Pray for Everyone

1 Timothy 2:1-7
September 19, 2010 (25th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1.  You may have noticed in the past few years, even the past few decades, that politics and religion in this country have gotten mixed up.  Presidents, congresspeople, governors, even Supreme Court justices, call upon God for help and ask for God’s blessing.  Something called “family values” has become shorthand for a conservative Christian social agenda.  Cases come to trial about removing “In God We Trust” from our money.  And in the last three years, Illinois has required a daily “moment of silence” in classrooms across the state and then repealed that requirement as being covertly religious.  Everyone knows that we enjoy “separation between Church and State” in this country, but we aren’t sure what that means, and most of us only want that separation when it is convenient for us.  Sometimes people say that they just wish politics and religion could remain separate.  They especially say to me, as a pastor, that the church should not get involved in specific political issues—that we should just preach the Golden Rule and stay out of particular debates. 

Even if we thought that course of action were preferable, the Bible again and again shows that all of human life, including political leaders and political structures, must be met through the person of Jesus Christ. 

It’s no surprise really.  Both politics and religion are focused, at least in part, in how we ought to live together.  Naturally, we Christians must find ways to live in the world.  It’s an old concern.  The advice we heard from 1 Timothy this morning admonishes us to pray for “kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.”  That kind of advice made especial sense for early Christians who were trying to live peaceably in an empire that was openly persecuting them.  But perhaps it makes sense for us now as well.  How must we live to be Christians in the world?  And to make the question a little more focused for this morning’s sermon:  how must we pray to live as Christians in a world that is ruled by powerful people and political systems?

2.  Fortunately we Presbyterians have a leg up on this question.  Our Presbyterian form of government with representative bodies of elders, presbyters, and delegates to General Assembly is not dissimilar to many western democracies.  You can’t be a Presbyterian for too long before being introduced to the Book of Order, the governmental part of our church’s constitution, which is full of theology as well as rules and regulations about how we are to work together as a church.  One of our favorite catchphrases, which comes from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, is that we like to do things “decently and in order.”  Indeed, part of my seminary education was to become familiar with Robert’s Rules of Order!  The reading we heard this morning from 1 Timothy is a bit like an ancient Book of Order.  The writer of the letter, ostensibly Paul, is instructing Timothy on how to run a church and be a good Christian leader.  The passage we read this morning focuses on how important it is to pray for everyone.  Special emphasis is placed, as I mentioned, on praying for muckety-mucks, head honchos, grand poohbas, and other politicians and rulers.  It seems that it has long been our responsibility to make intercessions with God for our earthly leaders.  In other words, our religion is supposed to play a role in politics. 

3.  So for whom should we be praying?  Well, there’s President Barack Obama.  Then of course, there’s the congress.  Our senators are Dick Durbin and Roland Burris—we should certainly pray for them.  And depending on where you live, your congressperson is either Jerry Costello or John Shimkus—both need our prayers.  The mayor of Alton is Tom Hoescht and the mayor of Godfrey is Michael McCormick.  But we need not limit ourselves to the United States.  We can pray for the leaders of other nations:  for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of Iraq.  We should pray for our military generals and for Ban-ki Moon, secretary general of the United Nations.  We should pray for the leaders of our enemies: for Mahmoud Admadinejad of Iran, Kim Jong Il of North Korea, the leaders of Al-Qaeda, and for the leaders of Mexican drug gangs.  The letter to Timothy makes it clear that we Christians must pray for all these leaders—the good, the bad, and the ugly—because Jesus Christ gave himself as a ransom for all people, everywhere.  It is not our job to distinguish who deserves our prayer.  We are to pray for peace, for godliness, for dignity and leave the rest to our Lord. 

4.  Naturally, we must not pray only for leaders and rulers.  We must pray for all people.  We don’t believe that prayer is some sort of vending machine, where we put in the prayer and God must dispense the result.  Instead, we believe that we have been taught to pray by Jesus’ own example.  We believe that prayer reorients our lives and reminds us that we all rely on God.  We believe that prayer brings healing to individuals and to communities.  So we are called to pray for everyone. One incredible website I found while preparing this sermon is http://www.prayer4every1.com/.  Anyone can go to this website and enter a prayer request and it is immediately posted so that all visitors to the site can lift up other people in prayer.  A few recent entries included a little girl who has been having seizures, for a woman named Janice, for the ministries of a church in Florida, and for all married people. 

