I just realized today that I never posted the sermon I heard at the Synod Assembly in Sturbridge, MA in June. I had written briefly about it while I was at the assembly. After I arrived home, I contacted, via e-mail, Pastor Elaine Hewes and asked her if I could have a copy of her sermon so that I could post it on my blog. She very graciously sent it to me and said I was free to post it.
I realize that it is rather long but please read to the end. It flows very nicely and builds up to a wonderful finish.
Without further ado, the sermon:
Synod Assembly Evening Prayer
June 3, 2010
Isaiah 6:1-8 Psalm 103:1-5, 10, 11 Romans 8:12-17
Congratulations to those of you who are graduating from the School of Lay Ministry this evening. I had no idea, until I looked at the curriculum of the two-year course of study, how much material you covered in that short amount of time; one year devoted to Biblical studies, the other devoted to Lutheran theology and history, with a close look at how Lutherans have assimilated into the American context with its complex mix of religious traditions. Not to mention the additional bonus of reading and reflecting on Mark Allen Powell’s book Giving to God, culminating the course of study with a emphasis on stewardship. (I wonder whose idea that was).
That is a lot of material to cover, in addition to on-going study-groups and semi-annual retreats for further instruction, reflection and conversation….. But you did it. You have completed the requirements of the course, and tonight we celebrate your accomplishments, recognizing that there is just one thing left to do; something I hope Ted Asta told you about; something that is being prepared for you in the side yard of the Sturbridge Host Hotel at this very moment, which is why we are back in this place for Assembly this year and celebrating your graduation just after the barbeque….
I am talking of course about the live coal…. Ted, did you tell them about the live coal? And the whole coal-to-the-lips thing as these brothers and sisters in Christ are now sent out into their congregations and their communities with a deeper sense of what it means to proclaim the Word of God?….. Did you tell them about the live coal?…..
Maybe it’s time to reinstate the live coal in the commissioning of disciples. Not just for our new graduates of the School of Lay Ministry. But for all of us. Pastors, Associates in Ministry, Diaconal Ministers, and lay people alike. Maybe it’s time to light our fire. Because, brothers and sisters in Christ, the Word we have been commissioned in our baptisms to bring to the world is at the heart of it, no different than the Word Isaiah was commissioned to bring to the People of Israel in the 8th century BCE. And if he needed to be touched with a little fire in preparation for speaking that Word, why shouldn’t we?
It’s interesting to note that every commentary written on the sixth chapter of Isaiah, which is commonly referred to as Isaiah’s “commissioning” ceremony, warns against reading these eight verses in isolation. Most probably because when we read them out of context we don’t get a sense of the mess Isaiah found himself in as he confronted Judah and Jerusalem in the 8th century BCE.
Take a look at the chapters surrounding Isaiah’s call narrative, and you will get a sense of the mess the People of Israel were in…. Read these chapters, and you will hear the indictment God leveled at Jerusalem and Judah through the prophet Isaiah saying things like, “How the faithful city has become a whore! She that was full of justice, righteousness lodged in her – but now murderers! Your silver has become dross, your wine is mixed with water. Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them…..
“Therefore, thus says the Sovereign, the Lord of Hosts, the mighty One of Israel, I will pour out my wrath upon you… I will turn my hand against you; I will smelt away your dross as with lye and remove all your alloy…”
This is strong language, intended to be strong medicine for a people who had lost their sense of covenantal relationship with the God of justice and righteousness; a people who had been born of love and shaped by a story of liberation from bondage, but who suffered in Isaiah’s time from a terminal case of amnesia; a people in bondage to trinkets and trifles and systems and seductions so subtle and sweet they couldn’t even see them….
It was to these people and to this situation Isaiah of Jerusalem was called to speak the Word of the Lord. But as we heard in our first reading for this evening, before the live coal even touched Isaiah’s mouth it seared the eyes of his heart, revealing to him the truth of his own amnesia, his own bondage to those trinkets and trifles and systems and seductions so subtle and sweet they are barely perceptible…. “Woe is me!” he cried out in the presence of the Holy God, the Lord of heaven and earth…. “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips…..”
