Please pray with me.
Gracious and loving God, as we
enter this time of meditation, may you take the imperfect words of my
mouth, the meditations of each of our hearts, directing them to a perfect
understanding of your love, your care and your presence with us. We pray
this all in Christ's name, Amen.
Grace and peace be to each, to
all, from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ.
My dear friends….
At our 9 a.m. Sunday service here
at Asylum Hill, there are some people who attend for very specific
reasons. One of those reasons is that, for a number of folks, there are
very few children in attendance. They simply are distracted by the
cacophony of sound that a large number of children provide. I used to
think that this was a silly reason, until I started to lose some of my own
hearing ability. With hearing loss, you discover that when there are many
different "sounds" calling for your attention, there are times
when you simply need one source of sound on which to focus. It's a good
thing some of those folks, or some of us folks, were not at one of our
neighboring churches recently where a new family insisted on keeping their
young child in worship, in the midst of a congregation that had trouble
finding even a handful of persons under 70 years of age. The child really
tried to be on his best behavior throughout the service, but it was clear,
five minutes into the minister's sermon, that they were losing the battle.
The child's squirming and loud stage whispers caused persons all around to
turn their heads and look...not approvingly I might add! Finally, in
disgust, the father of this little boy picked him up, rather roughly, and
began to stride down the center aisle. The little boy, leaning over his
father's shoulder, said with arms upraised and in a loud voice, "Pray
for me. Pray for me!" (laughter) And all of us have, or are even now,
with our arms upraised and crying to one another, "Pray for me. Pray
for me. Pray for us. Pray for the Creation."
Pray for one another. Indeed…this
worship service, on this particular morning, has had more prayers than any
service I have conducted in the four plus years that I have been here. But
if there has ever been a week when we have needed to be in a spirit of
prayer for one another, for ourselves and for our world, it is in these
very hours.
Jesus, in his ministry, spends a
great deal of time teaching about prayer and its importance. Indeed, the
prayer that Jesus gives to his disciples, then and now, instructs us to
pray to God by saying, "Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy
name." Jesus was very clear about the importance of prayer for us,
and we need to be absolutely clear about the importance of prayer in these
very troubling days and acting as the Church of Christ Jesus.
The second little illustration
for you: I love my two granddaughters. Excuse me, Beth. I love OUR two
granddaughters. McKenna and Morgan fulfill the promise on the little
bumper sticker that says, "Grandchildren are God's reward for growing
old." They are! The last time I saw them, McKenna crawled up on the
sofa next to me. She said, "Hi, Peepa." She calls me Peepa. I
hate it!! But…I love my granddaughter. And…it's out of my
daughter-in-law's family tradition so I can't "hate" it out
loud. But McKenna, crawling up next to me, said in that very soft, gentle
voice, "Peepa, do you know how you and God are alike?" And, of
course, I was already into the process of polishing my mental halo when I
said to her, "No, McKenna, how are God and I alike?" She said,
"You're both old." Pray for me, indeed, and help me temper the
view I hold of my world, for after the many experiences I, and you, have
walked through in our life's journey, we tend to get set in our ways…even
when they stray from the faith statement we seek to follow. After all,
there has been lots of water that's gone under the bridge and even more
water that's gone over the dam. But maybe what that means is that I need
to carefully look and reexamine what God expects of me, how desperately I
am in the need of life changing prayer.
Vince Lombardi was a legendary
football coach…first for the Green Bay Packers and then for the
Washington Redskins...a Hall of Fame professional football coach. And
after one particularly devastating defeat while in Green Bay, Lombardi
convened his players on a Monday morning and said to them,
"Gentlemen, we need to get back to the basics!" Then he took
something from a bin and said to them, "This is a football." In
all sports activities today, we are acquainted with that language, aren't
we? The team that loses focus and the basics quickly becomes
dysfunctional. How many times have you heard Talick Brown or Ben Gordon
from U.Conn say, "..as long as we stay focused." And how many
times after devastating defeats on many different sport "playing
fields" do we hear, "Let's get back to the basics. Let's get
back to what we know...what we know we can do and what we need to
do." In other words, this is a "football." In God's word
from the book of Exodus, we are reintroduced to a basic game plan that is
extremely focused. We are reintroduced to the football. What we need to do
well, what we can do well, is to fulfill God's promise and hope for us.
Maybe because we've heard the Ten
Commandments repeated so often…or maybe because they've been shrouded in
all of the arguments about whether they belong in this courtroom or that
public building…just maybe we've stopped taking them seriously. Yet
immersed in the Ten Commandments, we can find the basis for sound
community living, and given the present state of our world, a review of
God's parameters for treating God and each other with basic dignity and
respect would be a very good thing. Perhaps the writer of Exodus could
have prefaced his or her remarks with these words... "Yo…Yo…my
people. Here's the plan: § You shall have no other gods before me. § You
shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of anything
that is in heaven above or that's in the earth beneath or that is in the
water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. §
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain for God will not
hold anyone guiltless who takes God's name in vain. § Remember the
Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your
work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath to the supreme and sovereign One,
your God. § Honor your father and mother that your days may be long in
the land, which the Sovereign One, the Creator God, has given to you. §
You shall not kill. § You shall not commit adultery. § You shall not
steal. § You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. § You
shall not covet your neighbor's house or anything else that is your
neighbor's. Yo…here's the plan!"
