 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Called to be a Light in the Rockfish Valley
Serving GOD with JOY and GENEROSITY
Serving GOD with JOY and GENEROSITY
 |  |  |  |  |
David Cameron has been the pastor of Rockfish Church since January, 2000.
Ordained as a minister of word and sacrament in 1982, David has served churches in
North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. With additional training in counseling he has
also worked as a family counselor. David is married to Kathryn, also a Presbyterian
minister, and they have two grown children, Katie and Will.
Archives of David's Sermons may be found here.
Ordained as a minister of word and sacrament in 1982, David has served churches in
North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. With additional training in counseling he has
also worked as a family counselor. David is married to Kathryn, also a Presbyterian
minister, and they have two grown children, Katie and Will.
Archives of David's Sermons may be found here.
Sign Language
Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-11
Luke 12:54-56, 13:1-9
There are two women I often see at the library when Will and I are there.
I assume at least one of the women is deaf
because they converse in sign language.
I try not to stare, but I do wonder sometimes what they’re saying.
Sometimes their hands move slowly, languidly
sometimes in broad sweeping gestures,
sometimes in fierce, choppy motions
that tell me I don’t WANT to know what they’re saying!
Even though I don’t know sign language,
I think I can sort of get the gist of what they’re saying just by the way they say it.
But I could be way off base.
The critics of Jesus imagined themselves as very capable
when it came to interpreting sign language – GOD’S sign language.
They had it all figured out – how God works, who’s naughty and who’s nice.1
We read of the time they came to Jesus, their copies of the National Enquirer
clutched in their soft, sweaty hands
telling him news of the latest Roman atrocity –
how Pilate had slaughtered a group of Galileans while they worshipped.
Scholars assume that by “Galileans” they mean “Samaritans”
who, you probably remember, were considered an illegitimate offshoot of the Jews
and routinely despised by the Jewish elite.
Jesus’ critics probably couldn’t disguise the glee in their hearts
as they recounted the details of this gruesome murder
somehow taking it as sign language from above;
a confirmation of what everyone already knew:
bad things happen to bad people.
Bad things happen to bad people. That’s a SIGN of God’s judgment, right?
It’s a comfort to know that, especially when you count yourself among the good.
How satisfying it is to say, “He got what he deserved.”
“I could tell just by looking at her that she’s a bad seed.”
“What do you expect, he IS a Cameron.”
Bad things happen to bad people.
That’s what a lot of people think, not just Jesus’ critics. The sign language is clear.
What’s interesting is that we still tend to think that
even when bad things happen to us.
Barbara Brown Taylor, a well known writer and preacher,
tells of when she was a hospital chaplain called to the surgical waiting room
in a children’s hospital to be with the mother of a little girl
undergoing surgery to remove an aggressive brain tumor.2
Brown recounts how she finally found the woman sitting in a chair
staring into space beside an ash try full of cigarette butts.
“From the smell that clung to the woman,” Taylor writes,
“She must have smoked every one.”
When Taylor sat down next to the woman, the woman blurted out,
“It’s my punishment for smoking these cigarettes!
God couldn’t get my attention any other way so he made my baby sick.”
Then the woman started to cry and she wailed,
“Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop! I’m going to kill my own child!”
Taylor writes of how she chose to give the woman a lesson in theology
and affirm for her that her God doesn’t do such things.
“I messed with her worldview at the very moment she needed it most,” Taylor writes.
“However miserable it made her, she preferred a punishing God to an absent…one.”
When VA state delegate Bob Marshall, a Republican from Manassas
made a comment in public recently
saying that disabled children were God’s punishment
on women who had aborted their first child
many parents of disabled children openly gasped.
Yet, it’s the most common thing in the world,
for parents, especially mothers, of children with disabilities
to torment themselves with self-accusation,
looking for the tiniest indication of what they did wrong
to deserve such an outcome
And you know what?
In a perverse way, it seems like it would bring some relief to find a concrete reason,
a clearly discernable sign.
But whether such a world view of punishment and reward brings comfort or not,
it’s not the way of the God to whom Jesus introduces us.
Jesus says to his critics, “Those Galileans Pilate murdered,
the eighteen upon whom that tower fell.
They were no worse than you.
You are no better than them.”
“You see the sign, but you’ve read it wrong.
Their deaths mean nothing more and nothing less than that life can be brutally short,
accidents happen, human beings act inhumanely toward one another.
It’s called being MORTAL.
To be mortal is to be vulnerable
and our vulnerability makes us do all kinds of self-destructive, short-sighted,
even wicked things.
Paul would later put it this way in his letter to the Romans,
“ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
“Are you shocked that these people met such brutal or apparently meaningless deaths?”