It was into this mess, standing knee-deep in this mess, that Isaiah was called to speak the Word of the Lord, receiving through his theophany in the temple not only the authorization for that work, which he had indeed already begun, but the fire he needed in order to continue doing it…..the refining fire of God’s fierce love touched to his lips with these words, “Now that this has touched your lips, your sin is departed, and your sin is blotted out.” Making him ready to sing those words we love to sing in response to the question, “Who will I send?” These words… “Here I am Lord; send me!”
Isaiah of Jerusalem was sent to a particular people in a particular time and a particular place to speak a particular Word. As are we. And there is no more important question for us as Lutherans to ask in this time called the 21st century and in this place called the United States of America than the question, “What is the Word we are called to speak?” Because you know there are a myriad of very loud voices proclaiming a whole bunch of words in the name of the God made known in Jesus that seem to me to have very little to do with this God or with this Jesus….
Like the one I saw on a church sign outside a small non-denominational church between Belfast and Augusta, Maine that said, “Either partake of the Living Bread or become toast.” Or the word we heard from Pat Robertson after the earthquake in Haiti, who suggested the devastation there was God’s rebuke upon the population for their ancestors’ use of “black magic,” or voodoo.
Or like the message we sometimes hear from our most sophisticated historically-rooted main-line denominations, including our own, that still sounds like this, “Salvation and redemption are ontological movements of self-improvement by which the elemental condition of our existential situation might be furthered in anticipation of something grandiose and worthy of every effort we might make in support of the process of sanctification.”
Or like the one I’m most tempted to speak because I know it so well. The one that goes like this. (sung to the tune of “Children of the Heavenly Father.”)
Oh my lovely Lutheran Ladies,
Drinking coffee strong and good,
Baking cookies by the hour,
Doing everything you should.
Yah’ I know you’re always pleasant,
Yah’ I know your manner’s mild,
Thinking grace is your through hot dish,
Tuna noodle with a smile.
But my lovely Lutheran Ladies,
Yah’ ya’ bettcha God loves you
Even though your lutefisk dinners
Taste a lot like Elmer’s Glue.
For the love of God is wider
Than the boundaries of the sea.
Offta, offta, alleluia,
Lutheran Ladies, by grace you’re free.
Maybe it’s time to reinstate the live coal in the commissioning of disciples, beginning with the pastors…. A live coal touched not only to our lips, but to our ears and our eyes and our hearts as well… Because maybe, by the power of that refining fire we might get to the heart of what we are called to speak….the heart of the word…in the same way my poet friend David Bengtson got to the heart of it one day while writing poems with grade-schoolers in his home state of Minnesota. He writes of that experience in a poem entitled “What’s Inside?”
Writing poems with a class of fifth and sixth graders at the elementary school in Grey Eagle, Minnesota, I try to help them imagine the extraordinary surprises that might be found in ordinary objects…
A leaf just beginning….a leaf about to fall.
What might we find if we could travel inside
the world of an orange, an acorn, an apple?
I show them my wife’s Russian nesting doll, matryoshka;
I open the mother and carefully lift out
each of the delicately painted peasant children,
line them across a table, until I hold the last one,
smaller than my thumbnail, and wonder what
we’d find inside this doll if we could travel that far.
…..
I hold out a round stone the size of my opened hand
and wonder what might be inside.
“Another stone,” says a student.
“And inside that stone?” I ask.
“Another stone” and “another stone”
and “another stone,” they echo.
“When we are finally left with the smallest grain of sand,
if we could go inside,” I ask, “what would we find?”
From my right, as though a young William Blake has
joined us, comes an answer, quick and confident.
“We’d find the universe,” he says.
Not so different perhaps from the 13th century abbot who held up an apple in the presence of his fellow monks, and posed the same question…. “What’s inside?” he asked… To which one monk responded, “the fruit of the apple.”
“And inside the fruit of the apple?” asked the abbot.
“Seeds,” answered another.
