The World Is Our Parish

            A couple of weeks ago, our parish facebook page got a “like” from a man in New Delhi, India.  If you’re reading this, my friend, welcome!

            Maybe it shows my age, or maybe it shows that I’m kind of a hick at heart, but I can’t get over the awesomeness of this.  It is amazing to me that a kid who has lived his whole life in small towns in South Dakota can preach a sermon or write a blog post, fire it through the internet, and have it read by somebody in New Delhi, India.

            It makes me realize, yet again, how, in this day and age, we need to re-think exactly what our ministry is and who it is we’re reaching.  It’s easy for us to start thinking of ourselves as just people in little churches in small towns.  When we think of ourselves that way, we can think, well, there’s really not much our church can do to make an impact on anything or anyone. 

That may not cause us to lose our faith, but what it can do is cause us to lose our enthusiasm.  We can lose our desire to go out and take chances.  We can lose our willingness to do new things, to innovate, to take risks to bring people to Christ.  We can start thinking of our ministry as being limited to those who are already within our walls, rather than thinking about all the people we might be able to reach who are beyond our walls, maybe beyond our community, maybe even half-way around the world.

The thing is that reaching beyond the immediate community should be something that all of us, as United Methodists, do instinctively.  It comes from John Wesley.  Wesley got into trouble with his church, the Anglican Church, because he would go beyond the borders of his parish to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ.  When he was criticized for that, he famously responded, “The world is my parish.”

As United Methodists, the world is still our parish.  That’s true whether we’re in big cities or small towns.  It’s true whether we’re in a big church or a small church. 

After all, after Jesus was crucified, all of Christianity was one very small church.  Basically, it was eleven people.  If those people had decided they couldn’t do much, or that they should just focus on the people they already had in the town they were in, nothing would ever have happened.

Jesus told us to go and spread the gospel.  He did not limit that to the people in our immediate vicinity.  He told us to go and make disciples of all nations.  That’s what those eleven people in the first Christian church decided to do.  That’s what we’re still supposed to do.

The world is our parish.  That’s as true for the Wheatland Parish as it is for any other parish.  Let’s keep looking for ways to go and make disciples of all nations, just like Jesus told us to do!

Ch-Ch-Changes

This is the message given in the Wheatland Parish on Sunday, July 1, 2012.  The scripture is Ecclesiastes 1:4-10.

            I grew up in the 1970s in the seventies.  What that means is that, when I was a teenager, the musical groups I was listening to were groups like Three Dog Night, ELO, and ABBA.  Now, by today’s standards, that’s all pretty tame stuff, but I remember that at the time, my parents did not like the fact that I was listening to that kind of music at all.  Not only did they not like it, they did not understand it.  They could not understand why I did not enjoy the big band music that they grew up with, bands led by people like Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman and, of course, Lawrence Welk.  And I’m sure my grandpa, who loved the old cowboy singers like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, could not understand why my parents would like that big band stuff.  And on and on it goes.

           

It can be easy, when we don’t like a particular style of music, for us to just dismiss it out of hand.  It’s easy, but it’s probably not a very wise thing to do.  Because, as we conclude our sermon series, “Stone Tablets in a Wireless World”, one of the things that constantly changes in our society is popular styles of music.

           

I’ve heard people say music is the universal language, but I don’t think that’s true.  I think music is a lot of languages.  Hearing a type of music we’re not familiar with is kind of like hearing a language we’re not familiar with.  When we first hear it, it just sounds like noise.  The only way it can make sense to us is if we spend enough time with it to get familiar with it.

           

Think about the traditional church hymns we use.  Now, I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way, because I love a lot of those traditional hymns.  One of the favorite parts of my week is when I go out to Oahe Manor on Tuesday morning and spend a half hour playing the piano and singing those hymns with the folks out there.

           

Here’s the thing, though.  I was born in 1958, and I’ve been singing those traditional hymns all my life.  But music has changed a lot since 1958.  Those traditional hymns sound nothing like the popular music of today.

