Luke 12:13-21 Children: I have one rule for this Children’s Time: you can’t tell a story about someone else, even if it would be a perfect answer to my question. And you can’t point at someone else, even if you know that they could give the perfect answer to my question. No, the rule is that you can only talk about yourself and no one else. Here’s the question: What’s the most foolish thing you have ever done? If you’re dying to point at your wife or brother, please sit on your hands. If you’re tempted to whisper in the ear of your husband or daughter, “remember that time when you …”, please put a sock in it. This is question is for you and only you to answer. All other answers will be whistled as a foul, or declared out of bounds. So here’s the question: What’s the most foolish thing you’ve ever done? My own story of foolishness is represented by a hockey puck. One day the pond actually froze where I lived in Maryland, and all of the transplanted northerners dug around in their basements and found skates and hockey sticks. One of us even found a puck. Though the ice was thin, we played a game of hockey, a rare winter experience in Maryland. At one point in the game, the puck slid over to a part of the pond where the ice was especially thin. It was our only puck, so we had to get it back. Fortunately, we were smart high school students and we knew the ice would break if any of us went over there to the thin ice. I’m pretty sure I was the one who came up with a plan: “Let’s get one of these little kids to go over and get our puck.” So we grabbed one of the eight year old skaters and said, “We’ll give you a quarter if you’ll get our hockey puck back.” But every other little kid on the pond heard the promised award, and a dozen of them sprinted over to get that puck before we could stop them. And as you can easily figure out, twelve eight year olds weigh a lot more than one teenager. It could have been a huge disaster, with a dozen ambulances pulling half-drowned and half-frozen children out of the water. I was very lucky that the ice held, and I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life in jail for being a fool. The most foolish thing you have ever done? The reason I have asked this question – and thanks to all of you who were brave enough to share your foolishness with the rest of us – is because the Jesus has a strong word for people like us who do these things: YOU FOOL! Wow, Jesus is usual pretty gentle in his speech, but there it is: YOU FOOL! What were you thinking? Jesus is telling a story, and I love hearing his stories, they always get me thinking in new ways. You did what! What were you thinking? Hold on, for a bit, and I’ll try to answer this in a moment. Adults: Jesus is telling a story, and I love hearing his stories, they always get me thinking in new ways. This story is about a man who is a successful farmer, so successful that he harvests more grain than he has room for in his barns. So he tears them down and builds bigger barns. Then, happy with his wisdom and success, he prepares to live the easy life without any worries. But here the story takes a sharp turn, “You FOOL!” Jesus says. He has all of that wealth, but he suddenly dies and all that success was for nothing. He was rich to himself but not to God. There is a web page that you may have run across in your internet travels, called the “Darwin Awards”. It awards people who do the most foolish things imaginable. At the top of the web page it reads: “Honoring those who improve the species...by accidentally removing themselves from it!” It goes on to note that most Darwin Award recipients receive it posthumously. Two co-workers decided to celebrate the 4th of July two years ago in their own special way. The plan? They loaded an old washing machine with tens of pounds of firecrackers, lit a fuse, dropped the lid, and ran. But nothing happened. Twenty minutes later, they decided that the fuse was a dud and went back to try again. Presumably neither was aware of the chemical friendship between oxygen and fire. As they lifted the lid the entire washer exploded, landing them both in the hospital for several days. Shrapnel from the washer spread in a 25-ft radius, leaving a large crater in its wake. Or the person who took his new car out on a drive on Canandaigua Lake one winter on a day that was too warm, and the car fell through the ice. Or the college student who enjoyed entertaining his friends by opening beer bottles with his teeth. A great party trick, except that by the time he was thirty nearly every tooth required a painful root canal. What are