When Pope John XXIII was elected more than 50 years ago, he was asked what he planned to do first as head of the Roman Catholic Church.  He replied:  “We are going to open the windows and let in some fresh air!”

The Scripture lessons from Luke-Acts this morning focus on Christ’s Ascension – not an aspect of our tradition that we normally spend a lot of time on!  We are told that after Easter morning, the risen Jesus appeared to his disciples and followers in many different ways for a period of time (40 days).  Then he took his final leave from them and ascended to Heaven.  But he did not do so without parting instructions – and those instructions were about opening the windows…and letting in the fresh air.

Jesus’ followers were directed to wait – to wait together – to wait together for the Holy Spirit.   The Spirit would empower them to be Christ’s witnesses – in their city, in their region, and out into the wider world.

I realize that many of us have trouble waiting – I often do myself, growing impatient at the slightest delay.  We have places to go, people to see, things to do and no time to sit around!    We have grown accustomed to multi-tasking, to being on the move, to being busy.  We are immersed in a culture that teaches us to be productive all the time, that says we are valued according to what we accomplish and that we must be “masters of our own situation.”

Yet instead of the instruction, “Don’t just sit there, DO something” – Jesus’ mandate is:  “Don’t just do something, sit there!”

The message of Ascension Day is that those of us who love Jesus and desire to follow him must wait. . .  wait together . . .  wait together for the Holy Spirit.  Rather than crashing our way through the undergrowth, charting our own course or flailing in our attempt to do something. . we are told to wait for the promise of God to be fulfilled, for the moment when we will receive the power of the Spirit.

In the words of Rev. Catherine Taylor of Blacksburg VA:

Jesus says, “Stop worrying about having things the way you want them and wait for something else, a power that is coming. A gift is on the way. Wait for it.”

A gift is on the way – wait for it!

Rev. Taylor reminds us that:

“We celebrate the Ascension because we’re no different from the early church who gathered around this story from the beginning to hear what they needed: the news that they were going to receive power. And perhaps even more importantly, we celebrate this day to be reminded that we have no power of our own and never have.”

What does it mean  – on the very day that we celebrate the life of Calvary Church and reflect on a year together in discipleship and ministry – to say that our church  has no power of our own?  What does it mean right now for our church to be “higher powered,” as they say in the recovery movement?  As we imagine the road ahead, as we seek to dream holy dreams and see Christ’s intention for our future. . . what does it mean for us to stop, put away the markers and newsprint and just wait. . . wait to be clothed with “power from on high?”  (Luke 24:49)

I think it means we all have to become sailors.

Now I myself haven’t ever sailed except once – with our friend Bob on a small lake in Freedom, New Hampshire.  We were in a tiny Sunfish sailboat, hardly big enough for two.

There are others of you know much, much more about sailing than I do!  But I do know that the basic goal of sailing is to move the sails and catch the wind.  That’s exactly what the church needs to do:  adjust our sails to catch the winds of the Spirit and then be moved in the direction that the Spirit is going.  I also know that on a large sailboat it takes a whole crew working together to accomplish that task.

Not a bad image for the church of Jesus Christ!

Robert McAfee Brown once wrote:

“The Church is a community in a very special sense.  It is not just a voluntary fellowship of people who think it a ‘good idea’ to get together occasionally.  The authentic Christian note is that the Church is a community created by God, called into existence by God, and dependent upon God for its very life and energy.” (from The Significance of the Church)

As we ready ourselves for the celebration of Pentecost next week and (I pray) a new manifestation of the Holy Spirit in us and through us in coming days. . . we need to think like sailors, pray like sailors and move like sailors – waiting upon the Spirit’s power in our life and ministry.

I wonder just how many of these coloring pages I completed in elementary school, featuring drawings of Greek gods and goddesses, as we learned the stories of Greek religion (then termed “mythology”). . . Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, Hera, Artemis (my favorite because she got to be out in the woods a lot.

Paul, the first Christian missionary, was struck by much more than bright Crayola colors as he walked around Athens in the year 52 of the Common Era – he saw statues erected to the Greek deities – altars everywhere he turned. Statues of gold, silver and precious stones.

