Ash Wednesday Sermon - Feb 26,2 2020

watch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNw9gq3i3Io

Ash Wednesday, February 26, 2020

          Reading an email correspondence recently, I noted that the sender put “Matthew 6:27” underneath his signature.  I don’t really know this person other than that we are a part of the same email group.  I had received several messages from him, and as I looked back, I realized, he always signs that way.  His name, and then Matthew 6:27. 

          So, I reached out to him just say, ‘Hey, I didn’t realize you were a Christian.  I think it is really great that you sign your messages that way.’  He hasn’t responded to my overture.  Like I said, I don’t really know him.

          Jesus is speaking.  Matthew 6 is the middle of his Sermon on the Mount.  In verse 27 he asks, “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”  Of course, this jumped out at me because of the spiritual discipline I committed to uphold for Lent 2020.  Through prayer, time in worship, and daily practice, my 2020 Lenten spiritual discipline is to renounce worry.  Jesus says in verse 25, “I tell you, do not worry about your life.”  I want to do my best to follow that command literally.

I wrote this in my February 2020 church newsletter article.  Typically, we don’t broadcast our spiritual disciplines for the world to see.  In Matthew 6, verses 3, 6, and 18, Jesus warns against announcing when we give to the poor or pray or fast as spiritual disciplines.  We most certainly should do these things, but Jesus encourages us to practice these disciplines in secret, for God’s eyes, not to gain spiritual credit in the eyes of others.   Spiritual disciplines should never be cases of “look-at-me.”  Our spiritual disciplines should draw us closer to God.

So, why do I announce mine every year?  I do it in my role as pastor.  I hope church members will follow my example.  I don’t mean each person needs to practice the disciplines I’ve committed to.  Rather, I encourage each Christian who would follow Christ to follow my example by undertaking spiritual disciplines that will specifically help him or her grow in Christ.  Maybe for you it is a practice you need to spend more time on - service or prayer.  Or, maybe for someone else, it is giving more money, so that you discover God is who ensures your life, not your bank account.  For another, it might be fasting, so that we discover God fills us and we crave him more than satiating our appetites.

For me, the discipline this year is to renounce worry as an act of faith, a pathway to joy, and a step of obedience.  Why this rather unconventional discipline?

Without going into too many details or rehashing stories told too many times, 2017-2019 have been difficult years for me.  Each year ended with me thinking, “Whew, I’m glad that’s over,” only to be greeted by more severe challenges at the very start of the new year.  I’ve come to dread what the next January might bring.  Followers of Jesus are not to live in dread.  We are called to joy. 

Each of the past three years included many nights with me wide awake at 2, 3, 4AM.  Sometimes, I could name the weighty issues that drove sleep from me.  I tried reading, praying, playing online chess with people halfway around the world.  Often, I just ended up brooding until daylight and then plowing through the next day.  Other sleepless nights, I could not name the demon that wouldn’t allow me rest.  I simply sat with the foreboding hanging over me.  Followers of Jesus should be able to rest secure in his arms.  He modeled this, sleeping soundly as the boat he and the disciples were in was tossed about by angry waves. 

Reflecting upon how much the stresses of pastoring and parenting repeatedly shook my sense of wellbeing, it became clear, I was not setting a good example to my church family.  We know the world is drowning in sin and bound for death.  Why would we be surprised when things get tough and life is a struggle?  Part of my responsibility is to help us, God’s family, see God in the midst of the storm.  The challenges of 2017, ‘18, and ‘19 may subside or be overcome, but this new year will provide obstacles of its own, and when we overcome them, 2021 looms.  Joy doesn’t come when the problems go away.  Joy comes when we set our eyes on Jesus even as we find ourselves in the midst of struggle.

Thus, I knew I had to get a grip!  And I knew I couldn’t do it on my own power.  I knew I couldn’t just will myself to stop worrying.  I need God’s help.  God offers that help.  So, I need to turn my attention from the worries and stress to the God who helps.  

I wrote the newsletter article and declared my intent to renounce worry.  That same day, I went to hear the orthopedist’s conclusions about my ankle.  He said it was messed up in about 4 different ways and the best bet would be surgery, followed by 6 weeks of no weight bearing. 

I’ve spent the last 25 years visiting church members before they have surgery.  I pray with them.  Then I go home.  They are in that hospital bed for a while, and then rehab, and then maybe they return to health, or maybe not. And I have prayed, maybe while in morning quiet time, or maybe while out walking or jogging.  I worry, I pray, and then I get on with my healthy life. 

