“I Have Called You Friends” - May 13, 2012

Text: John 15:9-17

Seaside, Florida is a small town that was founded in 1981.  It is a planned community, perhaps as planned as any community has ever been, and is intended as a throwback to what small towns used to be.  Seaside was built with 350 homes and plans for no further residential development.  The idea was that Seaside would be a place where folks would visit one another, know their neighbors, walk to the store - that it would be a clean, quiet, safe place, and that a sense of community would prevail.  The houses all have porches that are set exactly 16 feet from the sidewalk - close enough that porch-sitters can speak to passersby. 

Commercial and retail and residential properties are mixed together.  Bike paths and walking paths abound – there is less dependence on vehicles in Seaside.  Everyone in town can walk to the grocery or post office in 5 minutes or less.  There are no cul-de-sacs; every street is a through street so there are no arterial streets with heavy traffic.  And most streets end at the ocean.  Some of you may remember the movie “The Truman Show” from several years ago.  The movie is set in what is an artificially perfect small town, and the movie was filmed in Seaside.

It sounds very nice, but for some, Seaside looks a lot like a haven for white flight, a kind of novelty community for rich people escaping the city.  The fact that it has a lot more fancy restaurants and beautiful resorts and interesting, trendy shops than your average community of 350 homes might give some credence to those reports.

Nevertheless, the idea of a place where you don’t have to fight traffic and you know the neighbors and the streets are safe and everyone gets along is very appealing.

What Seaside and other communities like it are marketing, in a sense, is community.  They are appealing to our desire for friendship.  They don’t come right out and say, “Move to our town and we will be your friend,” but it seems the kind of place where friendships are more likely, more possible.

And this appeals to us because we are facing a shortage of friendship.  We have colleagues and co-workers and classmates and neighbors and acquaintances and Facebook friends, but most of us, if we are honest, are not just swamped with deep friendships.

Our text from John’s gospel is a part of Jesus’ instruction given to his disciples on the Thursday night before he was arrested.  In fact, we read this passage on Maundy Thursday.  These are some of the last words Jesus shared with his disciples before the cross.  And he speaks to them concerning relationships—with him and with one another.

He speaks of the centrality of love.  “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”  Jesus’ last word to his followers is love.  And if love is the last word, there are several related words and themes that explain what this love is like.

One is permanence.  “…Abide in my love,” Jesus says.  Remain rooted in my love.  If this sounds familiar, it is because in last week’s passage, Jesus also said, “Abide in me.”  For Jesus, this abiding, continuing, rock-solid love is crucial.  We are to hold fast to the sure and simple knowledge that we are loved by God and nothing can change that.  God’s love for us is abiding, and when we abide in God’s love, it affects everything else in life.

To abide in God’s love is to trust God and turn to God and live in God’s presence even in the difficult times.  We don’t run at the first sign of trouble.  We can live with doubt and ambiguity and face trying circumstances and yet remain in an intimate relationship with God because we know God loves us.  “Abide in my love,” Jesus says.  

There is also a sacrificial quality to God’s love.  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  Jesus did just that, laying down his life for us, his friends, and in doing so Jesus set the example for us.

There is a story from the Holocaust that demonstrates the sacrificial love in which Christ calls us to live.  In her book Conscience and Courage, Eva Fogelman writes:

People in hiding got sick and it required what seemed like crazy actions to get them well.  You could not call in a doctor to help a sick Jew.  And you could not bury one who died.  That person was not supposed to exist.

In 1942, Wladyslaw Misiuna, a teenager from Poland, was recruited by the Germans to help inmates at the concentration camp start a rabbit farm to supply furs for soldiers at the Russian front.  Misiuna felt responsible for the thirty young women he supervised.  He stuffed his coat pockets with bread, milk, carrots and potatoes and smuggled in food for them.

