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Foundry United Rev. |
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“Christianity on
Monday Morning and Saturday Night” Sunday, April 19, 2009 |
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Mark 14: 22-26
Rev. |
Let me
begin this morning with a story. If you understand this story, you understand
much of what I have been trying to communicate these past weeks since I began
this sermon series way back in February. It is a
story about one of my heroes when I was a young minister – the South Baptist
preacher Carlyle Marney. The last church he served before his death in 1979
Myer Park Baptist in Here’s
the story: Carlyle Marney was once spending a couple of days at a seminary in
the South. He wondered into a room where some of the seminary students were
having a discussion. They were arguing about where the Garden of Eden had
been located. Some thought it had been in what is today One of
the students asked Carlyle Marney where he thought the Garden of Eden had
been located. He said: “I know exactly where it was. It was at The
students looked at him as if he was crazy, so he continued. “It was
at Each of
us has in our life a Garden of Eden. Each of us has in our life a Christianity
is a sacramental religion, and as soon as it stops being sacramental, it is
likely to become thwarting and repressive, rather than liberating and
renewing. Here’s
what Christianity is: Christianity is a loosey/goosey collection of stories,
poems, tunes, memories from the past, speculations about the future, myths,
laws, reasoning and logic, jokes, rites, rituals, habits, practices and
silences. The purpose of all these stories and rituals is to help us find
ways to talk about and to think about and to feel about our lives which are mysterious
and imponderable and full of unanswered and unanswerable questions.
Christianity gives us all this as a way to discover meaning in life when its
meaning is not obvious, which it never is. Christianity is about finding the
inward and spiritual grace in the outward and visible things of daily life. What do
you think Christians have fought with each other about more than anything
else over the past 500 years? For the first 500 years of Christianity the big
debate was about the divinity and the humanity of Christ. Then Eastern and
Western Christianity split as a result of the relationship between Jesus and
the Holy Spirit. Then there were the
crusades and the inquisitions. But what do you think Christians have fought
about more than anything else these past 500 years? Turn to someone near you
and take 30 seconds to tell each other what you think Christians have fought
with each other most about over the past five centuries. Here’s
the answer: More than anything else over the past 500 years, Christians have
fought with each other about the sacraments – Baptism and Holy Communion. Should
baptism be by immersion, pouring or sprinkling? Should babies be baptized or
only those who have reached an age where they can decide for themselves whether
they want to be Christians: infant baptism or believers’ baptism? The
first Baptists, called Anabaptists, were persecuted for their beliefs and
often executed by both Catholics and Protestants by drowning. The Pope and
the Protestant reformers said, “If you like water so much, we’ll drown
you.” That’s how conflictual the issue
of baptism became among Christians. Christians
over the past 500 years have argued endlessly about Communion. Does the bread
actually and literally become the body of Christ? Or is the bread merely
symbolic? Does the wine literally and physically become the blood of Christ
or is it only a symbol of Christ’s blood? There
have been big arguments and divisions within Christianity about transubstantiation.
Do the molecules actually change into something else or, as others believe, is
this only a memorial…a way of remembering? James
White was a United Methodist professor of liturgy and worship who eventually
came to teach at I had a
professor in seminary who, whenever the topic of “the real presence of
Christ” in Communion would come up, would ask, “What’s the alternative? The
unreal presence?” So why
do you think Christians have fought so ardently about the sacraments? Persecuting
and drowning each other about the sacraments? Because
the big question of the past 500 years – the big question of modernity – is the
question of where God is present in the world…where God is present, if God is
present, in your life and mine. This is
the age of secularization. This is the age of science and scientific
explanations for everything. This is the age of rationality. This is the age
of urbanization. This is the age of our conquest of nature: our alienation
from nature. Where
is God to be found in the age of modernity? Modernity
is a different world than the Bible was written in. The assumptions we live
by are different. What we see and experience in life is different. Bill
McKibben is a well-known writer and activist about environmental
concerns. Al Gore says that he was
greatly influenced by Bill. He lives in Our
time has been called the age of information. Modernity began with the
inventing of the printing press. But McKibben says what has really happened
is that the kind of information we have has changed, and he suggested not
totally for the better. One of
the things McKibben did to prepare to write the Age of Missing Information is that he spent a month watching
television in Then he
went camping in the When we
are alienated from nature, from the natural rhythms of life, where do we find
God? How
many of us had milk with our breakfast this morning? How many of us have ever
milked a cow? Even farmers don’t milk cows anymore. Machines milk cows. How
many of us on an average day are awoken by the sun? By a rooster crowing? By
an alarm clock? How
many of us go to sleep when it starts to get dark? How
many of us have, say, an hour of silence daily in our waking lives…no
talking, no phone, no radio, TV, or iPod? So with
no contact with nature, no silence, where do we experience the divine and
holy in the midst of life? This is
really what we have been debating these past 500 years in our debate about
the sacraments. Some
Christians have said there are holy objects and holy moments. You take bread and
you say words over it, and it becomes transformed –transubstantiated – into something
else – the body of Christ – and, when you eat it, Christ enters into your
body. You find God in special segregated moments of your life when you are
being religious. You find the Lord on the Lord’s Day in the Lord’s house when
you read the Lord’s book. Others
have said you take bread and it merely symbolic. The Lord isn’t really
present. It is just an idea, just a memory, just a hope for the future. Both of
these are non-sacramental ways of thinking. Sacramental Christianity says
that God is present in all of life. The bread is every moment of our life. The
Eternal is present in every moment of time. The What
actually happens when we baptized a child? Does God suddenly start loving that
child? Of course not. God loved Max before he was born. God loved Max so much
that God held up Dee and Chris’s adoption process again and again until Max
would be ready for them to come to So what
actually happens at baptism? Is it purely a symbolic act? Just something that
reminds us of the love of God for each of us? No,
I’ve done enough baptisms to know that something very real happens at baptisms.
