Every Time We Touch
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins
Dt. 34.5, 7; Ps. 90.1-2, 17; Mt. 22.34-40

That doesn’t seem like any library I’ve ever been to; but it does remind me an awful lot of church…well, our church anyway! Isn’t it amazing how good romance and good worship share so much in common!

The gathering of people in that video were isolated, fixed on their own tasks, needs, desires, concerns. But when someone started talking about the power of love, things began to change.

At first, they are annoyed by her enthusiasm and joy about love, but as she remains committed to her witness, one by one they all catch the fire and unfettered joy takes over their lives…at least for as long as they will allow it. That is exactly what spirituality is…we come together, we share, we get uplifted, and we let our lives express joy. And then, the miracles start to occur.

“Every time we touch I get this feeling and every time we kiss I swear I could fly. Can’t you feel my heart beat fast, I want this to last. I need you by my side.”

In moments of intimate communion, I feel empowered. I want this sense of oneness to last; I need to be aware of you always with me. What profoundly good theology, and from a dance song! Of course, songs and poems and dramas and fictional tales are all through our scriptures. Maybe the wise ones have always known that love and joy and sharing are the true sources of powerful living.

And then, a line that almost perfectly sums up the message Christians call good news:

“You are my castle, your heart is my sky, they wipe away tears that I cry; the good and the bad times, we’ve been through them all, you make me rise when I fall.”

The power of love is the power of Resurrection. There may be difficult times, but if I know I am loved, I can navigate them. Even if life seems to knock me down, love can lift me back up. This could be my Easter sermon!

Now, when we talk about love, that seems sort of airy-fairy and not very tangible. I mean, who is loving all the time? And how can we really love our enemies? And how can we express love for those who are trying to hurt us and at the same time show ourselves the love we need and deserve? This love business has too many practical applications to work out…let’s just focus instead on sin and judgment and divine wrath…hate and fear are easy! This love business requires some work…and maybe that’s the point.

The first reading today tells us that Moses was a servant of God, and he had a full, meaningful life until the end. Moses touched people with his courage, and his generosity, and his commitment to justice. He touched people by offering service, and that gave Moses strength and purpose. Moses shows us that the richest life isn’t necessarily the life with the most possessions, but the life that has evolved beyond selfishness. The life that touches others lives with generosity and goodwill is a life that will be filled with joy.

Then the psalmist prays this morning, “God, you have always been our dwelling place.”

God isn’t limited to traditions, institutions, texts, or even any particular time. The universal power and presence that we call God is the Substance of all that is…our truest Reality is divine. God, as the Psalmist says, is our dwelling place. We don’t need to find God or be rescued by God from our sinfulness…

You may have noticed I don’t refer to us as sinners. Oh, God knows we make our share of mistakes. And, we all carry some old baggage that weighs us down and gets in our way from time to time. Most of us have developed habits that don’t add much joy to our lives. And in our insecurity, we may lash out at others because we are afraid that we are so insignificant our only hope of mattering is to tear down someone else so that we can at least be better than THEM.

We sometimes experience brokenness and in our brokenness we can even do things that could be called evil…but that is human evil, the result of brokenness, woundedness. It is an illusion, without any real substance. And we can overcome the illusion of evil and begin to contact the better angles of our nature. We may not live into or even be aware of our divinity, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t in and of God. God has always been our dwelling place. It is in God that we live and move and have our being. Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

You may sin, that is, you may miss the mark…we all do and will. Mistakes will be made, others will be blamed. But a person who makes a mistake, even someone who is in the habit of making the same terrible mistake over and over is not herself or himself a mistake. We are part of the creation that God calls very good. We aren’t sinners, even though we miss the mark. There’s an old saying where I come from: “You can put your boots in the oven but that don’t make’em biscuits.” Just because we aren’t done growing, healing, and learning doesn’t mean that we are innately evil. I reject as vehemently as a fundamentalist rejects science any notion of original sin. I don’t know if God ever makes mistakes, but if God does, I refuse to believe that humanity is one of them! We didn’t fall from perfection; we are still evolving toward it! Or better stated, we are learning, however slowly, to recognize and express the perfection that is our true state. We are the children of God. God is our dwelling place.

The Deuteronomy reading shows us that a life lived in service is a full life. The Psalm reminds us that Perfect Love, Eternal Love, God is our true home. Then the gospel ties together trusting the God in us and serving the God in others.

Jesus says the greatest commandments are simply to love God and love others. What a non-dogmatic view. If you love God then you will love yourself and others because we are in God and God is in us. We can’t love God but not God’s dwelling place. It’s easier to bash the Mormons or the Mennonites, the Buddhists or the Baptists, the Sikhs or the Seventh Day Adventists, the Agnostics or the Anglicans, the Jews or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Wiccans or the Wesleyans…it’s easier to fear queers than to delight in diversity…it’s easier to worship a book than to wrestle with it, to worship the sacraments than to allow them to reveal the holiness within us…it’s easier to complain than to sustain, to resist change instead of resisting injustice…it’s easier to be dogmatic, doctrinal, religious, even zealous than it is to embrace the simple words of Jesus…love God and your neighbor. Jesus will go on in the parable of the good Samaritan to say, PS – EVERYONE is our neighbor. Self-righteousness is so much easier than self-realization. And so religion has too often taken the easy path rather than doing the work of spirituality which is simply the work of learning to love ourselves and then loving others as we love ourselves.

God is love, so the more we love, the more of God we express. As we love and give and share with wasteful abandon, we are becoming more and more like God, which is, more and more like the truth of our infinite potential. To know God isn’t to call her this name or to call him that name…to know God isn’t to beg for divine favors or forgiveness…to know God is simply to allow God to become manifest in our experience which happens every time we offer love without condition or expectation of anything in return…every time we touch our world with love.

This kind of love take practice, especially if we were not shown it by our parents or caregivers in our formative years. But we can practice, and the more we practice the better we’ll get at it.

With our coming together to encourage one another to express the better angels of our nature, to challenge one another when we become too gossipy, too complaining, or too fearful, to comfort the despondent, and to practice acts of compassion, justice, generosity, and kindness…by coming together, learning together, and working together we will evolve and more and more of God will express through us and more and more love will flow out of us to help and heal the world around us.

Right relationship with the divine Reality isn’t about belief, tradition, or ritual…some very self-righteous, so-called orthodox people deny love or even human kindness to gays and lesbians, to people of other religions, and they often care little for the environment, for equal opportunity, and they sometimes seem much more supportive of war than peace.

They claim to believe in God, but they don’t seem to value much of what God most truly represents…peace, hope, love, compassion, generosity, justice, healing. If they had fewer beliefs and more love, what a different world we’d have. If we all had few beliefs and more love, what a different world we would have. There is a saying which I hope every person of faith will embrace as they grow and mature, and it is: “the older i get the more i believe, AND the fewer beliefs I have.”

God has always been our home. Our job isn’t to find God, please God, flatter God, cower before God, or even to believe much about God. Our job is to come home…to be more at home in God and to let the Love that God is express more fully through us. We are to touch the divine Reality of our lives, and touch the divinity of others, and thereby bring healing and wholeness to more and more people. And every time we touch the divinity within and among us, we express a bit more of the goodness that is our natural and true state. It isn’t always easy, and we won’t always get it right, and yet we can begin the process that leads to healing and fulfillment. We can begin the process in this God-filled moment. We start by loving…we learn to love ourselves and then to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. Just begin. If you’re not good at it right off, who cares? Just try and try again. It takes a life time but it starts in just an instant; why not this instant? As we touch the world with more love, we will be loving God, in fact we will be living the love that God is; and this is the good news.

© Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations
My true essence is loving.
My true nature is love.
I will love myself today.
I will begin to love my neighbor as myself.
I will be God’s love in action.
And so it is.

Final Word
“God is love and whoever lives in love lives in God and God lives in them.” 1 John 4.16

Always More
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, Sunshine Cathedral
October 16, 2011

The gospel lesson this morning is very familiar and really doesn’t need a lot of commentary. In the simplest reading of the text, Jesus seems to be saying that paying both tithes and taxes is good. Of course his opponents are trying to trap him. If they can get them to say people shouldn’t worship with their generous giving, then they can accuse of him not being a true prophet. Consistent and joyful generosity is absolutely sacramental in scripture; so, if Jesus doesn’t seem to know that, they’ve got him!

But, if Jesus says that people shouldn’t pay their taxes, then they can accuse of him of trying to get people to cheat the government. That makes him an enemy of the state, and for that he could get in a lot of trouble. But Jesus is smart enough to see through his opponents’ trap. And he says, “Be a good citizen…pay your taxes, AND, be a good worshipper…pay your tithes.” It’s not either/or, it’s both/and. God’s people aren’t looking for loopholes; the people of God want to do more, not less. The people of God volunteer, they share, they support the government and demand the government to then support its people. The people of God support their house of worship and other good causes and they lend aid to their friends. The people of God simply do all they can whenever they can. That’s the proper way to show the world what it means to be the people of God.

As John Wesley said, “Do all the good you can by all the means you can in all the ways you can to all the people you can for as long as you ever can.” God, Infinite Good, the Spirit of Life, the Mystery of the Universe, the Web of All Existence, the Source and Substance of all that is, must be so much more than we could ever imagine. We can know more and more of God, and yet, no matter how much we know there must still be more to discover. So, since God is always more, how we worship is by doing and being and becoming always more ourselves. As we do and become more, we experience more of God, which is always more than we could imagine. There’s always more to do, more to learn, more to share, more to experience, more to discover, always more.

The point that God is more than we have imagined, and even more than we sometimes want to imagine, is demonstrated in the lesson from Exodus today. In that reading we see Moses struggling with the temptation that we all have known. He wants to see God. He wants to see infinity from his finite vantage point. It can’t be done. The writer imagines God saying, “you can’t see me and live.” And that makes sense…to see the infinite, one would have to be beyond the constraints of mortal physicality.

