This, too, shall pass...views of a cynical optimist.

Sermon notes, Advent 4

eggerhaus — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 22:19:19 +0000

Sermon notes
Advent 3

Questions. Scripture is full of questions and full answers. In our Gospel today, John the Baptizer is asked, “Who are you? The Messiah?” “No.” “Who then? Elijah?” “No.” “Are you the prophet?” “No.” They persisted. “Let us have an answer.”
In the Gospels, Peter is also questioned. “Are you one of his followers?” Three times he is asked this, and three times he denies knowing Jesus.
As people of faith, sometimes we don’t get it. Sometimes we ask, “Who are you, God?” “Where are you, Jesus?” “I feel so alone…so frightened…where ARE you?” “What are you? “Do you love me?” “Do you care?” “Help me.” “Heal me.” Come to me.”

My friends in Christ, when I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was Hee-Haw. It had a lot of bluegrass and country music. Folks were laying around in the hay, thinking about going down to the corner of town to watch the stop light turn green. Such characters, too. Grandpa Jones, Junior Samples, Buck n Roy. It had other characters, too, that made an impression on an adolescent boy, (scantily clothed girls) but that’s another sermon. I got the humor on Hee-Haw. Simple.
HeeHaw also had Grady Nutt. Grady was a Baptist preacher, a comedian, and he came to be known as the prime minister of humor. (Pun intended.) Tragically, he died in the 1980s in an airplane crash. Grady Nutt had a saying, “Laughter is the hand of God on the shoulder of a troubled world.”
Two more weeks until Christmas. Our lessons today hit home for me. Too close to home. My mom died last Christmas Day and this is my first Christmas without her. It is difficult for me, on this Sunday of the pink candle of joy, because I don’t know what to do with this joy when I think about my first Christmas without mom…yet mom gave me much joy and my sense of humor. When I think of her I don’t think sad thoughts, I think of all the funny, outrageous things she said and did in her life. One thing I really miss is being able to send her a silly email or give her a call and say, “Mom, I got a good one for you…” She always got my jokes, and all this ornery deacon knows to do is keep laughing; mom would want it that way.
I love our Epistle today, as the opening passage from First Thessalonians is my favorite scripture verse: “Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in ALL circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” Paul urges us to not quench the Spirit and to hold fast to what is good. To have faith…for we are called to be God’s own, and God is there for us in good times and in bad times.
Hold fast to what is good. I’ll be bold and say that we all get that. If we have problems or fears or illness, this God with skin on that John the Baptizer proclaims…this John who is the voice crying in the wilderness…this God will be there for us to share our burdens. That child in the manger, that lil baby, so precious…shares our burdens and eases them.
We need humor in our lives. It is like the hand of God on the shoulder of a troubled world. We get that, too. It is like the desert rejoicing and blossoming. In the midst of the laughter, it is as if the sorrow and sighing flees away. The message of the prophet Isaiah is so relevant for us because it acknowledges the pain and the loss and the devastation the people had been through; and at the same time, it points to something beyond the present condition:
The creation will be renewed.
The ruined cities will be rebuilt.
The exiles will come home.
The oppressed will hear the good news.
Those who mourn will be comforted.
On this third Sunday of Advent, in many faith communities we will light this candle of joy. The story is told by our Presiding Bishop, Katherine, that we light this pink candle because Mary really wanted a girl. Ultimately, our joy is all about who Jesus is. After his time of testing in the desert, which paralleled Israel’s exile, Jesus is worshipping in the synagogue in Nazareth, and he is reading the scripture for the people, and he opens the Book of Isaiah to this very passage that we heard today:
The spirit of the Lord is upon me
Because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
And recovery of sight to the blind
To set at liberty those who are oppressed
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Then Jesus closes the book and sits down. And everyone is looking at him. Then he says to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
And in that moment, my brothers and sisters, we get it. AMEN

