Scripture for the 3rd Sunday in Lent includes Exodus 20:1-17; I Corinthians 1:18-25; and John 2:13-22
The story of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers and sellers of livestock in the temple precincts—here’s a Gospel event I’ve never seen as the subject of a stained glass window. Have you?
Imagine it. All those coins falling to the pavement. Tables tumbling at odd angles. Terror in the eyes of the animals. Shocked faces, as peoples mouths are left gaping.
I wonder if we know what to make of this one, how to display it in our gallery of Jesus moments.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke locate this spectacular temple protest near the end of our Lord’s public ministry. We’re accustomed to imagining that this strategic disruption of the status quo uniquely fueled the fires that would consume Jesus.
But John places this event right near the start of Jesus’s ministry. What a way for Jesus to make his mark! Unlikely he would have lasted as long as he did, says one commentator, if this is how he starts his itinerant preaching. Likelier, John moves the story up front because it serves his purpose as evangelist and theologian. What has immediately preceded this story is the transformation of water to wine at the wedding feast in Cana. Revealed there was the grace and glory and abundant new life on offer in Jesus Christ. What follows in today’s portion is the challenge and threat to the existing order posed by that new life. These two stories, back to back, create a kind of Gospel in miniature: God’s self-revealing in Jesus erupts at a wedding feast in Galilee. It is with humanity that God delights to dwell. Not so much the temple, not the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, not the hierarchy-bound ritual-blindered blood-soaked sanctuary made with hands. No, God is more the open-country village-life type who identifies with the kind of loyal love that is at the heart of a wedding feast.
But this God has a message for the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, and Jesus the messenger delivers it, exposing himself to the fiery backdraft.
It is not his message that simple abuses to the temple sacrificial system must stop. Perhaps that theme is there in Matthew, Mark, and Luke when they report Jesus railing against how the temple has become a den of robbers. But no, John’s Jesus says that the temple system has become a marketplace ruled by business-as-usual, a Charles Schwab investment office at each entrance. John has Jesus deliver a penetrating bunker-busting message: the entire temple sacrificial system must end.
And it is only John who reports Jesus’s words about destroying the temple. While he means the temple of his own body, his figure of speech has a double edge. John, last of the four Gospel-writers, has woven into his Gospel prescient words of Jesus that help the church make sense of the devastating obliteration of the temple by Roman armed forces, late in the first century.
When the temple is gone, something will take its place. That will be the Spirit-infused risen Body of Christ that has passed through the obliteration on Calvary, then burst the boundaries of Roman force, leaving an empty tomb to testify that no stone edifice can contain the divine.
When the temple is gone, something will take its place. That will be the Spirit-infused risen Body of Christ, the church, the community of people unified by loyal love, both his and theirs: united by the loyal love of Jesus Christ crucified and revealed by Easter light to be the power of God and the wisdom of God, and bound together by the loyal love of disciples, apostles, and countless ordinary people made extraordinary by having hitched their wagons to the star of God’s foolishness that is wiser than human wisdom, God’s weakness that is stronger than human strength.
Across this nation now, a large and growing number of congregations have to face the foundation-shaking challenges of merger and closure, requiring them to discover what will take its place, when the temple is gone. We don’t have far to look, to see our sister churches on the front lines of transformation, wondering what they are becoming. Are their water-barrels half empty or half full? Are they called to hold their own, or is God calling them to pour themselves out and so become fine wine?
Churches that are closer to these issues of life and death have much to teach congregations that seem insulated and secure. All churches need to hear the stories of congregations facing the loss of sanctuaries made with hands, while finding their security not in temples of stone and wood, but in the loyal love of Jesus Christ crucified and risen, showing itself in their experience of spiritual community and flesh-and-blood outreach.
The cleansing of the temple. That’s how today’s Gospel event is remembered by name. But, as we have seen, that emphasis comes more from the other three evangelists, whose message was more along the lines of summoning the religious community to clean up its act.
John’s Jesus has gone for the jugular. Rearranging the deck chairs will do nothing to change the course of our temples, which need more than cleansing. They need the power and wisdom of God; and, if I may add to St. Paul’s words, our temples need the pleasure of God—that is, we need to care, to know, and to commit our resources to what pleases God.
What that is hovers above us and within us in the radiant vision of the prophet Micah, whose timeless questions and answers must have been ringing in John’s mind as he wrote the words we heard today.
“’With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8)
Not the cleansing of the temple. The recovery of the temple’s primary purpose. The turning upside-down of the temple’s agenda, to serve the world and not the ecclesiastical-industrial complex, to convert a hierarchical system into a servant community that lifts up the lowly and puts the mighty to the task of washing feet and feeding the hungry. The tables are turned, announces Jesus at the start of his brief public ministry in John’s Gospel. And the water barrels are no longer for keeping: they are to pour out the rich wine of God’s new creation.
“The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing…” Well, aren’t we all? “…but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
Not the power of magical intervention, demanded by people needing signs and wonders to reveal God; not the power of holding the right philosophy or getting it right theologically, expected by people who believe they can think their way to God.
The message about the cross is the lasting durability of loyal love, foolish and weak from the standpoint of imperial powers, but the very cornerstone of the kingdom of God and the compass of the church.
(Gail O’Day’s commentary on John’s Gospel, Volume IX of “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, was helpful in preparing this sermon.)
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
The Power of Faith
Scripture for the 2nd Sunday in Lent includes Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
Nothing is simple in the Book of Genesis. For one thing, whenever a pivotal story is told, it is told twice, and with noticeable differences between the two tellings. In our Lenten series today, Diana Elvin will help us explore the two creation stories that are told, back to back, consistent in their central message that God made and loves the created order, but inconsistent as to how it all happened.
Perhaps we just shouldn’t be surprised that the foundational book of the Hebrew Bible regales us with two versions of watershed events. Consider it basic training for Christianity that presents its anointed holy one Jesus Christ not in one Gospel, but in four.
In today’s portion from Genesis, we hear the second of two stories about the covenant God made with Abraham. If you found something missing in today’s version, namely all that real estate in Canaan that Israel was promised by God, you’ll find that’s in the earlier version, a chapter or two earlier. And the other big difference is that in the first version, it looked as if Sarah’s maidservant’s son Ishmael was going to be the heir apparent to God’s covenant promises, but by the time of this second version (13 years have passed), Ishmael no longer has such hopes pinned on him. Maybe he had become such a difficult teenager that he’d burned his bridges—we just aren’t told. So the drama intensifies as God promises to Abram and Sarai (as they are still called) a son of their own who will bear the family standard. As part of the deal, they’re given new names—not major changes, but subtle ones. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah… but don’t expect me to tell you what the differences mean. The language experts say they don’t know, except that the newer names sound less Semitic and more Aramaic, and the point (probably) is that this elderly couple is expected to live up to their new names—which (probably) mean “exalted father” (Abraham) and “princess” (Sarah). And, by the way, the fact that Sarah gets renamed means that God—this time—is including her in this new version of the covenant. Given the tenuous place of women in patriarchal societies, this is a big difference between the two versions. Maybe it’s proof of evolution, and evidence that behind every patriarchal society stands the matriarchal presence that knows how to get things done.
What’s worth keeping from all this? How about a lively sense of what old age is for? If it isn’t dramatic enough, getting called out at age 86 (first version) to play a key role in helping God form a new nation that will bless all other nations, imagine it happening again at age 99 (second version)! There’s a lot of laughter in the background of both stories. In an age when there were (probably) no little pills to help things along, a lot was being asked of Abraham—and Sarah. As St. Paul reflects on their stories several hundred years later, he observes that the God in whom Abraham and Sarah believed “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, Abraham believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations,’… (so) He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
Well, then. Let’s hear it for the power of faith and the virtue of glorifying God! But lest we get lost in fantasy about old age, virility, and fertility, let’s take home the message that becoming elderly in no way disqualifies—and may in fact uniquely qualify—a person when it comes to helping God bless other people. It’s common to say that elderly people have in their toolkits wisdom, perspective, a certain regard for the little things that manifest caring, and the ability to see the forest for the trees.
But the Abraham and Sarah stories show that something more is required, for old age (and any age) to connect with the missionary drive of God. St. Paul teases it out when he observes, “it all depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all… descendants.”
Packed into that rich statement are several insights. The whole enterprise of life, from God’s primeval creation of this biosphere to God’s new creation of a new heaven and a new earth through the self-offering of Jesus Christ, all rests on grace. For that reason, the primary way that we human beings may contribute to the enterprise of life is by the exercise of faith, trust. And the beneficiaries of our contributions to life are not to be limited to our own tribe, family, denomination, party, or persuasion. All of these insights Paul harvests from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, which makes me think that a deep trust in the grace of God is the most useful tool in the toolkit of old age (or any age).
There’s one more thing to take away from the Abraham and Sarah saga, and what St. Paul makes of it. This is especially pertinent in a season when the Anglican Communion has called her members worldwide to recognize that we and our planet are in crisis, requiring us to rediscover a proper stewardship of our environment.
Paul casts the story of this elderly couple as an example of God bringing about a new creation. He says that the God Abraham and Sarah believed in is the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” This is God’s generative nature, not confined to the start of our universe, but woven into the web of being is this leaning into new life that allows God to be known as the one who says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
But, to do that, God requires old people-- and young people, and middle-aged people-- who are willing to unsettle their lives as radically as Abraham and Sarah, who moved at a great age not into assisted living, but into unmapped territory as they left their ancestral home in what is now Turkey and migrated west towards the Mediterranean coast of Canaan. God requires people willing to be stirred out of retirement, out of comfort zones, out of age-old assumptions and entitlements, to become stirrers of a new creation, a new society, new ways of being in the world.
God required of Jesus of Nazareth a degree of commitment unique among human beings, but not inherently different from what God needs from us all, the faith and trust we’ve seen in Abraham and Sarah, the kind that will commit the whole of life into the hands of God.
