The Message that Cost Jesus His life

I.

It’s Palm Sunday today--or Passion/Palm Sunday as it came to be called in some traditions several years ago. Palm Sunday commemorates Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, what would be his final entry into the Holy, Jewish City, when a handful of easily excited fellow Passover pilgrims got all up in the air about the possibility that he was their long-awaited Messiah. In their excitement, they threw plant cuttings of some sort across the pathway on which his little borrowed donkey colt carried him into the Holy City to celebrate with as many Jews as could come to and squeeze into Jerusalem how their forebears had been led out of cruel slavery into a long wilderness sojourn and ultimately to freedom in a land they called “the Promised Land” because they said God had promised it to them and provided it for them in exchange for their faithfulness to God. Perhaps as the details of the theo-historical events were remembered by the Hebrew storytellers, everything came across a little more dramatic than it actually had been. For example, the whole lot of them hadn’t always been paragons of piety though many of them had suffered greatly to make it all forty years from escape out of Egypt to entry into the Promised Land; many of them, though, if they even made it all the way, were mostly angry with God during the forty years of walking in circles and repeating the same hopeful routes over and over again--naturally, without success. If a route doesn’t get you where you’re going the first time, it’s not going to get you there the second time or the twentieth time.

When the construction of the interstate system in Knoxville, Tennessee, the largest “big city” near Halls Crossroads, which was my home town, had just been finished, we had to go pick up Dad from work late one night because he worked overtime and therefore wasn’t able to leave with his carpool. By “we” I mean Mom, my sister Kim, and myself; my brother Greg would come along for several more years. Dad worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for the Atomic Energy Commission, but the city of Oak Ridge is more frequently remembered by American historians as the home town of Martha Ellen Ralls, the gutsy lady whom WE today call “Martha Brown.”

There were no shortcuts between Halls and Oak Ridge in those days; these days some segments have been shorted a bit by new road construction. Anyway, Dad called Mom to tell her we needed to come to pick him up and that she could shave off about ten minutes of her drive if she’d get on the new interstate near Fountain City and take the first exit she came to, so that’s what Mom tried to do. This story probably goes back 50 years as I was about 7 when it happened, maybe a little younger, and I’m now 57.

Mother did everything Dad had told her to do regarding navigation, but for some reason every time she took the exit it looped her right back up onto the interstate. It wasn’t clear how one was supposed to merge out of the far right lane into another lane that would take one to the road she or he presumably wanted to get to. Lots of passengers in cars pay very little attention to what’s going on outside the car, leaving that to the driver, but after a long while of everything looking exactly the same every time I looked up, I said to Mom, “Things really do look exactly the same out there,” and Mom started laughing almost uncontrollably. She said, “They sure do, and that’s because we’ve been driving around in circles for half an hour. I can’t get off this crazy interstate. Your Daddy is going to kill us when we finally get out there.” There were cell phones, no service station that she could figure out how to get to, and practically no other drivers to think about waving down for help.

I have no recollection at all as to how she finally got herself out of that repetitive mess, but once she did she announced that she’d never drive on the interstate again. Only rarely has she broken that vow. For your information, Dad wasn’t the least bit amused by Mom’s story when we finally arrived at the X-10 plant where he worked. He kept asking, “How in the world could you just keep going around in circles for more than thirty minutes?” She had no suitable explanation for him, but when she tried to say something, she repeatedly laughed so hard there were no clear words.

So the ancient Hebrews had the same kinds of experiences over and over again during their forty years in the desert; no matter how many times they walked the same pathways they saw no sign of civilization and ended up right back where they’d begun.

The cultural storytellers who remembered and told these stories to subsequent generations forgot about wasted steps and wrong turns. The further removed they were from the actual events, the more determined, resolute, and pious all the Hebrews getting out of Egypt were. It wasn’t so; several of my Mother’s spiritual forebears were out in that Sinai dessert laughing their fannies off at the fact that Moses who loved a lot about being the big boss kept taking them over the same wrong pathways over and over again.

Laughter aside, there was a powerfully sobering side to the Jewish feast of the Passover. They did, in fact, escape the Pharaoh’s cruel slavery, but their lives were at risk.

There’s more that lacks any possibility for humor. The very name of the Jewish feast commemorated to this day as a necessary part of remembrance for them is bone-chilling and tragic. As a part of the lore of how Passover came to be, there were memories of how the Pharaoh refused to let his Hebrew slaves go free. According to the ancient Hebrews there was a whole series of plagues that God Godself sent on the Egyptians to force open the Pharaoh’s ironclad clutch on the Hebrews. None until the last one worked. The final of these plagues was the most blood curdling. All the Hebrews in Egypt knew to splash the blood of a sacrificial animal above the entrance to their homes; this blood-sign protected them from the angel of death who came throughout all of Egypt at God’s command, they said, and killed all the first-born sons in homes lacking the splash of blood over their entranceways. You know who lost big time, don’t you? The Egyptians, of course, because, as the story was told, the Hebrews were God’s people, and God warned them to protect themselves with the splash of blood. None of the Egyptians knew so the angel of death killed firstborn Egyptian son after firstborn Egyptian son. The angel of death “passed over” (thus, “Passover”) all the Hebrew homes with animal blood splashed on the fronts of their dwellings.

I’m so grateful that we live in a time where we are able to look at a story like that and see it as a part of culture’s lore rather than an historic account that describes the nature of an angry god who works through, among other sources, natural acts such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and famines to communicate a divine point or as a way of stomping the divine feet to punish those who fail to live up to the divine standards and rules.

In any case, as the story went the Hebrews ate their last meal on the way out of Egypt in a hurry because they knew they had to go the very second Moses said so. Even in their grief, though a bit slow, the Egyptians could relatively quickly marshall forces to attempt to capture the escaping Hebrews. The Hebrews had to strike while the grief was hot, you could say.

I call the food the Hebrews ate while hurrying out of Egypt on their way to a place where they could be their own people “freedom food,” and we’ll be eating modern freedom foods at our Maundy Thursday meal this coming Thursday, a dish from each of several countries and cultures in the world struggling right now for a way to freedom.

This is what Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem to celebrate with his sister- and brother-Jews as he rode into Jerusalem on the donkey colt. It was an annual event that they believed they dared not forget. Even if some of the details of the ancient story were tampered with and dramatized to try to make them more memorable if not more cliffhanging, the core is almost certainly true. The ancient Hebrews were enslaved, and they had to put their lives on the line in order to try to reclaim their freedom.

As Jesus rode the little donkey into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, he didn’t enter as a free man; to the contrary. He and his sister- and brother-Jews were under the thumb of the mighty Roman Empire who gave them some religious freedom, but hardly a complete religious freedom; and certainly not widespread, full-fledged freedom. For Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries, freedom was more an ancestral memory and a hope than, for them, a present reality.

