Sermon - "Acts of God"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

May 26, 2013 – Trinity Sunday

Psalm 8; Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

“Acts of God”

By a show of hands, how many of you knew before coming here this morning that today is Trinity Sunday?  That’s what I thought.

To be honest, outside of theologians, church staff, and whichever deacons are on duty today, very few people know or care that today is Trinity Sunday.

I doubt if any of you woke up this morning, roused the kids out of bed and hurried out the door shouting, “We can’t miss church today, it’s Trinity Sunday!”

Admittedly, Trinity Sunday is a pretty low-key celebration on our Christian calendar.  We don’t spend weeks preparing for it and we don’t have any rituals associated with it.

We don’t have a Trinity Pageant where we dress our children up as the three aspects of God and reenact the workings of the Holy Spirit.

But maybe we should…

because Trinity Sunday is a celebration of a pretty amazing thing:

It’s a celebration of the many ways that we live in relationship with God.

It’s a celebration of the sheer awe that we feel when we encounter God in the form of our transcendent Creator; It’s a celebration of the brotherly bond we feel when we encounter God in the human form of Jesus; and it’s a celebration of the sustaining energy we feel when we encounter God moving through us in the form of the Holy Spirit.

Yet because this celebration is about a feeling or an experience rather than an event, like Pentecost, or the birth, death, or resurrection of Jesus, we often don’t know what to do with it.

It’s too vague and ethereal for us to wrap our minds around.

For many of us the mere mention of the word Trinity causes our eyes to glaze over. 

I knew I was in trouble in seminary, when my theology Professor, Mark Heim, ended a 3-hour lecture on the Triune nature of God by saying,

“If you find that you are thoroughly confused by all of this - Good! Now you understand the Trinity!”

But truth be told, we really don’t have to fully comprehend how God can be three in one or one in three to understand that the Trinity is all about relationships.

God is by nature a relational God.

God relates to us through Creation - through nature and through other created beings;

God relates to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, who showed us how to live, love, and transform ourselves anew; and God is relates TO us and THROUGH us in the movements of the Holy Spirit, who in keeping with the tradition of Wisdom and Sophia, guides and inspires us to act creatively, compassionately and justly in our world.

These are the three faces, or three relational experiences that we have with God - as Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

Now theologically, we can say much more about the doctrine of the Trinity then this.

But I’m not going to.

Believe me I could.  Three years ago while in seminary I wrote what I thought was a pretty decent sermon on the Trinity, but when I re-read it this past week I put myself to sleep.

So I will spare you a lengthy explanation of the doctrine of the Trinity, partly because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over to the point where you start thinking about your grocery lists, but mainly because the mystery of God is not something that we can capture in doctrines, creeds, or statements of belief.

I believe the mystery of God is best encountered in experience and in story.

So allow me, if you will, to shift gears here for a few minutes and tell you a story.

It’s a story about how I encountered the mystery of God through the experiences of my father.

My father was a veteran of World War II.

He served in the Navy on a Tank Landing Ship that moved artillery, heavy equipment, and large groups of marines and infantryman across the ocean, depositing them on the shores of foreign lands in Europe and the South Pacific.

The Tank Landing Ships were called LSTs.

My dad used to say that LST stood for “Large Slow Target.”

When I was growing up, my father would tell us stories of his experiences during the war, but because we were children he tended to focus on the adventure and the humor of his exploits, without revealing the harsher realities of war.

I suspect he did this for his own well-being as much as he did it for ours.

There was one particular story that he loved to tell.

The story began with my father and several of his shipmates wandering around aimlessly on a beach on the island of Sicily.

It was April 1943, and they were in the midst of unloading a battalion of marines on shore.

When this wayward group of 18 and 19 year-old sailors began to get in the way of maneuvers, a Marine commander ordered them off the beach.

My father and his buddies piled into an unattended Jeep and headed up the road to see what was on the other side of the dunes.

 Not five minutes later they came careening back onto the same beach they had just left.

At this point in telling the story my father would start waving his arms around as he imitated the red-faced Marine Commander running toward their speeding jeep and yelling at the top of his lungs, “I thought I told you Navy guys to get off this beach!”

This was right before the commander stopped dead in his tracks as he noticed the convoy of enemy tanks coming up the road just behind my father’s jeep.

With no time to think, my father and his shipmates abandoned the jeep, dove into the water and swam back to their ship, which was anchored less than a mile off shore.  Reaching the anchor ropes, they climbed up and landed soaking wet on the top deck. 

My father went below to change into a dry uniform and 10 minutes later arrived at his newly assigned gunnery post back up top…. just as a passing plane dropped a bomb out of the sky and right through the center of the ship.

The force of the explosion blew my father overboard and into the water. 

Acting on instinct he clawed his way back up the anchor rope and onto the deck of the now burning ship.

As the heat beneath the deck burned through the soles of his shoes, the official call came out to abandon ship and my father found himself jumping back in the water he had already come out of twice before, this time with his uniform in shreds.

After treading water for nearly an hour he was picked up by another ship.

His LST sank off the coast of Sicily and he was sent back to the States to await a new assignment.

After several days of traveling, my father finally arrived back on Long Island on a crowded troop train wearing a borrowed uniform that consisted of navy dress pants, an army infantry shirt and boots that were two sizes too big.

As the train pulled into his hometown he stumbled out of the station and unknowingly right into a neighboring barbershop where he collapsed with exhaustion into the first chair he saw. 

