Wise Up

 

Ephesians 5:15-20

August 15, 2021

             My dad was the Executive Director of the American Lung Association in Tennessee. What that means is that I grew up surrounded by a wealth of information on the dangers of smoking. Christmas Seals and everything they represented were a fundamental part of my world.

When I was four years old, I was in a public service announcement for Christmas Seals. I remember it because my job on camera was to sit and play with two toys, while Whispering Bill Anderson, who was the state chairman that year, talked about the importance of Christmas Seals and the Lung Association and keeping children safe. I was allowed to keep the toys.

My mother will tell you about the first time the two of us took a plane trip together. This was back in the days when you could smoke anywhere, including airport terminals. I would see someone smoking, and before my mom could stop me, I would go up and tell them that the cigarette they were smoking would eventually make their lungs sick and they would die.

            Like I said, I was surrounded by information on the dangers of smoking. The knowledge that smoking was a dangerous habit was part of the air that I breathed, no pun intended. So, guess what I did when I was a teenager?

            I started smoking.

            Because even though I had all the knowledge about the dangers of smoking, that knowledge didn’t stand a chance against my desire to look cool, to be cool, and to hang out with the cool kids. It didn’t stand a chance against peer pressure, and my friends who smoked and did cool things like blow smoke rings. So, I decided to give smoking a try.

            I remember when I learned to inhale. My friend had given me some of her cigarettes on the sly. It was a warm night, and the darkness kept me hidden from eyes that might report to my parents what I was doing. I walked up and down our street, puffing on a cigarette, practicing inhaling the smoke and blowing it out again in a “cool” way. Even if I would not have had the knowledge about smoking that I did, you would think that doing something that made me so sick to my stomach and lightheaded and dizzy would have clued me in to the fact that this might not be the best habit to pick up. But, like I said, my knowledge could not stand up to the pressure I felt to be cool. I look back on it now and know that nothing about smoking was cool. But you could not have convinced me of that then. It’s been many, many years since I smoked, and it was giving up smoking that finally solidified my knowledge into wisdom. I had to finally wise up and say that starting smoking was one of the dumbest things I had ever done.

            I told my kids that message about smoking repeatedly when they were growing up, hoping against hope that they would learn from my mistake rather than make that specific mistake on their own. But that’s the thing about knowledge versus wisdom – we can have all the knowledge in the world, but wisdom comes from experience. And it seems that human nature dictates that we gain our wisdom not so much from watching the mistakes of others, but by making our own. That is, we gain wisdom if we learn from the mistakes we make.

            Wisdom is where we are today. But what is wisdom, exactly? Is it just confined to what we learn from our experiences? Is it a synonym for knowledge, or are the two different? In the passage we read from I Kings, the Lord visits the newly ascended Solomon in a dream and asks Solomon what God should give him. Unlike what other young and inexperienced kings might have asked for, Solomon does not request wealth or power. Solomon asks instead for an “understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil;”

Solomon realizes just how young and inexperienced he is, and that being the ruler of God’s people will take more than power or riches. So, Solomon requests wisdom. The Lord grants him his request. 

            In our passage from Ephesians, we continue to explore the new life we have in Christ and the new rules for living that this life requires. It seems to me that this new living and its new rules require wisdom to accomplish.

            “Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil. So do not be foolish but understand what the will of the Lord is.”

            Be careful then how you live, not as unwise people but as wise.

            One commentator that I studied said that the Greek verb for live also implies walking. Be careful then how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise. How do you walk wisely? Well, when I was walking up and down my street learning to inhale a cigarette, that was some rather unwise walking. I suspect that the point Paul was trying to make to the church in Ephesus is not just about literal walking, but about spiritual walking as well. And spiritual walking is learning that life is filled with temptations and trials. We pray about those very things every week in the Lord’s prayer. But a true temptation disguise itself as good, doesn’t it? My wanting to be cool, to be liked, to be in the in crowd sounds foolish and vain to my ears now, but it didn’t when I was a teenager. If I could be liked and accepted, I thought, how much better my life would be. How easy it was to think that smoking would make me accepted, rather than realize who I was should be reason enough to be accepted. But that’s where wisdom comes in. My knowledge about the dangers of smoking should have told me that there was nothing cool about it, but it took years and living to find the wisdom to realize my knowledge was correct.

            Wisdom that came from life and learning taught me that lesson that knowledge and wisdom don’t always go together; I’m still learning that lesson. I had a lot of knowledge, but very little wisdom. And therein lies the rub. Don’t get me wrong, I am not going to dismiss the necessity and the wondrousness –I mean that seriously – of gaining knowledge. The hardest and the most challenging and some of the best weeks of my life this past year have been the weeks when I have been in a seminar for my Doctor of Ministry program. I love to learn. I love being a student again. But what I learn in books does not necessarily translate into wisdom, and it certainly does not always translate into discernment. Because that is what I hear in this text.