As Jesus displayed and expressed this deep trust, willing to embrace the worst that human nature and human society could dish out, his own disciple Peter took him aside and scolded him for exaggerating the risk, over-stating the challenge, and frightening the weak. This was no longer a private conversation, for we’re told that Jesus turned and saw his disciples nearby, near enough that he knew that loud Peter had been heard, anxious Peter seen. Whereupon Jesus rebuked Peter for being short-sighted, self-absorbed, and timid.
However we understand the plight of our planet, however we would advocate going about repairing the damage, addressing the plundering, and protecting the endangered, our scriptures put before us today the sharply opposite examples of Abraham and Sarah at their best, on the one hand, and of Peter, on the other, at his worst.
What story will be told of us? What does God require of us now? Among the choices we have, how will we recognize and make the very best ones we can?
Nothing is simple in the Book of Genesis. For one thing, whenever a pivotal story is told, it is told twice, and with noticeable differences between the two tellings. In our Lenten series today, Diana Elvin will help us explore the two creation stories that are told, back to back, consistent in their central message that God made and loves the created order, but inconsistent as to how it all happened.
Perhaps we just shouldn’t be surprised that the foundational book of the Hebrew Bible regales us with two versions of watershed events. Consider it basic training for Christianity that presents its anointed holy one Jesus Christ not in one Gospel, but in four.
In today’s portion from Genesis, we hear the second of two stories about the covenant God made with Abraham. If you found something missing in today’s version, namely all that real estate in Canaan that Israel was promised by God, you’ll find that’s in the earlier version, a chapter or two earlier. And the other big difference is that in the first version, it looked as if Sarah’s maidservant’s son Ishmael was going to be the heir apparent to God’s covenant promises, but by the time of this second version (13 years have passed), Ishmael no longer has such hopes pinned on him. Maybe he had become such a difficult teenager that he’d burned his bridges—we just aren’t told. So the drama intensifies as God promises to Abram and Sarai (as they are still called) a son of their own who will bear the family standard. As part of the deal, they’re given new names—not major changes, but subtle ones. Abram becomes Abraham and Sarai becomes Sarah… but don’t expect me to tell you what the differences mean. The language experts say they don’t know, except that the newer names sound less Semitic and more Aramaic, and the point (probably) is that this elderly couple is expected to live up to their new names—which (probably) mean “exalted father” (Abraham) and “princess” (Sarah). And, by the way, the fact that Sarah gets renamed means that God—this time—is including her in this new version of the covenant. Given the tenuous place of women in patriarchal societies, this is a big difference between the two versions. Maybe it’s proof of evolution, and evidence that behind every patriarchal society stands the matriarchal presence that knows how to get things done.
What’s worth keeping from all this? How about a lively sense of what old age is for? If it isn’t dramatic enough, getting called out at age 86 (first version) to play a key role in helping God form a new nation that will bless all other nations, imagine it happening again at age 99 (second version)! There’s a lot of laughter in the background of both stories. In an age when there were (probably) no little pills to help things along, a lot was being asked of Abraham—and Sarah. As St. Paul reflects on their stories several hundred years later, he observes that the God in whom Abraham and Sarah believed “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, Abraham believed that he would become ‘the father of many nations,’… (so) He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead… or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.”
Well, then. Let’s hear it for the power of faith and the virtue of glorifying God! But lest we get lost in fantasy about old age, virility, and fertility, let’s take home the message that becoming elderly in no way disqualifies—and may in fact uniquely qualify—a person when it comes to helping God bless other people. It’s common to say that elderly people have in their toolkits wisdom, perspective, a certain regard for the little things that manifest caring, and the ability to see the forest for the trees.
But the Abraham and Sarah stories show that something more is required, for old age (and any age) to connect with the missionary drive of God. St. Paul teases it out when he observes, “it all depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all… descendants.”
Packed into that rich statement are several insights. The whole enterprise of life, from God’s primeval creation of this biosphere to God’s new creation of a new heaven and a new earth through the self-offering of Jesus Christ, all rests on grace. For that reason, the primary way that we human beings may contribute to the enterprise of life is by the exercise of faith, trust. And the beneficiaries of our contributions to life are not to be limited to our own tribe, family, denomination, party, or persuasion. All of these insights Paul harvests from the stories of Abraham and Sarah, which makes me think that a deep trust in the grace of God is the most useful tool in the toolkit of old age (or any age).
There’s one more thing to take away from the Abraham and Sarah saga, and what St. Paul makes of it. This is especially pertinent in a season when the Anglican Communion has called her members worldwide to recognize that we and our planet are in crisis, requiring us to rediscover a proper stewardship of our environment.
Paul casts the story of this elderly couple as an example of God bringing about a new creation. He says that the God Abraham and Sarah believed in is the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” This is God’s generative nature, not confined to the start of our universe, but woven into the web of being is this leaning into new life that allows God to be known as the one who says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
But, to do that, God requires old people-- and young people, and middle-aged people-- who are willing to unsettle their lives as radically as Abraham and Sarah, who moved at a great age not into assisted living, but into unmapped territory as they left their ancestral home in what is now Turkey and migrated west towards the Mediterranean coast of Canaan. God requires people willing to be stirred out of retirement, out of comfort zones, out of age-old assumptions and entitlements, to become stirrers of a new creation, a new society, new ways of being in the world.
God required of Jesus of Nazareth a degree of commitment unique among human beings, but not inherently different from what God needs from us all, the faith and trust we’ve seen in Abraham and Sarah, the kind that will commit the whole of life into the hands of God.
As Jesus displayed and expressed this deep trust, willing to embrace the worst that human nature and human society could dish out, his own disciple Peter took him aside and scolded him for exaggerating the risk, over-stating the challenge, and frightening the weak. This was no longer a private conversation, for we’re told that Jesus turned and saw his disciples nearby, near enough that he knew that loud Peter had been heard, anxious Peter seen. Whereupon Jesus rebuked Peter for being short-sighted, self-absorbed, and timid.
However we understand the plight of our planet, however we would advocate going about repairing the damage, addressing the plundering, and protecting the endangered, our scriptures put before us today the sharply opposite examples of Abraham and Sarah at their best, on the one hand, and of Peter, on the other, at his worst.
What story will be told of us? What does God require of us now? Among the choices we have, how will we recognize and make the very best ones we can?
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Tree-Hugging Dirt Worshipers
Scripture for the 1st Sunday in Lent include Genesis 9:8-17; I Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15
Last Sunday, we sang a wonderful spiritual with the refrain, “Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.” I’m not sure if it was Monday or Tuesday before I stopped humming and hearing that heart-song.
Today’s portion of Genesis can be described as the foundation for that hymn. On the surface of things, the Bible presents this first covenant as the font from which later divine covenants flowed, including God’s promises to Abraham upon which Israel sees itself as chosen by God from among the nations to bless the nations. And, given how the Hebrew Bible has shaped the Christian faith, the case can be made that the new covenant of reconciliation in Jesus Christ has this first covenant with Noah as its cornerstone.
It’s no surprise that we 21st-century Christians may not be willing to stay on the surface of scripture, as we consider such a Bible text as this one. It is by now the standard approach to understand the Book of Genesis as a kind of archeological dig, recognizing layers of ancient stories organized and edited by later writers. While the stories speak of primordial times, they have been shaped and re-presented by writers who pressed a strategic purpose, much later than the primeval voice we’re hearing on the surface of the story.
Today’s portion of Genesis is thought by many commentators to show the signs of having been written—by which is meant the ancient stories, told over countless centuries, re-crafted by a skilled author—between 600 and 500 years before Christ, making this apparently oldest (because first) of the Hebrew scriptures actually younger than the famous books of the great prophets that we trace to some 700 years before Christ.
And what might the strategic purpose have been that midwifed the birth, the genesis, of such a story as this one about the covenant with Noah? What had happened between 600 and 500 years before Christ? The pivotal experience of the Babylonian Exile, a calamity for God’s chosen people when, in the year 587, the brightest and best of Israel’s citizens were deported to the homeland of their arch-enemy. For some 50 years, by the waters of Babylon Israel sat down and wept, until, starting in the year 538, following the miraculous edict of King Cyrus of Persia who freed Israel, those who had gone out, carrying the seed, returned again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.
Oh boy, I hear someone saying. We are expected to care about this? This is somehow relevant to us? Well, yes, it is. The writer’s strategic purpose is to assure the hearers that God has not withdrawn from the created order. As devastating as current events appear, God has not left us comfortless or alone. That message was urgently needed during the time of Israel’s exile, and was intensely celebrated upon Israel’s return. Hearing this story about the primeval commitment of God to Israel’s ancestors, her then-current exiles would have taken heart. And we, millennia later, can hear the heart-song encourage us in a time of our own (and our planet’s) urgent need. Increasingly, the human race is exiled from intimate loving regard for the earth and its myriad creatures. It will help us restore that healing relationship if we allow this covenant with Noah to show us that God is at work now, within the created order, to reconcile us to a stewardship, a cherishing, a respecting that is not so much a commitment we have to invent, but an apprenticeship we have to serve in faithful teamwork with God who is already committed, to us and to the earth.
It’s all there in the covenant with Noah. We know about covenants. We are united to Jesus Christ in the covenant of baptism, where God’s commitment to us is made crystal clear and, in turn, we embrace certain commitments to God and our fellow human beings. While our baptismal covenant makes no direct mention of protecting our environment, we certainly hear it in the Iona Community Creed where caring for the earth is raised to creedal status. I’d vote for making it more explicit in a revised baptismal covenant some day, to save our children and grandchildren from having to hunt for it. It’s there-- in the call to resist evil (renouncing the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God)-- and it’s there in striving for justice, peace, and dignity, which surely requires embracing a strongly green passion for safeguarding our environment.
I am grateful for all tree-hugging dirt-worshippers. I noticed that identity announced on a parishioner’s bumper sticker recently. Guess what? God—the God of the Bible—is one, too. God establishes this covenant not only with humankind, not only with every living creature, but with the earth itself. The rainbow in the clouds will remind God, God says, “of the covenant between me and the earth.”
Here is a wake-up call to return to basics. The everlasting arms we lean on are embracing not just human beings, but also the enormous range of non-human life forms, the biosphere itself, including the dirt. All of life, and all that supports life, is within the heart of God, is of strategic worth to God, is important to the mission and purpose of God in Jesus Christ, the incarnate God who has made the world of matter… matter.