The barber approached him, placed a cape around his neck and broke into small talk as he began to cut my father’s hair.

“So, home from the war are ya?” he said,

“Did you see much action over there?” 

 I heard this story many times when I was growing up, and I suspect over time there was some conflation or exaggeration of the actual events both in the telling and the hearing.

But as I got older, my father began to add details to the story that he hadn’t included before.

He revealed that when the bomb hit his ship there were more than 500 men still on board, and he was one of only 68 to survive. He watched his friends disappear from sight within feet from where he was standing.

If he had been assigned to his regular post in the engine room he would have been lost as well. 

He told us that there were Marines who were thrown into the water with him after the blast. Marines who were each weighted down with over 70 pounds of equipment, and try as he may my father could do nothing to help them stay afloat. In desperation, he had to let go of their grasping hands, or be dragged below himself.

At the tender age of 19 my father was a first-hand witness to suffering that I cannot even comprehend.

Suffering that he was powerless to prevent or alleviate in any way.

Suffering that he carried within himself, hidden behind his wartime adventure stories and pushed aside by the everyday demands and routines of life.

My father came home from the war, married my mother, had a houseful of children, and lived a long and happy life until he passed away a few years ago at the age of 79.

But for most of his life, his experiences in the war left him with a question he could not answer:  “Why?” – Why did he survive when so many did not?

Listening to my father story’s evolve over the years mirrored my evolving experience of God.   

At first I delighted in the adventure and mystery – not knowing what was going to happen next but feeling certain that all would be well in the end.

God, like the image I had of my father as a child, was all powerful, all knowing, and in control at all times.

No matter how many times my father got blown off that ship, he’d always land on his feet and live to see another day.

And no matter how many bad things happened in the world, God would always keep me and the people I loved safe and away from harm.

It doesn’t take long for most of us to question this experience of God; to let go of this feeling of certainty.

Someone close to us dies, a parent loses a job, a natural disaster hits too close to home, or some other tragedy rushes into our life and suddenly we’re left questioning whether God is as all powerful and as in control as we once thought.

When my father began to reveal the gritty details of his war experiences, this time as an elderly man reduced to tears because of what he had seen, he no longer seemed as invincible as I once thought.

My experience of God was shifting as well.

“There but for the grace of God, go I,” is what we say when others experience a loss.

Was my father blessed for having survived when others died?

Or was he just lucky?

Was God rolling the dice with our lives? Was our suffering somehow part of God’s plan?

Or worse, was God powerless to stand in death’s way?

We hear these questions raised every time a natural disaster strikes, as we did early this week when tornados flattened entire neighborhoods in Oklahoma and Texas.

Insurance companies call these disasters “Acts of God” because there is no apparent human cause to blame.

While some Christians believe that God sends such disasters as punishment for humanity’s sins, there are plenty of us who believe that a loving and compassionate God would never be the cause of such suffering.

When children are pulled alive from piles of rubble we praise God for saving their lives, but we don’t dare take the next logical step and question God’s goodness for allowing other children to die.

In the bleak wake of war, tragedy, and disaster, it is evitable that our experience of God is questioned, if not found lacking entirely.

In the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami in Indonesia, where 200,000 people were lost to the power of the sea, a group of refugees approached a Jesuit priest in one of the many camps that sprang up after the disaster.

The refugees told the priest that they were interested in converting from Hinduism to Christianity.

“Our God has failed us,” they said. “Maybe yours will do better.”

These Acts of God are a far cry from the Acts of God that Lady Wisdom speaks of in our text from Proverbs, where she stood beside God at the beginning of time like a master worker, rejoicing in the beauty of the world that God created and delighting in the human race.

Likewise, Psalm 8 speaks of God’s power over heaven and earth, and the glory and honor we received for being created in God’s image.

Creation is glorious. We are glorious.

We hear these themes repeated in scripture over and over again.

So why doesn’t creation or humanity seem so glorious when tragedy strikes and our lives come crashing down around us?

Perhaps because both God and God’s Creation contain a much deeper vein of mystery than we’re comfortable accepting.

We can’t explain why bad things happen in this world.

We can’t explain why some people die while others live.

We can’t explain why my father was pulled from the sea off the coast of Sicily, while someone else’s father never came home.

We can’t explain why God created a world in which Creation itself seems to possess Free Will as much as we do, and randomness and chaos seem to be built into the natural design of our universe.

For many of us, our first images of God were formed in our childhood –

in Sunday School, through Bible stories, and in the stories heard at our parents knee. God was a doting Father who watched over us from above.

Ideally, as we grow into adults we come to expand our childhood understanding of God as the ‘Great Protector in the Sky’ to include an image of God that is more ambiguous and complex. To accept a God who created a world in which bad things happen to good people.

To ask questions knowing that they can’t always be answered. To tell our own story in its entirety, without leaving out the details of our pain and our not so wondrous experiences of this world, because we know that God is with us throughout it all.

God is a mystery, and much, much bigger than the God shaped box we’ve constructed to contain our image of the divine.

The Holy Spirit wasn’t designed to fit in that box either.

Neither is Jesus.

All three are much more than we can ever imagine.

The Trinity by definition is described as a “mystery of the Christian faith.”

Thus anyone who says they fully comprehend the Trinity is missing the point.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the Trinity in ways that we can comprehend.  

God is love. God is hope. God is light. God is good.

