LUKE 7:36 – 8:3

Our celebration of Easter was one of the most joyful experiences I have had on an Easter Sunday.  Now, as I shared in my sermon last Sunday, we are in ordinary time, day to day living.  Most of our days are lived in ordinary time.

One of my favorite biblical stories is Jesus being invited to the home of Simon the Pharisee.  Simon believed in what his religion taught, even when it was hard for him to believe it.  Simon followed the rules, even when the rules were hard to follow.

Into Simon’s house comes a woman who Luke says is a sinner, but he never says why.  All we know is that her life was such that everyone in the community considered her to be a sinner.  One assumption is she may have been a prostitute; maybe.  There are a lot of ways to be considered a sinner, not all of them sexual.  Maybe she had cooked the books, maybe she had stolen, maybe she was addicted to something, maybe she was mentally ill.  We don’t know.

She brought with her a jar of ointment.  Ointment that would be used to perfume a body during the time between the person’s death and his burial; it was very expensive.  People would buy a teaspoon at a time whenever they had money left over, and they would keep it hoping there would be enough to take care of their bodies after they died.

This perfume became a person’s saving account.  If things got really tight, they could sell a quarter teaspoon to someone to help them make it through the week or the month.  This woman brought her life savings in an alabaster jar, and clearly brought it meaning to anoint Jesus.

Simon the United Methodist raised his eyebrows.  Jesus says to Simon: When I came to your house, you did not wash my feet.  You did not greet me with a kiss.  This woman knows what she has received from God.  She has washed my feet, wiped them with her hair, and she has not stopped kissing my feet since she has come here.  This woman knows that because she has been forgiven much, she is loved much.

Stewardship is a kiss.  It is not a duty or obligation that we do because the church needs money.  This is a message that I try to convey not only in the fall but throughout the year.  I do this because giving is a spiritual discipline.  Stewardship of the earth is a kiss.  Stewardship of our national heritage is a gift.  Stewardship of Oak Cliff is a kiss.  Stewardship of our family is a gift.  Stewardship of our time, talent, gifts, service, and witness is a kiss.

We give as a kiss, an act of love.  We give out of love because God has first loved us.  Some people give to the church out of duty and responsibility.  They give to the church because the church needs money in order to do its ministry and mission.  However, I hope that is not the reason you give.

We give out of a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the presence of God in our lives.  We give because we love God.  Stewardship isn’t about the church’s need to get.  It is my conviction that in order to be whole we need to give.  Giving is a kiss, an act of love that draws us closer to God.

We are in very different places in our financial lives these days.  The importance of your gift is not the amount, but the importance of it is the expression of your gratitude to God.  There are many ways to kiss God.  This is one.

John 10:11-18

There is a story of a preacher who moved to a new congregation but soon discovered that something about the water at his new residence disagreed with him.  After several bouts with intestinal disorders, the church decided to invest in a water filtering system and softening system for the parsonage.  When the abbreviated copy of the minutes of the Church Council meeting were distributed, it read: “It was moved, seconded, and unanimously approved that the Trustees would take care of the preacher’s drinking problem.”

Given some of the news over the last few years about religious leaders, I imagine there are a fair number of clergy and their congregations who wish that all they had to deal with was something as straightforward as a drinking problem.

Every ordained minister in God’s creation is sent and gains authority from the people who, over the years, in the name of God, sent them. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says to his disciples, “Whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your servant…”  There are two words that encompass Jesus’ ministry: sent and serve.  Ministers are sent, and the reason they are sent is to serve.  It is essential to know the difference between giving glory to God and getting glory for oneself.

One of my seminary professors once told a group of students, “Remember, you are not the shepherd of the flock.  The flock already has a shepherd.  You are just the sheepdog.”  The call to ministry is really a call to be a sheepdog.  The sheepdog occupies not a position of honor, but one of service.  The minister is servant of both the Shepherd and the flock.

There are, however, some perils that can turn a good sheepdog into a worthless mutt.  First, some sheepdogs become lap dogs.  If you pet a sheepdog too much, it may decide that it wants to be petted rather than to tend the sheep.  The flock that overly pets its sheepdog may discover that it can train its sheepdog to do tricks.  It can teach the sheepdog to heal, sit, roll over, or even play dead.

A second thing that threatens to turn a good sheepdog into a worthless mutt is that some sheepdogs become obsessed with scratching fleas.  In some churches there may be people-fleas like those few people in the church whose mission in life is to be upset about everything and oppose every decision.  Sometimes the minister gives so much time settling grievances among church members that other church members go unattended.

A third sheepdog hazard is that some sheepdogs love the sound of their own bark.  Sheepdogs are not called to bark, they are called to tend sheep.

MATTHEW 28:1-10

There is an Easter sunrise service that I hope still takes place on the edge of the Grand Canyon.   A giant boulder is heaved over the rim.  As it goes crashing down the side of the Grand Canyon into the Colorado River far below, a two-thousand voice choir bursts into the Hallelujah Chorus.  Despite all appearances, we live in an Easter world.

Several years ago, Rev. Gordon Cosby, pastor of the Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., explained the biblical understanding of life to the children of the church by saying, “Life gets harder and harder, but life gets better and better.”  I imagine most of us can readily identify with the first half of that statement.  Life certainly does get harder and harder.  As the years increase; so do the responsibilities.  It is the other half of the sentence that bothers us; life gets better and better.  Many of us cannot believe this because it is simply not true in our personal experience.  But remember, we live in an Easter world.

The empty tomb may seem like an illusion.  The situations and frustrations, the anxieties and the hurts that you and I encounter from day to day seem so overwhelming that not even Easter can take them away.  What appear to be passes as reality and has many of us believing that most of the time we are in a Good Friday world.  We, too, want to know who is going to roll the stone away.  We gather to celebrate Easter Sunday, but we know what awaits us on Monday morning.

Fear, indifference, laziness, selfishness, and sentimentality are all destructive.  This is the crowd that gathered on Calvary to witness the greatest miscarriage of justice of all time.  They assembled not necessarily to approve of what was happening, but also not to raise a voice of protest either.  Being compassionate, but not confrontive.  We often prefer guilt to responsibility.

Easter is not sentimentality.  The temptation is to reduce the resurrection to something manageable: the coming of spring, the rebirth of hope from despair, truth that will never die, the memory of a life lived two thousand years ago.  If Christianity is simply an affirmation that Jesus of Nazareth is just a great example, then I want out of the movement.

The affirmation of Easter is that “Christ is risen!” and with us now.  Now, not as a memory that will fade, but as a presence in the life of the creation and an undying presence in our lives.

Easter does not take away Good Friday.  It destroys the force of Good Friday.  Easter proclaims that God has the last word.  Easter represents both a command as well as a promise; a command not that we sympathize with Jesus who was crucified, but that we follow Christ who is risen.

So, now the question is: Are we going to live in a Good Friday world or in the reality of an Easter one?