Last Sunday, July 10 was a significant day for churches across the United States. I'm guessing that almost every congregation had some sort of focus or response to the shootings in Falcon Heights, Baton Rogue and Dallas. Below is the sermon I shared. After the sermon our congregation sang "We Shall Overcome" with linked arms. Many of us were in tears. I pray that the Spirit can continue to move people of faith to create a more peaceful world.
Today
is the third Sunday of a summer sermon series called, “Tending to the garden of
our spirit.”
We
have a large group of people from Chain of Lakes who are camping this weekend
at Presbyterian Clearwater Forest. I
know that they are taking advantage of the summer. The camp is on Clearwater Lake. It wouldn’t surprise me if they saw a loon
slowly descend on that lake. What a
spiritual experience.
This
is the type of spiritual experience I’d like this sermon series to help you
have.
We’re
looking at our spirit. We’re using a
garden as a metaphor to describe our spirit.
The
AIM of this series is to give you practical tools to tend to our garden.
Let’s
catch up a bit.
The
first week I made the case for how our spirit is like a garden. We looked at the very first story in the
Bible that was all about a garden. I
shared how without the God our spirit is just like dirt, but with God something
special can come.
Last
week we looked at how God planted us. In
particular we looked at the parable of the sower or the parable of the
soils. I asked you to think about what
the soil of your garden looks. I gave
each of you a bag of soil as an illustration.
I’ve kept mine in my office this week.
I want my soil to produce 30, 60 and even a hundred fold.
With
that introduction let me encourage you to get out the devotion that is in the
Bulletin. We’re looking at watering and
fertilizing our garden. One way to do
this is to have an active prayer life. I
wrote a devotion for you this week on prayer.
In the middle is a place to take notes.
I believe god might say something to you that you’ll want to
remember. On the back is a listing of
our congregation’s prayer requests.
How many of us have lived through a drought? I grew up in an agricultural area and my
parents both grew up on farms, so the amount of rainfall was always
important. During the spring and summer our
family would follow this closely. We lived
near a lake and we would frequently talk about how high the lake was or if the
lake was low. This past Friday morning
when I talked to them we talked about the level of the lake. We were always concerned about the amount of water that came from the
sky.
But I can’t say I’ve ever lived through a serious drought. I’ve lived through some times that we’ve had
sprinkler restrictions, but that’s not a drought.
I did some research on droughts this week. One of the worst droughts in the United
States was the drought that hit in the 1930s.
It was known as the Dust Bowl.
There was such a lack of rain that the ground turned to dust. This was before many methods of soil
conversation that we use today.
The area of the Dust Bull was immense. Some say that the Dust Bowl covered a million
acres of land in Texas, Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and
Kansas. There would be immense dust
storm that were known as black blizzards.
A person could hardly see. At
times the soil reached all the way to the East Coast and was deposited in the
Atlantic Ocean.
Millions of acres of farmland became useless. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced
to leave their homes. Many of them were
known as Okies. They traveled from Oklahoma
to California. And they were highlighted
by the writing of John Steinbeck in some of his novels.
Fortunately we are not in a drought today.
SLIDE I did some
research this week and discovered a web site that monitors drought conditions
in the United States. Here’s a picture
from a few weeks ago
SLIDE I was most interested in
Minnesota. Only a small portion of our
state is in a drought right now.
The connection to our own spirit is not hard to
understand.
SLIDE Without water and fertilizer the garden
that we describe as our spirit will become like a desert. Watering our spirit is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. There might not be a more important task that
we can do.
One of the ways we water and fertilize our garden is
through our faith practices. I think
five are important
SLIDE
1) Daily prayer
2) Daily Bible reading
3) Weekly worship
4) Service in the
community
5) Financial giving
All five of these help keep the garden of our spirit
watered. They protect us from a
drought.
For myself I’ve had an active prayer life for over 30
years. I can’t imagine my life without
praying to God. I know my prayer life
sustains me. Hundreds of times I’ve
walked away from my prayer life in a different place then when I started
praying that day. God had done something
to me that I couldn’t have imagined. My
garden was watered and fertilized.
At Chain of Lakes we give you the tools to pray. Just as a reminder I would encourage you to
use this devotion. Use it every
day. I would encourage you not to read
it all at once. Open up the Bible
reading or find the reading on-line. Do
the reading, read what I’ve written about it.
Use the prayer requests for your time of prayer. That would take you about ten minutes. Those ten minutes are a way to water your
garden.
God cares about our spiritual practices, because they
water our garden. What’s very important
to God is the connection between our spiritual practices and the condition of
our heart. God doesn’t want us to go through
the motions of our faith. We see this in
the reading from Isaiah that we heard today.
I want to try something a little different. Take a Bible that is underneath one of these
chairs and open it up to Isaiah 58. If
you can’t find a Bible I’ll have the words on the screen. In the Red Bible the page number is 674; in
the Blue Bible the page number is 647.
Let me share some context. This past of Isaiah was written after the
exile. There are two very important
dates in the Old Testament.
One is 722 and the other 587. 722 was when Israel was conquered and the
people deported; 587 was when Judah was conquered and the people deported. When you’re reading a prophet in the Old
Testament it’s important to know whether the book was written before 722 or
after 722; And it’s important to know whether the book was written before 587
or after 587.
This portion of Isaiah was written after 587. Most people think that the people were in
exile and were coming back to Jerusalem.
The people were coming to terms with why this horrible exile took
place. They felt that God had abandoned
them.
And they asked this question in verse 3
SLIDE
“Why
do we fast, but you do not see?
Why
humble ourselves, but you do not notice”
Isaiah
58:3
Their question is similar to a question we might have
found ourselves asking from time to time.