II.

Many of us Silversiders celebrate today with our sister- and brother-Delawareans who saw a brighter relational future for themselves signed into law this past Thursday when the Delaware House approved a law already given thumbs up by the State Senate that will allow same gender couples the rights of Civil Union. It’s not an approval of same gender marriage, but it is the younger sibling of same gender marriage.

The First State became the eighth state plus the District of Columbia to take a stand on relational freedom for lesbian and gay persons. Throughout its 150 year history, Silverside Church has always celebrated and rejoiced the realization of any and every act of justice. Gay and lesbian Delawareans are freer today than they were at breakfast on Thursday morning. They will be freer still when Governor Markell, who openly supports the move, signs it into law. And they will be freer still come January when all authorized marriage officiants in the state--clerks of the peace, clergypersons, ship captains, and judges--will be able to seal a Civil Union when both individuals are of the same gender. I very much look forward to that day.

Coming this far has been a long and arduous journey for many same-gender couples in our state. I have a very fine therapist with whom I consult when life begins to feel a little too heavy at times. She is very good at her job. Her name is Frann Anderson; she is a clinical social worker. She is a lesbian, and she and her partner have been together for a quarter of a century. The two of them have been working for full civil rights for Delaware lesbian and gay persons for sixteen years. She called me on Friday and said, “It’s a great day to be gay in Delaware.” Of course, she was responding to what happened Thursday in Dover.

This is what happened as Reuters reported it:

Delaware governor Jack Markell is expected to sign into law a bill that will make the state the eighth to recognize civil unions for same-sex couples, his office said on Friday. The Delaware House of Representatives passed the previously approved state Senate bill 26-15 on Thursday. The legislation amends the present code on civil unions to include two individuals of the same sex. It stops short of extending the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions, nor does it require religious institutions to conduct ceremonies for same-sex couples. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Hawaii, Nevada, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia recognize at least some of the legal rights of domestic partnerships.

Silverside Church has always, always, been on the side of justice; equal rights for all people including relational rights for all consenting adults are justice issues. I’m delighted that our church welcomes lesbian and gay as well as straight participants. Wanting and helping people to be free is at the core of what we’re about. I would not serve as pastor of a church that refused to welcome homosexual persons into full participation in every aspect of the church’s life, just as many of you--straight or gay--wouldn’t participate in a church that discriminated in any way against gay and lesbian persons. As we celebrate this just act, let us not imagine that homophobia died in our state on Thursday.

I was giving last minute pointers to my basic speech students who are preparing their final speeches of the term; the final speeches happen to be persuasive speeches. I was showing the class how Dr. King introduced his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which public speaking professionals routinely classify as the greatest speech delivered in any venue in the United States during the twentieth century. The speech is truly a work of rhetorical art.

As we came across his reference, in his introduction, to that massive gathering in Washington, DC, in 1963, Dr. King called it the event that would go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom for all people in American history. This class met Friday morning, and the events of Thursday were fresh in my mind. I spoke of the approval of Civil Unions for lesbian and gay persons as an act of freedom for one group in our society running behind persons of color in terms of full freedom. At that point one of my students who is rather gifted as a speaker and who happens to be African American said in a way that sounded mocking and condescending of gay and lesbian persons, “Well, there sure are a lot of them around here.” The professor and the other students froze. I didn’t know what to say at first, and when I thought of what I wanted to say, it would have been the wrong thing. What I thought to myself, though, was, “Young lady, just a few, few years ago you wouldn’t be allowed admission into hardly any institution of higher learning, and when that opportunity would come to you you’d be sitting in a classroom with all your classmates and your professor being African American only because you would not be thought of as someone who had the same value as a white student. I wonder when rights for persons of color began to be fought for seriously in this country, if some racist in the deep south, in my home town for example, didn’t say in response to any legal victory for African Americans, “Well, there sure are a lot of them around here.”

Freedom is something to celebrate. Justice is something to turn backflips about. They are never possibilities or realities to sneer at and only affirm when their realization benefits you personally. “There sure are a lot of them around here.” How rude!

True enough, though. Not everyone in Delaware or around the country began celebrating Thursday.

The Emancipation Proclamation was a Freedom Document, but it didn’t stop slavery in its tracks. It started a domino-like process that took a long, long time to get around to every state in the union; even then, with slavery made illegal, the Caucasian majority limited the rights of persons of color for years and years and years. Still, even now with full civil rights for persons of color both guaranteed and protected by the laws of the land, racism is far from being an ancient relic displayed behind thick glass as a museum piece to go and have a look at what once was. Slavery is no more in this country, but racism is as ripe as the apple you savored the other day.

James Weldon Johnson was an amazing American who happened to be a person of color. Talent and intelligence seeped from him whether or not he was trying to demonstrate or use them or not. He wrote a poem about the long, hard struggle for full freedom people of color in this country had to endure, and it was written long before the Civil Rights Movement.

The poem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was first presented publicly in 1900 when 500 students of color at a segregated school where Johnson happened to be the principal recited his poem to celebrate President Lincoln’s birthday and to welcome a distinguished guest to their school, Booker T. Washington. James Weldon Johnson’s brother, Joe, set the stirring poem to music in 1905, and in 1919 the NAACP named it the “Negro National Anthem.” I love the the music and the words; it’s in our hymnal, but I always feel uneasy when we sing it because most of us Caucasians know nothing really of the struggle of people of color; and I think we white folk might do better to listen only to this one. Or maybe the song could be adapted in focus with Professor Johnson’s blessing, were he still living in this realm, for any group of people who ever had to fight for a freedom that was withheld from them because of a fact of their birth that couldn’t be changed: ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical or mental limitation--anything that would allow a power group to rob someone of her or his full freedom because of something over which she or he could have absolutely no control.

Lift every voice and sing,

'Til earth and heaven ring,

Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;

Let our rejoicing rise

High as the listening skies,

Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,

Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;

Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,

Let us march on 'til victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chast'ning rod,

Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,

We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

'Til now we stand at last

Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,

God of our silent tears,

Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;

Thou who has by Thy might

Led us into the light,

Keep us forever in the path, we pray.

.....

III.

Jesus didn’t have to die to win God’s favor on behalf of the rest of humanity, those who came before him or those who would come after him. The fact is, Jesus didn’t have to die at all, from God’s point of view. God did not will Jesus’ death.

The fact is, Jesus didn’t have to die at all until he reached the end of his body’s ability to sustain necessary biological functions. In other words, he should have lived to a ripe old age.