Though Christian theology has yet to make enough of this emphasis, it has not been entirely missing. Thomas Traherne, Anglican priest in Hereford along the Welsh border, now recognized as one of the great poets of the 17th century, left us this rhapsody to reveal to us the ground of our being:
“Suppose a river or a drop of water, an apple or a (grain of) sand, an ear of corn or an herb. God knoweth infinite excellencies in it more than we. He seeth how it relateth to angels and to men, how it proceedeth from the most perfect lover to the most perfectly beloved, how it representeth all his attributes, how it conduceth in its place, by the best of means to the best of ends. And for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the author and God the end is to be beloved for all their sakes. O what a treasure is every (grain of) sand when truly understood! Who can love anything that God made too much? His infinite goodness and wisdom and power and glory are in it. What a world would this be, were every thing beloved as it ought to be!”
In the beloving expressed in God’s covenant with Noah, God takes on the unconditional obligation, the ongoing indelible commitment to the entire web of life. Remembering this covenant is God’s responsibility, and God chooses the rainbow to remind not us but God of this divine responsibility. “The covenant will be as good as God is,” observes a commentator on Genesis. And as ecumenical, interfaith, and universal as God is: for this covenant with Noah is not just with any one community of people. It is with all people. Since the story starts in Israel’s court, it is for Israel to keep this ball in play; and it is for Christians, shaped by Judaism, to spread the word that we have a very green God who has made everlasting promises to non-humans as well as humans, and humans have a responsibility to follow the divine lead.
Buddhists do an admirable job inviting this responsibility through mindfulness training. This Wednesday will be a Day of Mindfulness at Williams, as the College’s Meditation Society and the Chaplains’ office sponsor public events that will include opportunities to walk a labyrinth at the Faculty House, to enjoy a catered vegetarian lunch that will teach mindful eating, to participate in a mindfulness through movement workshop in Upper Goodrich Dance Studio, and a guided meditation sitting at Thompson Chapel, culminating in an evening talk entitled “Heart of Mindfulness” by Rebecca Bradshaw, dharma teacher. We are all invited to any and all of these events. I’m looking forward to attending several.
And Anglicans worldwide are called, this Lent, to develop a mindful approach to the environment, shaped by the mind of Christ. We launch today the first of five gatherings following the ten o’clock service to hear scripture as we enjoy homemade soup and bread, then enter conversation, facilitated by a team of parishioners, John Ladd our leader today. There has been no sign-up for this experience: simply come downstairs after worship, where coffee will be ready and, closer to 11:30, the meal will start (and there’s plenty of food). Augmenting this Lenten series, we’re encouraging participation in this year’s ecumenical Lenten carbon fast, described in today’s leaflet, a practical way to make each Lenten day count.
Two thousand years have shown us what a theology based on the centrality and superiority of the human race can do to exile humanity from its God-given capacity to hug trees, treasure species, steward resources, and confirm the worth of dirt—and of the entire biosphere of which we all are part. Do you think it’s time to recognize that, in the covenant with Noah, God has entered covenant with the earth… and wants to teach us the heart-song?
(Thomas Traherne’s meditation appears in “Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality”, edited by Richard H. Schmidt, Eerdmans, 2002. The commentator on Genesis mentioned here is Terence E. Fretheim, in “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, volume 1.)
Last Sunday, we sang a wonderful spiritual with the refrain, “Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms.” I’m not sure if it was Monday or Tuesday before I stopped humming and hearing that heart-song.
Today’s portion of Genesis can be described as the foundation for that hymn. On the surface of things, the Bible presents this first covenant as the font from which later divine covenants flowed, including God’s promises to Abraham upon which Israel sees itself as chosen by God from among the nations to bless the nations. And, given how the Hebrew Bible has shaped the Christian faith, the case can be made that the new covenant of reconciliation in Jesus Christ has this first covenant with Noah as its cornerstone.
It’s no surprise that we 21st-century Christians may not be willing to stay on the surface of scripture, as we consider such a Bible text as this one. It is by now the standard approach to understand the Book of Genesis as a kind of archeological dig, recognizing layers of ancient stories organized and edited by later writers. While the stories speak of primordial times, they have been shaped and re-presented by writers who pressed a strategic purpose, much later than the primeval voice we’re hearing on the surface of the story.
Today’s portion of Genesis is thought by many commentators to show the signs of having been written—by which is meant the ancient stories, told over countless centuries, re-crafted by a skilled author—between 600 and 500 years before Christ, making this apparently oldest (because first) of the Hebrew scriptures actually younger than the famous books of the great prophets that we trace to some 700 years before Christ.
And what might the strategic purpose have been that midwifed the birth, the genesis, of such a story as this one about the covenant with Noah? What had happened between 600 and 500 years before Christ? The pivotal experience of the Babylonian Exile, a calamity for God’s chosen people when, in the year 587, the brightest and best of Israel’s citizens were deported to the homeland of their arch-enemy. For some 50 years, by the waters of Babylon Israel sat down and wept, until, starting in the year 538, following the miraculous edict of King Cyrus of Persia who freed Israel, those who had gone out, carrying the seed, returned again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.
Oh boy, I hear someone saying. We are expected to care about this? This is somehow relevant to us? Well, yes, it is. The writer’s strategic purpose is to assure the hearers that God has not withdrawn from the created order. As devastating as current events appear, God has not left us comfortless or alone. That message was urgently needed during the time of Israel’s exile, and was intensely celebrated upon Israel’s return. Hearing this story about the primeval commitment of God to Israel’s ancestors, her then-current exiles would have taken heart. And we, millennia later, can hear the heart-song encourage us in a time of our own (and our planet’s) urgent need. Increasingly, the human race is exiled from intimate loving regard for the earth and its myriad creatures. It will help us restore that healing relationship if we allow this covenant with Noah to show us that God is at work now, within the created order, to reconcile us to a stewardship, a cherishing, a respecting that is not so much a commitment we have to invent, but an apprenticeship we have to serve in faithful teamwork with God who is already committed, to us and to the earth.
It’s all there in the covenant with Noah. We know about covenants. We are united to Jesus Christ in the covenant of baptism, where God’s commitment to us is made crystal clear and, in turn, we embrace certain commitments to God and our fellow human beings. While our baptismal covenant makes no direct mention of protecting our environment, we certainly hear it in the Iona Community Creed where caring for the earth is raised to creedal status. I’d vote for making it more explicit in a revised baptismal covenant some day, to save our children and grandchildren from having to hunt for it. It’s there-- in the call to resist evil (renouncing the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God)-- and it’s there in striving for justice, peace, and dignity, which surely requires embracing a strongly green passion for safeguarding our environment.
I am grateful for all tree-hugging dirt-worshippers. I noticed that identity announced on a parishioner’s bumper sticker recently. Guess what? God—the God of the Bible—is one, too. God establishes this covenant not only with humankind, not only with every living creature, but with the earth itself. The rainbow in the clouds will remind God, God says, “of the covenant between me and the earth.”
Here is a wake-up call to return to basics. The everlasting arms we lean on are embracing not just human beings, but also the enormous range of non-human life forms, the biosphere itself, including the dirt. All of life, and all that supports life, is within the heart of God, is of strategic worth to God, is important to the mission and purpose of God in Jesus Christ, the incarnate God who has made the world of matter… matter.
Though Christian theology has yet to make enough of this emphasis, it has not been entirely missing. Thomas Traherne, Anglican priest in Hereford along the Welsh border, now recognized as one of the great poets of the 17th century, left us this rhapsody to reveal to us the ground of our being:
“Suppose a river or a drop of water, an apple or a (grain of) sand, an ear of corn or an herb. God knoweth infinite excellencies in it more than we. He seeth how it relateth to angels and to men, how it proceedeth from the most perfect lover to the most perfectly beloved, how it representeth all his attributes, how it conduceth in its place, by the best of means to the best of ends. And for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the author and God the end is to be beloved for all their sakes. O what a treasure is every (grain of) sand when truly understood! Who can love anything that God made too much? His infinite goodness and wisdom and power and glory are in it. What a world would this be, were every thing beloved as it ought to be!”
In the beloving expressed in God’s covenant with Noah, God takes on the unconditional obligation, the ongoing indelible commitment to the entire web of life. Remembering this covenant is God’s responsibility, and God chooses the rainbow to remind not us but God of this divine responsibility. “The covenant will be as good as God is,” observes a commentator on Genesis. And as ecumenical, interfaith, and universal as God is: for this covenant with Noah is not just with any one community of people. It is with all people. Since the story starts in Israel’s court, it is for Israel to keep this ball in play; and it is for Christians, shaped by Judaism, to spread the word that we have a very green God who has made everlasting promises to non-humans as well as humans, and humans have a responsibility to follow the divine lead.
Buddhists do an admirable job inviting this responsibility through mindfulness training. This Wednesday will be a Day of Mindfulness at Williams, as the College’s Meditation Society and the Chaplains’ office sponsor public events that will include opportunities to walk a labyrinth at the Faculty House, to enjoy a catered vegetarian lunch that will teach mindful eating, to participate in a mindfulness through movement workshop in Upper Goodrich Dance Studio, and a guided meditation sitting at Thompson Chapel, culminating in an evening talk entitled “Heart of Mindfulness” by Rebecca Bradshaw, dharma teacher. We are all invited to any and all of these events. I’m looking forward to attending several.
And Anglicans worldwide are called, this Lent, to develop a mindful approach to the environment, shaped by the mind of Christ. We launch today the first of five gatherings following the ten o’clock service to hear scripture as we enjoy homemade soup and bread, then enter conversation, facilitated by a team of parishioners, John Ladd our leader today. There has been no sign-up for this experience: simply come downstairs after worship, where coffee will be ready and, closer to 11:30, the meal will start (and there’s plenty of food). Augmenting this Lenten series, we’re encouraging participation in this year’s ecumenical Lenten carbon fast, described in today’s leaflet, a practical way to make each Lenten day count.
