Talking Points

I watch the news on TV sometimes, and listen to the political pundits, which, I know, is not really the same as being informed.  Sometimes I think it would be better for my health not to listen at all.  It is not that I prefer to be ignorant.  But what I realize, after listening for awhile, is that I actually learn very little.  What I hear is "Talking Points."

Talking points have become very predictable.  I know almost exactly what everyone is going to say.  It is as if someone gave the commentator a piece of paper, and told them what to say.   And I am not sure what I dislike most about the talking points.  I'll admit, sometimes it is just the fact that I disagree.  I think they are not taking something into consideration.  Sometimes it is the utter partisan predictability.  But sometimes it is the fact that they don't really feel real.  They don't acknowledge how messy life is, how complicated real solutions to our political issues really are.

They are talking points, not a real conversation.

So I am thinking about talking points, and wondering if perhaps we don't have talking points in the church sometimes too.  I was thinking about this on Sunday, when I preached about Jesus casting out a demon.  It's a really rich piece of scripture, and there are a lot of theological points to be made, the authority Jesus has, the power of evil, how Jesus won't let the evil spirit speak.  And I love all these points, and I'm really good at talking about them.  I learned a lot in seminary, and I have been in the church for a long time.  And I have been praying and talking to Jesus for a long time too.

But while writing down and thinking about all of the relevant points, sometimes other thoughts creep in, wreaking some havoc on the talking points I am so good at.  I think, Jesus, I have known you for long time, and I believe that you can cast out demons, and that you have more power than evil.  But I have to say that sometimes, terrorists blow up more people in Kabul, a young woman in despair completes suicide, a baby is stillborn, a drunk driver kills a family of four -- and it's hard to talk about Jesus casting out the evil, because there is so much evil still here, and I don't know what to say about it.

The talking points are fine, but they aren't enough.  They don't acknowledge how complicated life is, how messy faith is, how you can have trust in God and be floundering at the same time, how you can be trusting and rebelling, a sinner and a really good person, and how God is sometimes really hard to believe in, if you live in the world.

I remember a confirmation class a long time ago.  A junior high student was having a hard time with a particular aspect of faith that evening.  "You can't tell me what to believe!" he said.

My colleague sort of chuckled and said, "It's my job to tell you what to believe."

What he meant, of course, was it was his job to tell us what our faith's answers are to the great questions of life, what kind of God we have, what we believe about sin and evil, that God is the Trinity and Jesus is completely God and human, what it means when we pour the water over someone's head, where to find hope.

Those are the talking points.  But underneath the talking points, there is something else.  There is testifying to God's voice and God's silence in our life, why we believe when it doesn't make sense, what we do when everything falls apart.  And sometimes it does.

Close Encounters with Jesus: The Man Born Blind

John 9:1-41/ Lent 4 Year A

            Dear friends in Christ, dear people of Grace, grace to you and peace from God our father, and from our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Amen.

            I remember the time, several years ago, I spent the morning in the waiting room of a prestigious university hospital. 

            A member of my congregation was having surgery, so that she could begin to hear again.  A modern miracle! 

            It seemed too good to be true! 

            How can someone who cannot hear – ever learn to hear again!  It’s a procedure called a “cochlear implant” – and I read up before the surgery to see if I could understand anything about it. 

            As I found it, it is not a sure thing.  There is more involved in learning to hear than just having the implants. 

            Once you do that, your ears have to be retrained so that they know and can interpret what they are hearing.  It takes time. 

            Still, though, a miracle.  Who would have thought it?

            The woman who was having the surgery had not been born deaf.              So in that way she was not like the man in the parable, who had been born blind. 

            She had been born with some hearing, but gradually, as she got older, she began to hear less and less.  And she missed it. 

            She wanted to have the surgery so that she could retrieve some of what she had lost.  She was willing to try anything.

            The man born blind, though, did not appear to be desperate. 

            He didn’t approach Jesus, asking for healing.  He was just sitting there, an object lesson for Jesus’ disciples. 

            So Jesus, they asked, “who sinned, this man or his parents?  What caused his blindness?” 

            Jesus does not answer their question really. 

            It is not the cause that he is interested in so much as the cure. 

            For the glory of God – he heals the man.  And then the blind man’s troubles begin.

            Because:  no one believes him! 

            They either don’t believe that he was the same man (the one who sat and begged), or they don’t believe that he was really blind, or they don’t believe that Jesus could have healed him. 