           

It was not always that way.  When people like Martin Luther and Charles Wesley were writing what now are our traditional hymns, they very often used the popular tunes of the day.  They just put Christian words to them.  The songs people sang in church sounded just like the songs they sang in other places.  Now, they don’t.  And to people who are not used to “churchy” music, it sounds foreign.  It sounds just as foreign as if we were speaking in a foreign language.

           

The reason people like Luther and Wesley used the music of their day to give people a Christian message is that music is a very powerful thing.  It evokes images.  It evokes emotions.  It evokes memories.  Songs get connected in our minds with certain events.  I’ve seen people cry while listening to a song, not because the song is particularly sad, but because it reminded them of something sad that happened when they heard it.  And I’ve seen people smile when they hear a song, again not because of the song itself, but because of a happy memory that they’ve connected to that song in their mind.  Music is something that is extremely powerful.

And music sticks with us.  It’s probably easier to memorize music than anything else.  I can hear a song that was popular when I was in high school, and even if I have not heard it for twenty or thirty years, I can still remember all the words.  I’ll bet there are songs you can do that with, too.  That’s how powerful music is.

           

Because music is so powerful, music is something we can use to reach people who might not be reached by listening to a sermon on Sunday morning.  That’s true no matter how wonderful and brilliant these sermons you hear on Sunday morning are.  Again, music sticks with us.  I’ve been going to church all my life, but there are very few sermons I’ve heard that I can remember.  I can remember lots of songs about faith, though.

           

As you know, we’re doing a contemporary song in our worship services now.  In our Wednesday night services in Gettysburg, we’ve been using more contemporary music.  It’s not that contemporary music is inherently better or worse than traditional hymns, but it is more like the music you hear on the radio.  That means contemporary music is less of a foreign language to people who are not used to traditional hymns.

           

What’s interesting, though, is that while styles of music have changed, the things songs are written about have really not changed all that much.  The reason for that is that people have not changed all that much.  We still have the same basic human needs—food, clothing, shelter.  We still have the same basic emotional needs, too—respect, love, feeling that we make a difference.  Each generation thinks it’s creating the world over again, but in many ways the world stays pretty much the same from one generation to the next.

           

The author of Ecclesiastes recognized that.  He tells us that even though we may think things are new and different, they’re really not.  He tells us that no matter what happens, “The sun rises and the sun goes down…The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north.”  We may think we’re experiencing things no one has ever experienced, or feeling things no one has ever felt, but in fact, he says, “There is nothing new under the sun.”  If we see a thing and think it’s new, he says, “It has already been in the ages before us.”

           

That may seem kind of depressing, in a way.  It may make us feel bad to realize that, despite all the ways the world has changed, we’re really not all that special, after all.  Everything we’re experiencing has been experienced by others.  We think we’re creating all this stuff that’s new and different, but all we’re really doing is fiddling around at the margins.  We change the technology, we make it easier to communicate and to travel, but we don’t do anything to change human nature. We may not like to think about that.  It can make us sad to think that, at the end of our lives, nothing about the world will be fundamentally different, that, as the author of Ecclesiastes says, “A generation goes, and a generation comes,” but nothing much actually changes.

           

But in another way, that can be comforting.  What it means is that, despite the changes we’ve talked about in this sermon series, God created a world that is pretty stable.  I mean, think about it:  it would be a pretty fragile world if one generation could come along and totally change everything about it, right?  Human nature would be pretty weak and unstable if it could be made totally different from one generation to the next.  If it was easy to change the world for the good, it would be just as easy to change it for the bad.  The fact that human nature does stay the same, that our human needs, whether physical or emotional, stay the same, that the world as a whole does not change easily, and that it has never has changed easily in all the years of human existence, shows that God wants it that way.

           

There’s another thing that’s comforting about this, too.  And that is that, while human nature may not change, God’s nature also does not change.  God is the same God today that was thousands of years in the past, and God is the same God that will be thousands of years in the future.  God’s love never changes.  God’s mercy never changes.  God’s grace and forgiveness never change.  Music may change, fashions may change, hair styles may change, technology may change, but God never changes.  God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

           

There’s one more thing that does not change, too, and that’s God’s promises to us.  God promised, through Jesus, that our sins would be forgiven if we believe in him.  God promised that if we believe in Jesus, we will have everlasting life in heaven.  And God promised to send the Holy Spirit to enter our hearts and increase our faith, so we can feel God’s presence with us here on earth.  God promised all these things to us, and those promises will never change.  God is always faithful to God’s promises.