Sermon notes, 22 Pentecost, 2011

eggerhaus — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:45:48 +0000

One of the curious facts about each one of us is not what we believe or don’t believe about God, but rather what we believe or don’t believe about ourselves.
     Sadly, the most pervasive tendency of Christians today is to be reluctant servants. It is the belief that if God wants something done, hopefully God will call on someone more able than me to do it.
     So, this begs the question: Why are we, as   Christians, reluctant to be servants?
     In our Gospel lesson today Jesus said: “The Kingdom of Heaven is just like a man going abroad who called his household servants together before he departed and handed his property to them to manage”…according to their respective abilities!
     This does not mean that God is not fair. It simply means, to those who have been given much, from them much will be required. It means that everyone has been given something and from each one of us something will be required. God has a right to expect something from us.
     This story is a glorious reminder to those of us who are forever being hypnotized by the big things in life. But Jesus, in contrast, was forever calling our attention to the importance of little things…the five loaves and two little fish he used to feed five thousand; faith the size of a mustard seed to move
mountains; a widow’s mite is the most significant offering in church. All this to remind us that the small and seemingly insignificant are loaded with possibilities!
     The story is about the kingdom of heaven. It is about those who will enter the kingdom and about those who will be refused admission. God does not automatically haul everyone into heaven by some last compelling gesture. No, God makes heaven our decision.
     With the recent Holy Days and holidays (all Souls, All Saints and Veterans Day), we’ve had souls and saints on our minds and in our hearts. We all have our own loved ones who are our own saints. (My great grandma.)
     This Gospel is about risk. The choice before us is one of being a reluctant servant or a risky servant!
     Tear the haloes off of the heroes and saints of the past, take a good look at them before we put haloes on them and you will see what I mean.
     Moses was a man with blood on his hands; he’d killed an Egyptian, yet this man with a stammer led his people to the promised land.
     James and John were loud-mouthed fisherman trying to badger Jesus into giving them special seats in heaven.
     Peter was a blundering hulk of a man widely known for making promises he could not keep.
     Paul was an unimpressive little Pharisee determined to persecute every little Christian that crossed his path.
     Saint Therese –the Little Flower– was a woman with a child-eyed view of Christ who promised to shower us with roses from Heaven.
     Stand them up without their haloes and you see them as one talent little people whom God took and twisted their talent into something incredibly significant…so today we call them saints!
     My friends in Christ, many of us, this ornery deacon included, tend to forget, and we live a tragic illusion: the thought that God exists for us, rather than we exist for God; the notion that God exists to
do for us what we want, rather than our existing to do what God wants.
     God’s biggest problem is not with big, important people. For one thing, there are only a small number of them in the whole world. God’s biggest problem is with all of us “one talent” types who believe that no matter what we do it won’t make much difference. We one talent types do make a difference. We’re not inadequate and we all matter…to each other…and to God. AMEN