We pray for all these people because we believe with the writer of 1 Timothy that: “there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself as a ransom for all.”  This good news is not meant to exclude those who don’t believe in Jesus but rather to include all in the merciful salvation won for us in Christ. 

5.  But more than the good news of this universal salvation given to all people, there is also the good news that when we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, we reorient ourselves and our society.   I was recently reading through some instructions for prayer in the introduction to a Lutheran daily devotional book.  The writer suggested that each of us, upon waking in the morning, sit up in bed, cross ourselves and say, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”  Likewise, when we go to bed at night, we should say our prayers, making intercessions for all people, and asking for a godly rest through the night.  In this way, you live your whole day with prayer bookends around your actions, your thoughts, and your encounters. 

And when those prayers are made in the name of Jesus Christ, the one who perfectly reveals God’s love and goodness to us, we begin to see the world, see other people, see our leaders, and see ourselves in a new way.

In the Wednesday morning study group, we have been studying the apostle Paul.  Do you remember what happened to him on the road to Damascus?  In the experience of conversion, he was blinded by the light of Christ.  Later, when he joined fellow Christians, who prayed for him, something like scales fell from his eyes and his vision was restored.  Something similar happens to us when we approach the world in prayer through the mediation of Jesus Christ.  We see new things.  Indeed, we see basic human dignity where before we saw strangers and enemies.  We see the need for justice and peace where before we saw the seduction of national or economic interests.  We see brothers and sisters who live by the same mercy and grace that we live by when before we saw no one at all.  This is the power, the gift, and the necessity of prayer for all people.

Let us pray:

Great God of the whole world, we pray for our rulers and leaders, that they may guide the nations of your world with compassion and justice that all people may live in all godliness and dignity.  Send your Spirit to continue to teach us to pray so that, in you O Christ, all human beings may find the truth of your love.  In your holy name we pray.  Amen.

Celebration!

Luke 15:1-10
September 12, 2010 (24th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1.  Did you know that just about every day is a good day for a party?  If you have trouble cutting loose and letting down your hair, if you need a pretty darn good reason to have any fun at all, then, boy, do I have some good news for you!  If you do even a little bit of searching around, you can find a reason to celebrate every single day.  For example, today, September 12, besides being both Commissioning Sunday and Grandparents’ Day, is also Chocolate Milkshake Day, National Video Games Day, and on the perhaps lest festive side of things, National Pet Memorial Day.  If these days don’t satisfy, we can probably get by with celebrating tomorrow, which is also Fortune Cookie Day, Uncle Sam Day, Positive Thinking Day and National Peanut Day! 
Of course, I remember with the rest of the nation the anniversary of September 11 and the tragedies of that day, but today I would rather get us back on track to celebrate.  Every Sunday morning is a great day to celebrate what God does for us. 

2.  The last few Sundays here at church have not been completely celebratory.  The scripture texts have been pretty tough on us.  Lately, in our lectionary readings Jesus has been hanging out with Pharisees, who totally get him down with their nit-picky legalism.  And then he’s with a crowd of followers, whom he normally has good words for, but last week he gave them some hard words.  He challenged the Pharisees’ social customs and unjust pecking order and he challenged the crowd of followers to commit themselves fully to his gospel.  But in the very next verse, in Luke chapter 15 verse 1, Jesus is back in his comfort zone:  he’s with tax collectors and sinners.  

Jesus knows who he’s with when he’s with tax collectors, prostitutes, moral reprobates, ne’er-do-wells, and the like.  These are the kind of people who know what a sin looks like.  They are intimately related with that place in human experience that today’s 12-step movement calls “rock bottom.” 

In today’s theologically-sophisticated Christian church, we are quick to point out that we are all sinners.  And so maybe we should imagine ourselves in this group close to Jesus.  Lord knows we’ve all had our own scrapes with sin, with bad mistakes, with regret.  That’s precisely why we start our worship services with a prayer of confession.  We acknowledge who we are and what we’ve done so that we can receive forgiveness and move on with our worship and thanksgiving. 

But on the other hand, these sorts of New Testament sinners might be out of our league.  In fact, Jesus makes clear that, not only have these people done some bad things, they are also on the edges of society.  They have been ostracized.  They are not welcome with the good people—the Pharisees, the regular folk—you and me. 

But on yet another hand, maybe we do belong with them, with these legendary New Testament outcasts—the tax collectors, the prostitutes, the ne’er-do-wells.  I say this because as Christians, we have made a commitment with Jesus Christ to welcome the stranger, to live with the outcast, to embrace a social reality that defies prejudice and division. 