But one day, one of his workers, Deborah Salzberg, contracted a mysterious infection.  Misiuna was beside himself.  He knew if the Germans discovered the open lesions on her arms they would kill her.  He had to cure her, but how?  He took the simplest route.  He infected himself with her blood and when the lesions appeared, he went to a doctor in town.  The doctor prescribed a medication, which Misiuna then shared with Deborah Salzberg.  Both were cured and both survived the war.

There is a friend with an abiding, sacrificial love.

Laying one’s life down for one’s friend can happen in different ways.  Ralph Milton reminisces about his father:

Dad was a teacher.  He taught high school, and one of the boys in that high school, a classmate of mine, was (to be very politically correct) socially challenged… Stan (not his real name, of course) was royally messed up.  He needed help, and needed it badly.

Stan’s dad was chair of the school board, and hence my dad’s boss.  One day Stan’s dad came by our house in that tiny Manitoba town.  I was in the shed fixing my bike, so I overheard the conversation he had with my dad, who was outside in the garden.

Stan’s dad wanted to talk about my dad’s chickens, which we kept to supplement that meager teacher’s salary.  My dad wanted to talk about Stan.  Several times, my dad introduced the subject of Stan’s problems.  Several times, Stan’s dad changed the subject to the chickens.  Finally my dad lost his patience.  “You are more interested in my chickens than in your own son!” he blurted out.  Stan’s dad turned on his heels and left.  That night, dad was called to a special meeting of the school board.  He was fired.

When he came home from that meeting, after telling mom what happened, he went and wrote a long letter to Stan’s dad.  Not about being fired.  About Stan.  “The boy will wind up in jail,” said my dad.  And he was right.  That’s exactly where Stan wound up.

Ralph Milton said, “Whenever I look for a definition of the practical love that Jesus was talking about, I think of my dad’s love for Stan.”

The love Jesus is describing here, an abiding love, a sacrificial love, is very practical.  It is not mere sentimentality, but desiring and working for the very best for the other.

It is exemplified in true friendship.  We are to be such friends to each other, and amazingly, Jesus has called us friend.  “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends.”

There is a world of difference between a servant and a friend.  It is the difference between obligation and love.  It is the difference between involvement and detachment.  A servant, a hired hand, just does the job and that’s it.  There is no deep personal investment.  But a friend is vitally involved and has a deep concern for what happens.

There was a contest involving a young female pop music star.  High school guys could enter this contest and if they won, this singer would come and sing at their high school prom and be their date for the evening.

I’m sure that this sounded like a great prize for a number of high school boys.  Well, as it turned out, it wasn’t.  This singer showed up but that is about all that can be said.  She half-heartedly sang two songs, showed little enthusiasm, and didn’t give her “date” the time of day.  She didn’t talk to him and wanted nothing to do with him.  She was there because she was obligated to be there and the promotion helped to sell records.

He would have been better off with a friend.     

To be a friend involves mutuality.  To be friends places two on equal footing.  Which makes it all the more amazing that Jesus has called us friend.

This is not the first we hear of such a thing in the Bible.  In Exodus, we read that “the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend,” and in Isaiah, God speaks of “Abraham, my friend.”

Frederick Buechner says that “not even God can be a friend by himself apparently.  You see Abraham, say, not standing at all but sitting down, loosening his prayer shawl, trimming the end of his cigar.  He is not being Creature for the moment, and God is not being Creator.  There is no agenda.  They are simply being together, the two of them, and being themselves.

And it is not simply a privilege for the patriarchs.  Jesus says, “I have called you friend.”  Friendship with Jesus, requires a mutual relationship.  Jesus could run the show and we could be the servants, the hired hands, and maybe that’s the way we would prefer to think of Christian faith.  It’s easier that way.  It requires a lot less of us.  We have less invested.  But for whatever reason, Jesus places trust in us and calls us friends.

We relate to Jesus not out of obligation, but out of love, and rather than being detached, we are intimately involved in God’s work in this world.  God has placed trust in us.  God has called us friend.

