Shouting at the Sky

Warwick Memorial United Methodist Church

16 September 2001

Luke 23:13-34

On September 11, 2001, I was serving as the associate pastor of my first pastoral appointment. Tracy was pregnant with our first child Ellen, but we were not telling people yet. The day before, on September 10, our church’s beloved lay leader J.T. Johnson had died suddenly. I had already been scheduled to preach, and the Rev. Larry Adams, our senior pastor, graciously allowed me to preach. What follows is what I said that Sunday.

We have all lived through one of those days where we will always remember where we were and what we were doing. We will always remember how old we were and to whom we were talking and what we were going to do when we heard the news. We will live the remainder of our days remembering how when we heard the news we quickly scanned our mental Rolodexes, trying to remember which loved ones were where. Did anyone have a reason to fly today? Was anyone in Manhattan or in northern Virginia? Maybe I should call, just to be sure.

It was only my second day in the parsonage of my rural, three-point circuit of churches when the phone rang and a voice on the other end of the line informed me that John Ben Varga had died. John Ben was, in many ways, a patriarch of that small community, and his death in the middle of the week meant that my first sermon in my new pastoral appointment would be a funeral sermon for someone known across the county, just not by me.

Almost immediately after I received the phone call regarding John Ben, I received another call from the pastor who was my predecessor in that appointment, offering to return and help in any way I needed, or to allow me to handle things myself. I told him I appreciated his generous offer but felt comfortable handling things myself.

When I was in divinity school, the twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette released an album titled Jagged Little Pill. It was a tremendous hit, yielding six singles, charting at number one in the United States for twelve weeks, and selling 33 million copies worldwide. If you remember those days, you have probably heard at least one song from the album. In the days before YouTube and streaming music services, Jagged Little Pill was played on practically every radio station, it seemed, all day long.

One of the best-known songs from the album is titled “Ironic” and it is known for, among other things, the lyric “It’s like ten-thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” In many ways, this lyric succinctly describes how church life and pastoral ministry feel in a postmodern age.

Allow me to explain: For centuries, the cultural landscape in this nation was like a seemingly infinite field of bowls of soup that stretched all the way to the horizon and the church possessed a seemingly endless supply of serving spoons. When I was a young person, like so many of my colleagues in ministry, I felt a calling to serve soup. I graduated from college and enrolled in seminary. I was ordained, graduated, and received my spoon, just as I expected based on what I witnessed in the lives of those who led me to the soup in the first place. I was a soup-server, and I anxiously awaited a lifetime of service to the people and communities to which I was sent; communities I believed would be hungry for soup for as long as anyone dared imagine. The soup line seemed to stretch forever. Besides, you basically had to eat soup in order to fit into most places.

And then, it seemed, the world lost its taste for soup.

It did not happen overnight. Sometimes people simply grew tired of soup and sought other forms of sustenance. Other times we only served the soup to people who looked and lived like us, and not like our communities. Still other times, we simply served bad soup that made people so ill they were done with soup forever, no matter how we changed the recipe.

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June 13, 2019

A hearty congratulations to the Maggie Walker Governor’s School Class of 2019. I pray God’s richest blessings upon each of you as you reach this tremendous milestone in your lives. All of the work, the late nights, the tests, quizzes, exams, homework, projects, classes, and lectures are finally and gloriously done. No more pencils, no more books, etc., etc., etc.,

I would like to begin my remarks this evening by acknowledging that our gathering is smaller in number that we hoped and prayed it would be with the passing of your classmate Eli Greer two years ago. In his honor, I would like to share a poem with you. I had already planned to read one stanza and discuss it, but tonight it seems fitting to read it in its entirety. The poem is one of my favorites, a poem titled “To an Athlete Dying Young,” composed by the English poet A.E. Housman.

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No audio this week.

Third Sunday of Easter – May 5, 2019 – Mark 9:14-29

The Lord helps those who help themselves. According to the demographer and pollster George Barna, the statement “The Bible teaches that God helps those who help themselves” had the following results in a February, 2000 poll:

• 53% of Americans (in general) agree strongly
• 22% agree somewhat
• 7% disagree somewhat
• 14% disagree strongly
• 5% stated they don’t know.

Of (self-described) “born-again” Christians:

• 68% agreed
• 81% of non “born-again” Christians agreed with the statement.

Despite being of non-Biblical origin, the phrase topped a poll of the most widely known Bible verses. Seventy-five percent of American teenagers said they believed that it was the central message of the Bible.

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Autoplay audio here.

Third Sunday of Lent – March 24, 2019

1 Corinthians 10:1-13

“But with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”

I once read a time-management related weblog where I encountered an article about the danger of wasting time. The author’s premise was this: the worst kind of time-wasting trap that we can fall into is not goofing off. It is doing fake work. When we are goofing off, we know you are goofing off. However, when we are doing fake work, we are doing things that seem like real work, except for the fact that they aren’t. So, for example, when I should be writing my sermon and I am instead filing papers on my desk, re-shelving my books, and checking e-mail and Facebook, I may be in my office, I may feel like I am working. If you were to peek through my window, I may even look like I am working, but I am not working. What I am doing is using fake work to assuage my conscience because what I am really doing is avoiding what truly needs to be done. I do it all the time. The reason the bushes at my house are pruned is because I do it when I really should be raking the leaves, and so on.