some of the foolish things you have been a part of? I have this fallen tree in the front yard, too heavy to move, so I decided to pull it with my car by screwing a big bolt into the wood and then tying it to the back end of my car. I moved the car forward and in less than a second the back window of the car shattered into a shower of glass that ricocheted all over the inside of the car, covering me with chunks of glass. It turns out that the rope got real tight and then the big screw pulled out and rocketed right at the back of my car, smacking into the window. This happened several years ago, but I’m still finding bits of glass in the floor mats from time to time. When I took it into the repair shop I admitted how foolish I had been, and the repair guy, Dave, looked me right in the eye and said, “we’ve all done things like this”. Now if you were a spectator you would have been quick to intervene with all of your wisdom and experience to tell the people about to embark on disaster to reconsider, right? Firecrackers in the washer? Driving a car on the ice? Using your teeth to open beer bottles? Those are obviously foolish things to do. I wish you had been there the day I tried to move that fallen tree. But here’s the hard part of the story Jesus tells: There’s nothing that the man did that looked foolish at first. It seems like he’s a good farmer, and a wise merchant. He thinks that about himself, and his peers probably agreed. But Jesus calls him a FOOL, for not seeing the big picture, for not understanding the things that are really important, for trusting in his riches instead of God. So it gets me thinking about the things that I do that appear to be intelligent, the things that all of us do thinking we are wise, not realizing how foolish we really are. What are the things we don’t yet realize are foolish? The things that we think are wise and intelligent, prudent and rational … but may not be smart at all? How about our high reliance on petroleum as the cornerstone of our economy? Of course, petroleum powers automobiles, heats our homes, fuels industry, but it’s running out, evidently involves greater and greater risk to get it, destabilizes entire economies as the price rises, the use of it contributes to pollution, protecting oil resources from competitors requires the diversion of a huge amount of social wealth, and may be a key reason for outright war. Yet I pull up the pump and the thing I am usually thinking is how smart I have been to find the best price for gasoline in the county – did anyone pay less than $2.78 per gallon this past week? The last thing I think as I fill up the gas tank is that I’m a fool, but maybe I am? Can you think of some other things that appear to be smart but may end up being incredibly foolish? Ellieana’s first birthday is coming up so I went to the store on Friday to look for some gifts. What could be smarter than to buy some cool gifts for a baby? After all, our children and our grand-children are our greatest treasures. I went to a major chain store well-known for having a big supply of children’s toys. I found lots of good ones that Ellieana would enjoy, with good prices, and there were even some deep discounts. I felt smart that I had come to the right place, but then I started looking at the labels of each of these attractive items. Not one was made in the United States of America. Now I’m not a national chauvinist most of the time, but there is a major trade imbalance involving China, and it is widely understood that jobs being created in China to make plastic toys for children are causing American jobs to disappear. After diligent searching I finally found a little soccer ball made in the United States and a set of awesome toy cars actually made in Plattsburgh. I felt a little less foolish when I got to the check-out line, especially when I turned down the offer of a plastic bag for my purchases – plastic is a petroleum product, too. I have given two cases of foolishness, and you might choose to debate me about these particular examples., or have better ones to suggest But I encourage all of us to think about the things that we do that seem wise and intelligent. But that may turn out to be foolish! I once heard of valuable guideline for making important decisions - it’s called seventh generation thinking – will the decision we make today benefit the seventh generation down the road, or will today’s decision hurt the seventh generation? I had heard about this, but I looked it up last night and found that this is an Iroquois teaching, something from right here in western New York! Cool.