It’s a life where I feel like I need to have a lot of control.  Whether it is my family, or the church, I need to feel like I am in control.  I’m not!  But I need to feel like I am.  After March 6, I won’t be able to pretend that.  I won’t be able to rely on my own strength and independence.  If I want to come to the office to work, I’ll need Candy or I__ to drive me.  At home, there are a number of adjustments we will need to make to accommodate my post-surgery condition.

Immediately after the talk with the surgeon, the implications began settling in, and it made me … no, I couldn’t.  I had just hours before declared my intent to renounce worry.  Could God so quickly put my resolve to the test?

Let’s be clear.  My problems are very small compared to what many people here have had to face.  I know that.  The issues that worry me come in the natural course of life.  The degenerative condition in both my ankles would have required surgery whether I declared my intent to renounce worry or not.  God didn’t cause me to need the surgery just to test whether I really would lean on Him and not worry.  Rather, God met me in my distress, both the pressures of the past three years and my more recent fears.  You may perceive your problems to be much bigger than mine, or not as significant.  Whatever you’re facing, joy comes when we meet Jesus in it, take His hand, and allow ourselves to be led as He walks us out of it. 

Jesus knew his journey would lead to his death, and I believe, he knew it would be death on a cross.  Never did he show the slightest apprehension about his fate. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his crucifixion, he begged for another way, but that was not the prayer of worry.  That was a prayer of anguish at being betrayed, denied, and abandoned. 

He says, “I tell you, do not worry.”  He had the authority to give this command because he is Lord, because he faced much worse than what we face, and because he did it without worrying himself.  His “do not worry” is not an overture of encouragement.  It’s a command from the Holy God. 

Along with the command comes grace, because try as we might, we cannot follow it, not perfectly.  Committing to spiritual disciplines is our attempt to lean-in, into obedience, into the realities of the Kingdom. 

I wonder how the guy who signs his name with Matthew 6:27 is doing in his own efforts to renounce worry.  As I said, he never got back to me.  But someone who does know him told me a little more about what led him to this verse.  He is young, under 25.  Last year, his sister died while having a seizure.  Unbelievable grief!  What more can be said?  Jesus’ words of promise - promise that we need not worry - have been a lifeline for this young man.

Having turned fifty, having just gotten over the flu, facing one ankle surgery and possibly another, as well as other procedures that come with turning 50, 2020 will be for me a year of attending on my own health.  To do that well, I need to focus more than ever on who I am in Christ.  The church is His and He’ll take care of it and even help it thrive.  And he’ll help me do my part in it, but he will have HIs successes with or without me.  My family is his and I have my part in it.  Through prayer, worship, and daily intent, I must lean into Him.

I close by inviting you to consider your own story.   The God who walks with young people through unbearable grief and helps 50-year-olds come to grips with their own frailty is the same God that walked Jesus down the road to the cross and then out of the empty tomb.  That God loves you.  God knows your story.  So, spend time considering your story, especially the struggles that threaten your spiritual life. Then select spiritual disciplines to which you will commit from now, Ash Wednesday until Easter Sunday this year.  Through the consistent practice of these disciplines, lean into Jesus’ embrace.  You’ll grow in your relationship with Him and even in times of trial, you will have joy.

AMEN

On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety (by Andrea Petersen)

Andrea Petersen gets intensely personal in her book “On Edge: A Journey Through Anxiety.”  She tells of her lifelong struggle with identifying her own battle with anxiety disorders.  In the process, she is transparent not only about herself but also about her family.  She includes the time when she briefly lived, in high school, with a friend instead of with her parents because they had moved and she wanted to finish out the school year.   That disastrous idea was aborted midstream.  She also relays her father’s laid back parenting style, including a time he was supposed to be watching her, but was high on has, and she got into the hash. 

She clearly loves her parents and her husband and child. And all of them have been a part of her journey.  As she tells the story, she also relays the research and different approaches to treatment that have been used as psychology has evolved in its understanding of anxiety.  She comes at the issue from every conceivable angle, but she skillfully reminds the reader throughout that her work as a journalist comes from both her professional acumen and from her own tortured experience with anxiety.  A most telling observation comes at the end of the chapter in which she explore the connection to heredity and anxiety.  She writes, “Anxiety disorders almost certainly have multiple causes – from genetics to childhood trauma to how your parents interact with you.  And for any given person, the mix of these factors will be as singular as a fingerprint” (p.92).

