Sermon Dec. 10 2017-Father Cunningham

         I was listening to someone the other day saying that they could recall a time when the world was more unstable.  I might quibble a little bit with that assessment, but with much of what is going on currently, it does feel that things are spiraling out of control – the falcon cannot hear the falconer and all that.  North Korea is acting even crazier than usual (which was a pretty high bar already), Russia seems to be pining for the old Soviet days, China is building islands and then claiming them as sovereign territory, the Middle East seems even more Middle Easty than usual and in the United States the people who are not involved in sexual harassment seem to make up for that by just hating each other.  The only good news that I have heard in a while is that George Clooney says that he is going to be taking a break from acting.  And the question that this inspires in many of us is when will it change?  When will there be peace on earth and goodwill towards men?  And further, I think the question asked by those of us who are religious and even by many of the non-religious is why is God allowing this to happen?  Shouldn’t God intervene?  What is the point of being God if you let us humans make a dog’s breakfast out of everything?  Well, there is an interesting line that we have from 2 Peter today, that while not answering that question in its totality does offer some thoughts.  It states, “Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” 

         This passage addresses two things.  The first is the seeming slowness of everything.  That is if Jesus came to save mankind why are things still so messed up?  It’s initial answer has to do with the timing, that is it will happen, but not quite yet.  That is what it means by saying that a day to God is like a thousand years.  So while it may seem like God is not doing much we need to see things from God’s perspective, where it has only been two days since Jesus was born in Bethlehem.  And that may be interesting but I really want to focus on the second piece of information which has to with why God allows for the world to be in such turmoil.  The answer according to Peter is that this allowing for poor behavior is in actuality a gift.  We may not like that the world is in its current state, but in order for God to save as many as possible, which is his will, he needs to be patient.  

         In the small scale you can think of it like when you are doing something wrong.  Do any of us want God to come back at the moment when we are egregiously sinning or would we like God to wait a few minutes until we have calmed down and put our house in order?  The idea that Peter seems to be expressing is that, if God would like everyone to repent and return to him, it is going to take time.  So if God came at this moment and separated the sheep from the goats lot of people would be on the goat side of the fence.  But since God wants everyone to return to him he is patient, he is waiting for things to change.  And of course with anything involving humanity such a hands off aproach will have its good side and its bad side.  Giving us time to get better also gives us time to make things worse. 

         We are in the season of Advent, which contrary to popular belief is not a divinely sanctioned shopping trip, but rather a time of preparation.  A time in which we look at ourselves and ask what in us is not ready for the Messiah to come.  A way to think about it is like the parable we heard a few weeks back about the wise and foolish bridesmaids.  If you recall half of them brought extra oil and half did not and so when the bridegroom finally arrived those that had not brought enough oil were not ready for him.  And so the question for us is are we ready for Christ to come, or put in the terms of our reading from today, what in us is God being patient about because he does not want us to perish?

         I was having a discussion with a friend the other day about the fact that many Christians can be a real pain and do not behave in very Christian ways.  The friend asked me why this was.  I said that there is always the issue of original sin, but I said that I think there is another issue, that while not entirely Martin Luther’s fault, comes from a sort of over-eager reading of his doctrine of sola fide, that is by faith alone.  This doctrine came out of the Reformation and was basically meant to show that we cannot earn our way into heaven.  In other words, I cannot do enough good things to make God have no choice but to let me in.  It said, instead, that it was really only through faith in the power of God that we can be saved.  Salvation is the work of God and not through our own works, abilities or actions.  And I do not disagree with this as a theological understanding, but in practicality it can become a sort of the hammock of salvation.  In other words you can claim that you have faith and then just sot of lie back and do whatever you want, because if works do not have anything to do with salvation then why bother to do anything?  Why try and make the world a better place or for that matter make yourself a better person?  Now I don’t think this is what Luther was getting at, but a misreading of that idea has lead to a sort of stagnation among some.  However when properly understood, faith is not just an ascent to a certain belief, but rather is something which should infiltrate every part of our being.  If I have faith in gravity I am not going to try and walk off a cliff like the Wile E. Coyote did in the old Looney Tunes cartoons.  Instead I am going to act in ways that accord with my faith in gravity.  Similarly, if I have faith in God I am going to live in ways that are in accord with my faith in him.  And if there are parts of my life that prevent this from happening, those areas need to be examined and changed. 