Let’s hear the story again (Acts 17:22-31), this time from The Message:

22 So Paul took his stand in the open space at the Areopagus and laid it out for them. “It is plain to see that you Athenians take your religion seriously. 23 When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed, to the god nobody knows. I’m here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you’re dealing with. 24 “The God who made the world and everything in it, this Master of sky and land, doesn’t live in custom-made shrines 25 or need the human race to run errands for him, as if he couldn’t take care of himself. [God] makes the creatures; the creatures don’t make [God]. 26 Starting from scratch, [God] made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable, with plenty of time and space for living 27 so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him. [God] doesn’t play hide-and-seek with us. [God] is not remote; [God] is near. 28 We live and move in him, can’t get away from him! One of your poets said it well: ‘We’re the God-created.’ 29 Well, if we are the God-created, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to think we could hire a sculptor to chisel a god out of stone for us, does it? 30 “God overlooks it as long as you don’t know any better – but that time is past. The unknown is now known, and [God's] calling for a radical life-change. 31 He has set a day when the entire human race will be judged and everything set right. And he has already appointed the judge, confirming him before everyone by raising him from the dead.”

Paul’s visit to Athens was unexpected and unplanned. His preaching about Christ had so angered the people of Thessalonica that they followed him and incited riots among the crowds in the next town. Rather than risk his safety, the believers there had sent him to safety in Athens.

There, while he waited for Silas and Timothy to join him, he saw the sights and tried to understand something about the Athenians. He found shrines and altars dedicated to a variety of gods and goddesses. It troubled him – “provoked his spirit,” Acts says – and he sought to engage monotheists, polytheists and philosophers on the subject.

Concerned about Paul’s teachings of Christ crucified and risen, some of the intellectual elite took him to face the court of elders, kind of an Athens city council which dated back more than 600 years. There at the Areopagus, a small rocky hill northwest of the Acropolis, he encountered the nine prestigious and venerable judges who adjudicated matters of crime, law, philosophy and politics.

After all, Paul seemed to be promoting “foreign deities,” the crime for which Socrates was convicted and received the death penalty of a cup of poison.

Was Paul perhaps guilty of the same crime? Might he suffer the same fate?

What had struck Paul the most, in his walking tour of the city, was the altar he found erected not to the goddess of agriculture or the god of war. . . but “To an Unknown God.” – “the God nobody knows,” as The Message puts it.

This altar had no idol because neither the name nor the attributes of the god was known. It was like the tomb of the unknown soldier, whose exact identity cannot be ascertained.

Perhaps someone had been healed, cured or rescued and need to thank the gods in some way, but didn’t know exactly who to thank!

Perhaps it was left over from a time six centuries before Christ when Athens was decimated by a mysterious plague which had no known cause or cure. City leaders assumed that it was the consequence of offending one of the panoply of deities but, not knowing which one to appease, they erected altars that insured they wouldn’t miss any of the deities. And the plague disappeared.

Perhaps to us that seems like a ridiculous, one-size-fits-all approach to religion – sort of like hedging one’s bets. But before we start to feel superior, we should consider these words by West Virginia UM pastor Jenny Williams:

“If the gods of their other altars or shrines fail them, perhaps an “as-yet-unnamed” deity will look favorably upon them. Though this sounds like an ancient problem, I’ve seen a similar sight in southern California. There you can get into a car that has a rabbit’s foot sitting in the cup holder, a Sacred Heart air freshener dangling from the rear-view mirror, a bobblehead Buddha sitting on the dashboard and a Darwin “fish with feet” emblem on the trunk.”

It’s the age-old problem faced by Judaism and then by Christianity: the problem of idols.

From that first golden calf statue fashioned out of the jewelry of Jews fleeing Egypt, God’s people have had to resist and challenge the siren songs of human-made things which purport to offer prosperity, fertility, success and happiness.

Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah actually poked fun at idols and idolmakers, pointing out the ridiculous substitutes their people were accepting, as they abandoned the true and holy God of the covenant:

Jeremiah:

“A tree is cut down in the forest; it is carved by the tools of the woodworker and decorated with silver and gold. It is fastened down with nails to keep it from falling over. Such idols are like scarecrows in a field of melons; they cannot speak; they have to be carried because they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them; they can cause you no harm, and they can do you no good.” (Jeremiah 10:3-6)

Isaiah:

“The maker of idols hasn’t the wit or the sense to say, “Some of the wood I burned up. I baked some bread on the coals, and I roasted meat and ate it. And the rest of the wood I made into an idol. Here I am bowing down to a block of wood!” It makes as much sense as eating ashes. (Isaiah 44:19-20)

Our culture has no reason for self-righteousness. We too have a society filled with alluring and tempting things to which we are beckoned to devote ourselves. And underneath it all can be seen a skewed search for God.

