Text: Luke 8:26-39

The prophet Isaiah once walked around the land of Judah barefoot and naked – for three years.  This likely falls under the category of “Bible stories I didn’t learn in Sunday school.”  We are rather fond of Isaiah overall.  This is the prophet who spoke of the peaceable kingdom: “the wolf shall live with the lamb…the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.”  Who declared, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares.”  The same prophet who spoke of the coming of Immanuel, whose vision of a just and wise ruler we so readily connect with the person of Jesus.  This prophet, Isaiah, one of the most cherished voices in Jewish and Christian tradition– once went three years without wearing any clothes – in public.

He did this as a sign.  That’s what it says in Isaiah chapter 20 where this happens.  The Lord, Yahweh, wanted naked Isaiah to be a sign to the people about what would happen to those who violently rebelled against the great empire of their day, Assyria.  They would be stripped of all they had and utterly put to shame.  Over the span of those three years, every time Isaiah passed their way, people would have to consider that it was their own nakedness that was really at stake.

Wendell Berry has a whole series of poems about The Mad Farmer.  He’s willing to claim this title for himself because of his belief that in a world gone insane with greed and destruction, the only sane response is to go “mad.”  We’ve borrowed the last line from one of his more well-known poems, The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, for past Easter worship themes: “Practice resurrection.”

Here are some words from another poem “The contrariness of the Mad Farmer:”

I…

 https://joelssermons.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/20160529sermon.mp3

Texts: Proverbs 8:1-4; 22-31, John 1:1-5

About four years ago the University of Chicago received a large grant from the John Templeton Foundation.  It was for the creation the Wisdom Research Project.  The project is pretty much what it sounds like, and describes its mission this way: “ We want to understand how an individual develops wisdom and the circumstances and situations in which people are most likely to make wise decisions.  We hope that, by deepening our scientific understanding of wisdom, we will also begin to understand how to gain, reinforce, and apply wisdom and, in turn, become wiser as a society.”

Dr. Howard Nusbaum is the Director of this project and was recently interviewed in a publication I receive, which is how I found out about it (Bearing: for the Life of Faith, A publication of the Collegeville Institute, Spring 2016, pp. 16-17).  The interview notes that Wisdom researchers “use everything from brain scans to personal narratives to help them test their hypotheses about wisdom.”  Some are researching the effects of meditation on awareness and humility, both keys for wisdom.  Others are looking at the relationship between wisdom and the body.  For example, one research team has found that “years of ballet practice are related to increased wisdom.”  It’s never too late to start… Other researchers are finding significant connections between wisdom and sleep!  While sleeping our brains help us to generalize “from experiences, allowing us to use knowledge from one experience to help with a novel situation.”

So the next time you take a nap or lay down at night to sleep, consider it an exercise in gaining wisdom.

Nusbaum is especially interested in asking, “What is the relationship between wisdom and human flourishing?”  He cites Aristotle who believed these two were closely connected.  Nussbaum says that flourishing “does not…

Text: Exodus 1:8-22

A week and a half ago Geneva Reed-Veal spoke at the Library of Congress.  She was addressing the newly formed Congressional Caucus on black women and girls.  Her speech lasted about four and a half minutes.  She began: “I don’t have a big long statement to read. What I’m going to say to you is that I’m here representing the mothers who are not heard, I am here representing the mothers who have lost children as we go on about our daily lives.”

Geneva Reed-Veal is the mother of Sandra Bland, the 28 year woman stopped by a police man in July of last year for a failure to signal a lane change.  Bland had verbally challenged the cop for pulling her over, the confrontation escalated, and he arrested her.  She was found hanged in a jail cell three days later.  The official cause of her death was ruled a suicide.

Sandra Bland’s story made national news, but in her talk Geneva Reed-Veal asked for a show of hands for who could name the other six women who died in custody in jail in the US that same month, July 2015.  Nobody raised their hands.  I couldn’t have either.

Reed-Veal’s response: “That is a problem. You all are among the walking dead, and I am so glad that I have come out from among you. I heard about Trayvon, I heard about all the shootings, and it did not bother me until it hit my daughter. I was walking dead just like you until Sandra Bland died in a jail cell in Texas.”

On this Mother’s Day, Sandra Bland’s mother has declared that I, and probably most of us here, are “walking dead.”  Alive, but unaware.

This winter and spring I’ve been part of a Sunday school class that’s been studying…

Text: Acts 16:9-15

Joel

Lydia was a businesswoman.  More specifically, she was “a dealer in purple cloth.”  Her conversion was important enough for the early church to include it among the limited selection of stories in the book of Acts.  But it’s a brief story, and it provokes just as many questions as it answers about the person of Lydia.

We’re told that Lydia was from the city of Thyatira, long known as a center for purple cloth production.  Kind of like saying you’re a corn farmer from Iowa.  Thyatira was in the region of Lydia in Asia Minor.  So not only are you a corn farmer from Iowa, but you are named Iowa.  Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth and she was… Lydia.

But when we meet her in this passage, she is not in Thyatira, or Lydia, or Iowa.  She’s in the city of Philippi, a major economic hub a couple hundred miles northwest of Thyatira.  And she has a home in Philippi.  She has a home.  She has a household.

We are told that Lydia was already a “worshiper of God.”  On a Sabbath she hears a message from another traveling salesman of sorts, a spiritual entrepreneur.  Paul is preaching to a group of women, and she’s one of them, gathered outside the city gate by the river.  She likes what she hears.  She joins this gospel movement and is baptized.  She and her household are baptized.  She invites Paul and his companions to join her, in her home.

And this is pretty much what we know about Lydia.

How does she come to be from two places?  Why is she the head of a household in a patriarchal world?  What exactly did baptism mean to her if she was already a worshiper of God?  And in those waters of conversion, how…

Text: Acts 11:1-18

 During the Easter season we’ve been talking about different conversions.  Not just a one and done experience, but a series of experiences that convert us toward the overflowing love and grace of God.  We looked at Thomas, then Saul, the artist formerly known as Paul, and last week Chris talked about Oscar Romero.  With Peter up this week I’m aware that makes for four men in a row, so I’m glad to report that next week the lectionary features Lydia, the seller of purple cloth, and the week after that, Mother’s Day, we’ll meditate on the Divine feminine.

As I looked at this Acts 11 story, which is one of Peter’s many conversions, I was reminded of a model I’ve found helpful in thinking about spiritual growth.  We’ve included an image of that as a bulletin insert.  It’s a pretty simple model, based on concentric circles, or in this case concentric hearts.  Rather than being linear, it starts inward and moves outward, from egocentric, to ethnocentric, to world centric.  And then there’s a fourth ring which for some reason isn’t in this image.  It’s sometimes called cosmo-centric, or being-centric, or Christ-centric.  I’m not even sure who to credit for this model.  I learned about it through the writing of Ken Wilber, who has done a lot of work integrating different wisdom traditions.

So I invite us to think about conversion this way this morning, as a process of expansion, growth outward in all directions.  And we can see how this Peter story follows this trajectory.

In the egocentric phase our awareness is pretty much limited to ourselves.  Ego is just Greek for “I”, so to be egocentric is to be centered on I, me, oneself.  This carries all kinds of negative connotations, nobody wants to be “egocentric,” but like these…