And yet, time and again, we find ourselves wanting to trap God inside a box, a container, an image, a name, a religious tradition, a political ideology…we want to say, “Here is where God is and this is what God is…See, we have God; we know God; we own the rights to divinity!” But when we believe that we have locked God in the box of our own understanding, we simply have fooled ourselves. Trying to trap God in the boxes of our own comfort will fail as surely as Jesus’ opponents failed to trap him with the false dichotomy they presented to him.

The Ten Commandments contain a strict and clear prohibition against idolatry: “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in the sky, or on the earth, or in the water” (Deuteronomy 5.8). The problem with an image is that it can too easily become a crutch. We see the image and we forget that image is not essence. We forget that images are symbols that point beyond themselves, never to themselves. And all too soon we allow the image to become magical, sacred, a substitute for a real relationship with the power and presence we call God. Whenever we whittle the mystery of life down to an image, no matter how familiar or comfortable that image maybe, we have made God too small and have thereby stunted our own spiritual growth.

We can never be bigger or better than our understanding of God. And so, if our God can be carved, painted, baked, photographed, molded, contained in a book or otherwise limited by any finite condition such as nationality, gender, or religious tradition, then we have made God too small, and we who are made in God’s image then will also remain much too small.

In Exodus 32, we see a story about the hazards of idolatry.

Moses has gone up a mountain to commune with God. Mountain tops often represent the divine presence in ancient mythology and in our own scriptures. While Moses is away, the people get impatient and fear that without Moses to speak for God, they will have no experience of God. So they persuade Aaron to let them build a golden calf (probably representing Apis, the bull-god of Egypt).

When Moses comes down he sees this tribute to the past, this longing for the system that had oppressed them, and he goes berserk. Aaron tries to tell him that it all just mysteriously happened…people just randomly started throwing their gold jewelry into a camp fire and eventually out rolled this golden calf! Moses doesn’t buy it and he unleashes sheer terror on his own people. He’s angry that they want to “see” God, that they want God to be so small that God can be seen, known, understood, owned. And he’s especially angry that what they are worshiping is the past, and at that, a past that dehumanized them and from which they have escaped. Why would they ever want to go back to that?

However, Moses now, just one chapter later, is caught in the same temptation. He too wants to “see” God…not as a tribute to Egyptian oppression, not as a monument to the past, not as a golden calf, but still…he wants God to be manageable. He wants God to fit nicely into an image. He wants to see God’s face…he wants God to be small enough to fit into a single experience. And God says, “Never gonna happen!”

God reminds Moses that God’s Name is Un-Namable! For our own convenience we call God this and that—Elohim (Masc./Fem./plural)…El Shaddai (Almighty Breasted One)…Adonai (My Lord, or sovereign, or protector)…Spirit…Father…Mother…even “God” and all of these names and many more are found in our scriptures, which shows that no one name is good enough, big enough, sufficient enough. And there is another name for God that says just that…Yahweh. It’s a word we have to guess how to pronounce because it doesn’t contain vowels. It’s more a verb than a noun, and a to be verb at that. It means I Am what I am, or I will be what I will be, or I Am the One Who Is, or the Ground of Being. It’s similar in some ways to the Chinese Tao, the principle of life, un-namable, itself no-thing and yet the underlying reality of everything.

God in this story reminds Moses, “My goodness will be all around you, and I will announce my name…The One Who Is…but you can’t see me…I’m beyond images, things, finite perceptions…I am no-thing, the source and substance of all things…I don’t exist, I am existence…I’m not powerful, I am power…I’m not present, I am presence; omnipresence…I am all that is and the whole is even then more than the sum of its parts! I am eternity. I am infinity. Finite life can’t possibly see infinity. You can experience me, trust me, depend on me, but you will never see me, own me, limit me, fully know me.”

It calls to mind that old story about the blindfolded people who are led to an elephant and asked to describe it. The one touching the trunk describes the elephant as long, bending, strong but still flexible, wider at the top and narrower near the end. The one touching a tusk describes the elephant as hard, inflexible, strong, with a dangerous feeling point at the end. The one touching a leg describes the elephant as hard, round, unmovable until it moves itself, and heavy enough to crush you if you got in its way. Another person touching the tail describes the elephant at thin, frail, and smelly. What each person describes is their own experience of a much larger reality. With their blindfolds on they can’t experience the whole elephant, and even if they were to remove the blindfolds, they still would only see one side or maybe two…not the front, back, top, bottom, outside, and inside all at once. There’s just too much elephant to see from any one vantage point.

God must be infinitely more complex than an elephant.

When people say that only Christians can know God, or that God favors our country, or our allies, or that God wants men to be dominant over women, or that only opposite gender attraction can be holy and life-giving…when people say that God shares their prejudices, they are saying they have seen the face of God; but that isn’t possible. So what they’ve done is make their prejudices into an idol; they’ve made their god too small, and have kept themselves too small as a result.

The writer of the New Testament Letter to Timothy says that God is immortal and invisible (1 Tim. 1.17). Beyond sight. Or as we pray so often here, “God of many names, mystery beyond our naming”…which is to say, mystery beyond any single understanding or experience, beyond any name or image. Our God has no face, or, perhaps God has as many faces as are in the room, and billions more as well.

And the Apostle Paul said, “We live by faith, not by sight…” (2 Corinthians 5.7). People of faith don’t need to limit God to a text, a tradition, or ritual, a symbol, a name, or any other idol or graven image. We don’t have to see God as completely as one might see a snow globe or a lucky charm.

We can trust God, but not figure God out.

We can experience God, but never fully know God.

We can see something of God in nature, in art, in our loved ones, in ourselves, in our community, in our aspirations, in our dreams, even in our enemies, but whatever of God we think we see or know, God is still much more.

And if God is more, then we can still be more. We can grow more and more into the Truth of our being. We are of God and in God; we may can only see God from one side or one angle, like Moses, but also like Moses, we can experience God’s light and presence and develop an intimate trust in the one that cannot be named, seen, or defined. If we can let God be more, then we will discover that life can be more…filled with infinite possibilities, even miracles. God is more than we have believed, and so are we. This is the good news! Amen.

© Durrell Watkins 2011

AffirmationsI am more than I have believed.
I am more than I have expressed so far.
There are more blessings for me.
There are more miracles for my life.
There is more of God for me to discover.
There is also more of me.
Alleluia!
Amen.

Final Word
“Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you are alive, it isn’t.” Richard Bach

So Many Guests, So Many Meanings
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, Sunshine Cathedral
Philippians 4.4-9; Matthew 22.1-14 (Oct. 9, 2011)

Oscar Wilde once said, “Some people cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” And while it may not be obvious at first, I think happiness, or at least joy, is what our readings this morning are encouraging within us. The Apostle Paul encourages us to find reasons to rejoice even when situations are difficult, and Matthew gives an image of a life celebration. Both writers shared these missives during difficult times in their own lives.

Patricia is a woman in Kenya. She’s a church goer, and she always assumed that AIDS was a divine punishment on people who somehow deserved it. She thought God would protect good people and allow or even cause the unrighteous to contract it. That’s how she thought until she tested HIV positive. Then, she became one of the people she had always judged to be somehow beyond the reach of God’s love.

As a result of her diagnosis, she lost her job. She was depressed to learn that many people felt toward her the way she had always felt toward people living with HIV. But, she turned to God in prayer asking for comfort and strength and wisdom, and she says that her heart was changed as a result. Instead of judging others who have HIV, and instead of feeling like a helpless victim, she realized that she could actually be part of a solution to the AIDS crisis.

She learned about HIV and started talking about it in her church. She shared from her personal experience that judging people with HIV wasn’t helping the people living with the virus and it wasn’t helping the mission of the church. She got treatment, and she’s done very well. She is a living example of how medicine and hope combined can be a powerful and healing force in response to HIV/AIDS. Not only did she come out about her diagnosis and advocate for others, she also gave what she could of her personal resources to make a difference. In addition to raising her own five children, she took in five more children who had lost their parents to AIDS. She went from judging others to feeling like a victim to becoming a survivor, a teacher, an advocate, and a care giver for 10 children. She became a person of power who used her personal power to help and heal others. She now loves life and works for an AIDS education organization. She hasn’t single handedly changed everyone’s attitudes about HIV, nor has she discovered a cure for AIDS, but she has experienced healing even with HIV and she has found purpose and peace, hope and healing in her life and she has learned the joy of sharing those gifts with others.

Patricia discovered that nothing can separate us from the love of God, and as we embrace the power of that truth, we find happiness that we never had before.

The Gospel reading this morning may have a similar message for us.

In Matthew’s story, some Aristocrats throw a big party. Some aren’t interested in it, others are. And at least one person who shows up for it doesn’t stay. Matthew suggests the guest is thrown out for not being dressed properly. How did we go to begging anyone who would to show up to throwing someone out for not following a dress code?

Perhaps lost in translation, distanced from its historical and cultural context, there is a message of hope and grace. I will offer today 5 possible interpretations of the parable Matthew attributes to Jesus. You will need to choose which one appeals most to you.

#1 – The Non-Engaged Guest: Perhaps the royal party givers represent God and the ongoing invitations and the mixture of all kinds of people is meant to show that God is always calling all people to come into community, to share resources, and to experience life as a celebration. Just because we may not be ready at a certain moment to respond to the call to come into mutual community doesn’t mean that God ever stops offering it. Someone will hear the call, and respond with a whole life commitment. And so the call is repeated over and over and over. It never ends.

Maybe the person who is tossed out for not wearing wedding clothes symbolizes people who don’t allow themselves to experience joy; they don’t enjoy the blessings of the community because they’ve never fully engaged it.

They show up but don’t participate, or they participate with the expectation of getting a place of honor or privilege…they don’t “get” what the party is about so they don’t stay, or if they stay, they don’t have the same experience as those who are there to learn, share, and experience life in a more abundant way. People can be in the room, but not really be present. They are holding onto their grudges rather than the possibilities of healing and growth. They are holding onto their fears rather than embracing hope. They are trying to control others rather than trying to improve themselves. They are at the party, but not enjoying it, not participating in it, not sharing in the celebration. They aren’t tossed out by the host; they simply remain on the outside of things by their own choosing.

