Better

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

There are some comedians who can tell a joke and keep a straight face while the audience laughs.  Not my grandpa Roy.  He always laughed hard at his own jokes.  And if his audience around the table laughed with him, he laughed even harder. 

He had lots of quips and witticisms.  But I’ll always remember his response to the simple question, “How are you?”.  If you said, “How you doing grandpa?”, he said, “Better.”  Every time, that was the response, “Better.”

 

It was that word – “better” – that kept offering itself to my mind and heart as I read from Acts 2 about the way people responded to Peter’s preaching on the Day of Pentecost.  Why was it that so many people responded positively to the news that one crucified had been raised?  Why was there an early movement of people who wanted to share their lives and live differently in the light of this news?  I think they did so because they were after something better – a better story, a better world, a better path forward for themselves and others.

I don't believe that God's grace makes us pretty or smart or rich or morally superior to others.  But I do believe it can make us . . . "better."  The reason we gather is to see if we can get "better" together, because getting "better" all by myself is something I've never been able to do.

Of course we all have different backgrounds and experiences.  But I think one of the things that we all have in common is that we want to move forward in life.  We don’t really have a choice, do we?  Tomorrow and the next day will roll in like the tide, whether we’re ready or not.  But the real question is whether we are really living the life that God offers us - or just getting by.  Whether we’re flourishing or just surviving. 

One of the reasons that I need the church as part of my life is simply to remind me not to settle for a paltry, petty little life.  We’re hungry for our lives to be intense and flavorful.  We don’t want to carefully sip it. We want to gulp it all down.

If you need a word for that, maybe it’s . . . “better.”  “Better” doesn’t mean you don’t like who you are and where you are and whom you’re with and what you’re doing.  “Better” just means that you want to live the fullest version of yourself possible.  It means that you want to live near the top of your range of possibilities.  You don’t want someone else’s life.  (Well, sometimes we do, but that’s a sermon for a different day!).

Living your life along with other people in the shared rhythms of worship and work  can help you do this.  God’s big plans to renew and bless the whole world are received and lived out by little bands of people in local places.  Church isn’t a club you join.  It’s a movement of people responding to the good news of God’s love by saying, “I want to be friends with God, and I want to share my life with others headed that direction.”  That’s why so many people responded to Peter’s preaching, and continue to respond to the message of God’s amazing, forgiving, healing love.  We all respond to God’s grace in a very personal way.  But it’s never a private, individualized matter.  We join a movement that provides for us a life-rhythm, along with some friends and some tools and resources, so that we can do the work of becoming the person God has created us to be.

Our reading today occurs on a Jewish feast day, when there would have been Jews from all over the Mediterranean region visiting Jerusalem as pilgrims.  And while they’re visiting, God pours out the Holy Spirit on the earliest followers of Jesus.  Caught up in the Spirit God poured out upon them, these simple Galilieans were able to communicate the good news of God’s love in many different languages that different groups from various parts of the Mediterranean could understand.

The sound of so many different languages was so unusual that many of the bystanders could only come to one conclusion.  These people had too many mimosas this morning at brunch!  It reminds me of the first time I spent St. Patrick’s Day in Boston with friends.  We were walking down a street past an Irish Pub at 10am and a small group just ahead of us turned into the pub.  And the doors opened just as we walked by and the place was full at mid-morning!  Look, I’m not going to deny that I made a stop in a pub.  But at least I waited until early afternoon like a normal human being!

So Peter stands up and offers a strange defense to the crowd: “We’re not drunk,” he pronounces.  “It’s only 9am, and we haven’t had time.”  Or at least that’s my loose paraphrase.  And then he launches into a speech that focuses on why the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ is good news for all people, from different places, with different backgrounds, who all speak different languages.  And what we read today was the conclusion of that speech and the enthusiastic response of those who listened to the message.

We’re told that those listening were “cut to the heart.”  That is, something about this news met them in a deep and personal way that called for a life-changing response.  “What do we do now?” they asked Peter.  And he told them to join their lives to a new movement of people: reorganize your life, receive baptism as a sign that God has called you into this new community, so that you can begin to experience God’s forgiveness and the strength God makes available to us in the Holy Spirit.  And many of them did just that, though of course they couldn’t quite know what they were getting into.

This reminds me of the time I visited a Ukrainian Orthodox Church in New York.  When I entered the elaborate and beautiful sanctuary, the service had already started.  A small older man greeted me quietly in Ukrainian, figured out I’m not Ukrainian, then waved me to follow him.  I thought he was going to escort me to a seat.  But no, he led me over to two other old Ukrainian men who were holding candles on top of wooden poles as tall as I was.  Then the guy lit a candle in another one and shoved it at me.  This all happened so fast I wasn’t sure what to do. I began to quietly explain that I’m just visiting, I’ve never been here before, I don’t speak Ukrainian.  But in the middle of my explanation he waved me off and herded the three of us toward the center aisle.  And as we processed down the center aisle – these two Ukrainian regulars and me, the guy who’d arrived about two minutes previous – the congregation stood.  And the priest waited for us at the front.  When we got down front, one of the guys elbowed me a little to the left, then nodded when I was apparently standing in the right spot.  The priest read the gospel passage for the day, in Ukrainian of course, and then closed the Bible.  My partners give me a nod and we turned and processed to the back of the sanctuary.  The other two guys hand the head usher their candles.  And then when he takes mine, he smiles and says, “You did fine.”

