Dear friends,

Here is a joke I read last week.  This is how it goes something like this:” Due to financial hardships that cannot be explained, the light at the end of the tunnel will be temporarily turned off.”  I bet you can think of times in your life when you could relate to that or maybe you can relate to it right now.  Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?  Not only can’t you see it, it feels like it’s been turned off.  There are two experiences in today’s lectionary readings that involve hardship.  One is the flood experience.  The other is the desert experience.  One is in the Old Testament, the other is in the New.

Last week we talked about the highpoints and low points of Jesus life, with the Transfiguration being a high and say, the Garden of Gethsemane being a low.  In today’s text in Mark Jesus goes straight from a high: His Baptism in the Jordan with the dove descending and God’s affirming Him to a retreat to the desert.  In this desert Jesus faces the power of evil who tempts Him to choose power over servanthood to God.  He was in a deep wilderness.  This is fitting, because today is the first day of Lent and in Lent we remember Jesus’ journey of suffering.  In honor of this journey, we too are called to make a journey of reflection and humility.  Mystics and contemplatives have withdrawn into the desert over the centuries.  The starkness and inhospitality with its contrast of extreme temperatures forces one to focus on the inner world.  It strips away the things that distract them.  The desert is a place where things dry out and wither, at least in the summer.  There is a state park in Arizona at the edge of the Superstition Wilderness called “Lost Dutchman State Park.”  Seems some Dutch miner got lost there some where.  Happens in deserts. When we talk of a desert experience we think of suffering and of things being withheld from us.  There is a shortage.  Goodness dries up.  We either perish or we figure out what really matters. That’s what Jesus does.

Then there is the experience of the story of the flood.  It seems to be the opposite.  The land gets inundated.  Instead of exposing the landscape, it covers it over, makes it disappear.  To build the three gorges dam the Chinese government flooded ancient villages and covered the landscape in water.  In the flood story only Noah’s ark is left, the rest is covered in water.  Water can be more frightening than the absence of it.  But there is also the rainbow, the rainbow that combines the light of the sun and droplets of water.  You need both that sizzling ball that punishes the desert and the water that can flood us to form the rainbow, a symbol of promise and commitment.

In this valley we live between the threat of flood and the threat of drought.  Last year was an above normal rain year.  This year we may not get to twenty percent of normal.  We live between the flood and the drought.  This is true of our life.  We live it between the extremes of flood and drought.  The flood is the stress and the drought is the depletion and depression.  In the flood there is too much of.. and in the drought there is too little of….

Remember Jon and Kate and their eight.  I’d sit and watch it occasionally.  They split up and she continued the show about a family with a pair of twins and a group of quintuplets.  The show finally gets closed down and Kate who had taken on quite a lavish lifestyle disappears from view.  I saw on Yahoo that she went on some psychology show and she confessed how lonely she was, how no man would want to take on eight children.  It used to be her life was a flood. The whole world was in on her life and it kept flooding in.  Now it seem her life is more like a drought.  How things can change?

Friends, this is the reality of life.  We live between having too much flood in that we don’t know how to process it all and having our life dry up and finding ourselves a little, or a lot, depressed.  I am sure there are those here who are flood people, overwhelmed by responsibilities and tasks and demands.  There are also those here who are desert people, whose activities and contacts and opportunities have dried up.  Only the lucky ones have the desert rain with desert flowers.  If there were only those two, desert and flood, we would be in trouble.  All we would do is go back and forth between stress and and depression.  But there is also the rainbow.  There is God’s promise.  There is God saying: “ I will be Your God and You will be My people. I am part of You and You are part of Me. There is a sacred contract I am drawing up between you and Me and the rainbow will also be a reminder of that.”  Friends, God’s love is like an eternal Spring, like a rainstorm in the parched desert.  We have the promise that we are not alone.  We are guaranteed that we can never be completely lonely, for God’s love has been solemnly promised to us.  Thanks be to God. Amen.