Again, Jenny Williams:

People are reaching for an experience of the divine. Some express their search in their automobile shrines, while others kneel at the altar of Superlative Experience: they’re seeking the highest high, the biggest vehicle, the most extreme sport, the most sordid confession on a reality show. Many in our culture are indulging in this cult of experience, which is actually a misguided groping for God.

Now one way we could go with this passage is to discuss the idols in our own cultural surroundings. “American Idol” is a pretty good place to start. The advertisement for Jeep Cherokee might be another: “The things we make, make us. . . ” but that’s not where I want us to go this morning.

Paul was, like prophets in every age, appalled by the existence of so many false gods. Nonetheless he seems to have genuinely approached the Athenians with respect, recognizing people searching for God but in “all the wrong places.” He went beneath the “symptoms” to find the cause.

(Blogger Melissa Sevier):

Instead of telling them that they are vile pre-judged pagans on a one-way trip to hell, he tells them that both he and they worship the same God! Paul and the other vagabond preachers saw God at work in the world through all people; expanding the definition of “chosen.”

How can this story from the first generation church help us live as Christians in a multicultural, interreligious world?

It seems to me that the Church sometimes finds ourselves locked into a polarity from which we need, by God’s Spirit, to break free. In some corners of the church we hear only condemnation for the lack of religious clarity and commitment. In other quarters Jesus’ name is all too seldom mentioned, and it’s hard to get a read on what the point is, what is being proclaimed or lived out.

It’s kind of like the middle schooler who, preparing for summer camp, was worried that he might be taunted for being Christian. Nevertheless his mother carefully placed his Bible in his duffel bag, next to his clean socks. At the end of the week, the child returned, and his mother discovered the Bible in exactly the same spot it had been when he left home. “It’s ok, Mom,” the child said, with relief in his voice. “Nobody even knew that I love Jesus.”

Some Christians use their faith in a heavy-handed way – others don’t even mention Jesus’ name. Is there a “more excellent way??”

Paul leads here by example, and offers Christians a different way to live our faith in a world of cultural and religious diversity.

First, he is culturally multilingual – he learns about the people he is with, comes to understand what motivates them and what their values are. He is genuinely interested in them and speaks their language.

He quotes a poem by Aratus written in Athens 300 years earlier. “In, or perhaps through, whom we live and move and have our being: for we are his family.” Paul quotes a pagan poet!

He goes to the synagogue and talks with people there. He walks around the marketplace, engaging others in theological dialogue and debate.

Second, he finds common ground with people who are very different from him. I know you are interested in religion, he begins. So am I. You are children of God. So am I.

Third, he sees an opening and takes it. The “unknown God” reveals a gap in their thinking and a spiritual need. Paul steps in to fill in the blanks with his own experience and the proclamation of Jesus Christ to satisfy that need.

Fourth, he offers the message of the one God revealed in Jesus and challenges them to make a decision. He is debating Greek intellectuals who seems “to enjoy the search for truth more than the acceptance of it,” as one scholar observes. The Epicurean and Stoic philosophers wanted to engage God only as a concept, and not as the incarnate God who lays a claim upon our lives.

Bishop Will Willimon of Alabama served as chaplain at Duke University for more than twenty years. He tells the story of an undergraduate who complained about the religion department, which included four professors who taught a wide range of courses in world religions. “They know a great deal about a great many things in religion,” she said, “but none of them in the department are practitioners of any particular faith. I find that strange. They know everything about God except God!”

Finally, Paul has no control over the responses to his message about Christ. Some clearly mock and dismiss him as a wild card. Some indicate that they may want to talk again. Some believe, and become followers of the Jesus Way.

The “unknown God” is a God who can’t be “managed.”

The “unknown God” has created all human beings.

The “unknown God” has been made known in Jesus Christ.

But what shines forth is the way in which it is possible to communicate our truth in a world with many different beliefs:

The “unknown God” is a God who can’t be managed.

The “unknown God” has created all of us.

The “unknown God” has been made known in Jesus Christ.

Paul’s word for the people of Athens is a word for us, too – and for our world.

Thanks be to God.

At the heart of Methodist Christianity is a single word, and that word is GRACE.

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, was raised in a Christian home. His father Samuel was a clergyman in the Church of England in the 1700′s. John lived in a parsonage in Epworth, England and learned of Jesus Christ literally at the knee of his mother Susanna, who was a hearthside theologian and John’s first mentor and teacher.