         And this is much the idea of not only what Peter is getting at but with Advent in general.  We are to look at ourselves and ask what in us is not glorifying to God and needs to be changed.  There should be something different about us because we are Christians.  Yes, I certainly know that none of us will be perfect, but that is what we are striving towards.  God is very patient with us, God does not want us to perish, but this requires some cooperation on our part.  It requires us to try and be a little better today then we were yesterday.  It requires a little more of us to be conformed to the will of God.  In the great Christmas Hymn Joy to World, which we will sing in a few weeks, we hear the line, “Let every heart, prepare him room.”  And that is the question for us: are we preparing room for Jesus’ coming, or is God going to have to be patient with us for another year?  The goal of course is to make ourselves conform to God and his perfect will so that we may be his both now and forevermore.   

Sermon Dec. 3 2017-Father Cunningham

         I made an observation the other day and it is probably not original and probably not entirely true, which may make you wonder why I am going to share it, but hey I needed an introduction.  Anyway that observation is that the amount of Christmas decorating someone does is inversely proportional to their church attendance and general ascent to the basic tenets of the Christian faith.  Incidentally, this idea came to me when I was speaking to a Unitarian who was unboxing a giant inflatable lawn Santa and so at least anecdotally I think I am on pretty solid ground.  Anyway, I am not sure of the reason for this inversely proportional relationship, but I hold out hope that it has something to do with our reading from Isaiah today describing the coming of the Messiah.  Just listen to its opening:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence-- 

as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil-- 

to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

          Not a mention of red nosed reindeers or dancing snowmen, but instead a sense of power and justice.  God coming down to earth is not seen as sentimental or kitschy, but is actually looks a bit dangerous.  So maybe the more you know about God coming to earth the more you are unsure about decorating for it.  The image of fire kindling brushwood and nations trembling at God’s presence is not something that would show up in a Hallmark Christmas special and does not make for wonderful inflatable lawn decoration.  And I know that this is not how everything played out, that when God became man a dwelt among us it was not the burning fire and trembling nations type of appearance but I don’t think we can totally discount such predictions as those found in Isaiah.  The reason I say this is because it helps us think of Christmas a little differently.

            In many ways what we think of as “Christmas” is much more of a secular celebration than it is a religious one.  And please don’t think I am here to say it is all terrible – I like Christmas trees and decorations as much as the next guy, but the specialness of the season seems to be ascribed to something besides God.  Yes Jesus get’s an occasional nod, but he is really just a piece in the overall celebration.  Christmas is less about the incarnation and more about something vaguely called Christmas magic.  In fact if you don’t believe me put Christmas and magic together in a Google search and you get 36 million hits.  Whereas if you put Christmas and “tremble at your presence” you get a mere100,000 hits.  But anyway the point is I think we might need to up our game a little bit on how we deal with Christmas.  The word magic does not seem to be the right word on which to focus in this season partly because it sounds a bit too much like a Disney World commercial.  Magic is a cheap version of the true wonder that we are to have.  Instead of magic I think we need to instead focus on the word mystery – not in the Scooby Doo sense but rather in the sense of how does this God as described by Isaiah show up as a baby in Bethlehem?  How does the all powerful God of the universe become so meek and mild?  And, of course, we will get into more of that as we get closer to Christmas, but I want to take a few moments and focus on what that act tells us about God.  What the God as described by Isaiah must be like. 