Jesus’ death was a repulsive, unjust execution by a half-competent bureaucrat with deeply ingrained prejudices against all Jews. Pilate, the Roman-appointed governor over the Jews who lived and visited in Jerusalem, was in Jerusalem at Passover time because his job required it of him. The Emperor, Tiberius Caesar, required it of him. To him, Jesus was one more worthless Jew; they were all the same to him, seriously.

Jesus didn’t die to save us from our sins; what a horrible, ghastly, sickening notion. Jesus died because Pilate became convinced that Jesus had the ability to instigate a Jewish uprising against Rome while so many Jews were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.

Jesus preached a message of freedom to a people who were not free people, and in order for them ever to become free they would have to take on Rome militarily speaking; or, at least, that’s the only way Pilate could imagine it could happen. He knew for a fact that Rome wasn’t going to give the Jews their freedom as a gift for good behavior. Honestly, the more rabble rousers he could be rid of, the better for the Roman Empire, and maybe the Emperor gave him perks for doing away with the trouble makers.

Jesus wasn’t your average troublemaker, though. He was more like a persistent thorn in the side of people and an institution that wanted to sustain and justify that absence of justice robbed from the Jewish people, though they did give the Jews some limited freedoms as long as they didn’t interfere with or interrupt anything beloved or protected by Rome. Therefore, Jesus didn’t really disturb the Romans until he began preaching the possibility of freedom to a people who weren’t free.

Jesus was in a long line of such bold and brash risk takers and dreamers.

How dare you, Moses! How dare you tell the Hebrews that they didn’t have to be slaves to the Egyptians any more.

How dare you, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs! How dare you tell your sister- and brother-Germans and through them the rest of the world that same-gender love is normative for some in the human family years before anyone had ever penned the word “homosexual”! How dare you tell them that the world doesn’t have to be a world in which gay and lesbian persons must be second class citizens and the butts of crude jokes and hidden in the shadows to be kept away from respectable heterosexuals! How dare you cause them to believe that there are societies where their freedoms can be full and complete, not limited and compromised!

How dare you, Harriet Tubman! How dare you tell slaves, legally owned by White and Black Americans, that they could be free!

How dare you, Jocelyn Andersen! How dare you tell fundamentalist Christian women that they are not bound by God or by scripture to submit to or return to physically and emotionally abusive husbands!

How dare you, Demi Lovato! How dare you tell kids who don’t fit in where they are that they don’t have to tolerate bullying ever again. You’re just a kid yourself with problems of your own; go away and take care of those. Don’t you dare make these misfit kids and teens believe that they have the same rights all kids have!

How dare you, Mohammed ElBaradei! How dare you tell modern Egyptians that President Mubarak’s freedoms are being dolled out to the few and not to the masses! How dare you tell the masses that they, too, can be fully free!

How dare you, Jesus! How dare you make your contemporary Jewish sisters and brothers believe that they would not forever be bound by Rome and that the love of God, yeah the Empire of God, would be one day overtake Rome and call all people, Jews and Gentiles alike, to be fully free--spiritually, politically, and in every other way. How dare you!

This was the message that cost Jesus his life! If you want to know why Jesus died, I’m telling you why right now. There was no other reason. He did not die for your sins or to save you from your sins. He died because he wouldn’t stop preaching the possibility of freedom for all people, including the Jews along with him held captive by Rome.

We have this horrible human trait. It shows up again and again in history, ancient and modern. The free folk want to limit who gets to be free with them. The leaders and the rulers at the top of the heap want to protect all their freedoms and then limit every person or program who might now or in the future interfere with their privileges. If you don’t believe I’m telling you the truth, I want you to read a summary of the budget cuts being proposed by our government leaders over against the programs they will happily let slide if they can at all. I’ve never seen a more self-serving process since Jim and Tammy Faye were begging for money on television so they could live like royalty and even air condition their dog house with money that was promised for the poor. I’m all for animal comfort, and anyone who knows me knows that’s absolutely the case; but their dog or dogs could have lived in their mansion in their own room and never interfered with the high old life the Bakkers were living with the dollars they were raising supposedly to support the needy around the world.

Listen again to what the God of the prophet Hosea said to his errant fellow Hebrews. God wasn’t eternally angry with them and planned no eternal punishment for them. The God of Hosea knew nothing of a hell; that was a concept dreamed up much later by those who didn’t think a painful death was adequate punishment for the despots and the serial killers of the world.

The people to whom Hosea preached, and certainly Hosea himself influenced the preaching of Jesus, were people who would know freedom again despite the circumstances in which they found themselves. The heart of Jesus’ message sounded a lot like much that Hosea said:

I will heal their disloyalty; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily [which should be translated “iris”], he shall strike root like the forests of Lebanon. His shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive tree, and his fragrance like that of Lebanon. They shall again live beneath my shadow, they shall flourish as a garden; they shall blossom like the vine, their fragrance shall be like the wine of Lebanon.

This is a beautiful message that says all of God’s people who have ever lost their freedom because of something they did that was clearly their fault or because of forces completely beyond their control will have it restored. Hosea’s God even says, “I will heal their disloyalty, and I will love them freely.” In other words, God will not wait around in a snit for people to fix problems to which they contributed individually or collectively or problems that others created for them. God will fix the problem, even if the problem has been disloyalty to God and will love the culprits as well as the innocent victims freely.

People who know they’re loved can be free; those who believe that are not loved can never be free even though their laws may say they are. Hosea’s God said, the people whom God blesses will be like the dew that falls over the whole nation of Israel. What could be freer than the morning dew, and what could there be more of than dew that covers everything on the ground of a whole nation?

All the images from the prophet Hosea here are of free and joyous people, people who flourish like young olive trees sprouting branches, like wild irises sprouting up all over the place. Ethel Merman’s great-great grandmother is singing, “Everthing’s coming up irises; let’s give thanks for all that is!”

Rome said, “The Jews may never be free. We are eternal, and the Jews may serve our needs eternally. If they are ever free, it is ours to say. This rabble rouser who is preaching a freedom that exceeds what Rome controls should be done away with; any excuse will do, really. A complaint from a few Jewish leaders that Pilate normally would have ignored all together he turned into a charge of insurrection and treason, crimes punishable by death--crucifixion to be precise. There was no theological reason for Jesus’ death; it did not make the world a better place and did not win many more people to God’s causes.

Jesus’ death was a tragedy, not a triumph. God would say that death wouldn’t be the final word about Jesus or about any of us relationally tied to God, but only misguided, however sincere, folk venerate the death of Jesus, his execution by crucifixion, which he suspected he faced soon after he rode his little borrowed donkey into Jerusalem. That did not slow him down, however. He would preach freedom as long he had breath. That’s why he died.

