"The Path and the Promise"

Scripture: (B)
Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25:1-10
1 Peter 3:18-22
Mark 1:9-15
Scripture: Jonah 3:1-5,10 Mark 1:14-20
Generations Together: ""The Choice""
Choice between lies and truth
Text
Introduction
 
I've never quite understood the Noah's ark story: ?particularly as a story for children.
I mean it is cute, with all the animals, but look at the big picture: God has just killed every man woman and child, every worm, spider and wildebeest, every bird, baboon and butterfly on the face of the earth.
This isn't the stuff of sweet dreams; it is the stuff of nightmares.
I mean really, cutsie wallpaper on children's bedroom wall with the boat and two by two animals marching in, but what about everybody else?
What will happen to the kid who is able to identify with the outsider? What torrent of terror would fill her dreams?
 
But here's the thing. The Bible knows death and destruction are real. And the story, the real gutsy core of the Bible, is that there is a rainbow after the storm.
 
Every religion is pretty much about two things.
On the one hand, religion is about keeping the world exactly as it is ?and never changing anything - because stability - like a bright sunny day - is what keeps things safe and secure and predictable.
(We like things predictable and - except on our birthday - we really hate surprises.)
On the other hand, almost every religion is, at least in part, about adapting to, accepting and surviving change.
What is change? Those are the storms we experience when the world doesn't turn out to be the way we thought it was. That's when the shallow stream we waded through a thousand times without getting our knees wet is suddenly now a raging torrent and we are up to our neck and sinking.
Change is when it feel like God is wrecking everything. God (or Satan, or nature or the powers that be) are ripping our world apart and laughing at us the whole time.
But the Bible says that behind the storm of change is a rainbow. Behind the disaster is a promise.
The message of the Bible is that:
Behind death and destruction is love.
For hopeless parents like Abraham and Sarah or Mary and Joseph, or Ida and William there is hope.
Out of slavery there is a promised land.
Behind arrest and danger there is good news, even in Galilee.
In devastation, disease and deformity there is new promise and new possibility.
In the wilderness there are angels.
And from the gray clouds of God the destroyer is the whisper and the promise of a multicolored God of love.
I A Faith of Change
My take on religion has, obviously, been deeply influenced by my Dad.
For him religion could never be about keeping things exactly as they were. Otherwise, as a man born with no arms, he could never have taken part in it. Ministry, he was told was a two armed adventure.
Ministers have to raise their arms in benediction at the end of the service. How could someone born without arms do that? Ministers have to take babies in their arms and scoop water out of the baptismal font in the palm of their hand and pour the water over the baby's forehead. How could he do that? Ministers have to pick up the communion bread and say "this is the body of Christ broken for you." Ministers have to lift the communion cup and say, "The blood of Christ, shed for you."
"Harold, you are a nice guy, but you really ought to consider another form of work.
"I mean, a minister needs to be an example of the best and the healthiest and the most whole and well, you?you don't have any arms."
Religion was for him and is for me about the courage to change - no to transform the world.
Look where he began. For months after my dad was born, his father, William, did nothing but agonize over what he had done wrong that God had cursed him with this crippled child.
Harold's grandmother, Johanna, a stern, iron-willed German matriarch was out in town shopping when the church bells begin to toll indicating that someone had died. Two other women in the store, not knowing who Johanna was, said they hoped it was that poor little crippled baby who had died. Stricken, in part because she realized, at that moment that at least part of her had been praying for exactly the same thing, Johanna was transformed and dedicated herself to stop fighting this change and help her daughter-in-law allow the boy to become all he could be.
But we all have a deep instinct to fear and even hate what is different. All of us have an aversion to change. All of us are afraid every time the world confronts us with a new and different reality.
My reality? My experience forces me to believe that change is necessary and good.
But a lot of religion is all about keeping things exactly the same.
I imagine sometimes it is even like this:
II. You Wake Up. Your face against the concrete.
You have gotten used to the floor. The hard stone could no longer rob you of sleep. But the cold keeps seeping into your bones. Sometimes the cold makes you as stiff as the concrete. And the grayness of the concrete is turning your mind a permanent shade of gray.
Then, driving the stiffness and cold out of your body by sheer will, the offer made by your jailer returns to the gray clouds of your consciousness. It had not been a dream.
All would be forgiven. You would be set free. All you have to do is agree to one little thing. Then you could leave the prison's gray concrete cold behind and return to the sun and air and earth of freedom.
Just one thing: one little thing.
Before your dreams and memories finish sifting themselves through your brain, the sound of boots in the corridor refocuses your reality. The heavy door of your cell was opening. Dragging you up and out before you could even stand, you are on the way to your warden, jailer and judge.
"All you have to do is say you believe that everything is meant to be just the way it is. Just promise you will never challenge a law or question the legitimacy of our rules ever again."
"That's all it takes. That's all we ask. Then all will be forgiven and you will be set free.
"Acknowledge that we know the truth, that we speak the truth and that we are the truth, and (within the limits of that truth, of course) you will be set free.
"But if you can't believe that every word we tell you is the truth?
