2011
Pentecost, Year A
Acts 2:1-21

In the criminally under appreciated sitcom Sports Night, by the end of the first season, the producer Dana Whitaker, played by Felicity Huffman, is having a hard time. Her sports news show is failing in the ratings, her competition at work is sneaking up on her, her mentor and boss had a massive stroke, and the network is showing an inclination to replace her. To add to her stress, there was a bomb threat in the studio the week previously, and her fiancé has broken up with her, after revealing his infidelity. Dana decides to deal with all this by buying a camera.
She buys a camera, and pours all her panic and stress into this one thing she can control. Picture taking! She will take a picture of the people where she works, all together, all looking perfect. And when someone asks where her engagement ring went, she says it’s at the ring cleaners, laughs it off. Problem solved.
Only not so much. Because just as she’s succeeded at getting everyone and everything perfect for the picture, everything lined up and fixed up just as it should be….
The film pops out from the back of the camera, as the flash misfires.
Which would be a fixable thing, if not for someone else asking at that same moment, where Dana’s ring had gone again?
And Dana just implodes.
The actress plays it brilliantly, because you can see that for her, it was the culmination of everything that had gone wrong up until that moment. And she just melts into tears of frustration , and starts yelling about this being the latest in a long line of humiliations, which she can take! And be fine with! With the exception of the camera! Because that’s just too much, and now something good needs to happen, just one good thing, before the day is over, and is that too much to ask?!?!?

In that moment her mentor, who’d suffered the stroke, and hadn’t been seen since, walks into the office. Calls her name. And asks her to please, as nicely as possible, get the show on the air. Great moment.***

We get so excited about Pentecost, sometimes, that we forget that on Pentecost? The disciples were petrified. They were scared, they were frustrated, they were confused.
They had given up several years of their lives, all they owned, left family, friends, neighbors, livelihoods, security, social respectability. All to follow a young rabbi whom, they believed, would bring the reign of God to earth. All those prophecies made true.

But then, Jesus is arrested by the authorities, put on trial and killed. This was a shock for a couple of reasons. First off, when Rome started crucifying political criminals, they never stopped with just the head of the organization– they liked to finish the job. So not only were the disciples contemplating some career choices that looked pretty shaky in hindsight; they also were convinced they were going to be killed.

Secondly, their friend was gone. By this point in the story, Jesus has been killed, risen, and has ascended to heaven. So while the disciples have seen the risen Lord….they also realize that he’s not sticking around. He might not be dead, but their problems aren’t solved. In fact, it creates another problem. Because, now, not only is the Roman army is still after them, they think. They still don’t have jobs. We can take a guess and figure that their families are none too pleased with them, if they were to return home at this point, tails between their legs, but now–
What to do about Jesus?

He ascended to heaven, leaving them in charge. He gave them a job to do. They are to tell the story of Jesus, of everything they have seen and experienced of God’s love for the world.

But right now, the thought of going out and doing something just seems like one more thing that can’t be done, in a long line of things that are going wrong. It’s one more obstacle to overcome, and it just looks too daunting.

It’s into this environment that the Holy Spirit sweeps, and the church is born, and the disciples are enlivened. (and accused of being drunk), amusingly. They were terrified, confused and ready to give up and go home, and now, they are overcome with passion for their callings. They are renewed.

But what’s striking is what the Spirit is not, as much as what the Spirit is.

As frightened and as confused as the disciples are, the Spirit does not come as a magic fix-all. Nothing is suddenly righted, or made all better. Peter isn’t suddenly a genius, and Thomas isn’t suddenly rich. The church isn’t made safe from Roman persecution. Their problems don’t disappear. Their problems don’t change; the people do.

The Spirit empowers the disciples to get up, and remember that Jesus called them for a reason. The Spirit empowers the disciples to use gifts they didn’t even know they had, in the service of each other, and people they had never even met before. People as different as could be suddenly hear the good news told to them in words they can understand, all by the power of the Spirit.

There are times in our lives when we are pretty sure that we have run out of things to go wrong. When we have hit the bottom of the barrel, and we look around at the state of things and think, “Surely, someone else has to come and fix this, because I just don’t have anything left to give. I have no idea where to start with this problem. Surely God will send someone else.”

When we are tired, when we are frightened, and confused, when the reality of the brokenness of the world overwhelms us, then it becomes all we can see. And we fixate on the brokeness, til it paralyzes us. “God, you can’t want me to do this, I’ve been told I’m too old. I’ve been told I’m too young. I’ve been told I’m not useful because I’m a woman, or I haven’t read the right books, or have the wrong opinions. Really, God, you need to send someone else.”