If Jesus’ died with the message of freedom on his lips, though political freedom was denied him throughout his lifetime, should anyone who embraces the principles of Jesus as best we can understand them have to live without freedom? The clear answer is no. Notice that Jesus didn’t put military forces in place to gain anyone’s freedom, including his own. We might learn a lesson from that; there are other ways to win freedom.

Amen.

Wasted Worry

I.

My guess is that most of you know Nathaniel Hawthorne’s celebrated novel, The Scarlet Letter. The story is set in the early days of New England life, and a young woman, Heather Prynne, has become pregnant out of wedlock. When her baby is born, the townspeople are righteously indignant; they demand to know who the father is since her husband has experienced delays and has not yet been able to make it to New England. She refuses to reveal the identity of her lover so the people of the town require her, from then on, to attach to her clothing any time she is in public a piece of red cloth cut into the shape of a capital A. The A stands for “adulteress.”

I haven’t changed my sermon subject for today. I’m still preaching on the subject of “wasted worry,” but I must confess that I do not preach this sermon as someone who has conquered worry; truth be told, I may have perfected the practice, if practice makes perfect! Therefore, I stand before you today as someone who should have affixed to his garment any time he is in public a piece of cloth cut into the shape of a W, which would expose me as the worrier I am. In the world of color symbolism, dark orange expresses worry, and it’s interesting that the painter Edward Munch, who painted emotions as compositions, used dark orange in his painting titled “Anxiety.” If anxiety and worry aren’t the same things, then they are either best friends or lovers. So, my W should be dark orange in color.

Anyway, today before I could attempt to preach on this subject, I had to be honest with you about where I stood with worry. Some would ask, why would a preacher who hadn’t overcome her or his struggles with any behavior that is disruptive to spiritual wholeness and health bother to or dare to preach about it? One of the preaching professors at Princeton in the generation gone by, George Sweazey, told his students and his preacher-readers in one of the highly regarded preaching textbooks of its time that if they only preached sermons on the struggles in life they’d overcome, their possibilities for sermon subjects would be staggeringly small. With that said, the load off my chest that only confession can bring, I now continue with today’s sermon. Don’t worry about my longer than usual introduction! We’ll still get out on time, more or less!

I was all worried this week about the possibility that the government was going to close down at midnight on Friday. Jon Heggan is a real live political scientist, and I’m going to have to get Jon to tell me if there has ever been a time in American history when we’ve had more clowns and morons in the House and the Senate than right now. Anyway, it occurred to me on Friday afternoon that maybe a government shutdown of this particular government would be a pretty good thing in reminding voters and potential voters how worthless much of the present government really is.

I realize that’s much too simplistic a scenario because there are those, mostly the poor, who’d have to take it on the chin yet again if the whole federal government did shut down. I did find it interesting that those in the House pressing for a government shut down would continue to draw their salaries if successful in shutting it down. Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan who already returned from one hell to a different kind of hell at home would lose their benefits while the Tea Party darlings who are willing to do anything, seriously, to take away every woman’s right to choose abortion if she feels she must make that decision would still be well taken care of.

There’s a website called “The Worry Depository.” At the top of its home page, there’s hook that will keep worriers reading everything else they can find on the site:

What if there’s no more oil? What if my spouse leaves me? Will there be more terrorist attacks? My cholesterol is too high. How am I going to pay the mortgage this month? Have I wasted my life? What if I have to declare bankruptcy?

For worry warts, this is the soundtrack to our lives. But given the current state of economic and political affairs, worry has become a national anthem. Economic and mental health statistics reveal a growing plague of worry and anxiety in the U.S.

I’d say that therapists know more about the profundity of the true impact of the current national financial crisis than do the economists. Even so, at least one person tried to challenge that norm. Have you ever heard of the “Misery Index”? No, it’s not measured by how many people moan about a given Sunday’s sermon at coffee time.

The misery index was devised by an economist, Arthur Okun, who was an economic adviser to President Johnson. Mr. Okun said that you can have a reasonable understanding of how miserable the American people are at any moment in time by adding the unemployment rate to the inflation rate. I would add to that how many hours per week Glenn Beck, Laura Schlessinger, and Rush Limbaugh are on the air, but Okun didn’t know them so that doesn’t count. If you add these two figures, the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, it only makes sense that you will have some idea of the pulse of the nation. If unemployment is high and inflation is worsening, some kind of negative effect is hitting not just business and industry, but the citizens themselves. Okun called the negative impact on the citizens “social costs.” To restate, “A combination of rising inflation and more people out of work implies a deterioration in economic performance and a rise in the misery index.”

The misery index today, not counting your arthritis or the boring friend you couldn’t get out of having lunch with after church, is 11.01. That’s not too bad. Okun or his followers went back as far as 1948 to start keeping track of this monthly figure. Since 1948, the least misery US Americans have experienced was in July of 1953 when it was 2.97. The worst we’ve ever had it, and you have to keep in mind that war or tragedy may have no impact on this index because in some war times the economy improves, is June of 1980 when the misery index registered a whopping 21.98.

Attentive folk in the helping professions have long known that there is a major connection between financial hardship and emotional distress. Plenty of those who suffer a major loss of income become depressed, and a frightening number of those who become depressed end up taking their own lives. Mental health researchers tell us that it’s very predictable; when economic uncertainty is on the increase, mental health is on the decline. The principle can apply in a home, in a church, in a community, a small town, or in a nation. Few people are at their best when they’re worrying about how to feed their families and keep a roof over the heads of their loved ones. Few people are at their best when their static fixed incomes rarely increase, and they have to decide on whether to buy food or their medicine.

In our current recession, or whatever it is, the home foreclosure crisis is surely one of the leading causes of worry among working class Americans. One of my preaching students last year preached in one of her sermons that God had turned the foreclosure people away from her family’s home only hours before giving them the boot. There were many shout outs and much applause for God in her audience of fellow seminarians; but when time for critique came, and it always comes after all practice sermons, I asked her why she thought God had protected her family’s home from foreclosure while allowing so many others to be on the streets with their kids or living in their automobiles?

During this economic downturn, which in many places is improving--thank goodness!--mental health professionals say that they’ve seen stunning increases in substance abuse, relational instability, and domestic violence. It’s as if after a point, worry forces us to strike out at ourselves or others, and those nearest us are the easiest targets.

With adults having so many problems with the economic crisis, children are often overlooked, but they shouldn’t be. They see their parents worrying, and they hear whispers of parental conversations about what they would do if they lost their jobs and/or their homes. And the children become profoundly worried, but don’t know what to do with their worry; the effects of their worry often eventually show themselves in inappropriate behavior, poor academic performance, and a loss of interest in what they had loved doing such as playing sports or taking dance lessons, which their parents can’t afford to pay for any longer anyway.