Jesus says that we are his friends if we do what he commands, which at first doesn’t sound like friendship at all—what kind of conditional friendship is this?  But then we look at what he commands: love one another.  That’s it.  That’s the new commandment.  That’s the great commandment.  We love Jesus as we love one another.  Our friendship with Jesus grows as our friendship with one another grows.

Leonard Sweet says “the greatest decision facing the 21st-century church is whether it will function as a law-based community of faith or as a grace-based community of love.  Will we be defined by some carefully articulated, theologically sophisticated, logically delineated ‘Articles of Faith?’  Or will the church welcome its role as a living, breathing, healing, helping organism known for its ‘Acts of Love?’”

The story is told of a man who died and went to hell.  His family and friends formed a committee to enlist influential people to go to the iron gates of hell and plead for his release.  His pastor was the first emissary to go.  He stood at the iron gates and shouted to Satan, “Open the gates and let him out.  He was a pretty good church member.  He never missed an Easter or Christmas service.  He always put a dollar in the offering plate when he was in church.  He was a good man. Open the gates and let him out!”  The gates of hell did not move.

Next they sent his golfing partner, who explained what a good golfer he had been.  He was excellent with the fairway irons, he observed proper golf etiquette, didn’t cheat much, and he let faster groups play through.  His golfing partner cried to Satan, “Open the gates and let him out.”  The gates did not budge.  Several other influential people went to hell to plead his case and ask Satan to let him out, but to no avail.

Frustrated, the man’s mother charged down to hell, yelling “Open the gates and let my son out, or I’m coming in!”  The iron gates opened.

You didn’t think that I would forget that today is Mother’s Day, did you?  Today is a good day to give thanks for those who would charge the gates of hell for us.  I got out my Greek Bible this week, which I really hate to do because I am so rusty at it, but the word translated “friends” here is a form of the verb “to love.”  When Jesus speaks of those who would lay down their lives for their friends, it could be more literally translated “lay down their lives for those whom they love.”  Now, who would lay down their very life for one whom they love?  Many of us think of our mothers, who in a very real sense lay down their lives for their children in all of the ways they give of themselves for us.

Yesterday we had a work day here at church.  We got a lot of work accomplished.  I was trimming the bushes in the front yard.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but some of them have gotten pretty tall.  I was on a ladder cutting back the top of an overgrown bush when I noticed a bird nest.  It looked to be in pretty good shape and I wondered if it was occupied.  There were some leaves on top from the hedge trimmer and I pulled them back to reveal a pile of nearly featherless babies – they must have been just a couple of days old.

I was surprised that I hadn’t been attacked.  Then, I noticed a robin on the rail by the window well nearby.  And then I saw her again on the edge of the roof, right above the nest, where she hung out most of the morning.  We ran a chain saw and hedge trimmers, Jon had a blower vac cleaning out window wells, Bob and Joe were cleaning out gutters, there was a lot of noise, a lot of commotion, but through it all, that mother was looking out for her babies – like a lot of human mothers.

Abiding, sacrificial love.

Jesus says, “I have called you friends,” but it is really even deeper than that.  “I have called you my beloved ones,” he says.  We are beloved by Jesus, and his instruction to us is clear: love one another.  Love one another.  It is that easy.  It is that hard.  Amen.

“Connections” - May 6, 2012

Texts: John 15:1-8, Acts 8:26-40

This is a time of the year when people really pay attention to gardening and plants and vegetation.  Every year our sycamore tree leafs out and then the leaves shrivel up and fall off.  We sometimes have to rake leaves in May or June.  Then a second crop of leaves come along.  This is caused by a fungus that is pretty common to sycamores around here, and our tree seems to be OK – it’s getting its new leaves.  I have been told trees are susceptible to this fungus when there is a cold, wet spring.  Well, from January through April we had a record for warmth; it was the first April since 1890 with not even a trace of snow.  And we are still low on precipitation for the year.  So, this has most definitely not been a cold, wet spring – it’s been the opposite - but the leaves are falling anyway.