But it is precisely into the broken rooms of our panic that the Spirit sweeps. Not to give us the answers, or to give us magical solutions, though I’ve often wished that were the case. But to reassure us, that we are precisely the people God wants to serve the world in this particular situation. And whether we can see it clearly or not, we have precisely the gifts God requires for this moment to heal a fractured world.
And with the Spirit’s help, we are given the strength and courage to use them.

Amen

***The television show I reference here is ‘Sports Night’, written by Aaron Sorkin, genius behind “A Few Good Men”, and “The West Wing”. The episode is ‘What Kind of Day Has it Been?’, the first season finale. It’s on Netflix streaming now. Go. Watch it. Now. Trust me.

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Why we should not emulate the Borg

Posted on June 6, 2011 by megancastellan

This week I got to stay in Flagstaff again, and preach at Epiphany, the local Episcopal church. Hooray! While I enjoy driving all over Arizona, it is also nice to stay home every so often.
Especially when I-40 is closed because of fire again. (Ah, summer in the high desert!)
Here is what I said. And the following things should be noted:
1. I got my brother’s permission for citing our email discussion.
2. The Hafiz poem is from a book called “The Gift”, translated by Daniel Ladinsky. Highly recommended.

Easter 7, Year A
John 17:1-11, Acts 1:6-14

My brother, Aaron, is a comedy writer in Los Angeles. We are very different people– we don’t even really look alike. To meet us, most people wouldn’t guess we were related at all. When I went out to visit him and our two cousins in March, our cousin Elliot asked me if I played basketball in school. Aaron and I looked at each other and laughed for several minutes.
In school, Aaron played three varsity sports, including basketball. Meanwhile, I wrote a scathing op-Ed piece in the school newspaper, partially aimed at the misdoings of the basketball team. Aaron helpfully disavowed being related to me.

This week, I sent Aaron a link to a newly-founded ‘women’s entertainment and humor destination!’ website. What did he think? Because I didn’t think it was funny, and I wanted to know if I was missing something, and he’s usually good at this sort of thing.
Aaron responded the way I expected him to: with a long commentary about women in comedy, and a comprehensive review of the website in question. What I did not expect was the final note at the end: ” you’re a girl. I’m not. Respond to this with thoughts!”.
Aside from his sudden failure at writing like someone with a bachelors in communications, I was impressed with my brother.
Generally, his approach to the world is pretty know-it-all. But here he was, admitting that there was going to be a difference between how he perceived something, and how I did, and that difference was important. That difference could even be creative.

The readings for today center around an idea of wished for unity. At the end of his prayer, Jesus prays for the disciples to be one. As he is about to ascend to God, the disciples anxiously inquire of Jesus if this will finally be the time when Jesus will restore the one true united kingdom to Israel under the one true unified God. Unity all over the place.

It’s such an attractive idea, unity in God, unity with each other. No strife or conflict to worry about, everyone agreeing all the time. There’s even a psalm about it. Oh how pleasant it is, exults the psalm, when the people dwell together in unity! It is like oil upon the head, running down upon the beard! Which, I’m assuming, is actually, a more pleasant a thing than it immediately sounds.

How often do we come home at the end of a long day, or better yet, at the end of a church meeting, and dream of a day when everyone will be brought by the power of the Spirit to perfect agreement with everyone else? When we won’t actually have to have meetings anymore, because the perfect solution to each problem will just present itself magically in our minds?
When denominations will disappear, because, as an old professor of mine used to say, everyone will eventually give up, and become Episcopalian as God intended? Oh happy day!

Unity! Is this what we picture when we say unity? But, notice!
When Jesus asks for his disciples to all be one, he conditions it. He says, as the Father and I are one.
And now that’s a tricky image, isn’t it? What is the relationship like between Jesus and God?
Jesus and God, the Father and the Son, are close, but they were by no means the EXACT same entity. They didn’t subsume each other.
They were different. They are different.
While both of them are God, they are still different, unique. So much so that Christianity doesn’t work if they suddenly start to merge into each other.
Now, At a certain point, we need them to be the same. We need Jesus to be the Christ, to be God made flesh, to be God’s way to experience our human life. We need them to be the same.
But at another point, we need Jesus to be Jesus, and God to be God. We need God to create the heavens and the earth, and we need Jesus to wander around down here explaining it to us, and telling stories, making God reachable.
Without the difference, it doesn’t work. Without the sameness, it doesn’t work either.