In the closing chapter, Peterson shares some of the coping strategies that have enabled her to learn to live with anxiety and even thrive in spite of that anxiety.  She muses about what life would be like if she did not have anxiety, but then she quickly dismisses the notion.  “When I try to envision my life without all the experiences anxiety has given me – as well as the ones it has taken away – I don’t recognize myself” (p.260).  Her conclusion is realistic and hopeful. 

I read this book in order to help me love someone in my life who has an anxiety disorder.  And the book has indeed been helpful.  I recommend it for anyone who struggles with anxiety or for anyone who wants to better love and care for people they know with anxiety.

What The Resurrection Means for our Pain (1 Peter 1:3-9)

Sunday, April 3, 2016

            What color of suffering do you know well?  Endless shades of pain visit human beings: disease and treatments that mock us with hope only to have hope dashed when a relapse comes; loss – loss of a loved one, loss of a relationship, loss of job and with it loss of identity; that which shall not be named – mental illness; anxiety of various types.  Pain comes from every angle.  Anxiety by itself takes on numerous forms – relational.  I struggled with that one for years.  There’s theological anxiety: what if what we do every Sunday is all for nothing, there is no God, and this life is all there is?  And social anxiety, which branches off in countless directions.

            What a horrible opening paragraph to the sermon one week after Easter.  Just last Sunday, we stood joyfully blinded by light emanating from the empty tomb.  We can still see it from here, still feel its warmth.  And I stand reciting verse after verse of depression. 

            First Peter 1:6 says Christians rejoice even as we suffer various trials.  This letter was read in churches that worshiped about 60 years after the resurrection.  These were second generation Christians, most of whom had not met Jesus in person or even any of his original followers.  They came to faith as we do, by the witness of those who came before them.  However, unlike us, in the late first century, to be part of a Christian church was to be part of an extremely small and often persecuted minority.  Where the passage describes the “various trials,” that word ‘various’ literally means in Greek ‘multi-colored.’

            That’s the crossroad where today’s church meets the Christians of the first century.  That’s the intersection of struggle and faith.  While our trials differ from theirs, like them our struggles are multi-colored.  Some of the trials we go through come from our own mistakes.  We find ourselves knee-deep in messes of our own making.  Some can be explained.  A person is in a wheel-chair because another person drank too much beer and then drove a car.  Some suffering cannot be explained.  God, why does one 55-year-old run several marathons a year while another 55-year-old comes down with cancer?  And God doesn’t answer the “why” question.  Some suffering is unfairly stigmatized.  We show great compassion for the one with cancer while we judge the one with depression.   Neither did anything to be afflicted.  It is not the depressed person’s fault he is depressed but from Christians he hears, “Get over it.” 

And by the way, even if someone suffers and it is his own fault, as followers of Jesus, the giver of unlimited grace, aren’t we to be givers of grace and compassion?  It is why Christians visit prisons and love prisoners.  We are called, in Christ, to even love people who in some way are responsible for the difficulties in their lives.  We are not supposed to rub people’s noses in the messes they make.  We are called to love all and especially to heap love upon those in pain. 

Eventually, pain visits each one of us.  What do we do with this word from 1^st Peter that says followers of Jesus rejoice in our trials?

How do we rejoice in times of trial?

Easter is not that far in the rear view mirror.  It is just last Sunday.  See the tomb?  It is empty because Jesus who was dead is alive, resurrected.  Feel the life pouring forth from Easter?  First Peter says God has “given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:6).  The resurrection doesn’t stay fixed as something we sing about at the beginning of spring only to stay there, forgotten by midsummer, and then re-visited next year again at the first of spring.  The resurrection is a means by which God gives us new birth.

In new birth, we have undergone a change and there’s no going back to who we were before we put our trust in Him.  In new birth, we have a new outlook.  Yes, we still face challenges and trials.  Some among us go through significant suffering.  All have times of difficulty.  Yet we know that on the other side of our deaths, eternal life awaits.  The darkness of our rainy days is pierced by the vibrant rays of eternal joy that is ours in Christ. 

Also in new birth, our sins are forgiven and paid for.  So we can relate to one another as individuals free from death’s grip.  In the resurrection of Jesus God adopts us as His own sons and daughters and reserves for us the inheritance promised to children of the king.  We are, in Christ, a family.  This doesn’t instantly make our present struggles go away.  But it does mean that when we face numerous shades of pain, we do not face these trials alone. The resurrection doesn’t stay put in the week of late March and early April.  The resurrection is God’s way of creating.  God creates hope.  God creates a family.

