Acts: 11: 1-18; Revelation 21: 1-6

A new way of seeing

What is that you and I do that really matters?  Have you asked yourself that?  We have all have our assumptions about what matters, but chances are we don’t think about it that much.  Chances are we do not have a way of evaluating which things we do really matter and they compare to others. For instance how do you compare helping your relatives with helping a homeless guy? How do you compare giving to church with giving to a charity?  How do compare providing for your family with volunteering?  What really matters, friends?

The problem in Acts was dietary laws. This was a major issue. It still is for conservative Jews and for Muslims: Kosher and Halal. Once at a gas station in Asia a truck driver’s helper got really mad at me because he thought I used the word pig in his local dialect in addressing him. That is much more of an insult to a Muslim?  A pig is about the worst animal out there, because pigs like eating garbage.  There is quote (maybe it’s Yogi Berra, maybe it’s not) which goes as follows:” Never get into a mud wrestling match with a pig, because the pig likes it.”  No pigs and their meat are not a good thing in Judaism and Islam.  In Hinduism it’s cows, but for the opposite reasons: cows are revered. We don’t quite understand, but we won’t eat horses or dogs. That’s not a religious thing, but it’s more because we see them as family members.   To us diet is a thing that is about our self-preservation and our health, but it still involves our values, even though it is not a religious or spiritual issue so much.  So Peter through his dreams sees things differently and he changes all the rules of the game: what God has created cannot be profane, so go ahead and enjoy it.

We’ve talked about maps and how the discovery of maps and the improvement of maps has been changed the world. The world looked so different when the land that lay West of Europe was not connected to the land that lay to the east. Then it changed when Columbus believed  the earth was round, but much smaller.  India was supposed to be in the Caribbean.  Not only was the continent behind the Caribbean much bigger than he assumed but the largest ocean on earth lay between it and East Asia.  Now with google maps all we have to do s type in an address and we scroll around the world to a spot we know or we want to know.  The rock group Arcade Fire had a video a few years ago in which you see yourself running and when you type in your address, google maps takes you there and you find yourself running in your own neighborhood.  A very strange experience. What a new way of seeing?

Friends, what we think matters in our lives has a lot to do with how we see the world. For people who believe the world can’t be changed, perhaps only their family matters.  For believe who don’t think we should be worried about people half a world away, the actions we should take are in our country only.  So it depends  a lot on how we see the world we live in it. The perspective is important. Let’s take this congregation for instance.  If we are going to do new creative things in the years to come, we are going to have think about how we see this church of ours. Some will say: “it needs to be bigger.” Others may say:”I came here because it’s small and people call you when they haven’t seen you for a few weeks.  Some may say, we need to make sure we have a parking lot in the future.” Others may say:” where we park is not as important as what we do for the community around us.” Some may think that what matters is the size of our Sunday school.” Other will say:” You’re never going to have an equal number of students from different grades when you are a small church. It’s really the old school house idea. “ Some may say we need to get enough money to keep the church going.” Other may say money shouldn’t not be our main concern, for it wasn’t for Jesus.”  It all depends on how you look at it.

Friends, I am hoping that in the next year we will be able to engage each other in a deliberate process of exploration.  I would like it to be a year of exploration.  Like Peter we may come to see that what we considered crucial isn’t and what we considered trivial is crucial.  A new way of seeing may be what we need.

In the Book of Revelation the whole issue of what matters is gone.  The text does not even talk about that anymore. It points to a time when there is a new heaven and a new earth.  When all the things that once mattered and that matter now and will matter in the future have come together in something new and beautiful.  As Christians it is in the light if that text that we must see the world.

Job 38; Isaiah 26: 4; Jeremiah 17: 4-6, 12-14; John 10: 22-30

Trust issues

I believe that in our day and age we face a real crisis of trust. Let’s start with a question: how can we trust in a time when it seems we can no longer trust anyone or anything? I would like to give you the answer right away: I believe that the way we can trust God most reliably in our day and ages is through trusting God’s grace.”  The people of Northern Ireland refer to the brutal Civil War between Catholics and Protestants as “The Troubles.”  When we look at the book of Job we see a man with nothing but troubles, nothing but the deepest suffering.  Isaiah and Jeremiah lives in a time of exile or coming exile, a time of deep troubles.  These prophets are not psychics, but they have a sense of the direction of history and God’s role in it.  They refer to nature.  Isaiah speaks of trust as rock and for Jeremiah a person who trust God is like a tree planted by the water.  When we look at John we see Jesus referring to His followers as “sheep.” He does not do so because He thinks His followers are less than intelligent people, on the contrary, He mentions sheep because the people of His time on earth knew them and understood their nature and one thing they knew them for was their trust. It is as if the sheep know instinctively that however far they stray, this shepherd will track them down, cradle them in His arms and bring them home gently on His shoulder.  It is all about the shepherd intently watching over them rather than the lack of insight of the sheep.  It’s about trust.  God asks Job to trust God implicitly:” Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell, if you have understanding.  Who set its measurements, since you know? Or stretched the line on it? On what were its bases sunk? Or who laid its cornerstone?  When the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy? “

