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PASTOR’S CORNER, NEWSLETTER July, 2010 Then give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Luke 20:25 Jesus’s situation is so different than ours it’s almost impossible to imagine. He had none of the civil rights we take for granted--freedom of speech, the right to assemble, the right to complain to and about government without being jailed or worse, the right to a fair trial, etc. Jesus couldn’t even vote. People didn’t elect leaders then. Leaders were chosen by powerful elites who were answerable to no one but themselves. That was true throughout the ancient world. But in Palestine, things were even worse. The elites there were foreigners, who ran Palestine for the good of Rome, not Palestinians. Jesus lived in occupied territory. His occupiers cared so little for his culture, they used coins which violated Jewish law and custom. Coins bore a “graven image” forbidden by the First Commandment, the image of Tiberias Caesar on which was inscribed a message which mocked the Jewish God. It proclaimed Tiberius “the divine Augustus.” Pious Jews hated the coins. And yet one of those who asked Jesus the politically explosive question, “Should we pay taxes to the Romans?” just happened to have one on him. Maybe Jesus smiled as he handed it back to him, “Give Caesar, Caesar’s, and God, God’s.” In other words, if you are going to enjoy the privilege of buying and selling with Caesar’s money, you ought to pay the taxes which support it. For the last 2,000 years, Christians have struggled to understand how that saying applies to their particular situation. Christians have asked themselves, “Does ‘giving Caesar Caesar’s’ mean paying taxes for government activities that are contrary to God’s will, or should we withhold that portion?” “Should we pledge allegiance to the emperor (or the flag)?” “Can we as Christians kill in defense of Caesar (or our nation)?”. Different Christians have arrived at different answers. This July 4th, we celebrate a revolution no one in Jesus’s day could have dreamed of, a revolution which gives us freedoms they could not imagine, including the freedom to choose our own “Caesar”, answerable to us every four years. With that revolution has come the responsibility of Christians both to protect those freedoms, and to maintain our primary allegiance to God. As we pray this July 4th for God to bless our country in all its works, let us also pray that we will be led by the Spirit to hold ourselves and our country responsible to God, who is Lord of all.

Last Sunday's Sermon Time after Pentecost.Lectionary 17.July 25.2010 Before I went to seminary I worked four years at a sheltered workshop for cognitively impaired adults. Part of my job was finding work our clients were able to do, going to factories and other businesses, looking for tedious jobs nobody there wanted to do, but our clients would love, so we could do it better and cheaper. Of course if I didn’t find such jobs, our clients didn’t work, and didn’t get paid. So a little pressure there. When I did find work, part of my job was setting it up in simple enough steps that a person with an I.Q. of 69 or lower could do it without help. Part of my job was meeting the contractor’s production schedule and arranging for pick up and delivery. So a challenging job. Lots of different hats. Good training for being a pastor. But hands down, the most frustrating hat I wore was that of the keeper of the pop machine key. I don’t know how I got stuck with it. Maybe it was cause my desk was closest to the break room. I don’t know. Anyway, when the machine didn’t work, people came to me. “I put my money in and--” “yeah, I know, you didn’t get any pop. Come on.” And I’d go in, unlock the machine, make sure they’d really put money in it, and give them their Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Orange Crush, whatever. After a while they didn’t even have to come. I’d hear them first, rattling the coin return, mashing the buttons, banging the display, bouncing the whole machine back and forth, swearing. I was amazed at how angry people got over a fifty cent can of pop. One guy actually broke his foot kicking the Pepsi machine, I had to take him to the emergency room (another of my hats–safety officer). I said, “Steve, it’s a can of pop.” He said, “Rog, it’s the principle of the thing. I put something in. I should have gotten something out.” And you know what? Over the years I have met people who feel exactly the same way about prayer. Yes, prayer. Maybe they prayed for someone to be healed, or recover from an injury, and that person died. Maybe they prayed that their job not be eliminated; they got laid off. Maybe they prayed to pass an important exam and they failed. In Jesus’s words, they asked and did not receive, searched and did not find, knocked and the door stayed shut. They had put their prayers in, thought they had pressed the right button, and gotten nothing, at least nothing they wanted. And since they couldn’t exactly rattle, mash, bang, bounce, or kick God, which doesn’t work with pop machines, they just quit, quit praying, quit believing in the power of prayer. And I understand their anger. I’ve been there. Probably so have you. I remember years ago, praying for a tiny unborn child, our unborn child, our first, praying it would survive a pregnancy in crisis. It didn’t. It