Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Taking a Hammer to Your Faith

Brad Sullivan
6 Easter, Year A
Sunday, May 25, 2014
St. Mark’s, Bay City, TX
Acts 17:22-32
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21

If God were made of gold or silver or stone, then I could understand fighting over God. That’s what people used to do. When one tribe attacked another tribe, the first thing you’d do is steal their little gods; that way their gods might fight for you, or if you didn’t like their gods, then you could just destroy them. That way they’d have no gods fighting for them. So if god were made of gold or silver or stone, then it would make a lot of sense to fight over God. We fight over all kinds of stuff we don’t want other people to take.

Paul tells us, however, what we already know, that God is not made with gold or silver or stone, or something crafted from the imagination of people, so no one can take God away from you. No one can destroy your conception of God, except of course when they do…destroy our conceptions of God.

Those are actually good times, or they have been for me, when I’ve had my conception of God, whatever it was, and someone’s said something or done something, or something has happened in my life, and that concept of God has been smashed with a hammer, and I’ve been left wondering. God is different than what I thought God was, and that’s a good time because then God gives his Holy Spirit to say, “here’s a new way of understanding me.” It’s like the old way, but different. I don’t believe in God the same way I did when I was four years old. So God grants us his Spirit to take our conceptions of him and smash them with a hammer, so his spirit can then grant us a new understanding, a new concept, a new revelation of himself.

Now, we’ve got the creeds in the church which give us our basic understanding of our faith. We’ve got the Apostle’s Creed which we pray at our baptisms. We’ve got the Nicene Creed, the church’s creed which is what we all believe together about God, and within those creeds, there is an awful lot of wiggle room, and awful lot of variation in what we believe about God.

I hear people talk about what they believe the creed means, and I think, “really? Because that sounds really different than what I believe, but it fits within the creed.” So there is a lot of variation and wiggle room within our faith for what exactly we believe and how exactly we believe it, and that’s good thing because there is a lot of variation in all of us, and God helps us believe in and understand him in different ways.

I just decided not to have a confirmation class this year. I’ve held classes for the pasat nine years, and we’d get folks signed up for the classes and make schedules and prepare what were well-planned classes, people wouldn’t be able to make all of the classes. I realized that over the course of those nine years, I spent more time in make-up sessions with those who couldn’t make the schedule classes than I did in the classes themselves, and without fail, the make-up sessions were better than the classes themselves because we could have about our faith and question and wonder together. That’s what God wants us to do, to understand him and love him with joy and wonder and some questioning too. That way when the hammer blow comes to our faith, it doesn’t destroy our faith and grind it to dust. It just chips a little off here and a little off there, and God’s Holy Spirit comes and reforms where it needs to reform.

Confirmation and the classes that went with it had almost became a hurdle where you had to believe exactly how the bishop or the priest believed. There were tests you had to pass. I never had to pass a test, but I heard about them, and this was 24 years ago, that I heard about having to pass Bishop’s tests. I never had to, and yet today, I still hear questions from people thinking they have to pass tests in order to be confirmed. We haven’t taken test for confirmation for a long time, but people still remember it. I think the point was to help give people a good solid foundation, but it ended up being this barrier. The bishops and priests were barriers to confirmation making sure they held the sacraments holy so that anyone who didn’t believe just in the right way didn’t get to it.

What a bunch of hogwash. Jesus never said that. He didn’t say, “well, if you can claim at least 85% intellectual assent to the creeds of the church, then people will know that you are my disciples.” No, he said they’ll know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

What we have here and believe in the church is what we have here and believe in the church. We don’t come to worship here in this building to protect anything made of gold and silver, to protect God from his church.

God is in our homes as well, and we worship God and we pray in our homes together. We pray and believe in God a little bit differently in each of our homes, so when parents say, “I want my child to be baptized,” or “I want my child to be confirmed,” I say, “great, teach them about the faith.”

Those are the promises we make whenever we have our children baptized. We say, “I am going to raise my child as a disciple of Jesus.” The church says, “we’re going to help you with that, but we’re not going to take it over for you.” So we raise our children, our family our friends, we raise each other in the faith, and there’s going to be some variation in what and how we believe, and God is not diminished by that. God is glorified in that.

The differences we share and the other ways we believe…I’ve had arguments with people when their beliefs about God were very different from mine. These are Christians I’m talking about, and I’m thinking “that’s just weird,” and they’re thinking, “you’re a heathen.” I’m thinking, “but it’s in the creed!”, and Jesus is looking down saying, “You silly people. Just love each other; that’s what I commanded y’all to do.”

