The Burial of Terry Tolerton

The Burial of James Terry Tolerton
Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 23
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
John 6:37-40

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Terry Tolerton was a remarkable man indeed!  Though I did not know him personally, you all did.  That’s why you’re here today.  To pay tribute to a man you loved, who made a difference in your lives.  I have heard a few stories about him, and I’ve read his obituary, and we’ve heard the wonderful testimonies from John, Christina, and Will.  And I can tell just by looking around this room today that he left a great legacy.

And as I thought about all the things Terry did over the course of his 82 years, I realized the common threads running through his life are consistency, and showing up.  I mean you can just run down the list.  Two tours in Vietnam, a war that many people bent over backwards to get out of fighting.  But Terry showed up.  He served his country proudly.

He had a lifelong obsession with golf—which I’m guessing has something to do with why we are gathered in this particular place—but nobody is born a good golfer.  Golf is a game that is perfected over the long hall.  Again: consistency and showing up.  Terry’s level of commitment to family shows these traits as well.  And building a business from one little shop into a multimillion dollar organization.  That happens through consistency and showing up.

And, possibly the greatest example of this was in his final years caring for his beloved wife Judy.  He was there for her, because he loved her.  So often in life it is easier and even tempting to not show up.  To just tell yourself that somebody else will step in.  But the life of Terry Tolerton is a shining example of the value of consistently showing up.  I have no doubt that Terry is greatly missed, for who he was as well as the for example he set for all who knew and remember him.

I hope that you will continue to share your stories and memories of your time with Terry in the days and years ahead.  But here is what I really want you to hold onto as you leave this place today . . .

In the passage of scripture I read a few minutes ago, from John’s gospel, Jesus says, "Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away.” And “I will lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.”  Jesus is always consistent, and faithful, and keeps showing up, and never loses what is his.  All of us are given the gift of life on this earth, and when our time here is through, we return back to the one who gave us that precious gift of life.

Terry spent his days consistently showing up.  And he passed that attitude on to his children and his friends.  And now he has returned to the one who always shows up, in every circumstance, and every stage of life.  Though Terry is lost to us as we continue to live out our own lives, he is not now—and never was—lost to God.  Because Jesus does not let go of what is his, and God consistently shows up for each one of us, and will raise us up with Terry on the last day.  May God bless Terry Tolerton, and may God bless all of you.

Amen

YEAR B 2024 pentecost 21

Pentecost 21, 2024
Amos 5:6-7,10-15
Psalm 90:12-17
Hebrews 4:12-16
Mark 10:17-31

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

The epistle reading from Hebrews and the gospel lesson from Mark go together perfectly today.  And what ties them together is one of my favorite themes of all:  God is God, and we are not.  I feel like I could end right there.  God is God, and we are not.  Amen.

But let me say more.  A man comes up to Jesus and kneels before him and asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  So much to say about this question!  First of all, we don’t know what he means by the phrase “eternal life.”  I’m trying to wean myself from using Greek words in sermons, so I’ll just say that the literal translation of what he is asking for is “age-long life,” that is, life without beginning or end.  He most certainly does not have in mind what we think of as heaven, or God’s kingdom.  He is asking for life that has no beginning or end.  So, again, we don’t know quite what it is he is even asking for here.

Secondly, he uses the phrase, “What must I do to inherit.”  Now, in my family, there is no inheritance coming my way—at least not that I know of.  But if I imagine myself in a family that did have an inheritance laid out in a will, it would never occur to me to ask what I must DO to inherit what is already rightfully mine.  It’s like asking, “What must I do to get a birthday present?”  Or like my cat asking, “What must I do to be fed?”  The answer in all these cases is . . . what . . . exist?  Have a pulse?  You don’t earn an inheritance.  I mean, not in a healthy family.  It’s like asking, “What must I do to earn your love?”

So that shows us the road map ahead here.  The man is working from the assumption that he CAN do something to EARN an inheritance.  And he’s also starting from the vantage point that it’s certainly possible, since he’s been doing and doing and doing all his life.  Then Jesus rattles off the commandments to the guy: “You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.”  And what does the man say?  “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.”

Seriously?  Seriously.  You have kept all these since your youth?  What were you raised by wolves?  And it’s important to note the inclusion of the word “defraud” in this list.  You don’t usually get this in a list of the commandments.  And it makes me wonder if Jesus threw it in there for a reason.  Because a command not to defraud definitely lends itself to the follow up from Jesus, to go and sell everything and give the money to the poor and follow me.  Of course, it’s even possible that the man hasn’t defrauded anyone personally, but is part of a system that oppresses the poor and protects the wealthy.  Which is a whole other sermon.  We don’t know.