But Oftentimes, we get fixated on similarity. We become convinced that unity is the only way to go, and that if we don’t achieve perfect similarity, we have failed. If everyone doesn’t think like us, we are failing, if there is conflict, we have screwed up, if there is disagreement, or strife, or whatever, we have done something wrong. We confuse unity with conformity, and the two are not the same. As Christians, if our model for human relationships is the Trinity, then we need to remember that the Trinity is not conformed to one another, and it would not work if it was. We don’t worship a weird version of the Borg. Praise God.

We worship a triune God. We worship unity in diversity. We worship a God who is complicated and multi-voiced through the centuries. And this God teaches us that each individual voice needs to be more than tolerated: they need to be celebrated.

Our different perspectives are valuable, not just a fact. They are gifts of God, given by the Spirit for our enrichment, for the benefit of the whole. Those aspects of ourselves that make us different also lead us to see aspects of the world that others cannot, movements of the Spirit that others miss. That’s important. That is necessary. That is necessary if the Body of Christ is to function as a full Body, and not just a disembodied head, or a dismembered arm.

And though the fact that our differences lead us to see the world distinctly, often leads to clashes and conflicts, that’s ok. If the spirit can speak through our differing voices, our distinct perspectives, then the spirit is going to speak through our conflicts too.
Sometimes the people of God disagree. Sometimes they do this loudly and vigorously. And sometimes, unfortunately, they do this in not so kind ways. Conflict isn’t antithetical to being a good Christian– you can have conflict and still have unity.

Because, in the end: What gives unity isn’t similarity, and it isn’t perfect agreement, and it isn’t, most certainly, forced acquiescence. What gives unity is simple: Unity is found in love.

Jesus and God and the Spirit are bound in love. The perfect sort of love that recognizes the unshakable, unbreakable image of God in the other. That honors the other, and promises that despite disagreement, the relationship will not end. Love: patient, kind, unselfish and unfaltering. The sort of love that we find in God is the sort of love we are called to cultivate for all people on earth. That sort of unbounded, unbroken love flowing out from God and uniting us with every living thing.

That is the love in which we find ourselves, and all of creation already enclosed, so long as we open our hands to embrace it. As the poet Hafiz said: out of a great need, we are all holding hands and climbing, not loving is a letting go. Listen! The terrain around here is far too dangerous for that.

Amen.

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Telling Stories

Posted on May 29, 2011 by megancastellan

Today, I got to supply at a local ELCA parish here in Flagstaff, and got my ecumenism on. All the churches I supply for are kind and welcoming, but this group is particularly laid back. The first time I supplied for them, I forgot that the Lutheran liturgy goes as follows:
1. Confession or Reminder of Baptism
2. Absolution
3. Opening hymn
4. Kyrie-esque responsorial prayers, generally sung to one of ten (!) settings.
5. Gloria/ song of praise, and on.
So it’s mostly identical to Episcopal liturgy, with penitential order added,just a teeny bit different. And the first time I supplied, I forgot the opening hymn, just entirely. (They announce hymns, rather than just break into them.). Graciously, no one said anything, or looked aghast. They just proceeded on. Gold star for laid-backness for them. And meanwhile, I have gotten lots more practice at Lutheran liturgy.
Anyway, here is what I said in the sermon.

6 Easter, Year A
Acts 17:22-31, John 14:15-21

My grandfather liked to tell stories about our relatives. Lots and lots of stories, about his great grandfather who lived on the plantation in Spotsylvania County and was so ornery that he got into a bar fight, got sliced open across the stomach, and held his intestines in by hand as he rode to the courthouse so he could swear out a statement against the guy who stabbed him.
Or the ancestor in Scotland, who was in a boat race to claim some land from the king– whoever laid his hand on the shore first won the land. Seeing that he was losing, my ancestor cut off his hand and threw it to the shore, winning the race….and losing his hand.
My brother and I loved to hear these stories, over and over, and of course they would get taller and taller with each retelling. First it was one mile to the courthouse, then it was five. Then it was ten. And I have no idea if any if this really happened.
But here’s what I do know– I learned a lot of truth by listening to these stories.
The stories my grandfather chose to tell spoke some deep truths about his family, whether or not the facts were accurate.

Clearly, we were a strong group, maybe headstrong is a better word, and maybe prideful. And the sort of person who will chop off their own hand to win a contest is probably prone to the streak of insanity that definitely was present in my Southern Tennessee-Williams inspiring family. But stubborn? Able to persevere? And proud enough of those traits that we tell story after story about them? You bet.