Is the story telling us that happiness within a faith community comes from being fully engaged? Participating with time, talent, treasure, prayer, worship, positive speech, goodwill, and faithfulness beyond personal issues, disappointments, and grievances?

#2 – The Marginalized God: Maybe it’s a misreading to see the Royals as God and the person tossed out as some kind of malcontent. Maybe the Royals are the privileged elite and it is their sense of self-importance and entitlement that excludes the marginalized, different person (the sort of person for whom God would have a preferential option, according to Liberation theologians). God may be the victim of cruelty in the story, not the perpetrator of it.

Is the story telling us that the person most unlike us, the one who seems most out of place, is the very person in whom we might have the most life-changing experience of God if we were only open to it?

#3 – Let the Host Be the Host: Maybe the story is simply telling us to not judge others. God will decide who is worthy and who isn’t. We just need to show up and realize that others are showing up too, and some of them may be very different from us. But we are guests, as are they, and it isn’t our job to decide which guests are “good” guests. We’re all beneficiaries of a feast we didn’t ask for, work for, or purchase. Maybe we should be fully present, and let others reap the harvest of their own planting. We don’t need to pass a lot of judgment; it isn’t our party. We just need to enjoy the hospitality and show our own gratitude.

Is the story telling us that we waste too much time with our judgments, finger pointing, accusations, and complaining; and while we are misusing our time and energy, we’re actually missing the party?!

#4 – Not Tossed Out but Coming Out?: We could view the story through the lens of our spiritual heroes this week. Thinking of National Coming Out Day (Oct. 11) and the remembrance of Matthew Shepard (Oct. 12), we might see the story as an allegory for our own lives. The party is the celebration of who we are and the affirmation of our sacred value. The marriage feast is a celebration of our union with the divine, all-loving Presence. The person dressed commonly is the one who doesn’t need to pretend to be anything other than she is, and because she is self-aware and Self-Realized, she is then sent out into the world of fear and hatred and loneliness to share the gifts she has received at the party. She knows who she is and she is now sent out to help others learn of their sacred value, and perhaps to bring them into the on-going feast as well. She isn’t tossed out, she has embraced the power of coming out and now she must live a life of fearless honesty as a model for others to follow.

Is the story telling us coming out as progressives, as friends of justice, as a community that recognizes the presence of God in heterosexuals and bisexuals and homosexuals and transgender people, indeed, in all people…that coming out strong with our empowering message of hope and healing is the path to happiness and wholeness?

#5 – The Castle & the Banquet Are Within: We could view the story through the lens of St. Teresa of Avila, another spiritual hero this week. St. Teresa compared the soul to an interior castle. Perhaps the Royal Party takes place within our own interior castle. The Spark of divinity within us calls out to every part of our being: our body-selves, our emotions, our sexuality, our intellect, our aspirations, our talents, our whole Selves to show up and to live integrated lives where we honor and celebrate all of who we are without needing to hide any part of us or deny the truth of our sacred value. The castle and the banquet are within us, and not until we find them there will we find them at all; we will forever feel excluded from the feast, unaware that it was for us and within us the whole time.

Is the story telling us that the presence of God and the Sacramental Feast of unconditional Love are always within us, and nothing outside of such an inward experience will bring us peace and joy?

Maybe each of these interpretations are appropriate for different ones of us at different times, depending on where we might be on our life journey? In any case, I am convinced that the story does not suggest that God rejects anyone for any reason.

Matthew imagines Jesus telling this story to make the point that the banquet of divine Love is open to all people. The Apostle Paul states it a bit more directly in his letter to the Philippians. Paul says, “rejoice always” and “keep your mind on [good things]” while he himself is sitting in a Roman prison cell! This shows that having a positive attitude doesn’t always control the situation, but it can keep the situation from controlling us.

I’m sure Paul would rather not be in prison; and I’m sure he actually hopes to get out of the jam he’s in. But right where he is, even if it isn’t the situation he would choose for himself, he chooses to believe that God is present to comfort, strengthen, and uplift. Paul trusts that a divine peace (“beyond understanding” – beyond what circumstances seem to justify) is available to him even in prison. The authorities can incarcerate his body, but nothing can hold his thoughts and attitudes prisoner without his consent. He doesn’t let circumstances dictate what he believes about himself or his relationship with God. And so, even in prison, a peace that passes understanding is available to him.

Paul isn’t rejoicing that he is in prison. He isn’t even rejoicing because he knows for certain when and how he’ll be released. He rejoices because even in the worst of circumstances, God is with him; and if God is with him, peace and even moments of joy are possible.

Life isn’t always easy; but for people of faith, it doesn’t have to be in order for us to experience peace, joy, and a sense of being at home in the universe. The world is always changing; sometimes to our liking and sometimes not. But when we know that nothing can separate us from divine love, then we can celebrate the good times and navigate the difficult times, and enjoy communion with God all the while. And this is the good news. Amen. © Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations:
I choose joy today. I embrace peace today. I focus on what is good. And I trust God to sustain me. Thanks be to God! Amen.

Final Word
“Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are.” Marianne Williamson

Now What?
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins
Sunshine Cathedral, Oct. 2, 2011

Gypsy Rose Lee famously said, “God is love; but get it in writing!”

Spirituality that a faith community is meant to foster, is the guarantee written on our lives that God is love, and that loving presence has a home and that heavenly dwelling place is none other than the human heart.

That message would ring clear as never before beginning in 1968.

Once again a new moment was called forth to enliven the Christian community, to loosen the imagined restraints on divine Love. 43 years ago, on October 6th, 1968, a gay defrocked Pentecostal minister had a worship service with 12 people in his living room. That minister was Troy Perry and the church he started on that divinely appointed day was Metropolitan Community Church, known affectionately as MCC, and Metropolitan Community Churches can now be found all over the world.

In the beginning, the mission and message of MCC was very simple…God loves gay people too. Such a simple message scandalized the larger Church. Whenever the prophetic voice calls out that God loves what society said was unlovable, it is a scandal, a divine, sacred, miraculous, world changing scandal. And that simple, positive, inclusive message was so uplifting and literally life saving for so many people, that MCCs started popping all over.

The message grew, expanded; you see, if we were marginalized, then integrity would demand that we seek not only our own liberation, but the liberation of all who had been marginalized. And so MCC started advocating for women’s issues, for a better understanding of transgender issues, and when AIDS broke out MCC was among the first to offer hope and compassion to people living with the virus, as well as comfort to those who were mourning losses from the viral onslaught.

By 1972 MCC had a woman pastor in Sacramento, and in 1973 Freda Smith was elected to the governing Board of Elders. Freda, an unapologetic feminist, challenged MCC to include women in every area of leadership and in the language used in worship and governance. Once again the world was shocked to learn that God is not a boy’s name. In addition to being an activist and a minister, Freda Smith is also a therapist and she would use sermons to offer emotional healing. For a problem in life, she would say, “Find it, face it, fix it, finish it, and forget about it.” When there is a challenge, a disappointment, and we’re tempted to say Now What? Remember Freda’s wisdom: Find it, face it, fix it, finish it, and forget it. In other words, move on, move forward. Release the past to the past and begin to embrace the infinite possibilities of the future. MCC had powerful leaders in the beginning, to be sure. And we still do…I think of the former Vice Moderator of MCC, Rev. Elder Don Eastman who is a member of this church and is a mentor to pastors all over the denomination. I think of public theologian Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson, our Presiding Elder and Moderator. And I think of the Rev. Dr. Robert Griffin who is not only one of our pastors he is also the Vice-Chair of MCC’s Governing Board…he is constantly encouraging us as a congregation and as a denomination to look forward, to move ahead, and to believe that we can be more than we’ve ever been before.

And MCC has touched countless lives for decades now with a simple gesture every week…the open invitation to share Communion. No matter what you believe about communion, no matter if you are a member of any church at all, MCC has stated without apology that if you dare to bring all of who you are to the Communion table God is big enough to make the ritual feast be whatever you need it to be! Months before the Stonewall Riots and half a decade before the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders, MCC was saying God doesn’t have step-children…We are ALL made in the image and likeness of God.

Years before there were medications to help manage HIV, MCC was saying, God is bigger than AIDS.

And even still, while churches argue over who can and can’t get married and who can and can’t receive Communion, and how much water it takes to make Baptism work, or how many times one can be baptized, MCC simply says as Jesus did, “Whosoever will, may come!”

MCC has forever changed the conversation of the global Christian family. In, through, and as MCC, God has done it again. Once again, a mighty wind has rushed through the upper room of human hearts, and new tongues are being spoken declaring in new ways that God’s love is all-inclusive and unconditional, never excluding anyone for any reason.

Four years after the birth of MCC, one of the first few MCC churches helped to start a new one in Broward County. The MCC in Miami helped pioneer a new church in Fort Lauderdale. The new parish would be called first, Church of the Holy Spirit, and then, Sunshine Cathedral. And 39 years later, we’re still here…reaching more people than ever before, still changing lives and offering hope and healing.

I’m so proud of MCC. I’m proud of what we’ve done. And I’m proud that Sunshine Cathedral is part of that great and noble story. But my question is, “Now What?”

We cannot rest on the achievements of the past. We cannot get stuck in the regrets of the past. We cannot fool ourselves into believing everything was accomplished in the past. We aren’t building a museum of history; we are building a highway to the future! There is always more to do. No matter how great yesterday was, today is calling us to new action and what we do today will create tomorrow’s world. So, now what?

The Apostle Paul had success as a Pharisee, a lay scholar. He then became part of the Christian movement, and then a leader of the movement. But he could not rest on his previous accomplishments; his resume would not take him into the future. He had been busy and successful in the past, and yet he says, “I consider myself to have taken hold of this…Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.” In other words, “Now What?!”