But what we do know is that this requirement from Jesus makes the man go away sad.  And, we don’t know if he went and did what Jesus said.  Maybe, maybe not.  However, the entire conversation with Jesus seems rooted in the man trying to justify himself.  I have done all these things since my youth.  So check me out Jesus!  I probably don’t really need to do anything in order to inherit eternal life because I’m rocking it over here.  But I just wanted to be sure you knew how great I am.

And after he goes away sad,  Jesus says to the crowd, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” And they were greatly astounded and said to one another, “Then who can be saved?”  Which makes me ask, wait, was everybody rich?  They hear that it’s hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven, and their response is “then who can be saved?”  And to their astonishment, Jesus says, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”  And that’s the key here.  Impossible for mortals; possible for God.  Whatever their reason for asking, “Then who can be saved?”  Jesus reminds them that God can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  God is God, and we are not.

And then, hot on the heels of that exchange, Peter has to go and open his big mouth.  He says, “Look, we have left everything and followed you.”  Translation, Peter is now trying to justify himself, just like the man on his knees.  We’ve been doing an awful lot over here, so check us out Jesus!  We probably don’t really need to do anything in order to inherit eternal life because we’re just rocking it over here.  But we just wanted to be sure you knew how great we are.  Same point, just different words.

Both Peter and the man who approaches Jesus have a secondary agenda.  And that agenda is to let Jesus know just how terrific they are.  Look at what we have done!  All this on our own over here.  We probably don’t even need any help from God because we’re just so darn good!  And it is awfully tempting for us to fall into that same trap.

Look at me Jesus, coming to church and everything.  Making a pledge toward the stewardship campaign.  Bringing in supplies for the animals, and blankets for the needy, and letting the other drivers go first at a four-way stop sign.  We love to pat ourselves on the back.  And we look to others to support us in that.  Praise is a tempting drug for us all.  And—when it comes down to it—the more we do, the harder it is to remember that we can never do enough.  I mean even Mother Teresa needed Jesus!  We cannot earn an inheritance.  But it sure is hard to stop trying!

And that brings us to the epistle reading from Hebrews.  As we heard, “before God no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.”  Sounds a lot like the collect for purity.  To you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid.  Except we get the addition of “The one to whom we must render an account.”  Sure we are naked and laid bare before God’s eyes, uncomfortable as that sounds, but render an account?  That sounds pretty scary doesn't it?  It’s one thing to be known, but quite another to have to answer for it.

But then we also heard, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.”  That’s a lot of double negatives, so let’s reword it.  In Jesus, we have a priest who can sympathize with our weaknesses.  Sympathize with our weaknesses.  God knows our failings, and Jesus understands what it is like to be human.  It’s easy to forget that.  But as we say in our Creed every single Sunday, Jesus is fully God and fully human.  He knows what it is like to be us.  And he knows we are unable to do it on our own. Even as we are so anxious to tell God we have followed all these commands from our youth, and have given up everything to follow Jesus.   And that brings us back to the main point: God is God, and we are not.  And then we come to the best part of all the readings today, from Hebrews . . 

“Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”  I think we have to break that sentence down, because it is really really good news if we really can hear it.  

First, God sits on a throne of grace.  Think about how you imagine a throne, and the purpose of a throne.  Thrones are for power and punishment and judgment.  This, however, is a throne of grace.  A throne of unmerited unconditional acceptance.  And when we approach that throne, we receive mercy.  Mercy, not judgement, not demanding an account, not accusation.  We receive mercy.  And we find grace in our time of need, because God knows we need grace, because we can’t do it on our own!  God is God, and we are not.

So hear that sentence again:  “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”  With boldness!  We worship a God who knows us intimately, who knows we cannot do it on our own, who knows how much we want to point at all the good stuff we have done in order to win favor, and who still offers us grace upon grace.  We are known, and we are loved.  All that we are and all that we do is known to God, and we are loved.

And together, we can approach the throne of grace with boldness.  Because we are known.  Completely known.  And we are loved.  Completely loved.  And we are always invited to this Altar, where mercy, and grace, and forgiveness, and compassion, and sympathy, and honor, and dignity, and love reign supreme.  Let us approach the throne boldly, because we are boldly loved.

Amen.