The resurrection also opens the door to personal knowledge of God.  We are invited into real relationship with the creator of the universe.  First Peter says that we of the New Birth are “being protected by the power of God” (1:5).  This might sound odd when we openly acknowledge that Christians have hard days and seasons in dark valleys like everyone else.  What does this scripture mean when it says we are being protected?

We’ve named a few things.  In Christ, we have eternal hope.   Even though we live through some painful some days, life after death comes next.  In Christ, we have a community. Even in bad times, we have people around us to make the bad more bearable.  And when 1^st Peter as well other passages says, we are “being protected,” it means God is with us now. 

The Holy Spirit is mentioned in 1^st Peter 1 in verse 2, again in verse 11, and in verse 12.  The Spirit makes the church holy (v.2) – both the church corporate and individuals within the church.  We are set apart to God.  The Spirit lives within us, helping us know how to pray, giving us courage and strength to stand up in spite of the onslaught of various attacks (v.11).  And, the Spirit brings into our hearts news from Heaven (v.12). 

Of course this is not news like that reported by The New York Times or CNN or WRAL.  What we get by the Spirit from Heaven is revealed news – deeper understanding of God.  It puts our difficulties in proper perspective, helps us see the blessings in our lives, and expands our capacity to love others.  Hold onto these promises:  we have eternal hope, we are in a family, and God is with us.

What makes it possible for us to keep our eyes on the resurrection so that we are comforted and emboldened in dealing the world around us?  I find hope in a basic practice that when done consistently creates in us a mindset that we will see God no matter how tough today or any day is.  In this practice we stay fixated on God and who we are as people of the resurrection in Christ.

I am talking about daily and weekly rituals of worship.  Verse 6 says we rejoice even when we suffer.  I am certain that the rejoicing talked about here, which was done in the early church, was not an emotional response.

Yes! I just lost my job because my pagan neighbor found out I refuse to offer sacrifices to this city’s local deity.  Fist pump!  Oh year, my wife and I were kicked out of the synagogue because they don’t believe Jesus is the Messiah and we do.  We just lost the community of friends we’ve had our entire lives.  Sweet!  My son just got his head knocked in by a centurion who found out he follows Jesus and will not bow to images of Caesar.  Hallelujah.

I don’t think that’s what was meant by rejoicing.  The early Christians wept and mourned; they had grief, fear, and doubt.  “Rejoice” is a spiritual discipline.  We are Easter people.  Even when we know our Christian brothers in Syria are being targeted by terrorists, we rejoice because of who Jesus is, because our sins are forgiven, and because of what Easter means. 

He is risen!  Syrian Christians hurt, but terrorists cannot wipe them out.  We worship weekly to remember our victory and rejoicing is part of our worship because we are Easter people.

He is risen.  My depression cannot get the best of me because I sing the songs of resurrection even when I am down; and, when I am so down I cannot sing, my brothers and sisters in Christ around me sing for me and I am reminded of the family of which I am a part.

He is risen.  Alcoholism, death, angst – none of it can claim us.  We are already claimed by the one who defeated death.  We are his.  Our weekly and monthly rhythms of worship remind us, keep us in step, open us to new revelations from God, and help us regularly reset our lives. 

I have just experienced a loss that leaves me feeling like a failure, utterly crushed and adrift.  Rejoice!  Hallelujah!  Amen! 

The rejoicing done in corporate and individual worship is not a show of false happiness.  My loss leaves me feeling broken.  But I trust more in the God of Easter than I trust in my feelings.  It feels like I am broken, but the tomb is empty; there is more to the story and more to my story.

So, we come back every week.  We look one another in the eye.  We embrace.  We weep at the cross on Good Friday, soar in the light on Easter Sunday, and the rest of the time immerse ourselves in the word and in the worship.  We trust it.  We rejoice because of who God is and God is who He is no matter what is going on. 

In doing this, we discover as we look back at the Hells we’ve endured that blessing was there all along.  Sometimes we don’t realize salvation is happening while we are being saved but only upon looking back at it. Oh, that’s where Jesus was!

“Although you have not seen him,” First Peter says, “you love him; and even though you do not see him now,  you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls” (1:8-9).  In daily, weekly practices of worship, we don’t see Him, yet, actually, we do see the Lord.  In the church, in the songs, in the Spirit, we do see Jesus.  We live in the potential where any moment may be the moment when God breaks through.  And we know He is with us in every moment.  So every experience of life is lived in the light of the empty tomb.

He is with us, always.  Our God is with us.

Every day, we are people of the resurrection filled with a hope that never fails.

AMEN