In any case, whether we should be comforted by seeing ourselves in the group with which Jesus felt most comfortable—or whether we should be challenged by seeing ourselves amongst the holier-than-thou Pharisees, we all can recognize how awful it feels to be alone and lost. 

3.  In Jesus’ parables, there’s a little lost sheep and there is a little lost coin.  The way the stories are set up, it is clear that Jesus wants us to see ourselves in the sheep and in the coin.  We may not even know we are lost, though we probably do—what’s really at issue is that God, respectively the shepherd and the sweeping woman in the story, has lost us and wants to get us back. 

The main mover and shaker in these parables is God.  God moves to find and restore the lost one.  God leaves the other 99 sheep to find the one.  And God turns the house upside down to find the what was lost.  God is always coming to bring us back when we lose our way.

Methodist bishop Will Willimon remembers a story from Annie Dillard. 

Annie Dillard, the great American writer, tells in her book about her life growing up in Pittsburgh. She was a smart young woman. By the age of fifteen she’d read through all the books in the Carnegie Branch of the Pittsburgh Library near her home. And reading those books she decided that all this religion stuff is bunk and God doesn’t really exist. So she took it upon herself at age fifteen to show up at Shadyside Presbyterian Church and she said to her aging pastor, “I want my name off the roll. I don’t believe in God anymore.”

The pastor said, “Okay.”

Annie Dillard said, “You’re not going to try to argue me out of it?”

And he said, “No, no, no. You’re too smart for me. There’s no way I could argue you back in.”

So she said, “I want my name off the roll.”

He said, “It’s off the roll.”

She said, “Okay.” She walked out of the minister’s office and on her way down the hall she heard him mutter to himself out loud, “She’ll be back!” She wheeled around, went back into the office and she said, “What did I hear you say?”

He said, “Oh, I said I presumed that you’ll probably be back.”

And she said, “Look, this is my life. I live my life like I want to live my life. I’m not coming back!”

Well, Annie Dillard wrote in her life story, “As I write this I’m 48 years old and I’m back.”

The amazing truth of the gospel is just that.  God wants us back and will come get us no matter what.  No matter how far away you get, no matter how lost you become, no matter how turned around you are, God will stop everything to come and get you.  One person has said it this way, “To lose faith is to wander into that place where one can be found.” 

4.  And once the wanderer has been found, then God does the unexpected.  When the lost one is found, all the people, the sinners and the Pharisees, the insiders and the outsiders, are called out to party.  God doesn’t need any other reason to celebrate.  Nothing is more worthy of celebration than when one of God’s beloved is restored.  To the consternation of the holy and to the comfort of the sinner, God parties like there is no tomorrow when God finds us and brings us to safety.

Way back in 1980 (that’s 30 years ago, believe it or not!) the band Kool and the Gang had a huge hit in their song, “Celebration.”  You have most certainly heard this song—the lyrics of the first verse go like this:

There's a party goin' on right here
A celebration to last throughout the years
So bring your good times, and your laughter too
We gonna celebrate your party with you.

Yes, we should celebrate!  At the end of it all, today’s gospel does not invite the sinner to repent.  Instead, it invites the righteous to join the party when the community is restored. We once were lost, but now we’re found.  Once, we were gone, but now we’re here. So all together: let us bring our good times, and our laughter too.  We gonna celebrate this party with you.  Amen.

The Calculus of Discipleship

Luke 14:25-35
September 5, 2010 (23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1.  If these were the only words we had from Jesus, we would have a very different idea of who he is.  Most of us think of Jesus as merciful.  He’s a healer and a miracle worker.  He’s the Son of God who gives of himself to save and redeem us.  He’s the King of Heaven sitting on God’s right hand welcoming us to the eternal banquet at the end of our earthly life.  But then, in passages like the one we hear from Luke’s gospel this morning, Jesus suddenly is speaking words to his followers that are as hard as nails.  He seems almost unreasonable in his stridency.  He says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”  These are incredibly hard words!  What are we to make of them?  How in heaven’s name can the Lord of love and mercy, the one who is always trying to draw us together into a community of faith, say these hard, divisive things?  Well, I’ll say up front that most Bible scholars and commentators try to lessen the impact of these words in some way.  They either say that the Aramaic word for “hate” had a more benign meaning than the English word.  Or, and this is more common, they say that Jesus was exercising poetic hyperbole to make a very serious point.  These kinds of interpretations help us get our heads around Jesus’ words, but we must not forget that Jesus said something very demanding—very serious.

