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David Orendorff         John 15:12-13             April 1, 2012

Last Sunday my sermon was about Jesus saying that a seed must die to produce a harvest. I spoke of how meaningful this metaphor of Jesus’ death was to me and hopefully to us. I also said that the legal and ritual understandings of why Jesus must die did not particularly speak to me. That Jesus died as a substitute for the legal death I deserve, or that the sacrifice of Jesus as the Lamb of God was the last sacrifice God required for my forgiveness, just didn’t speak to me.

Then at the Scripture and Sermon discussion group Bob Ward spoke of why both the legal and the ritual explanations for Jesus’ death spoke to him. Bob said, “Because Jesus died for me I know I am forgiven and that I don’t have to carry any guilt or shame for the failures of my life.”

Bob said it and the light went on. It was just what I needed to hear. I had been looking at Jesus’ death from the wrong angle, from the angle of what God needed to forgive us. But Jesus’ death is not about what God needs; it is about what we need. God doesn’t need a courtroom and Jesus to die as the substitute for our sins, but we do. And God doesn’t need the ritual sacrifice of the Lamb of God to be persuaded to forgive us, but we do. Because we are hard headed and hard hearted, God makes the ultimate sacrifice of love so we understand how great is God’s love for us. The thing is, we just don’t believe that God absolutely forgives us and unconditionally loves us. So God arranges a demonstration of infinite love by sending his beloved son to die so we will know we are loved. Even with this demonstration I and others are obviously slow on the uptake.

In the Gospel of John Jesus says it this way, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” There is no greater love than the willingness and the act of dying for another. Anything less is not complete love. And God’s love for us is complete.

I am reminded of when Erika and Johanna were babies. My love for them was such that, when they were ill, I would pray that the illness be taken from them and given to me. And if that meant I needed to die in their place, I was ready to die. God’s love is the love of a parent for a child and we are that child.

Jesus’ death is not what God wants or needs but is God’s demonstration of absolute forgiveness and love for us. Jesus’ death means we don’t have to pay the price we should pay for our debts. Jesus’ death means we don’t have to offer up ritual sacrifices to appease God who ought to be angry with us. The only thing we need do is accept the forgiveness offered as a gift from God. And if God forgives us unconditionally and universally, then we ought to forgive each other unconditionally and universally.

As we enter this Holy Week and prepare for communion, I invite you to close your eyes and reflect on a regret you may carry, on a guilt or shame that is yours. In your mind, see your hand write it down. Got it? Now, still holding what you have written, remember that Jesus died for us. Breathe in slowly and deeply the love God has so clearly demonstrated by Jesus’ death. Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a giant hand with a giant pencil shaped like a cross. And on its end, coming straight at you is a giant and very soft eraser.

One last note: Remember that God’s second great demonstration of love for us was to raise his son from death. But that is for next week’s celebration.

Shalom and Amen.

 

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David Orendorff        John 12:20-26             March 25, 2012

It isn’t that Jesus dies that so much bothers us.  We know everyone must someday die from this life.  It is the timing and manner of Jesus’ death which is bothersome.  What we really want to know is why Jesus had to die so young and by crucifixion.  Couldn’t God have figured something else out?

Even Jesus wondered about his death.  You remember after his last supper Jesus takes his disciples with him to pray in the garden.  Sensing his death is near he tells his disciples that his soul is filled with sorrow, even the feeling of death.  And then going further into the garden alone he prays to his father in heaven, “Abba, all things are possible to you; remove this cup (this death) from me.”[1] Or to paraphrase, “Abba, can’t this cup be a different cup?  Can’t you find another way?”  But ever faithful and trusting of God he ends his prayer with, “Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Over time we, the church, have struggled with the death of Jesus.  Various explanations have been offered.  Two primary ways we have tried to understand the “why” of Jesus’ death are a legal explanation and ritual explanation.  In the legal understanding we are criminals deserving of death for our crimes against God and humanity, but God, the judge, accepts Jesus’ death in our place so we don’t have to die.  But since God makes and enforces the law, couldn’t God just pardon us without the death of Jesus?

There are several ritual sacrifices used to explain Jesus’ death. In one the sins of the village are symbolically placed on an unblemished lamb or goat and the lamb/goat either sacrificed or driven into the wilderness to die carrying the sins away from the village.  There is a ritual bathing in the blood of a bull.  The claim about Jesus in all these is that Jesus is the last sacrifice ever needed.  No more lambs, goats or bulls need be offered to receive God’s forgiveness.  But if all this is symbolic, couldn’t the Lamb of God simply have symbolically died with the same effect?

Though I understand and fully accept that the legal and ritual explanation are intent on helping me understand that God loves and forgives me and us, I confess they don’t particularly work for me.  I do not say this to challenge others for whom they do work and are a great comfort.  For many over centuries and still today the legal and the ritual understandings are the most satisfying ways of understanding how Jesus’ sacrifice sets us free from our crimes and our punishment.  I would not take away the grace thus brought from anyone.

