[Propertalk] 4 Lent b

[robertpmorrison at charter.net]

Here's the first draft for this weekend ... 8 - )

Bob

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF ST. ALBAN, ALBANY  	         	              THE 
FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT - B
NUMBERS 21:4-9                            		    	                	 
18th MARCH, 2012
  EPHESIANS 2:1-10		                                                	 
PSALM107:1-3, 17-22
JOHN 3:14-21

	Good news! God didn’t bring us to this point of time, and to this 
place, in order to wipe us off the map. Not even to clip us up the back 
of the head. God brought us here to be saved – and to be saved in the 
most remarkable way – by inviting us to stare at the very thing of which 
we’re most afraid, and learning to see it in a new perspective. In the 
ultimate sense, nothing we see, or hear, or feel can hurt us. All we 
need to do, then, is to alter our perceptions about what’s going on.

	“These men were talking about the benefits of boxers vs. briefs. I 
noticed that the guys who were wild and footloose liked boxers and the 
ones who were more uptight liked briefs. And they got around to me and 
they said, “Which do you like, boxers or briefs?”

	“And I said, ‘Depends.’” 1

	Aren’t words fun!

	An author has just produced a book with the intriguing title “Your 
Church is too Safe”. The subtitle tells what it’s really about. “Why 
Following Christ Turns the World Upside-Down.” 2

	Words – and pictures too – need careful study. We all know how things 
can be manipulated so that it can seem from a picture that you and I 
were hang-gliding over the Grand Canyon last week. In the same way, if 
we’re not careful, words can start to lose their meaning and 
understanding also.

	It’s worth quoting from a review of that book about church and safety.

	“Historian Daniel Boorstin documents a momentous shift that occurred in 
North America in the nineteenth century: we stopped calling people who 
went on trips travelers and started calling them tourists.

	“Traveler literally means ‘one who travails.’ He labors, suffers, 
endures. A traveler—a travailer—gets impregnated with a new and strange 
reality, grows huge and awkward trying to carry it, and finally, in 
agony, births something new and beautiful. To get there, he immerses 
himself in a culture, learns the language and customs, lives with the 
locals, imitates the dress, eats what’s set before him. He takes risks, 
some enormous, and makes sacrifices, some extravagant. He has tight 
scrapes and narrow escapes. He is gone a long time. If ever he returns, 
he returns forever altered ….

	“A tourist, not so. Tourist means, literally, ‘one who goes in 
circles.’ He’s just taking an exotic detour home. He’s only passing 
through, sampling wares, acquiring souvenirs. He tastes more than eats 
what’s put before him. He retreats each night to what’s safe and 
familiar. He picks up a word here, a phrase there, but the language, and 
the world it’s embedded in, remains opaque and cryptic, and vaguely 
menacing. He spectates and consumes. He returns to where he’s come from 
with an album of photos, a few mementos, a cheap hat. He’s happy to be 
back. He declares there’s no place like home.”

	The reviewer went on, “We’ve made a similar shift in the church. At 
some point we stopped calling Christians disciples and started calling 
them believers. A disciple is one who follows and imitates Jesus. She 
loses her life in order to find it. She steeps in the language and 
culture of Christ until his Word and his world reshape hers, redefine 
her, change inside out how she sees and thinks and dreams and, finally, 
lives ….

	“A believer, not so. She holds certain beliefs, but how deep down these 
go depends on the weather or her mood. She can get defensive, sometimes 
bristlingly so, about her beliefs, but in her honest moments she wonders 
why they’ve made such scant difference ….

	“You can’t be a disciple without being a believer. But—here’s the 
rub—you can be a believer and not a disciple. You can say all the right 
things, think all the right things, believe all the right things, do all 
the right things, and still not follow and imitate Jesus.

	“The kingdom of God is made up of travailers, but our churches are 
largely populated with tourists. The kingdom is full of disciples, but 
our churches are filled with believers.”

	Ask yourself for a minute what each of us is doing here. You and I 
should note that it doesn’t REALLY matter so much what brought us here. 
What we do now that we ARE here, that’s the important matter.

	The Hebrew people were on their way out of Egypt. They thought they’d 
like their own freedom – to choose what to wear, when and where to work, 
where to shop, what to grow; anything except working for those 
Egyptians. No matter that they’d guaranteed meals, a place to sleep, and 
a job, no matter that the bosses were pretty difficult with whom to 
work. But they needed to get out of there. It’s just that they didn’t 
count on the cost that the trip would take.

	What were they looking for? Howard Johnson’s every thirty or forty 
miles; Applebee’s poolside, with a liquor licence?

	Neither of these could happen – getting to the place on which they’d 
set their hearts was hard work, and dangerous too. Of COURSE they’d 
encounter wild life; so what if they had manna for the five-hundredth 
morning in a row? The food was keeping them alive and they WERE getting 
closer to their goal.

	Snakes, though – they’ve always been a source of trouble. You don’t 
mess with snakes, even if they DO taste just like chicken!