Our beliefs are important, but there’s a lot of wiggle room within them. Our beliefs, sometimes we end up making them into little idols themselves. They aren’t made of gold, or silver, or stone, but they are every bit as rigid. Sometimes we need that hammer to come down and break them so God’s Holy Spirit can enter into us again and say, “love me, and I will reveal to you once more who I am.” Amen.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Jesus Was a Bullfrog

Brad Sullivan
3 Easter, Year A
Sunday, May 4, 2014
St. Mark’s, Bay City, TX
Acts 2:14a,36-41
Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17
1 Peter 1:17-23
Luke 24:13-35

I wrote earlier this week about the joy and wonder of faith and belief without, of believing in Jesus without having seen him.  The scripture last week was about Thomas and Jesus appearing to the disciples and we always call this story “doubting Thomas,” a though he did something wrong, but he didn’t.  Jesus appeared to the other disciples and immediately he showed them the marks of the nails in his hands and side.  Then when Thomas said he wouldn’t believe unless he saw those same marks, all he was asking for was exactly what Jesus had shown the other disciples right away.  So Thomas asks Jesus to see the marks and Jesus shows him and he believes, and then Jesus says, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  And so we think, “Thomas doubted!  Bad Thomas.”
No, that’s not what Jesus said.  Jesus didn’t say, “everyone else is so much better than you, Thomas because they have believed without having seen.”  He didn’t say that.  He said blessed. 
We aren’t blessed because of some greatness or some meritorious act on our parts.  We’re blessed because blessings happen.  When we wake up in the morning and the sun comes up, we are blessed.  We didn’t do anything to earn the sun coming up.  It just comes up and its rays warm our bodies, and we are blessed.  Jesus didn’t say, “Thomas, you are in so much trouble now and everyone else is so much better….you’re like a worm and it’s a good thing I already love you or you’d be out.”  He didn’t say that.  He just said blessed are those who believe even if they haven’t seen.
I think part of that blessing is the joy and fascination and wonder of believing without knowing.  Children have that joy and fascination and wonder, and believing without seeing allows us to have that same childlike joy and wonder that is so abundant in children.  Jesus said come to the Kingdom of God as a little child.  Come with that childlike joy and faith and wonder that comes with believing without having seen.
Now today we have Cleopas and his companion walking on this 7 mile journey to Emmaus and Jesus shows up.  They have no idea who he is.  Their hearts are burning as they’re talking to him on the way, then they share a meal and they realize it’s Jesus, and they said, “were not our heats burning on the way?” 
Two things happened here.  They met Jesus in a very unexpected place and way.  We wouldn’t expect to meet Jesus on the way to Van Vleck, but he might show up, and suddenly we get there and we realize, “I think I just encountered Jesus; it was awesome.”  And then they recognize Jesus and knew him in sharing a meal together.
Jesus shows up in unexpected ways.  We have no idea when and where Jesus is going to show up, and we probably won’t realize it until afterwards, and like “wow, my heart was burning there and it felt like God was present.  I’m not sure because I’m supposed to meet Jesus in churchy stuff, and I was just helping someone out, but I think it was Jesus.”  We can meet Jesus in anyone, because he dwells in all of us, right?  “It is no longer I who live but Christ who dwells within me.” 
We get to encounter Jesus in anyone or anywhere in creation.  In music.  In people.  In nature.  In whatever.  Good.  If your heart is burning and you feel like there is this experience of God and you think to yourself, “I think that was Jesus,” good.  Trust it.  Go with it.  Question with childlike fascination and wonder, sure, but trust it.  If you think you’ve just encountered Jesus, you probably have.
The next thing that happened on the Emmaus journey was they had a meal together and their eyes were opened, and they realized it was Jesus they encountered in the meal.  We do this meal really well in the Episcopal Church.  We gather together.  We share stories of our faith.  We pray together and for each other, and then we share the meal, and we encounter Jesus in the Eucharist.  We don’t know exactly how.  We encounter him with childlike fascination and wonder.  Kids get it when they bounce up for communion to encounter Jesus.  They don’t understand it, they just love encountering Jesus.  We do this great here, and this is not the only meal where we get to encounter Jesus.
We can encounter Jesus in any meal that we have.  Think about feast kinds of meals that we have:  Thanksgiving, Easter, Christmas, Weddings, etc., and we have a bunch of people who love each other who are sharing stories and laughter and joy…maybe there are a couple people we don’t know that well, but now it’s like we’re family because we’ve shared this meal together.  The joy, the laughter, the love shared around a meal:  that is Jesus.  The fascination and the wonder and the love of people:  That is Jesus.  So when we share these meals together, knowing Jesus isn’t that crazy.  We get it if we would just let ourselves get it.  We understand if we would just see with the eyes of childlike fascination and wonder and love, then we see, there Jesus was all along.
So when you have these moments, just trust them.  Just trust that it really was Jesus whom you encountered and then, do exactly what Cleopas and his companion did.  They went immediately to the other disciples and said, “Guess what?  We just encountered Jesus!”

We share these stories.  When our hearts are burning and we thing we encountered Jesus, then we go and we share these stories.  We tell people…maybe not a total stranger.  “I just saw Jesus in a bullfrog.”  Ok, don’t tell that to a total stranger.  Tell that to your family and friends and share these stories so we can experience together Jesus everywhere.  Everywhere in this world, we get to share these stories of joy and faith and wonder that come with the blessing of believing even though we haven’t seen.  Amen.