            Friends and neighbors question him – even the religious authorities.  It seems that everyone is looking for a loophole – a reason NOT to believe that something miraculous might have happened.    

            No one has ever healed a person blind from birth before.  It never happened before; it can’t happen now.  

            If Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath, he broke the law.  Therefore he cannot be a holy person.   

            There are so many reasons that this miracle could not have happened. 

            You have to wonder why people are so quick to dismiss, so quick to disbelieve – especially in something that seems so -- well -- wonderful… 

            The only thing that I can think is that somehow this miracle went against what they already held on to..  It upset the status quo.  It was unsettling. 

             It changed reality.  It was like an earthquake, somehow.    

            So no one believes this once blind man, and really, all he has to offer is this testimony, over and over again, “I was blind, but now I see.”  That’s it.  It’s just his experience.  

            He just keeps saying,  “This is what happened to me.” 

            And – and it took me many years of reading this story to actually notice this – even though this man received his sight from Jesus – he has not actually SEEN Jesus. 

            All of the people questioning him – they could ask him and he would not be able to tell them what Jesus looked like.  

            He has experienced this healing but he hasn’t seen Jesus yet.

            And I think that’s important.

            Because the point is not just to see.  The point is to see – Jesus.

            And that’s just where all of the rest of the people are blind, aren’t they? 

            They see – but they don’t see Jesus. 

            They don’t recognize him. 

            They have their own pre-conceptions about what a respectable Messiah will look like, and he doesn’t fit. 

            He cares about the wrong people – the poor, the outcast, the lonely, the desperate. 

            He is not so interested in cause – as he is in cure. 

            He goes around healing people without finding out first if they are worthy.

            Blindness.  What does it mean? 

            In John, it’s not just about physical blindness. 

            It’s about being blind to the presence and power of Jesus in our midst. 

            It’s about being blind to what he is up to, and who he is calling us to care about, and include. 

            It’s about being blind to his power – but also his grace.  

            It’s about being blind to injustice, blind to other people, hardened to suffering.

            It’s about being blind to how God is working in the world.

            The woman who had the miracle surgery – she was desperate to hear again, even just a little. 

            She knew what it was like, and she mourned the loss of the sounds and the voices she used to know. 

            Her parents were both hearing, so she was the only one in the family to have this  -- disability. 

            She and her family came to our church – we had a signer at one of our services. 

            And one year in Lent we learned a prayer in sign language.  We said it every week, along with the sign language. 

            I am not sure why I thought this was a good Idea, actually.  And truthfully, there were some people who didn’t think so. 

            After that year, they said, “Let’s not do that again.  It was a dumb idea.” 

            Be that as it may, every week we practiced this prayer.

            God be in my head, and in my understanding.

            God be in my eyes, and in my looking.

            God be in my mouth, and in my speaking.

            God be in my heart, and in my thinking.

            God be in my end, and in mine departing.

On the 5^th Sunday in Lent, I decided to throw caution to the wind. 

            We would just sign the prayer this time, without speaking it. 

            It would be a different way to pray. 

            So there was this great silence while we “said” the pray and made the signs together.  It was odd. 

            It turns out that the woman’s parents were visiting that weekend.  They were in church with her, and afterwards they said to me, about that prayer, “It was the first time we understood what our daughter’s world is like.”

            God, be in my head, and in my understanding.

            The blind man had a close encounter with Jesus.  He received his sight.  And then – he saw -- Jesus.

            May it be so for us, as well.

            AMEN

           

Close Encounters with Jesus: the Woman at the Well

Lent 3 Year A

John 4:5-42

          

            It’s the longest recorded conversation Jesus had with anyone in any of the Gospels. 

            It is full of deep theology, humor, and human interest.  There is eager curiosity, there is misunderstanding, there is deep insight. 

            And it’s a conversation between Jesus – and a Samaritan woman.  He’s not supposed to be talking with her, and they both know it. 

            First, because she is a woman, and second, because she is a Samaritan, an outsider.  Jews and Samaritans did not have anything to do with each other.

            The Samaritans lived in the area which had once been the northern kingdom of Israel. 

            They were of mixed-descent and mixed religion. 

            The Jewish people considered them to have sold out the faith.  When the Jewish people had been taken into captivity in Babylon, and then were allowed to return home, they did not allow Samaritans to help them re-build the temple. 

            The hatred between the two groups was hard and fast. 