What helps me understand God’s great forgiveness in Jesus is Jesus’ own explanation.  To explain why he must die to the disciples, Jesus offers neither the legal nor the ritual understanding.  Jesus instead chooses to explain his death with an agricultural metaphor, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus’ explanation is so very different than either the legal or ritual understanding.  For one thing, the legal and the ritual are linear.  That is they are on a sequential time line in which something happens, then something else happens and then there is a result.  Jesus’ explanation is in cyclical time.  Something happens, then something happens then the first thing happens again as the cycle begins anew.  Jesus’ death then is not the end of a process but the ongoing process itself of dying and then rising, just like seeds that produce fruit which have more seeds that produce more fruit and on and on into all the future.

I am reminded of a tree that falls in the forest and as it rots becomes a nurse log, giving life to insects, worms, moss, flowers, various berry bushes and multiple new trees.  In its death the tree is reborn giving more life in its death than it gave in its life.

Jesus, by his explanation of his death, invites us into the never ending cycle of death and rebirth so that one seed produces thousands and one generation produces the next.  To follow Jesus is to die and rise eternally; it is to be a part of an ever expanding number of seeds and fruit.

There is a second aspect of Jesus’ explanation that also grabs my attention.  Jesus’ explanation is a metaphor, which is very different language than the language of law or ritual.  In seminary I learned that metaphors are polyvalent, that is, they have many meanings and the meaning a listener finds depends on the current life of the listener.  For instance, in reflecting on the need for a seed to die in order to produce fruit I thought of marriage.  In order for me to be fruitfully married the David that liked to date several girls at a time, had to die.  I had to date only one girl for the rest of my life.  And then I thought about being a parent.  In order for me to be a fruitful father, the David that liked to go out with friends spontaneously had to die; the footloose freedom of being without children had to give way to the need to love and be present with my children.  And from the view of being a pastor I thought that in order for me to be a fruitful pastor the David that liked to be involved in acting and stage productions had to die.  For me it was not possible to give good attention to being a pastor and give good attention to being a dramatist.  In order for me to learn patience, the impatient David had to die.  In order for me to be sober the David that used alcohol had to die.  The list of the times I have needed to die is long and the list of my resurrections into new life is just as long.

Jesus came as the seed that would plant the Kingdom of heaven on earth.  And like the grain of wheat, if Jesus wanted the people of the kingdom to be more than just he, he had to die.  So like Jesus, if we are to be resurrected into new life, heavenly life, we must die.  To be transformed from a broken and partial self to a whole and full self means that something old has to go and something new has to come.  The glory and miracle is that in each death the one seed planted becomes fruit full of life and new seeds for the next cycle.

One final observation:  By Bella’s baptism we are reminded that baptism is also a dying with Christ that we might be raised with Christ.  In baptism we die in the warm water of God’s mercy trusting that by our death with Christ we will, by the power of the Holy Spirit, be raised with Christ.  It is by this death that we become fruitful for the earth and all God’s creation.  In baptism we die and to be raised with power to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.[2] By remembering our baptism with Bella we remember that we are in a process of continual dying and rising that we might be more like Jesus; we are reminded that we are seeds that by death are brought to life and to give life; we remember that we are never finished but always being made more complete and thus more holy.

I pray that as we follow Jesus in worship, study and service we lose our lives that we might find our lives in God’s love, love of our neighbor and a more authentic love of ourselves and be a part of the great new harvest.

Shalom and Amen.

[2] Micah 6:8

 

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David Orendorff       John 3:16-21         March 18, 2012

On the monitor is a famous news photo from the Viet Nam War era.  The girl in the photo has been identified as Kim Phuc.  In 1972 Kim and her family where in Trang Bang when it was bombed with napalm.  Kim’s clothes were set on fire and she ripped them off as she ran from the village.  Kim was cared for by the Americans and though terribly burned, lived.  The photograph was taken by an American reporter and clearly shows to us the horror of war.  This photo caused many to rethink their support of the war in Vietnam.

When the Americans left Viet Nam the Vietnamese government used Kim as propaganda for 17 years even though it was not the Americans but the South Vietnamese that mistakenly bombed Trang Bang.  For seventeen years Kim was made to lie for the Communist Party of Vietnam.

In 1989 she was sent to Havana, Cuba to study Pharmacology and there met another Vietnamese student whom she married. Kim and her husband were given a trip to Moscow for their honeymoon.  At a stop in Newfoundland they took the opportunity to escape to Canada.  Kim, her husband and two boys now live in Toronto.  It is an inspiring and happy ending to a very sad story.

But there is another tragic story associated with this photo.  On Veterans Day 1996 Kim was invited to speak at the Vietnam War Memorial.  Kim talked of forgiveness for the pilot that had dropped the bomb on her and her family.  A note from the crowd was passed to her and John Plummer, a United Methodist pastor, claimed to have been that man.  Later he clarified that he was not the pilot but had as an American advisor to the Vietnamese Air Force, he had coordinated the bombing.  There was a media sensation over their reconciliation.  And this story of sin and forgiveness, of death turned to life is the sermon I was going to preach.  But in doing the research I learned of yet another tragedy associated with this story.