Now that wasn’t a very comfortable experience.  And if I was rating them on their hospitality I’m afraid it would be a rather low score.  But here’s the thing – it’s not all that unusual for people to respond immediately when they hear that God has raised up the crucified Jesus and is inviting us to a new life together.  The move from curious to committed can happen over the course of many years, or it can happen all of a sudden.  The move from bystander to full participant can be the end of a long process or it can be an emotional “yes” to the good news that still has within it a thousand questions yet to be answered.

You don’t need church to make God love you.  You are a person created and loved by God already.  And you don’t really need church to be a good person.  Your life has depth and beauty and meaning because that’s the way God created you.  And you don’t even need church to offer your life back to God in gratitude.  Your whole life is one long response to God’s love.  Everything you do, all the ways little and big you’ve shaped your life is your own unique way of responding to God.   But here’s the honest truth – life is long and hard and messy and full of all kinds of unexpected twists and disappointments.  And the church is a gift from God meant to support and help us along the way.

But there are a few things that are really difficult to do without sharing your life with other people who are following Jesus Christ.  I’ll name four of them briefly.

First, it’s difficult to give expression to the full range of what you’re feeling without the practices of singing and prayer.  Now I know, we can sing and pray on our own.  And I know that that not all songs and prayers that happen when we’re gathered meet us right where we are.  But over the course of a life, we will live through an enormous range of feelings and moods.  Singing and praying are ways to help you identify and recognize what you’re feeling, to acknowledge it as part of who you are and where you are right now.   For example . . . two weeks ago was Easter Sunday.  And I came to worship full of heartache, because that day marked one year from the death of my best friend.  And so it was good for me that our singing and praying were not filled with sentimental, cheap, insincere happiness.  Rather, our singing and praying were marked by the twin realities of crucifixion and resurrection, death and life.  And so rather than ignoring my sadness, or trying to shove it down, I was able to honor it, to acknowledge and express with honesty how I felt that day.

Second, it’s difficult to live with the right balance between humility and confidence without the practice of confessing our sins together.  Some things change in the worship liturgy each week.  But there’s always a place early on where we name the ways we’ve failed to love God, to love others, and to love ourselves.  And then we hear a fresh expression of God’s forgiveness.  Every week, some average Joe (or Jill) stands up here and pronounces, out loud, that because of Jesus Christ you are forgiven and loved.  And hearing that every week functions to make you both more humble and more confident.  It makes you into the kind of person who is both strong and playful.  You can find your energy and do your thing but you can also laugh at yourself.  You can live a responsible and focused life, and yet stay flexible enough to make yourself available to others. 

Third, it’s difficult to keep your heart open through all the pain, frustration and disappointment that mark every human life.   Many of the wounds and heartaches that mount up across a life can harden us.  Pain and loss can cause us curl into a protective ball like an armadillo.  When we’re hurt and angry we find people to label as enemies and then we embark on a life of nurturing grudges.  And over time, the human heart can get pretty cold.  We need church because we need a way to practice being tender and patient and kind, especially to ourselves.  Church provides us with tools for keeping ourselves open and vulnerable, for choosing love and connection even though we’ve been hurt before.  Church is the place where we tell over and over the story of God’s suffering love, God’s heartache, God’s willingness to bear our sin and evil in order to be with us.  This story reminds us that pain isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you.  The worst tragedy is to miss out on loving and being loved. 

Fourth, it’s difficult to do the hard work of becoming a better human being without the fellowship of other people on that same journey.  I don’t mean, of course, that people who belong to a congregation are better people or more virtuous or kind or generous or merciful.  Every one of us can point to people who have been in church their whole lives and who are just as mean, hateful, selfish and self-righteous as they ever were.  Likewise, every one of us can point to people unconnected from any congregation and yet are kind and compassionate and generous in a way that impresses us and might even make us slightly jealous of what they’ve accomplished.  No, my point has nothing to do with comparisons between people.  What I’m trying to say is that many of us live lives that are far beneath what we’re capable of.  We settle for pale versions of what’s possible.  We take the road of ease, thinking that will make us happy, when in reality the life that will be the most satisfying and meaningful will be the life that costs us something.  If we want to flourish and thrive and be part of God’s work of renewing and blessing all things, we’ll need the ordinary rhythms that occur in communities where people need each other.

I’m glad you’re here.  By God’s grace, we’re all in this together, trying to get better.  Life never stops.  It never settles down.  It never really stabilizes.  It’s always flux and change.  It’s always adjustment and reorientation.  And in that sense it can be a little exhausting.  To get through life in one piece, and to do that well, I think you need companions.  I think you need wise guides and travel partners.  You need patterns, rhythms, and habits that provide some structure for the many changes that happen across a life.  We gather because we need a space in our lives where we can admit what isn’t working and to find some ideas for what we might want to try next.  Here we can find the people, the prayers, and the practices that will get us through a life, beginning to end.  Amen.

Response: “The Real Work,” by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come our real work, 

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.
 

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
 

The impeded stream is the one that sings.