The Marriage of Melissa and Anthony

The Marriage of Melissa and Anthony
Proverbs 3:3-6
Philippians 2:2-4

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

I’ve done many a wedding over the years.  And I’ve seen some interesting things in those years.  But this is the first time a couple has chosen to use a passage from The Princess Bride as one of the readings.  It is . . . unusual.  But it is not surprising.  Because both Melissa and Anthony have always thought outside the box.  And that’s how they found each other.  By not staying inside the box!

But enough about them.  Now I want to talk about wuv.  Truuue wuv.
I’ve never read the original book, The Princess Bride, but I am very familiar with the movie version.  And I can tell you that the portion we heard a few minutes ago captures the big profession of love toward the end.  In a nutshell, we hear Westley telling the Princess Buttercup that when he says, “As you wish,” what he is really saying is, “I love you.”

From a Christian perspective, this is profound!  From a non-Christian perspective, it is also profound.  Because true love (or true wuv) comes down to surrendering our will to another.  Love does not insist on its own way, as the apostle Paul tells us in First Corinthians.  Setting aside our own way for the sake of another IS love!  It is giving rather than taking.  It is surrendering rather than defying.

Now I can hear all the clergy and social workers’ alarm bells going off when I talk like that.  We’ve seen enough unhealthy co-dependent relationships to know that surrendering in an abusive relationship is not love.  But manipulative relationships are not about love.  Quite the opposite in fact!

So fear not;  that is not what I’m saying at all here.  In a healthy relationship, both partners set aside selfishness.  They are both willing to say “as you wish” every day.  And it only truly works when you both do it.  In any relationship.

And for Christians, the ultimate model of this kind of love is Jesus Christ.  The one who literally gave up his life in order to bring us life.  Now I know that transition sounds like I should have switched to my youth worker whisper voice and grown a goatee.  But what is the death of Jesus if not the very pinnacle of “as you wish?”

But back to mahwidge.  Melissa and Tony have already shown themselves to know how to balance self-worth with “as you wish.”  The readings they chose from Proverbs and Philippians get to this same thing.  Both those biblical texts get at putting others first, and living together in love.  But, in some ways, that Princess Bride reading was the best text these two could have chosen.  Because they get it.  Like, they both get it.  And when two people approach each other as equals in love, they are ready to spend the rest of their lives saying to each other, “As you wish” every single day.

So now I invite the bridal party forward so we can get on with a maywidge!

YEAR B 2024 pentecost 20

Pentecost 20, 2024
Genesis 2:18-24
Psalm 8
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
Mark 10:2-16

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

I’ve been waiting three years for this gospel text to come up again, because I have more to say about it.  Now, of course, this is a difficult gospel text to hear.  And it is a particularly hard gospel reading for anyone who has gone through the soul-crushing meat grinder that we call “divorce.”  And, sadly, this gospel text is easy for people to hijack for the purpose of making things worse for those who have been divorced, or who are about to be divorced.  Because some people like to quote little pieces of scripture out of context to make other people feel bad.  (You know, like Jesus always tells us to do.)  But let’s start here . . .

Imagine you’re sitting at dinner with your kids, and they are arguing about something or other.  And the older kid is being really mean and making the younger kid cry.  (Because that’s how older kids are, as we younger kids know.)  And you say to the kids, “That’s it!  I don’t want to hear another word out of you.”

After the smoke clears, and the dishes are done, you go and check on the kids and ask how their day was.  And one of them writes their answer on a piece of paper, and when you ask why they are writing, they write, “You told us not to say anything anymore.”  And then you rightly say,  Wait.  Not saying anything was the emergency brake here.  It was the backup to prevent you from doing something worse.  A safety net.  “But you told us never to speak again.”  To prevent further harm!  Now that’s a long way to go to get where I’m going, but, believe it or not, that is what is happening in today’s gospel reading.

As we heard, some Pharisees come to Jesus and, to test him they ask, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”  They’re Pharisees.  They know the answer to this question already.  But they also know that to answer the question either way will cause division, which is exactly what they are hoping for.  But it’s even trickier.  Because their quote back to Jesus, from Deuteronomy, is not about divorce; it’s about remarrying someone whom you’ve previously divorced, but who has been married to someone else in between.  Don’t even bother trying to follow that.  Let’s rephrase it all a different way.

Let’s pretend that in Deuteronomy it says, “If you bump into someone and they fall down, stop what you are doing and make sure they’re okay before you do anything else.”  And the Pharisees come to Jesus and ask, “Is it okay to push people to the ground?”  And Jesus asks, “What does Moses tell you?”  And they say “Moses says, yes!”  Which is why Jesus then says, “It’s because of your hardness of heart that he wrote this commandment for you.”  Or, as you might say to your kids, “Because you say hurtful things, I made this commandment for you to stop talking.”  The Pharisees are looking to find an excuse to push people to the ground, and they are misusing the Law of Moses as the basis for it.  And in this case, pushing people to the ground is actually, divorcing one’s wife.