But, friends, trust is not our strong suit. We don’t do trust well.  Yes, we do not have a pretty good idea of trust in each other in this church, but in general our trust level is low.  We don’t trust our representatives in general, except our local one.  We don’t trust corporations or people or schools or the ability of our planet to sustain us. Our faith in the future is at a low ebb.  Friends, in the movie “The God’s must be crazy” a Bushman from the Kalahari desert in Southern Africa finds a coke bottle a pilot has thrown from a plane. He tries throwing it up in the air, but it comes down again and hits him in the head. He tries burying it, but a hyena digs it up again.  “The gods must be crazy,” he mutters. The other Bushmen soon discover how useful the coke bottle is: you can make sounds with ii when you blow in it, you can use it as a hammer or a cooking utensil or to stretch out cobra skin.  But it doesn’t take long for jealousy to emerge. Everyone wants to own the bottle. One child is hit over the head with it. The Bushman who found the object has enough.  He sets out on a long journey to the ends of his earth to dispose of the annoying object.  “The gods must be crazy.” It makes sense sometimes, for in our world we sometimes lose trust in God.

Friends, after all the concern about the availability of guns no one needs to the mentally ill or the disproportionally angry, Congress failed utterly to get anything passed.  The gun manufacturers are too rich and powerful.  It makes you want to give and lose trust. We see a bombing in Boston and you wonder how we can trust our public places if they evil or the crazy populate it with us?

I don’t know if you ever saw that famous Simpsons episode where the whole family is Rio de Janeiro for carnival.  Homer is kidnapped and his wife Marge is quite worried about him. Of course she is also in Rio during the carnival so she wants to dance.  “Gosh, I am worried,” she says, “but I also feel like dancing. What shall I do? I guess I’ll do both at the same time.”  So Marge worries…and dances, she dances …and worries. It kind of sums up our life: we don’t quite trust, but try to trust at the same time. We, like Marge, go back and forth.

We cannot lose trust.  We cannot thrive without it.  We must give the world a chance, but at the same time we must be realistic.  The world will eventually disappoint us.  It is just a matter of time.

Friends, we can bear to lose trust in our leaders.  We can bear to lose trust in people in general even.  We can bear to lose trust even in our schools or in the Church as an institution, but we can never afford to lose trust in God’s grace. That is just not an option.  God’s grace is at work in spite of the enormous obstacles of evil and suffering. God’s grace trickles through somehow.  Thanks be to God for grace that never ends.

John 21: 1-19; Acts 9:1-6

Encounters with Jesus

Life is full of strange encounters. A number of years back when we were traveling through Morocco, we met a young man named Abdul.  If you are traveling in a Muslim country, Abdul is one of those names you would expect someone to have.  So that was not that unusual.  Turns out Abdul was working for the government tourism department and we concluded that he was expected to get cozy with unsuspecting train riding tourists.  His route apparently was Casablanca to Fes in the interior.  He gave us advice on where we should stay and where we should eat.  We followed quite a bit of his advice.  The next few days wherever we went it seemed Abdul would pop up.  In the hotel:” Are you having a good time?”  In the restaurant :”How are you doing?” One of our boys quipped that we should be checking under the bed, or in the bathroom for Abdul before doing anything. But you can’t say, as much as it seemed so at first, that there was anything miraculous about meeting Abdul.  In a way we were following his script.

Friends, what about the encounters between the disciples and Jesus and the encounter between Jesus and Paul.  What was going on there?  What was so special?  What was the script. Well, first we could say that the encounters changed lives. The disciples would be so heartened by seeing Jesus again and the breakfast he cooked them.  The encounter was crucial in motivating them for a lifetime of service. Paul’s encounter with Jesus caused a huge turnaround in his life.  He went from Saul to being Paul, from being a persecutor of Christians to a caller of Christians, from being an enemy of Christ to one who loves Christ.  The text makes clear that it was an entirely transforming experience. Second, there was room for doubt and confusion.  There on the water’s edge it wasn’t completely clear to the disciples that this person was actually the Jesus he had known.  They did not recognize Him at first, but it slowly dawned on them.  For Saul the vision was a light flash that blinded them. Then there was a voice. There was a lot of room for interpretation.  Finally, the encounter with Jesus was unexpected.  It came out of the blue.  This was not something either the disciples or Saul were counting on.