Two thousand years have shown us what a theology based on the centrality and superiority of the human race can do to exile humanity from its God-given capacity to hug trees, treasure species, steward resources, and confirm the worth of dirt—and of the entire biosphere of which we all are part. Do you think it’s time to recognize that, in the covenant with Noah, God has entered covenant with the earth… and wants to teach us the heart-song?
(Thomas Traherne’s meditation appears in “Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality”, edited by Richard H. Schmidt, Eerdmans, 2002. The commentator on Genesis mentioned here is Terence E. Fretheim, in “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, volume 1.)
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Transfiguring Lives: Black Episcopal Luminaries
Scripture for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany includes II Kings 2:1-12; II Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9
Black History Month invites us to pay attention to our own African-American heritage as a nation and as a church, to celebrate the strides that have been made towards achieving a more perfect racial union, and to acknowledge the distance we have yet to go.
While the cost of progress has been paid by countless brave, patient, and divinely impatient men, women, and children whose names and stories we may never know, many heroes stand tall, including some who played unique roles in the history of the Episcopal Church.
One is Absalom Jones, who was born a slave in Delaware in 1746. He taught himself to read out of the New Testament. When sixteen, he was sold to a store owner in Philadelphia, where he attended a night school for blacks, operated by Quakers. At twenty, he married another slave and used his savings to purchase her freedom, later purchasing his own.
He worshiped at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, serving as a lay minister to its black members. With his friend Richard Allen, Jones was such a good evangelist that black membership grew so large that the alarmed vestry decided to segregate their black members into an upstairs gallery, a shameful step they took without warning. As ushers attempted to move them, the black members rightly and righteously walked out in a body.
Within a few years, African-American Christians in Philadelphia built the African Church where no one would be made to sit in the balcony, dedicating that church in 1794. They applied for membership in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, and were admitted as St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, later that year. Diocesan Bishop William White ordained Absalom Jones as deacon in 1795 and as priest in 1802, the first black priest in our church.
Eleven years after Jones’s death, James Theodore Augustus Holly was born a free African American in Washington, D.C. Raised a Roman Catholic, he later became an Episcopalian and was ordained a deacon in Detroit in 1855, and a priest in Connecticut, the following year. Appointed Rector of St. Luke’s in New Haven, he founded the Protestant Episcopal Society for Promoting the Extension of the Church among Colored People, and became a friend of Frederick Douglass. The two men would work together closely.
In 1861, Holly left New Haven to lead a group of African Americans settling in Haiti. Within the first year there, his wife, his mother, and two of his children died; but Holly stayed on, with two small sons, no less able (it was said of him) to speak of God’s love to anyone who needed to hear it.
In1874, James Holly was consecrated the first Bishop of Haiti, the first black man to be raised to the office of bishop in the Episcopal Church. Four years later, he attended the Lambeth Conference, an international gathering of all bishops in the Anglican Communion, the first black man to do so, and preached at Westminster Abbey on the Feast of St. James, his namesake.
Serving the people of Haiti until his death in 1911, Holly doubled the size of his diocese and established medical clinics in areas that had never had them. For the last fourteen years of his life he also had charge of the Diocese of the Dominican Republic. Holly is credited with laying a firm foundation for what is now the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church, Haiti, with its 84,000 members, a numerical strength no stateside diocese comes anywhere near matching.
Absalom Jones and James Holly give us two key stories to tell, from the 18th and 19th centuries, stories deemed so important in our church’s history that these men are considered saints, each given a day in the year when the church remembers them—February 13th for Jones, March 13th for Holly.
I want to tell you the stories of three more African American leaders in our church, from the 20th century, stories too recent to land them in our book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, but perhaps in time they’ll be there, with Jones and Holly.
Have you heard the name Verna Dozier? Like over 99% of the church’s members, she was a lay person. Her entire life was spent in Washington, D.C. From her agnostic father she inherited a questioning mind, and from her Baptist mother a deep faith. In time, she stopped attending the Baptist church with her mother and went with her father to hear the theologians speak at the chapel services at Howard University. She would say that, still later, "When I discovered the Episcopal Church, it was as if I had been waiting for that all my life."
For 32 years Verna taught English to junior and senior high students in public schools. On retirement, she began to lead Bible study groups for her parish. When parishioners congratulated her for beginning her ministry, she insisted that she was continuing her ministry of educating people for life. Countering the impression that a lay person’s ministry must be churchy, Dozier insisted that ministry is for all the baptized, and that most of it happens in the world. To her mind, “what happens on Monday is more important than what happens on Sunday, and if what happens on Sunday has no impact on Monday, then Sunday’s activities are a waste of time.”
The several books that Verna Dozier wrote in the 1980’s equipped the church for lay-led Bible study. We take that for granted now, but one of Dozier’s great accomplishments was to encourage the church’s people to gather in groups to lay their hands and their minds on the Bible, and not to treat it idolatrously, absolutizing selective biblical perspectives as if they were eternally binding laws, but to approach the text with three questions.
First, what does the passage say, what do its words mean, what are the key concepts? Second, why did the early Christian community preserve this passage? What issues were they dealing with, and how did these words help them make sense of their lives? Third, what does the passage mean to you and to the church today? Verna taught the church a method of Bible study that literally brought the good book home to people.
Here are samples of her own words. “We wax dewy-eyed over love in the New Testament, but we ignore justice in the Old so we don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about love. Love is justice in action.”
“The important question to ask is not, ‘What do you believe?’, but ‘What difference does it make that you believe?’”
“The church missed its high calling to be the new thing in the world when it decided to worship Jesus instead of following him… Worship is setting Jesus on a pedestal, distancing him, enshrining (enshrouding) him in liturgies, stained glass windows, biblical translations, medallions, pilgrimages to places where he walked—the whole nine yards. Following him is doing what he did, weeping over a situation that was so far removed from the dream of God and spending his life to make it different. Following is discipleship.”
Horace Clarence Boyer grew up in a family that took discipleship seriously. That was in Winter Park, Florida, in the 1930’s and 40’s. His family’s church was in the Holiness/Pentecostal tradition, and Gospel music was always in the air. Horace and his brother, James, formed the Gospel-singing Boyer Brothers and toured the nation, making recordings for national labels.
After serving in the Army in the late 50’s, Horace earned his master’s and doctorate from the Eastman School of Music and began teaching at colleges in the south before joining the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Massachusetts in 1973. Before he retired in 1999, Boyer directed the Voice of New Africa House Workshop Choir, a fifty-voice choir drawn from the five colleges. As a solo vocalist, he toured internationally, and as a lecturer he visited many campuses, including a stint as the Cesar Chavez-Rosa Parks-Martin Luther King Professor at the University of Michigan. From 1985 to 1987, he was named Curator of Musical Instruments at the Smithsonian Institution, distinguished scholar-at-large of the United Negro College Fund, and director of the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers.
In the last decade of his life, Horace visited us here several times, performing with and without his brother James in Gospel concerts under the auspices of the Williams Jazz Festival, and on occasional blissful Sundays leading us in worship. It was returning home from his last visit here that he and his wife Gloria hit a patch of ice up in Windsor and the serious injuries Horace sustained that night sadly silenced his rich singing voice.
Internationally recognized historian of Gospel music, Boyer injected this vibrant musical tradition into the Episcopal Church, helping thaw God’s frozen people and showing us that in addition to sitting, kneeling, and standing, Episcopalians can sway and clap and dance to the glory of God.
I will never forget the Sunday several of us took the Boyers to lunch. Water Street Grill was full of people that day, and we must have been ten or twelve at tables right in the middle. Horace decided to show us how black choirs traditionally process. Up he got, swinging his arms from side to side in rhythm to a tune he hummed, and out he went around those tables in a sort of dance step that must have made choir fun.
One of us (I think I’ll claim the credit) asked him how he found his way to the Episcopal Church. “It was Johann Sebastian Bach,” he answered. Walking to lawn mowing jobs as a boy, Horace would pass an Episcopal Church in Winter Park, doors open as the organist practiced, and out into this young boy’s soul flowed Bach. This was the 1940’s, and Horace would not have been welcome to enter that (or any other white) church, but he would walk real slowly by to catch music he had never heard before. On his own in the Army, not many years later, he took instruction in the Episcopal Church, the Christian tradition that gave him Bach and to which he gave back Gospel.
Barbara C. Harris was a cradle Episcopalian born in Philadelphia in 1930. By the 1960’s, she was chief public relations executive at the Sun Oil Company, and a devoted member of the Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia, the center of the black protest movement in that city, drawing Barbara into voter registration campaigns and the Selma march with Martin Luther King, Jr. The Advocate was also where the famous “Philadelphia 11” were ordained, our church’s first female priests, in a decidedly renegade defiance of a decision to ban women’s ordination until a wider consensus could be won. They won it, and Barbara was the crucifer at that service. By 1980, she was a priest herself.
Parish rector, prison chaplain, industrial consultant on public policy issues, respected voice of progressive Christianity, Harris became the first woman to be made a bishop in the Episcopal Church in 1988, when the Diocese of Massachusetts elected her Bishop Suffragan. Even though the Lambeth Conference had, earlier that year, resolved that the ordination of women as bishops was the prerogative of each national province of the Anglican Communion, Barbara’s consecration sent some conservative priests out of communion with the church, and those voices were heard in protest at most ordinations of women, as was witnessed here when Susan Crampton was made a priest in the 1980’s.
You’ll see from Barbara Harris’s photo that she has a commanding presence. Typical of the stories told about her was the evening she arrived to serve at a Boston meals program, straight from a state event, wearing her full length mink coat and flashing bright red fingernails. The guests that night loved being served by not just a bishop, but a hot bishop.
From all these heroic figures in our church’s past, we have inherited something of their spirit. God has shone in their hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ whom they proclaimed. And his is the transfiguring light that shines through their stories.
(Absalom Jones’s and James Holly’s biographical sketches in "Lesser Feasts and Fasts", Church Publishing, 2006, were used in preparing this sermon. Verna Dozier’s biographical sketch in "Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality", edited by Richard H. Schmidt and published by Eerdmans, 2002, was also used.)