“Hey Jesus, is it okay to divorce a woman and leave her to fend for herself with nothing in this first-century culture of ours that devalues women and children?”  Jesus answers, “What does Moses say?”  They respond, “Moses says yes!”  You ask your kids: Did I tell you not to talk anymore?  The kids write “Yes!”

So then Jesus does them one better, and says “. . . from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”  He turns the conversation from being about the legality of divorce into being about the gift of marriage.  They ask, “Is it okay to demean women and throw them into the street?”  And Jesus responds with, “As God intended from the beginning, men and women are equal.”  This response is no small deal, in that culture, or in ours.  Jesus turns their cynical selfishness into a justification for elevating the downtrodden.  “Hey Jesus, we’ve already got all the power.  Is it lawful for a man to get even more?”  

But we don’t hear this passage from Mark’s gospel that way.  What we hear is, “Don’t get divorced!  Jesus says so!”  But that is not what Jesus is saying to the Pharisees.  He is saying forget your legal trickery for oppressing women and look at the point of marriage: two actual people come together on equal terms, as God intended from the beginning.  But, in response, you might then point to the conversation with his disciples in the house afterward, where Jesus says, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”  

And my response to that is, first of all, this is a statement about remarriage, not divorce.  And, more importantly, women did not divorce husbands in that culture!  This is a radical thing to suggest!  In the conversation with the Pharisees and in the conversation with the disciples, Jesus is elevating women to their rightful place as equal with men.  Which might sound good and right so to do . . . but was definitely absurd to the people around Jesus.  It’s like here he goes again, lifting up the lowly, declaring that everyone is loved by God, threatening my value by making someone else my equal, like he did with that Syrophoenician woman a few weeks ago with that crumbs under the table stuff.  What’s next, Jesus, turning our children into our teachers?

Well . . . Jesus said to them, “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  Jesus always turns everything upside down. 

The Pharisees and the disciples were both trying to get legal arguments out of Jesus for the purpose of clarifying what they were allowed to get away with.  This is what adults do, you see.  Tell me the bare minimum I must do against my will in order to get what I am entitled to.  Or, sometimes, let me tell you why I am so deserving of your love, Jesus.  Or, get a load of how worthy I am because of all the things I have collected and hold so tightly in my hands.

But a child?  How does a child approach Jesus?  With open, empty hands, that’s how—just as we saw two weeks ago.  A child can offer nothing.  And in that culture, a child is worth nothing.  That’s why the disciples are trying to keep the children away from Jesus.  These worthless little brats have no business being around Jesus, say the disciples, because Jesus is only interested in the people who matter.  You know, the men . . . who can divorce their wives . . . like Moses says.

This gospel text is not a lesson on the evils of divorce.  And if you want proof, just look at what upsets Jesus here.  It’s not divorce, is it?  No, he is angry with the Pharisees for their hardness of heart, and for trying to twist the gift of the Law of Moses into a justification for mistreating women.  And did you see what makes Jesus indignant in this text?  The disciples’ keeping the children away from him.  Jesus doesn’t love the children because they’re cute; he focuses on them because they are insignificant and rejected, which is what makes them first, rather than last.

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  So—just like two weeks ago—we must ask ourselves, how does a child receive the kingdom of God?  How does a child receive anything?  The key to answering that question is to focus on the word, “receive.”  The word is not “earn,” or “deserve,” or “demand.”  No, the word is receive.  Children receive things because children cannot go out and get them on their own.  Children rely on the kindness and love of the adults around them—for better or for worse.  Which is why when the disciples try to stop them, Jesus becomes indignant.  Which is a very strong response when you think of it.  He is indignant that they would keep the children from him.  Indignant!

“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”  How do we receive something?  We stretch out our hands.  Our empty hands.  Nothing to offer; everything to gain.  This is how a child receives the gifts of God.  And it is also how the people of God receive the gifts of God.  We come to this Altar and stretch out our hands.  And if someone tries to stop us, we know that Jesus will be indignant.  Because you are welcome to this meal.  You are called to this heavenly banquet.  All of us equal.  All of us welcome.  All of us little children of God.  

And that’s when Jesus can take us up in his arms, lays his hands on us, and bless us beyond anything we can ever imagine.  Open your hands and receive the gifts of God.

Amen.