The question is why aren’t you rewarding us? We’re fasting; we’re doing what you asked us
to do and we were exiled. I’ve heard
this same question put another way. Why
aren’t you answering my prayers?
In Isaiah it’s as if the people were saying, “we’re
upholding our end of the bargain, Lord.
We are fasting. But we still got
sent into exile. Why aren’t you noticing
our fasting?” That is question of verse
3.
God answered the people
Look,
you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make
your voice hear on high. Is such the fast
that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Isaiah
58:4-5a
And
then in verse 6 God said:
Is
not this the fast that I choose:
To loose the bonds of injustice
To undo the thongs of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free,
And to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with
the hungry, and bring the homeless poor your house;
Isaiah
58:6-7a
We’ve spent a lot of time in our congregation helping
homeless teenagers. In fact our
congregation is becoming known in the community as the church to contact if
people are interested in helping homeless teenagers. This month our Presbytery gave us a grant to
help support six rooms at HOPE Place, the shelter that is being built for
homeless teenagers in Coon Rapids. The
grant was written by Pam Van Meter. This
is a terrific recognition by the Presbytery of the work you are doing. We are going to have to raise $1,500 as part
of this grant. I have no doubt we’ll do
this.
When we help homeless teenagers we are living out the
words of Isaiah 58. We are loosing the
bonds of injustice, we are undoing the thongs of the yoke, we are helping the
oppressed go free, we are sharing bread with the hungry and we are bringing the
homeless poor into a house.
I want to say, Yay, God!
Yay, God for what we are doing.
For our prayers are matched by our actions.
So to bring it back to watering the garden. We water our garden through our faith
practices, but our faith practices have to be consistent with the condition of
our heart. If we’re praying in the
morning and screaming at our spouse in the afternoon, then we’re missing the
mark. If we’re going to worship on
Sunday morning and then pointing our fingers in judgment at our neighbor on Sunday
afternoon, then we’re missing the mark.
The question I have is do your
actions match your heart.
We need to water and fertilize the garden of our own
spirit, but right now we need to water and fertilize the spirit of our
country. I’ve been saying this a lot
lately, but this has been a very hard week for our country. The shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge,
of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, and the killings of five police officers
in Dallas once again illustrate that the spirit of our country needs to be
watered and fertilized. The names of
the police officers in Dallas who were killed were Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith,
Michael Krol, Patrick Zamarriga, and Brent Thompson.
I’ve read a lot of commentary this week, but the best
comment I’ve heard came from my wife, Amy.
Before she went off to work on Friday she said that we’re at war with
ourselves.
We’re at war with ourselves. I have about a thousand Facebook
friends. As I went through my Facebook
feed on Friday morning it seemed that every one of them had an opinion about
what was happening. And every one of
them wanted to share their opinion. And
the argumentative nature of many of the comments reveals the anger that has
gripped the spirit of our country.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize there significant
problems in the relationship of the police to the African-American
community. We have significant issues
with the use of guns in our culture. And
race has always been an issue in American and still is today. Combine these three issues and what do we
have?
SLIDE We have a drought.
I certainly don’t have the answers to these three
problems. But I want to suggest two ways
that can help. I think both ways can
provide water to a parched garden.
The first is to recommit ourselves to compassion. I have to be honest, I haven’t witnessed a
lot of compassion in the last 72 hours in our country. I’m talking about the type of compassion that
Jesus frequently illustrated. It’s the
compassion of the Samaritan whose heart went out to a Jewish man who was beaten
and dying on the side of the road.
Samaritans and Jews had a long history of hating each other—not unlike
the history of white and blacks in America.
The Samaritan illustrated compassion.
And I’m talking about compassion for all the parties
involved. Compassion for the family of Alton
Sterling, for the two police officers involved in his shooting; compassion for
the family and friends of Philando Castile and for the police officer who
killed him. Compassion for the five
police officers killed in Dallas and the others who were injured; compassion
even for the family and friends of Micah Xavier Johnson who allegedly was the
sniper who killed those five police officers and wounded others.
Is this hard.
Yes. Having compassion for all
the parties is really, really hard. It
takes a watered garden.
People in the African-American community are angry. They have legitimate reasons to be
angry. I think we can be both
compassionate and angry. Many people
want to see significant social change.
There are legitimate reasons to fight for social change. I think we can be both compassionate and
fight for social change. The first idea
I want to share is to live into compassion.
The second idea is to communicate both/and thinking. It is so easy to put people into either/or categories. It’s the type of thinking that says if your
heart goes out to Philando Castile and his family that you don’t support the
police. The thinking that says if you even
have compassion for the officer who killed Philando Castile that you don’t
support the issue of African-Americans who have been killed by the police. The thinking that says if you wonder why we
have so many semi-automatic weapons, you want to take away people’s guns. We so easily want to put people into these
either/or categories.
Friends it’s the separation of people into categories
that has caused so much mistrust in the United States.
The idea that you can be either on the side of the police
or for African-American males doesn’t work.
Or the idea that you can be either for guns or against guns doesn’t
work. Or the idea that Black Lives
matter means you don’t believe that all lives matter. Either/or categories don’t work.
We can be both. We
can support the police and search for justice for African-American males. We can believe in the rights of gun owners
and limit their use. Our hearts can go
out to Black Lives matter and we can support them and our hearts can go out to
others too.
Jesus is our best example. He called out injustice by the religious
leaders of his day and did everything he could to bring people together under a
common umbrella of love. He wanted to
unite people. To water and fertilize the
soil of our country, we’re called to do the same.
So let’s go forth—doing all that we can to water and
fertilize our own gardens and to be agents of health and healing for our
community.
Let’s go forth …
