Hardness of Heart

 How Hearts Get Hard and Why In God’s Name It Matters

Hardness of Heart
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

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Audio from worship at 10 AM Worship Service October 3, 2021
at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Carson City.

I am wearing a mask so the deep breathing is not a sign of illness
but a sign of caring for others.

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

 Mark 10:2-16

 

Sermons also available free on iTunes

I want to talk to you about hardness of heart. Hardness of heart. Now, forget what you know about being hard-hearted because that is probably society’s definition of what hard-hearted is: someone that is not kind, not generous, not compassionate. Kindness, generosity, and compassion  are all good things. But in the Bible, the lack of them is not what makes one hard-hearted. To find out the Bible’s meaning of hard-hearted, we have to go back to the Hebrew Scriptures. There’s a lot of hard-heartedness going along in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The most common place where there’s hard-heartedness is the story of – anyone? Anyone? Bueller? No? Nothing? Anybody on Zoom chat? The Exodus story with Pharaoh. That Pharaoh guy was always getting his heart hardened. Right? And every time there was a plague; Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. And it wasn’t because he wasn’t kind or generous or compassionate or understanding. Hard-hearted in the Bible means you can’t see what God is doing in the world. This comes from not caring why things are happening only how. And Pharaoh lived for the how, never the why.

Remember the first plagues that came up, the frogs, the Nile turning to blood-red, all these things? Pharaoh was focused on how. Because he turned to his magicians, and his magicians did the same thing. Oh, well, that’s not anything special. My magicians can do that, as well. I know how you did it. I know the secret. I know the trick. I know the magic. And he completely missed why God was doing it. For that he was called “hard-hearted.”

Hard-hearted is when we don’t see what God is doing in the world and instead focus on how we are in the world. Don’t we do that a lot? In the beginning of our Greek scripture reading we hear more about how. In fact, all through this chapter it’s about the hows presented to Jesus, and Jesus going, why is God doing this in the world?

The Pharisees come up and say is it lawful – how – for a man to divorce his wife? And Jesus asks them, what does the law say? And they answer with a how. Well, you give her a certificate of divorce, you go to a notary public, you get it stamped, you do all the things and that. And Jesus calls that “hard-hearted.” Not because of the lack of compassion or kindness, the meanness of divorce, but because, as he goes on to explain, it’s not what God intends.

You see, Jesus isn’t here giving some moral rules for divorce. He isn’t here outlawing divorce. He isn’t tell you how to live your life. He isn’t telling you a bunch of reasons. We don’t have to go back and break out the scarlet letter “A” and put it on people so we know not to marry them. He’s telling us the why. And I know you all are a little titillated, maybe, about that word “adultery.” Can we say that in church? Have the children left?

But you know, adultery is not just what we usually think of it in culture. Adultery means to water down; right? If you have adulterated milk, that means someone put some water in it or some other things, watered it down. If a food or anything else is adulterated, it means it’s not the way it should be. If you think about that, the why of the adultery, instead of the scandlous how, it’s obvious today whoever does these things isn’t living the way God wants us to live. Every time in this chapter, and it’s three stories in one chapter, but we’ve only have two this week because as Father Jeff says, the lectionary elf says oh, no, only two, only two.

Every story, one, marriage and how a man owns a wife. That’s the way it was back then. Then there was children, another thing that a man would own. Leads up to, with the author of Mark, the story that we’ll hear next week about the rich young ruler although you have combined different gospel accounts to get the complete description. The story is about a man with great possessions that comes to Jesus with a how question. How do I inherit eternal life? How do I do it? And Jesus looks at him and loves him and answers with why are you living your life? Give away all that you have to the poor, and follow me.

And the answer to the how do I get this eternal life, Jesus tasks the rich young ruler, examine why you are living. Why are you living? Are you living to serve others? Are you living to help others? It’s the why question you should be looking at, not the how. Do we do that today? You know, we really, really are encouraged to ask the how questions and stop there. Now, I’m not going – the how people, need them in my life. I need them. I love them. That’s what I need, some people to tell me how to do stuff. But we can’t stop there. We’ve got to examine the why are we doing even what we know how to do. 

I quote Hélder Câmara, Archbishop in Brazil. A famous quote about how and why.

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a communist.

When I focus on how we’re going to feed the poor, well, that’s good. That’s safe. That’s acceptable. But when I ask why are there hungry people, why are there poor people, oh, now you’ve gone from preaching to meddling. You’re being a communist if you ask the why questions.

I love signs. I’m a big sign guy. Have you see the signs of the pandemic? I love reading them and considering them. The ones about masks. I know how you voted in the last election, just by the sign on your door. You know that? How did that happen? But can you see those? And some say “Due to government mandate, because of the Governor and the CDC, you’ve got to wear a mask.”

I don’t know about you, and we can take a survey later about how you feel about the Governor, but I’m pretty darn sure the Governor did not kill 700,000 Americans. I’m going to go out on a limb and say he didn’t do that. So that sign on the door saying the Governor makes us wear a mask, I’m saying, you know, that’s a how. That’s a how. How do we get masks on? We had the Governor say that. But have you seen others? Not many. Maybe I’m not going to the right places. It’s just occurred to me that, that maybe I need to go different places. But some say something like, “Due to the pandemic, you have to wear a mask.” Or a couple I’ve seen, “To protect you and others, you have to wear a mask.” Now, there’s someone that gets the why, and not just the how.

It’s been a bad year for the hows. Awful year. I’ve gone over and over about how are we going to meet as a Presbytery. That’s like my one job is to have a Presbytery meeting. I have a job. My job is to have a Presbytery meeting. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to do. Oh, my lord has it been hard to get a Presbytery meeting. I’m halfway through my term. I’ve had 28 minutes of Presbytery meeting in a year and a half. And that was only to have a meeting so we could pass a by-law change so we didn’t have to have meetings. It’s been a bad year for the how people.

But you know what? It’s going to be even harder coming back because I’m telling you, at least half of the people, maybe more, stop at the how. For them, church is all about the hows. How do we do worship? How do we do coffee hour? How do we do fellowship? How do we do communion? And that’s all they know, and that’s where they stop. And when you take away those hows, you’ve taken away their church. When you take away the how, you’ve taken away their faith and their identity, and they don’t have anything left. And they say, what? The ritual phase? I didn’t sign up for this. This is not how it’s done.

And I’m not picking on you church folk. It’s throughout the churches, all the churches. It’s also through the clubs. I’m a member of a social club, service club. We lost half our members. Half our members are gone. Our president was in tears our last meeting. Why? Because we’re not doing how it’s supposed to be done. And for some people that’s all their membership means, how we do things. That’s not how we do things. They forget the why. Or they never got to the why. We’re not there to meet together, shake hands, tell jokes, have our masks off, talk to one another, give hugs, all these things that people object to we can’t do anymore.

We’re there, and we say this, “To serve the community, one child at a time.” (see Why Kiwanis.) That’s why we’re meeting. That’s why we have a club. It’s not to meet together. It’s not to have lunch together. It’s not to talk together. It’s not to handshake together. It’s not to have fun together. It’s not to joke together. It’s to serve the community, one child at a time. That hasn’t changed. Pandemic does not stop the whys. Crisis does not change the why. Challenges does not change – oh, it wipes out the hows. And if that’s all you’ve got, you’re going to lose your faith, the how-to faith. But why God faith goes on.