As humans, we are story-telling machines. It’s how we make meaning out of things. It’s how we convey things that we feel are important. We do it as Christians, certainly. We are nothing if not people of a central story that we tell over and over again– the story of Jesus. And in that story, we celebrate and remember everything that we hold dear. What we know about God, how God relates to the world, how god wants us to relate to each other. All of that really is wrapped up in our big main story of Jesus.

The book of Acts is pretty much a description of the disciples trying to live out the central story of Jesus. Acts is a sequel to Luke– sort of Luke 2.0, written by the same guy for the most part. And if Luke is the story of Jesus, Acts is the story of what the disciples decide to do with the story of Jesus. It’s the story of ‘what comes next’.

And what comes next is essentially what you’d expect. The disciples witness the Ascension. They find someone to replace judas. Pentecost happens. But mainly, they travel around, filled with the Holy Spirit, sharing the story of Jesus, bringing new people into their fledgling community.

But each time they share the story of Jesus, they share it in a specific way. Each time the story of Jesus is told in the book of Acts, it changes. It morphs a little bit.

Notice the story we get today. Peter is in Athens, and, having wandered a bit around the city, excitedly makes his pitch to all Athenians within earshot that the God of Jesus is in fact a god that they already know. The god of his story is a god of their own story. How about that!

This is a bit of a left-field assertion for a devout Jew to make. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is usually not to be confused with Zeus, Mercury, or Hera. That’s the sort of talk that got a person exiled to Babylon, generally. So what’s going on with Peter?

But all throughout Acts, the apostles are doing things like this. The whole time. All the way back to Pentecost. Because, if you’ll remember what happened on Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended upon them and gave them the ability to speak and understand other languages, gave them the ability to listen and speak to people different from themselves.
And that’s pretty much what they’ve been doing ever since.

The first thing Peter does upon getting to Athens, filled with the Holy Spirit as he is, is he listens. He wanders around the city and he listens. He listens to who the people are, what they care about. And then, he starts to speak to them. And that way, he manages to convey to them the story of Jesus in a way that’s meaningful and authentic to them.

Listening, true listening is a gift of the Spirit. When Jesus tells his disciples that he will send them the Advocate, one of the things that the Advocate is supposed to do is allow the disciples to be led into all truth. To hear more truth. At Pentecost, in Acts, it was the Spirit that opened the ears of the disciples to hear God in a fuller way. But how often to we use that gift today? How often do we forget to listen at all, and rely on speaking instead? How often do we rush to speak ourselves, because we are so eager to share our story with the other person, and in our rush we forget that they have a story too?

Each encounter the apostles had in Acts exposed them to a different story. All of the languages they heard on Pentecost, each was a different story. Philip’s encounter with the eunuch– a new story to be heard. Saul– definitely a story, that would be told over and over and over again. And Cornelius, the Roman centurion, a new story. In each case, these weren’t just stories the apostles listened to for the exercise. And to be really cynical– they didn’t just shape their evangelism to fit the market.

The church at the end of Acts is a radically different thing than the church at the beginning of Acts. Each encounter, each story heard has shaped it. And the work of the Spirit has been nowhere more prominent than in the apostles’ willingness to let the stories they hear change them. When Cornelieus the Roman soldier shows up, they don’t just listen politely to Cornelius; they end up welcoming Gentile converts because of what he tells them of his experience of God. The Spirit works through his story, the spirit works the apostles’ listening. And the church is enlivened.

So, we, as we are sent into the world, our job is not so much to talk to people until we are blue in the face, filled with the power of the Spirit, and handing out biblical tracts.
Our job is to listen. To hear where the Spirit is in fact already at work in the lives of the people God created in the first place. And then, as the hands and feet of Christ in the world, to catch up and help.

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On the day after

Posted on May 22, 2011 by megancastellan

As promised, here’s the sermon I actually gave today. I preached at an Episcopal/Lutheran church on the edge of the Grand Canyon, in Williams.

May 22, 2011
5 Easter, Year A
John 14: 1-14

In 1844, a preacher in the Millerite movement named Samuel S. Snow read his Bible, and deciphered the Book of Daniel to such an extent that he declared that God would cleanse the earth with a plague of fire on October 22 of that year, destroying it utterly. Thousands of people rallied around his teachings, gave away their belongings and their property in preparation.

But, as you know, the world did not end. The day came to be called ‘The Great Disappointment.” Undeterred, Snow’s followers went on to found the Seventh-Day Adventists.

In 1806, a chicken, in Leeds, England, was discovered to be laying eggs that bore the inscription ‘Christ is returning.’ This caused no end of religious fervor in the city, and the entire country. People began to visit the hen in large numbers, and venerate the eggs as holy. To prepare for the return of Christ by selling all they had, etc.