Whenever we experience any of these acts of God - through Creation, through Jesus, through the movement of the Spirit -we are experiencing God.

In contrast, when we experience hate, injustice, tyranny, evil, or brokenness of any kind we can say that these things are not of God, but instead grow out of our own fears -

Our fear of losing control, losing power, losing face, losing our identity or our faith.

God is the force that pulls us away from those fears, away from our brokenness, and towards healing and wholeness.

God is that which we cannot even begin to define or comprehend yet God lives in relationship with us through our world, our experiences, and our stories.

 If you are still thoroughly confused by all of this - Good!

Now you understand the Trinity.

Thanks be to God, and Amen.

Sermon: "Teach Your Children Well"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

May 5, 2013

Acts 16:9-15; John 14:23-29

“Teach Your Children Well”

What if Lydia had decided not to go to the river on that day?

What if she had decided to not travel to the outskirts of Philippi on the Sabbath and to sit and listen to the men and women of Judea speak about their God of love and wonder?

Lydia was not a Jew by birth or practice, she was a Pagan, and while she was fascinated by this all-powerful God that the Jews held up above all other gods, she was not quite ready to buy into the faith hook, line, and sinker.

In fact, she may have been contemplating whether it was a productive use of her time to spend a Saturday morning listening to these Yahweh worshipers say prayers, sing hymns, and tell stories about this God who ruled over all creation.

She had a business to run, and the affluent men and women who sought out her fine purple fabrics would be waiting for her to open her stall in the city’s market place.

I imagine that it was difficult for Lydia to not think about the sales she was losing as she sat outside the city gates observing the Jewish Sabbath, while her customers took their business elsewhere.

What if Lydia had decided not to go to the river on that day?

Then she would have not have met Paul.

Or heard him speak about the ways of Jesus.

Or been moved to invite these people who called themselves followers of Christ into her home.

Or had her heart spread wide open to the point where she consented to be baptized herself.

If Lydia had not gone to the river that day then it may have been some other random worshiper or seeker who had their name preserved in the Book of Acts as the first Christian convert in the western city of Philippi.

But as a person of faith, I believe that Lydia was right where she was meant to be on that day, and she was having the experience that she was called to have, because she had opened her heart to God.

Lydia’s conversion is symbolic.

She was Christianity’s first convert outside of Asia Minor, in what is now modern day Europe. She was not a Jew, but a Gentile.

She was not male, but female.

She was not a poor fisherman, but an affluent businesswoman who had the means and the influence to plant the seeds of a church in a city that had no idea what a church was or why it was needed.

Lydia was everything that the first disciples were not.

Lydia represented the future of the church as God carried it outside the confines of Judea and western Asia and opened it up to the world.

I like to think that Lydia went to the river that day because God was eager for her to meet Paul.

And Paul went to the river that day because God was eager for him to meet Lydia.

I love stories of chance encounters… and I find it fascinating to contemplate how things could have gone very differently had the players made different choices along the way.

Lydia could have decided not to go to the river on that day, but it was just as likely for Paul to have taken another path, as well.

We may call it fate, but it’s in this encounter between Paul and Lydia where we see the Spirit of God at work.

In the book of Acts we’re told again and again of how the Spirit moves Paul -

first to conversion himself, and then to take the message of Christ outside of Judea to the Gentiles.

Paul is nudged and redirected by the Spirit over and over again as he travels from city to city, and it’s only after experiencing the vision of the man pleading with him to come to Macedonia that Paul travels to Philippi – a city that was outside the perimeter that the Spirit had directed him to stay within.

But this time, shipwrecks, getting blown off course, and unexpected imprisonments do not stand in Paul’s way.

It was time for something new to take root in the world.

Paul meets Lydia because he opened his heart to the guidance of the Spirit of God.

Lydia meets Paul because she did the same.

The Spirit is the advocate, the guide, the teacher that Jesus promises will descend in his place after he has ascended to God.

In John’s gospel, Jesus tells the disciples, “Peace I leave with you, and my peace I give to you. I am going away, but the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.”

There’s an old Buddhist proverb that says, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” 

All it takes is the slightest opening of our hearts to new experiences and a budding awareness of our desire to change for the better, and the Spirit of God will seep into that crack and pry us open as wide as we’re willing to go.

There are many ways in which the Spirit moves in our world.

The Spirit of God manifests in our lives in the form of human teachers –

Those who inspire us to discover our divine gifts and to take risks as we develop those gifts and learn to share them with the world.

The Spirit of God also comes in the form of teachers that we might not easily recognize.

In people who try and test our patience, our compassion, and our willingness to love.

Often it is the most difficult people in our lives who become our greatest teachers, as we learn how to live in community with those who have different beliefs, conflicting ideologies, or who just get under our skin or rub us the wrong way in a multitude of ways.

Most surprisingly, the Spirit of God can appear to us in those nudging forces that we often dismiss as something other than God’s presence in our lives:

Chance encounters, coincidental events, a gut feeling or intuition that causes us to choose one action or path over another.

Some of us are inclined to chalk these occurrences up to the randomness of the universe, to our instinctive need to find patterns of meaning in unrelated events, or to our own fears or desires manifesting themselves and influencing the choices that we make.

If we lean towards the rational and the pragmatic we can easily miss the times when the Spirit is moving in our lives.