You look throughout Scriptures through this lens, where we continue to come to God with how do we do something. And those are important, and those are good and helpful. But it is deadly if we stop there. We’ve got to continue on and say why are we doing things. Even Job, which is a huge sermon in all itself and story. Our little sermon from Job, our little Scripture from Job. How do you live? But Job, when everything went a terrible way, worse than the pandemic, and it gets worse for Job, he knows why he’s there. Shall we take the good from God, but not the evil? Why are we there? To serve. To be in a relationship with God, in good times and in bad. That’s why I’m here. That has not changed, even though everything else has.

Friends, as difficult as this last 18 months have been, it’s been so difficult, you’ve even got Presbyterians up preaching to you. Oh, my God. Lord almighty. When will it end, Lord? Even though the hows are broke away and changed and discarded, I’m telling you this is an excellent opportunity to remember the whys. Why are we here as a church? Because the hows have gone away. The things we used to do, the rituals we used to fund, the calendar, the cut-and-paste events. All gone. And we’re like Job, scratching ourselves with Zoom mics, hoping the itch would go away.

Shall we take the good from God, and abandon him when things aren’t so good? We will if we only focus on how we are supposed to live and how things are supposed to be and how others are supposed to be and that darn governor mandate. But if we focus on we’re here to help one another, to keep each other safe from pandemic, from death; we’re here to keep the hospitals less than full so that when people have a heart attack or a stroke there’s actually a hospital bed for them and not filled up with some COVID person from the pandemic. I don’t know about you, but it’s a lot easier for me to wear a mask for that reason than because the Governor told me so.

So I’m telling you, you want a way out, don’t be asking Jesus the how questions. Always look for the why, why questions. The how will lead you to a hardness of heart where you will not see God’s work in the world. You totally miss it. But looking at the why and the intentions of God will lead you to a blessed, contented, and maybe even, yes, the answer to the rich young ruler’s question: eternal life. Amen.

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Hardness of Heart

MINE!

 Ownership is a story, do tell.

Mine
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

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Audio from worship at Christ Presbyterian Church, Gardnerville, NV on September 5,2021
I am wearing a mask so the deep breathing is not a sign of illness but a sign of healthy precaution.

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

 James 3:13-4:3

 

Sermons also available free on iTunes

 James is a strange book. Martin Luther famously called it “an epistle of straw.” He was not a fan. Now, he was okay with having it in the Bible, but he was not okay with James going against Paul’s doctrine of grace through faith. James seems to be pretty much works, that your deeds are supposed to match your faith. Now, people harmonize this and say, well, James is about after you have faith. It’s about fruits, not about seeds and growing. It’s about what you do after you come to the faith, not before. But I don’t know. James seems pretty angry to me.

I mean, maybe it’s just directness, but still, murder? We got murder in the Bible? Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on with whoever he was writing to. But to accuse them of murder, that seems a little extreme. Let’s hope he wasn’t being literal. Yeah, we may want to look at other translations on that. You want something you do not have, so you commit murder. Disputes and conflicts comes from being wrong-minded.

What about a contemporary English version? Yeah, a little better. When peacemakers plant seeds of peace, they harvest justice. Okay. But still we’ve got the killing. And that whole asking thing, you ask for it and you don’t get, I don’t understand it. But in the contemporary version it talks about when you cannot get what you want, you won’t get it by fighting and arguing. You should pray for it. Yet even when you pray, your prayers are not answered because you pray just for selfish reasons. Well, that makes more sense to me. A selfish prayer goes unanswered. Or, you know, “no” is an answer. I keep telling that to my kids growing up, you know, “no” is an answer. Doesn’t mean I didn’t answer you. It’s just no.

But there’s another Bible, it’s not a translation, like they didn’t decode it word from the Greek to English. Eugene Peterson, “The Message.” It’s kind of when the pastor reads a Bible, kind of. And when I get into trouble a lot of times I say, well, how in the world am I going to work on this? I go to good old Eugene Peterson, and I say, “Eugene, throw me a bone. Help me out here.” And he talks this way.

“You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God, and enjoy its results, only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honor. Where do you think all these appalling wars and quarrels come from? Do you think they just happen? Think again. They come about because you want your own way and fight for it deep inside yourself. You lust for what you don’t have and are willing to kill to get it. You want what isn’t yours and will risk violence to get your hands on it.” And later, “You are spoiled children, each wanting your own way.”

We can look at those later, as homework. It’s always good to figure out, read more than one version of the Bible because, you know, nobody owns the Bible text. You know, I’m old enough to remember the big fight over the King James version. I had one guy witness to me that the RSV was published by a publishing house that was outright owned by Hell. You know, Hell with Satan and devils and all that. They’re actually the parent company of the RSV publishing house, which is United Council of Churches. He told me their home office was Texas, which makes a lot of sense to me, but still. I said, “Nah, I don’t think Satan’s in the publishing business.”

So it’s always good not to say who owns the Bible text because even if you can say, well, you have to go back to the Greek or Hebrew, well, even then, you know, there’s the footnotes and the various readings and which one you put up, which one you don’t. So it’s good to take more than one and not just say give the ownership of the Bible text and your faith to just one authority, even if it’s Gene Peterson.

I want to talk about ownership about this. There’s a really excellent book that came out earlier this year, “Mine.” There’s a lot of YouTubes and lectures by these guys. These guys are actually professors. So you can catch a lot of that stuff on YouTube without even buying the book. They give little pieces of it through there. And their main focus is that ownership is not set. It’s a story that we tell each other.

And there’s competing stories about how we decide who gets what when. We have stories that we tell each other, and they have six that they put down, pretty much variations on the theme. But they have six stories that we tell. You ever heard “finders keepers, losers weepers”? That’s one of them. And in the Scriptures, it talks about, you know, you want things that aren’t yours. You’re willing to do violence for them. You’re asking for the wrong thing, selfishness. All this reminds me of ownership.

Now, you may say “I’m not interested in that. You know, that’s ridiculous.” Well, if you’re not paying attention to the stories of ownership that other people are pushing on us and are telling us what is owned and what is not owned and what is theirs, they’re going to write the story so that it benefits them, so that they can have ownership at our expense. We need to pay attention to this. More and more is being owned by less and less because they’re better at telling the stories, of getting the laws written, of getting over public opinion.

Forty percent of the wealth in America is owned by 1% of the people. Is that a good story? Is that what we want the happy ending to be? And it’s getting more and more. States like South Dakota leading the way, Nevada’s not too far behind, to make sure that the rich stay rich. They don’t have to even – they can protect their wealth in South Dakota and Nevada so that even law judgments against them, much less family claims or ex-spouses or children or even legal judgments cannot touch their wealth because of the stories of ownership that South Dakota’s bringing up, and Nevada in defense or jealousy, I don’t know what, is catching up with and making sure that the wealthy stay wealthy.

Well. That sounds political. Well, let’s talk about something we can probably relate to not political. Has anyone been on an airline? This is the part where you wake up and raise your hand. Has anyone been on the airline? No, no one?

PARTICIPANT: Not recently.

REVEREND RAMSEY: I mean within your life.

PARTICIPANT: Yes.

PARTICIPANT: No.

REVEREND RAMSEY: All right. Yeah, your entire life. Not yesterday.

PARTICIPANT: Yes.