2.  I don’t want to bury the lead too much—I think the point of Jesus’ words, and the point of this sermon is that being Jesus’ followers—his disciples—demands everything we’ve got.  Rev. Alyce McKenzie remembers a story from her childhood that sounds awfully familiar—perhaps you had a similar upbringing:  “When I was growing up, my dad was big on perseverance proverbs. ‘Winners never quit and quitters never win.’ ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ He even had a picture over his desk in his study of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s battle flag that flew over the USS Niagra during the Battle of Lake Eerie in 1812. It read ‘Don’t Give Up the Ship.’ …Growing up we were never allowed to quit anything. That’s enough to make you think twice before you join the marching band.”  It’s a good lesson for children, and maybe for adults too:  If you sign up to do something, see it through, do not give up.  Of course, there are times in our lives when quitting is appropriate—sometimes we start things that become too harmful or just don’t make sense to continue with.  But the basic point stands—don’t sign up for something unless you are ready to commit to it.

3.  Jesus is looking around at the crowds that are following him around.  He sees people that are in the crowd for a lot of different reasons, and one senses that he feels distinctly suspicious that many of these people are fair-weather friends.  One has to wonder if he may also look around the Christian churches today, gathered this morning, and wonder the same thing.  So he decides, with hard words, to make clear to all of us following him that there are serious ramifications of being his disciple.  One commentator has said that this passage is “the fine print” of being a Christian, and that once you’ve heard it, you can’t say that you haven’t.  The fine print of Christianity is that being Jesus’ follower must be your number one commitment in your life. 

4.  Once you know the fine print, that being a Christian can be nothing less than all-consuming, then Jesus invites you to get out your calculator and make some prudent calculations.  He gives a couple of examples that, unfortunately, continue to be relevant in our modern world.  First, he mentions a contractor.  The wise contractor does not start a building project until he first calculates whether or not he will be able to complete the job.  Otherwise, he’ll be stuck with a half-finished eyesore and be the laughingstock of all.  To drive the point home, he makes another example in the area of warfare.  What military leader would lead his troops into a war without first being next-to-positive that he could win the conflict?  Even if you’re not a contractor or a military general, you get the gist of what Jesus is trying to say.  When you say, “Jesus, I will follow you,” when you agree to be a member of Jesus’ church, when you make promises at your own baptism and at the baptism of others, you commit yourself to something that hopefully you have made provision to carry through. 

5.  So, how would we make this tally?  When we were examining this incredibly demanding fine print, how would we calculate what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called the “cost of discipleship”?  Well, what do you think it requires to be a Christian?  Let’s start with the baseline.  You need to come to church to worship with your fellow Christians pretty regularly.  You need to serve others in some way.  You need to give of your time and talent.  You need to pray.  You need to study.  Ok, that already can seem like a whole lot in busy lives.  But after Jesus’ words that we need to forsake everyone, even ourselves, to follow him, that we need to take up the cross, even these tall orders do not seem quite tall enough.  There are more difficult tasks.  We must turn the other cheek.  We must forgive those who harm us.  We must give the coat off our own backs.  We must go the extra mile.  We must love our enemies.  Perhaps there’s even more.  Perhaps we cannot move through our lives keeping our religion separate from politics, or from our family life, or from our work, or from our school.  Jesus suggests that we need to give up all our possessions.  More hyperbole? 

Have you ever done those little thought experiments where, with friends, you say:  “If you had to give up one of these for the rest of your life, what would it be?  Would it be chocolate or red wine?  Would it be french fries or pancakes?  Would it be movies or books?  If you had to choose just one of the pair, which would it be?  In the context of Jesus’ terribly hard words, in the context of the fine print, which would it be:  following Jesus or anything else? 

6.  By now, if you’re like me, you are realizing that you are not going to be able to do this thing.  If I have to give up all my possessions and put my family in 2^nd place and live out my faith in every arena of my  life without fail, then, no, I can sincerely say that I am going to be found wanting. 

But the good news (and there is always good news!) is that all these commitments are not the price of a ticket into Jesus’ company.  Jesus is inviting all of us now.  We don’t need to be perfect disciples to join in.  That’s right.  Total commitment is not the price to follow Jesus, it is the inevitable consequence.  If you stay with him on the way to the cross, if you never leave him, if you make him first in all, the consequences could be hard indeed. 

