The Gift of Fathers

Today, at 7am, as I was driving to church with Sandy my cell phone rang. I knew as soon as I saw on my caller id that it was my brother Roger with the news that I had been expecting for several days, my Father had died during the night. Dad's health has been declining for the last couple of years, and it was his wish to make it through this Christmas, and, by the Grace of God, he did.

The Holy Spirit was at work this week, text I preached on today contained this line from Paul's Letter to the Colossians, "Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart." This line fits my Dad pretty well. He encouraged me, challenged mentored me, protected me, and in his generation's way, he loved me. I cannot remember Dad every saying "I love you" but I never doubted that he did. Dad showed his love for me, and my brothers and sister in the way that he raised us.

I will have the opportunity to preach at his funeral, something that I am very happy to do. I can't help remembering though, a good friend of mine from my previous parish who always got on me for my funeral sermons. "You have to preach the Gospel Pastor, you need to preach 'fire and brimstone' at a funeral sermon. There are a lot of folks who never attend church who attend funerals and if all they hear is how great the guy in the box is they will think 'if that guy is going to heaven like the pastor says then why bother going to church.'" Well, I didn't always say the "guy in the box" was going to heaven, as a matter of fact I rarely implied that, but I wasn't preaching with smoke coming out my ears so it wasn't good enough for my friend. Problem is, when a person attends church and all they hear is "hell fire and damnation" it is just a reminder for them why they don't attend church more often.

Dad showed his love for us in the way he lived his life. Mom taught us the Faith; Dad taught us the love of family, community and country. He showed us, by example, the importance of attending church as a family. Dad was raised a Roman Catholic. When Mom refused to have us kids raised in that church he could have simply not attended with us, but he chose to come to church with us. He knew how important it was to go to church as a family, and attending worship in the Branstiter family was never optional. However, it was not drudgery either. I never heard Dad complain about going to church. The only time I heard him complain was when someone sat in our pew (second row from the back, pulpit side, next to the Gaummer stained glass window). Dad never really stopped being a Roman Catholic; he simply loved his family more.

That is what Paul is asking us to do in the reading today, love one another.

COMING OUT OF THE BASEMENT

Today's sermon was the last in the series "Encounters with Jesus". I chose for this final sermon, the story of "Doubting Thomas." This text, traditionally the text for the first Sunday of Easter is misnamed. Thomas was a doubter (a better translation is unbelieving), but, he is also simply human. Which one of us, returning home to family and friends and being told that a person we loved, who died three days earlier, had suddenly appeared would not have the same reaction as Thomas.

I have always wondered about why the disciples were in a room behind locked doors, "for fear of the Jews". We Christians, for a variety of reasons have either locked ourselves, or others in rooms ever since.

Someone once said that "America has sobered up in the basement of churches" and this is very true. Since the earliest days of Bill W. and Doctor Bob, AA and other 12 step groups have been meeting in churches, most often church basements. We think we are doing them a favor by putting them down in the basement. Down in the basement their coffee won't stain the thirty year old carpet in the "Ladies Aid Room" and of course up until a few years ago they needed a place to be able to smoke. And then, we figured, there is that thing about anonymity; they needed, so we thought, to be someplace where they would not be seen, looked at, or for that matter spoken to. We lock the AA groups in the basement, out of sight and out of mind, another ministry of the church, a ministry that gives us that good liberal feel good feeling, but a ministry that we would rather lock up somewhere else, and not in the church basement.

I visited an open meeting once and asked one of the men at the meeting if anyone from the church had ever come downstairs and invited them to church. He kind of chuckled and said, "No, we aren't allowed upstairs." Interestingly, "They (the AA people) were in a locked room, because the Christians of the church were afraid of the AA people" a twist to the John text.

What does the church have to fear of an alcoholic, drug addict, sex addict or gambler if they are in recovery? Maybe, like some who fear homosexuals, their disease may rub off on them and then they will need to go to rehab. We talk about feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, but do we ever invite them upstairs to worship with us. Do we ask them their name, do we sit down next to them at the Thanksgiving dinner and talk to them or do we find one of our regular members, you know, the givers, and sit down next to them. Members of AA and other 12 step groups feel like they are invisible when they walk into most churches. People look at them, but not really at them, if one of these people speak to one of these AA members it is normally to ask them, "May I help you?" with the look of terror in their eyes that say, "I sure hope not."

It is time for churches to start inviting people to church. Next time your AA group meets in your basement, go down, introduce yourself to them, and invite them to next Sunday's worship. Chances are you won't, and thankfully these wonderful people will eventually find their way to Recovery Worship where they will be welcomed.

Merry Christmas, see you Thursday night

 

Breaking the Law

Today at Recovery Worship we took a look at the healing of the man by the pool from John 5. In Jesus' day there was a pool where people went, hoping to experience miraculous healing. The pool, called Bethesda, was a large pool surround by five covered porches. There would be crowd of sick people who would lay around the pool and wait for the water to "bubble up" and thus receive healing, at least according to tradition.

