Sunday, January 18

Here's my reflection/sermon for today (Sunday, January 18)

At our lectionary discussion group last Tuesday evening, the group started off fairly cautiously exploring the concept of what it would mean to be known. It didn’t take long, however, for one member of the group to throw caution to the wind and ask a rather provocative question.

“I can see how it would be a good thing to be known if you were a regular person,” the member began, “but what would it be like to be known completely if you had issues – I mean serious issues. If you lacked a conscience... If you were a sociopath, for instance?”

As the group sat quietly for a moment contemplating the question, wouldn’t you know it – my mind began racing. And within a matter of seconds, it landed on a particular individual that I had encountered on a television show.

On October 1, 2006 the world was introduced to a character in a Showtime program titled simply: “Dexter”. The show told the story of a thirty-something year old man by the name of Dexter Morgan.

Dexter was a young man whose life had begun with a horrific trauma that most of us here could not imagine living through. His single mother who – at one time had been a drug user – had turned police informant. She was involved in a sting where her cover was blown. As a result, she was taken with her children to a small storage unit by associates of the drug dealers and brutally murdered in front of her two young sons: Brian and Dexter. As if being forced to watch the brutal murder of their mother wasn’t bad enough, Brian and Dexter were left alone in the bloody storage unit for days with their mother’s body.

One of the policemen who eventually found the boys made the decision to adopt Dexter – knowing full well all of the details of Dexter’s life. Despite years of interventions that followed, Dexter’s adoptive father – Harry – knew that Dexter had deep-seeded issues that he would probably never be able to fully overcome: mainly a propensity toward violence and a fascination with blood.

Given that knowledge of Dexter, Harry made two decisions in a bold attempt to salvage Dexter’s life. First, he decided to get Dexter involved in hunting – which he hoped would serve as an outlet for Dexter’s propensity toward violence. And second, he helped set Dexter on a path of study that led him to a career as a blood spatter specialist in the Miami police department – a career where he could be around blood and not get himself in trouble.

These two actions represented desperate attempts by Harry to take the knowledge he had of Dexter and make the best of a bad situation. And while Harry’s plan seemed to work for a while, eventually it broke down – and Dexter turned into a vigilante serial killer who administered his own brand of justice.

All week long, my mind pondered a question regarding the issue of what it meant to be known that grew out of both the Tuesday evening discussion and Dexter’s circumstance. That question was this: what makes being known by another human being different than being known by God.

The more I thought about the question, the more a sense of clarity began to emerge for me. Let’s see if I can help bring some of that clarity to you as well.

When we think about what it means to know another person – there’s usually a passive side to that process. We think that in order to know another person we simply need to get inside their head a bit and discover what makes them tick. It’s there that we often stop – at the point of understanding. Under the guise of getting to know someone, we allow the other person to stay the same.

So what about the act of being known by God? How’s that different?

In his commentary on the book of Psalms, J. Clinton McCann, Jr. says that the implication of the Psalm, is three-fold: “our lives derive from God, [our lives] belong to God, and [our lives] find their true destination in God’s purpose” (New Interpreter's Bible 1237). That is where the seed of the difference lies.

You see unlike the process of being known by another person - where the goal is to stay largely the same - the goal now becomes something else: transformation – transformation in the sense that we come to understand our lives are no longer simply our own, they are God’s.

Nowhere is that simple but profound truth more evident than through the person of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Had Martin allowed himself to settle for a goal of simply being known by others; Martin would have gone to his grave as the person others knew him to be in 1957. He would have gone to his grave with descriptors like “preacher’s kid”, “doctor of philosophy”, “husband”, “father”, and “pastor”. He would have accepted the status quo that surrounded him, and he would have taught us to accept the status quo as well.

Thankfully, Martin didn’t settle for simply being known by others. He aspired to be known by One much greater. A knowledge that was rooted in the awareness of where his life was derived from, whom he belonged to, and where his true destination lie. First, he allowed the power of what the psalmist called that “wonderful knowledge” to seep in and transform his life. Then he took that power out into the world and transformed our lives as well.

Friends, as I conclude my time with you this morning, I want to leave you with this simple and straightforward challenge. This holiday weekend I ask you to open yourselves up and allow yourselves to be made known: not simply for whom you are today – but for whom God is calling you to become tomorrow. If you do that one thing, we won’t be a room full of people who have gathered to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – we’ll be a room full of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s.

Amen.