REVEREND RAMSEY: Okay. So what’s your position on reclining? Huh? So what, reclining or tray table? Do you recline?

PARTICIPANT: Yes.

REVEREND RAMSEY: Yes. You’re a recliner. How many recliners have we got here? All right. All right. How many, oh, no, I’ve got the tray table, you’d better not recline on me? How many? No one?

PARTICIPANT: No.

REVEREND RAMSEY: Both. You want both. I like an honest man.

JIM WHITE: All the time.

REVEREND RAMSEY: Yeah. Okay, all right. Usually it varies half and half. Sometimes 60/40. It depends on the audience. If you get the – I have really good stuff here I can’t find. All right, here we go. The tall and tech-y versus the small and sleepy. That’s going to sell, yeah, that’s great. Whether they want the legroom and laptop or whether they want to recline and rest. Looks like we’re a recline and rest kind of people here. Maybe so. Maybe a little bit slower. I mean, there’s been outbreaks on airlines that they had to shut down the flight and make an emergency landing to get the people out over reclining.

And, you know, they have these little knee defenders. They’ve got these little clamps that you can put on your tray table so it stops the other person from reclining. You can actually buy these on the Internet. And so that just escalates everything. And people have gotten injured. People have gotten thrown off.

And, you know, well, whose is it? I mean, the author says that the theory of the recliner is that attachment. And he says, “I own something because it’s attached to something I own. There’s something that I have, and then this is attached to it.” And that’s that little button, the little button that reclines. I mean, that’s definitely on your seat. You’ve got the button. You’ve got the right to use it. So attachment. You can recline. All right. That’s one story of ownership. Things that are attached to me, things that are near me, belong to me. We tell that story all the time.

Ah, but there’s other stories. The story of possession, that if I am there, and I am occupying it, it’s mine. First come, first serve. Ever hear of that? I was there first. And so how does every airplane flight start? Keep your seats in the full upright and locked position. Right? That’s off to the races. We’re starting the thing right here. And so the possession at the beginning of the flight is the knee people, the leg people, the laptop tray people. They are the ones. They’ve got it. The flight starts. It’s theirs.

Somebody leans back, you’re taking away what I already have. I’ve already established it. I sat here. It’s me. It’s mine. And that is a huge principle in American and world law. If you make use of something long enough, it’s yours. Possession. So that’s why we have a fight between the recliners and the legroomers. Who’s right? Anybody want to vote? No one wants to vote. Looks like we’re a reclining kind of congregation. Is that right? Anybody, does anybody want to speak for the legroom people? No tall people here. Okay.

PARTICIPANT: Been short all my life.

REVEREND RAMSEY: What?

JIM WHITE: I’ve been short all my life.

REVEREND RAMSEY: Oh, have been short. So you’re cool. You’re cool with the leg. Yeah, all right, yeah. Now, you see what we’re doing here, we’re fighting among ourselves over a sliver, a wedge of space in an airline thing. And we can do that, and we can make stories that say you’re not allowed to recline. It’s my space. I am allowed to recline. I have a button. You know, I’m allowed to. And we can argue about that, and arguments get there. We can escalate and put little clamps on there. We can curse each other out. People have offered cash for not reclining, and threats. And those don’t work, by the way. They’ve studied this. People don’t go for the cash offer.

But is that what we’re talking about here? Where is the problem? The problem, if you want to look at it another way, is that airline is selling that space twice. Right? That airline is selling, renting that space to the recliner and also saying also it’s for your legroom. So there’s two people they’re trying to put in one space. And you say, oh, they’re not doing that. They’re not that bad. Well, I tell you, it used to be there was 35 inches between seats. There used to be 35. But there’s no rule saying there has to be, so over the years it’s now down to 28 inches in some airplanes – 28, from 35 to 28. And you say, well, that’s bad, but what’s the deal?

Every one inch, every inch they reduce, the airline gets to put six more seats in the airline. Now, you figure in, what, three, four, 500 bucks a seat per flight per three a day on an airplane, times six. And if you make it, most airlines, if you make coach absolutely hellish, you can ask for more money and get up to first-class, where they actually have legroom, actually have decent seating. So there’s a little more money, too. Now, you say, what about Southwest? All hail. Oh, they’ve got their hand out, 20 bucks and you get to pick a good seat. Get to be in the front of the line. Where you can get an exit row seat maybe. Or a seat up in the front of the plane.

So by telling a story of recliner versus laptop table or legroom, and say let you all fight over there, you know, the airline could solve this. They could say no reclining, or you have to ask for reclining, or they can make a rule. But then they would have to enforce it. And then it would be focused on them and not focused on the passengers. They just rather said, hey, just everybody play nice, you know. See how the story of ownership matters even in the smallest things.

Now, I have a solution. There is another way. So let’s tell another story. Has anyone ever watched “America’s Deadliest Catch,” about fishing in Alaska? I got one nod. They have a reality show that show these people going out and get crab, or maybe halibut, in Alaska. And they’re out there in the horrific weather, trying to go fishing, and laying out traps, and trying to get them back before anyone else can.

You see, as the fishing became better, and more people came to the fishing, and more and more boats came out, it became more and more intensely competitive to get fish. And so they went out there in all kinds of weather, trying to get enough fish in their catch, and other people were doing that. So it didn’t matter what the weather was. If you were allowed to go out, you went out. And so for a while it was more dangerous to fish, be a fisher person in Alaska, than it was to be on a foot patrol in Afghanistan or Iran, 2004/2005. It was the most deadliest job, even more than serving in the military in a war zone.

Well, that’s just capitalism. I mean, first come, first serve. That’s another story. First one to get the fish, that’s yours. And so you’d better be first. If somebody else is going out in hellish weather, you’d better get out there, too, because they’re going to get all the fish, and you’re not going to get any. What to do? Well, couldn’t do nothing.

The state of Alaska said. “Enough of this. We’re embarrassed by this pillage, not to mention the deaths and the overfishing.” And they said, “We’ll just – I know what we’ll do. We’ll just limit the catch. We’ll just limit it, how much they can get, to protect the overfishing and the craziness.” So they just limited the catch. And they said, “You can’t go out before this date, and we can only catch this much. And then it stops.” There you go. Problem solved.

Only problem was that just compressed the craziness because it turned out that there were so many people out there fishing, so many in competition, it was like a derby, a death derby. And they went from, in 2004, it was only three days, from the beginning, and you’d better be out there right at the starting gun, go, boom, to the time they got the amount of fish that they were allowed to get before they start overfishing. Three days. It was a hellish three days.

You try to get all your fish for the year in those three days, and guess what? You got the fish. Let’s say you were successful. You got the fish. You brought them in. So has everybody else. The entire year’s catch came into port in the market in the same day, or three days. Guess what happened to prices? They plummeted because there’s so much. And then the rest of the year is nothing. Well, what to do?

So Alaska said, “Well, we’ll try again.” They said, “Okay, we’re going to sell shares. And every boat that was out last year, whatever you caught last year, you get this much this year. So Jim, you did a thousand last year, you get a thousand this year. Betty Lynn, you did 500, you get 500 this year.” And so on and so forth until they divvied up the entire catch. Now you can go out any time you want and catch as much as you want up to that limit. So if the weather’s bad, no worries. Wait. You can’t get any more. You can’t get any – you can’t get any more if you go out in a storm. Wait for the better weather. And they were able to do this.