Jesus asks his critics.
“You are as vulnerable as they were!” Jesus fairly shouts.
“You also need to repent because you could just as easily end up like them.”
Any time I hear the word “Repent,” my mind immediately flashes on a caricature
of an angry street preacher pointing a boney finger at people walking by
condemning them for any number of real or imagined infractions.
But the word “repent” comes from the Greek word, “metanoia”
which simply means “to change one’s mind.”
Jesus is not putting together a laundry list of his critics’ sins.
He’s hired no private detective to peek through their curtains, to bug their bedrooms.
But he IS trying to get them off their obsession
with seeing life through the lens of divine reward and punishment.
He’s trying to alert them to the fact that they cannot hide from their mortality
behind obedience to the law, even God’s law.
There is only one sign from above that God gives God’s people.
That is the sign of the strong hand coming up to arrest the downward fall of the axe.
It was John the Baptist who came preaching in the wilderness a message of repentance.
He said, “Even now the axe is lying at the root of the tree,
Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit
is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3:9)
Jesus told his critics, those who thought they were experts at reading sign language,
the parable of the fig tree that would not bear fruit.
In the Bible, a fig tree is always a symbol for Israel
A fig tree that bears no fruit is just wasting space!
A fig tree that bears no fruit is fit for nothing more than making toothpicks!
If life were nothing more than rewards for being good
and punishment for being bad,
then the axe should fall swiftly and without mercy on a barren tree.
But in Jesus’ story the gardener is there to plead for the tree.
The gardener is there asking for one more chance.
A little more fertilizer, perhaps.
Maybe a more careful pruning would help.
There’s always the axe. But not yet. Not yet.
The bread on this table, this cup from which we drink are sign language from God.
Isaiah asks a good question.
“Why would we spend our money on that which is not bread?”
“Why would we want to labor for that which does not satisfy?”
Yet we do it all the time because we are mortal –
vulnerable, scared, and easily manipulated.
Accidents do happen, sickness and disease take their toil,
human beings act inhumanely from time to time.
But those are signs simply of our mortality.
The bread and the cup, THEY are signs of God’s goodness
and God’s deep desire that WE might one day bear good fruit.
Until that day, the strong arm of the gardener
will continue to stop the downward fall of the axe.
And one day, one day, the fruit will come
and we will give evidence of God at work in us.
But we will do that NOT to get a reward,
but because that IS our reward.
_____________
1 Snyder, Dean J., Senior Minister of Foundry United Methodist Church, Washington, D.C.
Exegesis of Luke 13:1-9
2 Taylor, Barbara Brown, Life-Giving Fear, http://www.religioin-online/showarticle?title=641.
Copyright David Cameron 2010
Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-11
Luke 12:54-56, 13:1-9
There are two women I often see at the library when Will and I are there.
I assume at least one of the women is deaf
because they converse in sign language.
I try not to stare, but I do wonder sometimes what they’re saying.
Sometimes their hands move slowly, languidly
sometimes in broad sweeping gestures,
sometimes in fierce, choppy motions
that tell me I don’t WANT to know what they’re saying!
Even though I don’t know sign language,
I think I can sort of get the gist of what they’re saying just by the way they say it.
But I could be way off base.
The critics of Jesus imagined themselves as very capable
when it came to interpreting sign language – GOD’S sign language.
They had it all figured out – how God works, who’s naughty and who’s nice.1
We read of the time they came to Jesus, their copies of the National Enquirer
clutched in their soft, sweaty hands
telling him news of the latest Roman atrocity –
how Pilate had slaughtered a group of Galileans while they worshipped.
Scholars assume that by “Galileans” they mean “Samaritans”
who, you probably remember, were considered an illegitimate offshoot of the Jews
and routinely despised by the Jewish elite.
Jesus’ critics probably couldn’t disguise the glee in their hearts
as they recounted the details of this gruesome murder
somehow taking it as sign language from above;
a confirmation of what everyone already knew:
bad things happen to bad people.
Bad things happen to bad people. That’s a SIGN of God’s judgment, right?
It’s a comfort to know that, especially when you count yourself among the good.
How satisfying it is to say, “He got what he deserved.”
“I could tell just by looking at her that she’s a bad seed.”
“What do you expect, he IS a Cameron.”
Bad things happen to bad people.
That’s what a lot of people think, not just Jesus’ critics. The sign language is clear.
What’s interesting is that we still tend to think that
even when bad things happen to us.
Barbara Brown Taylor, a well known writer and preacher,
tells of when she was a hospital chaplain called to the surgical waiting room
in a children’s hospital to be with the mother of a little girl
undergoing surgery to remove an aggressive brain tumor.2
Brown recounts how she finally found the woman sitting in a chair
staring into space beside an ash try full of cigarette butts.