Jesus tells us in the gospel today that the kin-dom of God will be given to those who produce the proper fruits. Well guess what, WE are the proper fruits! We are the ones to move forward not into the familiar, but into the divine unknown. We are the ones to include new people and new kinds of people. We are the ones to do what has not yet been done; and to do what has been done even better and in new ways for new generations.

Guess what…our message is good for gay men.
Our message is good for lesbians.
Our message is good for people who don’t even know what they are yet because they never knew it was OK to ask the questions.
Our message is good for transgender men and women.
Our message is good for heterosexual people who are looking for a spirituality of unfettered joy and self-empowerment.
Our message is good for people struggling with meth addiction, and alcoholism.
Our message is good for people ready to heal from the abuse of the past.
Our message is good for people who want to come out of their closets of shame and into the light of self-acceptance.
Our message is good for people who are grieving significant losses.
Our message is good for people who need to know that they are the apple of God’s eye and not God’s mistake.
Our message is good for people who are tired from carrying around hate and fear and are ready to be set free.
Our message is good for single parents.
Our message is good for people who have been struggling with a call to ministry.
Our message is good for a world that needs to be reminded that God looks at everything that has been created and calls it all very good!

Thank God for MCC.
Thank God for Sunshine Cathedral.
Thank God for those who first dared to dream the dream of what could be.
Thank God for those who have added new dreams, knowing there is always more to be done.
Thank God for every person who loves this church, and who loves herself or himself a little more after finding this church.
And thank God for every person who prays for this ministry.
Thank God for every volunteer.
Thank God for every person who gives generously and consistently because they love this church and they believe in its mission and they want to reach more and more people with the good news that God doesn’t have one person to waste!
Men and women, queer and straight, there’s not a soul that God will hate!
Thank God for the time, talent, and treasure you give to make sure that more people will know that truth for themselves.

We have the history. We have the calling. We have the people. We have the talent. Now What?!

Now we pray for justice, for peace, for healing, we even pray for our enemies; because even if we can’t love them yet, we know God does.
Now we give with more joy and enthusiasm than ever before.
Now we recommit to reaching more people with truly good news.
Now we invite more people to share this miraculous experience that has added so much to our lives.
Now we say, “the past was pretty amazing, but you ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Now we strain toward what is ahead, determined to produce good fruit, affirming that the future has infinite possibilities and we allow ourselves to be the hands of God working miracles in our world.
Now we say – I’m ready to be all that God created me to be…my body is good, my sexuality is perfect, my gender identity is right for me, I value my mind, and I trust that God’s love leaves no one out.
And now we commit to sharing that good news with more people. Somebody still needs that message; will you help them hear it?

God is love, but get it in writing. Guess what? We are the writing! WE are the good news. And so it is!
© Durrell Watkins 2011

AffirmationsGod’s love can heal every heartache.
God’s love can renew every soul.
God’s love can mend what is broken.
God’s love is making me whole.
And so it is!

Final Word“You cannot uneducated the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.” Caesar Chavez

The Divine Mind Meld
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, Sunshine Cathedral (9/25/11)
Philippians 2.1-2, 5; Matthew 21.23-27, 31b-32

I grew up watching Star Trek, the television series. Then there was the Saturday morning animated Star Trek series. Then there were the Star Trek films. Then there were new Star Trek series: Star Trek – the Next Generation (LOVED IT), Star Trek – Deep Space Nine (kind of liked it for a minute but got over it quickly), Star Trek – Voyager (LOVED IT), and Enterprise (Snore).

Of course in the Trekkiverse, Klingons are mighty warriors, Ferengi are super-capitalists, Betazoids are telepathic, the Q are omnipotent, and Vulcans can perform what they call a mind-meld. A mind-meld is when a native of the planet Vulcan mentally connects with another sentient being, sharing memories, thoughts, and knowledge. The Vulcan and the one with whom she or he mind-melds essentially achieve a psychic unity, a mental inter-connected oneness.

That is exactly what I think of when I read St. Paul’s words to the Philippians, “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

There is a prayer often used in the Unity church. The prayer states, “I am centered and poised in the Christ Mind and nothing can disturb the calm peace of my soul.” To have the mind of Christ, to fill our minds with the mentality or attitude that was demonstrated by Jesus, we might say, to mind meld with Jesus is to find ourselves centered and poised, not allowing anything to rob our peace and joy.

We’ll get back to Paul’s exhortation to have the same kind of mind, or psyche, attitudes and habitual thinking as Jesus had. But first, let’s notice three important things about Jesus’ mindset from the gospel reading today:
1. Jesus trusted his own relationship to and with God.
2. He didn’t let his critics define him.
3. And he didn’t let the critics define others for him (Jesus affirmed those the religious establishment would call “sinners”).

In other words, Jesus chose what he would believe about himself, about God, and about his fellow human-beings. Jesus demonstrates that belief is a choice! Religious tradition said that certain people were sinners; Jesus said that many of those so-called sinners were closer to God than the religious institutions that condemned them! Jesus chose to not accept the prejudices that others claimed were the will of God! Jesus chose to believe that God was better than that and that God’s grace was more accessible than many had been preaching.

What we believe can’t be dictated to us in a creed; we must, as Paul said, “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling,” that is, we must take responsibility for our own thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs. Our hearts are not controlled by Salt Lake City or by Vatican City or by any centralized location of supposed religious authority. WE are responsible for what we believe, and we can choose to believe the best about ourselves, about our world, and about the God in whose image we are all made!

Our first reading this morning reminds us that our beliefs are like magnets. What we believe attracts circumstances, relationships, and situations that will validate those beliefs. If you believe you are an unworthy sinner, you will find ways to make terrible mistakes so you can then tell yourself, “See?!”

If you believe you are unattractive or loveable, you will repel people from you and you will find yourself being lonely or overlooked…not because you aren’t perfectly wonderful, but because you believe you aren’t perfectly wonderful, and so the people who show up in your life are those who will share the negative view you have of yourself.

If you believe you are unlucky, bad luck will seem to stalk you like a bad date who just couldn’t take the hint!

If you believe you can’t do something, then you will surely fail at that thing if you even pretend to attempt it in the first place.

If you believe God is punishing, you’ll never feel safe with your spirituality.

If you believe that illness is more powerful or more natural than the state of health, then your health may suffer as a result.

If you believe the world is out to get you, you fill find betrayal around every corner. No amount of praise will ever make you feel safe or appreciated or good enough until you choose, even without the praise of others, to feel good about yourself.

If you believe the world is intrinsically unsafe, you’ll find accidents and mishaps and danger all around.

It’s like this: when you are bowling, you want to keep your eyes on the pins you want to knock down; the ball tends to follow your focus. When you are driving, you want to keep your eyes on the road because the car will tend to follow your focus…if your attention drifts, the car may drift into a telephone poll! What we focus on we drift toward, create or attract. A belief is an opinion we have rehearsed until it has taken up residence in our consciousness; it is a thought we have focused so much energy on it seems obviously true to us. And having focused so much thought and energy into that belief, we will drift toward or attract that very thing. The writer of the book of Job said, “The thing I feared has come upon me.” Of course it did; fear is focus, and what we focus on we tend to drift toward, create, or attract.

But the good news is that focus works regardless of what we place our focus on. So, once we learn that our focus is on what is destructive or sabotaging or unhelpful, then we can change our focus and thereby change our experience! The situation itself will often change, but even when it doesn’t, how we interpret the situation and respond to it will change, and that in itself can seem like a miracle sometimes.

I have found myself in toxic situations…where people mostly want to gossip, complain, criticize, scheme, or hurl insults. When I get trapped in that, sometimes even participating in it, that never really feels good and nothing good much comes of it. But if I will inject positive speech, or choose to ignore the negative speech, or remove myself entirely from the situation, then my focus returns to what is positive, life-giving, and joyous. It may not change how others think or behave, but it totally changes my experience. I can’t change you; you can’t change me. We must each take responsibility for our own thoughts and beliefs.

In the gospel lesson today, Jesus chastises his opponents for not being willing to change their beliefs. He doesn’t tell them what opinions they have to hold or what non-provable thing they must blindly accept; he just challenges them to trust that God may be bigger and better than they have so-far imagined, and to believe themselves and others to be a little better than they’ve supposed as well.

When we change our thoughts, our attitudes, our habits, our focus, we change the direction of our lives. As Ernest Holmes and Norman Vincent Peale would say, “Change your thinking and change your life.” When I believe in scarcity, I experience it. When I believe that I am somehow separated from the Source of life, I experience lack or loneliness or fear or sorrow. But when I change my belief, and thank God we can, then my life gets back on track and things start to work out better again.

Napoleon Hill was a writer and teacher of success principles; he was also an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. Hill taught that beliefs determine much of our experience of life and if we are unhappy with our experience, we can change our beliefs and thereby change our experience.

Napoleon Hill is the one who famously said, “what your mind conceives and believes it can achieve…no matter how many times you’ve failed or how loft your goals might be.” He also said, “What your mind feeds upon it will attract” and, Hill also said, “We have the power to take possession of our minds.” In other words, we can change our beliefs. We can believe in ourselves. We can believe ours is a world full of potential. We can believe we deserve the best. We can believe we are capable of forgiving, worthy to be loved, and capable of success. Remember Jesus often said, “Let it be done to you according to your belief.”

Now, sometimes we’ll not be very honest with ourselves. We’ll say, “I’m very optimistic; I’m one of the most positive people I know…arrrgggghhhh!” Okie dokie. And we want that to be true. But our beliefs are really our habitual thoughts, and our habitual thoughts create feelings. So, once we notice how we feel, we know what we really believe. If we feel anxious, afraid, bitter, resentful, jealous…these aren’t happy or peaceful or constructive feelings. We didn’t get those feelings by holding onto hopeful, happy thoughts! If our feeling isn’t joyful, our thoughts aren’t positive, and once we realize that our thoughts aren’t what we’d like them to be, we can change them.