On the other hand, if we lean towards the belief that everything happens for a reason and that God directs every minute event in our lives, then we might be challenged to explain why God would arrange for us to win the lottery or to get a good parking spot at the mall, while seemingly doing nothing to thwart the plans of those bent on causing pain and suffering in the world.

We can’t explain how God’s Spirit moves among us… or why some hearts are open to feeling and responding to God’s presence and others are not.

But even those who consider themselves to be jaded realists, can name at least some ways that they see God at work in our world.

Last week, 27 members of our Senior High Youth Group spent 7 days in New York City being the presence of God in the world.

Our teens pushed themselves miles outside their comfort zones to serve people who have had very different lives than they have had.

They met men, women, and children who have no homes, no families to fall back on, and little hope that their lives will change for the better in the near or distant future.

The teens cooked and served meals, carried heavy crates of food, washed dirty sheets, sorted through piles of fruit and vegetables pulling out what was spoiled, and played with smiling children who went home to neglectful parents and empty cupboards. The stories they heard were heartbreaking.

The work was endless. Yet the teens came back to the church where we stayed each night, rolled their sleeping bags out on the floor without complaint, and thanked God for the blessings in their lives and their chance to serve and make a difference in the lives of others.

We have much to learn from our kids.

Two weeks from today, the 21 members of our 8^th grade Confirmation class will stand before this congregation and make a decision about their level of commitment to our church community and to God.

For those of us who choose to join the church as adults, it can be difficult to find time in our busy schedules to attend the required 2-hour orientation session before making the decision to join.

Even then, it’s not an easy decision to make as we consider whether we want to officially commit our time, talent, and treasure to a church when we have precious little to spare as it is.

In comparison, our 8^th graders spend a year committing their Thursday nights to confirmation classes, their Sunday mornings to attending services here and at other houses of worship, and countless other hours writing reflections and spending time with their mentors, as they learn what it means to be a Christian in the world today.

Finally, each Confirmand will meet one on one with Pastor Dick, our Confirmation leaders, and their mentor, to discuss whether or not they feel ready to join the church as a member at this time.

It’s not an easy decision to make as our young teens think deeply about what they believe about God and Jesus and how they wish to express their faith in the world.

Again, we have much to learn from our kids.

The Spirit of God continues to teach us in ways that we least expect.

Through the spiritual questioning of a child, the selfless acts of a teenager, the audacious hope of a person living in poverty, the challenging behaviors of our adversaries, and the everyday chance encounters with the divine that leave us shaking our heads in amazement.

What if Lydia had decided not to go to the river that day?

What if she hadn’t opened her heart and allowed God’s Spirit to find its way inside?

What if each of you had decided not to come here to worship today?

What if you decided not to walk in the Crop Walk, or donate food to SHARE, or volunteer at Ann Marie House, or sing in the choir, or gift your time and talent to a committee, or teach Sunday School, or mentor a Confirmand?

What if you hadn’t opened your heart and allowed God’s Spirit to find its way inside?

We have wonderful and compassionate kids and teens in our congregation because they learned about serving God from watching all of you serve God.

God calls us to teach our children well, just as the Spirit teaches us well, as we learn to walk in the ways of Christ, together in community.

Jesus said, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled…” ….for the Spirit of God will always be with you.

Thanks be to God, and Amen.

Sermon: "Touching Thomas"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

April 7, 2013

John 20:19-31

“Touching Thomas”

When I was about 5-years old, and too young to venture very far from the front yard of our home, I would listen with wonder to the stories my older siblings would tell about the amazing places they would visit in our suburban neighborhood, just beyond the perimeter that I was allowed to explore.

One of those places was called “The Island”

Nearly every day during the summer my siblings and their friends would get on their bikes and take off down the street. When I’d ask them where they were going they’d say, “We’re riding down to The Island.”

My mind would fill with images of swaying palm trees and sandy white beaches, and being a fan of Gilligan’s Island I imagined that the Professor and the Skipper would be there as well.

I so wanted to go there with the older kids and see it for myself, but they’d always tell me that I was too young to go that far.

Each afternoon when they returned from The Island I’d ask them if they found any coconuts or caught any fish, and I’d wonder how they managed to ride across the water without getting their bikes soaking wet.

One day my brother Brian finally relented to my pleading and agreed to take me with him on their daily trip down to The Island.  

Brian had one of those big, wire baskets that held newspapers on the front of his bike, and that’s where I sat as we sailed down the street and beyond the parental boundaries that had hemmed me in.

But to my surprise, after only a few minutes of riding, we arrived at The Island.

There in the middle of the cul-de-sac at the end of our street was a large oblong patch of grass, surrounded by a curb, and with clump of trees growing in the center.
It was a traffic island, a turn around circle for cars.

Of course the other kids thought it was hysterical that I had expected to find an actual island with palm trees and sandy beaches.   

I felt silly and embarrassed for believing the amazing story they had told me.

“Don’t worry,” my brother reassured me, “when you’re older we’ll take you on a real adventure. Down by the baseball field, on the edge of the woods there’s an old storage shed. But,” he added, “even us older kids are afraid to go inside, especially after dark.”

At this point I was skeptical.  I asked him, “Why would anyone be afraid of a stupid storage shed by a baseball field?”

“Because,” he said with a wink, “it’s full of bats!”

To which I replied, “Really?? Let’s go now!”

I’m guessing many of you could tell similar stories of having been duped into believing something that was not true or turned out to be much different than what you expected.