And so because it stretched out, and because the problem wasn’t so intense, instead of three-day season in 2004, they went to 2006 of three months. That leveled out the prices. If the prices were too low, guess what, you stay in port. You don’t go. You go later. It doesn’t matter. The fish will still be there. Your portion of the fish will still be there. And from the worst, deadliest job in America in the early 2000s, by 2014 and 2015 there was no death in the fishing industry in Alaska. The fish were preserved.

And guess what? When they had time, they had time to fish, they were able to take the immature crabs, a few other crabs, the other fish, they were able to sort that and put it back in the ocean. It was better for all, the whole ecosystem. And what it took was a change in the story of ownership in a way that stopped the selfishness. That stops getting everything they can. And you can say murder results because if you take someone out on a boat in terrible, awful weather, and they die, who’s to blame? Wasn’t necessary. We have an example right here.

Now, the reality show took a nosedive because they had to edit out all the boring parts. It’s pretty boring to go fishing now. You didn’t get swept overboard in the storm, and you weren’t out there on the icy, icy decks. You didn’t have to be.

Eugene Peterson said, “You can develop a healthy, robust community that lives right with God and enjoy its results only if you do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other with dignity and honor.” That’s how it works. Friends, we’ve got lots of challenges. I mean, this fire is, you know, a crisis right now. But it doesn’t really take a look at how we maintain and preserve our planet and our forest and climate change. How are we going to take care of that?

Are we going to keep everybody taking whatever they want, spew whatever they want in the atmosphere? First come, first pollute? Or are we going to take the time and trouble to do the hard work of getting along with each other, treating each other, including those grandchildren that are coming, great grandchildren that are coming along. What kind of world are we going to leave them? What claims do they have on us and on our planet?

Are we going to do the hard work, like they did up in Alaska? Slowly other fisheries are moving, and they didn’t do this in Alaska, they copied Norway. It’s slowly becoming the norm among fishers. There’s downsides to it. I mean, no system’s perfect. But there’s a lot of win-win-win in this, of getting along, of sharing, of considering others, of considering the Earth and the ocean and the planet.

Oh. How do you fix that reclining seat and tray table thing? Well, threats don’t work. Mechanical devices don’t work. If you throw yourself back hard enough, you just pop those clamps. How do I know? I read about it. I didn’t do it. So none of that stuff works. Threats, cajoling, offering money, none of that works. What worked, and this is almost an aside in one of the interviews of the book’s author, the only thing that works is, back when you could, was if you bought a round of drinks for the people around you. Or snacks. You didn’t have to buy drinks. You go, hey, you know, you gave out beverage coupons. Hey, everybody, beverage coupons. Why? Because no one wants to be a jerk in a community.

If you can create community in that airline, and the easiest way to do that is pass out liquor coupons apparently, you’ve only got a little bit of time. Then people got along, didn’t recline their seats, and asked for permission each way, and got along. So even in that little tiny, tiny, tiny example, example from the Scriptures talking about going with other people, being community, not being selfish, getting along with one another, doing the hard work of community, works, for a better life for everyone.

So James may not tell us how to get to Heaven. I mean, he barely talks about Christ. But, you know, he tells us how to avoid hell on Earth. And for that, I’m thankful. Amen.

Mine

Hanlon's Razor

 We can search for miracle as well as we can find malice in others

Hanlon’s Razor
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

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Audio from worship at Christ Presbyterian Church, Gardnerville, NV on August 1,2021

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

Ephesians 4:1-16

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One difference between a community and a cult is just that – difference. A community embraces it. A cult outlaws it. Both are organized around a common goal and beliefs. But community is harder than a cult because everyone is not like you and me. More specifically, it’s harder because not everybody is me. If it was me, everything would be fine. But it doesn’t work that way in community. Only in cults.

You’re saying, why is he talking about community? Because that’s what our scripture’s about. You may think that it’s about spiritual gifts. This is one of those spiritual gifts inventory passages. You know, the one we all love to like. It’s just like, you know, it’s an Amazon Wish List, and we just got a gift card. You know, we’re going through it saying, oh, what can I get? Oh, boy.

But I want to caution you, at least for today, do not pretend that this is Christmas Eve, and the verses are gaily wrapped packages for us to shake and figure out what we got. Because that’s not what the scripture is about. In fact, all the spiritual gift list is not to talk to us about how wonderful it is to have gifts, although that’s pretty good. It is about community. It is about differences, about how people that are different, in different ways, are blessed together to build up the body, even though they are different. You get that? It is about embracing differences.

And look how subtly it has changed. Instead of saying, oh, them, they’re not like us, they’re different; instead of saying people are different, and we’ve got to put up with them, it says what? People have different gifts. People that are different are gifts, not burdens. Not something to be fixed. Not something to be convinced. Not something to come in line with the one true opinion – which is mine, by the way. They are gifts.

What if we went along with that? It goes, “Oh, what a gift that is.” You know, it’s kind of like in the South. I don’t know, anybody from the South? They have that saying, “Oh, bless her heart.” That means I don’t really approve of what you’re doing or saying, but bless you anyway. Now, you can go through what that means. But I’m going to take it to mean you’re a gift. Your specialness, uniqueness, problematic behavior I’m taking as a blessing; I’m taking as a gift.

Now, one of my main errors is I forget to explain my title. So let’s get that done. Hanlon’s Razor is by Robert Hanlon. Did I get the name right?

ATTENDEE: Hanlon.

Hanlon, yes, thanks. I wrote it down for all of us. Yeah, Robert Hanlon is a computer programmer. And he sent in this to a joke book, kind of distilling what has been floating around in literature and quotes for centuries. And he says that “Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Don’t think someone is evil and out to get you when it could be they’re just stupid, and not even thinking about themselves or you or anybody.

Now, Bob, come on. That’s pretty harsh. You know. Stupid? Really, Bob? You know, Bob must be one of those cultural elites, you know, went to college, thinks they know everything. Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve just cut myself with Hanlon’s Razor because I’m assuming malice in what he says. Well, I’m still not happy with the stupid.

So since I’m the one true measure of all things for like 20 minutes, I would like to say a different one. Let’s call it Ramsey’s Razor. That’s great. You saw that coming. Ramsey’s Razor. And I’m going to say do not attribute to malice what can be explained by miracle. Do not attribute to malice, to evil in the world, to somebody out to get you, what could be a miracle.

When you say “miracle,” what do you mean? Some supernatural intervention in the orderly course of nature? Well, yeah, those are showy, and that’s good. But that’s not just all the miracles. For me, miracle is that what we talked about in the gospel, a sign. A work that points to Jesus Christ and to God. And you look at it, and you say, “I see God there.” You know, like you look at my face, and you see Jesus. Right there. A miracle. You think God when you see this. And you see Jesus struggling in the gospel because he straight-off calls him out. He calls him out. He says, “You’re just here because you’ve got the loaves, and you were fed with bread.” And he’s talking about the feeding of the 5,000. He’s talking about the miracle.

And boy, do we go on about that. You know, oh, he just had five loaves and two fish, and then they came up, and they had baskets over, and let’s do the calculation, take an inventory, and how many was that? And it was just men, so it was probably more like 10,000. You know, okay, that’s an okay miracle. But, you know, I’m pretty sure a competent caterer could do that, and definitely a magician could pull that off. There’d be a little prep work, but it’s doable. Far as a miracle goes, I don’t know.