	The problem was that the people thought they’d be home free the minute 
they cleared customs at the Nile. THAT’S why they left.

	Some think it’s just the same at Church, or at school, or at home, 
wherever we go. We’re ALWAYS travelling. Sometimes we’d just like to set 
up camp wherever it’s comfortable and everything would come to us. 
People would be nice and polite; no one would have troubles, or 
disappointment, or discouragements. After all, isn’t that why we left 
the various Egypts in our lives? We want to leave all the problems 
behind us. We’re looking for answers. We’d like everyone to be pleasant, 
for nothing to happen to our bank balances.

	I’d have liked to have travelled to Lincoln City at the beginning of 
last week and not have rain. But that wasn’t how it worked out. Not only 
did I have rain, there were 87 mph gusts of wind, there was flooding, 
and then on top of that
there was snow.

	All other things being equal, you might have thought that all of that 
rain would have turned the snow to wet mush. Morning light showed 
differently, however. Five inches of snow – in an Oceanside community – 
five inches of very wet snow, which bowed tree limbs down to the point 
that they were snapping off like gun shots through the night. By morning 
there was still no way out of town. I couldn’t escape. I couldn’t pack 
to try to come back here – Cape Foulweather was closed just south of 
Depoe Bay and Highways 18 and 101 were both closed to the north.

	I didn’t have to do anything on Tuesday, so that was a plus. But I 
wondered about Wednesday and appointments I had back here. I guess I was 
a traveller last week, not a tourist!

	When time came to leave on Wednesday I loaded the car and set out, 
wondering what might lie ahead of me. One way or another, though, I had 
to face whatever it was.

	That’s the encouragement offered through the Scripture readings this 
morning. We’re ALL going to have problems of one sort or another. That’s 
life. Some may be small. Some may be more of an inconvenience than 
anything else. We can always reschedule a meeting, if that’s what it 
takes. Other things can be more challenging. It may be getting out and 
about when it’s stormy and we’re not sure if we’re up to it. It may be 
having a discussion with someone, a discussion which is painful and 
which we’ve been postponing for a while. It may be having to make a 
decision whose outcome is unknown – all that we have to go on is that 
whatever’s happening right now is too uncomfortable, isn’t right, 
lessens our dignity.

	There ARE times when we DO have to pack quickly and get out of Egypt 
and, yes, there ARE times when we’ll get away from the situation and 
wish we’d never made that decision. But for our health, our sanity, our 
spiritual survival, we DO have to make that decision. Note that I didn’t 
say it would be for our comfort. Simply that we have to choose and work 
through whatever consequences result. And this is something that we MAY 
have to face more than once, maybe more often than we’d like.

	Jesus wasn’t in a hurry to be crucified – but the way the idea of the 
episode in Numbers is adapted in John’s Gospel suggests that Jesus 
recognized that the important thing is commitment to what is right, 
what’s in accord with God’s will, what provides the greatest help and 
encouragement to everyone. Sometimes that’s incredibly difficult – but 
facing that danger head-on, no matter how scary, facing it CAN and DOES 
often help us first to analyse what’s happening, then what our feelings 
are about the process, and also help us to go through with it. And the 
really good news is that we never move past whatever makes us anxious, 
nervous or frightened, we never take even the first step alone. Moses 
was told to hold on to that staff on which the snake was hung. Jesus on 
the cross had His arms held out. Both of then gripped the cause of our 
discouragement and neither of them let go.

	We’re encouraged this morning, then, to face up to whatever changes, 
whatever difficulties, whatever anxious moments we may have, knowing 
that not only did our spiritual forebears give us an example. So do our 
sisters and
brothers beside us in the pew.

	We’re given encouragement this morning to face up to any challenge that 
lies ahead of us.

	You and I are asked who you are, who I am – a tourist or traveller? a 
believer or a disciple? We are to ask ourselves what these words mean to 
us and, if we pick one and it looks a bit scary, then it’s probably the 
right one for us. But then, we need to look again; to listen again; to 
discover that God is holding that scary thought, that scary picture; and 
God is smiling, God is beckoning us forward, offering us health, and 
strength, and salvation as we continue our pilgrimage in the company of 
the serpent.

	Just think how we always used to believe, quite biblically, in fact, 
that the serpent is the source of all of our troubles.

	Maybe there IS something to snake handling after all! As those ads say 
on TV about medication, however: “Ask your Physician – Jesus, the Great 
Physician – ask your Physician first, though, whether you should be 
trying this.”

NOTES:

1 	– Via “A Prairie Home Companion”: 3rd March, 2012

2	Your Church is too safe: Why Following Christ Turns the World 
Upside-Down” by Mark Buchanan Zondervan, © 2012. See review at 
http://lists.christianitytoday.com/t/121571201/7738212/516313/0/






Robert P Morrison
Interim Vicar
The Episcopal Church of St Alban
PO Box 1556
Albany OR  97321   541-921-1076 (cell)