7.  But you will not be alone.  Thanks be to God, when we follow Christ and take up the cross with him, we are given the Church.  I’m talking about the Church with a capital C.  This is the congregation of the faithful that goes beyond the congregation of First Alton.  It’s the Church of all those who have read the fine print and signed up anyway, those who know full well that their priorities will never line up with the priorities of the world.  You know, the priorities that say it is fine to go to church on Sunday and not think of it again until next week.  Or that say that it is fine to spend all kinds of money on clubs and property and luxuries and give some spare change to the church. Or that say that some people are better than other people on this earth because of their citizenship or class or race or gender.  Or that actually think that poor people deserve to be poor because they lack what it takes to be well-off like us.  Maybe we’d like to be members of a Church where everyone was like us and had the same sophistication or money or background or family that we had.  But that’s a Church that is ignoring the hard words from today’s gospel.  That is not the Church that Jesus is giving us.  Jesus is giving us a Church made up of all those other disciples who have agreed to give their all.  Jesus is giving us a Church that is ruled by the priorities of his cross.  It’s not an easy place to be, but it is the only place to be.

Let us pray:  God of all people, give us the courage and strength to follow where you lead us.  Help us to find our value, our identity, and our purpose in you and in no other.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.

Who Is Missing?

Luke 14:1, 7-14
August 29, 2010 (22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Rev. Brett Hendrickson

1.  Some of you know that I started teaching at Lewis & Clark Community College this past week—I’m teaching a few sections of World Religions and really enjoying myself.

Being back in the classroom has got me thinking about some of the academic theories and methods that I have studied over the years.  A lot of what I do as a scholar of religion is to document, evaluate, and think about people’s culture. 

The thing about culture is that it is often more easy to recognize someone else’s culture than your own.  Anthropologists, those scholars who spend most of their time studying culture, have noticed that it is all too easy to forget that you have your own assumptions and peculiar ways of doing things when you are examining someone else.  Or, as Jesus would perhaps say: it is easier to point out the dust in another person’s eye while ignoring the log in your own. 

2.  In a kind of humorous demonstration of this principal, an anthropologist named Horace Miner wrote a description of a foreign culture way back in 1956.  He said the name of this North American tribe was the “Nacirema.”  He said the people in this tribe all had little shrines in their dwelling places.  In these shrines, they had a charm-box full of magical packets that treat real or imagined maladies.  Underneath this charm box, the Nacirema always locate, “a small font. Each day every member of the family, in succession, enters the shrine room, bows his head before the charm-box, mingles different sorts of holy water in the font, and proceeds with a brief rite of ablution.[5] The holy waters are secured from the Water Temple of the community, where the priests conduct elaborate ceremonies to make the liquid ritually pure…The daily body ritual performed by everyone includes a mouth-rite. Despite the fact that these people are so punctilious [6] about care of the mouth, this rite involves a practice which strikes the uninitiated stranger as revolting. It was reported to me that the ritual consists of inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical [paste], and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.”

Of course, the surprise ending of this account of the strange Nacirema people is that Nacirema is just “American” spelled backwards, the shrine is the bathroom, the charm box is the medicine cabinet, below which is the sink where we wash our faces and brush our teeth.  Sometimes, our own cultural practices and daily habits and ways of interacting with the world are so close to us that we can’t even see them!

3.  This is precisely what’s happening in this morning’s gospel reading.  Jesus is at a dinner party at the home of a leader of the Pharisees.  He probably feels pretty comfortable.  Many scholars have argued recently that Jesus’ own interest in holiness and the law suggest that he himself, if not officially a Pharisee, was sympathetic with their basic program.  However, as the gospels abundantly show, Jesus was also quite critical of the Pharisees and their legalistic excesses.  The Pharisees and their gathered guests cannot see their own culture because it is too familiar.  They cannot see the way meals in their society were theaters of social class and importance.  They cannot see that a dinner party was an opportunity for the guests to cement their rank in the community based on where they sat.  And they cannot see that it was also an opportunity for the host to induce debt in his guests so that they would have to pay him back with invitations to lavish parties at their own homes. 

Jesus, with the acumen of a brilliant anthropologist, does see what’s happening at the dinner party.  Moreover, he tells the two-part parable about the imaginary wedding banquet where guests strive to sit in the low place so that they might be invited to the place of honor and where the host does not invite his muckety-muck friends but rather the poor, the halt, and the lame knowing full well that they cannot pay back his kindness.

4.  Food and eating are mentioned in the gospel of Luke more than in any other gospel.  And so when a banquet scene appears in Luke, we should perk up and pay attention—something important is about to happen!  Over and over, Luke and Jesus use the parable of the wedding banquet to point to the Realm of God. 