And I keep hearing Bobby McFerrin singing in the back of my mind, “Don’t worry. Be happy!”

II.

As far as I can recall, the central figures in the world’s great religions were non-worriers. I mean, how many people would want to join up with a spirituality movement whose leader was a hand-wringing, fretting, worrying bundle of nerves? Most spirituality movements hope to give adherents inner peace in the face of a chaotic, unpredictable, sometimes very cruel world. There are all sorts of ways religious groups have encouraged their members to deal with worry.

Some say that if there’s something causing you worry, the best thing you can do is to jump in and try to change it; when you’ve done all you can do, regardless of the outcome, you know there’s no reason to worry any more. Either you fixed the problem, or it’s not going away--any time soon, at least. Worry has proven to be completely unproductive in responding to the problem so it should be removed from the picture.

Some groups have said the world is a whole set of hopeless problems that can never be solved; the only intelligent response, therefore, is to focus on the world to come where all problems have been removed. Many Christian groups have opted for this alternative, and they teach those who practice with them to discount the troubles of the world because by and by these troubles will be nothing more than a blip in experience when they look back on them from the perfect next world where pain, sorrow, and suffering are no more. “Soon I will be done-a-with the troubles of the world, going home to be with God,” the slaves on those old southern plantations sang when their masters weren’t within earshot.

In the film version of Alice Walker’s “Color Purple,” Celie is the victim of physical and emotional abuse heaped upon her by her husband whom she calls Mister. Celie is talking to another woman, Sophia, also a victim of domestic abuse about the best way to handle it. Celie says it’s best to endure it because this life doesn’t last long while, in comparison, heaven, where there is no domestic abuse, is forever.

Sophia says, “Oh no. The best thing you can do is bash Mister’s head in when he tries to hurt you and think on heaven later!”

One long-practicing Buddhist was trying to teach a novice about how Buddhists approach worry. This is what he said:

We are not called upon as Buddhists to deny the world, and certainly not to escape from it. We are called to live with it, and to make our peace with all that is. In Buddhist terms, that peace is called Tathagata. The Thus Come One is enlightened as he is, not as he would wish himself to be. There is no escaping this. The world of worries we wish to escape from in the beginning of Buddhist practice is found to be enlightenment itself in the end.

Some Buddhists use a strand of worry beads to help them deal with or overcome their worry. It is, in a way, parallel to the Roman Catholic rosary. Buddhist prayer beads, traditionally called malas, first developed as religious tools in Hinduism, Buddhism having developed as a sect growing out of Hinduism. A strand of these worry beads typically has 108 beads--though in some branches of Buddhism, this varies. The earliest Buddhists kept the Hindu prayer bead practice, and it continues in many Buddhist circles to this day.

Each of the 108 beads reminds the devout Buddhist of something she or he should overcome and, thus, no longer worry about. The number of beads, 108, is not an arbitrary number. There are six senses as they envision human experience: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and thought. There are three realms in which these have been or will be operative: past, present, future. There are two possible conditions of the human heart: pure or impure. Then, there are three broad possible emotional responses to what is experienced: like, dislike, or indifference. So, 6 senses multiplied by 3 realms multiplied by 2 possible conditions of the heart multiplied by 3 possible emotional responses. 6 x 3 x 2 x3 = 108.

The propensity to worry or not to worry is culturally and socially based. If you have been brought up to believe, for example, everything that happens in this world is mere illusion, as some groups through the centuries have taught, then pain or tragedy aren’t real, and if you can talk yourself into believing that, good for you. You can probably get elected to public office in this country.

I don’t know how accurate these statistics are, but I’ve heard comparable analyses for years. Something like 43% of all US American adults suffer poor health as the result of worry and stress. Of all the visits to primary care physicians, up to 90% of the patients have worry-related complaints or disorders. In medical research, worry has been linked to all the leading causes of death in this country including heart disease, cancer, lung disfunction, accidents, and suicide. Human resource specialists estimate that on a typical work day in our country, about one million workers are absent because of issues related to worry. Someone has said, “Consider the mental fatigue of nights without sleep and days without peace, and we get a glimpse of the havoc worry plays in destroying the quality and quantity of life.”

Worry weakens our immune system. Further, as Dr. Charles Mayo, for whom the Mayo Clinic is named, pointed out in the early part of last century, “Worry affects the circulation, the heart, the glands, the whole nervous system. I have never known a person who died from over work, but many who died from worry.” Speaking of the Mayo Clinic, some recent research out of that stellar health care institution reminds us that at the beginning of the twentieth century, physicians in this country were almost unanimous in their belief that most disease was caused by bacteria. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a substantial number of physicians are asking each other if things have changed so that most disease has worry as its root. Dr. Hans Seyle has said, “Unrelieved stress is the cause of all disease.”

I ran across a gruesome little story a while back; now I’m worried about whether I can tell you the story with clarity! Death was walking toward a city one morning, and some man recognized Death on the move; many don’t. The man dared to ask Death, “What are you doing here? What are you up to?”

Death answered, “I’m going to take 100 people from your town.”
“That’s horrible!” the man protested. “You can’t do that. These are good people here; there’s no reason you should bother them at all.”
“Well, that’s the way it is,” Death said. “That’s what I do. You know that. Everybody knows that.”

Thinking he could thwart Death’s plan for the day, he ran back into the center of town and told everybody he possibly could what had happened. Death was on his way into their town intending to take 100 of them out with him. At the end of the day, the man was pleased with himself for having made an effort to spread the word. He was sure he had saved at least a few lives, but that, tragically, was not the case; all total, ten times as many as he’d anticipated died that day.

At dusk, the man ran into Death again. “You told me you were going to take 100 of us, but you took 1000 of us! What in the world is wrong with you?”

Death said, “I did what I said I was going to do. I took 100 people from your town today. The other 900 died from worry, and they have you to thank for that!”

I believe the following anonymous admonition can be traced to Ireland, and that’s as much as we know about its origin. It goes like this:

You have only two things to worry about--either you are sick or you are healthy. If you’re healthy, you have nothing to worry about, but if you’re sick you have two things to worry about. Either you’ll get well, or you’ll die. If you get well, you have nothing to worry about, but if you die you have two things to worry about. You’ll either go to heaven or hell. If you go to heaven, you’ll have nothing to worry about. If you go to hell, you also will have nothing to worry about because you’ll be so busy shaking hands with your friends you’ll have no time for worry.

III.

What does all this talk of worry have to do with flowers, in this sermon series on flowers? Well, I’m not talking about sending flowers to the sick, though that is a lovely gesture for those sick folk who have no allergies to flowers. If you send flowers to someone with allergies to flowers, you’ve got something to worry about!