We need to live wisely, walk wisely, following God, being filled with the Spirit and not getting filled with wine or anything that might distract us from giving thanks and praise to God. We need to walk wisely in this life, making the most of our days, and use our wisdom to discern what God is calling us to do, to be who God is calling us to be.

And in the midst of a world that is in absolute turmoil, we need wisdom more than ever. We need wisdom in our leaders – at every level. We need wisdom in our collective groups, such as our church family. We need to find the wisdom in ourselves, the wisdom that comes from our own lived experience. We need to pray for wisdom, just as Solomon did. We need to pray to find the wisdom to meet the pressing needs of our time.

As we were discussing these passages in our lectionary group this past week, someone brought up a prayer for wisdom – the Serenity Prayer.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

This is a contemporary adaptation of a prayer written by Reinhold Niehbur, and it is widely used in 12 step groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. I can imagine that a huge part of dealing with addiction is admitting that we are powerless to change some things. But give us courage to change that which we can, and the final point, the wisdom to know the difference. How much of my precious energy have I wasted trying to change what I cannot change? How much grief and anguish have I caused myself trying to change people and circumstances that I was powerless to change? How much better am I – spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally –when I find the courage to change only that which I can?

I’m getting a little bit wiser in discerning between the two, but it has taken me a lot of hard knocks to achieve this wisdom. I have tried and I have failed – again and again. And when I have crawled my way out of those failures, when I have gotten some distance from them, I have seen that what pulled me through in the end was grace. Grace. Grace from other people, grace from God, grace that I finally offered to myself.

One of the things that we don’t hear often about King Solomon is that he went on to mess up. He prayed for wisdom and God granted it. He showed wisdom in many of his decisions, but he also messed up and he messed up big. So, it seems to me that gaining wisdom is an ongoing process, it is a lifelong process. So, yes, let’s pray for it. Let’s work for it. Let’s live for it. What wisdom do we need to ask for this morning? What wisdom does the world need? And, what grace and compassion and forgiveness do we need to offer one another when we fail to walk wisely, when we fail to wise up?       

            I’ll probably spend the rest of my life seeking wisdom, seeking to be wise, but I know that in those fleeting moments when I am able to emulate Jesus, and love as he loves, then I am one step closer to the wisdom I seek. 

Let all God’s children say, “Alleluia.” Amen.

 

Hungry

 John 6:22-35

August 1, 2021

            “I’m not hungry, I’m bored. I’m not hungry, I’m bored.”

            Have any of you ever repeated that mantra to yourself? I have. Many times. Sometimes it works to convince me not to eat something that I really don’t need, physiologically, but oftentimes it doesn’t.

            This last year or so, I feel like I’ve spoken these words more often than usual. When we first went into lockdown, I made some grand promises to myself. I was going to work out every day. I was going to sit quietly and meditate every day. I was going to make nothing but healthy foods, and finally get a handle on the food demons that haunt me.

            That worked for about a month. And then I found myself pulling down the brownie mix I had on hand for when company came and baking it just because. Even my grocery shopping changed in this past year. I have never bought so many bags of chips when we weren’t having a party. I didn’t buy them just for me, let me make that clear, but for all four of us living in the house. They became a staple comfort food. Comfort being the key word here. When the whole world was turned upside down, and we were trying to figure out how to survive in this new reality, comfort became extremely important. We wanted comfort and, for a lot of us, that comfort came in the form of food.

            And I know I’m not alone in this. I saw a post on social media from the actor Will Smith. You know Will, the former Prince of Bel Air, who has played everything from the guy who kicks the hind quarters of aliens in Men in Black and Independence Day to the king of boxing in Ali. Mr. Smith, like many of us, spent a long time this past year, grazing, and he has gotten a wee bit out of shape in the process. So, to keep himself accountable and real, he posted his before picture on social media and pictures of himself once more hitting the gym and working out to recover from his time seeking comfort in food. Seriously, if Will Smith has struggled with eating for comfort this past year, then I don’t feel quite so bad that I have too.

            I’m not hungry, I’m just bored!

            I suspect, however, that eating for comfort rather than sustenance was not an issue for most people in Jesus’ context and culture. I suspect that they did not take food for granted, because it was something that could be in relatively short supply without much warning. I suspect that many of the people who followed Jesus, who flocked to Jesus, who listened to his words and wondered at his ways, knew what it meant to be hungry, really, deeply, sustainably hungry. They knew what it meant to be hungry in ways that I never have and most likely never will.

