Sermon: "I Am Legion"

Rev. Maureen Frescott

The Congregational Church of Amherst, UCC

June 23, 2013

Psalm 22:19-22; Luke 8:26-39

“I Am Legion”

Before I begin the sermon I want to address one question that I suspect popped into many of your heads as we heard this gospel story today – and if you’ve read or heard this story of Legion before it’s likely that you’ve had this question lingering in the back of your mind ever since.

In fact, a friend of mine asked me this question just the other day after I told her what the gospel text was for this Sunday.  She said, “I get that this story of Legion is about demonic possession and Jesus healing a very troubled man…but tell me Reverend, why did Jesus have to kill the pigs?”

We can’t seem to get past the pigs.

It’s hard enough to sift out a meaningful, modern-day message from a story about demonic possession, but if we’re picturing Wilbur and Babe leaping off a cliff to their deaths, it can really get in the way.

Yes, the pigs are innocent bystanders in this story.

There they are grazing on the hillside minding their own business when suddenly they become a convenient home to a legion of demons.

The pigs are so troubled by this development that they choose to run down the hillside and drown themselves in the lake – effectively sending the demons into the very abyss they were trying to avoid.  And what we end up with is a lot of dead pigs and a group of angry pig herders who have just watched their livelihood destroyed right in front of their eyes.

So before we talk about the man named Legion, or Jesus’ extraordinary healing abilities, or the extensive reach of God’s love….

let’s talk about the pigs.

The traditional explanation is that in first century Jewish culture the pig was considered to be an unclean animal. They were not to be eaten or touched. There were no pig farms in Judea.

Jesus and his disciples encountered these pig herders in Gentile country.

So it stands to reason if you have a hoard of evil demons on your hands, why not send them into the nearest unclean and therefore expendable animal that you see?

Middle Eastern mythology also held that demons could not survive in water. So the frightened and stampeding pigs offered a convenient vehicle to get the demons into the watery abyss where they would ultimately reach their demise.

While the death of the pigs in this story may ruffle the feathers of our 21^st century, animal loving sensibilities, I assure it was not Jesus’ intention to anger the folks at PETA.

(I promise you, no animals were harmed in the telling of this gospel story)

What may be more troubling to some about this story, is that Jesus seemed to have no regard for the pig herders - who most likely had families to feed, and who were now left without a source of food and income. 

The possibly unsatisfactory answer to this objection is that when we live out the radically inclusive message of the gospel in the world, the results are sometimes painful.

Systems of power and commerce are overturned and we as a people have to make sacrifices and painful adjustments to ensure that everyone is included at the table.

Jesus asked many of his followers to make difficult choices and to give up their livelihoods to spread the hopeful word of the gospel.

But some, like the pig herders, end up as unwilling participants in the destruction of systems of imbalance.  Unfortunately, in order to raise some up, others must be willing to take a step down.

I said that this answer might be unsatisfactory to us because we don’t like the idea of having to suffer a loss to allow others to gain, even if we all stand to gain so much more in the long run.

But what is it that we gain from the healing of Legion?

Now that we’ve set the pigs aside, it’s time to tackle our demons.

When Jesus steps out of the boat in the land of the Gerasenes he is immediately smacked in the face with the stench of overwhelming evil and fear.

And all of it is contained in the form of one man -

a naked, screaming, wild-eyed man who hides in the shadows of the tombs on the outskirts of this Gentile city.

We’re told that many times he has escaped the chains and shackles of those who’ve tried to tame him, as his internal demons drove him over and over again into the wild.

His name is Legion.

But Legion is not the name of the man who cowers at Jesus’ feet.

It is the name of what possesses him.

The version of the story that appears in the gospel of Matthew says it best:

Jesus asks the man, “What is your name.” and the demons respond,

“I am Legion: for we are many.”

In the Roman army, a Legion consisted of up to 6,000 men, and it believed the gospel story invokes this name to drive home the point that this is no ordinary demon possession that we’re talking about.

This is not about one man wrestling with one demon – which today we might define as an addiction, or a physical or mental illness that causes one to behave erratically and disruptively.

This about all of the demons that we encounter when we step into the world.

This story is a foretelling of what the disciples can expect to encounter when they take their message of the gospel to a world that is for the most part unprepared and unwilling to endure the changes and the sacrifices that must be made to build the kingdom of God – a kingdom where oppression, poverty, and systems built upon fear and control are no more.

These are the systems that permeate our world.

We don’t know how to function without them.

We live in a world where some are leaders and others are followers, and this inevitably creates imbalances of power that lead to oppression and tyranny.

We live in a world where individualism and personal achievement are rewarded, which leads us to lift up those who succeed and cast blame and judgment on those who are struggling – telling ourselves that they fail because they lack ambition, discipline, or have become too reliant on the support of others.