As children we may fall victim to tall tales and practical jokes, but as adults the sting of falling for falsehoods is much more painful, as it takes hold in our relationships, our business dealings, and our political, religious, and ideological convictions.

It feels especially hurtful when we discover that something we’ve invested a significant amount of our time, money, energy, and passion in turns out not to true, or based upon false information.  

In this technological age we might think we’ve become pretty savvy to those who try to pull the wool over our eyes.

Having access to the Internet is both a boon and a curse in this regard.

With a few clicks we can check on the reliability of a car we’re thinking of buying, examine the business practices of the contractor we’ve hired, and fact check everything from election campaign speeches to suspicious emails sent by scam artists phishing for our passwords.

The internet helps us to be more savvy consumers, but as we know, the internet is also a breeding ground for misinformation and false claims –

on news blogs, social media sites, and in chat rooms - where stories spread like wildfire, and the frequency of repetition leads some to believe that they must be true.

Moreover, just as in television and print media, the line between factual news and biased opinion has blurred beyond recognition, and we’re left wondering how much of what we hear and see is true and how much of it is tainted by the prejudices, ignorance, and fears of another.

It’s so hard to wade into the world today without holding to some level of skepticism and doubt.

We can only imagine what it must have been like in Jesus’ time, when the only way you had to verify if something were true was to ask your neighbors, and to hope that they would not lead you astray.

It’s fitting that every year on the Sunday after Easter we hear the story of doubting Thomas.

Just one week after hearing the amazing story of a man named Jesus, who came back to life after being crucified, we hear the story of a man named Thomas who doubts that such a thing is even possible.

“Show me the proof,” Thomas said.

For us, hearing the story of the Resurrection followed immediately by the story of doubting Thomas gives us the space to examine our own struggles with belief.

And we need that space.

Every Sunday we step in here from a world that bombards us with competing ideologies and conflicting truths, to hear the story of a man who claimed that HE was the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Every Sunday we step in here from a world where many gods are lifted up for us to idolize – money, power, fame, materialism – and we come together to worship the one God who calls us to set all those other gods aside.

Every Sunday we step in here from a world that is beset with fear, suffering, violence, and oppression, and we’re encouraged to place our trust in the building of a Kingdom yet to come, where love, peace, and equality for all will reign.

I don’t know about you, but if we didn’t come in here every Sunday carrying some doubt about the resurrection and its ability to change us and our world for the better, I’d question our connection with reality.

Our faith would become rigid and joyless if we didn’t have doubt inspiring us to imagine new ways of encountering the divine.

Christian author Philip Yancy writes, “Doubt is the skeleton in the closet of faith, and I know no better way to treat a skeleton than to bring it into the open and expose it for what it is: not something to hide or fear, but a hard structure on which living tissue may grow."

Thomas may express a reluctance to believe his friend’s accounts of the resurrection, but Jesus does not chastise him for his doubt.

Jesus appears a second time to give Thomas what the other disciples had already experienced - the sight of the risen Christ in the flesh.

And he offers a blessing for those who would come after – the church –

those of us who have no option but to believe without having seen.

The reality is that none of the disciples had believed on faith alone.

They sat huddled in a locked room, convinced that Jesus was dead and buried, despite having been told by the women that the tomb was found empty.

If they had truly believed without seeing, they would have been out shouting it in the streets rather than hiding behind a locked door in fear for their lives.

But Jesus walks through the locked door and meets them in their fear.

And he greets them by saying, “Peace be with you.”

He does not scold them for ignoring the significance of the empty tomb,

he doesn’t admonish them for hiding themselves away rather than spreading the good news of the resurrection….and he never asks them, “Why?”

“Why did you run when I needed you most?”

“Why did you abandon me and lose faith in the one moment that you had to prove yourself as true disciples?”

Jesus doesn’t return to his disciples to render judgment.

He doesn’t come to place blame.

He doesn’t come seeking revenge.

He doesn’t appear in the Temple or the Roman court before those who had him killed in a defiant show of “I told you so.”

Instead he comes to his friends, those who loved him most, with the greeting, “Peace, be with you.”

Jesus gave them what they needed.

Love…reassurance….and the Spirit of God that he breathed out upon them, to strengthen and inspire them for the task that lay before them –

the building of the church. 

He met his disciples right where they were, in the locked room, fears and doubts and all.

And because Thomas wasn’t there the first time, he came back a week later and did it all over again.

Perhaps Thomas didn’t need to touch Jesus as much as he needed to be touched by Jesus.

He needed to know that he was not forgotten.

He needed Jesus to reach out to him and include him amongst those he had called to carry on his name.

And that’s what Jesus did.

He reached out to Thomas in Spirit, just as he reaches out to us.

The only difference is, we can’t see Jesus.

At least not in the way that his disciples saw him.

But we can see Jesus in so many other ways.

In the faces and actions of those who give so much of themselves in the name of love.

In the difficult choices that we make to include everyone at the table, even if it means facing our fear that there will be less to go around.

We see Jesus in as many ways as there are people seeking to see him.

Even though sometimes the way in which others see Jesus is difficult for us to believe.

There was a story in yesterday’s news about a woman who claimed to see the image of a cross and a crown imbedded in the side of a Pepperidge Farm Goldfish cracker.

To her it was the image of Jesus, and a message from God, as this was something she’d never seen on a Goldfish cracker before despite her habit of consuming between two and three pounds of them every week.