Now…if you take the key phrase
in each of those words from our Creating and present God, you know that
the very first four Commandments are about our relationship with God. You
shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself a graven
image or worship and serve that image. You shall not take the name of the
Lord your God in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. We need
to look at our relationship to God…each of us, all of us.
I'm always interested when
someone tells me that he or she is an atheist. There is no such thing as
an atheist. We all have our gods. We all define a supreme power in our
lives, that power which we worship and follow…that power which leads us
to life or to death.
As the story continues in Exodus,
we receive the next six Commandments, and all of them deal with our
relationship to one another. Honor your father and your mother. You shall
not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall
not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet. Is it
any wonder that Jesus finally gave us, in response to a question, the
theological and spiritual "sound-bite of life conduct"…You are
to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength and your
neighbor as yourself." That is a compendium of the plan that God sets
out for us in the 20th chapter of Exodus.
The Ten Commandments are God's
straightforward explication of the facts of life. This is the way I want
you to lead your lives. All other wanderings and moral complexities lead
to death. If God is a father God…if God is a mother God…if God is a
parent for all of the Creation, we know that a wise parent does not leave
a child to his or her own devices to discover what is right and what is
wrong simply by experimentation. The patient God and the patient parent
graciously teach the child the way that leads to life. These are the
cornerstones. These are the touchstones by which you will have life at its
fullest, thereby enabling the child to avoid mere trial and error as a way
of defining a faith belief system. God does that for us in the Ten
Commandments. In God's gracious granting of the law to Israel and in
Israel's gracious preservation of the law for us, "Yo…here's the
plan."
Abraham Lincoln once asked his
advisers, "If you call a sheep's tail a leg, how many legs would the
sheep have?" His advisers promptly told him--five, whereupon Lincoln
said, "No, because calling a tail a leg won't make it so." But
there are many sad instances among us, within us, about us, where people
thought and think that calling a wrong a right would or will make it a
right. G. K. Chesterton said that if a man is walking and comes to a cliff
and keeps on walking off the edge of the cliff, he will not break the law
of gravity...he will prove it. There are, frankly, my dear friends, too
many examples among us, within us, of those whose sad lives are proving
not the fallacy or the error of the Ten Commandments, but their
continuing, even eternal, validity. Sad, chaotic and confused lives are
the result of life lived on our own, of living by our own rationale rather
than by the wisdom of God. It is not that a restrictive and punitive God
imposes the laws of the Ten Commandments upon us. Rather, it is that God
reveals to us the structure of reality as God has created it... the way
God wants the world to work, so that we're precluded from having to find
that out by ourselves. This is the way God wants God's world to be
structured. These are not our boundaries, but they are our launching pad.
As I look at those Ten
Commandments, it's clear that I'm in some trouble. It's clear that I've
failed in some areas of my life in terms of what God's plan for me has
been. That's where a word of forgiveness is important to us all. My guess
would be that each and all of us who sit in the sanctuary this morning are
familiar with and find something in that checklist with which we really
struggle and have a difficult time. But in response to our failure, it
does not mean we, or God, should set the bar lower. It means that we need
to look carefully at our lives, look at where God has placed the bar and
say to one another and to our world, "We're going to give it a go
again," because that's the way God wants the world to be.
There's a wonderful friend of
mine who was senior minister at the Community Church in Vero Beach,
Florida, the place where your pastor emeritus, the Rev. Dr. James Kidd, is
currently doing an interim pastorate. Julius always used to talk about the
importance of confession in worship, and so much so that he would refer to
Lutheran liturgies, OLD Lutheran liturgies. Did you know that before there
was a prayer of confession in the old Lutheran tradition, they always read
the Ten Commandments to remind one another of how carefully they needed to
examine what God's desire was for them and where they had fallen short?
Yo…Yo…my people...Here's the
Plan!
Those of you who know me well
know that no matter what plan I hatch, my wife has an addition or
adjustment to the plan. Just before worship began, she brought to me a
prayer that Rabbi Harold Kushner has written: Let the rain come and wash
away the ancient grudges, the bitter hatreds held and nurtured over
generations. Let the rain wash away the memory of the hurt, the neglect,
and let the sun come out and fill the sky with rainbows. Let the warmth of
the sun heal us wherever we are broken. Let it burn away the fog so that
we can see each other clearly, so that we can see beyond labels, beyond
accents, gender or skin color. Let the warmth and brightness of the sun
melt our selfishness so that we can share the joys and feel the sorrows of
our neighbors and let the light of the sun be so strong that we will see
all people as our neighbors. Let the earth, nourished by rain, bring forth
flowers to surround us with beauty. And let the mountains teach our hearts
to reach upward to heaven.
It's about the
"football"…the basics and the focus of who we are and whose we
are…for life!
Even with all this water under
the bridge and over the dam, please pray for me as I promise to pray for
you. Let us pray for one another. Let us pray to God and let us listen for
the still small voice that says, "Yo, Here's the Plan."
Amen and Come By Here, My Lord.
It's not about presents. It's about presence.
Let us together break the bread of life.