Now, some will argue that negative thoughts are sometimes appropriate. We do vehemently argue for our perceived limitations sometimes. And, true enough, no one is ever going to say, “Hallelujah I broke my toe” or “Zippity Do Dah the house is on fire” or “Oh happy day the dog just bit me.” There may be times that a moment of fear or caution is understandable, even appropriate. When the hurricane or tornado is coming your way, take cover! But if we are often angry, often resentful, often scared, often bitter, often complaining, then we aren’t just responding to a rare difficult occurrence; we are continuing a habit that is sabotaging our success, our happiness, and our fulfillment. And once we realize that, we can make a course correction. What the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

In the final analysis, we are each our own greatest asset, and/or our greatest obstacle. If we want to change our lives, we start by choosing beliefs that will serve us better. We start by choosing our thoughts more carefully. We start by letting the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus; that is, we open ourselves up to a divine mind meld. And we can, and as we do miracles will flow into our lives. And this is the good news! Amen. © Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations
I am centered & poised in the Christ Mind…
And NOTHING can disturb the calm peace of my soul.
Amen.

We’ll Never Outrun God’s Love
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, Sunshine Cathedral
Jonah 3.10, 4.1-11; Matthew 20.1-16

I love that song of Louie Armstrong’s.

The song takes some liberties with the details of the story of Jonah, but even so, it shows something very important…that Jonah tried to run from his purpose in life but even trying to run from God he actually finds his true purpose. He doesn’t like it, but he can’t escape from it.

We know this story from childhood, but there may be more to it than we realized as children.
There are three points that I want to share from this ancient myth:
1. God’s love is all-inclusive; it leaves no one out.
2. God really does answer prayer.
3. We have a purpose and nothing short of embracing it will make us happy.
We’ll return to those points in a few minutes.

As the story goes, a man named Jonah is suddenly (in the first verse of the story) called by God to go to Nineveh. This seems strange and even distasteful to Jonah because Nineveh is the capital of the Assyrian Empire. Assyria had conquered the kingdom of Israel and so Israelites tended to think of Assyria as their enemy.

Immediately, Jonah decides to book passage to what we now call Spain. Instead of dealing directly and generously with his perceived enemies, Jonah tries to go in the opposite direction. While on the ship sailing for Spain, a storm starts to brew. The superstitious crew members on the ship are afraid the storm is the result of the weather gods being displeased with someone on their ship. Superstitious people still tend to blame difficult situations or unpleasant experiences on the wrath of a deity rather than trusting the divine presence within them to help them successfully navigate the difficulty.

The crew members draw straws to see who on the ship has offended the spirits of the sea, and poor Jonah draws the short straw. As they believe he is guilty of causing the stormy weather, the crew sacrifices Jonah to the sea.

Then, as so often happens, a HUGE fish comes along and swallows Jonah whole. Jonah lives for about half a week in the belly of a fish. And having nothing else to do, Jonah reflects on what has happened. He tried to do exactly the opposite of what he believed God wanted him to do; he did the very opposite of what he knew was good. Along the way he gets in trouble and almost drowns; but is rescued by a fish of all things. So he gives thanks that he survived drowning and he reluctantly tells God as he understands God that he will go to Nineveh after all.

Just then (could the timing be more perfect?), the fish gets a tummy ache and projectile vomits Jonah right onto the shore of guess where…Assyria! Jonah brushes himself off and starts walking to the capital city, Nineveh.

Parenthetically – Nineveh is named for the fish god, Ninos, which is one of the Assyrian deities. Jonah is called by God to go to Fish City, and when he refuses, he winds up being carried to Fish City by a FISH. Whatever else you think about the story, that’s darn good writing!

In Nineveh, Jonah keeps his promise by interacting with the Ninevites. But he does as little as he can. In fact, he preaches a sermon and his sermon is one of the shortest sermons in human history, just one sentence long. He says to his audience, “Forty days from now Nineveh will be destroyed.” And he walks away.

“See God? I went to Nineveh. I interacted with the Ninevites. I even preached for them. Mission accomplished.”

Really Jonah? That’s your sermon? God hates you and is going to drop kick you into oblivion?

Well, the people of Nineveh don’t like to think that there is some angry deity laying a trap for them, so they start doing the spiritual work of discovering God for themselves and trying to serve God authentically. And apparently, that has a pretty good pay off, since 40 days came and went and Nineveh was not destroyed.

Jonah is devastated to learn that God does not in fact hate the people he hates. God is not going to destroy the people Jonah wanted destroyed. Apparently, God listens to their prayers and loves them too! Who knew? How could God be so gracious to the Hindus, I mean the agnostics, I mean the Leather community, I mean people living with HIV, I mean people in recovery, I mean people who have made difficult procreative choices, I mean Gay and Lesbian people, I mean transgender people, I mean the Ninevites…”those people”?

Jonah can’t stand that God is so gracious, well, so gracious to his enemies. He was happy enough to believe that God would rescue him from drowning even when he was trying to run from God; but being gracious to him is one thing. Being gracious to THOSE people is just something else!

And then Jonah starts to pray again, and this time, he gets pretty real. He’s desperate enough to tell God the truth! You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you start being brutally honest with God. Jonah prays, “I knew all along that you weren’t going to destroy Nineveh!” Jonah suspected all the time that God was better than he was portraying God to be. And so he stomps off to hide and sulk and pout. While he’s having his ongoing temper tantrum, a big weed pops up. And Jonah becomes very attached to the weed. This weed is suddenly his best buddy. Jonah, seriously, it’s a weed.

Then, overnight, as suddenly as the weed popped up, the weed dies. And Jonah is bereft! And in agonizing grief, drama queen Jonah cries out, “I wish I were dead!” And God finally says, “For real? Jonah, do you really need to feel so out of sorts?” And Jonah answers, “Sure do!”

And God shames him by saying, “Really? You care so much about a weed that that came into your life and left in just a couple of days? You didn’t plant it. You didn’t care for it. It was a weed already! But you can care so much for a weed and yet you can’t understand why I would care for all the people in Ninevah?” And that’s how the story ends.

The story reads like a dream or a fantasy or a fable. It is clearly more literary than literal. This is a fictional tale, but powerful and while it isn’t factual, it is very true. And what is true about it are the three points I mentioned in the beginning.

1. God’s love is all-inclusive; it leaves no one out.
Have you ever felt like a Ninevite? Someone that others seemed to want annihilated? Well, that was their prejudice, their hatred, their issue; not God’s. God’s love has never, will never, could never exclude you for any reason.

On the flip side, have you ever felt like Jonah? Glad and reasonably certain that God loved you, regardless of your mistakes, but you just didn’t understand how God could care for “them”? Maybe your worst fear was that God loved “them” too? Well, you may as well face your fear; because as St. Paul told the Romans, God shows no partiality. And as the writer of 1 John told his audience, God is love. How could Love ever be less than loving to anyone at any time for any reason?

Jonah didn’t want to believe that God could love the people he couldn’t yet love. That put him in a pickle, or between a rock and a hard place, or using the idiom of the story itself, in the belly of a fish. Whenever we are drowning in our own fears, hatreds, prejudices, and ill-will toward others, we find ourselves in the belly of fish. But healing comes from knowing that God’s love is all-inclusive; it leaves no one out.

2. God really does answer prayer.
Jonah prayed to God in the belly of a fish, in the quandary he found himself in when he knew that he should share the good news of God’s all-inclusive and unconditional love; but instead he simply wanted to run from the people he didn’t like, or if he had to deal with them, tell them that both he and God didn’t care much for them. Such hatred never feels good, never leads to wholeness or joy. And so Jonah turned to God in prayer and God responded by nudging him toward Nineveh to do what was right and good.
Then the Ninevites turned to God in prayer so that they could know God for themselves and live in the joy of an awareness of the divinity within them; and that prayer changed their lives.

And then when Jonah was miserable because he had to face that God really does love everyone, even those people we don’t, once again Jonah turned to God in prayer. And God spoke to his heart saying, “If you can care so deeply about the things in your life, how much more must I care for all life?” A life of real prayer will be a life of generosity, change, growth, renewal, and insight. God really does answer prayer.

3. We have a purpose and nothing short of embracing it will make us happy.
What is your purpose? To grow, to learn, to give, to share, to love, to discover the presence of God within you and then to see that same divine presence in All Life. We aren’t living our purpose when we are stuck in selfishness, or revenge, or self-pity, worry, or hatred. We’ve all been in the belly of that fish, and the healing comes when we stop running from God and embrace the light of love that is always with and within us. We’ll never outrun God’s love for us! The love that God is will never let us go. To accept our oneness with God and to share the light of that truth is our true purpose.

The story of Jonah, like our gospel today, is a story of grace. Grace isn’t earned and it can’t be lost. It’s freely given and no one is excluded from it. Grace is the nature of divine love. Maybe it’s time to stop running from the empowering truth that God’s love embraces us, and our friends, and our enemies. To remember this is to experience peace and hope and joy and even our share of miracles. God is Love and we are eternally in and of God. The Love that God is will never let us go; it will never let ANY of us go. And this is the good news. Amen.
© Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations
God is Love.
Divine Love includes me.
Divine Love includes us all.
And God’s love is working miracles now.
Amen.

Final Word
“Love one another and help others to rise to the higher levels, simply by pouring out love. Love is infectious and the greatest healing energy.” –Sai Baba

Rescuing God from the Rubble
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, Sunshine Cathedral
Sirach 27.30, 28.3-4, 7; Matthew 18.21-22

Robert and I were living in Western Maryland on September 11th, 2001. We lived an hour from DC, where one of the attacks occurred, and we lived about half an hour from where the plane in rural Pennsylvania went down. We lived 4 hours from New York City and I preached in a New Jersey suburb of Manhattan the very next Sunday. Two years later I was I a resident of Manhattan.