           

Music may change, technology may change, but God does not change.  When we feel a little unsettled at all the changes in society, we can remember that we’re not the first generation to feel that way, and we won’t be the last.  And we can remember that, no matter what happens, the sun will continue to rise and set, the wind will continue to blow, and God will continue to be God.  God will continue to love us.  And God will continue to offer eternal life to all of us, young or old, through our faith in Jesus Christ.  That’s the message of those old stone tablets, and it still applies, even in a wireless world.

A Theology of Root Beer Floats

            A few weeks ago, I made a comment on facebook about loving root beer floats.  I noticed that this brief comment garnered many more likes and comments than my typical blog post, and observed that I should probably start blogging about root beer floats.

            Well, why not?  It’s summer.  If there was ever a time for root beer floats, this is it.  So, why not write about it?

            Why root beer floats, I wonder?  How did root beer became the beverage of choice for floats?  No one seems to know the reason, other than I gather it was the beverage used first.  I even went to the modern-day repository of all knowledge, the internet, and could not find the answer. 

It seems curious.  I like root beer okay, but it’s not my favorite soft drink.  I prefer Coke or Pepsi.  Most people do.  You can make a Coke float or a Pepsi float, of course, but most people don’t.  The root beer float is the gold standard, the thing all other floats are compared to.  It’s the Babe Ruth of floats.

Maybe it’s one of those eternal mysteries that we’ll never know the answer to.  And you know what?  That’s okay.  We know root beer floats are good.  We know they’re one of the best things it’s possible to have on a warm summer day.  Maybe that’s all we need to know.

As I think about it, there are a lot of things in God’s world that have no real reason for being, other than that they’re beautiful and/or enjoyable.  The colors of a sunset.  The perfect roundness of soap bubbles.  Roses.  The brilliance of a field of sunflowers.  Baseball.  Music.  Why not root beer floats, too?

Maybe that’s the better question to ask.  Instead of wondering why root beer floats, maybe the better question is, why not root beer floats?  Or, maybe the better thing is to not ask questions about root beer floats at all.  Maybe the better thing to do is just accept that root beer floats exist and enjoy them, rather than wondering about them.

In fact, that’s probably the best approach to take to all of the blessings God gives us.  Instead of wondering why God gives them to us, or instead of asking why God chooses to give them or not give them, maybe we should just accept God’s blessings and enjoy them.  After all, as I’ve said before, God is not a problem we have to work out or a puzzle we have to solve.  We’re not asked to understand God.  We’re asked to accept God’s blessings, serve God, and love God.

So, this summer, make sure you take the time to have a root beer float once in a while.  Not every day—there is the problem of too much of a good thing after all—but once in a while.  When you do, think about the incredible love of our awesome, wonderful God.

Attitude Adjustment

This is the message given at the WOW (Worship on Wednesdays) service in Gettysburg June 27, 2012.  The scripture is Matthew 18:21-35.

What we read in Matthew tonight is a pretty common theme in Jesus’ teaching.  We all hope to God will forgive us, we all want God to forgive us, we all need God to forgive us, but Jesus says God will only do that under one condition.  If we want to have God forgive us, then we need to forgive people on earth.  Jesus even says that in the Lord’s Prayer:  forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us

So, we need to learn to forgive people.  But how can we do that.  Obviously, it’s more than just saying the words.  That’s what we do when we’re little kids, right?  At least it’s what I did when I was a little kid.  I’d get into a fight with brother, and Mom would break it up, and then she’d say, “now tell him your sorry.”  And, of course, I would, but the truth is that I was not sorry at all.  If I was sorry about anything, it was that I had not hit him harder when I had the chance.