Luke 10:38-42 Do you remember the special contest that M&Ms candy ran some years ago? Everyone knows the traditional colors of M&Ms – red, green, yellow and brown. But if you looked at your M&Ms carefully, if you found a blue M&M, you would have won a million dollars. If you found one of those blue M&Ms you would win the jackpot, because only a few blue ones were made, hidden among the zillions of other M&Ms. A million dollars! I don’t know about you, but there’s a lot I could do with a million dollars. If all it took to get that million dollars was to find a blue M&M, that’s a short-cut I could live with. When I sat down in my Mom’s apartment to prepare my sermon on Thursday night I was glad to have remembered this search for the million dollar blue M&M, but last night, when I got at home I did a little more research and found out that my memory is totally wrong! There was no blue M&M contest at all. Instead, what happened was that people got to vote on a new color to add to the traditional mix of M&Ms, and Blue was color that won. But let’s pretend that my incorrect memory is accurate, that there was a million dollar blue M&M. But before moving on, let me digress, I also found something else about Blue M&Ms’ last night. According to a July 28 2009 CNN news story, “The same blue food dye found in M&Ms could be used to reduce damage caused by spine injuries, offering a better chance of recovery, according to new research. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center found that when they injected the compound Brilliant Blue G (BBG) into rats suffering spinal cord injuries, the rodents were able to walk again, albeit with a limp. The only side effect was that the treated mice temporarily turned blue.” As someone who has had a spinal injury, it’s nice to know that the good scientists at the University of Rochester believe that a fistful of Blue M&Ms has a medicinal benefit. If you see me, or anyone else, looking bluer than usual, now you know why! OK, I have digressed wildly from the Gospel lesson, and digressed from my digression, so let’s get back to the main business of the day: the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ! I was in a Bible Study group when I was a student pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church on West 57th Street on Manhattan. We were reading one of those hard to understand stories about Jesus and his hard to understand teachings. Maybe it was this story about Mary and Martha? Mary and Martha – the M&M Sisters. What the heck does this story mean? During the two hours of Bible Study we talked about what all the things it might mean: do Mary and Martha represent different categories of faith or discipleship? Is Jesus is giving psychological insights about their personality types, so that we might emulate in our own lives something of the personality of either Mary or Martha? Is there practical instruction about the washing of dishes in the home? Or does washing dishes or not washing dishes represent a critical perspective in the journey of faith? Or is everything in this story governed by context, that dishwashing, normally an important daily chore, is rendered unimportant because Jesus’ time is drawing to a close? All these interpretations, all these insights, and Judy Fryer, one of the Bible Study participants. finally turned to me in exasperation: “Jim you’re a seminary student just tell us what it means. Just tell us what it means. There’s too much guesswork, too much uncertainty; just tell us what it means.” In a way, Judy figured I had already found the blue M&M, not because of good luck, or because I was willing to eat my way through a million M&Ms to find it, but because I had the inside track due to my field of study at Union Theological Seminary. She estimated that she read the Bible one hour a week and she imagined that I read the Bible ten hours a day every day of the week. And because I must have already found the answer, I could save her a lot of time and trouble and just give her the answer, too. “Here, Judy, here’s the meaning, here’s your blue M&M!” Judy would have been very happy! From time to time I’ve had different people ask me for the blue M&M answer concerning other parts of the Bible, communion, for example. “Jim, just tell us what it means” for those who are confused about the meaning of the bread and the cup, or “Jim, just tell us how to make communion work”, for those who are trying to feel the difference when they partake. “There are so many interpretations, just to tell us what it means?” Well, there are a lot of answers to offer to those questions. It’s just a meal that teaches people about sharing, it’s all about Jesus getting ready to die, it’s the Jewish Passover turned into a Christian ritual, it’s a ritual representing things that happened a long time ago, it a powerful experience of Jesus Christ in the present, it’s a taste of heaven to come, it’s a time of sober reflection, it’s a joyful celebration, when you eat and drink your life will be different. “Jim, just tell me what it means” might be how Judy Fryer would ask. Just give me the blue M&M.” I won’t give you the blue M&M of perfect understanding. But I will give you my best thinking, my best thinking this morning, but I have to tell you that my mind might be different tomorrow, or next week, or next year! But here’s what I like about the story. Mary and Martha were friends of Jesus, and he enjoyed visiting their home, and he enjoyed being part of the family’s back and forth, give and take, all their conversations about things important and unimportant. He enjoyed the dinner preparations, he enjoyed being with his friends. So today rather than psychoanalyze Mary and Martha, or decide who in your family is best suited to wash the dishes in your home, just try to enjoy the meal, enjoy being together, enjoy our friendship. Yes, there will be some clean-up afterwards – whose turn is it this morning? – and you can help with the cleanup if you are more like Martha, or just come right out onto the steps to enjoy the goodies if you feel more like Mary.