I had friends who were even closer to the catastrophe. A friend of mine in Brooklyn was walking across the bridge to her office in Manhattan and she actually witnessed the terrible event. We had friends who were on the subway on their way to the Trade Center that morning. We had friends who were separated from their spouses for hours without communication and were of course worried sick until they finally found their loved ones.

I had also friends in large cities all over the country, Chicago, LA, Boston, Dallas…wondering and worrying that the places they called home could be next. It was probably the scariest day I remember since the days before there were effective treatments for HIV.

But of course, we got past that terrible day. People from all over the country flocked to New York City to offer help in any way they could. People just showed up with garbage bags and shovels and water bottles, offering to donate blood, volunteering their time and concern in an effort to help our largest city heal.

Stories came out about courageous people confronting their attackers on the airline that went down in Pennsylvania.

We learned about the bravery of Father Mychal Judge, a Fire Department chaplain who lost his life that day.

We heard stories of people being lifted from the debris by anonymous heroes they never saw and were never able to thank.

We saw Broadway and Off-Broadway performers inviting the world to New York with a stubbornness that suggested that in truth, the human spirit is indomitable.

We saw people of many religions coming together to pray together in ways that some of them had not done before.

We saw musicians giving concerts to raise money to help relieve suffering.

We saw signs at barber shops and doughnut shops and auto repair shops invoking blessings upon America.

We saw people helping one another, moving past their fears in the moment of crisis, showing compassion for those who were hurting, and finding ways to face their grief and heal from it.

About an hour from New York City, a group gathered at a coffee shop on 9/11. It was a small group of Christians and members of the Jewish faith. The coffee shop was convenient for them so they stopped by every morning for coffee on their way to work, and they just saw one another so often they learned each other’s names and occupations and one of them was a Protestant minister. The owner of the coffee shop was an immigrant from the Middle East, and he was Muslim. He treated his customers very well and just as this group grew fond of each other they were also fond of him; after all, it was his establishment that had brought them all together. They were friends because of his business.

On 9/11, even though they had already all been to the coffee shop for their morning breakfast on the run, those friends returned to the coffee shop to see about their friend, the owner. They were worried that he would be grieving that people had so misrepresented his religion; that people had done terrible things in the name of the God that is shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews. They worried that unkind or unthinking people would take out their pain and grief on him, even though he was a friendly neighborhood shopkeeper. Christians and Jews and at least one Muslim gathered that day to support one another, to offer love and friendship and goodwill, and they even, can you believe, prayed together. What a sacred, God-filled moment that must have been.

Hatred struck a blow on 9/11, but the Spirit of Life would not, could not be snuffed out.

The Nazis in World War 2 couldn’t defeat the omnipresent Spirit of Life.

The devastating attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not defeat the Spirit of Life.

Jim Crow could not defeat the Spirit of the Life.

The Vietnam War couldn’t defeat the Spirit of Life.

The AIDS crisis couldn’t defeat the Spirit of Life.

Misogyny, violence against women and children, racism, homophobia, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, Alzheimer’s, addictions, economic downturns have all failed to wipe out hope and resilience and the determination to not only survive but to also thrive. Whenever we have been tempted to believe too much in the diabolical, collectively we have time and again corrected that mistake by rising up and proving that the fiercest illusion of evil cannot destroy human dignity or the divine spark from which that dignity shines.

We can and ought to celebrate our resilience. We ought to be filled with reverence and gratitude that even such a terrible tragedy is not beyond the hope of healing. But there are also lessons to learn.

Every Sunday we pray, “May peace prevail on earth.” It’s a powerful and beautiful prayer in its own right. But it is even more incredible when we consider its origin. Masahisa Goi thought of the Peace Pole and the Prayer that is on it, “May peace prevail on earth.” We have such a pole on our front lawn. Masahisa Goi dreamed up the Peace Pole and its prayer in Japan in 1955, just one decade after the nuclear holocaust two cities in his country experienced. He didn’t pray for revenge, or even for safety or healing just for his people, but his prayer was that PEACE would prevail throughout the entire world. There are now over 100,000 peace poles with that prayer on them in almost 200 countries. What a powerful witness; what a powerful prayer. May peace prevail on earth.

That prayer represents a generosity of spirit that absolutely must lead to healing. Jesus tells Peter in the Gospel today that we must try to forgive over and over and over until we actually are able to let go of our rage and our thirst for vengeance. Forgiveness takes work, we may have to attempt it repeatedly, but our own healing is tied to it, so it’s worth the work.

We are given that same lesson in the reading from Sirach. Roman Catholics grew up with Sirach in their canon of scripture. Anglicans grew up with it as instructive if not canonical, as part of a group of texts connecting the Old and New Testaments. For others, Sirach may be new.

Jesus ben Sirach wrote his book of wisdom teachings about 180 BCE. He revealed in his opus the tensions in Jerusalem at the time. In an environment of conflict, which included economic injustice and political intrigue, one might wonder how individuals could experience personal, emotional healing. Sirach suggests that forgiveness is the way. Forgiveness heals personal hurts and strained relationships; in fact, forgiveness is a staple of a just society.

We naturally demand accountability, but we often confuse holding people accountable with exacting revenge. We forget that restorative justice is more healing than retributive justice tends to be. Confrontation without vengeance is possible.

A few hijackers committed odious acts on 9/11/01. They blasphemed their religion when they did; and we blaspheme our own when we use their reprehensible act as an excuse to hate people who had no part in it.

I can promise you that God in no way ordained those attacks, and every cry for help and every moan of agony was heard by God that day and the first tear shed on 9/11 was God’s. But while God’s heart was broken that day, as were ours, that painful moment was not the end of the story.

People helped one another. People grieved their losses and remembered their loved ones. People shared. People hoped. People demonstrated courage and compassion, diligence and dignity. And those moments were resurrection moments where the glory of God was allowed to shine and where healing began to take place. We saw humanity at its worst that day; and we saw humanity at its best. Jesus son of Sirach, and 200 years later, Jesus son of Mary, both tell us how to be our best. We pray, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” We pray, “may peace prevail on earth.” We pray, “wherever I am, God is, and all is well.” And those prayers will be answered.

The attacks of 9/11 are well behind us now. But there are other sources of pain in our lives, other opportunities to forgive, other opportunities to express generosity, hope, goodwill, compassion; other opportunities to heal from the past and move forward into a glorious future. Are we ready to embrace those opportunities in our lives?

In the Tim McGraw song we heard at the opening of the service, “Live Like You Were Dying,” we heard good advice. When faced with mortality, the character in the song shares how he decided to make the most of the time head, no matter how long that time might be. He says: “I loved deeper and I spoke sweeter and I gave forgiveness I’d been denying.”

Could healing be that simple? Could it be as simple as loving, and giving, and forgiving? If we can rely on the witness of scripture, then such healing really is possible; it’s always possible. No matter what has happened in our lives, we can still turn within and find that God, divine love is with us no matter what is happening around or even to us; and as we express that love we can rescue God from the rubble, and in turn, God can rescue us. And this is the good news. Amen.
© Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations
I am loving, giving, and forgiving.
In the name of God,
And by the power of God,
I am experiencing healing now.
Amen.

Final Word

“We’re not about what happened on 9/11. We’re about what happened on 9/12.”
–Jeff Parness, founder of New York Says Thank You

A Golden Gospel for a Golden Life
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins
Romans 13.8-10; Matthew 18.18-20

Golden Girl clip (1:35)

Everything I ever needed to know I learned from “The Golden Girls.” The Golden Girls offered a sort of corrective for religion gone bad.

First, they formed an ecumenical community. Rose was Lutheran, Blanche was Baptist, and Dorothy and her mother Sophia were Catholic. Sophia practiced a syncretic form of Catholicism that included rural Sicilian folk-magic. Many of their friends were Jewish. They didn’t have to all believe the same things as long as they believed in themselves and in one another.

Secondly, they realized that humanity is diverse and there is something good in all people. And there are all kinds of people in the world of the Golden Girls:

Each of the four women has a healthy attitude about her sexuality and celebrates her the physical experience of life by sharing intimacy with a partner, or in Blanche’s case, a long series of many partners (let the one without a lifetime of tricks cast the first stone!).

Rose has a sister who has lost her sight.
Dorothy has a son who marries an older woman.
Dorothy also has a dear friend who is lesbian and Blanche has a brother who is gay.
And Blanche’s widowed father winds up marrying a much younger woman.
Sometimes these differences cause them to need to examine their attitudes and beliefs, but in the end, their love for their dear ones is always what matters most and differences are finally embraced and often celebrated.

Thirdly, they demonstrate the prospering power of generosity. While Blanche owns property, none of the women make enough money on her own to live alone. Sophia lives on a pension and the other three women work part time, until Rose later becomes a television producer. But their limited incomes don’t mean they have to have a limited experience of life. They live together, sharing the burden of the mortgage and utilities and food, and by sharing they find they have plenty and actually live quite a comfortable lifestyle. Sharing empowers them to prosper, and connects them intimately with one another so that they are never alone in moments of need.

Finally, The Golden Girls demonstrate the need for the Golden Rule. We know the Golden Rule from Matthew 7.12, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” (I remind our fundamentalist friends of this teaching when they try to deny same-gender loving people equal rights and standing in our society).

In the clip we started with this morning, we see Blanche and Rose sniping at each other, and in their petty personal battle, they wind up insulting and hurting Dorothy. When they behave selfishly, they hurt one another. But eventually they always realize that they their love for one another is more important than the petty issues that try to divide them from time to time, and so they always reconcile, reaffirm their love and commitment to one another, and return to a life of shared joy as a result. They always get back to treating one another with the love and respect with which they would like to be treated themselves.

The Golden Girls ought to be a required course in every seminary and a standard part of every church’s religious education curriculum! At Sunshine Cathedral, it kind of is.

We can find the Golden Girls Gospel in the Gospel reading we heard this morning.