What Jesus says in this parable is that we will have to pay the full penalty for all the things we’ve done wrong unless we forgive people from our hearts.  That’s kind of a tough standard, you know?  Forgive people from our hearts.  We cannot just make an intellectual decision to forgive someone.  We cannot offer forgiveness to someone just because we know we should.  We need to really mean it.  We need to really feel it.  Nothing can be held back.  Forgiving someone from our hearts requires a total, emotional commitment to forgive.

That’s hard.  It’s hard because sometimes the wrongs that other people do to us are pretty serious.  Sometimes they’re done by people who we thought we could trust.  Sometimes they’re done by people who are really close to us.  Sometimes we put complete faith in someone, only to be betrayed by them.

I suspect most of here can think of a time when that’s happened to us.  If it has not happened to you yet, it probably will.  It happens to most of us at some point in our lives.

When that happens, it can be really hard to forgive someone.  In fact, it can be darn near impossible.  Even when we know we should forgive, it’s hard.  Even when we really want to forgive, it’s hard.  There are times when we wish we could forgive, when we know it’s the right thing to do.  There are times when we know the anger and resentment and bitterness we’re holding on to are bad for us, much less for the person we feel them toward.  We know forgiving would not only be the right thing to do, it would be the best thing we could do for ourselves.  Still, sometimes it just seems like we cannot do it.  We cannot forgive, no matter how hard we try.

So what do we do?  How do we make ourselves feel something we don’t feel?  And how do we make ourselves stop feeling something we do feel?

I think our parable gives us some clues.  Let’s look at it.

First, look at the way the question comes up.  Peter asks how many times he needs to forgive someone.  If Peter has a specific situation in mind when he asks this question, we’re not told about it.  He seems to just be asking about how we’re supposed to live our lives.

It seems to me that just asking the question that way, “How many times shall I forgive someone”, starts us off on the wrong foot.  Asking the question that way says we want forgiveness to be limited.  It says we don’t want to always offer forgiveness to people, we just want to forgive certain people at certain times for certain things.

That’s the first thing about ourselves that we that we need to change.  If, before anything even happens, we start out with the idea that we’re only going to forgive certain people for certain things, we’re lost before we start.  We need to begin with the goal of forgiving everyone, no matter what.  We may not be able to actually do it, but that should be our goal.  Otherwise, we’ll never be able to forgive the way Jesus wants us to.

            Then, Jesus tells Peter a story.  He tells him about a king who wants to settle his accounts.  The way Jesus tells it, it sounds like these are just business transactions.  The king does not seem to have any particular emotional investment in any of this.  He’s just collecting money.  A guy comes with a big debt, he can’t pay it, so the king says everything the guy has should be sold to pay the debt.  That’s what the law said was supposed to happen at that time.  It was nothing personal.  It was just business.

Then, though, the debtor makes it more than just business.  He begs and pleads with the king, promising that he’ll get the debt paid if only the king gives him more time.  That gets the king interested.  Now, he does get emotional.  He’s touched by what the plea of this debtor.  He not only agrees to give the guy more time, he cancels the debt entirely.  This guy will never have to pay the money back.  He’s off scot-free.

Now, you’d think the debtor would be happy about this.  What happens, though, is the debtor runs into another guy.  This guy owes the debtor some money.  What does he do?  He does not forgive the debt.  He does not even calmly ask for his money, the way the king did.  He immediately grabs this guy and starts choking him, demanding his money.  He refuses to listen to any please for mercy and has him thrown into prison.

Look at the difference in attitude.  The king may not have been looking to let people off, but at least he was open to it.  He did have any bad feelings toward the people who owed him money.  When the debtor found the guy who owed him money, however, he was spoiling for a fight.  He does not even give the guy a chance to pay him.  He immediately grabs him and chokes him, all the time demanding his money.  It never occurred to him to just forgive this guy.  Forgiveness was not on his radar.  He wanted vengeance, not forgiveness.  There was no way he could give forgiveness, because of his attitude.

            That’s where it needs to start.  That’s why Jesus says we need to offer forgiveness from our hearts.  We need to have an attitude of forgiveness long before anyone wrongs us.  At the very least, we need to be open to the idea of forgiveness.  If we don’t have our hearts right to begin with, we’ll never be able to offer forgiveness when the time comes.