At the age of 5 John was the last member of the family to be rescued from a house fire – and ever after he thought of himself as “a brand plucked from the burning.” This traumatic event shaped him forever, causing him to wonder for what purpose God had spared his life.

He was brought up as a Christian and baptized, taught to keep the commandments of God. He was nurtured in God’s goodness and love. “But,” he wrote “all that was said to me of inward . . . holiness I neither understood nor remembered.”

He faithfully read the Bible and said his prayers in the morning and evening. He attended church regularly and received the sacrament of communion when it was offered.

“Yet,” he said, “I had not all this while so much as a notion of inward holiness.”

At the age of 22 – as his father was urging him to go into the ministry – he began to see “that true religion was seated in the heart, and that God’s law extended to all our thoughts, as well as our words and actions. . . “I began to aim at, and pray for, inward holiness.” And doing good – being good – he thought he had become a good Christian.

In addition to the Bible, he continued to read serious books about the Christian life: Thomas a Kempis – William Law. He, along with his brother Charles and members of the first Methodist class meetings at Oxford University, began visiting the prisons, assisting the poor and sick in town and doing what good he could with his presence and with his money.

At the age of 27 he fasted twice a week and “omitted no occasion of doing good.”

Still he was haunted by an unsettledness in his soul. “I could not find that all this gave me any comfort, or any assurance of acceptance with God.” He sought the counsel of other Christians and even traveled to Savannah, in the English colony of Georgia, to work as a missionary among the native peoples of America.

Journal entry, February 24, 1738

“I went to America, to convert the Indians; but oh! who shall convert me? I have a fair summer religion. I can talk well; nay, and believe myself, while no danger is near; but let death look me in the face, and my spirit is troubled.”

In a terrible winter voyage across the Atlantic, which lasted four months, he witnessed the amazing serenity of a group of German Moravian Christians on board the ship – he envied their tremendous peace and calm.

“In the midst of the psalm wherewith their service began, the sea broke over, split the mainsail in pieces, covered the ship, and poured in between the decks, as if the great deep had already swallowed us up. A terrible screaming began among the English. The Germans calmly sung on.”

After an unsuccessful two years as a missionary in America, and an unhappy end to a promising courtship, he returned to England, now 35 years of age – disheartened and racked by self-doubt. He yearned for a “true, living faith” and the serenity exemplified by his friend Peter Bohler and the other Moravians.

On the evening of Wednesday, May 24, 1738 Wesley went “unwillingly” to a Methodist meeting in a home on Aldersgate Street in London. Someone was reading from Martin Luther’s preface to the Letter of Romans:

“Faith it is that brings the Holy Spirit, through the merits of Christ. The Spirit, in turn renders the heart glad and free. . .Then good works proceed from faith itself.”

“Faith is a living, unshakeable confidence in God’s grace; it is so certain, that someone would die a thousand times for it. This kind of trust in and knowledge of God’s grace makes a person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and all creatures. This is what the Holy Spirit does by faith.”

“About a quarter before nine [Wesley recorded in his Journal] while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”

No longer was the Christian gospel a kind of “general” good news – a message for others. The good news of Christ’s salvation became personal and real in a new and life-changing way that it had not quite ever been before in Wesley’s heart and life.

John Wesley was reborn, at the age of 35, by the Holy Spirit and knew from then on the peace he had sought. The fear of death with which he had struggled abated and disappeared – so that at his death at age 87 his last words could be: “The best of all is, God is with us.” He found the “true, living faith” he had so long sought and yearned for – and that contagious faith began to spread like wildfire in England, America and around the world.

At the heart of Methodist Christianity is a single word, and that word is GRACE.

Grace is like the Coast Guard ship that comes to rescue those who are drowning. It is there not because we deserve it, but because God loves us. It is “prevenient” – it exists before we are even aware of it (which is why we baptize infants in the UMC and do not require that persons be of an age to decide for themselves.) Grace is a gift.

Grace is also like the lifeline thrown out to a drowning person. “Justifying” grace is the act of grasping onto that lifeline – the decision to reach out, to trust, to accept the salvation, the rescue, being offered. And grace is what happens once we are taken aboard the ship – covered with blankets, surrounded by caring hands, being warmed by a mug of hot coffee.

It’s all gift, and it’s all grace – and it’s not until we have been changed on the inside that we will truly understand it and be at peace.