We have chicken wire around some of our hostas, but not all of them.  The rabbits are just having a buffet on those that are not protected.  Lois Macken gave me some hostas that she said were valuable to serious hosta people – they were kind of rare - and it’s just my luck, the rabbits in our neighborhood have champagne taste.  They leave the plain vanilla ones alone and really go after the hard-to-find hostas.

Many of us pay attention to such things this time of year.  In the spring, we are attentive to planting and growing.  We are planting flowers and thinking about tomatoes.  In the culture of the Bible, people paid attention to agriculture all year round.  Their lives and their livelihood depended on it.

Jesus used an agricultural metaphor when he said that he is the vine and we are the branches.  We bear fruit only as we are connected to Christ, the vine.

The grape vines in Palestine in Jesus’ day had two kinds of branches--one bore fruit, the other did not.  (There may be nice hybrids today where that isn’t the case, but that’s the way it was then.) In order for a vine to produce well, the branches that did not bear fruit had to be cut way back so that the energy of the plant went into producing fruit, not more leaves.  And even fruit-producing branches have to be pruned.  The grapes need sunlight to ripen and you don’t want the vines to become too dense.  Without a gardener to tend the vines, the vineyard eventually goes to ruin.

I once took a to work at a place called Henderson Settlement, a mission that provided all kinds of services in a very poor, economically depressed area of Eastern Kentucky.  Henderson Settlement had a farm and used it to teach farming techniques to folks in the area as well as produce food for their meal programs.

Several years before we were there, they had planted an apple orchard.  The hope was to encourage people in the area who were losing jobs in the mining industry to raise apples as a cash crop.  But the farm manager left and the new manager had more interest and expertise in other areas, and eventually the orchard became neglected.

After a couple of years this manager left, and a new farm manager was hired.  Her name was Myrtle.  She saw this wonderful potential in the orchard but was nearly heartbroken because the lack of care had almost destroyed it.  But she decided that they would try to save the orchard.

It took a great deal of work.  The trees had to be pruned.  They were cut way back.  Disease had set in and they had to cut down a number of trees that were beyond helping.  It took a couple of years before things really turned around, but the orchard made a comeback, and seeing the possibilities, several residents in the area started their own orchards.

Some of the language in our reading is pretty fierce -- cutting, pruning, being thrown into the fire.  But pruning is really about care.  The gardener wants the vine to produce, wants the vine to be healthy.  Pruning is in the vine’s best interest.

The heart of what Jesus has to say is about “abiding in me.”  The vine is the source of life, and the branch has life only to the extent it is connected.  “I am the vine, you are the branches.”  Time and again Jesus says, “Abide in me.”

This points us to the idea of being connected and staying connected.  In order to produce fruit, we have to be connected.  What is the fruit that we are to produce?  We get a good idea in Galatians 5:22, where Paul writes “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Uncared for vines do not suddenly produce fruit.  That uncared for orchard in Kentucky did not just suddenly bounce back.  And if we are not connected to Christ, we won’t suddenly begin producing the fruit of the spirit.

There is a great connectedness in life, and if we are out on our own, disconnected, we are like a branch that has been cut off.  A cut off branch is good for nothing. At Henderson Settlement, they had a huge bonfire after all of that pruning.  All that pruned branches are good for is burning.  

The vines and branches are a wonderful metaphor.  But where the metaphor breaks down is that grapevines don’t have a choice about where or whether they will be connected.  We do.  We can connect to Christ or we can be disconnected.  Or we can attach to something else that may not be so life giving.

Now, if we are all connected to Christ, if we are all attached to the same vine, then we are all connected with one another.  So this image has to do both with our relationship to Christ and our relationship to one another.  It is all connected.

We live in a time when everyone talks about “connectivity.”  We stay connected through social media, email, smartphones, text messaging.  We stay up on what is happening.  But all of this connectivity does not necessarily lead to real, personal connections.  Maybe we need to ask ourselves, “How well-connected are we - really?”  