Friends, we just talked about the brief encounters Frederick Buechner (“Yellow Leaves”) had with Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower and how he got to know Maya Angelou and what his boarding school teachers meant to him.  I once had quite a lengthy private conversation with the man who would not long after become Indonesia’s fourth president, although that would have not been clear to either one of us.  I was working in the office if the National Council of Churches and his office was just a half mile down this crazy wide steamy dirty boulevard with rusty pedestrian overpasses with beggars. He was then the head of the world’s largest Muslim social organization, the Nahdlatul Ulama, with thirty million members. I wanted to show him a small book I had just written on addiction I thought might be useful to his organization.  Even though he was nearly completely blind, he leafed through the pages.  Then he talked how he was always in danger, how the generals were after him. He also warned me about other Muslim organizations and how they were no good, talking like anyone would about their rivals.  His office was an absolute chaos, with folders and files stacked on top each other.  But, you know what, friends, visits like that with powerful people do not come often in our lifetime, it is an encounter I do not often think about.  It did not transform me.  It was a side note to my life.  Isn’t that ironic? The meetings we had with important people may not be the encounters we remember.  The ones we remember are the ones where we felt truly loved, truly guided, truly understood, truly accompanied.  Those are the encounters are often transforming like the ones in our texts for today: they may not always be completely clear and often unexpected as we see in the text.

This leads us to an important question: how are our encounters with Jesus related to the encounters with other people?  Those people, however powerful they are or may become, they are after all just people.  The text in Matthew which forms our call to worship, gives us a clue here. Jesus says:” whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.” “Whatever you do for others, you do for me.” It’s that simple, but what does that mean?  What that means, friends, is that in our encounters with others we may encounter Christ.  This means that in our encounters with other people, Christ may be present there. Do you realize how powerful that is?  It means that when we least expect it in the encounter with another we may be transformed.  Christ may be at work in that relationship. What this does is turn the everyday into the potentially sacred. May God give us many experiences like that.

John 20: 1-19: Acts 5:37-42

What can your hands do?

Dear friends

Today we have our annual encounter with the Thomas story. So I thought I would do something different this time.  Instead of talking about doubt, I want to talk about hands, but in a literal and not-so-literal way.  Thomas refuses to believe that Jesus is among the disciples again after the resurrection. Thomas may be known as the doubting disciple, but he is really not that bad. He has been quite loyal.  Thomas is upset that he wasn’t with the other disciples when they saw Jesus. He insists on seeing Jesus’ hands, ravaged by the nails that put Him on the cross.  Now feet have been in the news lately.  Pope Francis washed people’s feet recently, even the feet of non-Christians which caused a bit of an uproar.  But hands, there is something about hands. Perhaps they are second only to the eyes in being personal.  Perhaps they are second only to the eyes in connecting us to the world around us and to each other.  Hands express so much of who we are.  We use our hands after all to greet people, to attend to people who need care, to prepare food that nourishes us and others.  But we also use our hands to perform decisive acts, but also to pound tables in frustration and anger.  We use our hands to communicate, with a pen, with a keyboard, in sign language. Friends,  let us not underestimate the power and meaning of hands.  I had a friend who once told me that she never forgets a person’s hands.  I had a student on Java who did not have a functioning right hand.  And therefore had to use his left.  The left hand is only used for the bathroom over all.  You never give or receive anything with your left hand.   It was a source of great shame for him.

But Jesus’ hands were even more important.  Those hands were symbolic of so much.  Those hands had blessed people. Those hands had healed people.  Those hands had soothed people and supported people.  Those hands had channeled love to people.  Those hands had been raised in praise. But more than anything those hands had experienced the frightening suffering of the cross.

Friends, if you have ever seen a severe injury to a hand, you realize how personal a hand is.

But sometimes, friends, we have to change what we do with our hands. This could be because of severe arthritis or there is no more need for us to do a job we were doing or just because we lost energy or strength.  We may even be known for what we can do with our hands: repair teeth, putt golf balls, paint canvases, sculpt stone, mold pottery, weld metal, make stained glass, fix cars, write stories.  At one point or another we will have to change what we do with our hands.  Friends, what can you with your hands?