We picked up with verse 18, but if we backed up just there more verses we would see Jesus giving the spiritual community instruction on how to avoid destructive conflict. In verses 15-17 Jesus acknowledges that in communities people will sometimes act out and cause unnecessary trouble. He challenges the community to deal directly with the person who is being cantankerous and if repeated attempts at direct dealing fail, then the community should stop giving energy to the antagonist all together.

After his missive on direct dealing and fair play, Jesus continues with verses 18-20 which we heard this morning, where he says that what we bind will be bound in heaven and what we loose will be loosed in heaven. That is, what we hold onto in consciousness sticks with us, and what we release from our habitual thinking and attitudes can no longer drag us down. Binding and loosing is about forgiving one another. Either by dealing directly with one another and working out our problems, or if that doesn’t work, then moving on and releasing the person who won’t embrace fair play, but one way or the other we have to release our animosities, our grudges, our complaining, and our bitterness because until we release them, loose them, they remain bound in our souls and they keep us bound and unable to thrive.

And then Jesus gives the most encouraging statement. He says when we gather together, in our large, corporate worshiping community or even in small gatherings where there may be just two or three of us…in a class, at lunch or dinner, having coffee or drinks, or chatting in the social hall or on Facebook or on the phone…when we gather together, no matter how small the gathering, when we do it in Jesus’ name, that is, with the integrity and goodwill that Jesus modeled, then all the goodness he represents is present with and in us, and we’ll be stronger as a group, and happier as individuals. “Wherever two or three or gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”

Jesus is helping us today build authentic community, an orderly and loving community. When there are disagreements, deal directly with the offending party rather than telling everyone at Scandals and Rosie’s and Starbucks that he or she is Satan’s toe jam. And if you just can’t work it out one on one, and if mediation doesn’t seem to help or if all parties aren’t open to it, then release the relationship so you can find it in your heart to forgive the person and move on with what matters in life. You don’t have to hang out with someone who isn’t nice to you, in fact, you probably shouldn’t! Who wants to be around negative people?! But until you forgive, you are hanging out with them anyway, in your head. You want them out of there…then let them go, loose them…forgive them.

Release the hurt feelings. Release the grudges. Release the temptation to gossip. Release the habit of complaining. Release it; let it go. Loose it, and move back into the light of healing. It’s a process…we all have to work on it – God knows I do; but it’s worth the effort. At times I have resisted forgiving, but I have never once regretted forgiving once I’ve done it.

Until we truly learn to love ourselves, we’ll never have much harmony in our lives. Until we release our fears and anxieties and worries, how could we ever release our hatreds, since they are usually projections of how we feel about ourselves?

Jesus quotes Leviticus 19.18 when he says, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10.27). And the fact is we will never love our neighbor until we love ourselves. Love your neighbor as yourself, because really, that is what we’ve always been doing…loving our neighbor as much, or as little, as we love ourselves. The racist, the homophobe, the sexist, the xenophobe, the anti-Semite…they’ve found a group to attach their hatred to, but their real dissatisfaction is with themselves. You can’t love yourself and hate an entire group of people; it just isn’t possible.

We try to bully our way to importance, or buy our way to importance, or manipulate our way to importance, but none of that ever makes us feel truly good about ourselves. We have to start accepting our innate importance! We are going to have to start believing in ourselves, forgiving ourselves for those silly mistakes we’ve made along the way; we’re going to have to be good to ourselves before we are going to be able to be consistently good to others.

That’s why the bible counsels us over and over to examine and work on our thoughts and feelings and attitudes:

“The worries of this life…come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.” Mark 4.19; “Let the Spirit change your way of thinking…” Ephesians 4.23; “…Do not conform to the unhealthy attitudes you had when you lived in ignorance…” 1 Peter 1.14. We know a better way now, and by practicing what we know, we’ll demonstrate more peace in our lives.

We have to release the fears, the self-condemnation, the anxieties, the sense of not being good enough, because until we do, we will never love ourselves enough to show love to others sufficiently enough to heal our world. How do we start loving ourselves more, feeling better about ourselves, believing in ourselves? A Course in Miracles says a miracle only takes a little willingness. And Dr. Robert Holden said in this morning’s second reading, “Intention rules the world.” We begin with the desire, the willingness, the intention to start loving ourselves more, believing in ourselves more, and demonstrating our divine goodness more and more, starting today.

We’ve been doing a lot of binding in our lives; it’s time to do some loosing…loose the fear and worry and all those other negative attitudes by which we sabotage our relationships and our happiness. As we remove those things from our consciousness, we will begin to develop the life of achievement and joy that we all deserve and desire. We can do it; together we will do it. And this is the good news. Amen.
© Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations
I am willing today to love myself. I choose today to believe in myself.
I allow healing to take place in my emotions now.
I am blessed. I am a blessing to others.
Divine light shines through me now.
And so it is.

Final Word
“Light of the world…Shine on us all, set us free. Love is the answer.” England Dan & John Ford Coley

I Am___(& I Get to Fill in the Blank!)
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins
Sunshine Cathedral (8/28/11)
Ex. 3.1-14; Matt. 16.24-28

I love Will.i.am’s stage name. Of course, he was born with the name William, but has used Will.i.am as one of his stage names for decades now. How clever to convert William to Will.i.am! To use I AM as one’s name! To consciously say every time he gives his name, Will.i.am, I am Will, I know who I am. What a great symbol for us all.

And I also love that short video he did for Sesame Street, where he begins with a powerful statement of truth: “If what I am is what’s in me then I’ll be strong that’s who I’ll be and I will always be the best me I can be.” I wish children heard that in churches more and not just on Sesame Street. If we had internalized that message early in life, how much happier we’d be, and what a blessing to our world we would be. Of course, it’s never too late to learn it.

That entire song is just one empowering affirmative declaration after another. Will.i.am sings, “There’s nothing I can’t achieve because in myself I believe.”

And then he has the muppets practice the power of I AM statements. He has them say:
What I am is –
Thoughtful, Brave, Special, Smart, Super, Magical

If we can get children to believe in themselves in that way, we won’t need anti-bullying campaigns, because children who love and believe in themselves won’t need to tear down others in order to feel better about themselves; neither will adults.
And children who love and believe in themselves won’t grow up to terrorize and demonize people who embrace the fluidity of gender, or who celebrate their love for someone of the same gender, or who know that God could never be limited to a single country, religion, or any group.

Now, the Will.i.am song also shows how the power of I AM can be used negatively. While some are pulling what is wonderful into their I-Am-ness, saying, What I AM is special or smart or magical, there is also Oscar with his trash can consciousness boldly declaring that what he is, is “grouchy.” And he gets to be. I AM works as powerfully in one direction as in another…As long as Oscar thinks of himself as a grouch surrounded by garbage, he will continue to have that very experience. But the Count and Bert and Grover and Big Bird and the others are making more empowering choices that lead to hope and joy, as they affirm, “I AM special, I am brave, I am super”

We see a very similar message in the first reading we heard today.

When Moses left Egypt and settled in Midian, he married Zipporah. In today’s story we see Moses, working for his wife’s father, Jethro, leading a flock of sheep. And he takes the flock to Mount Horeb, where he encounters an angel of God who speaks for God from a burning bush that somehow never burns up.

Now, before we go on, we have to acknowledge that even just this much of the story is filled with symbolism. The story, in addition to imagining how Moses might have felt called to the work of pursuing justice for his people, is also an allegory for our own spiritual journeys.

So far we see Moses leading a flock…so we know he has leadership potential because he is already leading…sheep, instead of people, but still, he must have some kind of organizational skill and he is developing it as he leads sheep.

What do sheep represent? Innocence. There is something innocent, sacred, gentle, divine within all people, and Moses is called to see that quality in his people and call it forth and lead them forward into an experience of liberation.

And where has Moses led these sheep? To Mount Horeb. Mountain tops often symbolize the divine presence, and this mountain in particular represents being in the presence of the Holy. Moses calls forth the innate goodness of people and then leads them into a life-giving experience of God. Isn’t that what we all are seeking as we form and build a worshiping community together?

Next we see that on this mountain Moses experiences God in a dramatic way. He encounters an angel, a messenger of God, speaking for God in a burning bush that never burns up.

Let’s stop again. The angel of God is a messenger of God, or in our experience, perhaps thoughts of God that lead us deeper and deeper into an experience of God. Where is the angel, the symbol of God’s presence? In a burning thorn bush. Moses has fled for his life from Egypt, and gone from being nobility in the empire to working for his father-in-law tending sheep in the outback. He’s had some hard times, some fear, some pain, some disappointments. Where is God when everything is a mess? Where is God when it hurts? God is present! Pain doesn’t chase God away; even in the difficult moment God is there. What could be more uncomfortable than a burning thorn bush in the desert, but that is exactly where Moses finds the angel of God’s presence…in the uncomfortable place. Where is God in our moment of distress? Right there with us.

The bush burns but doesn’t burn up. It experiences heat, but it isn’t destroyed by it. When we feel like we’ve been through the fire, yes it was hot, but we’re still here. The fire burned, but it didn’t destroy. So rather than obsessing on the pain, we can choose to celebrate our survival! God was with us, not causing the trouble but neither abandoning us in it, and on the other side, we survived. Maybe we learned a few things about ourselves along the way. And we have more to accomplish still in our lives!

The voice calls to Moses from the bush, “Moses!” and Moses answers, “Here I am.” I am right here, fully present in this moment…fully present with my innocence (the sheep) and with God (the mountain), present even in my distress (the burning bush). In the moment of mindfulness, we are present, we are here now, we are open to miracles.

Now, the voice from the burning bush tells Moses, “Come no nearer. Take off your sandals; you are on holy ground.” ”Come no nearer.” Why shouldn’t we come nearer to God? Because there is no nearer to be! Right where we are, God is! We don’t need to approach a flaming angel, we’re already on the mountain. Right where we are is holy ground! Begin your worship right where you are, as you are, because that is exactly where God is…you are on holy ground!