Luke 10:25-37

     If you want to experience old-style snow you can still do it because Canadian TV stations have not converted to digital yet.  Tune to channel 5 in Toronto and see how much snow you can find.  That’s the channel I was watching the World Dup games on, usually with a bit of snow.  But, hey, it’s winter in South Africa right now, so maybe the snow was real, the kind that falls from the sky?.

     A year ago the way TV signals were transmitted changed abruptly from analog TV to digital TV.  If you have cable you wouldn’t know the difference, but if you get your TV over the air you had to get a new TV or a converter box to make your old TV able to receive digital signals.  There’s no snow anymore.  With digital TV either you get the perfect signal or nothing at all.  At our house you have to aim the antenna exactly at the transmitter in order to get the over the air digital signal.  I’m too cheap to get cable, so it means we spend a fair amount of time playing with the antenna rotor to get good reception.   

     Well, this isn’t Radio Shack, it’s a church, so I hope you won’t mind if I shift from technical to spiritual matters at this point.  What could good reception have to do with today’ story about the Good Samaritan?

     The story is very well-known.  A man is traveling down a road when he gets robbed and beaten up.  In New York City where I went to graduate school we referred to this as getting mugged.  It doesn’t matter what you call it the result was the same.  The man was badly hurt, left in a bloody heap at the side of the road, with all of his clothing and valuables taken.  Surely the next travelers down the road will stop and help him. 

     The first person comes by.  It’s a priest.  A Jewish priest, maybe on the way home from the Temple in Jerusalem.  He takes one look at the bloody victim, and crosses over to the other side of the road pretending not to see him.  The next person comes by, a Levite, and the same thing happens, cross over to the other side of the road, too.  A Levite, in case you didn’t know, was a member of a Jewish clan dedicated to the service of God.  He also must have been on his way home from the Temple. 

     Finally, a Samaritan comes by.  And I should tell you that Jews and Samaritans despised each other.  If Jews walked through a  Samaritan village, people would throw rocks, curse and spit to drive them away.  And if Samaritans walked through a Jewish village – the same thing.  What is especially interesting about this is that Jew and Samaritans were essentially identical, they believed in the Law of Moses, but what made them different was that Jews worshiped God on Mt Zion at Jerusalem and Samaritans worshiped God on Mt. Gerazim in Samaria.  If I had a Jew and a Samaritan from those days standing right in front o your you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, but they would know the difference instantly.

     So it would have been likely that the Samaritan, upon seeing the Jewish man in a bloody heap at the side of the road, would have gone over and kicked him a few times and said a few curses, too.  But that’s not what happened.  The Samaritan went over and helped the man, bandaged him up and found a place for him to stay until he recovered, and paid the money to cover the cost. 

      People listening to Jesus would have been astounded by this story because it went against everything they knew about their enemies, the Samaritans.   In fact, they would have been more than astounded.  They would have been deeply offended.  They would not have seen this as a basic story about kindness, but as a story where the Samaritan had a hidden agenda to rape and pillage while pretending to be kind. 

     But Jesus is answering the question, “Who my neighbor?”  And way back in Sunday School I learned the simple answer to that question – be like the Samaritan, the one who unexpectedly offers mercy and kindness to someone in terrible need.  You, too, can be that unexpected person who steps across a rigid boundary to offer help and support to someone in need.  It might include befriending farm workers.  It might involve visiting people in jail.  It might be volunteering at an AIDS program. 

     But there is another lesson in all of this, and it has to do with that phrase I began with: “good reception”.  At Union Theological Seminary I spent a year studying the Parables of Jesus with Dr, Walter Wink.  Instead of doing a lot of lectures, he tried to get us into the story, so that we would experience the grace of God personally.  So one day, we acted out this story of the Good Samaritan, and each of us got to play the different roles, the victim, the muggers, the priest, the Levite and the Samaritan.  We found a dimension to this story that is often overlooked.  You see, the traditional question is “which one will you be in life, the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan?”  The second question that rarely gets asked is, “What did the victim experience in all of this?”  You see the traditional view fits in with our traditional view of Biblical faith, that we have to be incredibly generous givers, but the second dimension of the story has to do with good reception, to teach us something new about receiving things from others and even more from God.

     In this church we are very good at giving, but I think we need a lot more learning about receiving.  Too many times we turn down what is given, believing that we don’t really deserve it or that somebody other than ourselves is more deserving.  We have offering plates for your giving, we have a food box for you to give food, we give sermons and prayers and programs, but we don’ty do as much to demonstrate good reception, being able to receive from God. 