Tim Kimmel told about his mother, who died of cancer.  From the time doctors found the cancer, she only lived five months.  Her decline was rapid; none of the various treatments helped her.  It was very difficult on the family.

Tim and his younger brother lived 2000 miles away.  They flew to see their mother three times in those five months.  Tim called every day to see how she was doing.  Tim’s father was with her every day and other brothers and sisters who lived nearby stopped in almost daily.

Shortly before Tim’s mom died, a very wealthy, influential member of the community was admitted to the intensive care unit for observation.  On the third night he was in the hospital, he had a conversation with the nurse just before Tim called to check on his mother, and the nurse couldn’t help but share that conversation with Tim.

This young nurse told Tim that she had just talked with one of the most powerful people in the community.  He had a lot of influence, even in the hospital.  He had been there for three days without a single visitor.  He had a wife and children, but they hadn’t been by.

As this nurse was giving this man his medication, he asked about the patient in the next room.  “Oh, that’s Mrs. Kimmel,” she said.  She told him about her husband, who was almost always there, and her children who were frequent visitors, and about Tim and his younger brother who would fly to see her and called every day.  The man asked about Mrs. Kimmel’s condition.  The nurse said that they would be surprised if she lived another week.

And then this wealthy, powerful, influential leader in the community said, “You know, I would gladly trade places with Mrs. Kimmel and die in a week, if in that week I had a spouse and children and friends who cared enough about me that I didn’t have to die alone.”   

We can lose sight of the importance of connections to one another.  And it can be hard to stay connected.  Someone wrote about all of the retired people who move to Sun City, Arizona.  Some retire and move to a warmer climate but in the process, they cut themselves off from family and friends and wind up shriveling up, becoming spiritual prunes.  But others say, hey, let’s a few of us get together and have some friends over and they build relationships and they thrive.  If they feel like they are being cut off, they graft themselves onto another part of the vine.  

If you look at a vine, it is really tough to see where one branch ends and another begins.  They encircle one another, surround one another--the branches are all together.  Nobody cares which branch of a tree the fruit came from.  There is no status or rank among the branches.  That says something about the church.  Lay or ordained, male or female, young or old, all are equally accountable for bearing fruit.  And all are connected.

I read about a flood in Nebraska several years ago.  A man named Herman Ostry had a barn.  Water was already in the barn 29 because of a rising creek, and he needed to move the entire 17,000 pound barn to a new foundation about 150 feet away.  His son had devised a lattice work of steel tubing that had been nailed, welded, and bolted to the inside and outside of the barn.  Hundreds of handles were attached.

After one practice lift, 344 volunteers slowly walked the barn up a slight incline.  Each one supported less than 50 pounds.  In just 3 minutes, the barn was on its new foundation.

That’s a picture of the church.  Connected.  Caring.  Supportive.  Encouraging.  The church is to be a source of help and support and love, but this only happens as we stay connected – as we abide in Christ.

There is a hymn by James Manley titled “Part of the Family” that talks about the importance of being connected to the community of believers:

You know the reason why you came,
yet no reason can explain
so share in the laughter and cry in the pain
for we are part of the family.

God is with us in this place
Like a parent’s warm embrace
We’re all forgiven by God’s grace
For we are a part of the family.

There’s life to be shared in the bread and wine
We are the branches, Christ is the vine
This is God’s temple, it’s not your or mine,
but we are part of the family.

There’s rest for the weary and health for us all,
there’s a yoke that is easy, and a burden that’s small.
So come in and worship and answer the call,
For we are part of the family.

The story from Acts this morning is a kind of case study of someone who yearned to be connected to God.  An Ethiopian eunuch is searching.  He goes to worship at Jerusalem.  A foreigner, an African, goes to the temple to worship.  He is on his way home, reading from the scriptures, and he doesn’t have a clue what he is reading.