We live in a world where our differences are alternatively celebrated and feared; where we pride ourselves on our tolerance for diversity while at the same time remain suspicious of those from other cultures, countries, races, and religious traditions.

The evils of this world are inevitable.

They are a product of human fear, free will, and brokenness.

These are the demons that possess us all.

We each have our personal demons as well. Our addictions. Our traumas. Our physical, emotional, and spiritual scars that influence how we treat one another and how we treat ourselves.

These are the demons that we wrestle with on a daily basis.

And like Legion, we resist God’s efforts to drive them out of us.

When Jesus encounters the cowering Legion, the demons within him say, “What have you to do with me?” “I beg you, do not torment me!”

These are the voices of the demons speaking, for they of course fear their own demise, but we can imagine we also hear the faint voice of the man trapped within. This is the only life he has known. As much as the demons have forced him to the edges of society – to be bound up in chains and feared and mocked – to be free of the devil he knows and be left to wander in a world he does not know and has few skills to navigate, is much more frightening than being chained for life.

Many of us have been there or have loved one who have been there.

Some of us are there right now.

We feel at home amongst the tombs, hiding in the shadows, resisting those who reach out to help, because we’re so deathly afraid of letting go of what has become comforting and familiar, even it’s slowly killing us and we know it.

Drugs. Alcohol. Depression. Abusive and unhealthy relationships.

Impossibly high standards that drive us to work more, earn more, buy more, and achieve more while our health, families, and sanity crumble around us.

What the gospel gives us is hope.

In this story of Legion, this poor withering soul of a man weighted down by the force of thousands of demons, comes alive at Jesus’ command.

He did not cast the demons out. Jesus did.

But in their absence it would have been easy and expected for him to continue to cower in the shadows in fear of a world that he barely knew.

Like an ex-con just released from prison, an addict transitioning into sobriety, or a woman living on her own for the first time after a lifetime of dependence on abusive men, taking that first step into the glaring light of the free world is both exhilarating and terrifying.

Which is why this man healed by Jesus does not leap up and run into town shouting in joy and amazement – a small detail that makes this story ring truer than many others.

Instead the man sits at Jesus’ feet, now in his right mind, but silent.

Until Jesus moves to leave and the man begs Jesus to take him with him.

His instinct is to cling to Jesus, just as many of us who find healing wish to cling to the people or place that helped transform us.

But Jesus tells the man to return to his community, to serve as a living testimony to the power of God’s love and healing.

Return to the people who knew and loved you before you started spiraling downward. Your story is inspiring to strangers, but it is all the more powerful when told to people who know the battles you’ve faced, who see themselves in you, who look at you and think, “He overcame his demons with God’s help, maybe I can, too.”

At the end of this gospel story, Jesus gets back in the boat with the disciples and returns home.  He traveled all the way to the land of the Gerasenes and never made it past the shoreline.

It’s as if the entire trip across the sea of Galilee was done to meet this one man. The calming of the stormy sea, the casting out of a legion of demons, one man’s life is changed for the better, a new disciple has been set loose in the land of the Gentiles, and the stage has been set for the building of the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ disciples are witnesses to all of this, as are we.

There’s a reason why the gospel writers felt this story was worthy of inclusion in their accounts of Jesus’ life.

I’d like to imagine that they hoped their Gentile readers and their future readers from other cultures and other lands would see their way past the drowning pigs and the fleeing demons and see the joy of the gospel message contained within.

This is a story of transformation.

The kind that only be found in the power of faith.

If we’re going to work together to transform this world – to cast out the demons of systemic poverty, oppression, and inequality, then we need the power of God and the belief that God is willing us to do this to get it done.

If we’re going to transform ourselves, to seek help to cast out our personal demons and to ultimately help others to do the same - then we need the power of God and the belief that God is willing us to do this to get it done.

The only way to achieve transformation is to stand toe to toe with the Legions that possess us and our world and lean on the strength of God to pull us out of the abyss.

As writer Suzanne Guthrie puts it, “Healing requires Confrontation - and bold truth telling. If you can't name the disease, how can you find the proper cure? Perhaps it takes a radical withdrawal into the desert, or living naked among the tombs to isolate a problem so enmeshed with everything else in life and culture. Here, evil finds its name revealed, and, shouting and protesting in fear, it trembles in the presence of Holiness.”

The people who witnessed the healing of Legion reacted with fear.

They asked Jesus to leave because they were afraid that he might do the same to them.

How do we respond when confronted with the gospel truth that we have something possessing us that needs to be released?

That there’s something inside of us in our heart, our something outside of us in our common culture that has us bound and chained in fear?

How willing are we to let Jesus reach into our lives and turn them upside down so that we all might be healed?

We are Legion, for we are Many.

The good news is that God is much bigger than the fears that we hold onto.

The good news is that love conquers fear.

Always. Always.

Thanks be to God, and Amen.

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.