You heard in our reflective reading for today Jesus talking about flowers, lilies; and he talked about them in order to teach a lesson on worry. An ancient story with very contemporary relevance.

So, one thing we learn from this scriptural snippet is that people in Jesus’ day, Jesus’ followers among them, worried. If you’re in favor of worry, you’d have to say most of them legitimately had a great deal to worry about. Most of them were poor, and some of them were so poor they literally didn’t know where their next meal was coming from. All were under Roman domination and had limited freedoms. Then, there was hardly unity among the Jews themselves about how to be or what to do.

Jesus had some sermons on worry, and they were likely summarized and included as a part of the so called Sermon on the Mount, which was really a compendium of many sermons Jesus preached.

Jesus admonished his hearers not to worry about life’s basics--food, water, and protective clothing. That’s shocking, but most of what has been recorded in the Sermon on the Mount is shocking at some level. It seems if there were any justifiable worry at all, it would be worry about these very items. Worrying about the basics seems justified. Who would approach a hungry person and say, “Don’t worry about food.” That’s cruel, isn’t it?

Jesus makes a very good point about life being about more than food and the human body being of greater value than anything with which we might cover it. True enough, as long as the person to whom we’re speaking has had enough to eat and has warm clothing on to fight bitter, brutal temperatures. Who in the would in her or his right mind would stand at the door of Emmanuel Dining Room after the lunch period had ended and the building had been locked up and say to someone who stopped by, begging for food not knowing the schedule on which lunch was served, “Now, don’t you worry about food. Isn’t there more to your life than eating?”

In the world as it was intended, with food enough for all, and, by the way, there’s still enough food produced in our world to feed every person every day; no one is supposed to be hungry. But if you are hungry; and especially if you carry a hungry child on your hip, there’s no more pressing need than getting nourishment. If someone is hungry, telling her or him not to worry is silly. Even if worry won’t produce any food, it is, I think, beyond human capabilities to avoid worrying about finding food for someone is hungry. A starving person may be encouraged not to worry because she or he no longer feels a sense of hunger and will shortly die.

Similarly, there is plenty of clothing in the world so that no one needs to be cold. Like food, the problem is not availability, but distribution. Stupid, selfish people are responsible for hunger and someone getting cold enough in the dead of winter to become ill and die due to lack of sufficient warm clothing.

Jesus uses birds and flowers to help him illustrate his very important points. Jesus is not preaching to hungry people; if someone were hungry he’d see to getting them fed before he started his sermon. He’s making a generalized point about how ineffective worry is in solving any of life’s real problems.

So, he says, look at the birds. Do they seem as if they’re worried to you? Does any one of them seem to be preoccupied with planning a menu for the day or the week? No. They’re flying around doing what birds do. When it’s time to eat, they go and find what God the Creator, or you could say what nature, has provided for them. They didn’t grow it; they didn’t reap it; they didn’t preserve it for later consumption. They eat what is here for them to eat, and as long as we don’t mess with their habitat, they have no trouble eating well day by day.

This is how it was intended for humans too. There was to have been no worry about adequate food for everyone. The earth is capable, if we don’t botch it up, of producing ample food for all the inhabitants of the planet, and this remains true even though the planet has vastly more people on it in more places than Jesus could have imagined.

So, Jesus got it. If your kid is hungry, you’re going to be worried about her or his wellbeing, and you’re going to do what you can do to make sure that hunger is alleviated. The point well taken, though, is that worry doesn’t produce the food. Worry doesn’t cause the hunger pangs to go away.

Jesus asks as he preaches along, “Can you add a single hour to your life by worrying about it?” Of course not, he expects us to answer, and he had no idea what medical science knows today. In fact, worry will steal life from us.

Birds generally eat well if people will just leave them be, and flowers will typically blossom radiantly if we don’t botch the soil or over water them or under water them or bring them anywhere near me. As Jesus preached this sermon on various occasions with adaptations, always as far as we know in outdoor settings, he must have glanced, now and then, around where his hearers gathered and seen the gorgeous wild flowers that grew beautifully, year in and year out. Even a monarch with the most gifted designers and seamstresses and tailors in the world working for her or him could not have any garment made with beauty enough to exceed the natural beauty of the lilies of the field.

We’re not talking about a fashion show here, though. We’re talking about clothing necessities, and Jesus preaches again, very simply, very honestly, if you lack the clothing you need to keep the elements from harming you, worry won’t get you those clothes. You may not be able to keep from worrying about a warm coat if you don’t have one for winter, but the worry will not create or provide a coat for you. So worry is wasted.

When people live according to God’s standards, no one needs to worry about winter warmth. No one should have such concerns. Building societies with compassionate programs for the hungry and the homeless is a much better pass time than worry. Habitat for Humanity for one example teaches us that while we may only be able to build one house at a time, that’s a whole lot more productive than sitting around worrying about homelessness.

Jesus was evidently known to close many of his sermons on wasted worry by reminding his hearers that if there are concerns on your mind, let them be today’s concerns. Tomorrow is apt to hit us with a whole different set of concerns. “Today’s trouble is enough for today.” Amen to that.

There’s an old gospel song with this chorus:

One day at a time, sweet Jesus,

That's all I'm asking from you.

Just give me the strength

To do everyday what I have to do.

Yesterday’s gone, sweet Jesus,

And tomorrow may never be mine.

Lord, help me today, show me the way

One day at a time.

A word from Walter Hagen in conclusion: “Don’t hurry, don’t worry. You’re only here for a short visit. So be sure to stop and smell the flowers.” Amen.

Sanctuary Flowers

I.

Osho, the Hindu mystic and philosopher, admonished:

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars...and if you have eyes you will be able to see that their whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents. They are not going to become rich, and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers....It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are.

Martin Luther was one of the spiritually-focused types who believed he saw God in nature, and about that he had this to say: “God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars.”

You can’t be suspicious, said Hal Borland, of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Flower God, God of the Spring”:

FLOWER god, god of the spring, beautiful, bountiful,

Cold-dyed shield in the sky, lover of versicles,

Here I wander in April

Cold, grey-headed; and still to my

Heart, Spring comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer,

Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant;

Spring, flower-planter in meadows,

Child-conductor in willowy

Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses:

Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity:

O child, happy are children!

She still smiles on their innocence,

She, dear mother in God, fostering violets,

Fills earth full of her scents, voices and violins:

Thus one cunning in music

Wakes old chords in the memory:

Thus fair earth in the Spring leads her performances.

One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal

Green - one more, and my bosom

Feels new life with an ecstasy.

Flowers in sanctuaries have brought unutterable beauty into worship space for who knows how long. The flowers don’t arrange themselves, but the typical church member might well have no idea who actually does the flower arranging; it’s usually a small group of dedicated volunteers, mostly women in most places, who quietly do their work without thought of recognition or fanfare.