One commenter on the story remarked,

“Maybe God's message to her was to cut back on the Goldfish.”

Another said more seriously: “When a defect on a Cracker is a significant affirmation of your faith, perhaps something is wrong with your faith.”

Perhaps.

Perhaps it would be a better use of our time to see Jesus at work in the world then imprinted on the side of a cracker, or in a grilled cheese sandwich, or in the dirt stain on the side of a house.

But if the people who see these images need to see them, because their life has knocked them on their back and their faith is circling the drain, then who are we to judge what is a true experience of the risen Christ and what is not?

I believe Jesus appears to us when and where we need to see him.

In the face of a stranger seeking help, in the embrace of a loved one in need of comfort, and in the hard-to-believe, head-shaking, stories of chance encounters, miraculous healings, answered prayers, and bizarre sightings of the stereotypically long-haired bearded Jesus in the most irreverent of places.

If that’s what it takes to help us to get out of bed in the morning and put one foot in front of the other when we’d rather stay under the covers and cry….

If that’s what it takes to get us to set aside a distraction, an addiction, or an obsession, and go out and help others to do the same…

If that’s what it takes to get us to shift our eyes off the false gods in our life – money, power, and materialism – and set our eyes on what our faith requires of us – to love mercy, to act justly, and to walk humbly with our God…

Then I say bring on the fish tales.

Bring on the crazy stories of resurrected messiahs and hope born anew.

Bring on the far-fetched yarns that cause us to roll our eyes in disbelief and insist that we must see it with our own eyes to believe it….

and then we believe it anyway.

Because we know there’s more to Truth than believability.

Jesus was a gifted storyteller, and he wasn’t beyond stretching the truth and our imaginations with tales of magical mustard seeds, prodigal sons, and good Samaritans - to get our attention and to get us to cock our heads in bemusement.

I suspect Jesus knew that these were the stories we’d remember and want to take apart to find their truth, and once we did we couldn’t help but retell the story to our friends and all who are willing to listen.

Thomas will always have a home in our Christian story because his story is our story.

Blessed are those who seek to be touched by Christ.

Blessed are those who open their hearts to the promise of new life.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe,

   not in spite of their doubts, but because of them.

Peace be with you…

…and Amen.

Sermon: "Planting Jesus" - Easter Surnise

Rev. Maureen Frescott

Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

March 31, 2013 – Easter Sunrise Service

Luke 24:1-12

“Planting Jesus”

Easter is a challenge.

I saw a commercial on TV this week where a woman with three very active children running around in the background smiles into the camera with a look of exasperation on her face and says, “Easter is a challenge!”

She was not talking about her struggle to believe in the risen Christ.

The commercial was for JC Penny.

She was talking about the difficulty of finding Easter outfits for her kids.

I can see why Easter is presented as a challenge in this regard –

It’s the one remaining holiday that emphasizes getting dressed up in your Sunday best to attend church or to visit family, and new outfits can be costly when you have growing kids.

Thankfully, JC Penny is there to meet the challenge of Easter.

But for many of us Easter is a challenge.

Because when we hear the stories of our Christian tradition,

we sometimes don’t know what to do with the resurrection.

We get that Easter is about celebrating the miraculous event of Jesus being raised from the dead in defiance of those who wished to silence him once and for all. 

We get that Easter is rife with symbolism and metaphors about our own ability to rise from the ashes, to be reborn into a new way of living, and to find hope in the midst of despair.

We get that here in New England, Easter aptly coincides with the season of Spring, where flashes of green pushing up from the earth is a sign that winter has loosened its deathly grip on our world.

We get that Easter can have many layers of meaning, but when we hear the stories of the resurrection retold on Easter morning a good many of us may still find ourselves shaking our heads.

The word that the writer of the gospel of Luke uses is ‘perplexed”

The women came to the tomb, saw the stone rolled away, saw that Jesus’ body was gone, and they were perplexed.

Perplexed is a good word to use here.

It means confused and baffled.

And just like those women who discovered Jesus’ empty tomb 2,000 years ago, we too may be confused and baffled by what it all means.

Some of us may struggle with what we BELIEVE about the resurrection – whether we think the story of Jesus rising from the dead is literally true – but I suggest that we set that aside.

The Resurrection is not something we can prove or disprove,

and many of us have grown weary of religion that is preoccupied with BELIEF- especially when it dictates what we should and should not believe to be considered a faithful Christian.

I propose that what we find perplexing about the resurrection is not so much what to BELIEVE about it, but rather what to DO about it.

Whether we believe the resurrection is literally or metaphorically true is irrelevant if we walk away from Easter Sunday without feeling changed by our experience of it.

When you hear the story of that first Easter morning and imagine yourself standing along side the women gazing into the empty tomb… what do you see?

Do you see the promise of the risen Christ who conquered sin and death so that we might be redeemed?

Do you see where Jesus’ broken body was laid and hear a call to enact change in a world where redemptive violence is our default position in a misguided quest for justice and peace?

Do you see the potential for new life and new possibilities that takes root when we let go of what we once held near and dear and allow it to wither and die - our distractions, our addictions, our convictions - whatever keeps us from loving others as fully as God calls us to do?

There’s a lot we can see when we look inside that empty tomb.

But sometimes it takes more than just peering inside to be changed by the Easter resurrection experience.

We have to embrace what we see and act in the world as if what we’ve seen is our new reality.