The lifeline is prevenient grace.

Our taking hold of the lifeline is justifying grace. Faith allows us to trust and reach out – and empowers us to grasp the saving lifeline of Christ’s love and transforming presence.

What we do with the rest of our lives – after our rescue – is what Wesley termed “sanctifying” grace – or holiness. Inward holiness of heart and outward holiness of life – all of it made possible only by the renewal of God’s power working within us.

Hear again the words of Ephesians 2:8-9:  It’s God’s gift from start to finish!

You did not save yourselves; it was a gift from God.

It is by God’s grace that you have been saved through faith. It is not the result of your own efforts.

You are saved by God’s grace because of your faith. This salvation is God’s gift – it’s not something you possessed; it’s not something you did that you can be proud of. Instead, we are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things. God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.

At the heart of our Wesleyan, Methodist, Protestant, Christian heritage is a single word – and that word is? “GRACE!”

Grace is the #1 strand of our DNA and must become the guiding principle and reality of our lives.

Because of God’s grace we no longer need to measure ourselves, or allow others to measure us, by human standards of achievement. A sense of worth is God’s gift to us. Our lives are ultimately justified and our worth assured through faith in Jesus Christ. “To accept this as the central reality of our lives is the most critical spiritual concern that confronts us,” in the words of Christian author James Fenhagen.

In closing, I share with you the Gospel according to Frederick Buechner

“Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There’s no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream, or earn good looks, or bring about your own birth. . . Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. . . A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace:

There’s nothing YOU have to do. There is nothing you HAVE to do. There is nothing you have to DO.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you ARE because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.

There’s only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you’ll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

The 23rd Psalm is one of the best-known, most-loved pieces of the entire library known as the Holy Bible. Some say that in an age of increasing biblical illiteracy, the familiarity to many of this psalm is a very encouraging sign!

The fact that the psalm was written by, and for, an agrarian society – that its imagery is taken from the every day life of sheep herders – could potentially make it more difficult for people in our electronic age to grasp…

Perhaps it is for that reason that we find many examples of modern paraphrases seeking to recast Psalm 23 in metaphors from our modern context. We have:

The 23rd Psalm for sailors: The Lord is my pilot, I shall not drift.

The 23rd Psalm for the workplace: The Lord is my real boss, and I shall not want.

The 23rd Psalm for busy people: The Lord is my pace-setter, I shall not rush.

and for computer geeks: The Lord is my programmer, I shall not crash.

Somehow Psalm 23 gets right to the heart of our religious life, our faith journey – our human need. At the heart of this poem – this song – is a relationship of trust, security and confidence – to which we aspire. We wish that this serenity could be a 24-7 thing…We pray that little Sylvia will know this serenity, which grows out of a knowledge of who she is and whose she is. We want that knowledge for ourselves as well – in a world that turns and changes so fast sometimes it makes us dizzy. We long for the steadying, reassuring faith of the psalmist – the comfort of sheep in the care of a good shepherd, who knows each one by name!

Now most of us probably do not take kindly to the idea of being a sheep. It goes against our North American cultural grain, which so prizes independence and self-sufficiency.

One seminary professor observes:

“Sheep are not brilliant creatures, and we cannot be flattered that the Psalm thinks of us as sheep. Leave a sheep without a shepherd, and he nibbles a bit of grass here, wanders over there for some more, sees a patch just past that rock; and before you know it the sheep is lost, or has fallen into a ravine, or been devoured by a wolf.”

But like it or not, we have all wandered and been lost – we are all threatened by ravines and wolves.

Key to our salvation and survival is our relationship with the One who, as another song of faith goes: “holds the future and holds my hand.”

A famous actor was once the guest of honor at a social gathering where he received many requests to recite favorite excerpts from various literary works. An old preacher who happened to be there asked the actor to recite the Twenty-third Psalm. The actor agreed on the condition that the preacher would also recite it. The actor’s recitation was beautifully intoned with great dramatic emphasis for which he received lengthy applause. The preacher’s voice was rough and broken from many years of preaching, and his diction was anything but polished. But when he finished there was not a dry eye in the room. When someone asked the actor what made the difference, he replied, “I know the Psalm, but he knows the Shepherd.”

At the heart of the matter is our relationship with the Shepherd. The 23rd Psalm is even composed so that the poetic design points us to that truth. Scholars have realized that in the original Hebrew there are exactly 26 words before the declaration “Thou art with me” and 26 words which come after. The poetic rhythm causes us to “sing” the truth that God being with us is at the very center of our lives.

