Pastor's Notes

There is a reason delivery trucks and construction equipment beep when going backward. Going backward is dangerous. One can be deluded into thinking they see everything that is back there. Sometimes our best view as we go back is through mirrors, not our own set of eyes.

Having said this, there is something in our humanity that too often wants to go back when faced with confusion, new ways that threaten old understandings, and when we are going through a difficult time. There is something in us that seems to think going back to a former, older, safer burrow is better when something about our current situation seems to make us feel we are under assault. And though we think we see the past clearly, that is not always so.

Sometimes when I return to my native Pennsylvania, I chuckle at some of the road routes. Many were built long ago on Native American trails on or over mountains which were in turn made previously as game trails. Over the centuries with new construction equipment more and faster cars, some of the roads have been straightened and curves widened. I wonder what we are constructing now in the West that generations much later will wonder with amusement why we did it this way? Where are we operating now in a way that pulls us back?

There is a place for good ol’ human conservatism. I remember working with an architect on a church project who said his goal in every building he designs is to create something that future generations will wish to restore, not remodel. There is much back there that is good. There is much in the past that may have served the past, but would serve us poorly now. Anyone want to return to manual shift cars? Fans instead of air conditioning?

Not all that is new is good or better. Even those things that are positive changes frequently come with a cost as something important had to be abandoned to allow the new to come and flourish.

Genesis tells us God created. Science tells us creation is evolving. I even remember a dentist in my congregation tell me he and other dentists are beginning to see evolutionary signs of wisdom teeth evolving out of humans. This is all to say if creation is not static, why would we assume life is or ought to be? The issue is not change; it is what change? Which changes are good, which are not? Which need to be fine-tuned to be good?

Think of the life and life-style in the Bible, a book covering a period of perhaps a couple thousand years with its stories. What is the same as today? Not much. Not much that is, except the stories were of humans and what has changed least is our humanity. We are taller now and live longer. No one really will miss wisdom teeth. Yet the essence of humanity with its fears, longings, love, thinking, innovating and much more remain essentially the same. We laugh, we hurt, we have drives and passions, and we maintain our survival instinct.

We must however not treat the past with rose colored lenses as some ideal time and place. An ideal time and place has not occurred since the Garden of Eden. I have heard older pastors say, “Many think of the ‘50’s” as a golden time for the church. Those of us serving then never saw gold. Maybe an occasional yellow tint, but never gold.”

This is where history comes in. It comes best when the failures and evils of the past are put out there as well as the good and successes. If we learn only the “good” parts, how can we learn to recognize and identify what is wrong in our own time? How can we live in hope if we think the good seemed to be only in the past? How frustrated would we be to think we have messed up like no one ever has.

Be warry of those who want to lead us to some imagined time and place of the past. I heard someone recently say how much better it was when they were a child many decades ago. Better for who? Whites? People of color? Middle class or wealthy? Laborers or management? Always remember to go back we have to put the vehicle in reverse…reverse which means the opposite direction. What people, what culture have ever flourished by going backward? We are better served filtering out the good ideas from the not very good ideas of those who call us forward to something new. There is a reason trucks and construction vehicles beep out a warning when going backward. Maybe we can install this system in our humanity.

It is no secret that we humans often do the exact opposite of what God would have us do. Neither is it unknown we often know what God would have us do, but instead we too frequently do quite the opposite.

Often-times our refusal or inability to do what God calls us to do is our misunderstanding of just who we are called to be and our desire to be something else or someone else even when we do have some understanding of who we are. In so doing, we actually misused and abuse the Christian faith.

It seems we have all, at times, wanted the Christian faith to be something that rescues us from our humanity. That is, we want to be something and someone other than who God created us to be. We want escape from our humanity. We want to be transported into being someone who is always healthy, does the right thing, is admired by most everyone, and is really good at all we do.

That, however, is not in the human job description. No where do I see God or Jesus or even St. Paul or other authors of scripture demanding perfection. Instead I see them as calling us back to our very human roots.

