Flowers, Clouds and Witnesses: Holy Week Sermon 2013

Holy Wednesday Community Service

First Baptist Church, West Jefferson

March 27^th, 2013

Hebrews 12:1-3

                  I’ve joked that during Holy Week I’m always happy to make it through this week alive and one piece. Never before have the words been so true than this week. Will you pray with me?

                God of Holy Week,

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing in your sight, Oh God, our strength, and our redeemer. Amen.

                  This past Sunday, as I was planning to sing the glorious hymns of Palm Sunday and hear the wonderful choir here at First Baptist lead us in worship during their cantata, I was on my way down 221, the snow started to come down and the roads got slick, I was in a car accident with another vehicle and I ended up in a ditch. My leg was pinned in the vehicle and I suffered a pretty rough concussion, as grim as that sounds I am thankful. When we phoned the towing service that had my car they were astonished that someone had survived such an accident, this, as it should has put things in perspective.

                  The text from Hebrews that we heard today is the Epistle lesson for Holy Wednesday, and let’s be honest, it’s not a text that we hear during Holy Week. It’s really not gloomy enough. It speaks of a great cloud of witnesses and frankly all of us, myself included find it easier to preach on betrayal, on death, on despair. But this text, this text challenges us to look at Holy Week in a different context, a context that points beyond today, what some countries call Ugly Wednesday.

                  I think on a cursory level this text is perfect for those of us who live in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We all who have driven the roads in Ashe and Watauga County have been through a cloud. That enveloping experience of being consumed in something really big, the somewhat terrifying encounter with low visibility, we’ve all been through a cloud. So to imagine being enveloped by a cloud of people, people who witness to their faith and to our hopes. Those are the types of clouds we all need to experience.

                  Fred Rogers, the man known better to us all as Mr. Rogers said something incredibly profound during his lifetime. Allow me to share it with you now, “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.” So great a cloud of witnesses, this week I have experienced that cloud. With all your phone calls, your texts, your Facebook messages, your kindness and prayers. You all have inspired me, in a way that I hadn’t yet thought possible.

                  You see, us Christian folk sometimes get in this idea that we need to be more like Jesus than Jesus was. We always need to minister to the people; the people of faith are waiting for us to visit them in the hospital, to call them, to email them, to console them. But as I was so roughly reminded this week, ministry is a two-way street. Even Jesus, the one who was preparing to celebrate his last Passover meal with his friends allowed them to minister to him throughout his life. I can’t help but think of the stories that weren’t recorded in the Gospel accounts. Using holy imagination I imagine Jesus after crying in Gethsemane, and these big burly fishermen, tax collectors and manly men trying to console their leader. (I'm almost positive Mary Magdalene was there too, so she might have helped.) I imagine Peter and Andrew’s friendship with Jesus being strong. Little did they know that it would take them to their own respective crosses.

                  Now mind you these are only my thoughts. But Mary Button, a modern day theologian puts it this way, “We can only begin to understand the meaning of the crucifixion when we take away our polished and shiny crosses and try to locate the cross in our own time, in our own landscape.” Friends we come to this Holy Week as people in search of the resurrection. I find it all too often that we let our Holy Weeks define our Easter instead of letting Easter define our Holy Week. For our time, and our place, we are on the side of the resurrection that allows us to let Holy Week know who is boss. That death doesn’t have the final say, that a meal with friends is a holy occasion to be celebrated and thankful for. We have the unique opportunity as people this side of the resurrection to surround ourselves with a cloud of witnesses to that resurrection.

                  By many accounts, I shouldn’t be here, standing before you all today. The reality of life is that we are faced with death. Now, don’t get me wrong I’m blessed and thankful I am able to be here to preach, but more than that I am incredibly and forever thankful for those witnesses to the resurrection that tell me that no matter what happened this past Sunday, as Julian of Norwich said, “all will be well, and all matter of things shall be well.” We have confidence in the resurrection even in this holy yet gloomy week in our liturgical calendar. We have confidence not only in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come, but also in resurrection right here, and right now.