And even those of us less familiar with farming and livestock – can turn to the experience of neighbors like Elizabeth Smith of Caretaker Farm in Williamstown MA. As a caring and responsible shepherd Elizabeth sleeps with a baby monitor in her room during lambing season so that she can run out to the barn in a flash when she is needed.

Dr. James Limburg:

God is with us. We are not alone down here. The whole Gospel is that God is with us. Jesus was called “Emmanuel,” which means “God with us.” John Wesley’s dying words were, “The best of all is, God is with us.” God doesn’t shelter us from trouble. God doesn’t magically manipulate everything to suit us. But the glorious with is unassailable, unchangeable, the only fact that matters.

Our hope grows out of our relationship with the One who is always the closest thing to us, even when – especially when – we are frightened and lost.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, considers the 23rd Psalm to be the answer to the question: how do we live in a dangerous, unpredictable, and frightening world?

Right after 9/11 — when everybody was asking me, “Where was God that Tuesday? How could God have let such a thing happen?” — the answer I found myself giving was, “God’s promise was never that life would be fair. God’s promise was, when it’s your turn to confront the unfairness of life, no matter how hard it is, you’ll be able to handle it, because He’ll be on your side. He will give you the strength you need to find your way through…God is on my side, not on the side of the illness, or the accident, or the terrible thing that happened. And that’s enough to give me the confidence.”

At the heart of our life is the love and presence of God. At the heart of our life – and in our passage through the valley of the shadow of death – is God’s companionship – which transforms every situation.

That is why people continue to turn to the 23rd Psalm – over and over again – that is how we can face the tough things without being defeated. That is our faith and our hope:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;

he leadeth me beside the still waters,

he restoreth my soul.

He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness,

for his name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.

Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,

Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

I’ve met many people who explain their absence from church and characterize their spiritual life by saying that they do believe in God – and they like to spend time in Nature. In response to that I have begun to say 2 Yes-es and a But. Yes to belief in God, Yes to time in Nature BUT…

You see over time I have come to a clear and firm conviction:

You can believe in God all by yourself.

BUT you cannot be a Christian alone.

John Wesley:

“Christianity is a social religion; to turn it into a solitary thing is to destroy it.”

The Emmaus story is for some of us our favorite post-Easter morning story.

It demonstrates the presence of the risen Christ in community – and in it we find all of the foundational elements of Christian life.

Christian scholar John Dominic Crossan apparently recognizes that readers find his book The Birth of Christianity daunting in size and scope. He pokes fun at himself. “It took me 500 pages to say what Luke says in just a few lines.” The lines he speaks of are the Emmaus story, which I think can be told almost entirely with participles – you know, those “-ing words” which point to ongoing action.

Walking – sharing – discussing – inviting – breaking – telling. Reflect on your Christian life -where are you strong, where do you need more of a good thing??

Walking side by side – on the road toward home – from Jerusalem to Emmaus, about 7 miles. . .two friends. Cleopas and someone else (so each of us can see ourselves in the picture?)

Sharing “all these things that had happened” – H2H highs and lows – ups and downs – being genuine and even vulnerable with each other about the things that are important to us. What’s happening with us.

Robert McAfee Brown:

“a community within which Christians can sustain one another, not only in the need for hardheaded analysis and personal immersion in struggle with the oppressed, but also in the need for the sustenance of the Gospel that promises hope and courage and freedom even when things look discouraging.”

Discussing the Scriptures – considering where God is in the events of the day – in the tragic, heartbreaking, confusing events of the day. Karl Barth: “Christians should read “with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

Walking… sharing… discussing…

Inviting “the stranger” to stay with them – hospitality – the mysterious person who had joined them on the road seemed to be going on farther than Emmaus. But they “urged” him, compelled him, prevailed upon him, to stay the night.

Paul Wadell, professor of Religious Studies at St. Norbert College, points out that “imitating the table manners of Jesus” isn’t easy because “the hospitality of God is radically unlike the hospitality of Martha Stewart.” Christians are called to live out not “safe neighbor love” – restricted to those we find easy to care for – but risky love offered to the stranger in our midst.

We can only do that because sharing bread is at the heart of our life – it is the essence of who we are and what we do.

Breaking bread: both table fellowship in homes AND Communion: central and key.

“Nothing schools us in the divine hospitality more than Christian worship and the Eucharist.”