Black History Month invites us to pay attention to our own African-American heritage as a nation and as a church, to celebrate the strides that have been made towards achieving a more perfect racial union, and to acknowledge the distance we have yet to go.
While the cost of progress has been paid by countless brave, patient, and divinely impatient men, women, and children whose names and stories we may never know, many heroes stand tall, including some who played unique roles in the history of the Episcopal Church.
One is Absalom Jones, who was born a slave in Delaware in 1746. He taught himself to read out of the New Testament. When sixteen, he was sold to a store owner in Philadelphia, where he attended a night school for blacks, operated by Quakers. At twenty, he married another slave and used his savings to purchase her freedom, later purchasing his own.
He worshiped at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church, serving as a lay minister to its black members. With his friend Richard Allen, Jones was such a good evangelist that black membership grew so large that the alarmed vestry decided to segregate their black members into an upstairs gallery, a shameful step they took without warning. As ushers attempted to move them, the black members rightly and righteously walked out in a body.
Within a few years, African-American Christians in Philadelphia built the African Church where no one would be made to sit in the balcony, dedicating that church in 1794. They applied for membership in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania, and were admitted as St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, later that year. Diocesan Bishop William White ordained Absalom Jones as deacon in 1795 and as priest in 1802, the first black priest in our church.
Eleven years after Jones’s death, James Theodore Augustus Holly was born a free African American in Washington, D.C. Raised a Roman Catholic, he later became an Episcopalian and was ordained a deacon in Detroit in 1855, and a priest in Connecticut, the following year. Appointed Rector of St. Luke’s in New Haven, he founded the Protestant Episcopal Society for Promoting the Extension of the Church among Colored People, and became a friend of Frederick Douglass. The two men would work together closely.
In 1861, Holly left New Haven to lead a group of African Americans settling in Haiti. Within the first year there, his wife, his mother, and two of his children died; but Holly stayed on, with two small sons, no less able (it was said of him) to speak of God’s love to anyone who needed to hear it.
In1874, James Holly was consecrated the first Bishop of Haiti, the first black man to be raised to the office of bishop in the Episcopal Church. Four years later, he attended the Lambeth Conference, an international gathering of all bishops in the Anglican Communion, the first black man to do so, and preached at Westminster Abbey on the Feast of St. James, his namesake.
Serving the people of Haiti until his death in 1911, Holly doubled the size of his diocese and established medical clinics in areas that had never had them. For the last fourteen years of his life he also had charge of the Diocese of the Dominican Republic. Holly is credited with laying a firm foundation for what is now the largest diocese in the Episcopal Church, Haiti, with its 84,000 members, a numerical strength no stateside diocese comes anywhere near matching.
Absalom Jones and James Holly give us two key stories to tell, from the 18th and 19th centuries, stories deemed so important in our church’s history that these men are considered saints, each given a day in the year when the church remembers them—February 13th for Jones, March 13th for Holly.
I want to tell you the stories of three more African American leaders in our church, from the 20th century, stories too recent to land them in our book of Lesser Feasts and Fasts, but perhaps in time they’ll be there, with Jones and Holly.
Have you heard the name Verna Dozier? Like over 99% of the church’s members, she was a lay person. Her entire life was spent in Washington, D.C. From her agnostic father she inherited a questioning mind, and from her Baptist mother a deep faith. In time, she stopped attending the Baptist church with her mother and went with her father to hear the theologians speak at the chapel services at Howard University. She would say that, still later, "When I discovered the Episcopal Church, it was as if I had been waiting for that all my life."
For 32 years Verna taught English to junior and senior high students in public schools. On retirement, she began to lead Bible study groups for her parish. When parishioners congratulated her for beginning her ministry, she insisted that she was continuing her ministry of educating people for life. Countering the impression that a lay person’s ministry must be churchy, Dozier insisted that ministry is for all the baptized, and that most of it happens in the world. To her mind, “what happens on Monday is more important than what happens on Sunday, and if what happens on Sunday has no impact on Monday, then Sunday’s activities are a waste of time.”
The several books that Verna Dozier wrote in the 1980’s equipped the church for lay-led Bible study. We take that for granted now, but one of Dozier’s great accomplishments was to encourage the church’s people to gather in groups to lay their hands and their minds on the Bible, and not to treat it idolatrously, absolutizing selective biblical perspectives as if they were eternally binding laws, but to approach the text with three questions.
First, what does the passage say, what do its words mean, what are the key concepts? Second, why did the early Christian community preserve this passage? What issues were they dealing with, and how did these words help them make sense of their lives? Third, what does the passage mean to you and to the church today? Verna taught the church a method of Bible study that literally brought the good book home to people.
Here are samples of her own words. “We wax dewy-eyed over love in the New Testament, but we ignore justice in the Old so we don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about love. Love is justice in action.”
“The important question to ask is not, ‘What do you believe?’, but ‘What difference does it make that you believe?’”
“The church missed its high calling to be the new thing in the world when it decided to worship Jesus instead of following him… Worship is setting Jesus on a pedestal, distancing him, enshrining (enshrouding) him in liturgies, stained glass windows, biblical translations, medallions, pilgrimages to places where he walked—the whole nine yards. Following him is doing what he did, weeping over a situation that was so far removed from the dream of God and spending his life to make it different. Following is discipleship.”
Horace Clarence Boyer grew up in a family that took discipleship seriously. That was in Winter Park, Florida, in the 1930’s and 40’s. His family’s church was in the Holiness/Pentecostal tradition, and Gospel music was always in the air. Horace and his brother, James, formed the Gospel-singing Boyer Brothers and toured the nation, making recordings for national labels.
After serving in the Army in the late 50’s, Horace earned his master’s and doctorate from the Eastman School of Music and began teaching at colleges in the south before joining the Department of Music and Dance at the University of Massachusetts in 1973. Before he retired in 1999, Boyer directed the Voice of New Africa House Workshop Choir, a fifty-voice choir drawn from the five colleges. As a solo vocalist, he toured internationally, and as a lecturer he visited many campuses, including a stint as the Cesar Chavez-Rosa Parks-Martin Luther King Professor at the University of Michigan. From 1985 to 1987, he was named Curator of Musical Instruments at the Smithsonian Institution, distinguished scholar-at-large of the United Negro College Fund, and director of the famed Fisk Jubilee Singers.
In the last decade of his life, Horace visited us here several times, performing with and without his brother James in Gospel concerts under the auspices of the Williams Jazz Festival, and on occasional blissful Sundays leading us in worship. It was returning home from his last visit here that he and his wife Gloria hit a patch of ice up in Windsor and the serious injuries Horace sustained that night sadly silenced his rich singing voice.
Internationally recognized historian of Gospel music, Boyer injected this vibrant musical tradition into the Episcopal Church, helping thaw God’s frozen people and showing us that in addition to sitting, kneeling, and standing, Episcopalians can sway and clap and dance to the glory of God.
I will never forget the Sunday several of us took the Boyers to lunch. Water Street Grill was full of people that day, and we must have been ten or twelve at tables right in the middle. Horace decided to show us how black choirs traditionally process. Up he got, swinging his arms from side to side in rhythm to a tune he hummed, and out he went around those tables in a sort of dance step that must have made choir fun.
One of us (I think I’ll claim the credit) asked him how he found his way to the Episcopal Church. “It was Johann Sebastian Bach,” he answered. Walking to lawn mowing jobs as a boy, Horace would pass an Episcopal Church in Winter Park, doors open as the organist practiced, and out into this young boy’s soul flowed Bach. This was the 1940’s, and Horace would not have been welcome to enter that (or any other white) church, but he would walk real slowly by to catch music he had never heard before. On his own in the Army, not many years later, he took instruction in the Episcopal Church, the Christian tradition that gave him Bach and to which he gave back Gospel.
Barbara C. Harris was a cradle Episcopalian born in Philadelphia in 1930. By the 1960’s, she was chief public relations executive at the Sun Oil Company, and a devoted member of the Church of the Advocate, Philadelphia, the center of the black protest movement in that city, drawing Barbara into voter registration campaigns and the Selma march with Martin Luther King, Jr. The Advocate was also where the famous “Philadelphia 11” were ordained, our church’s first female priests, in a decidedly renegade defiance of a decision to ban women’s ordination until a wider consensus could be won. They won it, and Barbara was the crucifer at that service. By 1980, she was a priest herself.
Parish rector, prison chaplain, industrial consultant on public policy issues, respected voice of progressive Christianity, Harris became the first woman to be made a bishop in the Episcopal Church in 1988, when the Diocese of Massachusetts elected her Bishop Suffragan. Even though the Lambeth Conference had, earlier that year, resolved that the ordination of women as bishops was the prerogative of each national province of the Anglican Communion, Barbara’s consecration sent some conservative priests out of communion with the church, and those voices were heard in protest at most ordinations of women, as was witnessed here when Susan Crampton was made a priest in the 1980’s.
You’ll see from Barbara Harris’s photo that she has a commanding presence. Typical of the stories told about her was the evening she arrived to serve at a Boston meals program, straight from a state event, wearing her full length mink coat and flashing bright red fingernails. The guests that night loved being served by not just a bishop, but a hot bishop.
From all these heroic figures in our church’s past, we have inherited something of their spirit. God has shone in their hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ whom they proclaimed. And his is the transfiguring light that shines through their stories.
(Absalom Jones’s and James Holly’s biographical sketches in "Lesser Feasts and Fasts", Church Publishing, 2006, were used in preparing this sermon. Verna Dozier’s biographical sketch in "Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality", edited by Richard H. Schmidt and published by Eerdmans, 2002, was also used.)
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
He Didn't Even Ask
Scripture for the 6th Sunday after the Epiphany includes II Kings 5:1-14; I Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45
Every November for the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, I’ve gone to my primary care physician for a physical. And like clockwork, he would ask me what I was doing for exercise. This moment wouldn’t be quite as awkward as the prostate exam, but close, because I would usually have little to report.
And it wasn’t as if he kept raising the bar higher, from year to year. “Even walking briskly for a half hour a day would make a difference,” was pretty much what he would urge.