Luke 10:1-11 CHILDREN I remember a 4th of July a long time ago, when my parents took me to the see the fireworks in Endicott. I was old enough to know what fireworks were and I know I was looking forward to it. We brought a picnic dinner and when we got the park we spread out a blanket and waited for the sun to go down. Finally the time came and everyone settled back to watch the show up in the sky. And there it was, the first “wooosh” sound, followed by the sky lighting up, it looked like a flower blossom, no a fountain, with a million colored lights, You could hear everyone reacting “oooooh”, but then something completely unexpected happened. KA-POW, KA-BOOM, KA-BLOOIE! The whole sky exploded, and I dove under the blanket, too scared to emerge for the rest of the night. Tonight there will be fireworks in many towns around our area. It’s to celebrate the 4th of July. What actually happened on July 4th, 1776? It’s the day that the Declaration of Independence was signed by the Second Continental Congress. Actually the date the Congress declared independence from Britain was on July 2nd, but July 4th became better known as the date when it was signed. It had been composed by a committee of five, including John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. Two of them later became president, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. And those two men died exactly fifty years later on July 4th, 1826. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, Adams wrote to his wife: “I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.” So that’s why the fireworks, the whooshes of color in the sky, and loud booms – ka-pow, ka-boom, ka-blooie – that send children hiding under the blanket! A day of deliverance solemnized from this time forward forever more! ADULTS On Wednesday in Batavia I had my final Physical Therapy appointment. Yayyy! As Nancy was stretching my neck, and Stephanie was massaging a woman’s leg on the next table, they were talking about rock concerts they had attended. Nancy said something about the first rock concert she had attended years ago. It was to see a group named Blue Oyster Cult. Blue Oyster Cult? Who ever heard of them? Sounds like a bizarre religious group, maybe bivalve invaders from Jupiter, or possibly a conspiracy to subvert America through tainted seafood? Nancy gave my neck another stretch, and then all of a sudden … ka-pow! No it wasn’t my neck losing a sprocket, it was my mind that snapped back to the past and I remembered that I had been to a Blue Oyster Cult concert, and maybe it was the first big rock concert I had ever attended? In the summer of 1972 my friend Pat and I signed up help register young voters. It was the first Presidential election in which 18 year olds were allowed to vote. The organizers of the registration drive were delighted to have us as volunteers. Nothing better than having eighteen year olds to sign up other eighteen year olds. Our first assignment was to go to a rock concert just outside of Annapolis, Maryland. It featured Blue Oyster Cult. So Pat and I got permission to set up our card table next to the entry gate, and we had a big stack of registration forms because thousands of teenagers were about to walk past and we could easily sign them up to vote. It didn’t happen like that at all. In fact, it was a disaster! Instead of hordes of eighteen year olds swarming us to get registered, they completely ignored us, or told us to buzz off. They were too excited about hearing Blue Oyster Cult’s big hits, “Seven Screaming Diz-busters” or “OD’ed on Life Itself” (from their album “Tyranny and Mutation”) to pay any attention to us. Not one person took up our invitation. We handed out flyers, and most of them were thrown on the ground and trampled by those who followed. It was hugely discouraging. This turned out to be just one of the many times in my life when my idealism has run head first into an unbending brick wall. In later years I’ve learned that it just goes with the territory, but for the first time out as a young idealist it was a terrible defeat. After thirty minutes of this, I was ready to give up. Who needs to face such discouragement? But Pat was there and I didn’t want to quit on him. Later I found out that Pat felt the same way, he was ready to quit, but he didn’t want to let me down. Though it was a tough experience of going against the tide, we stuck it out through the end of the night. Jesus was onto something important when he recruited all of those disciples. Usually we hear about the twelve, but this story says that there were seventy of them. Jesus was escalating the effort. He himself couldn’t get to every town and village in Israel, but he could send his disciples far and wide to prepare the way, to spread the word that change was in the air. Like Pat and me, these seventy disciples would be going against a strong tide of indifference and hostility. In every town or village they visited they could expect that people would ignore them, say unkind words and even throw rocks at them. But this is where Jesus was smart! He sent them out in pairs. He knew what he was doing. Each member of the pair would not want to let their partner down, and they would stick to the cause no matter how difficult. So, one question to ask you is this – do you have a partner in your faith journey, someone who helps keep you committed to the cause, even when the odds are poor, someone whom you help keep committed when they are faltering, or ready to give up? Jesus sent them out two by two, with whom does he send you? Jesus says there is a large harvest, but not enough workers to bring it in. Some of the farmers in our area know all about this. I was talking to one the other day who told me that fear of immigration arrests have reduced the number of Mexican farm laborers by thirty to forty percent. As you can imagine, they are wondering how to do all the work in the fields. Jesus was facing the same difficulty. He saw lots of opportunities, lots of potential, but there just weren’t enough followers to complete the job. So when he sends those disciples out two by two it’s not just a smart strategy, it is born of urgency. And this leads to the second question – do you see the urgency in what Jesus has invited us to do? But what is that harvest? The farmers around here want to harvest things from the field. Like what? That’s easy! Cabbage, beans, corn, wheat, other fruits, vegetables and grain. What kind of harvest if Jesus aiming for? It’s not complicated. It’s a harvest of people. People who are ready for healing, ready for forgiveness, ready for a second chance, ready for peace, ready for understanding, ready for a next step, ready for love, ready for a change. To be a healthier congregation in our ministry, we need to know who are partners are, and we need to understand that the harvest is ready.