But I tell you, how about this? If, I’m saying if. So no emails to the stated clerk; okay? I’m saying “if” right here. So if, what if this is? You remember the story? It’s supposed to be a sign of God for the miracle. A child comes up. Maybe a girl. A child comes up and says, “Well, I got my lunch. I could share that.” And a disciple says, “Well, what’s that among so many?” And so Jesus accepted that gift, and he brought her out in front of the crowd, and he broke it. Remember? He broke it. He held it up, and he blessed it. He took it from, let’s say a little girl, and shared it out.

And people say, well, it was a miracle because of the baskets. The baskets were magic baskets. They never filled. Well, you know, back then there wasn’t any fast foods, or wasn’t any restaurants on the turnpike. There wasn’t any of that stuff. People, if they were going out for the day, you’d better believe they had food. They were packing a lunch. But you know, when you’re in a crowd, and all sorts of people around, maybe you don’t want to get out your food when there’s a bunch of hungry people around you. Maybe you don’t want to do that.

But, you know, they saw the little girl, and they go, well, you know, the little girl shared stuff. She shared all she had. I’m not going to be shamed up by a little girl. I got stuff. Hey, you want something? It’s like that Nevada Day Parade. Have you ever tried to be sober throughout a Nevada Day Parade? You’ve got to pretty much be militant about it. “Hey, I got something. Try some of this.” You know?

So that little girl, and Jesus’s acceptance of her gift, changed that crowd of strangers into a crowd of friends and family, sitting down for a meal. And where they had scarcity, when they had nothing, they had plenty because they had it with them all along. You know, it’s like that famous church building – have you ever heard of the church building fundraising capital campaign? The campaign person comes up and says, “I’ve got good news. We have all the money we need for this capital campaign.” And everybody goes, “Hallelujah. Praise Jesus.” And then he says, “Yeah, it’s right in your wallets.” Not so much hallelujah there.

And I tell you that my version of the transformation of that crowd from strangers that will let the other persons go hungry, to a family and friends and a community that shares their bread with one another until there’s enough and more left over, I’m telling you that’s a miracle. That shows me God and the way God wants us in the world, much more than how much bread is in that basket in the leftovers. That’s the gospel.

And we look out at the crowd, and they said, oh, that person’s going to take my bread. That person’s going to steal my lunch. That person is going to grab my wine if I bring it out. Malice. But Jesus was able to turn that into miracle. Be okay if I share my stuff. Everyone else will share. It’ll be a miracle. I’ll be a sign of God’s working among us. It’d be a taste of heaven, if I assume miracle instead of malice.

My brother doesn’t call me for decades. He just doesn’t call. And I thought it was, you know, because of that incident 25 years ago, you know, back when we were kids. Or it was because he doesn’t care about me, or because he’s mad at me, or because I’m too preachy, or because of his wife. Malice. None of that’s true. I mean, I didn’t check it out, just put it in my head.

We’ve been pretty much meeting on Zoom for an hour every week during the pandemic. You know, we go back and forth. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not so good; you know? But there’s no malice there. Miracle. I was talking to him, and both of my brothers come on the Zoom most of the time. And he says, you know, “We’ve got to keep this up because, if we don’t, I don’t talk to Tim for a year.” It’s not malice. It’s just that we’re not looking for the miracle.

Twice I was in a big church. How do you know it’s a big church? Because the pastor’s office has a private bathroom. I’m telling you, as I got older, that got better and better, I’ll tell you. And one time I was in a church, and I’d go around the church, doing I don’t know, whatever I was doing. And behind me followed the custodian. The custodian followed me. You know, he just giggled. I could hear him chortling back there. And I go, “What are you doing?” He goes, “Oh, no, don’t mind me. I’m fine.” I walk more and hear him giggling. What’s he doing? What is up with that guy? You know? Couldn’t figure it out.

And I go, why is he following me? Does he think I’m stealing stuff? What is he doing? You know? I go, “What are you doing?” I finally said. He goes, “Well, Pastor, when you walk around with your coffee, you spill little drops on the carpet. And it’s a lot easier just to wipe them up as soon as they come off.”

Malice or miracle? You know, where there’s confirmation bias, you probably heard about this, this is what runs YouTube and Facebook and our magazine subscriptions in olden times, you know, and our television news selection now in that we want to hear things we already know. We want to confirm our beliefs of what we already suspect and believe and understand. And so Facebook and YouTube have really fired up on that. And if you keep watching YouTube, they say, oh, you like that? Here’s a little bit more. Oh, you like that? Here’s even more. And if you like that, here’s even more and more. And you just keep rolling down into a rabbit hole of our own biases and prejudice.

And then there’s also availability bias or availability heuristic. Which means the information that is most recently available, that it’s easy for us to get, is the one we go by. Basically, it’s the lazy principle. You know, it’s a lot easier to read a tweet than a book. It’s a lot easier to go with a hot take from a TV host over a few 30-second sound bytes than it is to listen to a lecture on an expert. It’s a lot easier to watch someone on TikTok or YouTube, or someone at your breakfast table tell you about the latest medical news, about this or that, than to actually go to your doctor and actually talk to someone who actually studied medicine. That’s harder to do.

Availability. We look for the easy stuff. And too often, the stuff that is apparent, that is out there, that is ready for us to consume is the stuff that is designed to make us upset, to fire us up, to say the both/and, either/or, the other side, oh, gets upset, we’re going to suck you in to watch and click. Malice, not miracle.

And the malice people will tell you that the different ones are out to get us. And they’ll have little snippets or little snaps, little tweets to tell you about the different ones that are out to get you. Where in our scripture today we find the different ones are out to bless us. Ramsey’s Razors don’t attribute to malice what God says could be a miracle. Do you know how hard it must be with someone with the gift of prophecy? That person’s got to be hard to put up with. Or an evangelist? Can you imagine being with someone that’s an evangelist? But in our scripture it says those are gifts. Those are miracles. That’s what makes community.

If we look at what we have in our community as gifts instead as obstacles to fix, we can find the miracles. We want to fill up the voids in our life, the emptiness, the unknowns, the questions. And we can do that. We can do that with faith. We can believe that God is there, God is working. We can do that. And we can do that with fear, and so often we do. The scary unknown, the monsters in the dark, the scariness of what is coming next. We can fill that up with fear. And I’m not telling you either one. Sometimes it is fearful. Sometimes it is faithful, and it might be good for us to practice more on the faithful thing. I’m not telling you not to do that.

But I’m telling you, what if we could keep that empty space open? Keep it available for God’s work and miracle? Fill it up, not with faith, not with fear, but just keep it open and say God will show us the way. We’ll be faithful, and God will be there. You don’t have to fill it up with fear, or even with faith.

Ever hear that story about is a glass half full or half empty? That’s a trick question because I believe there’s no way to tell from a static picture whether the glass is half full or half empty. You’ve got to know which way you’re going. Because if you’re filling up the glass, it’s half full. If you’re draining the glass, it’s half empty. It’s on the way to being empty, or it’s on the way for being filled. There’s no way to say right in the middle, is that half full or half empty? It’s only with the direction. Maybe that’s hard to understand.