            So, when they hear Jesus talking about the bread of heaven, when they hear him say that they should work not for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, they want to know more. Just like the woman at the well wanted to know more about this living water, so she would not have to haul buckets back and forth to the well anymore, these people want to know about this bread that endures. They wanted to know because they were hungry – hungry in their bellies and hungry in their hearts.

            After all, Moses gave their ancestors the manna from heaven when they were wandering lost and afraid in the wilderness. What will Jesus give them as a sign so that they can believe in him?

            Jesus tells them that it was not Moses who gave them the bread of heaven. It was God who gives them the bread of heaven.

            “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

            This must have sounded like the best news ever! Please give us this bread – always. Jesus responds,

            “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

            I wonder if Jesus was trying to get them to think about what they were really hungering for. What are you hungry for? What do you think will satisfy you in the long run? Are you only trying to fill your stomach, or are you hungering for something far deeper, more long-lasting?

            This is John’s gospel, so nothing is quite what it seems to be on a surface reading. John wrote in metaphors. Words always have layered meanings and deeper truths than what we might think at first. So, what was John’s Jesus trying to make the people understand about bread and hunger? What was he trying to make them see?

            Obviously, Jesus wanted them to accept and believe in who he was, his real truth, his fullness as the incarnate Son of God. He fed their bodies with the loaves and fishes, but he was also trying to feed their hearts, their minds, their spirits. I am the bread of life. If you come to me, if you believe in me, if you trust in me, you will never hungry, you will never be thirsty – not for the things that really matter.

            But I think one of the problems we mortals have is that we get confused about what really matters. When people are hungry, physically hungry, the most important thing is getting fed. I am listening to an audio book right, a novel called American Dirt about migrant, refugees from Mexico and Central America trying to make their way north. One of the main characters is an eight-year-old boy named Luca, who is fleeing Mexico with his mother because their entire family was brutally murdered by a cartel. He and his mother should have been murdered too, but they escaped, and now in this short time as migrants, Luca has learned that he can never turn down the gift of calories, because they don’t know when they will eat again.

            When people are hungry, physically hungry, it is hard to think past that gnawing ache to what they need for a deeper, more fulfilled life. But we who have probably more food available to us on a regular basis than we could ever need, have the luxury of thinking about something deeper.

            I suspect Jesus knew that people who were physically hungry needed physical bread in order to contemplate the spiritual bread he offered. They needed to be fed by him in order to truly be fed by him. But he also knew that even if they stomachs were satisfied, they would still need help to understand what he was offering, who he was, who he is. Because our stomachs may be full, but we still don’ t know what our hearts are hungry for. And even if we have a glimpse of recognition of what Jesus is truly offering, even if we, like the people, ask for that eternal bread for always, it’s so easy to believe that there is other bread that will satisfy us more. Bread in the form of money or nice stuff or stability or retirement accounts. That’s all bread, but is it the bread that endures? Is that bread of life?

            What are we hungry for? Really? What do our hearts truly long for? What will feed us and sustain us and keep us?

            In a few minutes, we will gather around the table, and I will lift up the bread and repeat the words, “The body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” and we will eat together. So, I ask you now and in that moment to think about the hungers within you. What are you hungry for? What does your soul long for? And as you eat the bread, remember the One who is the bread of life, who is the bread that satisfies our souls. Remember him and then look at one another through this table where we gather. Look at one another as Christ looks at us – as God’s beloved children, each of us, and give thanks for one another. Give thanks for this bread of life. Give thanks for this nourishment which is now and which is eternal. Give thanks and let your hunger be appeased.

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

            Amen.

What Kind of Power?

 

II Samuel 11:1-15, John 6:1-21

July 25, 2021

 

            My first call was as an Associate Pastor in Rockville, Maryland. I started there in the summer of 1995, after I graduated from seminary. It was a whirlwind time. I graduated. Went through the process of accepting a call and being dismissed from my home presbytery. I said goodbye to friends. I found a place to live in Rockville, packed up my little campus apartment, moved and started at the church. I started sometime in July, and I was ordained in August.

            I remember vividly the first Sunday I was officially sitting at the front of the church with the head of staff, in my then new robe, and the head pastor introduced me again to the congregation and referred to me as “Pastor Busse.” For a split second I thought, “Why is he talking about my grampa? Why is he referring to Grampa Busse?”

            And then it hit me. No, I’m Pastor Busse. And I don’t know if my face reflected all of the emotions I was feeling in that moment or not, but I remember that I wanted to laugh, cry, get sick, and run away all at the same time. I remember thinking, “There’s still time to change my mind. I don’t have to do this. I’m not ordained yet.”