Notice the parables of Jesus. He uses images of a dysfunctional family, a vandal sowing bad seed among good seed, righteous clergy passing by a beaten man on a lonely road, a grateful ordinary peasant woman rejoicing at the discovery of a lost coin, and laborers in a vineyard, among other day to day images. These are not calls to perfection or an escape from our humanity, but taught as an opportunity for the imperfect sinners to learn from them and plunge back into our humanity to find our fix there, not outside of our humanness.

What parables might we create today in our day- to- day experience? The parable of the frustrated office worker whose WiFi went down, perhaps. Or the in over their head driver who bought a new car that is smarter than they are. Maybe the wealthy 1% and the gap between them and the growing number of poor. ..oh we have that one already, the Rich Man and Lazarus.

The point would not be to create heroes, but to bring us back to where we are supposed to be as humans living with and for others. Heroism is not humanity’s call; compassion, community, and love of neighbor in the day to day of ordinary life is the call. Occasionally when answering this call a hero or heroine might be created. These are more accidents or by products than destinations.

When an unknown department store seamstress in Montgomery Alabama refused to go to the back of the bus as local ordinances required, who knew she was to become an historical icon? She certainly had no idea. Others had done as she had, but remain unknown. Rosa was tired. Tired from working hard and tired of such discriminatory ordinances. In her resistance she was simply calling those around her back to their human roots as those created by God.

We are called to be neither Wonder Woman nor Superman. Our Christian faith is to allow us to drop the Wonder and the Super and just be woman and man….human. Amazing things do often happen when we do the ordinary things we are called to do with the gifts we have.

Does God laugh? Perhaps first we must ask, “Does God have a sense of humor?” Our answer to this latter question could well be that God does have a sense of humor. After all, God created us. Yet the Bible confirms we bumbling, fumbling, foolish ones were created for more than God’s amusement. God desired relationship.

The first instance in scripture of which I can think that has anything to do with God and laughter is God’s gift of Isaac to the more recently named and covenanted Abraham and Sarah. Isaac, as you may know, means, “He laughed.” Who wouldn’t laugh at the thought of a 100-year-old man and 90-year-old woman conceiving, bearing, and giving birth to a bouncing, healthy baby boy?

There are also two instances in the Psalms where God is reported to have laughed. In each case it is laughter at God’s enemies, the wicked, who are about to get their due. Actually, the Hebrew word translated into English as laugh does not mean the yuck, yuck, belly laugh of response to something funny or humorous. It means instead to mock in derision.

Laughter does come in different forms. Sometimes it is as response to a humorous situation or words. Sometimes it is the laughter of disbelief at something otherwise inconceivable. Sometimes it is a vengeful mocking over someone’s misfortune or displeasure….especially if they had hurt us in some way. Sometimes we even find ourselves laughing at some small misfortune in our own life.

No doubt being God is a sobering job. Imagine God today witnessing the war in Ukraine, famine in far too many places, oppression in others, pollution that destroys God’s created waters and air and causes intense warming, and prejudice and bigotry in the most comfortable of places. Imagine creating a world and people and seeing it not turn out as you had hoped. It would be difficult to find cause for laughter.

Yet we laugh. You and I. We live in this world God created. We see some of the same horrors. Others we rationalize or miss entirely, usually because we have some part in them. But we laugh.

God created us as we are. God gave us emotions in creation: anger, fear, sorrow, and happiness sometimes expressed in laughter. Why would God give us laughter? As respite and relief from life’s struggles? Perhaps. Certainly, laughter can do that. However, as I think out loud and write down these thoughts, I can’t help but wonder if part of laughter’s function is for us to not take ourselves or even life too seriously.

Oh, there is much in our life and definitely much in life that is very serious. Deadly serious. So serious it is easy to caught up in it all and not be able to come up for air. While laughter may not be able to always bring us to the surface, it may function as a snorkel to breathe in some of that fresh air so we are able to keep going.

There is also much in life that doesn’t make sense. Somethings in life may make sense, but we just don’t see the how and why of it all. Perhaps our gift of laughter is a small form of us, as we take life seriously, but not too seriously, being able to mock life and say, “You don’t have the last laugh on us. God has that last laugh.” That is to say, life is not where the final verdict on our life comes from, God alone has that final verdict. Laughter then, can be resistance to be sucked fully into the world and its ways.

