Alcoholics Anonymous' definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.  Being a disciple of Christ means allowing God to reshape us, both individually and collectively, so we can do a new thing and get different results.  This is often not easy, and grace is not cheap. 

Most of you by now have noticed the strange object being built in the corner of the parking lot.  Our half pipe for skate boarding, God willing, will be ready for our after school program which begins this Wednesday. My kids are learning in the long process of building the thing, that everything has a cost.  We congregational elders thought this half pipe might be a way to make the church a look a little less like it was “out to pasture,” a little more hip and fun for kids.  There is no doubt in my mind that God is the author of fun and joy, that God wants us to have life, and have it more abundantly.  So I don’t have a problem with the church providing a safe, fun place for kids.

The half pipe is a part of our larger attempt to be attractive to the hesitant and skeptical, to the culture of a new generation.  Some in the church growth business call it being a “user friendly church.” We talk about and work on publicity and attracting new folks, making them feel comfortable and welcome.  We have parties and picnics and go to plays and the beach.  Our choice of Todd for our new music director shows, in part, our desire to diversify and enjoy our worship music. Not that Todd is a punk rocker or that he can't hold his own in the classical department, but as one of our young new members put it in the survey, “It would be nice to have some music that makes me want to move.”

We want people to feel like moving here at St. John’s.  But the movement invoked, fundamentally and finally, is not all about fun.  One of the lessons kids will learn here is that our own personal pleasure, while important, is not ultimate.  There is much more to a fulfilled life and a healthy church than enjoyment.  So when we went to Pacifica to try out surfing at Camp Elmwood, we started by picking up trash along the beach.  We meet again next week at the Berkeley Marina to do the same. 

          Still, Christian discipleship is not a series of worship services and a few nice acts strung together.  And part of my desire to bring fun into the church has a deeper, more serious side.  God is sovereign over all of life.  Every part of our lives, including the pleasurable parts, are God’s territory, clay for God’s molding.  Hopefully, the Church can learn from extreme asceticism and Puritanism of its past, that if we deny our desire for pleasure, it will creep out in malformed ways.  On the other hand, pleasure sought without the spirit of God will ultimately wear us down and drain us of joy.  Dear God, make our joy complete. 

While not unrelated, the joy, which God brings, is much deeper than that of a half pipe or a more entertaining worship service. And it comes with a cost.  The cost is the choice to have God mold us, to dedicate our entire lives to be shaped to Her purposes.

Crowds of people were following Jesus, says Luke in today’s passage.  He made the lame walk; with him the poor had enough to eat.  He sounded like the prophets of old. The buzz was out; this guy was something special.  No doubt itinerant prophets along with dogs, children, musicians and magicians were a big part of the entertainment in first century Palestine.  People would come out of curiosity, to meet people, to have something to talk about.  And of course, they were seeking a little relief from the drudgery of daily life, hope in the face of oppression, sickness and death.

So Jesus throws in a wake up call for those hoping there is such thing as a casual Christian.  Count the cost because God wants all of you, your whole life.  No luke-warm or half baked-Christians please.

This doesn’t mean that we will not struggle with our faith, that we will have it all figured out so that we have no doubt.  This is not about judging right belief, but about living in faith, even when we feel inadequate and overwhelmed.  When we mess up or are bent out of shape, we allow ourselves to be remolded by God.  Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, to have Christ molded into us.

Bonhoeffer was a great German theologian whose discipleship was tested in Nazi Germany.  In prison for participating in the underground resistance plot to assassinate Hitler, he wrote this poem: 

“Who Am I”

Who am I? They often tell me

I stepped from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,

Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me

I used to speak to my warders

Freely and friendly and clearly,

As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me

I bore the days of misfortune

Equally, smilingly, proudly,

Like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I myself know of myself?

Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

Struggling for breath, as though hands were

compressing my throat,

Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,

Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,

Tossing in expectation of great events,

Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,

Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,

Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am Thine!

          Our fears and doubts, our desire for comfort and prosperity, family success and power are not eradicated by faith.  Those are God given feelings and desires.  God created the mind with which we doubt.  But these things are not ultimate.  God’s love and peace are ultimate.

Albrecht Schoenherr writes of Bonhoeffer in The Christian Century, November 27, 1985, pp. 1090-1094.

“Bonhoeffer came from a professor’s family; his father was a well-known psychiatrist. Thus, Bonhoeffer belonged to the upper-middle class. In such circles, it "didn’t do" to study theology. Bonhoeffer, who was very close to his family, defended his theological work to his brother Karl-Friedrich, a natural scientist and agnostic, in this way: "There are things for which an uncompromising stand is worthwhile. And it seems to me that peace and social justice, or Christ himself, are such things" (quoted in Bethge, p. 155).

He once explained his participation in the resistance by this analogy: if a drunken driver drives into a crowd, what is the task of the Christian and the church? To run along behind to bury the dead and bind up the wounded? Or isn’t it, if possible, to get the driver out of the driver’s seat?