Reflection February 19, 2012; Mark 9:2-7; 2 Kings 2: 9,10

Dear friends,                                             

We talked about trophies last week.  The theme today is dazzling moments, at first glance not that  different.  It’s February and we are back at the Transfiguration, the moment when Jesus’ divine nature is fully revealed.  The disciples Peter, James and John are there with Him as companions and witnesses.  Elijah and Moses appear to them in a vision with Jesus and Jesus’ garments became shining white, the text tells us.  On TV they talk about  the “wow’ factor.  This is the ultimately wow factor for the disciples. They are on top of a mountain and this is a mountain top experience.  The text gets specific.  Jesus’ clothes become so dazzling white that no launderer could have done any better.  The words in the text are almost comical.  Such an exalted moment and then the mundane remark about the launderer.  In a sitcom a sassy character is at her dentist and demands a teeth whitening procedure.  The dentist holds up the module with the different color teeth and she picks the most dazzling white. The dentist says:” Even you can’t carry that off.  Well, on the mountain in the Transfiguration story, only Jesus’ clothes could carry off that kind of shine.

People are still in shock over the sudden death of singer Whitney Houston.  She had a popular song about highpoints in life.  The lyric goes something like this:” Give me one moment in time, when I am more than I thought I could be, when all my dreams are a heartbeat away and the answer is all up to me.” Give me one moment in time, when I’m racing with destiny, when I can feel eternity, when I can finally be free.” I hope I got the quote right.  Think of Adele, the new phenom of the music world who won so many grammies last week that she could barely hold them.  I remember Titus Toyama’s brother who won a documentary Oscar and shared it with the audience at Sac State once. We all got to hold it.  What does Tim Toyama do for an encore? Presidents’ inaugurations must be one of those moments.

There were some really important moments in Jesus’ life.  We remember when he was a young teenager studying in the temple, a spiritual genius, even though he had Mary and Joseph in a panic because they couldn’t find Him. There was the time at the beginning of His ministry when He faced the temptation in the desert. Then let’s not leave out the Resurrection.  There were also the low points of course, the ultimate one being the crucifixion. Perhaps the two that stand in greatest contrast are the Garden of Gethsemane experience and the Transfiguration.  In the garden He wanted to opt out, wanted His suffering to be kept away from Him.  On the mountain He reached His glorious state.

Friends, if the story if Jesus had ended in the garden or at the cross, He probably would not have become the most important figure in World History in the past two thousand years.  But the story does not end there.  The story of Jesus in the end is defined by the highpoints, such as the one in today’s lectionary reading in Mark.

Friends, the Transfiguration is far from our everyday experiences. Therefore this passage is not one that is popular with many ministers.  It seems more something out of a movie. But it is a story that ties together the two most revered characters in the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah with Jesus.  This is not a story we can just toss aside.  But more than that it leads us to think about the highpoints in our own lives.  I don’t think we do that too often.  There are these instants in our lives when there is only joy and nothing else, but they may not be the ones that we expect.  The happiest times are officially our weddings and the birth of children.  But even at a wedding there may be fatigue or concern about one’s ability to be the best possible spouse or at the wonderful experience of birth there may be a sudden intense worry over the responsibility of being able to get this child safely to where he or she is supposed to go.  Even at the offer of a dream job, there may be doubt about our ability to carry it off, as exciting as the offer might be.