Sermon, Advent 3, yr A

eggerhaus — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:13:24 +0000

In one of her letters, Emily Dickinson wrote: “They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of him as somewhat of a recluse.”
John the Baptizer was an impatient soul, a prophet with clarion lungs. He proclaimed the entrance of that reclusive God into our common humanity. I boldly, and dare I say prophetically, feel that John would have precious little interest in how we worship and wait, every Advent, for the coming of Christ. This John, Christ’s cousin, was an interesting character, to be sure, dressed in camel hair, eating locusts and honey, and seeming addled, I’m sure, as he baptized in the desert. Were this Baptiser to show up some Sunday morning at Trinity, walk down the aisle and proclaim with those clarion lungs: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”, I think the more faint-hearted among us would likely cut and run.
The John the Baptist in our Gospel today is a different John than the one we heard about last Sunday. Then, he was the prophet…the one proclaiming the true branch on Jesse’s tree. This week, he’s been locked up by King Herod and wonders if Jesus is the messiah. He’s not the kind of John I like. Too personal. Too much like me. Moody. Scared. Doubting and doubtful.
For years, my spiritual director told me that deacons are the modern day prophets of the church. I was very uncomfortable as he reminded me of this whenever I visited with him before I was ordained, and such talk still bothers me fiercely. Before my ordination I dreaded the day that Episcopal hands would be laid on my head and an Episcopal voice would say: “Fill him with grace and power and make him a deacon in your church.”
Grace and power. I can live with grace, but power? I still fear those word and still fear what the Spirit, through those Episcopal hands and voice, gave to me. If my spiritual director is correct…that this ornery deacon is a prophet, I still cringe. My friends in Christ, please remember that “prophet” means spokesperson, not fortuneteller, and that the role of the prophet is to unmask pretense. It is not a welcome task. There is so much of it to unmask nowadays. Furthermore, there is little evidence to suggest that anyone ever asked a prophet home for dinner more than once.
Whether we like it or not, prophets are necessary. We church folk are too easily tempted to think of ourselves as a kind of exclusive society. As an example, the church rightly embraces its commission to make disciples of all nations, seems to understand this as what evangelism is all about, and can even lead the pretense parade about it.
In the semantics of the church, doubt has been a negative word. It is rarely used in a favorable way. Faith, not doubt, is the great word of the church. As I stand here every Sunday morning and look into your up-lifted faces, you look so proper, so content, so believing. You seem to be so certain, so full of faith, and so free of doubt.
But I have a suspicion that the way you look is not the way you are. Beneath the skins of all of us there is planted the seed of honest doubt. Perhaps we don’t share these feelings with anyone; but our doubts are there, and they are real. Our worship does not express our doubts, uncertainties, and skepticism. In facing this situation, all of us at times cry out with the man in the Gospel, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” This capacity to doubt can often lead to some of life’s most profound questions.
Such was the case with John the Baptizer. His question, the question of a prophet ill at ease: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?”, grew not out of his uncertainty, but out of his doubt. John the Baptizer had heard about the words and deeds of Jesus, but what he had heard did not square with his expectation of the Messiah.
After all, Jesus was born not to royalty, but to a peasant woman. He functioned not as a military ruler, but as a servant. He came not as a judge, but as a forgiving redeemer. He did not bring heavenly condemnation; he brought divine love. He did not associate with the religious establishment, but he went from village to village associating with the rubbish heap of humanity. He spent his time and energy with the least and the lost…folks like you and me…uneasy with our doubts. He was most concerned with the powerless: the blind and the lame, the lepers and the deaf, and the poor and the out-cast…the same sorts of folks this deacon and so called prophet is supposed to be concerned about! Jesus dared to teach that the weak occupied the most important place in the Kingdom of God…talk about a unmasking a pretense!
John the Baptizer – John the Doubter – became confused about the way in which Jesus acted out his messiahship. He had doubts about the validity of his contemporary, Jesus of Nazareth. His skepticism caused him to send one of his buddies to Jesus with the question: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” Like others in the New Testament, John the Baptizer was not positive. Oh, to be sure, there were fleeting moments of recognition. Mary thought Jesus was a gardener. Those on the road to Emmaus never did recognize him. Even his closest disciples were not certain if he was or was not the true Messiah.
That John the Baptizer had doubts about the messiahship of Jesus is revealed in his question: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” His question is not clear, either in what is being asked or why. But like all good questions, it impels the reader into deeper regions of thought.
Simone Weil wrote: “Christ came down and took possession of me…I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God…in the sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my sense nor my imagination had any part: I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love.”
John the Doubter asks, “Are you the messiah?” It’s the same question I ask…“Are you really God…God with skin on?” Through my doubt…through my asking where this God is…the prophet in me knows, in faith, that God is wherever we let God in. AMEN

Thanksgiving 2010

eggerhaus — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 11:30:47 +0000

This year I’m thankful for the God of my understanding, my sobriety, my wife, my children, my folks, my sister, my bishop, my AA family, my parish and parishioners, Fergus the Wonderdawg, something resembling health, my weight loss and coffee.

19 November, 2005…

eggerhaus — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:26:35 +0000

…the day my life changed.

How do I thank God? By carrying the message to the alcoholic who still suffers.