Let us fast forward to the book of Acts.  Jesus is no longer physically among his disciples. His hands are gone from sight.  The disciples, now apostles, have become the hands of Jesus to the world.  In the verses of the week we see and hear them at work.  They are facing angry opposition from the authorities.  They are spreading the message of Jesus.  The authorities want Jesus dead and buried.  The authorities want to move the apostles out of the public limelight.  No longer are there apostles who follow and help Jesus.  Their task has changed. Now they are leaders.  Different tasks were demanded of their hands.

Friends,  our tasks change.  Our hands do different things.  Often that is a bad thing or a sad thing.  Sometimes it is a good thing.   Sometimes a person who couldn’t before can get a job because a Rosa parks sat down and a Martin Luther King Jr. kept walking.  Perhaps soon a gay wedding coordinator instead on arranging the bows on the pews for someone else’s wedding can slip a ring on a finger of a man he loves.  Perhaps one day undocumented youths born in this country can come out of the shadows and make money legally.  Perhaps the unemployed fifty-something year old can be reschooled and go to work again soon finally.  Perhaps citizens of both Korea’s will be able to turn swords and rockets into plowshares finally.  Perhaps the car bomb makers of Iraq and Syria will make school desks and restock hospitals one day.   Perhaps people who have spent a lifetime thinking only of themselves will use their hands in service of those less fortunate.  Hands will do different things, tasks will change.   Sometimes people will even learn to use their feet and their mouths as hands to create, to write, to paint. Friends, the way the world is going, our hands will no longer do one thing all our lives.  Teachers will stop writing on boards, surgeons will operate in radically new ways, hands will use computers in a thousand new ways.  Friends, our world will be about constant retooling, redesigning, revisioning.  That is what the apostles had to two thousand years ago.   That is what we must do.  Friends, what will you use your hands for in the years to come?  How will you serve others and your God? How will you retool?  What can your hands do?  May God use them.  Thanks be to God.

Isaiah 65: 17-25; John 20: 1-18

The Resurrection Outlook

Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person?  In other words when life is not perfect but also not terrible, which is the case most of the time for most of us, do you tend to look at the positive side of what’s happening in your life or the negative?  This is what we are talking about today, our attitude toward life.  This is what we have just discussed:  what was the outlook, attitude of the disciples after Jesus was crucified and what should be our attitude, our outlook after the resurrection? Now we can talk of the glass being half empty or being half full, but we can’t speak of Jesus’ tomb being  half empty, or Jesus’ tomb being half full.  That sounds silly.  Either the tomb where Jesus was laid was full, in other words his body was there, or it was empty, in other words it wasn’t there.  There is no in between.  We can’t say it was a little bit there.  The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg in the seventies claimed that based on the culture of the days of Jesus, the word of Jesus’ resurrection could not have spread if nothing had happened, if it was all made up.   The Jewish culture of that day when there were so many charlatans and wanna-be and would-be Messiahs would have forgotten about this Jesus of Nazareth if he had been another fly by night healer and big talker.   Also in the seventies one of the major Dutch theologians by the name of Kuitert who taught at the university where I was a student in Amsterdam, wrote a book declaring that he did not think the resurrection was an actual event.  In Holland where society was becoming secular much more rapidly than it is here in the US, this was an enormous blow to faithful church people.  Pretty soon after that I left the Netherlands and except for a six month training program I took in the early eighties I have been absent pretty much the entire period since then, so I am not totally sure what people are thinking.   This was all before the post-modern movement in theology and the new advances in science.  Now let’s see if we can remember our science talk from last year for a second.  Let me do that by giving a simple example.  A few weeks ago I fixed a bicycle tire on Carolyn’s bike which I have been riding.  It was the rear tire. It seemed to have a straightforward leak and it was an easy matter.  After a few days I noticed that it was slowly leaking.  I kept having to pump it up, more every time I wrote.  I knew I had to take the inner tube out again.  Then for some reason the tire stopped leaking air and I had to add just a little every time with the pump.  The tire seemed to be fixing itself!  Now you will agree that this is not a likely event, but also not an impossible event. The odds of the tire leaking more air rather than less were, you would agree, much higher.  Now at the risk of sounding less than reverent, there are similarities with the resurrection.  Jesus rising from the dead after two days is a highly unlikely event, but not, as people in the seventies would have claimed, an impossible event.  The science of small things, which includes quantum mechanics, is teaching us things about energy and how it can be applied that would make Jesus joining the disciples once more in physical form, unexpected but not impossible.  This means that the resurrection has become much less of an unlikely event than we would have claimed in the seventies.  Resurrection is not the intellectual problem it was.