Friends, what we often don’t notice are the unexpected yet inspired moments of pure joy and peace when who we are and who we think we should be come together.  We all get some of those and I think it is important to go back and find them.  There is a danger if we don’t. There is a danger that if we don’t,  we will allow ourselves to be defined by our low points, by our disappointments, by our embarrassments. So go home –after coffee hour- and think of these high points, these moments of peace and destiny, when you did or were more than you thought you could be.  Those may have been the surprising moments God was speaking to you most clearly.  This does not mean that our low points cannot have meaning for us.  It is just that they don’t define us. Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Reflection February 12, 2012; I Corinthians 9:24-27

Dear friends,                                                           

We just talked about the different kind trophies people gather in their home and the trophies actors show off in movies or the trophies people collect on their travels.  Paul talks to the Corinthians about the rewards of winning in sports.  Paul compares himself to athletes today.  Athletes compete in race, but only one can win the prize. Christian disciples by being part of a race can all be winners and also run with a clear aim that doesn’t change.  Boxers box for a trophy, but when it comes to life, they are just beating the air and miss the target. Christian disciples fight for what matters.  But what stands out most is the prize itself.  The Greek athletes often competed for a wreath.  A wreath of course is something that goes bad, it is perishable.  The prize of salvation and being part of God’s family never perishes, Paul says. Nowadays many of the trophies the kids get aren’t much better.  They are made of very breakable plastic.  Our kids got a lot of those and I am sure yours did too.  They sort of lost interest in them. Parkview has so many basketball trophies that when we contacted the teams about who would want them, most weren’t interested.  That surprised us a bit.

So you could say trophies are perishable?  Even they physically remain the same, they may lose their value over time.  In the tv series modern family, one family member gets an award for accomplishment in environmental law.  His partner that goes to the garage and fishes out one of his trophies to put on the mantelpiece next to the award.  This becomes a huge argument.  Of course I don’t remember well enough to quote it word for word, but it was something like this: “Oh, you just put your award there, because I got one and now you can’t stand it and you have to parade out your country fishing award.”  The other says:”Listen I have so many trophies and you, because you were never athletic, never had any, so I felt bad and therefore I kept them in a box so I wouldn’t hurt your feelings.”  The first one says: “If you think my award, which is like the Oscar of environmental law, is in the same category as your stupid trophies, you’ve lost your mind.”

Friends, welcome to the complicated world of competition and accomplishment.  Actually “accomplishment” is a good word.  It is good to have academic trophies, intellectual trophies, travel trophies etc. if they give us a sense of accomplishment, that is if they mark the reaching of a goal we have set for ourselves.  We all need to set goals in order to be able to make our lives about something.  There is nothing wrong with us.  It helps give us a sense of identity as someone who is capable.  That helps us become more confident people.  The problem happens when we are trying to impress other people. That’s where it always goes wrong. This is where the human race has learned very little over the centuries.  We are still trying to impress people.  People will even go so far as to say that they have met someone who once met someone who was on some prime time tv program once.  If the trophies of our lives are there to impress people, then we are in dangerous territory.  They then become a manipulative tool.   They become a tool in raising the opinion others have of us.  And what’s sad is that impressing others, making others think we’re really something, comes from our deepest frustrations and dissatisfactions.  It goes back to sibling rivalry and inattentive parents and indifferent teachers. That’s where we learned the frustration and the desire for approval.  But, friends, in our hearts we know it is a bottomless pit. In our hearts we know that we will never please those who looked down on us or of whom we believed that they looked down on us.  Unknowingly, we often wish to impress even those who are no longer with us.  So mark your accomplishments with trophies of any kind, nothing wrong with that.  But don’t try to impress others, I know it’s second nature, but usually it causes suffering.  The Buddhist wise men and women are right about that: the desire for recognition causes suffering.

Let me offer a novel thought.  What about impressing God?  Not a novel thought perhaps.  We have tried that, by trying to be perfect Christians, it’s true, but we figured out it’s impossible.  Let’s look at it another way.  If God exists, then all of history and all the people who once were or shall be are part of God’s being and God’s memory.  You and I only look back three, at most four generations, unless we are related to a president or king, but God looks back forever and forward forever.  God in fact may be the only being to have sufficient memory. Human memory is extremely limited and fragile as you know.  So perhaps we should keep trying to live in a way that would impress God.  Paul already guaranteed us that the trophies we might receive do not perish. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Reflection February 5 2012; Isaiah 40: 21-31; I Corinthians 9: 16-23