            Now I know it is very out of favor to conceive of God as fearful and perhaps even a little wrathful.  In our day and age we have a very comfortable forgiving God.  A God who, like Santa Clause, may know who is naughty and nice but does not really do anything about it.  This God understands when you skip church because you stayed up late watching the directors cut of “Dude where’s my Car?”  This God would prefer that you have certain moral standards, but really just wants you to be happy.  Now I am not calling for us to conceive of God in a completely Jonathon Edwards, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” sort of a way but I do think there needs to be a balance.  Christmas, as currently conceived by our culture, offers a glimpse of a god who is a rather saccharine god, who is really just there to make us feel good about ourselves.  And I think because of this most people do not have much of a relationship with God because what they are presented with is not much with which to have a relationship.  Just as a Hallmark Card is a rather thin distillation of a relationship, the Hallmark Christmas is a rather thin distillation of Christmas.  What I mean by this is we do not get to see any of the power of God and why God became man and dwelt among us.

            And so what I think I am asking for in this season of Advent is not a return to seeing God in purely fearful and wrathful terms but rather to view God as who he truly is –seeing the mystery of God as being both all-powerful and all loving.  If we say that God is the creator and sustainer of the universe – this is a pretty big deal.  It implies an amount of power that we cannot understand.  And if we further believe that God is pure good it should at least make us pause and ponder what such a God might do with the things that are not pure good.  On Christmas Day, we know that he did not wipe us from the earth or blow up the earth like the Death Star did to Alderaan.  But we need to keep this in mind because it will make the Christmas all that much more meaningful.  If we realize just who this God is it will make a big difference in how we look at Christmas.  I think too often the wonder and magic of Christmas become clichéd sayings that give us a vague warm feeling but should rather be seen in the context of this God who has come to begin a mission of setting the world right.  A God who is capable of behavior that would strike fear in us, but instead came in the most vulnerable of ways.  God has granted us a reprieve not out of an inability to act, but out of love.  That may be the take home from Advent I, for us to act with love and mercy.

            The other day I was on what purported to be a Christian website and all of the articles were about what other Christians were doing wrong and how these Christians were on the fast track to perdition, if they did not come around to this website’s way of thinking.  I got the feeling that if it were in this websites power to destroy all of those with whom they disagreed and get away with it, there would be no hesitation.  But is that what we are building towards in this season of Advent?  Is the power and wonder of God with which we open going to end in apocalyptic ways on Christmas Day or are we building to the first act of the greatest act of mercy in the history of the world?  As partisan bickering, anger and mistrust are so prominent in our world maybe we should not be worried about Christmas magic, but rather Christmas mercy.  Maybe when we have the power to inflict judgment we should instead hold back and through our mercy invite others into the mercy of God.  As we begin this journey of Advent it is a time to contemplate God and our relationship to him so that we might show forth his power and grandeur not in works of vengeance but in works of mercy, so that we may be his both now and forevermore.

Sermon Nov. 12 2017-Father Cunningham

         There are certain things that we say which really have no bearing on reality, but they make us feel better, especially when you are a parent.  We tell our kids to be safe or study hard.  Comments like this makes us feel like we actually are doing something and then if the kid comes home with a bad grade we are off the hook because we told them to study hard and darn it they just didn’t listen.  And if you were being cynical you could say that the snippet we have from Paul’s Letter to the Thessalonians was just this type of advice – sort of a grey skies are going to clear up type thing.  But I am working on my cynicism and so that is not the route that I am going to take. 

          Paul is writing to the Church in Thessalonica and he seems to be initially addressing something that was a prominent question in the early days of the Church, but something about which we don’t give a whole lot of thought to these days.  Most in the early Church believed that Christ would be returning very soon, and by very soon I mean within their lifetime.  And so as time went on, some of those who believed that Christ would be returning before they died, died.  And for those who remained, a concern arose over what happened to those who had died, because the expectation was that none of them would see death before the return of Christ.  That is what Paul is getting at when he says, “For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died.”  In other words he is assuring them that those who have died do not have to worry about anything – they are not going to miss out on the return of Christ and the resurrection of the body and all that.  So that is the reason for Paul writing this section of the letter and while that is interesting historically, I want to take a minute and focus on the other stuff.   And by using the technical term other stuff I mean to ask a question about the assurance that he is offering and why is it more than just happy talk that does not reflect reality?