“ “Life for him consisted not of different compartments, but of a single reality,” continues Schoenherr. “This earth could not be considered apart from Christ’s footsteps, which are impressed in it. Christ’s manger stands on the earth, his cross is rammed into the earth, his grave is dug into the earth. Because God became human in Christ, there is only the one reality, which includes God, world and human persons. Bonhoeffer’s thought was not like ours, divided among different realities: employment and family, economy and politics. One does not find in Bonhoeffer any sneaked-in simplicity, in which a part of reality is ignored, or the kind of piety that only lives in and for the life beyond and lets things on this earth go as they will. Nor did he live in the kind of immediacy that knows no genuine obligations and only seeks personal wealth.

“He was, for example, one of the very few people who in April 1933, after the first Jewish pogroms, publicly intervened on behalf of Jews. At the time, most people thought the measures against the Jews were merely "childhood diseases" of National Socialism. Even in 1941, when the "final solution" was being implemented, he was able on the strength of his contacts to get Jewish people out of the country.”  To protect him, Niebuhr helped him get a visiting post at Union Seminary, but after coming over, Bonhoeffer decided he was called by God to be with his people.  He returned to Germany and joined the underground resistance, helping to plot the assassination of Hitler.  He was arrested and then hanged. 

Those who know me will not be surprised to hear that I have all sorts of voices running around in my head.  One of those voices questions how we permit our building and sanctuary to be used.  By definition the sanctuary is a sanctified place.  Webster online dictionary defines sanctified: 1: to set apart to a sacred purpose or to religious use: CONSECRATE
2: to free from sin: PURIFY
3 a: to impart or impute sacredness, inviolability, or respect to b: to give moral or social sanction to
4: to make productive of holiness or piety

Two weeks ago we hosted the Sabeel conference on peace in Palestine and Israel.  Sabeel came with a Palestinian Christian perspective, with a desire to end the occupation of the Jewish settlements and confiscation of land via the building of the wall further beyond the 1967 borders.  All speakers invited were to promote and end to the occupation via non-violence.  Voices told me this was a dangerous conference to host.  That it wasn’t something we should have in our sanctuary.  Faith and politics shouldn’t mix.

Then this week the Aquarian Minion, a Jewish sect holds their high holy days here in our sanctuary.  They asked if they could cover the cross.  A voice in my head says no.  Christ is the only way.  “I am,” John records Jesus as saying, “the way, the truth and the life, and there is no way to the Father except by me.”  It may be that our fathers and mothers, our ancestors in the faith would be rolling over in their graves if they knew we permitted such things.

Just as God warned the Hebrews through Jeremiah to refrain from idolatry and sacrilege, we should be vigilant to avoid polluting and watering down our faith and the sacredness of our sanctuary.  But another voice in my head says, “What is this way that is Jesus?  What is the way of the cross?  Certainly that way of the cross, the way, which is Jesus, is more than having a cross as a hood ornament or even saying the name Jesus.  It is not doctrine or sacrificial art that makes us disciples, but sacrificial love.  It is not the name of Jesus that saves, but his gracious love.  Without the grace, Jesus is just another name. 

And with all respect to the hard work and faith of our parents and grandparents, the practical result of rigid, exclusive theological positions have too often not resembled the Way.  They didn’t in the first century, nor did they in the twentieth century.

Sanctuary: from Late Latin sanctuarium, from Latin sanctus
1: a consecrated place: as a: the ancient Hebrew temple at Jerusalem or its holy of holies b (1): the most sacred part of a religious building (as the part of a Christian church in which the altar is placed) (2): the room in which general worship services are held (3): a place (as a church or a temple) for worship
2 a (1): a place of refuge and protection (2): a refuge for wildlife where predators are controlled and hunting is illegal b: the immunity from law attached to a sanctuary.

 So don’t misunderstand, especially if you are a visitor.  Don’t let our parents Puritan perspective on fun and holiness lead you to believe we are not serious about our sacred worship of God, and our discipleship for Jesus.  Do not think that since we are flexible with our application of scripture that we are not on the solid rock of the biblical Christ.  We are not wishy-washy, blown from here to there, but allowing God to mold Christ into us as we live in the real world. We seek to take the cross off the wall and have God tattoo it onto our heart.  In this post Holocaust, post 9/11 world, Let it be known that this is a sacred house of Christian worship, where you can find forgiveness for your sins and be empowered to live a life for peace and justice…Let it be known that this is a place where both Jews and Palestinians will find refuge and protection, a place to voice their adoration and lamentation.  May you and all immigrants from across town or from across the ocean find, that in this place, with these people, the law of love may not be the only law of the land, but it is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last.  May animals and humans alike know, that in this place, predators are controlled and hunting is illegal.  Not that if you are single, we don’t want you to meet someone nice!

So count the cost.  We want to feel welcome and have fun, and we seek to hear a Word, which reaches the very height and depth of our lives, from our most private, darkest part of our souls to the edges of the universe. The voice asks us to gratefully give and sacrifice, to be molded in the image of the one who took up a cross for the cause of righteousness, peace and grace.  This ain’t no disco.  This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