Well, this past November, he didn’t ask. He didn’t even ask. At the moment, I welcomed what I took to be his oversight, relieved that I could skip that moment of shame. But as time went by, I would occasionally return to that puzzling moment when…he didn’t even ask.
At some point, this registered as an uh-oh moment. That’s something like an Aha moment. Awareness is breaking through. But while an Aha moment often stirs surprise and excitement, an uh-oh moment can seem somehow ominous.
So I resolved to start walking as many times a week as I can manage. This resolve happened to coincide with the new year, but it wasn’t a typical new year’s resolution. This one had, well, the added impetus of one simple fact: he hadn’t even asked. If my own doctor had given up, it was time for me to act.
It’s not much, lacing up at the Field House and walking a brisk couple of miles on the most forgiving walking surface I’ve ever felt. Not much, compared to the athletes who are working out, practicing, and competing in the great open center of the Field House as I hoof along around the perimeter, and around, and around. Not much, compared to what some people do by way of regular work-outs, like my wife, who alternates between a morning routine of kickboxing and an evening routine of spinning.
Yes, not even that had motivated me to get out there and do something. Not until… he didn’t even ask.
Now, I tell you this story in part to report that I have a whole six weeks of experience to go on, as I relate to St. Paul’s metaphor of gymnasium events requiring self-discipline. I’m hardly punishing or enslaving my body, those four days a week that I walk (I will even confess that I have lost my scruples and drive down to Spring Street, thereby losing for all time my license to criticize Williams students who do the same) but I do get a small sense of Paul’s extreme language at around the 17th lap, definitely the 18th, especially as I push my pace. The thing is, with the exception of finishing up before the public walking period is over, there’s no race—and every time, I win a sensation of well-being that has me pretty well hooked.
In our first lesson, we met a man who was surprised by how easy his course of treatment would be. Who knows how long Naaman the Syrian army commander had suffered not just the physical symptoms of leprosy, but the social consequences of it too. It’s an isolating disease. Society shuns the leper. Maybe it was somewhat different for a hardened mighty warrior: perhaps just his presence already intimidated people and caused them to keep a healthy distance. Still, this was a man at the pinnacle of power, in high favor with his king, lacking nothing… except his health, which we know is nearly everything.
Notice who it is in his story who possesses the knowledge he needs: a young slave girl whom the Syrians had captured in a raid on their enemies in the land of Israel. He’s at the top of the power system, she’s at the bottom. He’s at the center, she’s at the far edge. But in this story of illness and healing, everything is turned on its head: Naaman is kept at a distance by everyone, and this little girl who is treated like property holds the saving knowledge that will bless her master with healing.
“I know someone in Israel who can make him whole,” she reports to her mistress, Mrs. Naaman, telling her about the prophet Elisha. There follows a comic horse opera, as the King of Syria sends a mule team of costly gifts to persuade the King of Israel to arrange for Naaman’s healing. That request terrifies Israel’s king, who is positive his enemy is going to declare war the moment he hears that the health care system in Israel is no better than the one in Syria.
“Not so!,” declares Elisha, the man of God who claims he knows just what to do for Naaman. “Send him to me.”
It’s then that Naaman has an uh-oh moment. Having heard of Elisha, the great commander of the Syrian army expected this powerful prophet of Israel’s God to do something dramatic, like make an impressive appearance, loudly invoke God’s intervention, and wave his hand over Naaman’s diseased body. But no. Elisha did none of those things. He didn’t show any such interest, didn’t have an engaging bedside manner, didn’t require Naaman to do this and that and the other… He just told him to go and wash in the Jordan River seven times.
“We have perfectly fine rivers in Syria,” grumbled Naaman. “I could have stayed home and washed in them,” he sputtered.
And we are again at a moment in his story when this high and mighty man is rescued by his servants. “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, like spend all your money, or give up your career, or never go home again, wouldn’t you have done it for the sake of your health? Instead, you’re being asked to let go, to let go of your need for dramatic victories and just bathe yourself in the present moment… seven times, in the Jordan River that’s right nearby. Once each day of the week, immerse yourself in new life, emerge on the seventh day in Sabbath rest and wholeness of life. Just do it, for heaven’s sake!”
Another leper visits us today, in the Gospel. And he, too, must have been surprised at how little was asked of him.
In the Middle East of the first century, society had elaborate and rigid rules for the shunning of lepers. For starters, you never touched one (from fear of contagion, but it went beyond that), making what Jesus does so compelling: the very first response he makes, before he says a word, is to break the taboo, stretch out his hand, and touch this man who has come to him for healing.
“If you choose, you can make me clean.” It has already happened through that touch, restoring him to full human community, but Jesus the Word of God uses words to seal this renewal of life: “I do choose. Be made clean!”
Jesus doesn’t ask anything of him before this stunning change of life. He doesn’t ask him anything, except to be still and say nothing to anyone; then Jesus directs him, “Show yourself to the priest and there in the temple offer what custom requires for a leper to be certified as healed and restored to the community.” I can’t help wondering if the priest had ever seen the healing of a leper. Wouldn’t he be speechless at this display of dramatic healing?
But it doesn’t go quite the way Jesus intended. The man, hungry for human contact, tells everyone he meets what God has done for him; and what resulted was a swelling of the crowd seeking that revolutionary touch of Jesus.
He didn’t ask the fellow to spread the word. He just didn’t ask. I once heard a preacher ask if this wasn’t reverse psychology: Have we had it wrong, all these years? Instead of urging our members to tell their friends what God is doing in their lives, should we insist that they say nothing to anyone?
This approach seems to have worked for my doctor and me.
Reverse psychology or not, notice the reversals that God does provide. While the leper moves from isolation into community, Jesus moves from the town out to the far country, to avoid the distraction of those fresh crowds intent on finding a wonder-worker whose gracious power they would not understand, because he comes among us as one who serves. Like the servant girl who has saving knowledge, and the man-servants who speak the truth, Jesus changes people with few words and simple humble touch.
What speaks to me from these stories is how each presents a man who needed a new lease on life, but was stuck and had to be helped to reach for it. In both cases, it is God who acts to help them, from right within their world. For Naaman, this divine leverage comes by the simple faith-sharing of a Jewish slave girl. For the Gospel’s leper, it is a poor itinerant preacher whose passing through the neighborhood brought the man face to face with something he may have never met before, pure unconditional compassion.
While it seems that little was asked of either man, one thing was: that each step out of the familiar predictable daily rut and into the new, the unfamiliar, the unpredictable. Type-A Naaman, dependent on adrenalin, the rush of combat, the use of force and intimidation, had to submit, to let himself go across the border into his enemy’s homeland where, to his surprise, he was assigned to (more or les) a week of spa treatment. But he had to choose to walk this new path.
For the Gospel’s leper, it was probably a leper colony that he was used to. Who can say what that was like, but we can assume it offered safety anad a sheltering rhythm of daily life, and this man depended on it. Now, nothing could prevent him from enjoying a much fuller life—but he had to choose to let go of the old life, and can we imagine the changes he had to embrace?
Each man had to be willing to take a new step, then another, and another—on into new life. Such will is what is required of us, whatever new lease on life we need to reach for. Without that will, how can we recognize the leveraging grace of God when it moves to get us unstuck and opens to us that new life?
There and then is the prize to be won.
Lent begins, a week from Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. Welcome a season of spring training to recognize the actions of God.
Every November for the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, I’ve gone to my primary care physician for a physical. And like clockwork, he would ask me what I was doing for exercise. This moment wouldn’t be quite as awkward as the prostate exam, but close, because I would usually have little to report.
And it wasn’t as if he kept raising the bar higher, from year to year. “Even walking briskly for a half hour a day would make a difference,” was pretty much what he would urge.
Well, this past November, he didn’t ask. He didn’t even ask. At the moment, I welcomed what I took to be his oversight, relieved that I could skip that moment of shame. But as time went by, I would occasionally return to that puzzling moment when…he didn’t even ask.
At some point, this registered as an uh-oh moment. That’s something like an Aha moment. Awareness is breaking through. But while an Aha moment often stirs surprise and excitement, an uh-oh moment can seem somehow ominous.
So I resolved to start walking as many times a week as I can manage. This resolve happened to coincide with the new year, but it wasn’t a typical new year’s resolution. This one had, well, the added impetus of one simple fact: he hadn’t even asked. If my own doctor had given up, it was time for me to act.
It’s not much, lacing up at the Field House and walking a brisk couple of miles on the most forgiving walking surface I’ve ever felt. Not much, compared to the athletes who are working out, practicing, and competing in the great open center of the Field House as I hoof along around the perimeter, and around, and around. Not much, compared to what some people do by way of regular work-outs, like my wife, who alternates between a morning routine of kickboxing and an evening routine of spinning.
Yes, not even that had motivated me to get out there and do something. Not until… he didn’t even ask.
Now, I tell you this story in part to report that I have a whole six weeks of experience to go on, as I relate to St. Paul’s metaphor of gymnasium events requiring self-discipline. I’m hardly punishing or enslaving my body, those four days a week that I walk (I will even confess that I have lost my scruples and drive down to Spring Street, thereby losing for all time my license to criticize Williams students who do the same) but I do get a small sense of Paul’s extreme language at around the 17th lap, definitely the 18th, especially as I push my pace. The thing is, with the exception of finishing up before the public walking period is over, there’s no race—and every time, I win a sensation of well-being that has me pretty well hooked.
In our first lesson, we met a man who was surprised by how easy his course of treatment would be. Who knows how long Naaman the Syrian army commander had suffered not just the physical symptoms of leprosy, but the social consequences of it too. It’s an isolating disease. Society shuns the leper. Maybe it was somewhat different for a hardened mighty warrior: perhaps just his presence already intimidated people and caused them to keep a healthy distance. Still, this was a man at the pinnacle of power, in high favor with his king, lacking nothing… except his health, which we know is nearly everything.
Notice who it is in his story who possesses the knowledge he needs: a young slave girl whom the Syrians had captured in a raid on their enemies in the land of Israel. He’s at the top of the power system, she’s at the bottom. He’s at the center, she’s at the far edge. But in this story of illness and healing, everything is turned on its head: Naaman is kept at a distance by everyone, and this little girl who is treated like property holds the saving knowledge that will bless her master with healing.