            Now, remember, I said that where it starts.  That’s not where it ends.  Because, again, there are some wrongs that are really hard to forgive.  Even if we start with an attitude of forgiveness, how do we forgive someone who’s betrayed us?  How do we forgive someone who does not deserve our forgiveness and may not even be interested it?

            What we need to remember is that we don’t offer people forgiveness for their sake.  It may help them, or it may not, but that’s not the purpose of it.  We offer people forgiveness for our sake.  Not because we want God to forgive our sins, either.  I mean, we do want God to forgive our sins, but if we’re just offering forgiveness for that reason, the forgiveness will probably not come from our heart.

            When I say we offer people forgiveness for our sake, I’m talking about the effect offering forgiveness has on us.  Have you ever held a grudge for a while?  What’s that do to us?  It eats us up inside.  It poisons us.  It keeps us from moving forward.  We spend so much time living in the past, thinking about the hurts and betrayals of the past, that we cannot enjoy the present or the future.

            But, have you ever held a grudge for a while, and then finally let it go?  How’d that feel?  It feels great, right?  It feels like a weight has come off of us.  It feels like we’ve gotten rid of something that was weighing us down, like we’ve finally taken our foot of the brakes and now we can finally move forward with our lives.

            The only way we can move forward is to let go.  The only way we can let go is forgive.  And the only way we can forgive is to begin with an attitude of forgiveness and then to turn things over to God.

            It still won’t be easy, but it can be done.  It can done with God’s help, because all forgiveness, like all love, comes from God.  It can be done by feeling God’s Holy Spirit in our hearts.  When we have the Holy Spirit in our hearts, then we can forgive from our hearts.

We Are Family

Below is the message given in the Wheatland Parish Sunday, June 24, 2012.  The scriptures are Mark 3:20-34 and Galatians 6:1-10.

           Wanda loves to watch the movies they have on the Hallmark Movie Channel.  Once in a while, if I’m home and I can’t find a ball game to watch, I’ll watch one with her.          

The thing about those movies is that, when you decide to watch one, you pretty much know what you’re getting.  You know, at the end of a Hallmark Channel movie, that the right woman will fall in love with the right man, whatever problems the kids are having will be worked out, and the people living in the town will all get along with each other.  In other words, these movies are pretty predictable.  When Wanda sits down to watch one of them, she knows there’s going to be a happy ending.

           

That’s not meant as a criticism.  As they say, this is a feature, not a bug.  When Wanda watches one of these shows, a happy ending is exactly what she wants.  Really, that’s what most of us want.  Not from a movie, necessarily, but from our lives.  The reason these shows appeal to us is that they show us a life that may or may not be realistic, but it’s a life we wish we had.  If we’re single, we want to fall in love with the right woman or the right man.  If we have kids, we want to believe that whatever problems they’re having will work out.  We want to live in families where we love each other and we all get along.  We want to live in communities where people care about each other and help each other and are there for each other.

           

As we continue our sermon series, Stone Tablets in a Wireless World, this is one of the biggest changes we see in society.  Loving families and loving communities used to be accepted as the normal thing in this country.  I mean, I know that the world was never really like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry or Leave It to Beaver’s Springfield, but there was a time when it was close enough that those towns and the people in them were recognizable to us.  We saw something of ourselves in those people.  We may not have all cared about each other the way the people in those families and in those towns did, but it was something we wanted.  It was an ideal we were trying to move toward, and it did not seem impossible that we could have it.

           

It’s not that way any more.  Mom and Dad getting married and raising children and staying together all their lives is not nearly as common as it used to be.  People knowing all their neighbors and visiting with each other and caring for each other is not nearly as common as it used to be.

           

Maybe you think this is not a problem in our little town, but think about it.  Think of all the families you know who’ve been touched by divorce.  I’m not saying this as a criticism or to pass judgment on anyone, but just think about them. 