Let’s talk about church. Is the church half full or half empty? Well, if you’re thinking the church is going to grow, more people are going to come, you’re going to say oh, my gosh, the church is half full. We’d better get some more chairs. If you’re thinking the other way, oh, my gosh, the church is half empty. We’d better get rid of the chairs. Or what if we could say it’s neither half full or half empty? There’s room for others. There’s room for others. There’s room for people to come. Did you know that church planner says if your church is more than 80% filled, new people won’t come because they say there’s no room for me here. They don’t see it as half full or half empty. They look at it, is there room for me?

And I tell you, if we fill things up with malice, there’s no room for a miracle. But if we somehow are able to keep the things we don’t know, the future we cannot see, and say to ourselves that with God we can go forward in there, if we can keep that place open, well, then, there’s room for God to do marvelous things. There’s room for God for a miracle to create community. There’s room for God to say, those people, they’re different. Praise God. It’s a blessing, not a curse.

Amen.

Hanlon's Razor

Four Julys

 Great Things Happen When We Listen to the “Other”

Four Julys
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

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Audio from worship at St. Paul’s Lutheran Family Church Carson City, NV on July 4,2021

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

Mark 6:1-13

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A video version is at the end of the text

On this July 4th, I would like to talk to you about four Julys. The first July is July 1775. No, not ‘76. 1775. Did you know our Continental Congress was meeting in July of 1775? Well, 12 of the 13. Even back then, Georgia had trouble with their elections.

And that Continental Congress back there in July 2nd of 1775, or July 6th, made a declaration, but not a declaration of independence, an “Olive Branch Declaration,” as it’s called, in which they sent to King George, as loyal colonists, a request for his help, for his righting of wrongs, for justice, for restoration, to let them be a part of their own governing, to release some of the most terrible bans and injustices.

And they wrote these as colonists, and they said they were colonists, and they tried to get King George and the Britons to embrace their great heritage of justice and fair dealing, and asked for fairness and for doing the right thing. They pointed out the excesses and promised that they would, you know, abide by law and order, you know, if they had law and order. If the Crown would come and do right by them, they would do right by them. They pledged their allegiance and their fealty to the monarch and to King George.

Now, remember this was after, not just the Tea Party. That was almost a decade ago. But it was after shots were fired. It was after Lexington and Concord. It was after Bunker Hill. There’s been shots fired. There’s been riots. There’s been violence. There’s been trouble in the street. There’s been disruption of commerce, the absolute worst thing that could ever happen. You know, Bottom Lines Matter.

And after all that, in this July of 1775, they asked the powers and structures and principalities and monarchs to do the right thing, and called on them to deliver justice, to lift the burdens and the laws and the suppression, to let them vote for their own representatives and laws and not have them imposed upon them. All very reasonable requests, done in a reasonable way, in the most gracious way, especially when you remember there was rioting going on.

Well, what happened? Nothing. King George reportedly, and I believe this, didn’t even read that Olive Branch Declaration. Instead he condemned the violence, condemned them for forming a political party, for raising an army and navy. That might have been a little bit too far. He had nothing to say to these people because of their violence. Who do they think they are, going against the monarchy, taking up arms against the King’s soldiers who are there to preserve law and order, protect and serve. Not a very good July.

Second July I want to talk about is the one that you’ll probably be talking about today and over this weekend. Of course July 1776, the next year. Now, rightfully so, you might be reading the Declaration of Independence and looking at all the inalienable rights, and that’s a great thing. And there’s quite a list of grievances there. But in those things, it doesn’t say please fix them. It just says here’s what he did. And most important part of this is, well, the rights are important. The grievances are important. But the beginning and the end of that is the most important thing because at the beginning they don’t talk about being colonists anymore. And at the end they don’t say that they are 12 colonies of the United States. Georgia’s finally got there. They’re all there. Maybe we could blame Georgia on independence, I’m not sure.

But on the last part they say, “We, the United States of America.” Now, none of that’s been done. We’ve got a war to fight before that. And it’s not so sure we’re going to win. But they declared they were not colonists. They were the United States of America, where all white, landholding men are free and had rights. That wasn’t true. But it’s what they believed and what they were going to live and what they pledged their honor and their lives to in that very different summer of 1776.

We asked. We tried. We petitioned. We had examples. We had lawsuits. We had rights. But you wouldn’t listen. So we’re going to stop talking to you and start living right in the way we want to be. And if you have trouble with that, that’s okay. We’re ready to back up what we believe with our lives, our property, and our sacred honor.

Now, the third July’s a little shaky. I didn’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but the Bible’s not really good on timestamps. I don’t know when this incident happened. But go along with me. Let’s say it happened in July, somewhere around AD 33. I don’t even know the year. But I figure I’ve got about an 8% chance of being right saying it’s July. I’m going to take it. And in that July of AD 33, here comes Jesus.

Now, you may have missed the subtleness of our scripture. And God bless the gospel writers and the translators and the Church and everyone else down the age who cleaned the things up. Did you notice the place where it turned? Well, I mean, first they say Jesus is wonderful. Where did he get all this knowledge? It’s wonderful words. Look at this. He’s a power, and he’s doing it all, you know, like what you all say after I preach here, you know, that kind of stuff. And you notice the turn, and what turns a crowd against him?

Eugene Peterson in “The Message,” not really a translation, more like a commentary, running commentary on the Bible, he takes this scripture and reformats it and says, “Who does he think he is?” And everybody turned and said, that’s right, Jesus says it’s supposed to be like that. That’s not his place. That’s not the way he should be. Did you catch that weird thing? You know for us, you know, we’re looking 2,000 years down the road, and we think, what is that “Son of Mary” stuff?

Now, remember this “Son of Mary” phrase, this was before Mary is the woman with the most statues in the world. And I got this straight from a 1980s Trivial Pursuit game, so I know it’s right. Before the veneration of Mary, before the blue everywhere, before rosaries and all that, you’ve got to remember this is first generation. This is Jesus pre-resurrection, before everybody. That “Son of Mary” was no compliment. Remember what we’re dealing with. We’re in a patriarchal society. Oh, my gosh, the definition of patriarchal, where all that matters is who your dad is, who your father is, what your lineage is. So it’s not “Son of Joseph,” it’s “Son of Mary.” You know, he doesn’t have a father. We don’t know who that father is.

Now, my wife, God bless her, she told me I couldn’t say the “B” word that they were calling him in church. I check out things with her. I said, “Can I say this in church?” And she usually says no. And I checked out with her, and she said, “No, you can’t say that.” So they were calling him a “mustard.” So you’ve got to catch that in there. It just slides it over. But they’re saying, “You mustard. Who are you to lecture us about how to live? Who are you to tell us what we’re doing is wrong? Who are you?” And you know what, I get that same thing in church. Who are these people telling us what pronouns to use? Who are these people telling us about racism? Who are these people? They don’t belong here.

Oh, yes, friends and neighbors, there’s still honor/shame culture, alive and well in America today. You know honor and shame. Somebody gets honored, that means someone else has got reduced honor. You know how that is? Like you know when Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world – there’s a list of rich people. He’s at the top. You know, I’m looking forward when he goes out into space because you know what that means. Jeff Bezos goes out in space, every one of us moves one notch up on the wealthy list because he’s not on Earth anymore. He’s going to make us all rich, finally. Finally, a little trickle down from orbit.