It’s not enough to just look into the tomb and walk away, we need to walk inside, take a good look around, and then turn around and see what the world looks like from the inside looking out.

Might we imagine what Jesus must have seen when the stone was rolled back on Easter morning?

Did he see a world that was crying out for the new life that he had to offer?

Did he see a world that was aching for a more hopeful response to oppression, injustice, and scarcity?

Did he see a world where we would experience the empty tomb and be moved to become his disciples thus ensuring that his message of God’s unconditional love would take root and continue to grow in his absence?

This is what is so amazing about the tomb in which Jesus was laid to rest – to those who placed him there it was just a barren rock cavern.

And when they rolled the stone into place sealing the entrance they thought they were burying him forever.

But they weren’t burying Jesus that day,

 they were planting him.

On Easter morning he pushed through the rock walls and reached out to the rising sun. 

He sprang up green and fresh and took root in every heart that dared to open wide enough to receive him.

We are the fruit of the Resurrection.

When we gaze into that tomb and see Jesus alive and working in the world we allow that seed to grow in our heart.

And out of that seed grows love, compassion, forgiveness, mercy, and grace...

     for a world that is in desperate need of them all.

As we leave here today may we remember to carry that seed of resurrection with us.

To nurture it and sustain it.

And to scatter it wherever we go.

The challenge of Easter is to keep Jesus alive in the world.

To step out of the tomb and to feel changed in a radically new way.

Christ has risen, indeed!

Alleluia and Amen.

Sermon: "Let Your Heart Break Open"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

The Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

February 17, 2013

Luke 4:1-13

“Let Your Heart Break Open”

I can always tell when the season of Lent has begun.

That’s when McDonald’s starts running its Filet-O-Fish sandwich commercials during prime time TV.

In recent years, Wendy’s and Long John Silver’s have jumped on the Lenten bandwagon as they too increase their marketing of their fish sandwiches to coincide with Ash Wednesday, supposedly to reach all those observant Christians who are abstaining from eating meat on Fridays during Lent.

There’s no irony lost in the fact that we might choose to emulate Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the wilderness by eating a 500 calorie fried fish sandwich, rather than a 600 calorie hamburger.

Those of you who are life-long Protestants may not be aware that Catholics are required to abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent.

But then again, most Catholics are not even aware that this requirement is still in place for the rest of the year as well.

When I was growing up as a practicing Catholic, we abstained from meat and ate fish every Friday, not just during Lent. Many people believe that this rule was changed with the reforms of Vatican II in the 1960’s, but actually the rule was amended to say that Catholics could choose to eat meat on Fridays if they perform some other act of penance to make up for it.

I’m not sure if ordering a small Diet Coke to go with your Big Mac counts as a form of penance.

But why is abstaining from meat during Lent, or any other time of the year, held up as a spiritual practice that Christians should follow to honor the sacrifice of Jesus?

We may joke that the Vatican owns stock in Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, but some conspiracy theorists would say that’s not far from the truth.

It sounds like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but those of you who grew up Catholic may remember being told that the Friday meat ban began when a powerful medieval pope made a secret pact to benefit the fishing industry and alter the global economy. The result: Millions of Catholics around the world end up eating fish on Fridays as part of a religious observance.

This makes for a great story, but there’s no evidence that it is true.

The more likely reason for no-meat Fridays came about when the early church instituted the practice to honor the sacrifice that Jesus made for us on Good Friday.  Meat was expensive and came from otherwise useful animals that sacrificed their lives for us by serving as a food source. Fish, however were considered to be expendable because they were plentiful, cheap, and had the added bonus of being closely associated with the meals that Jesus and his fisherman disciples shared together.

So there you have it, whether you were wondering or not, you now know why we have to endure Filet-O-Fish commercials during Lent.

Lent is traditionally the season where many Christians, not just Catholics, seek to emulate Jesus’ time of 40 days of fasting and resisting temptation in the wilderness by giving up some form of indulgence – like chocolate, sweets, alcohol, or some other luxury that brings us pleasure.

In recent years people have taken to giving up their reliance on technology by limiting the time they spend checking email or using their cell phone, staying off of Facebook, and doing less mindless surfing on the internet.

The criterion for choosing something to give up for Lent is that it has to be something that we would truly miss so every time we feel the urge to have it we become mindful that we are making a sacrifice for a full 40 days to honor the sacrifice made by Jesus.

But giving UP something for Lent has fallen out of favor in recent years as some claim the practice itself is self serving and self-indulgent.

Often our lists of things we’re giving up begin to resemble New Year’s resolutions that focus only on our own self-improvement.

We may see Lent as an ideal time to make the commitment to lose weight, eat healthier, or give up addictions in an effort to better ourselves.

The trend in recent years is to take something on during Lent rather than give something up.

We might pledge to try something new every day, to practice random acts of kindness to help others, to be more environmentally conscious and reduce our carbon footprint, or to keep a gratitude journal to remind us of all the blessings that we have in our life.

These are all wonderful things to do, and they do require us to make sacrifices – with our time, our energy, and our money.

But this drive to take something on rather than give something up may spring from our fear that simply depriving ourselves of something we enjoy is either not enough, or is too closely associated with all that is wrong with organized religion.

For some of us, the understanding that Lent is meant to be a time of penitence leaves a bad taste in our mouths.  Because it harkens back to the belief that we human beings are fallen, sinful, and unworthy of God’s love.