And in the Realm of God, we find that God’s culture, God’s social structure and intent for human relationships is radically different from the one that Jesus finds in the Pharisee’s home.

5.  But what about our culture, the rules and assumptions that surround us so tightly that we can barely recognize them?  Well, you don’t need me to tell you that—while our culture is not identical to that of ancient Palestine—we still have a culture that separates the powerful from the lowly, the strong from the weak, the rich from the poor, the white from the black. 

The great Reformed theologian of the 20^th century, Karl Barth, insists that the Christian community and our hospitality within this community may not under any circumstances make divisions based on:

• national, ethnic, or linguistic barriers in our world;
• racial differences;
• cultural differences;
• or class distinctions between rich and poor.

Barth also said that when preachers sit down to prepare their sermons, they should have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  So, let me share with you a cover story in the Post-Dispatch jus this last Tuesday.  The story pointed to the terrible fact that African American unemployment in the St. Louis area is much worse than for white residents.  The reporter writes, “An African-American living in the St. Louis region in 2009 was twice as likely to be unemployed as a white resident of the area.”  The jobless rate for black men in 2009 was 22.1%, compared with 10.5 % for the whole workforce. 

James Buford, president of the St. Louis Urban League for the past 25 years, blamed the discrepancy on several factors.  First, he mentioned the disintegration of the black nuclear family.  Then he points out that many black people do not finish high school (47% in 2008).  Finally, he pointed to black-on-black crime and high incarceration rates for contributing to unemployment.  While Buford refuses to blame racism for the unemployment, he is forced to agree with other observers that race is definitely part of the problem.  He and others insist that the answer to this problem lies in fixing a broken public education system, that is so frequently broken along lines of race and class.

6.  Let’s hold that thought for a minute and go back to Jesus.  Prof. David Lose argues that Jesus’ parable in this passage is precisely the kind of thing that gets Jesus killed.

Lose writes, “he dares not only to stand outside the social order of his day; he dares not only to call that social order – and all social orders – into question; but he also says these things are not of God. Jesus proclaims here and throughout the gospel that in the kingdom of God there are no pecking orders. None. Zero. Zilch.
And while that sounds at first blush like it ought to be good news, it throws us into radical dependence on God's grace and God's grace alone. We can't stand, that is, on our accomplishments, or our wealth, or positive attributes, or good looks, or strengths, or IQ, or our movement up or down the reigning pecking order. There is, suddenly, nothing we can do to establish ourselves before God and the world except rely upon God's desire to be in relationship with us and with all people. Which means that we have no claim on God; rather, we have been claimed by God and invited to love others as we've been loved.”

7.  So is there something we can say, for example, about public education in St. Louis that would so threaten the powers that be that we would be putting our life at risk?  Is there something we can do to so challenge our culture, the status quo, on questions of race, and sexuality, and class, and other wicked divisions that we sound like we are citizens of some odd country that does not share our culture?  Some odd country like, say, the Kingdom of God?

There’s a lot to say and a lot to do.  But let me give one humble place to start.  We must be radical and kingdom-based in our hospitality, in our welcome of people into this community of the church.  We must live and act as if everyone who is not here is someone whom we desperately need to have with us.  Who is missing?  Who do we need here that our culture is keeping out?  What social rules and assumptions are making it uncomfortable for people to be here with us, praising God?  If our congregation is to approach the openness of the heavenly banquet, then we must include all people here. 

I’d like to close this sermon with a wonderful story that UCC pastor Kate Huey tells, a story from her childhood: 

“When I was growing up in a family of eleven, meals were a big deal. My mother sat at one end of the table, and my father at the other. My four big brothers sat along one side of the table, and the five youngest, beginning with me, faced them on the other side. We always ate together, no matter how late my father had to work. Often, my parents would talk about the family business, but my father always asked each one of us “how our day went.” And occasionally, out of the blue, he would do a rather wonderful thing, as I look back on it now. Each of us could get lost in a sea of so many faces. But my dad would say, in a very serious tone, “How many people are happy we have John [or Libby, or Chuck, etc.], raise your hand.” And we would all raise our hands. (You made sure you always raised your hand, because you wanted everyone else to do the same when it was your turn – a great equalizer!) I can’t describe the effect it had on each of us to see ten hands go up in the air (some days people would put BOTH hands up – that was really something!)" Well, I think in that heavenly banquet in the eternal city, God will be like the dad in this story. God will say, “How many people are glad we have Jeff and Ruth and Betty June and Steve and Bob and Emily Dawn…raise your hand.” And we will. Amen