“I know someone in Israel who can make him whole,” she reports to her mistress, Mrs. Naaman, telling her about the prophet Elisha. There follows a comic horse opera, as the King of Syria sends a mule team of costly gifts to persuade the King of Israel to arrange for Naaman’s healing. That request terrifies Israel’s king, who is positive his enemy is going to declare war the moment he hears that the health care system in Israel is no better than the one in Syria.
“Not so!,” declares Elisha, the man of God who claims he knows just what to do for Naaman. “Send him to me.”
It’s then that Naaman has an uh-oh moment. Having heard of Elisha, the great commander of the Syrian army expected this powerful prophet of Israel’s God to do something dramatic, like make an impressive appearance, loudly invoke God’s intervention, and wave his hand over Naaman’s diseased body. But no. Elisha did none of those things. He didn’t show any such interest, didn’t have an engaging bedside manner, didn’t require Naaman to do this and that and the other… He just told him to go and wash in the Jordan River seven times.
“We have perfectly fine rivers in Syria,” grumbled Naaman. “I could have stayed home and washed in them,” he sputtered.
And we are again at a moment in his story when this high and mighty man is rescued by his servants. “Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, like spend all your money, or give up your career, or never go home again, wouldn’t you have done it for the sake of your health? Instead, you’re being asked to let go, to let go of your need for dramatic victories and just bathe yourself in the present moment… seven times, in the Jordan River that’s right nearby. Once each day of the week, immerse yourself in new life, emerge on the seventh day in Sabbath rest and wholeness of life. Just do it, for heaven’s sake!”
Another leper visits us today, in the Gospel. And he, too, must have been surprised at how little was asked of him.
In the Middle East of the first century, society had elaborate and rigid rules for the shunning of lepers. For starters, you never touched one (from fear of contagion, but it went beyond that), making what Jesus does so compelling: the very first response he makes, before he says a word, is to break the taboo, stretch out his hand, and touch this man who has come to him for healing.
“If you choose, you can make me clean.” It has already happened through that touch, restoring him to full human community, but Jesus the Word of God uses words to seal this renewal of life: “I do choose. Be made clean!”
Jesus doesn’t ask anything of him before this stunning change of life. He doesn’t ask him anything, except to be still and say nothing to anyone; then Jesus directs him, “Show yourself to the priest and there in the temple offer what custom requires for a leper to be certified as healed and restored to the community.” I can’t help wondering if the priest had ever seen the healing of a leper. Wouldn’t he be speechless at this display of dramatic healing?
But it doesn’t go quite the way Jesus intended. The man, hungry for human contact, tells everyone he meets what God has done for him; and what resulted was a swelling of the crowd seeking that revolutionary touch of Jesus.
He didn’t ask the fellow to spread the word. He just didn’t ask. I once heard a preacher ask if this wasn’t reverse psychology: Have we had it wrong, all these years? Instead of urging our members to tell their friends what God is doing in their lives, should we insist that they say nothing to anyone?
This approach seems to have worked for my doctor and me.
Reverse psychology or not, notice the reversals that God does provide. While the leper moves from isolation into community, Jesus moves from the town out to the far country, to avoid the distraction of those fresh crowds intent on finding a wonder-worker whose gracious power they would not understand, because he comes among us as one who serves. Like the servant girl who has saving knowledge, and the man-servants who speak the truth, Jesus changes people with few words and simple humble touch.
What speaks to me from these stories is how each presents a man who needed a new lease on life, but was stuck and had to be helped to reach for it. In both cases, it is God who acts to help them, from right within their world. For Naaman, this divine leverage comes by the simple faith-sharing of a Jewish slave girl. For the Gospel’s leper, it is a poor itinerant preacher whose passing through the neighborhood brought the man face to face with something he may have never met before, pure unconditional compassion.
While it seems that little was asked of either man, one thing was: that each step out of the familiar predictable daily rut and into the new, the unfamiliar, the unpredictable. Type-A Naaman, dependent on adrenalin, the rush of combat, the use of force and intimidation, had to submit, to let himself go across the border into his enemy’s homeland where, to his surprise, he was assigned to (more or les) a week of spa treatment. But he had to choose to walk this new path.
For the Gospel’s leper, it was probably a leper colony that he was used to. Who can say what that was like, but we can assume it offered safety anad a sheltering rhythm of daily life, and this man depended on it. Now, nothing could prevent him from enjoying a much fuller life—but he had to choose to let go of the old life, and can we imagine the changes he had to embrace?
Each man had to be willing to take a new step, then another, and another—on into new life. Such will is what is required of us, whatever new lease on life we need to reach for. Without that will, how can we recognize the leveraging grace of God when it moves to get us unstuck and opens to us that new life?
There and then is the prize to be won.
Lent begins, a week from Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. Welcome a season of spring training to recognize the actions of God.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
What's a Parish For?
Scripture appointed for the 5th Sunday after the Epiphany includes Isaiah 40:21-31; I Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39
On this Sunday when, for the 118th time, the people of St. John’s gather in Annual Meeting, let’s consider how our scripture readings help us answer a question that fits this day: What is this parish for? As we enter our 119th year, what are our purposes?
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth… (who) does not faint or grow weary; (whose) understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless… Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Isaiah’s rhapsody gives us our first answer. A congregation may be useful to God in channeling to people the spiritual power they need to renew their strength for running the race and walking the walk.
In elegant language, Isaiah sings of God transcendent “above the circle of the earth”, “at the still point of the turning world,” wrote T. S. Eliot, though the astronomers expand our vision: at the still point of the myriad receding galaxies, God is the center, the breath, the energy, the unsearchable understanding, the dynamism that calls and numbers all created forms, from the stars of heaven to the creatures of earth. God is over and above all, yet God is intimately close enough to give power to the faint and renewal to the weary.
A congregation, teaching people how to wait for the LORD, channels renewal as it flows from the still point of being to the being, to the creature needing renewal.
The hymn sung by the psalmist gives us a second answer to the question what a church is for. “The LORD… gathers the exiles… heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds.”
I imagine that in all cultures alienation is experienced, individuals losing their sense of belonging, the fabric of society not holding. As if symbolically addressing alienation, many cultures have dances that start with one person setting the pace, joined by another and then by another, clasped hand in hand, or arm around the waist, as an undulating chain of procession navigates the room, gathering-in everyone in the dance. “Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance,” wrote Eliot. A congregation must learn to dance out into the world with moves that draw people to step out of isolation into community, out of anxiety into trust, out of scarcity into abundance.
St. Paul, always ready with an answer, gives us our third today. He says that he is (and he means that we are) “entrusted with a commission” to proclaim the Gospel, the uniquely good news that opens us to our sharing in the blessings of the servant ministry of Jesus Christ. “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win
(many); I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”
A church congregates a ragtag army of people whose strong suits and weak links, whose questions and whose answers, whose day jobs and volunteer time, whose extroverted energy and whose introverted intuition all provide ways into the world to deliver the good news of God’s commitment to us in Jesus Christ, and to invite personal commitment to God in Jesus Christ.
Our Gospel today confirms what we already know, that the delivery system for that good news is one to one, one by one, one person at a time. A congregation’s usefulness to an intimate God will be in direct proportion to how passionately its many leaders believe that absolutely every person is to be fully welcomed into complete participation in the life of the Body of Christ. I can’t say those words without needing to confess that I and we fall short of that standard set by Jesus, but we know it is the standard to which we are held.
At the heart of this standard is the conviction that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ. And so nothing that could separate people from this parish community, nothing that could prevent their being fully welcomed, should be allowed to. No litmus tests, no dress codes, no behavioral expectations other than loving God and loving my neighbor as myself. I can’t say those words without needing to admit that I and we fall short of the standards set by Jesus, but that does not change the fact that our life together as a church is for the practicing of these standards and for growth in openness to the grace that will get us there and keep us there in the light. “Not here, Not here the darkness, in this twittering world,” insists Eliot. No, here the light.
That each and every person is of incalculable worth and value to God is shown in how Jesus’s public ministry is fully directed to the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, who, immediately upon the lifting of her fever, rises to serve. The whole city watching, person after person, sick or troubled in mind, body, spirit, a nightlong procession one after another, from sundown until sunrise, appears before Jesus to be validated into new life, confirmed in freedom, restored to community.
In the thick of all that caregiving, it was surely a meal that Simon’s mother-in-law rose to serve. Always sustaining costly service is the meal offered at Jesus’s table, and the feeding we do upon the Word, and the lifting out of fever that sacred music brings. Eliot says,
“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.”
I don’t understand all that, nor do I understand sacrament; but it nourishes me, by its form and pattern carries me, reminds me who and whose I am, who and whose you are to my right and my left at that table of his, of ours. Ensuring that every person find her place or his at this table, this is another Gospel answer to what a church is for.
And what that meal equips us for lies outside these walls. Where all is always now is right where God is perpetually at work in the world, calling us to that same work, one by one, and all together.
(T. S. Eliot’s words are all from “Burnt Norton”, the first of his “Four Quartets”.)
On this Sunday when, for the 118th time, the people of St. John’s gather in Annual Meeting, let’s consider how our scripture readings help us answer a question that fits this day: What is this parish for? As we enter our 119th year, what are our purposes?
“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth… (who) does not faint or grow weary; (whose) understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless… Those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Isaiah’s rhapsody gives us our first answer. A congregation may be useful to God in channeling to people the spiritual power they need to renew their strength for running the race and walking the walk.
In elegant language, Isaiah sings of God transcendent “above the circle of the earth”, “at the still point of the turning world,” wrote T. S. Eliot, though the astronomers expand our vision: at the still point of the myriad receding galaxies, God is the center, the breath, the energy, the unsearchable understanding, the dynamism that calls and numbers all created forms, from the stars of heaven to the creatures of earth. God is over and above all, yet God is intimately close enough to give power to the faint and renewal to the weary.
A congregation, teaching people how to wait for the LORD, channels renewal as it flows from the still point of being to the being, to the creature needing renewal.