Laughter, then is often a way to show our resistance to some of the world and its ways. It is our resistance to thinking everything is about us and everything is up to us. Laughter can be resistance to even our own self and our own ways.

So, watch reruns of the old sitcoms. Go pay $18.00 to see the Barbie movie. Watch a Mel Brooks movie on Netflix, Chuckle or break out in uproarious laughter. Yes, there is much in life of which to concern us greatly. We need to deal with those serious things seriously. We need also to appreciate the irony, humor and even silliness of life and enjoy a laugh or two to realize we are not the world’s savior. We are merely those who follow that one. In our following there is too often much at which to laugh. I don’t know if God laughs, but God does have to shake God’s head at us and our antics as we too often pretend, we are the saviors of the world.

Tom Ridenhour was my first preaching professor. A life-long Lutheran, he did not fit any stereotypical mold for Lutherans. As a native of North Carolina his ethnic foods leaned more toward grits than lefse. No Minnesota or Upper Midwestern accent. His was a southern drawl. His college and graduate years were with the Methodists of Duke and the Congregationalists of Yale with a stop in between with some Lutherans at Southern Seminary in Columbia, South Carolina. (By the way, ULC member and pastor, Jacqui Pagel also had Tom as her preaching professor.)

In preaching class the first weeks were spent on discussions and lectures on everything from the theology of preaching to ways to write a sermon for better eye contact. Then came the sermons, preached in class, by each student. You sometimes think it is hard to make your way through one sermon on a Sunday morning? Imagine having to listen to four or more in a single setting!

While an anxious classmate was up front preaching, we co-classmates, diligently sat at our desks filling out printed sermon evaluation forms commenting on eye contact, delivery, content, and more.

At the conclusion of each sermon, Dr. Ridenhour would stride confidently to the front, turn, and begin the evaluation discussion with a question. Quickly we learned that first question revealed his evaluation focus. Questions were often, “Where was the Good News in that sermon? How was the delivery? Could you hear him well or did she have good eye contact or seemed to be reading the sermon. Most memorable and most feared was the question, “Was that a sermon?” Now he would have to add a new question for some, “How would that appear on live stream?”

I wonder if Tom checked out his old students and their preaching once everyone went online. Somehow I think he had heard enough preaching from his hundreds of protégé’s during his forty or so years of teaching. I shudder to think that he might have caught me in the act on live stream!

Dr. Ridenhour asked questions so the preacher could learn and so those answering the questions could reflect and learn. Much of scientific, engineering, and even music, the arts and writing accomplishments were because someone had a question. “What would happen if we….? How might we be able to…..? What if we did this and/or that?”

Unfortunately, people of faith seem to fear questions regarding faith. Too much faith remains stagnant because we are unable to ask questions of one’s self or of our faith. If our faith seems a bit out of touch with today’s life it may be because we haven’t asked questions of it or have asked the wrong questions. It is also faith to which we must turn when questions seem to lack a definite or certain answer.

Jesus wasn’t afraid of questions. “What must I do to inherit eternal life? How can one be born again? Where do you get that living water? Who is my neighbor?” These are just some of the questions that came to Jesus.

Jesus responded to some questions with parables, straight answers, a healing, or a theological revelation about God. He was unthreatened by people’s questions. This ought to give us release from out anxiety about asking questions of our faith, or, for that matter, of God. Yes, it may change our faith. It might also strengthen it as we understand how it now relates to some new chapter of our life.

Imagine, finishing a sermon in class to your peers and a professor and have the professor begin with, “Was that a sermon?” I can’t remember what questions he asked after my sermons. I probably blacked them out because of fear or embarrassment. Regardless, many who had that question asked of an early preaching masterpiece no doubt went on to learn from it and become adequate if not very good preachers.

What if we saw life as more than pursuing answers to our questions. What if we saw life as having a consistent practice of asking questions of us? Think of your life. Of course you understand much more now than in the past. The future will provide even more insight. Yet has not life questioned you in the past? Will there not be further questions asked in time to come? As followers of Christ we need to work on being more comfortable in asking questions and more comfortable in having questions asked of us. A life of following Christ is not a linear progression of further understanding. It is also a bumpy path of trying to navigate what comes to us.