         The main point of what Paul is saying is that we are not to be as ones without hope, which is why he says, “so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.”  But there is another piece to this that can kind of be missed if you read through this too quickly.  And just in case you are worried let me assure you that we will return to the bit about hope, but I want to start with the first part, which is about grief.  Notice Paul does not say that we should not grieve; it is simply that the grief should not be like those without hope.  And I think this is very important because it dispels an issue that sneaks into Christianity now and then which has to do with the way in which we handle death.  Some Christians, who for charity’s sake we will say, believe that because we are Christian we should not mourn.  Some may even push it as far as saying we should celebrate when a loved one has passed because they have gone onto their reward.  But notice Paul does not say to avoid mourning, only to not mourn as those without hope.  And this may seem like hairsplitting, because mourning is mourning isn’t it?  But really it points to something that is very important. 

          To understand this a little better, we need to go back to the story of Lazarus and the shortest verse in the Bible.  If you remember from John Chapter 11, Lazarus was the brother of Mary and Martha and was very ill and died.  Jesus went after this had happened and was met by those mourning for the loss of Lazarus.  As the story continues Jesus would eventually raise Lazarus from the dead, but in between Lazarus’ death and his raising we have in verse 35 a verse which simply says that “Jesus wept.”  Now think about this Jesus has lost someone that he loved, while at the same time he knew that he had the power to raise him from the dead and yet he still wept.  You could hardly say that Jesus was without hope; I mean he was the Son of God and had control over life and death as he would show.  Yet at that moment when he saw that his friend Lazarus was not there he felt the terrible sting of loss.  And so you see mourning someone does not mean we are without hope instead it represents the feeling of loss, the feeling of emptiness that had previously been filled by another person.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that God keeps this gap empty so as to keep our former communion alive even if it causes us pain.  Jesus felt the pain and it is okay for us to feel it as well.  We can miss someone or mourn someone and still have faith and still have hope. 

         But this brings us to the second part.  We realize we will feel pain at loss, but we also have hope and the question is what distinguishes hope from foolhardiness?  I mean Linus had hope that the Great Pumpkin would come for all the good that did him.  And, so, what is the difference between our hope and simple wishful thinking?  Well the answer like many in the Christian faith comes down to the resurrection of Jesus.  The Resurrection was not just a neat trick, but rather it was the sign that death was not the final word.  We know that death is not the final word because we have someone that went before us.  Someone who was dead but rose again.  This signified that there was more.  Death was just a moment before the eternal glory that was to come.  We do not rely on feel good stories but rather we rely on an actual event.  The hope that we have comes from something that happened which shows that through belief in this person who rose from the dead we are able to conquer death as well.  The author of Hebrews refers to Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.  He is the pioneer because he went first.  He passed through death and came out resurrected on the other end.  And just like a pioneer we are to tread the way that he trod.  We are to follow knowing that it has and can be done.  We do not live as ones without hope because we have seen that death is not the final word. 

         And I would be remiss today if I didn’t mention the loss of our brother Gerry Bay.  I was taking Gerry communion weekly over the past few months and I would get the question from others of how he was doing.  And I always felt there were two parts to this answer.  There was the physical question to which the answer was that he was obviously declining, but there was also what we would call the spiritual question and the answer to this was rather incredible and rather inspiring.  Gerry was not living as one without hope.  He was ready to go to his reward, he was ready to rush out and meet the Lord.  Gerry was what we are called to be as Christian.  He did not ignore the physical reality.  He knew that his body was failing, but he also knew that there was something beyond this, something to which Christ calls us.  This is the life lived as a Christian, we may mourn, we may suffer, but we also hope.  And we do not hope in an unrealistic way but rather our hope is found in him who died and rose again so that we may have life and have it abundantly both now and forevermore.