“From the smell that clung to the woman,” Taylor writes,
“She must have smoked every one.”
When Taylor sat down next to the woman, the woman blurted out,
“It’s my punishment for smoking these cigarettes!
God couldn’t get my attention any other way so he made my baby sick.”
Then the woman started to cry and she wailed,
“Now I’m supposed to stop, but I can’t stop! I’m going to kill my own child!”
Taylor writes of how she chose to give the woman a lesson in theology
and affirm for her that her God doesn’t do such things.
“I messed with her worldview at the very moment she needed it most,” Taylor writes.
“However miserable it made her, she preferred a punishing God to an absent…one.”
When VA state delegate Bob Marshall, a Republican from Manassas
made a comment in public recently
saying that disabled children were God’s punishment
on women who had aborted their first child
many parents of disabled children openly gasped.
Yet, it’s the most common thing in the world,
for parents, especially mothers, of children with disabilities
to torment themselves with self-accusation,
looking for the tiniest indication of what they did wrong
to deserve such an outcome
And you know what?
In a perverse way, it seems like it would bring some relief to find a concrete reason,
a clearly discernable sign.
But whether such a world view of punishment and reward brings comfort or not,
it’s not the way of the God to whom Jesus introduces us.
Jesus says to his critics, “Those Galileans Pilate murdered,
the eighteen upon whom that tower fell.
They were no worse than you.
You are no better than them.”
“You see the sign, but you’ve read it wrong.
Their deaths mean nothing more and nothing less than that life can be brutally short,
accidents happen, human beings act inhumanely toward one another.
It’s called being MORTAL.
To be mortal is to be vulnerable
and our vulnerability makes us do all kinds of self-destructive, short-sighted,
even wicked things.
Paul would later put it this way in his letter to the Romans,
“ALL have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
“Are you shocked that these people met such brutal or apparently meaningless deaths?”
Jesus asks his critics.
“You are as vulnerable as they were!” Jesus fairly shouts.
“You also need to repent because you could just as easily end up like them.”
Any time I hear the word “Repent,” my mind immediately flashes on a caricature
of an angry street preacher pointing a boney finger at people walking by
condemning them for any number of real or imagined infractions.
But the word “repent” comes from the Greek word, “metanoia”
which simply means “to change one’s mind.”
Jesus is not putting together a laundry list of his critics’ sins.
He’s hired no private detective to peek through their curtains, to bug their bedrooms.
But he IS trying to get them off their obsession
with seeing life through the lens of divine reward and punishment.
He’s trying to alert them to the fact that they cannot hide from their mortality
behind obedience to the law, even God’s law.
There is only one sign from above that God gives God’s people.
That is the sign of the strong hand coming up to arrest the downward fall of the axe.
It was John the Baptist who came preaching in the wilderness a message of repentance.
He said, “Even now the axe is lying at the root of the tree,
Every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit
is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3:9)
Jesus told his critics, those who thought they were experts at reading sign language,
the parable of the fig tree that would not bear fruit.
In the Bible, a fig tree is always a symbol for Israel
A fig tree that bears no fruit is just wasting space!
A fig tree that bears no fruit is fit for nothing more than making toothpicks!
If life were nothing more than rewards for being good
and punishment for being bad,
then the axe should fall swiftly and without mercy on a barren tree.
But in Jesus’ story the gardener is there to plead for the tree.
The gardener is there asking for one more chance.
A little more fertilizer, perhaps.
Maybe a more careful pruning would help.
There’s always the axe. But not yet. Not yet.
The bread on this table, this cup from which we drink are sign language from God.
Isaiah asks a good question.
“Why would we spend our money on that which is not bread?”
“Why would we want to labor for that which does not satisfy?”
Yet we do it all the time because we are mortal –
vulnerable, scared, and easily manipulated.
Accidents do happen, sickness and disease take their toil,
human beings act inhumanely from time to time.
But those are signs simply of our mortality.
The bread and the cup, THEY are signs of God’s goodness
and God’s deep desire that WE might one day bear good fruit.
Until that day, the strong arm of the gardener
will continue to stop the downward fall of the axe.
And one day, one day, the fruit will come
and we will give evidence of God at work in us.
But we will do that NOT to get a reward,
but because that IS our reward.
_____________
1 Snyder, Dean J., Senior Minister of Foundry United Methodist Church, Washington, D.C.
Exegesis of Luke 13:1-9
2 Taylor, Barbara Brown, Life-Giving Fear, http://www.religioin-online/showarticle?title=641.
Copyright David Cameron 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|