            That may strike you as an extreme reaction to a simple title. But the Pastor Busse that was my grampa was a complex man. Everything he did and said and preached and taught was weighted with authority. He knew, or believed he knew, who was in and who was out when it came to God. I went to one of his Bible studies when I was 15 and it terrified me. Grampa Busse, that Pastor Busse, had authority and power. I did not.

            So, to hear myself referred to as Pastor Busse came with a whole heap of associations that even three years of school and a year-long internship did not make me feel prepared for. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for that mantle of authority to be placed on my shoulders. I wasn’t ready for it at all.

            You may have guessed already that I did not run away. I didn’t change my mind. I didn’t get sick while sitting in front of the congregation, and as far as I know I didn’t cry in front of them either. Although, it’s highly possible I went home and cried later. I got ordained later that summer, and in that service a stole was put around my neck, symbolizing my call to be a servant of Christ, a preacher and proclaimer of the gospel. And I have realized in the years since, that having that stole put around my neck symbolized the authority that was vested in me as that preacher and proclaimer of the gospel. Because preachers are invested with authority, whether we like it, feel it, acknowledge it or not.

            In all these years, no matter how much experience I have gained through a few successes and a lot of failures, I still struggle with that invested authority. I still struggle with the weight of that symbol. It seems to declare much more authority and knowledge than I actually feel most days. And part of the reason why I struggle with it, is because I know that with authority comes power. When I was in seminary, we were taught often about the fiduciary responsibility we owed to our parishioners.

            Fiduciary has a financial meaning to it, but in the context of ministry it also speaks to our responsibility to people’s faith. The Hippocratic Oath that doctors take is to do no harm. The vows that ordained elders, both teaching and ruling, suggest the same. To me it is about remembering that with the authority that is invested in me, whether I believe that authority to be true or not, is about having a certain amount of power, and doing my best not to abuse or misuse it.

            David did not understand that to be his charge, apparently. I often hear people try to weep this incident with Bathsheba under the rug. David is still God’s beloved, they say. It was an unfortunate incident, but that didn’t change David’s standing with God or anyone else. He was still the greatest king of Israel there ever was. But I don’t buy that, and I don’t buy it because the text does not buy it. The text does not make excuses for David. It does not let him off the hook. From the very beginning of the story, David is not where he should be. It was the springtime when kings went out to battle. But where was David? Not in battle. Not leading his troops. Not commanding his army. I’m not trying to justify war here, but if there was war, David should have been at the front, at the head, leading, doing what a king was supposed to do. Except he wasn’t. His army was in battle, and he stayed behind, and maybe had he been where he should have been, the rest of the story might not have happened. But he was not it, and it did.

            He abused his power with Bathsheba, and it was a flagrant abuse of power. David was king and would have had more power than anyone else, and Bathsheba was a woman with little or no power. Not only did he cause harm to her, he had her husband murdered to cover up his own terrible sin. David may not have killed Uriah directly, but he still had blood on his hands. As one commentator wrote, no mob boss could have done it better.

            Yet this morning we have two stories before us. The story of David is disturbing and triggering and painful. It is a cautionary tale of the corruptive influence power has. And then we have this story from John’s gospel. A story of Jesus and his power, which stands in stark relief to the power David wielded. Jesus proves his power in the feeding of thousands of people from the meager offering of one boy. He proves his power by walking on the water toward his disciples caught in a strong wind on a rough sea.

            Neither act of power was for show. They were done for the nourishment of the people, for the reassurance of his closest followers, and these acts of power was proven not by what he did, but by what he didn’t do. After the feeding, the people wanted to make him king, and he ran away from them. The people were going to take him by force if necessary and coerce him to be king, but Jesus would have none of it. He went away to a mountainside by himself to prevent the crowds from trying to take him. An earthly king was not the kind of power that Jesus was going to wield.

            So, what kind of power does Jesus have, what kind of power does Jesus use? I realize that there is debate in all four stories of Jesus feeding the crowds as to whether it is a purely supernatural event or that when people saw the baskets of food going around, that they suddenly remembered they had some bread or fruit with them as well, and they were moved to share. Jesus’ willingness to be generous, to feed so many thousands of hungry people, and people being inspired by that to do the same is certainly one kind of miracle. But Jesus supernaturally making the loaves and fishes multiply is another. I suspect that in John’s telling, it was the latter, but either way, Jesus uses his power not to coerce but to encourage, not to force but to feed.