“And inside each seed?” the abbot queried further….. Silence filled the room. “Ah, inside each seed,” the abbot said in whispered reverence, “is an orchard.”
Have you ever noticed how we churchy people tend to spend a lot of time focusing on what’s outside; namely, the skin of the theological apple? The skin of the apple with all its favorite questions to ponder, like how many angels can balance on the head of a pin, or what day the end of the world will actually arrive, or which drawer in the church kitchen to put the spoons, or if Mary was really a virgin, or whether or not the scoundrel who confesses the lordship of Jesus Christ on his deathbed actually gets to go to heaven….
Have you ever noticed how we churchy people spend a lot of time focusing on those kind of questions with their accompanying black and white, easy-to-manage, bumper sticker answers, which, says Barbara Brown Taylor is a lot like “studying the menu without every tasting the meal.” Or “spending our lives learning the stuff in the field guide without ever going into field.” Or perhaps, speaking eloquently and convincingly about the shiny smooth quality of Red Delicious apples, all the while forgetting that inside the skin, inside the fruit, inside the seed is an orchard….
What would it sound like if we, as people of faith, started to talk about the universe inside the grain of sand, or the orchard inside the seed? What word would we speak in the midst of the mess in which we find ourselves in our particular time and our particular place? What’s inside those lovely outside words like “Church, Lutheran, Scripture, sin, salvation, redemption, sanctification, judgment, heaven, hell, mercy, grace, stewardship, evangelism, Jesus, God, Holy Spirit, Trinity, incarnation, resurrection, love?” What’s inside? What word could possibly break forth into an orchard?
The pastor of the Lutheran Church of my childhood taught me the word inside all these outside words, beginning one night during confirmation class when we were all bored out of our minds studying Luther’s Small Catechism. None of us could image how anything our pastor was trying to teach us had anything to say to us of importance or interest…. Nevertheless, it was a night I shall never forget. For our pastor sensed our boredom. He walked over to the light switch on the wall next to the door and turned it off. Then in the darkness of a cold, clear Illinois night he invited us over to the windows, where he simply said, “Just look at all those stars.”
This is the pastor who taught me the word inside all the outside words. The word that runs through-out scripture from the first page to the last, he said. Do you know what it is? …. I’ll give you some hints.
Once, when a young woman was dying of cancer, a friend gave her a round stone with a hole in the center. The young woman who was dying couldn’t figure out what it was….nevertheless, with the little bit of strength she had to muster, she held the stone up to her eye. “Ah,” she whispered after a long moment, “now I see… it’s the way through.”
During the Holocaust a group of Jewish prisoners in a concentration camp decided to put God on trial on charges of negligence and abandonment. Over the course of a number of days the witnesses spoke powerfully against God, as the rabbi, taking the part of the judge, listened. At the end of the trial, the rabbi said, “in light of all the evidence given during the past few days, I hereby indict God on all the charges, and declare him dead….. Nevertheless, night is falling and it is time for evening prayers. Come let us pray…”
One Advent not so long ago, Christmas came early to a family I know very well. It came to four brothers who had had difficult relationships over many years, stemming from a family history involving alcohol and mental illness. The brothers were grown, and living far distances from one another; one lived in Oregon, one in Idaho, one in New Jersey and one in Maine. Long periods of time would go by without the brothers speaking to one another, and even then there was little love lost between them.
But when the oldest brother was about to turn 60, one of the younger brothers decided to try something he’d thought about for a while. And so he called each of the other two brothers and talked them into flying to Boise, Idaho for the oldest brother’s birthday. And he called the oldest brother’s wife and filled her in on the plan he had hatched for the occasion.
So on the day of the oldest brother’s birthday, his wife sent him to Costco to get groceries. The shopping list wasn’t long, but it was very specific. Costco is a big store. When the oldest brother arrived in the vegetable department to get the carrots, he found his brother from Oregon. When he started down the pasta aisle for the spaghetti, he found his brother from Maine. When he got to the cereal section for the Cheerios, he found his brother from New Jersey, and the four brothers spent the next three days finding each other. That was eight years ago, and they still check in with one another regularly…
In our family, we call it our Costco Christmas. Patterns of systemic dysfunction had plagued the family for years, nevertheless….
