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Sermon - May 24th, 2009
Dirty Laundry
Rev. Gwen Drake
Scripture: Acts 1:15-26
Prayer of Preparation: We give thanks, O God of sacred stories, for the witness of your word today. Through the stories of Jesus you challenge our assumptions, increase our awareness, nurture our imaginations, and touch our feelings. Bless the hearing of the word today. Speak to us and grant that by the power of your Spirit we may be hearers and doers of your word. Amen.
It’s Baseball season. And Francis T. Vincent, Jr., a past commissioner of baseball said in one of his speeches. “Baseball teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball and, precisely because we have failed, we hold in high regard those who fail less often—those who hit safely in one out of three chances and become star players. I also find it fascinating that baseball, alone in sport, considers errors to be part of the game, part of its rigorous truth.”
This statement about baseball is one of those metaphors about life. It seems like it takes our whole lives to figure out what to do with our failures, our flaws, our limitations, our imperfections. Some of us spend out whole lives trying to cover them up or deny they even exist. Some of us over-compensate for others imperfections and flaws. We all have dirty laundry, secrets, flaws, errors. It is part of being human. It’s the way we were created.
I have this crooked tooth and every once in awhile a dentist will talk to me about talking to an orthodontist about straightening it…and I think about it and the money involved and well, you can see I still have it. And face it, we live in a society that values absolutely perfect teeth. Well, one time I just blurted out, “That’s my crooked tooth, it’s who I am. I grew it myself. I don’t know who I would be if I didn’t have that crooked tooth!” I’m sure I surprised my dentist and I really did surprised myself when I said that.
The Bible is full of the truth about completely real, flawed, and sinful people—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rebecca, Moses, Jonah, King David. It is amazing that the blaring mistakes and poor decisions of these biblical characters were not edited out or cleaned up a little. Whether it is lying or envy or greed or stealing or adultery or murder, or disobedience or taking the easy way out--the Bible tells it like it was and seems to leave it all in.
Today’s Scripture reading is no exception. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles is a book that tells the story of the very beginning of the Christian Church. And at the very, very beginning is the story of Judas. Now, I ask you, is this any way to begin a history of First Church Jerusalem? It’s an ugly sight, the death of Judas. We are reminded of what he did, as one of Jesus’ disciples. He sold Jesus out for money, for a pile of silver, collaborating with the religious authorities in the arrest of Jesus. This is not dinner conversation. In fact, the lectionary selection committee thought it was not fit for Sunday morning, because, in the name of good taste (I guess), they omitted the verses that I left in, the ones about the sorry and rather bloody end of Judas, the betrayer.
Here’s the way I think the church usually handles ugly matters like betrayal. We turn away, scurry back to business as usual, call for a report from a committee, debate the finer points of the doctrine of apostolic succession, or ignore it and hope it goes away. The church just loves to dust itself off, send its clothes to the cleaners, and get back to the way things were.
However, the author of Acts, forces us to first look at Judas before moving on. Before we march out of the season of Easter and into Pentecost, we need to take a painful and honest pause to ponder Judas, reminding us about the reality of sin and betrayal. The very first chapter of the history of our church sends a chill down our spine. Our Lord’s betrayal came from our own ranks. Some would rather dismiss this part of our history as only a temporary initial setback, a disposing of the one bad apple, a mere digression. Not Luke, the author of Acts. He begins with the spilling out of Judas’ insides before we march off to Pentecost and the spilling out of the Holy Spirit. Luke reminds us of our own dirty laundry. What a way to begin our glorious history! We survive our first constitutional crisis, we elect dear, uncontroversial, good soldier Matthias, and move on with the same forces of resistance, betrayal, accommodation, and deceit that were present all along. For, after we get over Judas, comes the ugliness with Ananaies and Sapphira in Acts 5. Then comes the squabble about what to do when the Holy Spirit spilled out onto those Gentiles—(we heard about that last Sunday). And the ugliness still continued—the Crusades, the burning of the witches, the church’s sanction of slavery, the exclusion of gays and lesbians. All through our history we have our dark side.
This is what the Scripture reminds us today. It is not them (whoever they are). It is us. Betrayal, sin, failure is the same old story—just different actors and a different context—but the same, the same story repeating itself.
Later in Acts, as the history of the church continues, the gospel will be rejected by a variety of critics: religious leaders, popular mobs, the capitalist in Ephesus, the scholars in Athens, some Gentile bureaucrats. However, before any of them, the gospel was rejected by one of the chosen twelve, one who witnessed Jesus first hand, up close and personal—his name was Judas.
So, where is the good news and the grace in today’s message? Well, as usual, it is everywhere all through the story. Because even though Jesus was rejected and betrayed, he kept on loving. Even though Jesus was crucified, he uttered words of forgiveness. Even though Jesus was deserted, he came back to those who deserted him. He did all this so that we might begin again. He stays with us so that we might serve him faithfully despite our sin and our betrayals. He loves us so that we might love ourselves enough to stop denying reality and accept our lives as they are, confess our shortcomings. Because, that is where and when God works with us and through us.
We live in a world that is not “Dancing with the Stars” or “American Idol” perfect! Reality TV is not real life! We are here on this earth, created in the image of God, to find meaning in the absurd, some peace within chaos, a little light in the darkness, joy in the midst of suffering, and beauty in life that is often ugly and cruel. Living is not about denying reality. Living is accepting the reality, perhaps even necessity of our torn apart, fractured, difficult, pain-filled existence. Living is about accepting every part of ourselves, crooked tooth and all!
And if that is hard to do, remember that we have a savior who endured it all and returned to the very people who had forsaken him. We have a God who works through you and me who are fallible and quite ordinary people. We have a God who equips us to do some extraordinary things despite our failings and even because of our failings and through our failings.
The good news is that when we accept our fractured and imperfection selves as something that just is, then there is really no one to “blame” for our errors. Instead our errors and imperfections become our teachers. Like in the baseball, they are part of the game. They can be the point and the means of God’s grace and healing. It is where we became even more beautiful, more compassionate, more fully human and fully alive. Not only as individuals, but as a community of imperfect and ordinary people—a church that God works through, doing extraordinary things through us. It is through the incredible richness of our differences with all our flaws and imperfections, that we are the body of Christ. How incredible and amazing it that? Only something greater than ourselves could have made us this way, thanks be to God.
Amen. 1