Then, as an author of the time wrote, “A plain tale was soon put down, and quenched their religion entirely. Some gentlemen, hearing of the matter, went one fine morning, and caught the poor hen in the act of laying one of her miraculous eggs. They soon ascertained beyond doubt that the egg had been inscribed with some corrosive ink, and cruelly forced up again into the bird’s body. At this explanation, those who had prayed, now laughed, and the world wagged as merrily as of yore.”

And the world did not end.

As you might have heard, a radio preacher named Harold Camping predicted that the Rapture was supposed to occur last evening at 6pm, based on his personal reading of the Bible. All of the ‘faithful, bible-believing Christians’ would be whisked up to heaven while everyone else would stay to experience five months of desolation, torment and tribulation. After which, on October 21, God would finally destroy the entire world he had once created, everyone left behind included.

But, if you’ll notice, the world did not end. Or at least, no one got raptured. Much to the dismay I suppose of the people who started the Eternal Rest pet watching service, who for the low price of 150$ each, would match your left-behind pet with an unRaptured atheist, starting at 6:01pm yesterday. So someone will feed it.

How do we know? How do we know who to believe and what to believe? How do we know when we are confronted with a multitude of voices saying, “Listen to me! Do what I say! I know the truth! And the world really will end!” And they sound so sure, many of them. They sound so rational, some of them, and so clear, others of them. And then again, it’s not like there’s a lot in the world that’s clear and logical and rational in the first place, so isn’t it nice sometimes just to have a clear voice to follow, to give instructions?

So how do we know which voice to listen to? How do we know which voice leads us down the road to God?

We’re in the section of the lectionary right now where Jesus is giving his disciples final instructions before he’s arrested and crucified. It’s a section of the Fourth Gospel called the Farewell Discourse, and it’s basically their marching orders from here on out. How to be the church in the world, now that the Jesus training wheels are coming off.
And so today, it is in this context that we get this conversation with Philip and Thomas. Lord, show us the Father. Lord, show us the way.

In other words, this little ragtag band of misfits badly wants some assurance that they are doing the right thing, that they are on the right track in Gods eyes. And what does Jesus say in response?

If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. I am the way, the truth and the life.
In other words, you want to know God? Want to know what God wants, who God is? Look at Jesus.

Jesus is the clearest picture of God we have as Christians. Jesus is the window through which we see God most clearly. Jesus is our litmus test. Want to know if you’re on the right track or not? If what someone is telling you is from God or not? Ask yourself if it squares with the sort of thing Jesus cared about or not. Jesus is the standard. Through Jesus, we see God.

And while we can never learn everything there is to know about God, we get enough to begin to trace the faint outlines of who God is, and what God cares about.
In Jesus, what do we see?

We see a person who taught those around him.
Who taught us to love our neighbor as ourselves, as the greatest commandment. To give away all we have in care for the poor and the suffering. Who told us that as we have done to the least of these, so you have done to me, and that is how we will be judged.

We also see a person who lived out what he taught. Who spent his time among the lowest in his society. Who healed the sick, and the suffering, without question or precondition, and stood up for the persecuted, even at great cost to himself. He ate with tax collectors and lepers, sent women to preach his resurrection, and sent a mission to the Gentiles.

This is the Jesus that we see in the gospels; this is the God that Jesus shows us. A God of boundless, infinite love, mercy and compassion.

This God, the God of Jesus, is a particular type of God, yes? This is character of God who called his creation ‘good’. And this sort of God, this god of Jesus, is irreconcilable with the god who was preached on the airwaves this week, who was supposed to have the rapture yesterday. The God of Jesus is irreconcilable with a god who would send utter destruction and death on most of the human race as punishment for wrong belief. The God of Jesus would never wipe out most of humanity in earthquakes, fires and plagues just because they failed to properly figure out hidden number puzzle clues, and who gives true believers a free ticket out of harms way, then lets them watch, and cheer, while the rest of creation burns.

The Rapture god is not the God shown to us in Jesus. That is not the Way or the Truth Jesus shows us.

The god of the Rapture, the way of the apocalyptic vision, might offer easy assurance and simple to grasp formulas that explain, that we are in the chosen few. It might offer the excitement of being in on secret, hidden knowledge. It might offer the privilege of feeling more righteous than everyone around us. And all of those are very attractive when the world is chaotic, when times are tough and uncertain.

But they are no substitute for the living, breathing, presence of God in Christ. And today, my friends, the created world keeps turning, and the living Christ is yet still with us. And that’s truly rapture enough.
Amen.

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