Going to tell their good news – now THEIR good news. Has become their own. They will find that others back in the city have encountered Jesus also – in their own way – and from those encounters come the gospel message.

At the heart of the Christian story is bread – the breaking of bread, the sharing of bread. Which is why one cannot be a Christian all by herself or himself. At the heart of our story – at the heart of our life – is bread. Which makes you and me “companions,” from the Latin “com” “panis”- “with bread.” A companion is one who breaks bread with you.

Walking the road – sharing our lives – discussing the Bible – inviting strangers – telling about our God sightings. . .life in the Christian community. But at the heart of it all is bread. Breaking bread, sharing bread – and discovering the risen Christ as we do so.

Brian Wren: “Jesus is our strong companion – joy and peace shall never end.”

In Hammond Castle in Gloucester there is a 16th century German box. Made for keeping the family valuables. It is fitted with two locks and two keys. In order for the box to be opened, the two keys must be turned simultaneously, requiring not one but two members of the family.

The beauty of Christianity is that it requires not one, but two – to access the treasures of the faith. Jesus tells his followers: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am, in their midst.”

To quote UM Bishop Will Willimon:

“When some people come to the Lord’s Supper they come with long faces and sad hearts, as if they are at a funeral, as if their best friend has just died, or at least as if their best friend died 2000 years ago. But our best friend has NOT died! Christ is present, alive, at work in the world, in the midst of us.”

Thanks be to God – let the people say “Amen!”

Some years ago, a reporter carried out an interesting survey on the street.  Pedestrians were stopped at random and asked, without looking up, to describe the sky as it was that day.  Only a small percentage could give a description with reasonable accuracy!

William Arnold, who relates this incident, urges:  “One way to join the psalmist in marveling at God is by looking up!”

Psalm 8 is a song of praise, written by one who was inspired by the sky – not in the daylight – but a night. This poet was struck to the core by the vastness and magnificence of the cosmos and offers thanks to a wildly generous and imaginative Creator:  “When I consider your heavens:  O God, how majestic is your name in all the earth. . .”

This was sometime before the Hubble Space Telescope – probably 3 millennia prior to present-day scientists, who now estimate (because of Hubble’s data) that there are 9 galaxies in Creation for every human being alive on the face of the earth. . .

This adds a new “R” word to our mantra for the environment. . . You know the mantra I mean, right?  ” Reduce – Reuse – Recycle?”  The Psalmist inspires us to add another mandate:  “Reduce – Reuse – Recycle – “Rejoice!”  OR, perhaps the rejoicing should come at the beginning,  to indicate that our relationship with the planet – and our actions on behalf of the earth – are derived from our recognition of what God has done for us.

The rejoicing in Psalm 8 is 2-fold:  it is amazement and humility in the face of an awesome creation.  And it is amazement and humbleness not only that humans get to be part of it, but that we are assigned a singular role in creation, the role of caretaking:  “dominion”  – in the sense of a wise and compassionate ruler.

One preacher on this psalm writes:  “if there is anything more marvelous than the sheer scale and splendor of the universe, it is the revelation that in all of that vastness, we really do matter.”  In other wrods, even with the billions of galaxies, with their billions of stars,  and even with the billions of life forms dwelling just below the surface of our backyards, God is mindful of us.

God is mindful, but human beings – tragically – are not.

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is an “unprecedented environmental disaster” the impact and extent of the damage of which cannot yet be calculated or known.

Personally I am sick at heart about it.

This past Friday, the government closed more areas of the Gulf to fishing – now the area totals 48,000 square miles. There is talk of “dead zones” caused by oxygen depletion. The National Wildlife Federation expects that the oil “could wipe out entire generations of wildlife, making it impossible for some species ever to recover.”  Shrimp and brown pelicans – bluefin tuna – and manatees have all been mentioned by name.  The western Gulf coast is used by nearly all migratory land bird species of the eastern US, and is home to an estimated 45,000 bottlenose dolphins.   The EPA tells us that half of US wetlands are found in this area – an area totalling 5 million acres.

The oil rig blow-out occurred on April 20 and killed 11 BP employees.  The company, government and independent scientists disagree on the amount of oil that has gushed into the ocean to this point.  From his own sources, Al Gore estimates that it is 1 Exxon Valdez every 4 days.

And why?  Because human beings in the developed world – citizens of our nation – you and I – have not curbed our “insatiable appetite for oil” and are fouling our planetary nest.