That’s how honor and shame works. Everybody’s got a place on the list, and don’t you move. And that mustard son of Mary, he has no right to tell us anything. After all we’ve done for them, they dare to lecture us on critical race theory. How dare they? Don’t they know their place? That’s right. Right here we see Jesus is uppity and doesn’t know his place. What happens to this on this July? Jesus takes it pretty well. He’s astonished by it. Nothing much changed. Maybe we got used to it over the years and decades and millennia. And he could do not mighty power there.

See, just like King George, who doesn’t want to listen to those colonists, the people in Jesus’s time didn’t want to listen to that person who didn’t know their place. So what happened? Well, just like in 1776, Jesus says, okay, I gave it a good shot. I tried. I tried to tell them. And he says, we’re going to go ahead and live the way that we think we should live. We’re going to go out two by two, proclaim God’s good news, release to the captains, recovery of site to the blind, freedom. We’re going to bring out the downtrodden. We’re going to bring down the overbearing.

We’re not going to do this for profit or greed or capitalism. We’re going to do this together and rely on the good natures of others. And if they don’t want to be with us, we’re going to shake the dust off. And that was a curse. That wasn’t just, you know, personal hygiene. It wasn’t some sort of six feet, stay your social distance kind of thing back then. It was, all right, you’re on your own, and to “H” with you. I didn’t ask my wife if I could say that.

And in both those cases, 1776 and in this case, where Jesus went off alone, think about what great things happened. When people stopped worrying about being in their place and whether or not it’s appropriate and cramming that down our throats. I heard that one, too. It says we’re going to live the right way. And if you want to get onboard, you can, but we’re going to do great things. We’re going to be a great nation. We’re going to be a light of democracy and freedom. People are going to want to come here from all over. It’s hard to keep that up. But we’ve done okay so far. And it’s only if we go back to keeping people in their place that we’ll lose it. And we won’t be able to do great things like we have.

Now I’m into the fourth July. Have you been keeping track? I know there’s at least one. The fourth July. July 2021. You all have a choice. Just like they did back in that July in Nazareth, back like they did, those colonists in 1775 and 1776. And you keep hoping and asking and waiting. I mean, now is not the time. You’re too much in a rush. People aren’t ready for that yet. Can’t be that way, 1775 and the folks at Nazareth. And we won’t be able to do great works.

If we go back to saying we’ve got to get back to the way it should be, where everybody needs to be where they were in 1950, where everyone knew without a doubt which drinking fountain was theirs, you know, the good old days for white males, and not listen to anyone else. Because, you know, they’re rioting. They’re rebellious. There’s been shots fired. They have nothing to say to us. It’s not their place. They’re ungrateful for all that we have done for them. We do that, I’ll guarantee you we won’t have a great country, and we won’t have a great faith.

I hope all of you go forth this July 4th, remembering those four Julys. And that you would choose to follow Jesus, two by two, whatever you can do, wherever you can, not for personal profit or gain, and seek not to restore society and shut people back in their places, but seek to heal the sick, to lift up the downtrodden, to help people to cast out demons.

Perplexing. What are the demons today? What keeps people from living full and productive and happy lives? What keeps people from life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Homelessness, not having enough housing. We’ve got enough, we just don’t distribute it right. Hunger. We’ve got enough food. We just don’t give it up. Not be able to choose their representative, and taxation without representation, a common theme.

We were founded on that people choose their legislators, and not in the monarchy the legislators choose their people. Go out and fight them demons. For the answer is not to return to where everyone knew their place, and no one was uppity; but to follow that uppity savior, that mustard son of God, who shows us a new way of life, a new way of living. And we can be great as Christians and as a country. Amen.

Four Julys

Normal or Nomad

 God does call us to a Nomad not Normal life.

Normal or Nomad
a sermon by Rev. J. Christy Ramsey

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Audio from worship at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Carson City, NV on June 6.2021

edited from a flawless transcription made by edigitaltranscriptions all errors are mine.

1 Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20

Mark 3:20-35

Sermons also available free on iTunes

Video versions (both masked and unbasked) are at the end of the text

We have all felt like Samuel.  No, I’m not talking about being called old by the people, although we may have been there, too.  I’m talking about Samuel going crazy.  This is crazy Samuel time.  When you know what is right.  When you know what happens, and what will happen, and how the world is arranged, and you tell the people that.  In no uncertain terms, you tell them the reality of having a king, for example.  The high taxes.  The forced labor.  All the stuff.

 And the people, they don’t argue.  They don’t have a conversation, much less the compromise or consensus.  They just say, to all your wonderful reasons of how the world works, they say no.  No.  No.  All the stuff you said, all the great reasons you gave, we say no.  We want a king.  We want to be like other nations.  Did you hear it?  We want to be normal.  Who can say hallelujah to being normal?  I haven’t heard more consensus around an idea ever.  I want to be normal.  All praise to the God normal, where everything is normal.

 I want to talk to you about normal, that that isn’t normal.  And they’re proud of that.  I can tell you for sure you are not normal.  And I just have to say one day, one morning, my first Nevada Day parade.  First, we have the governor riding atop a military half-track, going down Main Street.  I go, what?  That’s not normal, the governor in a military half-track going down the main street.  That’s a little odd.  Then next, a few floats later, we have a convertible with sex workers telling us to come on down to the brothel for the Nevada Day Special.  Okay, that’s not normal for this Ohio boy.  And then, to finish up the parade, we have the synchronized shooting rifles drill team.  Okay.  We really don’t think that’s normal in Ohio or anywhere I’ve been.  We shoot guns together in a parade.  Not something we do.

 And we talk about going into a pharmacy or a grocery store, and there are slot machines, and a whole room full of them.  Now, people have told me all my life that the way I eat is a gamble, but here we have the slot machines to prove it.  Normal.  People wanting to be normal.  We want to be like the other nations.  You know, they have a king that goes out before them and fights their battles and does the things that other nations do.  We want to be normal.

 And I’m here to tell you that the Bible is against normal.  Well, that’s not totally true.  I mean, the Bible is sort of split.  The people and God come down differently because God is against normal.  The people, they’re all for it.  And you could say the whole story of the Bible could be, look at the lens between God saying don’t be normal and the people saying, yeah, we really want to be normal.  And that’s all story of salvation.  The abnormal love and grace of God calling normal people into abnormal community.

 And it’s not just the Hebrew Scriptures.  Our reading from the Gospel, we have the family of Jesus saying why can’t that kid just be normal?  Why can’t he get a normal job?  Why is he fooling around with demons?  And you see that it says “restrained.”  The family didn’t come to talk to him.  The family didn’t come to be with him in his meeting.  The family didn’t come to dinner.  They were outside.  They were there to restrain him.  Was this some kind of early intervention?  To try to convince him to change his ways?  To get him out of that cult he was starting?  They wanted him to be normal.

 Does that ever happen today?  I think if you go to any Pride event, you don’t even have to go to the parade.  You can just go to the people that came to watch the parade.  And they will tell you about their family, wanting them to just be normal.  Not be who they are, but be normal.  Not be with who they love, but be normal.  Study just came out in Canada that one out of 10 gay people up in Canada have been forced into some kind of conversion therapy.  One out of 10 in 2021.  To be normal.  Do we worship normal?

 Normally, in a typical year, 300 children die of ‘flu.  Every year, year in, year out, 300 children.  600 parents.  Let me see if I get my math.  Hundreds, thousands of grandparents lose a child.  Normal.  Oh, it’s normal.  But this year, with us wearing masks, keeping distance, washing our hands, zero children died of the ‘flu.  Zero.  That is not normal.  When you tell me, you want to go back to normal, I’ve got to say, hold on now.  Have you thought about what normal was?  Children dying?  You want to go back to normal?