Saturday, January 17

Today’s Readings: Psalm 123; Isaiah 47:1-15; John 1:19-34; 1 Corinthians 1:26-31; Psalm 115

I have an important anniversary coming up in my life. Next Sunday – January 25 – represents the fifth anniversary of the date I was ordained as a minister in the United Church of Christ. So what made me think of my anniversary a week out? Well, it just so happens that today’s reading from 1 Corinthians was the passage I used as the Scripture for my ordination service. I know that I raised some eyebrows when I selected the text since the text reads: “Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don’t see many of “the brightest and the best” among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose those ‘nobodies’ to expose the hollow pretensions of the ‘somebodies’?” (1 Corinthians 1:26-28 from The Message). In the days leading up to my ordination, there were those who tried to portray me as a somebody to make it appear I was worthy of being ordained (i.e. “salutatorian of his high school class, president of his high school class, graduated with honors from college, appointed to the human rights commission for the city in which I was raised, politician, etc). I refused to go there because I knew that the same people and structures that had supported and encouraged me on my way up, were the same ones that turned on me when I came out as a gay man. They were the ones who took delight in turning me from “a somebody” to “a nobody”. God did exactly the opposite. God embraced me during my so-called “nobody” days (actually well before then, but that’s fodder for another blog entry) and transformed me into something else: a “somebody”! So today – I can proudly say: “It wasn’t my intelligence or talents that qualified me to be a minister – it was my willingness to embrace my status as “a nobody” that opened me to embrace my call.” So where are you at with all of this? Are you still trying to live your life as “a somebody”, or are you willing to entertain the notion that – apart from God – you are “a nobody”? Til next time…

Friday, January 16

Today’s Readings: Psalm 71; Isaiah 46:1-13; John 1:1-18; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; Psalm 129

During one of my trips home during my seminary years, I found myself bored one afternoon so I started rummaging through old boxes in our garage to find something interesting to read. While glancing at titles, one title caught my eye. The title was “In His Steps”; it was a classic written in 1896 by Charles Sheldon. I had never read it before so I thought it would be worth reading. While the language was definitely dated (and admittedly more than a little cheesy in many places), the book's premise resonated with me strongly. For those of you who haven’t read the book, the basic premise of the book tells the story of individuals who transformed their individual lives (and the life of their community) by asking themselves one simple question whenever they faced a challenge: what would Jesus do? While that question had floated around for a long time, Sheldon’s book helped popularize it (though please don't blame Sheldon for the way the saying has been marketed and commercialized!). While there are some in progressive circles who have dismissed the question by treating it simply as a hokey cliche, I’m not one of those folks. For those of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus, that hokey question can help bring a clearer focus to our lives. I was reminded of the question when I read today’s passage from 1 Corinthians – for in that passage Paul wrote: “to us who are personally called by God himself – both Jews and Greeks – Christ is God’s ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one” (1 Corinthians 1:24 from The Message). The simple question – what would Jesus do? – can be a helpful way of accessing God's ultimate wisdom. When I find myself starting to get sucked into a cycle of verbal and/or spiritual violence by a virulent personality like Rev. Fred Phelps, for instance, I can take a deep breath and ask myself, “What would Jesus do in response to Rev. Phelps message of hate?” When I find locked in a power struggle with someone over control, I can ask myself, "What would Jesus do in the midst of the struggle for control?" The list of possible applications of the question goes on and on. Today, when you find yourself in a situation where you are unsure of what to do, try asking yourself that age-old question – “What would Jesus do?” – and see if it helps you access some of God’s ultimate wisdom and insight. Til next time…

Thursday, January 15

Today’s Readings: Psalm 119:73-120; Isaiah 45:18-25; Matthew 4:18-25; 1 Corinthians 1:10-17

Two days ago I was talking with an individual in his twenties about some of his friends’ experience of the church. The individual issued one of the most stinging indictments I could have imagined regarding the church; he said the church is totally irrelevant to their lives. “How sad,” I thought to myself as I heard him say those words. I thought that not simply because I’m worried about the future of the institution; I thought that because it was evidence of how much we Christians have gotten off track in our attempts to live out our faith. You see, if there was one thing that Jesus went out of his way to model for us it was that our faith ought to be relevant to the lives of people. Take the way Jesus issued Simon and Andrew’s call in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew. Knowing that they were fisherman, Jesus issued their call by saying: “Come with me. I’ll make a new kind of fisherman out of you” (Matthew 4:19 from The Message). By using language that was consistent with Simon and Andrew’s social location - language that was relevant to their lives - Jesus was able to reach out and draw them in. My question for you to consider today is this: how relevant is your faith to your day-to-day life? Is your faith a decorative ornament that you tuck away until a moment when you feel like taking it out, or is it something that’s integrated into the fabric of your every day life? Til next time…