Frances Beinecke, President of the Natural Resources Defense Council writes:

“We can blame BP for the disaster, and we should.  We can blame lack of adequate government oversight for the disaster, and we should.  But in the end, we also must place the blame where it originated:  America’s addiction to oil.  BP was drilling at 5,000 feet because our gluttonous appetite for oil demands it.”

And because we have already consumed most of the world’s readily accessible oil, we now have to look for it in more remote places, using even riskier and more damaging methods of extraction.

You and I, intended as partners with God in the care of creation – you and I, honored by God’s trust and caretaking responsibility – have allowed it to happen. We have committed sins of comission and sins of omission, and in large part have been oblivious to the environmental impact of our lives and lifestyles.

The UM Board of Church and Society is calling Christians to account:

“The slow-motion tragedy of the gulf oil spill lays bare our collective failure as caretakers of God’s good creation.  While unknown thousands of barrels of oil leak into the rich and diverse ecosystem of the Gulf o Mexico, how are we as Christians called to respond?  While it is easy to express anger and cast blame at the companies who owned, operated and profited from the deep sea exploration, we must also reflect on our own complicity through our endless demand for cheap oil.”

How do we respond as people of God, as people of faith, as awed viewers of the night sky, and singers of Psalm 8?

We have to change our ways.

We have to let go of the selfishness and greed that has caused us to put our own convenience and unsustainable lifestyles before the wellbeing of the extravagant web of life on this precious blue planet. . .”Insatiable is not sustainable.”

God placed us in a garden, and look what we have done to it!  We have behaved as if we were owners, rather than fellow creatures entrusted with caring for the garden.  We have confused our role.  We have acted as though the planet was ours to use as we please.  We have violated the first rule of ethics in medicine:  “First do no harm.”

Our friend Virginia White did a project for school on Rachel Carson some months ago.  We should find out what she learned.

More than 40 years ago Rachel Carson assessed the problem of environmental pollution this way:  “We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.” . . .

The Psalmist would add:  “a tiny part of the universe with a very big job!”

In response to this environmental emergency, we must urgently make lifestyle changes that will help restore balance and harmony to our planet home.   We need to once again approach our habitat with a sense of awe, reverence and humility.  We need every day to be Earth day!  We need to work as active and engaged citizens for a comprehensive energy and climate policy in our nation that will move us to a low-carbon economy.

The United Methodist Church, in its 2008 resolutions on Environmental Justice and Environmental Stewardship, has declared:

“We are called to eliminate overconsumption as a lifestyle, thus using lower levels of finite natural resources.  We are called to seek a new lifestyle, rooted in justice and peace. . . We urge UMs to analyze their consumption patterns and to seek and live a simple and less resource-dependent life.”

For their part, the UM Council of Bishops has written a pastoral letter calling us to hope, focused study and intentional and strategic action on behalf of a “renewed creation”.

Please go to hopeandaction.org and find out more.  We’ll be talking more about this in coming days.

We have to find the answers together – we need to change our ways, and change them now.

So here are a couple of things I have resolved to do, myself, knowing that it is very small in the grand scale of things:

1. I took the bus to church today.  I will do that more often.
2. I have started as of Friday using a push lawn mower.
3. I will continue to be aware of plastic packaging – no more cookies in plastic boxes and no more take-out that comes in styrofoam.
4. I will continue to support environmental organizations but will be more active in the legislative advocacy part of their work.

I call upon all of us to make changes as well – perhaps starting with reusable coffee cups, like the ones the Helping Hands group use!  That would be a really significant step in cutting our dependence on carbon-based fuel products.

At the grocery store this week I saw cloth grocery bags (I already have plenty) which read:  “Reduce, reuse, recycle, RETHINK your choices.”

The Gulf Oil spill urges me to:  “Reduce, reuse, recycle, REPENT”

Psalm 8 encourages us to:

Reduce, reuse, recycle and REJOICE – in this wonderful creation and in the privilege and honor of our special part in it.

( from Maryknoll magazine)

“In the beginning, God broke the divine darkness with a word – shattered the eternal silence with light – saw that it was good.

Nothing has ever been the same.

And God said, “Let butterflies blossom and flowers take wing.  Let feathered miracles reflect the glory of the earth.”  Then God looked at creation and wondered, “Who will care?”

So God imagined humans to care for creation.  And God gave them faith to see the light.  Last of all God gave them time, when all else failed, to begin anew.