When it comes to the Hebrew faith, this man is an outsider.  He is a foreigner.  He is a eunuch, and in a time in which having children was valued in a way that we really can’t understand, that put him on the outside.  In a sense, he was a sexual minority.  He is a government official, but not mentioned by name.  Yet he longed for a relationship with God.

And what is amazing is that God also desires a relationship with him.  Through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, God sends Philip.  Philip is willing to share with this very different person, this outsider.  We might want to pat Philip on the back for being willing to share with this man.

But on the other hand, looks at the hospitality offered by the eunuch.  He may be an outsider to the faith of Israel, but he is wealthy, he is well educated, he is influential.  Philip is none of these things, but the man offers hospitality to Philip by inviting him into his chariot.

They are both willing to reach out and to risk in order to have a relationship and a deep spiritual conversation.  Philip explains the scriptures, shares the good news of Jesus with him, and the man believes.  They come to a lake, the man is baptized, and then Philip is whisked away.  As suddenly as he appeared, he is gone.  But the Ethiopian rejoices.  Here is someone who desired a relationship with God and the fact is, God also desired a relationship with him.

“Abide in me,” Jesus says.  Jesus is urging his disciples to remain in him and remain with him.  He is about to leave them, first at the cross and then after the resurrection, through his ascension.  And he wants them to be prepared, to remain in fellowship and in community with each other and to abide in his teaching and example.

When we forget our source of strength, our source of life, when we are cut off from the source, we start to die.  

Jesus is the vine.  We are the branches. We are to stay connected to Christ, and we are to stay connected to Christ together.  Amen.

“Too Many Children?” - April 29, 2012

Text: 1 John 3:1-3, 16-18

 
“See what love God has lavished upon us, that we should be called Children of God.”

Children of God.  It is an amazing thing: we are called God’s children.  And if we are all God’s children, then we are brothers and sisters.  We’re related!

Our text this morning is from I John chapter 3.  This is an epistle, a short letter, that is historically connected with the Gospel of John because of similarities in language and theme, as well as letters known as 2 John and 3 John.  We don’t know who wrote it for sure, but it is a wonderful little book, and much of it focuses on the theme of love.

In the first part of our reading, we are told that 1)We are God’s children; 2)What we will be is yet to be seen – there is more to come, there is more to being God’s children than we can now know or imagine; and 3)Living as God’s children with this future anticipation, this hope, leads to lives that are just and pure.

Knowing that we are God’s children changes the way we see ourselves, it changes the way we perceive the future, and it changes the way we live now.

You know, I am still thinking about this idea of us all being God’s children.  Look around.  God has a whole lot of children out there.  An awful lot.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the world population is estimated at just a whisker over 7 billion.  7.009 billion, to be precise.  Now, when a whisker = 9 million, you know we are talking about a lot of people.  That’s a lot of children.  Too many to think about, perhaps.

The U.S. population is about 313 million.  To think a little more locally, the population of Iowa is around 3 million.  About a third of a whisker compared to the world population, but still, that’s quite a few people.  A lot of children. 

Looking at our own city, the Ames population is around 59,000.  Iowa State had a record enrollment (again) this fall; the spring enrollment is over 28,000, many of whom are included in the Ames population count.

There are a lot of children out there.  Fred Craddock once asked in a sermon whether God had too many children.  I think it’s a valid question.

Now, don’t get all upset at your pastor this morning, I’m just kind of thinking out loud here, but at times you just have to wonder.

How many is too many?  Well, it depends.  A lot of states have abandoned baby laws.  There are parents out there who feel that one child is too many, and so we have these laws that allow parents to leave newborn babies where they will be safe and cared for.  Then there are those children who are abused and neglected.  There was a major trial in Des Moines this past week stemming from the death of a 7 month old baby, Alexis Gilbert.  For some folks, for too many folks, one child is too many.