Friends, now let’s talk about what this means for our lives. Earlier we talked about the different philosophies we can use to view our life: we can believe that all has been decided anyway so no matter what we do we cannot change life.  We can decide not to take it seriously because life is all one big joke.  We can decide to believe that people are out to get us and that we always lose out.  We can decide just to live for the moment and accept the impermanence of things.  We can decide that we must exert our power over the world to get what we want.  And then there is resurrection thinking.  Then there is the resurrection outlook.  Resurrection thinking, the resurrection outlook tells us that there are many things in life that aren’t likely to get better any time soon:  that relationship with a sibling or a spouse, that pain in your lower back, that civil war in Syria, politics in the Sudan, North and South Korea’s war of words and rockets,  the world’s poverty rate, global climate change,  job prospects, the approval rating of Congress etc.  Resurrection thinking tells us, however, that there we have God’s grace,  God’s energy is at work in the world.  It may not be coercive, it may subtle, but it seeps and trickles through our lives.  We talked about God’s timing last week, so let’s connect that dot also.  If we keep believing that goodness can be resurrected or resurrect itself, if we believe there is hope, if we can just keep trying to spread love and kindness persistently in our relationships, in our little world and in the larger world, if we can keep at it, then I believe the most wonderful, unlikely things are going to happen.  At those moments when God’s grace meets our efforts, there will be resurrection.  He is Risen. Thanks be to God.

Luke 13: 31-35; Philippians 3: 18-20

Getting our house in order

Last we talked about spiritual housecleaning.  Today we continue with our house metaphor.  While last week we started thinking about the stuff in our garages and the nature of our emotional and spiritual baggage, today we think about the kind of “house” we live in and the kind of house we offer to God.

The distinction between “house” and “home” is disappearing.  Language changes. We don’t know when to use the word “lie” or “lay.”  “I think I will lay down for a nap,” is not a possibility, but people say it all the time.  We don’t wait “for” anything anymore, we are waiting “on.”  This makes it sound like the person speaking is sitting on top of the thing or person they are waiting for.   But the overlapping meaning of house and home is a commercial invention.  If you could think of a –potentially hideous- building for sale as something where you can feel at home, then you might be more likely to buy it.  A home is somewhere where you belong and where you make others belong. Jesus makes it very clear in His strong reaction that He does not consider Jerusalem or any other place on earth for that matter His home.  The reason why it is not a good home for Him, for God, is that it is a place of deceit. He calls Herod who is plotting to kill Jesus a “sly fox.”  He is even stronger about the city itself:” Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”  In Philippians Paul echoes the theme: We are citizens of heaven through our faith. Of those Who oppose the Christ he says:”I have often told you of them , and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction.  Their God is in their belly and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.”

So let’s talk, friends, this is a good time, about our hospitality to God.  How are we as a community, or as a family or as people a place where God would feel at home.  We have already talked about that already: what are we like as a house?  Instead of asking: if you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be or if you were a flower, what kind of flower would you be, what if would ask: what kind of house would you be? Perhaps it’s a lot like your house now, maybe not. What this strange question does is take the question of hospitality to a personal level.  Now this may still be hard to do:”how can we be welcoming to God.  We can think of giving God time, approaching God with humility, but I think it has a lot to with how we are hospitable to others.  In “Small Wonders: Essays,” Barbara Kingsolver writes about writes about her home city: “Tucson, the city where I live most of the time, is often to be said to be a Mecca for homeless people.  I don’t like to use this word “Mecca” because it suggests a beautiful holy land and a trip undertaken to fulfill the needs of the spirit, whereas thousands of men, women and children undertake the long journey to Tucson for one reason only: to fulfill the need of the body to lie on the ground overnight without freezing to death. They come here for raw survival; their numbers swell each October and then remain through each following summer a little higher than the year before. Increasingly they have become a presence among us, ignored by most of us, specifically banned by our laws from certain places where the city council has decided their panhandling may interfere with commerce. They are banned mostly, I think, because their presence is a pure, naked shame on all of us.” Friends, how well do we provide a sense of hospitality to people in our lives?  How do we welcome?