Jesus shows up at the pool one day and asks an interesting question to a man who was laying beside the pool. "Would you like to get well?" Jesus asks the man. The man tells Jesus that he had been waiting by the pool for thirty-eight years, however, he did not have family to help him, so when the pool began to bubble up, other people, many who had family there to help, were able to beat him into the water.

Jesus then tells the man to "Stand up, pick up your mat, and walk!" The man obeyed, stood up and picked up his mat. The Jewish leaders objected because the man was carrying the mat on the Sabbath, they also objected that Jesus had healed the man on the Sabbath.

In John's Gospel stories Jesus is called Rabbi over and over again. Being a Rabbi, he would have known it was "against the law" to heal on the Sabbath. He also would have know that it was "against the law" to have the man pick up and carry the mat.

It is obvious from the text that Jesus and the Jewish leaders did not see eye to eye when it came to the law. Could Jesus have waited a few hours until after the Sabbath to have healed the man? Sure, but why should he, it is apparent that the Jewish leaders had turned one of the Ten Commandments around from what God had initially intended it to be. The fourth Commandment is "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy," is about what we do, not what we don't do. Do we really "keep it holy" by not doing something?

Jesus was willing to break the law by healing on the Sabbath. Jesus was also willing to tell the man to break the law by picking up and carrying the mat. Jewish leaders knew the Scriptures backward and forward, yet they were spiritually dead. We have people in the church today who know the Scriptures backward and forward and they are also spiritually dead. They think that simply because they can quote Scripture that they are living their lives by the "Word Alone" yet they are living a life of Spiritual death. Jewish leaders used the law to keep people in line and obeying the Sabbath had nothing to do with keeping the Sabbath Holy. People today in our churches us the law to try to keep people in line, to conform, and when they don't they will use Scripture to condemn, all in the name of Christ.

When I was in Israel several years ago I was in a building that had several floors. One of the elevators was labeled the "Sabbath Elevator." On the Sabbath day the elevator would stop at every floor on the way up and every floor on the way down. The purpose was so that a person would not break the Sabbath by pressing the button of the floor they wanted off on, thus breaking the law by "working" on the Sabbath. There are some laws that need to be broken, this, I believe, is one of them. There are a lot of different ways to keep the Sabbath day holy, let's not get carried away with law keeping.

People in recovery have to break the rules sometime in order to live a life of recovery. The family rule is "don't go for help, fix your own problem" or "people in our family don't drink, you can't be an alcoholic." They don't seek help because of the law of the family, and sometime even the law of the church. "There is no such thing as addiction, you just have a weakness."

Jesus calls us to break the rules sometimes, especially when it helps us, or others to live a life of recovery, and Spirituality.

See you next Sunday

The Woman at the Well…Heroine or Slut?

At Recovery Worship this morning we continued our series on "Encounters with Jesus." The woman at the well was our topic; a woman, like many women in the Bible, is not always presented in the kindest of ways. I can remember at seminary when I listened to a classmate rake her across the coals. She was an outcast, going to the well at noon because the other women didn't want anything to do with her. After all, she had been married five times, and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. Of course, as was pointed out this morning, if a woman has been married five times in our culture we would call her a "movie star." But this isn't today. This story took place in Jesus' day, so two thousand years of Biblical tradition have pretty much made her a slut. As my favorite preacher Fred Craddock observed, "Evangelists aplenty have assumed that the brighter her nails, the darker her mascara and the shorter her skirt, the greater the testimony to the power of the converting word." Sandra Schneiders states the case more bluntly: "The treatment of the Samaritan woman in the history of interpretation is a text book case of the trivialization, marginalization and even sexual demonization of Biblical women." (Thank you Frances Taylor Gench "Encounters with Jesus")

I would think it is time that we threw away the Biblical tradition of trashing women and take a fresh look at the woman at the well. Yes, she had five husbands, and was living with a man. Well, from my perspective, if I had been married five times I think I would have taken a break. The text doesn't tell us anything about her five husbands - maybe they were jerks. Maybe they physically or mentally abused her, maybe they simply ignored her. Maybe, and I think more likely, her five husbands were brothers who simply passed her down after the death of the first one, this was not uncommon in those days. It didn't take much for a man to divorce a woman in those days. A man just had to say, "I divorce you" and that was pretty much it. There were no divorce courts, alimony, child support or pre-nuptial agreements.

I see this woman as smart, and brave, a heroine, not a slut. She gets in a dialog with Jesus and she can carry her own weight. Where Nicodemus seemed confused by Jesus' talk of being born again, or from above, this woman follows Jesus in his conversation about living water. She also sees the possibility of Jesus being the promised Messiah. She doesn't hesitate in doing what Jesus tells her to do at the end of the text, she goes back into the village and tells people what she has seen and heard.

In this story Jesus does not condemn the woman for her past, he accepts her as she is. He doesn't require her to express faith, repent sin, or any other act, other than to go and tell. This story works well in the recovery community where people are accepted for who they are today, not what they were yesterday.

For a contemporary view of this story check out this link on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49BbfgJbto

Vikings are coming on…..see you next week.