Also, maybe you think you know everybody in town, but do you really?  Next time you go to a community event, look around.  How many people there do you really know?  Maybe you know their names, but how many do you know well enough that you’d invite them over for dinner?  How many do you know well enough that you’d know if they were going through a serious problem?  How many do you know well enough that, if you were the one going through a serious problem, you could call them up and you know they’d be there to help?

           

Even in a town like this, it can be easy for us to feel alone.  Even when we know people’s names, we have a lot more acquaintances than we have real friends.  Even when our families get along, a lot of us live a long way from a lot of our family.  There are a lot of us, even in this little town, who don’t really know who they’d call if they were in trouble and needed help.

           

That brings us to our reading from Mark.  Jesus is with a crowd of people, and his mother and his brothers come.  They cannot get through the crowd, so they send a message up to Jesus that they want to see him.  Jesus does not get up and go to them, at least not right away.  Instead, Jesus says my mother and my brothers are right here.  Anyone who does God’s will is my mother or my brother or my sister.

           

Sometimes, we read that and think Jesus was being really disrespectful to his family.  That might very well be how some of the people who heard his statement took it.  I don’t think that was Jesus’ intent, though.  I think what Jesus was doing was making a point.

           

Jesus was trying to get us to look at family in a different way.  Jesus was telling us that family is more than blood relatives.  Those people are important, certainly, but they’re not the only ones we should consider family.  We should consider all Christians to be family.  Everyone who loves God is part of our family.

           

That was quite a change in attitude in Jesus’ time.  It’s still quite a change for us, today.  Think about how our attitudes would change if we truly looked at all Christians as family.  Think about how differently we’d treat people if, instead of looking at them as acquaintances, we looked at them as brothers and sisters. 

We’d show a lot more love to people, don’t you think?  We’d take more time to get to know people.  We’d take more of an interest in their lives.  We’d try a lot harder to find out what was going on with them.  We’d want to know when they were going through a bad time, so we could help them out.  We’d want to know when they were going through a good time, so we could celebrate with them.  We’d do what Paul writes in our reading from Galatians.  We’d carry each other’s burdens and do good to all people.  We’d be a lot closer to the people around us if we looked at them as brothers and sisters, rather than as acquaintances.

Now, at this point, maybe you’re thinking, if Jesus wanted to expand the definition of family, why did he limit it to just people who do God’s will?  Is Jesus saying that people who are not Christian, who do not believe in God, are not are brothers and sisters?  Are we not supposed to care about those people?

It’s a legitimate question.  After all, Jesus could’ve said, “all people are my brother and sister and mother.”  He did not.  He said, “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”  Why would Jesus have said that, if not to limit the people we’re supposed to treat as family?

Well, I think there’s another explanation.  I think what Jesus was telling us is that we’re supposed to try to make our family grow.  After all, what do we do when our families grow, whether by birth or by adoption or by marriage?  We celebrate, right?  We throw a party.  We want our families to grow.  We’re happy when they grow.

That’s how we need to look at our Christian family.  We need to try to make it grow.  We need to reach out to people in love and make them want to be part of our family.  We need to invite them into our family.  We need to let them know we have a place for them.  We need to know they are not just welcome in our family, but that we want them to be a part of our family.

In fact, we need to treat them like family even before they actually are.  That’s what we do in families, right?  If someone in our family is serious about someone, even before they get married, even before they get engaged, we start treating them like family.  We start getting to know them personally.  We start getting involved in their lives.  We invite them to family gatherings.  We include them in family pictures.  We’re letting them know that we’ve started to think of them as family, whether they’re actually family or not.

When we’re reaching out to people, that’s what we need to do.  We need to start treating them like family even before they actually are.  We need to get to know them personally.  We need to start getting involved in their lives.  We need to start inviting them to the stuff we have going on.  We need to let them know we think of them as family, whether they’re actually family or not.

Life may not be a Hallmark Channel movie, and we may not live in Mayberry.  We can still work toward that, though.  We can care for each other.  We can love each other.  By doing that, we can make all the people around us our brother and sister and mother, just like Jesus did.  Then, we can all have the happy ending we all want.