Sermon, 11/14/10

eggerhaus — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 20:51:31 +0000

     Some years ago, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks did a comedy skit called the “2000 Year Old Man”. In the skit, Reiner interviews Brooks, who is a very old gentleman. At one point, Reiner asks the old man, “Did you always believe in the Lord?”
Brooks replied: “No. We had a guy in our village named Phil, and for a time we worshiped him.”
Reiner: You worshiped a guy named Phil? Why?
Brooks: Because he was big, and mean, and he could break you in two with his bare hands!
Reiner: Did you have prayers?
Brooks: Yes, would you like to hear one? “O Phil, please don’t be mean, and hurt us, or break us in two with your bare hands.”
Reiner: So when did you start worshiping the Lord?
Brooks: Well, one day a big thunderstorm came up, and a lightning bolt hit Phil. We gathered around and saw that he was dead. Then we said to one another, “There’s somethin’ bigger than Phil!”
     Our Gospel today is one of those Apocalyptical stories…an end times story. It speaks of the destruction of the Temple. It speaks of war and anxiety. As all scripture does, we’re reminded in our collect to “hear, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest Scripture.”
     That’s a difficult task with such a heady, fearful Gospel. Yet it reminds us, so boldly, that salvation is not in the Temple, it is not in the stones, it is not in us. It is of Christ! Jesus reminds us, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”
     We must be hopeful. That’s what we’re about as followers of Jesus.
     We must believe that things DO change, however slowly. We must believe that, somehow “It gets better”, no matter what the headlines read and the pundits expound.
     God WILL make all things new. We’re so impatient, though. We want the new NOW!
     As I prepared this sermon, I came across a quote from the seventeenth-century Puritan theologian, John Owen. He wrote: “God could, if I may so say, more easily have made a new world of innocent creatures, and have governed them by the old covenant, than have established this new one for the salvation of poor sinners; but then, where had been the glory of forgiveness? It could never have been known that there was forgiveness with Him. The old covenant could not have been preserved and sinners pardoned. Wherefore, God chose to leave the covenant than sinners unrelieved, than grace unexalted, and pardon unexercised.”
     The world today…those papers and pundits…speak volumes about our seeming insatiability for instant gratification and everything shiny, and it can make us think our own personal needs and agendas should come first. That’s not the way it should be. God’s agenda comes first – and that CAN annoy us so much so that when our way isn’t followed, when we have to step back to let another person exercise their gifts, we need to remember that God’s goal is for the entirety of creation to be renewed. Not just wolves, not just lambs, not just cattle – not just human beings, but everything!
     Yet we chafe and chomp at the bit when we don’t find our own desires met. I think it’s human nature to resist change, no matter what the promised outcome. It’s human nature to shrink back when something new or unusual surfaces. It’s human nature to become defensive when we feel threatened. Please remember, my friends in Christ, that the point of Jesus’ conversation is that, actually, this is NOT what human nature is supposed to be like. Even if everyone else around us seems to be losing their head and panicking or being greedy, or being violent or selfish, Jesus encourages us to hold on to the hope which can never be taken away from us, no matter how disturbed we may be.
     More than that, though…because of the hope and the promise of the renewal of everything, we must be willing to stand in faith. Jesus wasn’t kidding when He spoke of wars, and suspicion, and fear. He was subjected to so much of it that He knew what can happen to us. It filled Jesus with such sadness to see some people struggling to conform to society, not matter what was happening; struggling to maintain the status quo or better in their own personal lives while doing very little struggling to encourage and support others that they might find that special someone who shines so much hope-filled love and light into their lives.
     THAT’S what the message of hope is all about. THAT is what it means to be renewed! We need to remind ourselves of this again and again. Jesus calls us to be a people of risk-taking. Jesus calls us not only to SAY we believe…Jesus wants us to DO what we believe.   I don’t need to remind you – to believe is an active verb, not a passive noun.
     Often it seems that the easiest way to deal with conflicting views, or difficult situations, or controversial decisions is to behave in an attitude of anxiety or fear. This where Paul’s words seem to hit home so strongly on point today. We tire of reading headlines about people suffering; about natural disasters; about selfish and stupid behavior that obliterates human kindness for whatever reason. The readings speak to us in our tiredness and remind us that we CAN be cheerful in the face of stress.   So Paul, writing to the Thessalonians begs us all:
NRSV: Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.
The Message: Friends, don’t slack off in doing your duty.
New Living Testament: As for the rest of you, dear brothers and sisters, never get tired of doing good.
CEV: Dear friends, you must never become tired of doing right.
     We may not have been aware of it, but we were called here this morning to hear God talking to us about having hope, of not being overwhelmed by people talking about how much destruction there is in our world. We have been brought here to have our life and witness affirmed, together, in prayer and song and Eucharist.       You and I have been brought here so that we can stand firm with others. The New Jerusalem is not yet here – it IS coming, of that we can be sure…and if we never tire in doing what is right, we can, and will…see that New Jerusalem…the Kingdom of God…in us, with us, and among us! AMEN

AP News Item

eggerhaus — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 21:45:47 +0000

KAPAA,
Hawaii (AP) – The tradition of Friday night football on the island of
Kauai has been disrupted by an unusual culprit: Young seabirds migrating
to the ocean are mistaking stadium lights for the moon and stars,
causing them to become disoriented, fall from the sky and be eaten by
cats.

Three generations of baseball fanatics

eggerhaus — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 18:45:58 +0000

Philip, center, with his old man (right) and his grand old man at another Royals loss.

AA in one photo…helping the alcoholic who still suffers.

eggerhaus — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 18:25:12 +0000

Bill W and Dr. Bob visiting the third AA, the start of an amazing fellowship. As the new AA said to his wife, “These are the fellows who understand…”

And now for something completely different.

eggerhaus — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 03:25:38 +0000