                  We can have confidence in the resurrection of a friendship, a relationship, a marriage. We can have confidence in the resurrection that some day we as a nation and a world will be at peace. We can have confidence in the resurrection of church members who are willing to call you when you are at your worst and say, “I get what’s going on, and I’m here if you need me.” That’s why we all join together this week as a community. We join together in a remembrance of the pain and despair and depression of the past, but we like those disciples joined in an upstairs room stand in wonder that sometimes we just forget the resurrection. Oh, how badly I wished that just one of the disciples would have thought about what Jesus was actually saying, how the resurrection was coming. But I think we need the disciples to be naïve and ignorant in this account because we find ourselves in that exact same situation. We wonder why we lost that job, when in reality something else is weaving its way into your life. We wonder why a parent or grandparent is dying of cancer, when God is ultimately accomplishing healing work even in the last moments of life. We sit in cars that are totaled and crushed around us and cry out to God asking to help us when in reality God is right there allowing resurrection to occur.

                  Friends we come to this sacred place as products of the resurrection, whether we realize it or not. Look back into your life, your time, and your place. Where was God rolling away the stone for you? Now this may sound like I’m ignoring this week of holiness and darkness. I assure you that to reach any Easter, you have to go through this time. You cannot reach resurrection in whatever form it presents itself with out some sort of death, some sort of mortal reminder that this isn’t all.

                  This past Sunday, when I was in the hospital, I had some visitors come and see me. One of my friends from Appalachian, Stephanie brought these flowers. These flowers were gorgeous; they were orange and yellow, the colors of spring that brightened my spirits amidst such a terrible situation. Little did I know what all Stephanie went through to get these flowers. You see it was a Sunday morning, and Stephanie first went to a florist only to realize they were closed. Then she went over to one of our grocery stores but no one was in the floral department to put the flowers in the vase. She finally had someone from produce come over who had never done anything with any sort of flowers to help make the bouquet look the way it did when I finally saw the flowers. It was complete with a bow and the flowers were for me, perfect.

                  So what do flowers and what my friend Stephanie had to go through to get me those flowers have to do with this Holy Week? Holy people of God we are caught in the mentality when we forget what happens before our resurrections. We want the immediate, the fast, and the easy. We want the end product, the flowers in the hospital that took little to no effort to make them arrive. We’re all guilty of wanting Holy Week without Easter. But Easter will be so much more meaningful for us this year, if we sit a little while longer here in the midst of Ugly Wednesday, the flowers are more meaningful to everyone if it takes us a little while to get them. So now, whenever you receive flowers from a friend, when someone calls, emails or texts you, or simply says hello to you on the sidewalk, let it be for you part of this resurrection process. For we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, witnesses to the resurrection, people who remind us of the grace of God, and the beauty of Easter. Thanks be to God, Amen.

Silver Linings Playbook: How the Church Dropped the Ball

         I recently saw the Oscar-nominated film Silver Linings Playbook. This film chronicles the journey of someone entering back into society after having just been released from a behavioral health facility. The story is woven in a way that he finds his sanity and love in the most unlikely of places. In the climactic scene of the movie, the protagonist’s father proclaims, “You have to pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it's a sin if you don't reach back... I'm telling you.”

            I adored this movie; it fostered a conversation that people need to have about mental health awareness. But one thing caught me that I’m sure not many others might catch. Throughout the movie, one part of life is severely lacking. The church is strangely absent from this film. Some of you might argue that the Hollywood culture no longer involves church but I’m starting to think that may not be the case.

            Where has the church been all these years? Where have we been as a community of faith? We’ve become entranced in the idea that somehow this entity we call church is a country club for saints instead of something more akin to Alcoholics Anonymous for sinners. I’ve seen it happen at churches all across the land, we walk in, our heads held high and our voices loud as we proclaim that all is right in our world. When deep down, our marriages are crumbling, our friendships are in ruin, our nights are a little darker than they used to be.

            The church has been absent. We’ve missed opportunities. I’m not saying we need to be everywhere at every possible moment. However I am suggesting that there are times when we need to stand in the gap. We need to be that bridge between a culture so hell-bent on destruction and the Kingdom of God offered to us.

            This can take many different forms. Mental health awareness within our congregations, domestic violence education and prevention, sexual ethics training and programs that enact safe congregation policies for our children and older adults are all steps congregations right here in our community to take to stand in the gap.

            One of the things I love about the community of faith is that, for me, they have stood in where I needed them. They have become the very essence of God by their actions and their kindness. On the flip side there are times when I felt like the community surrounding me wanted to do nothing that was fruitful for my faith development or the good of the Church as a whole.

            Ultimately, we must always remember that the church is a very human institution. There will be times when we make atrocious mistakes, but God isn’t done with the church yet. Take heart, because there is still work to be done. There are still needs in our community that congregations can meet. It’s our time, and our chance to stand up for the oppressed and stand in the gap for humanity. Friends when life reaches out to you at a time like this, it’s a sin if you don’t reach back.