Well, what happens? In this
moment something happens that happens through our entire lives for each one
of us. God sprinkles God’s grace and love on us. God pours out God’s grace
and love every moment of our lives. God plunges us into grace and love. All of
life is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace: all of
life. The
problem is that modernity has crowded grace and love out of our lives. This
is why we fight about the sacraments. Because modernity has squeezed Christ
out of our daily lives Monday mornings through Saturday nights, sacraments
now mean either everything or nothing. They have no connection to the rest of
our lives. While
Jane and I are in Our sacraments
say all of life is worship, all of life is holy, every bush is a burning bush
aflame with the Divine, every shower is a baptism, every meal is the body of
Christ. The eternal is here and now. The Last
Sunday night – Easter night – was one of those nights for me when I was very
tired but not sleepy. It was 11 at night. Jane’s mother was visiting. She had
long ago gone to bed. Jane had gone to bed. I was trying to read, but the
book was not holding my attention. I did
something I know I should never do at 11 o’clock at night. I decided to
listen to a song on YouTube. I’d
talked about So
after listening to a couple of Ladysmith Black Mambazo songs, I notice that
there are links there to a Paul Simon concert in And
then there are some other links. And more links. Everything sort of devolves
and the next thing I know it is three hours later, 2 in the morning, and I am
listening to Warren Zevon singing “Werewolves of London.” Do you
know Warren Zevon? He was born the same year I was. He started his musical
career playing piano for the Everly Brothers. He eventually wrote and
performed his own songs. He had a sort of twisted sense of humor. His songs
were sort of funny and unsettling at the same time. He used drugs heavily and
hung out with Hunter S. Thompson. But he eventually found sobriety, or
sobriety found him. Some time after that he was diagnosed with mesothelioma,
a deadly form of cancer. Before
his death, he appeared on the David Letterman show to sing four of his songs
and to talk to Letterman about his life and what it felt like to be dying. He
talked about it was an amazing calmness and humor. David Letterman did an
amazing interview. Letterman went up many notches in book. You can watch it
on four YouTube segments. At one
point, David Letterman asks Warren Zevon this question: Is there anything you
know from the place you are now that I might not know. Zevon thinks for a few seconds. He says;
“Not really, I guess… except enjoy every sandwich.” Every
sandwich is the body of Christ broken for you: every sandwich. Just
before he died, Carlyle Marney prayed a prayer: If entering now the zenith of my brief arc around and within
creation I should enter God’s grand hall tomorrow, called to my account for
myself, I should offer this confession and defense if indeed I could do more
than call down. But if able to give vocal response at all, I should say this,
“Thou knowest, dear Lord of our lives, that for fifty of Thy/my years in
ignorance, zest, zeal and sin I lived as if creation and I had no limit. I
lived and wanted as if I had forever, without regard for time or wit or
strength or need or limit or endurance and as if sleep were a heedless luxury
and digestion an automatic process. But Thou, O Lord of real love, did snatch
my bit and ride me into Thy back pasture and didst rub my nose in my
vulnerability and didst split my lungs into acquiescence and didst freeze my
colon in grief loss and didst press me into that long depression at the anger
I directed against myself. And Thou didst read over my shoulder my diary of
that long journey when I did melt before Thee as a mere preacher. Thou didst hear.
Hear now my pitiable defense. In all my sixty years I killed no
creature of Thine I did not need for food except for a few rattlesnakes, a
turtle or two, two quail I left overlong in my coat and three geese poisoned
on bad grain before I shot them in Nebraska, plus one wood duck in Korea. In
all my years I consciously battered no child though my own claimed much need
to forgive me. And consciously misused no person. Thou knowest my aim to
treat no human being as thing, never to hate overlong, to pass no child
without catching his or her eye and my innermost wish to love as Thou doest
love by seeing no shade of color or class. And Thou didst long ago hear my cry to let me go from Hear now my intention with grace as if it were fact. I do and have
intended to be responsible in creation by covenant and where I have defaulted
do Thou forgive. Forgive Thou my vicarious responsibility for all the
defection from Thy purpose of all Thy responsible creatures and accept this
my admission of utter dependency on Thy mercy. Naked I came into the world, how I am dressed at the conclusion
makes no difference. A pair of jeans or a www.foundryumc.org |
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