Well, this past Christmastime when most of us were busily involved with the frazzle and frenzy that makes Christmas Christmas for many moderns who know very little about the Jesus behind it all, there was a serious problem for the Flower Ladies, the Altar Guild, of the Gloucester Cathedral in Great Britain. Some of the church leaders decided that since these mothers and grandmothers were sometimes, though rarely, at church while choirboys were rehearsing, they would have to undergo criminal background checks into order to remain flower arrangers since rare contact with an altar boy or two did occur, and there were times when if both groups were present in the cathedral at the same time, the Flower Ladies and the choirboys might have to use the same lavatory. I’m sure you know about unisex restrooms in many public places throughout much of western Europe.

Well, the lead Flower Lady, head of the Cathedral’s Altar Guild for many years, resigned rather than have to submit to a criminal background check as a requirement for continuing to arrange flowers for worship services. For more than a decade, Annabel Hayter arranged and oversaw arrangements of the flowers at Gloucester Cathedral, providing her time and talent at no cost to her congregation in order to make her church more beautiful when people gathered for worship. This is standard for Church Flower Ladies all over the world.

Shortly before Christmas last, Mrs. Hayter felt that she had to turn her back on the job she loved, a job she felt gifted to do, a job through which she felt she was making a significant contribution to her church. Rather than undergo a criminal record check ordered by her church’s leaders, she resigned from her position. Had she been someone new to the church, that would have been one thing, but she was a longtime member; and no instance of inappropriate interaction between her or her Flower Ladies and any of the choirboys had ever been raised.

We can certainly understand any efforts to protect the wellbeing and the innocence of children in any kind of church setting any where in the world, and we can guess that the Gloucester Cathedral officials were trying to make sure everyone who even rarely came into contact with their children had no record of any kind of child abuse. At the same time, blanket rulings rarely work out well especially if it means changing flower pots in midstream, and if children are properly supervised by those into whose care they are given the chances of abuse are virtually nonexistent.

The church leaders told the church as a whole that they had reason to think that known pedophiles were trying to infiltrate the church membership to have easier access to the choirboys. Someone on the Board stressed the importance of keeping watch on the Flower Ladies and those whom they were recommending for church membership. This was odd for several reasons, one of which being there’s so little interaction between the two groups at the church. Flower Ladies are notoriously independent, secretive even, and often like to do their work while no one else is around. The only thing more confidential around here than what floral arrangement we’ll see when we enter on a Sunday is classified financial giving records of those who support the congregation monetarily.

The abuse of children by anyone for any reason is a tragedy, and I’m not making light of any effort to put a stop to it once and for all. Still, if I were charged with the responsibility to watch out for potential child abusers, I wouldn’t have grandmothers who arrange church flowers at the top of my list.

Another factor not seemingly considered by the Cathedral officials is an absolute principle never to be violated in any church. The clergy and the elected church leaders who don’t understand this rule can ruin a church as is being lived out at the Gloucester Cathedral as we speak. The rule is this: never mess around with the Flower Ladies. You will always lose; they will always win. This pertains to criminal background checks as well as to making suggestions about how to improve the floral arrangement prepared for any given Sunday. It is worth remembering that many church Flower Ladies learned floral arranging in vocational programs while they were in prison, and almost none of them was in prison for anything related to child abuse. Most of them were in prison for threats to clergypersons who tried to tell them how to do their flower arranging.

As for me, I never even enter the flower room--even if I’m the only one in the building. If asked to enter the flower room to see if something was lost or left there, I always have an excuse for why I’m unable to do that.

I would no more tell a Flower Lady how to do her job than I’d want her to tell me how I should preach. I occasionally make a suggestion well ahead of time about something related to flowers, never too close to a Sunday where I would hope that happens and never after an arrangement has been made. Even if I should think an arrangement looks hideous, which has never been the case, I’d absolutely not say anything critical about it even if a carnivorous plant had been used in the arrangement and was wrapping itself around me as I preached. I’d do what any self-respecting minister would do. I’d tell the deacons that it was their job to ask the Flower Ladies to make a change.

II.

Anyway, back to jolly old England. The Gloucester Cathedral must be large. Its Altar Guild has sixty members; well it HAD sixty members. Now it has almost no members since the Flower Ladies said they weren’t going to have criminal background checks. The average age of those serving on Gloucester’s Altar Guild is 70. Most, as I’ve said, are devoted mothers and grandmothers, and they are insulted by the assumption that on one of the very few times of year when they are even in the building while the choirboys are rehearsing any of them would sneak into the lavatory to abuse one of the children. Again, if those who work with the choir director to monitor the behavior and wellbeing of the choirboys stayed near the restroom any time a child had to be excused, there would be no chance a dear older women smelling a little like a funeral home would hurt any one of the choirboys in any way.

Reporters say that the Cathedral case has split the once close-knit Cathedral community wide open. One of Mrs Hayter's supporters described what was going on in their church as closely akin to T. S. Eliot's “Murder in the Cathedral,” a piece of historical theatrical fiction in which the Archbishop of Canterbury is murdered at the altar on an order from the King of England.

Cathedral officials are undeterred, and instead of focusing on why the Flower Ladies are upset they are concentrating on criticizing what they are calling “Mrs. Hayter's campaigning activities.” Feelings continue to be hurt, and the membership of the Cathedral continues to decline--in a country that has already seen more church decline than most. Years ago, religious studies scholar, Karen Armstrong, said only half jokingly in a lecture I heard her deliver in New York City, “It’s getting harder and harder to find a church in England; the congregations have died, and the buildings have all become museums.”

The nation of Israel has had two great Temples. The first was built by King Solomon, son of King David and the third King of the nation of Israel; it was destroyed 587 years before Jesus was born by the Babylonians who, after destroying the magnificent Temple, took most of the Hebrews into captivity. When the Persians defeated the Babylonians and inherited all the people they had overtaken and enslaved, they--the Persians--released some of the captured people and sent them back to their homes. The Hebrews were in that number.

Not only did the Persians send them back home, but also they encouraged them to rebuild the Temple they had so admired. Poor and still somewhat emotionally debilitated by the trauma of the captivity, they did they best they could, but the rebuilt Temple was nothing much in comparison to the glory of the original. Nearer the time of the birth of Jesus, the Romans ruled over the Jews, and Herod was the puppet “King of the Jews”; still he evidently had great rapport with the Romans, and he earned their respect to some degree. They allowed him to undertake a series refurbishing and expansion of the Jerusalem Temple, which, when finished, was one of the human-made wonders of the world at that time.