John Plummer’s confession was most probably an exaggeration or even fabrication.  Though Plummer maintains that he coordinated the airstrike as an advisor to the Vietnamese forces,  the records and his superiors say there was no American advisor for the strike on Trang Bang.  Online you can find articles arguing this side and that, including support for John Plummer by his Bishop and District Superintendent.  It gets all messy and one hardly knows what to believe, or what is truth.

I am reminded of similar questions last year raised about Greg Mortenson and the truth of his story in “Three Cups of Tea” and the efficacy of his foundation to build schools in Afghanistan.  There too is someone I admired who has been mired by claims that his story is not true.

The stories of Kim Phuc, John Plummer and Greg Mortenson remind me of how fragile is truth and how fragile are we.  I am reminded of when I have shaded truth for the sake of appearance.  I am reminded of how every hero I have ever had has been shown to have the same clay feet by which I am cursed.  I am reminded of my and our fallible human condition.  I am reminded of how often we have failed to love.   It would be so easy to turn cynical and believe that we are beyond redeeming; that we are beyond being saved to love and be loved.

But St. John believed, and I believe with him that “God so loves the world….”  God is about loving us.  Not just some of us.  Not just the good ones of us.  Not just the righteous.  Not just the beautiful.  Not just the winners.  Not just those of us who are mostly sane.  Not just the ones who know the right words, the right teacher, the right denomination, or even the right spiritual path.  God loves all of us.  God loves every molecule, atom and quark for every hour and nanosecond in the whole of this four, thirteen or infinite dimensional universe.  If it is, God loves it. God loves the whole world.   God loves you; warts, sins and all!!!

And this love is not given on the condition that we are worthy of being loved by infinity.  It is given exactly because we are not worthy.  God’s forgiving and redeeming love is given because it is exactly what we need if we are to be saved, or even if we are too live.  “Indeed,” Jesus says, “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” If Jesus had come to judge the world then the world is lost forever, for we all fall short of being the truth, of being complete love, of being worthy of God’s love.

We need love that forgives and then redeems liars and cheats to be honest disciples of compassion and mercy by transforming our hamartia (our sins of failure to love) into the mind, heart and hands of servant love.  We need divine love that is a gift, a grace; is unconditional and universal.   We need love that restores us to the loving people God made us to be.

Those who bombed Kim Phuc’s village need.  Kim Phuc needs forgiven for her propagandistic lies.  John Plummer needs forgiveness for his role in the terror of war. And speaking of needing forgiveness for the terror of war, with the revelations coming out of Afghanistan (the burning of Koran, the murder of sleeping civilians, unintended causalities of drone strikes and bombings) we who continue to pay for that war need forgiveness, need God to not judge us, but to love us and save us from ourselves.  And God does so love us that he sent his Son.

The Sufi poet Hafiz has a wonderful poem that says it so well:

We should Talk about This Problem[1]

(God says) There is a Beautiful Creature

Living in a hole you have dug.

So at night

I set fruit and grains

And little pots of wine and milk

Beside our soft earthen mounds,

And I often sing.

But still, my dear,

You do not come out.

I have fallen in love with Someone

Who hides inside you.

We should talk about this problem -

Otherwise,

I will never leave you alone.

Twenty years ago on March 15, in Lent, a congregation began to worship together.  A few with the help of many made arrangements with Laura Ingalls Wilder School to meet in the cafeteria, planned and staffed the worship, and with the help of many from other United Methodist congregations made thousands of phone calls inviting everyone to come and worship.  Some of those who created the first worship still worship with us.  Some of those who responded to a phone call still worship with us.  And many more have come since to worship with us.

It seems right that the first worship of Bear Creek as a fellowship was in Lent.  To the darkness of life that first worship was the promise of light.  To those who had forgotten or hadn’t heard of God’s love it was a witness.  That first worship, as we do today, began with the procession of a lit candle, the Bible and a cross to create sacred space in a school cafeteria; to create a sacred place of belonging for all who know Lenten darkness.  Look over the timeline on the wall and sense all the moments that God would not leave us alone and saved repeatedly this small and fallible gathering of the faithful.  Know behind every celebration are big and little deaths that have been turned to new life.  Know that 20 years is just the brief beginning of God’s great work to love the world in and through us.

Because God loves us, God does for us and our children what we cannot do for ourselves; God turns indifference into compassion, weakness to strength, sickness to health, and death into life.  What would appear to us as the certain end becomes the most remarkable of beginnings.  And the end of Lent what killed Jesus only made him stronger as the Christ.  And Jesus is the promise that what kills us makes us stronger.  So when you think you have failed and there is no recovery, remember that God will not leave you alone and is ready to talk.  Remember that God loves the world and that you are the world to God.

Amen and Shalom.