Now, we know that God doesn’t cause suffering. And we’ve considered that God is present with us through suffering. But does God do anything to relieve suffering? The story suggests that God does.
The voice from the bush says, “I’ve seen the misery of my people.” God knows. We are in God’s presence, and God is in ours. We are part of God; God is part of us. We are never separated from God. God knows the suffering of God’s people, and God suffers with them, with us. God is infinite compassion. Compassion means “to suffer with.” God is with us in our sufferings, aware, holding us, crying with us, and prompting us to help ourselves and one another.

How does God propose to rescue the suffering people? By calling Moses to lead them! What God does for us, God does through us. We are God’s hands. God is expressed through us, through what we are.
Here I am, God. And that means that I am available for God, through me, to make a difference. My words, my expressions of hope, my goodwill, my generosity, my faithfulness, my courage, my cooperation, those are the ways that divine Love is expressed and through that expression, healing can take place. Here I Am.

Now, not only does Moses say, “Here I am,” but look at the next part of our story. Moses asks, “What shall I say the name of our God is?” And the answer is, “I AM who is…” I AM is one of the names of God! Never say I Am something negative – that is taking God’s name in vain. Always follow the power of the divine name I AM with something positive and wonderful.

God is the Ground of Being, the Substance of all that is, Pure Being made manifest in/through/as creation, the creation that includes us and that is very good. The I AM, through Moses (“Here I am”), speaks out against injustice and for liberation. God is our life, and we are how God is expressed in this life. We need God and God needs us. It’s a partnership, a truly holy UNION. The Great I AM is forever part of all that we are. Here I am, with God, in God, and God in me. “If what I am is what’s in me then I’ll stay strong that’s who I’ll be and I will always be the best me I can be.”

In the gospel reading, Matthew has Jesus suggest that there would be people in that first century audience who would still be alive for the return of Christ; but then later in the gospel, Matthew will have Jesus say that he never left us and never would (“Lo, I am with you always!”). When we allow ourselves to be individually the expression of God, and collectively the body of Christ on earth, then that is how Christ never leaves and also returns. In reality, the Christ spirit never leaves, and in our experience, it is here in a new way for us as we allow ourselves to be fully present in new ways. Here I am.

The I AM is experienced on the mountain, and continues to be experienced in community, the church. We are the on-going story of the Great I AM. And so we get to say I AM…and then we get to fill in the blank. This is the good news! Amen. © Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations
In the name of the Great I AM…
I declare that I am hopeful.
I am courageous.
I am magical.
I am loving and loved.
I am receptive to miracles.
And so it is.

Who Are You?
Rev. Dr. Durrell Watkins, Sunshine Cathedral
Romans 12.1-2; Matthew 16.13-20 (Aug. 21, 2011)

That’s a list of incredible souls, isn’t it?

Dr. King, President Kennedy, President Mandela, Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Einstein, the student protester in Tiananmen Square, singers, athletes, inventors, peace and justice workers…tough acts to follow, or are they?

Our scripture readings today suggest that these heroes and achievers are expressing what is true of all of us; they are just the ones to show us that it’s possible. They aren’t exceptions to what we are; they are examples of what we really are.

Eric Butterworth taught, “We are human in expression, but divine in creation and limitless in potentiality.” That’s what the Apostle Paul is telling us today. That is what the writer of Matthew’s gospel is telling us today. There is a Power within us, not just some of us but within all of us which is limitless and it seeks to be expressed through us and we honor this divine Presence when we allow it to express through us. We won’t all be president or famous inventors or Olympic athletes, but we can each be happy and loving and generous and hopeful, and as we allow ourselves to express those divine qualities we will be contributing to our healing and the healing of the world.

How, though, do we make contact with these divine qualities within us and then allow them to flow through us into expression?

In our first reading, that ancient sage who learned to be the embodiment of compassion, the Buddha said, “We are formed and molded by our thoughts.” That’s the secret, isn’t it? We express the best by learning to believe the best about ourselves. We express the best by learning to look for the best. We express the best by developing the habit of speaking forth what is good and helpful and hopeful and encouraging.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable…and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.” Philippians 4.8 (NLT).

Has self-pity, or fear, or gossip, or complaining, or predicting doom, or expecting failure, or looking at every opportunity as a burden, or tearing down others rather than simply being your best ever brought you peace or hope or happiness? Probably not. Which is why St. Paul says try something different: Fix your thoughts on what is good!

Think of circumstances and situations and emotions as little fires. And think of our focused attention as lighter fluid.

There is a fire of dread. There is a fire of failure. There is a fire of self-loathing. There is a fire of fault-finding (there’s lots of those little fires, aren’t there?). There is a fire of perpetual anxiety (I’ve warmed my hands at that fire many times).

And there is a fire of hope. There is a fire of encouragement. There is a fire of goodwill. There is a fire of opportunity. There is a fire of healing. On which fires are we going to pour that lighter fluid? Fire is fire and fuel is fuel…whichever fire we pour the fuel on will get bigger and brighter and hotter. How many times have we developed the habit of pouring our fuel on the wrong fire?

Instead of building the fire of warmth in the fireplace, the fire that cooks delicious food in the stove, the fire that provides light and heat to toast marshmallows and hot dogs on a camping trip, we sometimes, out of sheer habit, build the fires that destroy forests and homes. Which fires are we building? Which fires are we feeding with the fuel of our focus?

Winston Churchill said, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” Which kind of person are we? And which kind will we choose to be from now on? If our first response to opportunity is to talk about how it is likely to fail, or how inconvenient it is that we can’t control every aspect of it, then we may sabotage or miss out entirely on that opportunity. But if we can train our minds to see what is good, to focus on the good, to praise the good, to invite the good, to accept the good, then guess what? Good is much more likely to be what we experience!

The Apostle told the Romans to present their bodies, their physical, lived experience, as a living sacrifice. In ancient times, sacrifices often meant death. You killed a bull or a goat or a ram to sacrifice to the deities. Sacrifice was deadly, bloody, messy, scary. Paul says to make life, not death, but life our sacrifice, our gift to the divine. Death, pain, destruction, negativity…these aren’t worthy sacrifices for the spirit of Life; Life is best praised by living well! You’ve heard that quote that has been attributed to every positive thinker who has ever written anything at all, but it’s true: “What you are is God’s gift to you; what you do with yourself is your gift to God.”

Make your lives the gift you give to Spirit. This more positive way of looking at things may take a change, but it is a transformative, healing, life-giving change. And so Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

Of course, Paul is building on the witness of the prophets. Hosea said that God wants us to show mercy, not to destroy life: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice…” Hosea 6.6

The prophet Micah said that instead of negative, destructive, fearful things, God desired more uplifting offerings. He said, “This is what is required of you, only to do justice and love mercy and live humbly with your God.” Micah 6.8

And one of the contributors to the book of Isaiah said that God doesn’t want pain and suffering and despair and fear and heartache from us. Those deadly attitudes are represented by the killing of animals, but in the very first chapter of Isaiah we read the prophet imagining God to say, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?…I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls or of lambs, or of goats…[Instead of killing, just] cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.” Isaiah 1, NIV. Sounds an awful lot like make your lives a living sacrifice.

We may not have slaughtered a lot of animals in our time, but we have killed hope, and we have killed joy, and we have killed the expectation of miracles. Stop the killing the prophets say, and Paul joins them by saying, “Live your lives in such a joyous, generous, optimistic way that your life is an offering of worship to God.” It’s a new way of thinking for some of us, which is why he tells us we’ll need to be transformed by learning to think in more optimistic, joyful, life-giving ways.

Dr. H. Emilie Cady taught, “Deny apparent evil; affirm good. Deny weakness; affirm strength. Deny any condition that is undesirable and affirm the good you desire. That is what Jesus intended when he said, ‘The things you desire, when you pray, believe that you receive them and you shall have them.’”

Now, I know that we each bear our own unique pain. Some of us were abused as children. Some of us have been in dysfunctional relationships. Some of us have landed on hard times. Some of us have been betrayed or abandoned by friends. Some of us have been given frightening diagnoses. Some of us have experienced profound grief. But renewed minds can help us recover from the pain; we can learn to give life a new chance to unfold in more joyous ways for us. We must stop sabotaging our opportunities because the past was painful. We have to learn to heal from the past so we can see and seize the opportunities that are before us today.

Have you had difficulty, disappointments, challenges? Good. Then you are the perfect candidate for a renewed mind, in fact, who needs it more? That patron of camp St. Oscar Wilde said, “the basis for optimism is sheer terror.” And it’s true. Because we have known pain, we need and deserve healing, and to experience the healing we deserve and desire we must turn from the pain of the past and toward the hope that Life is always trying to offer.

Dr. King said, “We must accept finite disappointment but we must never lose infinite hope.”

John Updike reminded us, “Dreams come true; without that possibility, Nature would not incite us to have them.”

And Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh counsels, “People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong…Why not try to see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?”

Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter said, “You are anointed.” That’s what Christ or Messiah means. You are anointed. But the question has two applications. Who do you say that I am, the person Jesus standing before you Peter? And, when you use the words “I AM”, who then do you say, “I AM”? Like the heroes we began with a few moments ago, Jesus is the example, not the exception. He is anointed, chosen, God-filled, and so are we. He demonstrates what is waiting within each of us to be demonstrated. And that understanding is the rock solid foundation against which negativity can have no power.

Jesus also says, “What you bind will be bound and what you loose will be loosed.” The baggage we hold onto, we get to keep; and what we let go of is released into the nothingness from which it came, freeing us to embrace new possibilities. Are you tired of being bound by past mistakes, by past failures, by past disappointments? Release them. Loose them. Let them go, and be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Know that the I AM of your being is blessed, chosen, loved, anointed, and forever one with God. That’s who you really are, and this is the good news! Amen.

© Durrell Watkins 2011

Affirmations
I Am willing to be healed.
I Am ready to be happy.
I Am generous, kind, and hopeful.
I Am anointed.
I Am blessed.
And so it is!

Final Word
“A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.” Herm Albright