            What kind of power does Jesus have? It seems to me that the ultimate answer to this question comes not from all of the miracles that Jesus performed or the healings that he did, but by what he didn’t do. He didn’t say “no” to the cross. He did not say “no” to the path of suffering servant. He showed his greatest power by giving up all his power.

            If Jesus could feed five thousand with a meager number of loaves and fishes, and if he could walk on water, if someone could be healed just be touching his robe, if he could bring the dead from the tomb into new life, then certainly Jesus had the power to save himself. But he didn’t. He didn’t. He refused to be a worldly king. He never veered from the path that led straight to the cross. He willingly laid down his power, and chose death, so that the world might finally understand life.

            Look, power is a tricky thing. If given the power David had, would I use it wisely or would I abuse it? I don’t know, because as a human, I fall and mess up and make mistakes and have to deal with their consequences. As do all of you. As do all of us. That’s the challenge of being human. And no matter how much authority we’re given or think we have, we still fail and fall and struggle with the temptation that power brings. And Jesus, both fully human and fully divine, faced those same struggles. He faced those same temptations. Maybe one of the reasons he withdrew from the crowds is because he knew that being a king would be too tempting, even for him. Jesus understood both the advantages and the dangers of power, and in the end, he taught the world what real power is.

            That real power is the power of sacrificial love. It is the power of compassion for people who are hungry, hungry for food and hungry for truth. It is the power of trust in God and God’s wisdom. Jesus taught us what real power is, and the power that he was privy to can be ours as well. Perhaps we cannot change a meager amount of food into a great feast, but we can come together in love. We can feed the hungry and be compassionate to those who struggle. We can forgive and ask for forgiveness in return.

So, what do we do with our power? How do we use it? How do we not? What power do we have as a congregation to help our siblings beyond these doors? What kind of power do we have, and how will we use it for the good?

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

            Amen.

Skunks, God, and This Present Moment

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                        Wendell Berry

 

            Early this morning, when the sky was beginning to lighten in the East, but dawn was not quite upon us, I was up, saying “good morning” to our cat, Jolene, and I happened to look out the window at our front yard. There, close to our front porch and right by my daughter’s car, was a strange looking critter. At first, I thought it was a cat or maybe a little dog. But the tail was so big and bushy, I thought that it could not possibly be a cat or dog. It was even bigger and fluffier than Jolene’s tail, and she has quite the floofy one.

             Something about that tail looked familiar. It looked like a skunk’s tail, but the tail and the back of the critter were so ghostly white, I didn’t think it could be. I thought skunks only looked one way. Of course, my knowledge of skunks comes primarily from Bugs Bunny and Pepe LePew. Don’t all skunks speak in a cheesy French accent and try to harass cats who, because of an unfortunate encounter with paint, look like skunks?

             Because I carry a small computer in my pocket in the form of a smart phone, I looked up different types of skunks. That was a skunk all right, and it was rooting and digging in our yard. I wasn’t sure what I needed to do. I went back to our room, tempted to wake up Brent, but thought better of it. In a few minutes the sky was completely light, and when I returned to the window the skunk was gone.

             Clearly, we need to make sure our home does not hold enticements for skunks, but I suspect that they will come around some no matter what we do. But while I was thinking about that skunk, I couldn’t help but think about this poem by Wendell Berry. It is a favorite poem of mine, and I often turn to it when I need a reminder about what matters in life and what does not. I doubt that little skunk was worried about grief or loss. Certainly, it would have been on alert for danger, and it has a magnificent defense system built into that bushy tail. But it was not having an existential crisis while it was digging for food. I’m pretty sure it was not questioning its purpose in the world or if anything it did had any real meaning. It was not worrying about the polarized state of politics or Covid or what kind of world its offspring would inherit. In other words, it was not worried about any of the things that I worry about on regular basis. It was just doing what skunks and other animals do – trying to find food and make it through another day.

             We are all creatures and creations of our God. Yes, even that skunk. But the difference between the skunk and other critters and us is that we can reason and think at higher levels. Most often, I would say that is a good thing. But there are times when my thinking and overthinking seems to cause more harm than good. There are times when my worries and anxieties about my life, my family’s life, our lives together, take hold of me and I find myself staring out the front window in the early hours of the morning instead of sleeping soundly. So, maybe there is a lesson to be learned from Berry’s poem and from that skunk – and other creatures too – maybe we need to learn just to be sometimes. We can call it being present in the moment or being still and at peace in the present, but whatever we call it, we need to find ways to practice it. At least I need to find those ways. Because spending too much time trying to gaze into the future, worrying about what may come, anticipating grief only serves to make me miss what is right in front of me.

             May all of us spend a little more time in the here and in the now, just being, present in the present. Thanks be to God for all of God’s creatures, even the skunks.