"?if you can't believe that every law we pass is just?
"If you can't believe the reality we show you
is all you need to know in order to live and love?
?and that is all that you should ever even imagine,
then pain and this prison and an eternity of agony and the torture of endless death are all you will ever know."
That is the offer the judge made.
That was the threat of the jailer judge for whom religion is about keeping everything the same forever.
Just believe that everything we say or everything written in this book or everything revealed by our priests, is the absolute truth and never question any of it and you will be happy and free forever. All your crimes will be forgiven and every sin washed away.
But you must not question.
You must not explore.
You must not challenge.
You must not seek to understand.
You must hate what is puzzling and different.
You must never side with the outcast or stranger.
People and things that surprise and challenge you must be attacked as the true threat they are.
You must never seek justice for those who are different.
That is the offer of some kinds of religion: Forgiveness and freedom, but only if you never question and never dare to doubt. Only if you never challenge the way things are and the way they have always been.
Then the jailer will set you free: free for eternity.
But that's not my faith. That's not my good news.
And I am absolutely convinced it is not the Good News Jesus preached.
III. For Me, the Promise Is About Courage in the Storm
In a world washed over with a flood of death, Noah can see a rainbow promise.
In a nation beaten down by Roman swords, a nation with all its hopes bleeding and nailed to a cross, there is a resurrection promise.
For Jesus, the arrest of the man he walked all the way to the Jordan river to see?
?and the terror of forty nights with the sharp toothed death of wild animals there in the wilderness?
?and forty days in the brutal blazing sun of Satan's white hot temptations?
?In all that, what does Jesus see? He sees Good News.
He doesn't turn on Dan Rather or Peter Jennings and moan that it is all hopeless. He doesn't watch police chases or America's stupidest felons and say the news is all bad, just like it looks. He has all that pain nailed to his hands and feet and he still proclaims good news.
Whenever I am told that some people should be excluded from the church because of who they are, I can only remember how they tried to exclude my Dad because they thought they had all the answers and because they were terrified of anything that might make them think or wonder or - God forbid - change their rules.
Whenever I am told that someone deserves to be in prison because of what they have done, I can't help thinking how it is the poor who end up stealing and the hopeless who end up hooked on drugs and I can't imagine that it is the rich and the hopeful that get to judge without ever understanding.
I remember the story of the storekeeper, back in the depth of the depression in the 1930's. He saw a little boy - maybe as young as six or seven - standing out front near a barrel of apples. Slipping out from behind the counter, he came up behind the boy and said: "Son, are you trying to figure out how to steal one of those apples?" "No sir," the hungry boy replied, "I am trying to figure out how not to steal one."
Whenever I hear that it is OK to lock someone up for fifty years for stealing golf clubs or shoplifting videotapes, I keep wondering which state legislator, up on his high moral horse ever had to struggle with poverty in his soul. Poverty that can grind you down in a nation where the vast majority of people who commit crimes were born poor and the overwhelming majority of the people in prisons grew up without money and without hope.
And I can't help but wonder, when I hear the shrill screams of those who think no punishment is too severe for what they call "the deviants" among us, if they ever had to struggle with who they are and the acceptability of what they feel in the intimate core of their beings.
And those who want to rain vengeance down on our enemies: have they ever tried to imagine the terror of a child in war or a simple soldier facing the most mechanized, computerized, organized and overwhelmingly deadly army on the face of the earth. There is a graveyard on the road back from Kuwait that used to be a road. Tens of thousands of fathers and brothers were slaughtered there. Shot in the back as they ran away because you can't surrender to death that is shot from the sky. And now we want to do it all over again. And it looks like we will, just because we can.
I fear we will, because we simply don't have the courage to see the world any other way. We don't have the courage to see another perspective or listen a little longer to another point of view, no matter how strange it sounds to us.
?Or because we can't imagine the feelings of those fathers and brothers.
But maybe I just don't get it.
Maybe my Dad, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were all wrong.
Maybe religion is only about keeping things the same.
Maybe it only belongs to the fundamentalists in Iran and Saudi Arabia and in Tennessee and Texas.
Maybe, but?
Conclusion
I believe the Bible has never been about shackling us to one way or to one single vision of the world.
I believe the Bible is about the angels you can still see when you feel lost in the wilderness.
I believe the Bible is about slaves who are set free.
I believe the Bible is about the cursed and broken finding healing and hope not in physical wellness but in the acceptance of others and in the heart of God.
The Bible is about rainbows after the destruction of a battle, or an earthquake or a flood.
The Bible is about the good news a crippled man can bring to a broken world.
?A broken world that keeps fooling itself into believing that it has all the answers.
The Bible does not have all the answers. The Bible gives us the courage to ask all the right questions.
That is the promise I see in the rainbow.
That is the Good News I am certain Jesus preached.
That is the Good News each one of us can become if we listen to each other with courage and love and pour out our own souls with honesty and with the assurance of a soul that is resting in the palm of God's almighty hand.