The Hoop of Love

            I wrote earlier that one of the things I felt about my ordination was a sense of relief.  I just want to explain a little more what I meant by that.

            It was not just a sense of relief that I’d actually been approved.  There was some of that, of course; you never know for sure that something is going to happen until it does.  Still, I was not all that worried that I was going to be rejected.

            The sense of relief comes from the fact that ordination is an awfully long process, and there are a lot of things you have to do.  I know there needs to be a process, and I know there are good reasons why the process is what it is.  My point is not to be critical.  Still, after a while, I started feeling like I was just being asked to jump through hoops, and fifty-three is pretty old to be jumping through hoops.  The relief comes from knowing that I’m finally through with the process, and I finally don’t have to jump through hoops any more.

            Except, of course, that’s not true.  I won’t have to jump through those same hoops again, but I’ll still have to jump through hoops.  We all do.  If you’ve ever tried to get a driver’s license, you’ve had to jump through hoops.  If you’ve ever been involved in a car accident, you’ve had to jump through hoops.  If you’ve ever tried to get (or use) health insurance, you’ve had to jump through hoops.  If you’ve ever had to deal with the government in any way, you’ve had to jump through hoops. 

I’m not whining about it.  Well, maybe I am, but my point is not to whine about it.  My point is that this is just the way life is.  Jumping through hoops is completely non-discriminatory.  It does not matter who you are.  It does not matter where you live.  It does not matter what you look like.  It does not matter how much money you have.  It does not even matter how powerful you are.  Even the president, who is sometimes referred to as the most powerful man on earth, has times when he has to jump through hoops.  It’s just the way it goes.

The great thing about God is that God hardly has any hoops at all.  The church can have a lot of them, sometimes, but God does not.  In fact, I can only think of one hoop God has:  love.  Jesus told us to love God and to love the people God created.  That’s the only hoop God asks us to jump through:  the hoop of love.  The other hoops were created by humans, not by God.

Society, being full of human beings, will ask us to jump through lots of hoops.  As we consider those hoops, let’s remember to stay focused on God’s hoop of love.  If we all made sure we jumped through that one, the other hoops would become pretty much irrelevant.

Hide and Seek

Below is the message given at the WOW (Worship on Wednesday) service in Gettysburg June 20.  The scripture is Luke 15:1-10.

            I remember back when I was about eight years old, I went to a high school basketball game with my folks in my old home town of Delmont.  I did that a lot, of course—I loved sports even then, and my oldest brother was on the team—but I remember this one particular time for a reason. 

After we got to the game, I did what most eight-year-olds do at a basketball game.  I went off to play with my friends.  Eventually the game got over, everybody started leaving, and I went to find my parents so we could go home.  I got near the exit, where I thought they’d have to come, but I never saw them.  Either they went out a different way, or I just missed them somehow.

Once I realized that, I went out to where I knew the car was parked.  As I approached it, I saw the car start to move.  I thought Dad was just playing a trick on me, pretending to leave to make me scared, but the car kept going.  I started running after it, but apparently Dad did not check the rear-view mirror and did not see me.  The tail lights got smaller, and eventually disappeared.  I had been left behind.

Well, they did not do it on purpose, of course.  When they did not see me, they figured I’d gone home with my brother.  My brother, of course, figured I was going home with my folks.  It was just a mistake.  I probably should’ve been smart enough to figure that out, and if I’d stopped to think, maybe I would’ve been.  At the moment, though, all I could feel was fear.  There I was eight years old, left alone on the mean streets of Delmont.

It all worked out, of course.  I walked to a friend’s house, they called my parents, and they came and got me.  I probably got some sort of a lecture about not wandering off, but I really don’t remember that part.  I just remember how scared I was when I thought I was lost, and how relieved I was when my parents came and I was found.

That’s not the only time in my life I’ve felt lost and alone.  It’s happened to me several times at various points along the journey of life.  I’ll bet it’s happened to you, too.  That’s why these stories Jesus tells about a lost sheep and a lost coin resonate so well with us.  Most of us know what it’s like to be lost, and most of us know what it’s like to be found, too.