Dear friends,

We have talked about perspective shift or perspective re-set. On this Super bowl day we talked about the perspective on football strategy at an Arkansas high school where the coach refuses to punt. We also talked about the message of the movie Money Ball.  We talked about George Armstrong Custer and how what he did on the Kansas frontier created a sudden shift in thinking.  All of this is about a shift of perspective.  In many ways the new approach was the opposite of how people thought things. The texts for today also deal with a shift of perspective.  Isaiah reminds us Who God is and what God is capable of.  Paul shakes us by telling us to embrace our weakness. Isaiah’s language is beautiful and lofty: “Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been declared to you from the beginning?  Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth,” Isaiah tells us. “It is God Who sits above the vault of the earth.  Its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.”  “Do you not know, have You not heard?  The everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, does not become weary or tired. God’s understanding is inscrutable.”

Friends, Paul’s tone is very different.  “Although I am free from all people, I have made myself a slave to all.”  He presents himself as weak: “to the weak I became weak.  I have become all good things to all people.”  Do you see the contrast between God’s greatness and the apostle’s weakness.  “So what,” you might ask.  Well it is significant because this is the opposite of what we think.  It is the opposite of what society teaches us.  It means a total shift of perspective, a complete re-set. By reading these texts and understanding how crucial they are, we are putting the re-set button of our lives.  You see, this is what we are told:” You have to be capable, you are responsible for achieving anything you want, you can achieve important things, but you have to make it happen.   It is in your hands. No one will do it for you. You create your destiny.  God is a whole different issue.  God you can’t see, so who knows how God can help you?”  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it, friends? Rings true, doesn’t?  We have to make it happen.  No one is going to help us. But then isn’t that a huge burden and a dark task  Because so many times people do all they can, make all the effort and it doesn’t happen?  In the end they become depressed and despondent.  They feel like they’re hitting their head against the wall.  Paul gives up his ability to be a self-made man.  He relinquishes everything to God.  He lets God’s grace flow.  Now this sounds great in church from the mouth of a man in a robe, but this is crazy hard. He is saying:” Let God’s grace flow through my life and I will do what needs to be done.  I will do what God tells me. God will open doors and close them.”  It is a fundamentally different way of thinking. It is a way of letting go of the pressure of producing and of being successful.  It is a way of throwing off the burden of expectation that society puts on us.  But it also means we give up control.   Paul would have been able to relate to the final verse:” “Those Who wait for the Lord will gain new strength. They will mount up with wings like eagles.  They will run and not get tired. They will walk and not become weary.” It is all about waiting upon God, not about making things happen, but letting them happen.

Friends, of course now we are stuck.  It all sounds great, but it’s like playing football with baseball rules. We don’t know how to do it.  How do we stop punting, if that’s the way the game is played?  How can we change the rules? If you said that to me, you would be right.  The world is the way it is.  You aren’t going to get anywhere if you don’t give it your all.  But on the other hand, you aren’t going to achieve everything you will set out to do.  In politics, the reality is that only one of those guys running is going to be president. One may get another chance, but the rest will miss the boat.  You simply cannot make everything happen.  If you don’t accept that, you will destroy yourself emotionally and spiritually.

There have been times in my life that I have been quite ambitious, that there were certain things I was convinced to accomplish to be considered a worthwhile person.  When I put myself a hundred percent in charge, I never felt happy. Somewhere down the line I had to learn to accept my weakness and to flow with God’s grace. Now I don’t believe God necessarily micromanages our life, but I do believe God’s grace seeps into and through our lives and energizes our lives.  Do we not know, have we not heard?  God has been our strength long before we were born and will be long after the world has forgotten our names.  Do we not know? Have we not heard? We are weak. Our faith is feeble.  Our powers are limited.  But we can mean so much to others if we allow ourselves to be led.  Thanks be to God. Amen.