This magnificent Temple was the one where baby Jesus was dedicated and circumcised at the age of eight days. It was the one where he was bar mitzvahed when he was 12 years old, and it was the one where, because of loss of focus and financial improprieties, he angrily overturned the tables of the money changers who worked within the Temple precincts. This was the Temple destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 in retaliation for multiple Jewish uprisings. That second Temple has never been rebuilt, but the land on which it sat is still, to Jews around the world, the holiest plot of ground on the face of the earth.

Some of those fixated on the end of time and on a literal interpretation of the book of Revelation, both of which are very dangerous positions to hold, believe that when a third Temple is built on that holy site, that will be the absolutely unmistakable sign that the world as we know it is coming to an end. If May 21 of this year really is J Day, Judgement Day, architects and builders better be getting themselves on the ball since it took seven full years to build the original Temple structure. Of course, I’m not sure of the value of a brand new Temple if the world as we know it is going to be divinely halted as the predictive-phobics tell us to anticipate.

Our topic today is sanctuary flowers, and--believe it or not--I’m not off topic. Stay with me here, and you’ll see.

Let’s get back to the first great Jewish Temple, the Temple built by King Solomon. The Temple becomes a part of one of the covenant commitments between God and the ancient Hebrews. That Temple becomes a part of how the Hebrews will keep their end of the their covenant promises to be God’s faithful people consistently. Indeed, it would be the center for the offering of sacrifices and corporate worship from the time of Solomon up through the whole of Jesus’ life and even until a few years after the Apostle Paul died. Flowers were a part of the story.

When the time came for Solomon to finish the interior of the first great Temple, he covered the stone walls with planks of cedar so that none of the stones could be seen at all; Solomon’s builders also used pure cedar in the construction of the rafters. The floors were constructed with cypress.

The nave, which was a large open space, a long central passageway, leading all the way from the narthex to the high altar, which was the center of sacrifice. This nave was forty cubits long, which was about sixty feet.

The cedar all over the interior walls was masterfully carved to reveal images of gourds, which many scholars say is often mistranslated and should read “rosebuds”; rosebuds along with a variety of open flowers--not closed flowers, but open flowers, which surely symbolized natural, mature beauty. Rosebuds--beauty awaiting development and maturity; and open flowers, representing beauty beyond beginnings. Many of the beautiful carvings were overlaid with pure gold.

As time went along, live flowers were used in worship spaces, and so the practice has continued down to this very morning. Beauty captured, arranged, displayed--in celebration both of nature’s art put into place by God and of one dimension of aesthetics that draws many of us into deeper levels of spirituality.

In many ways, Jewish law gives Shabbat, sabbath, the status of being the most important day in any week, and a holy day too. Often the Jewish home is cleaned extra well on Friday before sabbath begins at sundown, and the formal celebration, week by week, is begun with a fine Shabbat Friday dinner. Knowing what you know now, you will not be surprised to find out that many Jewish families display fresh flowers in their home until the sabbath ends, at sundown on Saturday.

III.

This is what I think happened. The Hebrews taken into exile after the destruction of their beloved first Temple couldn’t build a new Temple in Babylon, but when they gathered to worship as best they could in small groups or even as family units in Babylon, they remembered what they could remember of the place where they had worshipped with such joy and pride. When they thought of their beautiful worship area, they remembered the carvings of rosebuds and various open flowers overlaid with gold so they began to make sure flowers were present when possible as they gathered to worship in their Babylonian exile.

Once they were free again, flowers remained a part of their sabbath celebrations at home and in the rebuilt Temple. Since all the early Christians were Jews first, the practice naturally continued when the earliest Christians gathered for worship as well. So here we are in the twenty-first century, orthodox and reform Jews, fundamentalist and liberal Christians or followers of Jesus gathering to do whatever we do with accents of fresh flowers--although in some cases and places artificial arrangements are used on occasion. Isn’t it fascinating that theology could change so dramatically along with worship practices themselves, but the flowers are still here--and with them, never forget, the Flower Ladies. Here and there, there is even a Flower Gent serving on an Altar Guild these days.

The newest monotheistic religion, the one I haven’t mentioned so far today, also uses flowers at some religious gatherings, and so do certain other religious traditions outside monotheism. For example, at a Hindu wedding, the groom often arrives at the ceremony on a white horse that has been decorated with flowers; there is no guarantee that the horse enjoys the wedding or giving the groom a ride.

While Jewish ancestors, the Hebrews, may have gotten this rather comprehensive flowers-in-worship practice started for monotheists, there is archaeological evidence that the Neanderthals who inhabited parts of Europe and western Asia, going back almost a quarter of a million years, used flowers in their funeral rituals. The ancient Hebrews weren’t on the scene, at the earliest, until slightly less than four thousand years ago.

French novelist and poet, Gerard de Nerval wrote the following of flowers:

Today, as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, the peaceful generations of flowers have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle.

Back to the Hebrews for now, though; they do not use flowers at all worship gatherings. For example, reform Jews may allow flowers at funerals, but conservative and orthodox Jews, the more traditional groups with Judaism, do not.

At Islamic funerals, white and red flowers are not to be used as they are celebrative colors that should be used at weddings. Flowers are important to many Muslims; indeed, the Koran teaches: “Bread feeds the body, indeed, but flowers feed also the soul.”

William Wordsworth:

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

Many Roman Catholic churches try to stay away from scheduling weddings during the Christian season of Lent because Lent is a season of penitence, and not a season of celebration. If there must be a wedding, and I’m not talking about the shotgun variety, the flowers used must be purple, which is the color in Christian worship tradition that symbolizes penitence.

Speaking of Lent, which leads right into Holy Week and the commemoration of Jesus’ crucifixion, Greek Orthodox congregations construct mock tombs entirely from flowers. One of these structures, an epitapho, becomes central in Holy Week worship.

At a Mormon house of worship, no flowers are allowed in areas regarded as the most holy so you might see flowers in a narthex, but not in a sanctuary. You might see flowers in a social hall, but you will not see flowers in an area set aside for prayer and meditation.

Buddhist Altar Guilds have wide latitude regarding what kinds of flowers to use in adorning their altars. Any flowers with thorns in their stems, though, roses for example, are forbidden.

The great artist, Claude Monet, once said: “I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

Hymnwriters, Stainer and Bell, have this as the first stanza of one of their hymns:

Think of a world without any flowers,
Think of a world without any trees,
Think of a sky without any sunshine,
Think of the air without any breeze.
We thank You, Lord,
for flowers and trees and sunshine,
We thank You, Lord,
and praise Your holy name.

And the poet, Phillip Pulfrey, penned these beautiful thoughts:

The flower offered of itself

And eloquently spoke

Of Gods

In languages of rainbows

Perfumes

And secret silence...

Amen.