Nevertheless…..
I learned from the pastor of my childhood that this is the inside word; the most hopeful word in all the Bible because it means there is always, by the power of love, a second part to the story of every closed up, narrow, confining, deadly, tomb-like thing…. Start the sentence any way you want….
“In the beginning there was darkness and chaos….
Nevertheless…..
“Once upon a very dark time, Egypt held the people of Israel in the deadly bonds of slavery…. Nevertheless….
“In the deepest part of a great wilderness was a valley of dry bones….. Nevertheless….
“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise-men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under…. Nevertheless….
“Zacchaeus, you little two-bit shyster, no one in their right mind would go to your house for dinner…. Nevertheless….
“Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. Having said this, he breathed his last…. Nevertheless….
“So then, brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh – for if you live according to the flesh you will die; nevertheless…..
It is a Good Friday world we live in you know, and we ourselves are standing knee-deep in the mess….
Nevertheless….
Nevertheless…. The inside word, the Easter word, the Resurrection word, the Jesus word, the orchard word, the word that says there is always, by the power of love, a second part to the story of every narrow, closed, tomb-like, deadly thing, just as Isaiah discovered that day in the temple…. Did you notice it? Did you notice the “nevertheless” in Isaiah’s call narrative as we heard it read a bit ago? Listen…
And Isaiah said, “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; a people in bondage to trinkets and trifles and systems and seductions so subtle and sweet we can’t even see them…..nevertheless my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts.” Our translation says “yet” instead of “nevertheless,” but in Hebrew the word is “qi,” which can mean either…. “Nevertheless/yet, despite all this mess in which I stand,” Isaiah cries, “my eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts….
“My eyes have seen the king, the Lord of Hosts…. not only in his grandeur. Not only in his eminence, but also in his imminence…. For look, the hem of the Lord’s robe fills the temple…. The hem of his robe.” …. Did you ever hold onto the hem of your mother’s robe when you were afraid? Then you will know how lovely and how intimate such a thing can be.
Perhaps it was the intimacy of the divine hem rather than the heat of the live coal that blossomed forth the orchard in Isaiah’s heart that day and enabled him to say, “Here I am Lord, send me.” Perhaps it was that moment when Isaiah recognized that the God of all creation was an “inside God,” a God who dared, by the power of love, to enter the inside of the temple, the inside of the moment, the inside of the mess, the inside of the pain and bondage to speak the accompanying, suffering, Eastering, orcharding, liberating word of love…. nevertheless….
Perhaps it was the hem and not the coal…
If so, then I guess we don’t need the live coal after all. (Graduates of the School of Lay Ministry, you can breathe again). Because all we need is the hem, the bread, the wine, the water, the incarnate Word, the pastor who takes us now and then from our copies of Luther’s Small Catechism and brings us to the window on a cold winter Illinois night and says, “Just look at all those stars.” All we need is a friend who will give us a stone with a hole in the middle when we’re dying from cancer… “Ah,” she said holding it up to her eye…. “It’s the way through.”
All we need is anything that will remind us in the midst of our amnesia, in the midst of our own mess, that God is inside, having come, by the power of love, as deeply as possible….as deeply as possible to speak the inside word that says there is always a second part to the story of every narrow, closed, deadly, tomb-like thing. (Do you sense an orchard growing in your heart?)
This is the Word we are called to speak, dear brothers and sisters in Christ. In our own time and our own places, in our own families and communities of faith and halls of power and in all our dark moments when God is indicted on all counts of negligence and abandonment and declared dead….
This is the Word we are called to speak, because we have heard it ourselves, and we know not only what’s inside, but who’s inside….
shhhhh….. Listen….. It sounds like this….. (Make the sign of the cross…)
Nevertheless…..
A sermon given by Pastor Elaine Hewes
Redeemer Lutheran Church
Bangor, Maine
(Re-Printed and posted with permission from Pastor Elaine Hewes. Thank You!)
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thanks for information!!…