Beyond that, friends, how do we welcome God in our lives?  Would we be more hospitable to Jesus than Jerusalem was?  We have talked of the odd concept of ourselves as a “house.”  Whenever we have bought furniture for our house, we were always surprised that the space to put them in gave us very little options.  There were at mostly two.  They both looked boring. Unless, unless we put the furniture diagonally, which we did. This makes you lose a corner, but it opens us the spatial imagination.  A famous architect was once asked what great architecture was supposed to do and his answer was: ”to lift our spirits.”   What God wants to do is “heal our spirits.” So the question I have today is: can we change the architecture of our lives or more modestly, can we rearrange the furniture in our lives so God will feel more at home.  Can we change the routines and the habits of our life so that they become more God-friendly?  Can we put the routines and habits of our lives at an angle? Can we create time for speaking and listening for God and finding God between the lines?  Can we arrange our schedules to fit God and the service to God and people or are we going to expect God to fit in the left over spaces.  Are we going to give God room or must God take whatever is left at the end of the day?  May The Holy Spirit inspire us as we ponder this.

Joel 2: 12-16a; Luke 4: 1,2

Spiritual Spring cleaning

Dear friends,

Let’s talk about Spring cleaning.  It’s a little early, but the weather seems to be warming up slightly.  Can you think of things you would like to get rid of, things you just don’t need and that clutter your life?  I think we all can.  But what if we apply that to our spiritual life?  Could we come up with items just as fast? Probably not.  It seems a bit too abstract.  It’s not tangible. We can’t wrap our brains around it.  Let’s see if we can get there with a story.

I recently finished reading a novel by Richard Russo with the title: “That Old Cape Magic.” It is about a Hollywood TV screenwriter who also teaches at a college and about his thirty year old marriage and the wedding of his only daughter. He is a man who wants to live his life well and effectively and happily like all of us, but has great difficulty doing so, not unlike us in many ways.  But you could say this man Jack Griffin has a sour streak.  He is always putting people down and judging them.  This seriously affects his relationships of course.  He is always trying to get away from placing he looks down on: L.A., Sacramento and the Mid-west to be specific.  He gets his attitude from his parents, cranky college professors who graduated from Yale, wanted to teach in the Ivy League but wound up teaching in state college in Indiana.  They would get invitations to teach at one Ivy League school or another, but never at the same time, so they never went.  However every year they would rent a cottage on Cape Cod and as soon as they crossed one of the two bridges that lead to the island they would start singing “That Old Cape Magic.”  It was a refuge for them, a place they could spend the summer reinvigorating themselves.

It is also the place where Jack Griffin finds himself again two years in a row because of two weddings he has to attend, one being his daughters.  At the time of the first wedding he carries his father’s ashes in an urn in the trunk of his rental car, determined to pour it into the sea off the Cape. He finally enters the waves, trips, loses the urn and then, to his relief, retrieves it. Happy to have retrieved it, he takes the urn back home again.  The next year he comes back to the Cape he carries two urns, one with his father’s ashes, the other with his mother’s ashes.  The story becomes all about how Jack is like his over-critical, cranky, inconsiderate, selfish parents returning with nostalgia to a place they loved carrying their ashes, ashes he can’t quite get himself to release.  It is as if he won’t rid himself of their voices.  And that’s what it is all about: the voices of his parents.  At the last wedding he finds himself reacting to people the way his mother would: full of sharp sarcasm.  In the end he can let go, dumping out the urns at opposite ends of the Cape his parents both loved, because while they loved each other they were divorced and his mother insisted they be laid to rest at significant distance from each other.

Friends, Jack Griffin has emotional and spiritual Spring cleaning.  While he loved his parents, he cannot get rid of their anger at the world and his anger at them.  He wants to hold on to it, keep it in the trunk of his rental car.  As long as he holds on to the urn, he can keep resenting them for the sourness and disrespect and negativity they brought to the world.  It isn’t until in the end that he can do spiritual spring cleaning and ask himself who he really is and should be? He is finally free to be the kinder person he should be.

In Luke Jesus hears the voice of the Evil One Who tempts Him to take power because it is at Jesus’ fingertips, but he rejects it.  Instead of grabbing a hold of all the things that would make Him famous but would keep Him from with growing into the spiritual leader He should be, He renounces the power to follow God. Jesus will not take on the baggage of power that will make him nasty and selfish. So from the beginning to the end of his ministry Jesus travels light.

Friends, we call carry all kinds of baggage from the life we lived so far: the disappointments, the resentment, the anger, the grudges, but also the sins.  At Lent it is time to try to let go of them, to dump them out in the waves and live our lives renewed and with less weight to carry around.  We keep the memories and the love, but we get rid of all the bad stuff that weighs us down.  May God help us do so.