Which brings me to Lent, this wondrous forty-day season of the Christian liturgical year that should, if nothing else, save us from “fake piety.” It is a chance to allow God to change our wrong-headed and self-centered desires, so that our lives will follow our hearts in a more faithful direction. Lent is, in the broadest sense, about the admission that in order for us to embrace the life for which we were created, that we need God. As much as we sometimes hate to admit it, we are in need of God’s guidance, God’s grace, God’s redemption, and God’s forgiveness. In order to be kingdom people, there are things we need to make certain we do, and there are things we need to make certain we avoid. Lent is a time for us to remember this, and to make the necessary adjustments to our hearts and minds, knowing that as Jesus teaches, where our hearts are, there we will find our priorities and our desires.

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Autoplay audio is here.

Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany – February 17, 2019

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

On Sunday, June 16, 2013, I had just finished attending a district United Methodist Annual Conference orientation session in Charlottesville and was halfway home to the parsonage in Crozet, driving through the tiny village of Ivy, when my phone rang. It was my wife Tracy who informed me that I needed to come directly home, that her father had called with devastating news, and that she needed to immediately leave for Baltimore.

The news was that Tracy’s mother Nancy Crittenden was in Maryland attending a bridal shower for one of her great-nieces when she tripped on a step, lost her balance, and injured her head so severely that she was airlifted to the trauma center of the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where the following Wednesday afternoon, she would succumb to her injury less than an hour after life support was removed. She was sixty-five years old.

On that day, Tracy would remain with her father Jon, and I drove back to Virginia to pick up my two daughters Ellen and Claire from another family in our church, drive them to the parsonage, sit them on the couch in the front room beneath the picture window and break their hearts with the kind of news they had never heard before about a member of their family.

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This is sermon two in this series. The audio is here:

Summer of Forgiveness: As We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us – Seventh Sunday After Pentecost – July 8, 2019 – Matthew 18:23-35

“For this reason the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who wished to settle accounts with his slaves. When he began the reckoning, one who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him; and, as he could not pay, his lord ordered him to be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, and payment to be made. So the slave fell on his knees before him, saying, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you everything.’ And out of pity for him, the lord of that slave released him and forgave him the debt. But that same slave, as he went out, came upon one of his fellow slaves who owed him a hundred denarii; and seizing him by the throat, he said, ‘Pay what you owe.’ Then his fellow slave fell down and pleaded with him, ‘Have patience with me, and I will pay you.’ But he refused; then he went and threw him into prison until he would pay the debt. When his fellow slaves saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed, and they went and reported to their lord all that had taken place. Then his lord summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I had mercy on you?’ And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he would pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”

One of the strangest things about the Christian faith has to be the ways in which it commands things that most of the world regards as mere feelings. For example, in our United Methodist wedding liturgy, nowhere does the couple say “I do” (present tense). Instead, they say “I will” (future tense). The question is not “Do you love him/her on your wedding day?” It is “Will you love him/her down the road when you have both changed and some of the gloss has worn off the marriage, or at least, some patina has developed.

Jesus loves this. He loves to command us to do things that we believe we only have to do when we feel like it. Love God. Love me. Love one another. Love your neighbor. Love your enemies.

Jesus has this way about him where he is able to command us to separate how we feel from what we do, as we have a tendency to keep feeling and doing a bit too close together sometimes. Forgiveness is no different. Forgiveness has little to do with our feelings or even our judgements; whether we feel like forgiving someone or whether we feel like they deserve our pardon.

Rooting forgiveness in our feelings and our judgements can pretty easily keep it hidden away forever, so in today’s text, Jesus removes forgiveness from our feelings and judgements and roots it in something deeper and eternal: the depth of the forgiveness of us by God.

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In this guest post, we hear from Reveille’s Lay Leader Bo Bowden as he reflects upon his time in Slidell, Lousiana.

Early one Sunday morning in July just after breakfast, Pastor Carl Blackburn invited us to answer a simple question.  “Why are you doing this?”  The night before, his church, St. John UMC in Chattanooga, TN had hosted fifty-seven Reveille members en route to our New Orleans area mission trip.

It had been the first overnight of the trip.  We gave answers you might expect.  “To help others, to share the love of Jesus Christ, etc.”  My answer was a bit tongue in-cheek – “Why not?”  Maybe the coffee hadn’t kicked in yet.  Here’s my real answer:  Serving on Church Council, we sometimes make decisions affecting youth ministry.  I felt it to be one area I had not participated in adequately.  For me, this trip was an opportunity to become more involved.

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