That we are no better than the dust we are made of, as represented by the smudge of dirt that we have placed on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday.

It’s no wonder that those who feel weighed down by the baggage of these beliefs choose not to observe Ash Wednesday or resist the notion of “fasting” or giving up something during Lent.

But perhaps our attempt to zero in on the sacrificial practice of Lent and hold it up as antiquated, is in itself setting too narrow a focus.

Jesus went into the wilderness to prepare himself for his ministry.

Three years before he turned his face towards Jerusalem and resigned himself to his fate of carrying the cross, he walked out of the Jordan River, still dripping wet from his dunking by John the Baptist, and he set off into the desert.

He walked past the berry bushes and trickling streams and ignored the pangs of hunger and parched lips that urged him to shift his focus off of God and onto his human desires.

He did this for the same reason that religious observants have walked into the wilderness for thousands of years. Not to deprive themselves in an act of penance, but to turn down the volume knob on the unrelenting chatter of our human existence.

We can spend all of our waking hours consumed by our own needs.

Whether it’s our need for basic survival or our need to indulge our every want and desire.

All that chatter can easily distract us from seeking out and hearing the voice of God…and it can act as a cover for our own authentic voice that is desperately trying to be heard.

We may imagine that it was not the devil that Jesus encountered out in the wilderness, but the taunting voices of his own inner demons.

The voices that told him he was not good enough, not strong enough, not holy enough to do what it was God was calling him to do.

“You can’t survive without bread,” the voice said to him. “This is proof that you are only human and not as divine as you may think you are.”

“You can’t resist the tantalizing pull of power and glory,” the voice said to him. “This is proof that you will fail and not sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others as God has called you to do.”

“You don’t believe that God will ALWAYS be with you on this journey,” the voice said to him. “If you did you would not hesitate to test that presence by throwing yourself off a building, putting yourself in harm’s way”

We can say that Jesus was delirious and hallucinating after spending 6 weeks in the desert depriving himself of food and water…but there is something to be said for the spiritual practices of fasting and prayer….and the sense of clarity and focus that they bring.

We need not go to the extreme that Jesus did, of wandering in the desert for 40 days, but we can make an effort to turn down the chatter in our own lives by abstaining from the indulgences and behaviors that are making the most noise.

We may believe that Jesus was God incarnate and therefore he could easily overcome the temptations that he faced, but prior to beginning his ministry he lived 30 years fully immersed in a human existence.

Like all of us, we can imagine that he carried with him all the joys and pains of that existence. The times he felt lifted up, elated and celebrated. And the times he felt hurt or criticized, alone or abandoned, unworthy or unloved.

We can imagine that Jesus experienced times in his life when he had his heart broken like all of us do.

And ironically, in order to strengthen himself for the difficult ministry that lay before him, he needed to break his heart wide open all over again -

this time, in the loving presence of God.

All that we are is hidden in the recesses of our hearts.

Our hopes and our dreams, our fears and our weaknesses.

When we expose our hearts to God we allow light to pour in and illuminate those hopes and dreams, those fears and weaknesses.

That’s when the real work of tearing down and building up begins.

But we can’t get there if we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable before God.

Giving up our indulgences for Lent may seem like a silly and antiquated practice, but the problem lies not with the practice but with the way we’ve been carrying it out.

We may have mastered the art of depriving ourselves, of saying “no” to the things that bring us pleasure and joy because we feel the need to sacrifice as Jesus sacrificed for us,

but too often we miss the next and most important step.

We don’t turn to prayer and reflection to open our hearts to God.

For Jesus’ ancestors, tearing ones clothing was seen as a sign of penance, because it left one naked and vulnerable, but the prophet Joel told the people of Israel:

“Let even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing.”   (Joel 2:12-13a)

Giving up our indulgences during Lent is the equivalent of tearing our clothing, removing the protective layer that serves as a buffer to the elements that may harm us. But if we truly want to build a relationship with God, we must take the next step and rend our hearts as well.

Earlier this week I came across a beautiful prayer written by Jan L. Richardson, a Methodist pastor, artist, and writer.

The prayer is called, “A Blessing for Ash Wednesday” and I share it with you now.

To receive this blessing,

all you have to do is let your heart break.

Let it crack open.

Let it fall apart

so that you can see its secret chambers,

the hidden spaces

where you have hesitated to go.

Your entire life is here,

inscribed whole upon your heart’s walls:

every path taken

or left behind,

every face you turned toward

or turned away,

every word spoken in love

or in rage,

every line of your life

you would prefer to leave in shadow,

every story that shimmers

with treasures known

and those you have yet to find.

It could take you days to wander these rooms.

Forty, at least.

And so let this be

a season for wandering

for trusting the breaking

for tracing the tear

that will return you

to the One who waits

who watches

who works within the rending

to make your heart whole.

During this season of Lent, as we journey into the wilderness and leave our distractions behind, let us remember to listen deeply for the voice of God.

Let us allow ourselves to truly be vulnerable – to allow the light to flow into our broken places as we rend our hearts before God.

This yearly journey that we make towards the cross with Jesus brings us face to face with pain, deprivation, and death,

     but it always, ALWAYS, ends in resurrection.

As we wander in the wilderness, we may just notice that the fearful and resistant person we see in the mirror every day has begun to whither and die,

      as we’re born anew in the loving presence of God.

Amen.