died. I remember going home, racing up the stairs to an empty nursery, throwing up the window, and tossing all the baby stuff people had given us, out the window, into the snow, screaming at God. Neighbors probably thought I was nuts. I was so angry. But, by the grace of God, I didn’t quit. I’d learned as a child, the hard way, that God is not a pop machine. You can put all the right words in, but you can’t control the outcome. Prayer is more complicated than that, more mysterious, and more wonderful than we can imagine. In the Gospel, one of Jesus’s disciples asks, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And Jesus teaches them a simple prayer, simpler even than the one he teaches in Matthew, the one we pray every Sunday. “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins for we forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.” And then he says, use that prayer. Pray often. Pray persistently. Because prayer works. Just not always in the way we expect. If you think about it, prayer is one of the most arrogant and humbling things a human being can do. Arrogant? Think about who you’re talking to. Think about who you’re calling Father, Daddy. The Creator of the Universe. Do you know how big the Universe is? According to space.com, the known universe, accounting for inflation, is 156 billion light years across, 156 billion and every light year is nearly 6 trillion miles. And that’s just what we can see. The universe may be infinite. We don’t know. What we do know is that it’s filled with billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, trillions of planets, and we expect the designer of all that, the maker of all that, the sustainer of all that, the foundation of all that to care about me, one tiny, fragile, ephemeral creature on a small planet orbiting an ordinary star in a nondescript galaxy among billions? To listen to my petty concerns, my requests, my hopes, my fears. Now, that’s arrogant, and yes, that’s exactly what we expect. Jesus says, whatever you need, ask, and expect to get it. If it’s money, ask. If it’s a job, ask. If it’s a relationship, ask. If it’s strength, understanding, patience, courage, peace of mind, ask. What does the sign says out on Springfield? That’s right. Pray boldly. But Pastor what if we don’t get what we pray for? How could we not? I mean yes, you may not get the specific outcome you pushed the prayer button for. And then again you may. You don’t know til you pray. But what you will always receive is far more precious than what you asked for. What you always get is the Creator of the Universe’s full attention. You get to call God Father, Daddy, and God listens. And then Jesus says God gives you God’s own living presence, the Holy Spirit. That’s like putting your money into a pop machine, hitting a button, and instead of getting a Pepsi, out comes all the shares of Pepsico. You own the company. We invest a few minutes of prayer. We get the Creator of the Universe. So maybe, instead of getting angry, or doubtful, or quitting when we don’t get what we prayed for, we ought to be humbled. We’ve already gotten out infinitely more than we put in. What I prayed for on a hot summer evening many years ago was not money or better grades or a girlfriend or anything down to earth. What I prayed for was a sign. After taking Philosophy 101 and being introduced to an “objective” approach to Scripture in religious studies, my faith was a little shaken. I needed some assurance this God guy was really there. It was a sticky night, no air conditioning, I couldn’t sleep anyway, so I went outside, walked across the parking lot from the parsonage where we lived to the church where my dad pastored, stepped inside, it was cool in there, walked up front to the altar rail, knelt down, and began to pray for a sign. I didn’t know what kind of sign. A personally signed letter from the Almighty on celestial letterhead would have been good. “Dear Roger, Yes, I’m here. Love, God.” But a booming voice, a heavenly vision, even just shuffle the hymnals around. I didn’t care. Just something. But I got nothing, nothing but the sound of my own voice. And I was there a long time. I put a lot of prayer in the old machine. I punched a lot of buttons. So I quit, gave up, walked out of the church and was halfway across the parking lot when I looked up. And there they were. Angels. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Fluttering their wings. Filling the whole sky. I just stood there. Wow! Nice job. Good sign. Went home and went to bed. Next morning I heard on the local news that there had been a spectacular display of the northern lights the night before, that they looked like curtains fluttering in a breeze, or wings. At first I was disappointed. There was a scientific explanation to my angels. And it didn’t seem very likely that God would caused a geomagnetic storm 80 miles above the earth’s surface inconveniencing millions of people with power outages and disruption of communication just to give me a sign. On the other hand, it was the only night that summer I was outside like that, at just the right time. And even if that was a coincidence, and it might have been, and it wasn’t really a sign, which is possible, I still got far more out than I put in that night. I had a heart to heart for hours with the Creator of earth and sun and stars and everything in between.