Then there is Molly Shepherd.  She lived near Kingfisher, Oklahoma and was a member of the Arapaho tribe.  She had – are you ready? – 57 children.  57 children.  She gave birth to none but gave love to all.  In her 88 years, she adopted 57 children.  And they weren’t all cute little babies.  She adopted angry, smart-mouthed teenagers.  She adopted them and loved them all.  She had some rules: 1) help with the chores; 2) stay in school; and 3) the older ones help the younger ones.  And it worked.  For Molly Shepherd, 57 were not too many.

Small families are the norm these days.  The average in the U.S. is two children, which is a change from previous generations.  In the 1950’s, the average was just under 4.  For earlier generations, it was higher.  Some of us are only children while other came from pretty large families. 

I was doing some genealogy and found an ancestor, John Taylor, who is buried near Bloomfield, Iowa.  I didn’t know anybody in my family had ever lived in Iowa.  He had 8 children with his first wife, Susannah, including my great-great-great grandmother, Elizabeth.  Did you catch that?  My great-great-great grandmother was named Elizabeth Taylor.  After his first wife died, John remarried and had nine more children.  Seventeen altogether, and in his later years he and his second wife moved to Iowa with a couple of their children and their families.

Years ago, such large families were not uncommon.  My dad was one of 10 children.  Some would think that raising ten kids in the Depression would be too many.  Well, since my dad was the youngest of 10, I think 10 was a pretty good number.  Any less and I wouldn’t be here!  In my dad’s family, everybody pitched in, the older kids helped the younger kids, and it worked.

So, I have nothing at all against large families, but still, it seems like God may have too many children.  “How do you figure that?” you may wonder.  Well, if you can’t take care of them, then there are too many.  If you can’t feed them, then there are too many. 

Every day in this world, about 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes.  That’s one child every five seconds. 

School is almost out.  We are having our end-of-the-year student cookout tonight; this week is finals week.  The students have that combination of lack of sleep and anxiety over finals mixed with joy and glee and anticipation that this will soon be over.  When school is out, the general feeling is, Woo-Hoo!

The Ames schools aren’t far behind.  School is almost over!  Except that some kids won’t be saying “woo-hoo, school is out.”  Because at school, they have breakfast and they have lunch.  At home, they’re not sure what there will be to eat.  I am not just talking about children in the hollers of Tennessee or in inner-city Detroit, I am talking about kids in Ames, Iowa.

How many is too many children?  Well, if you can’t feed them, then maybe there are too many.

It’s not just food.  A study release last December found that 1.6 million children in the United States — one in 45 kids — were homeless last year, living in shelters, cars, abandoned buildings and parks.   Youth homelessness has increased 28 percent since 2007 in the midst of a tough economy.  Of the children affected, 42 percent were under the age of six, and a third of them were living with single mothers with chronic illnesses, the study found.

Does God have too many children?  I don’t know, but it sort of looks that way. 

In the U.S., about 700,000 children are in foster care every year.  There are all kinds of reasons kids are placed in foster care – drugs, alcohol, meth labs, jail, child abuse, unsafe living conditions.  The number of children needing care stresses the system.  I know we could use more DHS workers.  I know we could use more foster homes.  How many is too many children?  Well, if we can’t care for them, then it’s too many.

And so, we might go to God and say, ‘Look God, we know you are God and all, but let’s be honest: you have too many children.  There are just too many.”

A few weeks ago the National Archives released the 1940 U.S. Census.  You can go online and look up census records.  I looked up the records for my dad’s family, in Dahlgren, Illinois.  In 1940, my dad was 6.   Dorothy was 10, Virginia was 12, Leonard was 15, Willard was 18, Charles was 22, and the four oldest kids had already left home - they were already out on their own.  In fact, my dad never actually lived with his oldest siblings.  Well, except for a brief time with Aunt Opal, who was the oldest.