 You know, with normal, for people of color, every time they get a traffic stop, to be in a life-or-death situation, to be somehow an unwilling participant in a murder edition of Simon Says, that if you don’t do what I say as quickly as I said in the right quickly way, your life is in danger.  That was normal.  It was normal for us white people to deny, ignore, explain away, and say, oh, they must’ve done something wrong.  Oh, if they only did things quickly, or did follow instructions, or did this.  It was just normal for people to get killed, people of color to get killed over a traffic stop, over a minor violation, over a misdemeanor.  Is that normal we want?

How about women?  This is the only year, year and a half, in the recent history of our country where women were not constantly told to smile.  They’re so much prettier when they smile.  Where men would tell women how they should feel, how they should look, how they should act.  Heck fire, you didn’t even have to wear makeup if you didn’t want to.  It used to be normal to tell people how to live and how to smile and how they should be in the world.  And now we can put the mask on.  They don’t know if we’re grimacing or whatever.  Do you want to get back to that normal?

What about us religious folks?  Yeah, maybe you’re not a person of color.  Maybe you’re not a woman.  Maybe you don’t have children young and susceptible to the ‘flu.  We’re all in church.  We know what normal is at church.  Want to get back to the normal.  Do we?  I mean, with normal, that if you are not able-bodied and could not sit quietly without interruption for an hour – hour and a half if Christy’s preaching – you weren’t allowed to be in church.  You couldn’t be there.  You couldn’t be a part of the community.  Oh yeah, we had homebound ministry.  God bless everybody for doing all that.  But you couldn’t be with the people.  Couldn’t be with the Zoom.

And you know Zoom’s in the Bible.  You all know that; right?  I’m telling you.  You know what they call the Internet?  The cloud; right?  You’ve heard that.  Cloud?  The Internet?  What’s it say in the Bible?  Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, (Hebrews 12:1) Zoom, we’re talking about you.  And if you weren’t in town, if you were visiting out of town, if you moved out of town, you were cut off from community.  If you couldn’t get it together, and you couldn’t be in the exact same time, the exact same place, you couldn’t experience worship.

And I’ll go further.  Even if you weren’t disabled visibly, some people couldn’t come to church because of social anxiety.  They didn’t like to be touched and hugged and nattered at.  Maybe there was somebody that they weren’t comfortable being around with, they didn’t feel safe with.  They had a divorce, and the other person got custody of the church.  You know how that goes.  But with Zoom online, they could come and could worship together.

I don’t like to be hugged.  I’ve got things, and I pay people to listen to.  You don’t have to.  But I don’t like to be hugged.  I’ve got arthritis.  I don’t wear a badge.  I don’t have one of those wonderful placards that people are wearing now.  But handshakes hurt me a lot of times.  You know how terrible that is for a pastor, to not be able to handshake people?  Not without a grimace?  There’s other people that have more problems than I do that don’t want to be hugged, for one good reason or bad or whatever, and so they don’t come to church.  With Zoom, they can come and be like everyone else.

Don’t be normal.  Examine the normal.  Sure, it’s great.  I mean, this year has been four times the planning, twice the effort, for one half of the results.  It is so much easier to copy and paste, whether it’s church services or our life, to just replicate from one to another, change the dates, couple things, and off we go.  It’s so much easier, and that’s why people love the normal.  But that doesn’t leave much room for God.  If you embrace the normal, and only the normal, God says you have rejected me.

And you know what normal starts with?  “No.”  You can’t have normal without “no.”  No, you can’t have your own feelings.  You’ve got to smile all the time, women.  No, you can’t be with who you love.  No, you can’t be gay.  You just decide to be gay.  Stop being gay.  No, you can’t be it.  No, you can’t be a non—hugger and be in our church.  No, you can’t be disabled and fully participate in worship.  No.  Normal starts with no.

What do you do?  What can we do?  Well, you know, God reminds us in Samuel, you know, his preference.  He says, hey, remember the normal I took you out of?  Remember the normal called slavery, and Egypt?  Remember that normal?  Oh, yes, another day of being a slave.  Well, same day as the last.  Another day of backbreaking work with no hope and no help.  Okay, normal.

And God says no, no more normal.  I want you to be a nomad.  That’s a difference of being normal; right?  And that’s what we’ve been the last year and a half.  We’ve been nomads.  We don’t know where we are or where were going.  We’re saying, do we have masks?  Do we not have masks?  Is there contact?  Is there not contact?  Do we fog the place or not fog the place?  Do we have to stay away?  How many vaccines do we have?  Do we have vaccines?  Is it going to disappear?  Is it not?  Nomads.  We don’t know where we are.  We don’t know where were going.  We don’t know what’s next.  We kept planning for things, and we had to cancel them.  Where does the virus come from?  Where is it going?  What’s going on?  Nomads.

And when we’re not in our normal place, God has room to act.  God has room to do wonderful things, just in the church.  The church has made more changes and accommodations and advancements in the first month of the pandemic than we did in 20, 30 years.  Thirty years we’ve been talking about there’s a whole world outside these walls we could bring in if we just used the technology.  Oh, no, that’s not normal.

I remember – have you ever seen Father Jeff, he’s really into it.  He’s very competent.  But the day they closed church and said he had to go online, in Ohio we call it “deer in the headlights.”  You know, where the eyes get really big.  And he says, “What am I going to do?”  And I go, “I’ll be there.  I’ll be there Tuesday.  We’ll figure this out.  We can get it done.”  So I come in, and he’s just, “What am I going to do?  It’s not normal to not have church, but have church.”

And I asked him a couple of questions.  I said, “Well, do you want to talk and preach to a camera?  Because we could do it that way.  Or do you want to talk and preach to people on a screen that you can see?”  And he says, “Oh, I want to see the people.  I have to see the people.”  “All right.  We’ll get you hooked up.”  It wasn’t normal.  But it was a way during a crisis for the people of God to come together.

And we were gathered from all over.  People from all different places and times of the congregation were gathered together, and we could be together as much as we could, as cyber nomads, surfing the storms of the pandemic.  You thought that was hard.  It was.  You did well.  Some churches aren’t coming back.  I have a church that right now they’re discussing whether to close or not.  But you did well.

But good news.  Don’t rush back to normal.  Don’t rush back to normal.  Because for so many people, normal wasn’t working.  Normal didn’t let them talk to God.  And if you are honest and introspective, perhaps normal wasn’t working for you.  So don’t be too concerned if everybody around you doesn’t look at the world the way you do.  That’s a little upsetting right now.  Like Samuel, you’re going to say, “I have great reasons.  I have the facts.  I have the list.  I have all the YouTube videos that you can watch and know that I am correct.”

But God says, don’t take it personal.  We’re struggling with whether or not to go with me and be a nomad into this new world, or whether to return to Egypt and slavery and patriarchy and monarchy for the false god of normal.  Friends, be nomads.  Follow God.  Be with God in whatever crazy place you are.  Don’t try to shut down and shut out others by saying no to them, “No, that’s not normal.”  Instead say, “Come along with us.  We’re nomads on a journey together.”

Amen.

 Unmasked and Unrobed

 Masked Version with Robe

Normal or Nomad