As I was thinking about these stories Jesus told, there were a couple of things that struck me about it.  One of them is how persistently the lost item is looked for.  The searcher never gives up.  In fact, it looks like it never even occurs to the searcher to give up.  Listen to how Jesus put this:  the man who lost a sheep will “go after the lost sheep until he finds it.”  The woman who lost a coin will “search carefully until she finds it.” 

Think about that.  They search until they find it.  They don’t just search for a little while and then quit.  They don’t just check a few likely places and when they cannot find what they’re looking for go on about their business.  They look until they find it.  It does not matter where they have to go.  It does not matter what they have to do.  It does not matter how long it takes.  It does not matter what else they might have going on.  They look until they find it.

That’s how it is with God when we get lost.  God will look for us, and God will keep looking until God finds us.  It does not matter where God has to go to find us.  It does not matter what God has to do to find us.  It does not matter how long it takes for God to find us.  It does not matter what else God might have to do.  God will look for us until God finds us.

God does that for the same reason the man looks for the lost sheep until he finds it, and the same reason the woman looks for the coin until she finds.  God does that because each one of us is that important to God.

Maybe you wonder sometimes, why are we that important to God?  I mean, God is so much bigger and more powerful than we are.  Why should God care about us so much?

Well, think of that story of my getting left behind in Delmont.  Suppose I had not thought to go to a friend’s house.  Suppose, instead, I had just started aimlessly wandering those mean streets of Delmont.  What do you think my folks would’ve done?  They’d have gotten back to Delmont as fast as they could.  They’d have looked everywhere they could think of.  They’d have gone to everyone in town to ask if they’d seen me.  They’d have gotten the police involved.  They’d have done everything they could possibly do to find me.

Well, that’s obvious, I suppose, but why?  Why should they have done that?  I mean, my parents were so much bigger and more powerful than I was.  Why should they care about me so much?

Of course, you know the answer.  It’s because I’m their son.  That’s all the reason they needed.  It did not matter that they were bigger and more powerful.  In fact, that made them care about me even more.  They knew I could never make it on my own.  They knew I needed them to take care of me.  Because I’m their son, they were going to do everything they could to take care of me.  In fact, all these years later, they still do everything they can to take care of me, because I’m their son.

You and I are God’s children.  That’s all the reason God needs to care about us.  It does not matter that God is so much bigger and more powerful than we are.  In fact, that makes God care about us even more.  God knows you and I can never make it on our own.  God knows we need God to take care of us.  God takes care of us through our whole lives, because we’re God’s children.

Remember, though, I said there were two things about this story that struck me.  Here’s the other one.  The man will look for the sheep until he finds it, but what if the sheep decided it did not want to be found?  What if the sheep purposely hid from the shepherd?  What if every time the shepherd got close to finding the sheep, the sheep ran farther away?  Or, what if the shepherd found the sheep, only to have the sheep run away again?

            Sadly, that’s what we do sometimes.  We deliberately keep ourselves from God.  And the thing is that God allows us to do that.  God gives us free will.  God will never give up on us, and God will keep trying to get us to come back, but God will not force us.  God allows us the power to separate ourselves from God if that’s what we choose to do.

It’s such a sad thing when we do that.  It’s tragic, it really is.  It’s tragic in the eternal sense, of course, but it’s also tragic right here on earth.  God wants so much to take care of us.  God wants so much to help us.  We don’t even have to do anything, really.  All we have to do is stop resisting, stop hiding, and stop running, and let God find us.

If that’s what anyone here has been doing, why not stop?  Why not just stop where you are, turn around, and wait for God to find you?  I’ll bet it won’t even take very long.  And if you know someone who’s been doing that, try to get them to stop.  I mean, don’t try to force them, don’t try to threaten them or anything like that.  Just ask them to stop, turn around, and wait for God to find them.  After all, God already knows where they are.  All we need to do is stop resisting, stop hiding, and stop running.  All we need to do is turn around, and there God will be.

Jesus said there is a huge celebration in heaven and among the angels when just one person who was lost finally allows themselves to be found.  Let’s find a way to help kick off a party in heaven tonight!