The Russells are pretty easygoing, but Opal was the fussiest of the bunch.  I can say this because she and her husband Charles had no children, so there are no descendants to get mad at me for saying that, and because everybody knows it is true.  She was a good person, don’t get me wrong, I loved Aunt Opal, but maybe because she was the oldest she was pretty bossy.  She and Charles lived in Seattle where he worked for Boeing.  After he retired, they moved back to the Midwest.  They didn’t think they could take small-town Illinois, so they moved to Evansville, where we lived.  But it didn’t last long.  Evansville had too many stoplights, too few freeways, and Aunt Opal couldn’t buy carrots wholesale for her carrot juice.  It wasn’t cosmopolitan enough, they just weren’t happy, so in a few months they turned around and went back to Seattle and lived there until after Charles died.

Opal eventually moved back to Evansville again in her last years and as her health deteriorated, she couldn’t live alone anymore.  Being the healthiest and most able to do it, my dad and mom invited Opal to come live with them.  She was 25 years older than my dad.  My parents weren’t thrilled about it, but it seemed the right thing to do.  Perhaps predictably, it did not go very well – it certainly wasn’t easy - and before long her medical needs forced her to move into a nursing home.  But my dad visited Opal at least every other day and he took care of her financial and legal matters.  He took care of her.  Aunt Opal was Pentecostal, but when she died our Baptist preacher did the funeral.

The way it works is, the older ones take care of the younger ones – unless the younger ones need to take care of the older ones.

We can look at the world around us, we can look at individual stories and we can look at mind-numbing statistics and we can make a pretty good argument that God has too many children. 

But God answers us, “Oh, I have a plan.  I have a way to make it all work.  And you know the plan.”

The plan is, just like in a lot of big families, the older ones take care of the younger ones.   Those who are able take care of those who are not able.  Those who have take care of those who don’t have.  The well ones take care of the sick ones.  Those with love to give take care of those who need to be loved.  It’s not always easy, it’s not always a walk in the park, but this is the way it works.

We are all God’s children.  We are brothers and sisters.  And as God’s family, there are some rules.  Just like in Molly Shepherd’s family: Do your chores – do your part; go to school – be willing to learn; and the older ones take care of the younger ones.  Take care of one another.

I was the oldest of three.  Not the oldest of ten like Aunt Opal, but the oldest of three.  When I was a certain age, there were those times when my mom and dad would say, “We’re going into town.  We won’t be gone very long.  You take care of your sisters.  My question was the same as yours: “Do I have to?”  “Yes, you have to.”   

The older ones take care of the younger ones.  Whether you like it or not.

Our scripture puts it this way:
We know love by this, that (Christ) laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?  Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

Not in word or speech, but in truth and action.  If it isn’t made tangible, it’s not really love.

My goodness, we live in a world filled with need.  And when we think about it on the large scale, it is too daunting to think about.  We can’t make a dent in a world with a whisker over 7 billion people.  It is hard to have much of an impact on 313 million Americans or 3 million Iowans or 59,000 residents of Ames.  (What are we, anyway?  Amesians?  Amesites?).  It is hard to impact 28,000 ISU students.

Our scripture makes it easier.  How can you see a brother or sister in need and not help?  If you have the capacity to help another, how can you stand idly by?  We don’t have to take care of the whole planet; take care of the people around you, take care of the people you have a chance to help.

Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher of the 19th century.  A brilliant and quirky guy – somebody mentioned him at the college student supper a couple of weeks ago, I think it was Kevin.  Anyway, Kierkegaard told the story of being in Copenhagen and noticing a girl with a beggar’s basket leading three musicians down the street. The musicians were blind; they were classically trained musicians, playing Beethoven and Mozart.  It was wonderful music and a crowd gathered around them listening – a large crowd of poor people with no money to give.  Down the street, with their fine horses and carriages, were the wealthy people, on their way to the evening’s entertainment.

Kierkegaard observed in his journal: “There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are willing but cannot, and those who are able but will not.

Kierkegaard had it wrong.  There are actually three types of people.  There are those who are willing but cannot.  There are those who are able but will not.  And then, there are those children of God – older ones and younger ones - who take care of their brothers and sisters.

“Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”  Amen.


The idea for this sermon and some illustrative material comes from a sermon of Fred Craddock.