            It’s hard to choose from all of the threads in this long conversation. 

            There are so many and they are so rich:  the living water, the Holy Spirit, the God who will be worshipped in spirit and truth. 

            There is Jesus, who wants a drink of water, and the woman, who does not want to have to keep coming to this well, for some reason.

             But for today, I am most fascinated by this – the testimony of the woman, when she leaves her water jar and runs to her village.

            He told me everything I had ever done.  He can’t be the Messiah, can he? 

            What kind of a testimony is that?

            Maybe it is because I have been thinking so much about testimony lately – and I won’t stop either, at today. 

            We are having these “close encounters” with Jesus, lately, and testimonies come from close encounters with Jesus, don’t they?             

             I have heard testimonies in my life – maybe you have too – and often they sound like this, “I was lost, but now I am found.”

             “Jesus changed my life.”  “I know that I am forgiven because of Jesus.”   “God has given my life meaning and purpose.” 

            But here’s what the woman said, here’s the thing that really amazed her:  “He told me everything I had ever done.” 

            What was it about that that convinced her?

            Maybe it was the pure idea of prophecy.

             He was a prophet, and he knew all about her, things that no one else knew. 

            It was his ability to speak about her past and her present that made a difference. 

            He started out by teaching about the deep things of theology:  about living water, about the time coming when true worshippers would worship ‘in spirit and in truth’

            – but it was when he got to her life – that’s when the prophecy, that is when the truth finally hit her, that is when everything he said finally made sense. 

            “He told me everything I had ever done.” 

            But I think it was something else too. 

            When Jesus told her these things about herself, about her life, he didn’t speak in judgment. 

            He was just telling the facts – he didn’t say that she was the worst sort of sinner, and he didn’t even say she needed to turn around and live her life differently. 

            It’s not that he never said that to anyone.  It’s not that those sorts of things don’t need to be said, sometimes, either.  

            Sometimes the kindest thing you can tell another person is, “you need to turn around.  You are living dangerously.”  

            But all Jesus did was tell her about her life. 

            He told her the truth.  Without judgment.  Without looking down on her. 

            He knew her.  I think that was the feeling she had. 

            That deep down, he knew her.

             Maybe it was not just his words about her life, the whole, long conversation, that he was willing to talk with her, and to keep talking with her, and take her questions seriously.  He knew her, deep down.           He knew who she was. 

            He knew what her struggles were, he dreams, her fears. 

            He knew who looked down on her. 

            He knew what she was thirsty for.  Maybe he even knew why she did not want to keep coming to this well to draw water any more. 

            You know how rare that is, to be known – to be really known, by someone else?

             There are so few people who really know us, that we will allow to really know us. 

            There are so few people who know us – and who will walk with us, and keep loving us – no matter what. 

            We are blessed if we have a few of those people in our lives.  We are blessed if we can be one of those people for even one or two others. 

            Jesus met this woman – and it was a life-changing encounter – with Grace.   

            Here was someone who asked her for help – who took her seriously – who answered her questions – who knew her – really knew her, and who loved her. 

            Have you ever had an encounter like this? 

            I recently read a testimony on social media – a woman who became a Lutheran in her teens. 

            She came from another religious tradition, and even though all of Christianity is based on Grace – she had not experienced it before. 

           

            But she remembers sitting in a church service and hearing words of Grace – words of love – she doesn’t even remember now exactly what they were – but she felt such joy and freedom – it just washed over her.

            She said that she went to every service at the church for several months, just to make sure she hadn't heard wrong.

            In this congregation, she said, she had a life-changing encounter with Jesus – the pastor and the people from the congregation taught her and helped her to know God’s grace. 

            They walked with her and were there for her in a time of grief.    

            You know how rare it is to be known, to be really known, by someone else?

             To be known to the depths of our hearts – our hopes, our fears, our dreams, our sorrows --  Jesus knows us.  He knows our temptations and he knows our gifts. 

            He knows what we are hungry for – and he knows our spiritual thirst.

             He knows us, and so he alone can quench our thirst.

            There’s an old song that I sing with the children – maybe you know it….

            I’ve got peace like a river…. in my soul)

            I’ve got joy like a fountain (in my soul)

            I’ve got love like an ocean (in my soul)….

            It’s the water of life, isn’t it?  It’s the love of God.  That's what we need.  And it is deeper and wider than any ocean, overflowing our hearts, enough and more than enough.

            Amen.