The hymn sung by the psalmist gives us a second answer to the question what a church is for. “The LORD… gathers the exiles… heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds.”
I imagine that in all cultures alienation is experienced, individuals losing their sense of belonging, the fabric of society not holding. As if symbolically addressing alienation, many cultures have dances that start with one person setting the pace, joined by another and then by another, clasped hand in hand, or arm around the waist, as an undulating chain of procession navigates the room, gathering-in everyone in the dance. “Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance,” wrote Eliot. A congregation must learn to dance out into the world with moves that draw people to step out of isolation into community, out of anxiety into trust, out of scarcity into abundance.
St. Paul, always ready with an answer, gives us our third today. He says that he is (and he means that we are) “entrusted with a commission” to proclaim the Gospel, the uniquely good news that opens us to our sharing in the blessings of the servant ministry of Jesus Christ. “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win
(many); I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.”
A church congregates a ragtag army of people whose strong suits and weak links, whose questions and whose answers, whose day jobs and volunteer time, whose extroverted energy and whose introverted intuition all provide ways into the world to deliver the good news of God’s commitment to us in Jesus Christ, and to invite personal commitment to God in Jesus Christ.
Our Gospel today confirms what we already know, that the delivery system for that good news is one to one, one by one, one person at a time. A congregation’s usefulness to an intimate God will be in direct proportion to how passionately its many leaders believe that absolutely every person is to be fully welcomed into complete participation in the life of the Body of Christ. I can’t say those words without needing to confess that I and we fall short of that standard set by Jesus, but we know it is the standard to which we are held.
At the heart of this standard is the conviction that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ. And so nothing that could separate people from this parish community, nothing that could prevent their being fully welcomed, should be allowed to. No litmus tests, no dress codes, no behavioral expectations other than loving God and loving my neighbor as myself. I can’t say those words without needing to admit that I and we fall short of the standards set by Jesus, but that does not change the fact that our life together as a church is for the practicing of these standards and for growth in openness to the grace that will get us there and keep us there in the light. “Not here, Not here the darkness, in this twittering world,” insists Eliot. No, here the light.
That each and every person is of incalculable worth and value to God is shown in how Jesus’s public ministry is fully directed to the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, who, immediately upon the lifting of her fever, rises to serve. The whole city watching, person after person, sick or troubled in mind, body, spirit, a nightlong procession one after another, from sundown until sunrise, appears before Jesus to be validated into new life, confirmed in freedom, restored to community.
In the thick of all that caregiving, it was surely a meal that Simon’s mother-in-law rose to serve. Always sustaining costly service is the meal offered at Jesus’s table, and the feeding we do upon the Word, and the lifting out of fever that sacred music brings. Eliot says,
“Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now.”
I don’t understand all that, nor do I understand sacrament; but it nourishes me, by its form and pattern carries me, reminds me who and whose I am, who and whose you are to my right and my left at that table of his, of ours. Ensuring that every person find her place or his at this table, this is another Gospel answer to what a church is for.
And what that meal equips us for lies outside these walls. Where all is always now is right where God is perpetually at work in the world, calling us to that same work, one by one, and all together.
(T. S. Eliot’s words are all from “Burnt Norton”, the first of his “Four Quartets”.)
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
What Do We Value?
Scripture for the 4th Sunday after the Epiphany includes Deuteronomy 18:15-20; I Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28
My first impression, reading these appointed lessons today, was to wish I’d invited someone else to preach. Slim pickins’, I thought to myself. But since God gets to hear those first impressions, it didn’t take me long to wonder if it might be arrogant (even offensive) to be slamming the book shut solely because I couldn’t feel a stirring of my imagination. I found myself wondering if God wasn’t holding me to a higher standard than my first reactions.
At work in both first and second lessons is the ancient belief that there are many gods, many lords. All three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—insist that there is one God, only one God. Our Abrahamic bunk-mates, both Jewish and Muslim, find fault with us in our doctrine of the Holy Trinity, asking if this doesn’t smack of polytheism. But we quickly remind them of the missing word: ours is the doctrine of the holy and undivided Trinity, and we pound the table as hard as they do in asserting there is one God who presents in more than one way, but one God, by God!
Our readings today show how hard-fought and hard-won was the rise of the new belief, monotheism—one God. The nations neighboring ancient Israel had their fertility gods and goddesses, their martial gods, their tribal gods, worshiped at many altars with the flow of much blood, some of it human. Worshiped also on the high places with cultic prostitution, and in temples with food offerings. There was a certain libidinal appeal to how these gods were worshiped—never a dull sermon—and thus it was that the worship of one God in ancient Israel faced chronic competition, a recurring theme throughout the Hebrew Bible. As we heard today, the vestiges of polytheism could bring out the worst in the followers of Israel’s one God, including threats to murder any prophets who spoke in the names of other gods. Gosh, what kind of religion is that?
Fast-forward many centuries to the first in the Common Era and find St. Paul counseling the church at Corinth on the knotty question whether Christians were allowed to eat meat that had been offered in sacrifice at a pagan temple. Some things just don’t change. The old-time religion of many gods had a long shelf-life.
Today, I suppose our assortment of idols, household gods, and lesser divinities could include fame, wealth, beauty, athletic prowess, popularity, tenure, retirement… And, in our national pantheon, what? Nuclear supremacy? Single-party control of the House, Senate, and White House? A balanced budget? Winning the race for outer space? They all have their worshipers. And what is worship—worth-ship—but the repeated actions we take in service to what we value most?
That could be a sermon for another time. Let’s return to Paul. His answer to the Corinthians’ question carries a message that would outlast anything we think we know about the idolatries of his time. Paul constructs a careful argument asserting that idols have no real existence beyond the way that carved wood or hammered metal occupies space on a shelf, so it ought to make no difference whether the food offered to please the idols gets sold at the back door of the temple and taken home by Christians… or not. More important, he insists, is what message is heard when new Christians, in whom a fresh new conscience is being formed, converts from those pagan temples, watch church leaders serve up that lamb stew at the potluck supper as if it doesn’t matter.
Mattering, in other words, can’t be determined by logic alone. Compassionate thoughtfulness trumps reason in how believers treat one another within the intimate community of the Body of Christ. “Getting it” matters more than getting. The knowledge we claim must be a knowing of people, a knowing of God, more than a knowing of principles. And if we forget that, and make decisions and choices that wound our newest, weakest, youngest members, then we sin against Christ. The church family is that intimate: What we do to one another we do to him.
What made the apostolic community known and respected in Paul’s time was the way their communal intimacy trained them to be that way in the world. They didn’t just take care of themselves: they were generous neighbors and gracious citizens, a powerful antidote to the brutality and cynicism of imperial Rome, the force that occupied their lands. They practiced what their teacher Jesus had modeled: table fellowship that set equal places for poor and rich, Greek and Jew, female and male, free and slave, mainstream and marginalized. They took him at his word when he instructed them to treat the poorest and sickest as if they were treating him. They found their fulfillment in what he had announced he had come to fulfill: the binding-up of the broken-hearted, release of the prisoner, bringing good news to the poor.
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Paul’s words, but they surely were Jesus’s words, too; at least they spoke his Spirit.
In the civic and political life of our nation in a year of presidential campaigning that puffs up anyone aspiring to lead, in this long season of partisan wrangling, listen, watch for anyone who demonstrates love that builds. Vote for that person!
Be astounded when you encounter such authority, as Jesus’s first hearers were at Capernaum, when he did much more than speak. In the same intimacy that marked his table fellowship and would characterize his Church, Jesus fully encounters, entirely engages a very troubled man.
If there are many gods in the background of our first two readings, here in the Gospel stands someone with multiple personalities. The result is not dissimilar. What is inherently one, meant to be one, necessarily one, has become fragmented, fractured, chaotic. In place of a confident, centered, peaceable, creative spirit there is about this man a constant competition within him, a being-at-odds with himself that consumes his vitality, distracts from pleasure and joy, an endless appeasing of conflicting demands.
Facing this splintered person, Jesus unifies him, reconciles his oppositions, speaks into his chaos the Word of re-creation.
I want to say that we need Jesus to do much the same thing for our fractured dysfunctional nation, for we are in the grip of our oppositions and show signs of having an unclean spirit.
But as I hear myself say those words, I shudder at sounding like a right-winger who would insist that the United States of America is a Christian country that must become an entirely Christian country… and I recognize how easy it is turn a source of unity into a disintegrating influence that could shatter the very equilibrium we need.
So I will ratchet down my rhetoric, having heard a certain degree of puff in myself, and ask that we keep committing ourselves in this parish family to allowing love to build up an intimate community where taking care of one another informs not only our religious life, but also our citizenship in this country and our role as good neighbors beyond our borders.
To commit ourselves to this caring will keep requiring us to examine our little shrines, our household gods, to answer unafraid the question: Just what do we value?
My first impression, reading these appointed lessons today, was to wish I’d invited someone else to preach. Slim pickins’, I thought to myself. But since God gets to hear those first impressions, it didn’t take me long to wonder if it might be arrogant (even offensive) to be slamming the book shut solely because I couldn’t feel a stirring of my imagination. I found myself wondering if God wasn’t holding me to a higher standard than my first reactions.
At work in both first and second lessons is the ancient belief that there are many gods, many lords. All three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—insist that there is one God, only one God. Our Abrahamic bunk-mates, both Jewish and Muslim, find fault with us in our doctrine of the Holy Trinity, asking if this doesn’t smack of polytheism. But we quickly remind them of the missing word: ours is the doctrine of the holy and undivided Trinity, and we pound the table as hard as they do in asserting there is one God who presents in more than one way, but one God, by God!
Our readings today show how hard-fought and hard-won was the rise of the new belief, monotheism—one God. The nations neighboring ancient Israel had their fertility gods and goddesses, their martial gods, their tribal gods, worshiped at many altars with the flow of much blood, some of it human. Worshiped also on the high places with cultic prostitution, and in temples with food offerings. There was a certain libidinal appeal to how these gods were worshiped—never a dull sermon—and thus it was that the worship of one God in ancient Israel faced chronic competition, a recurring theme throughout the Hebrew Bible. As we heard today, the vestiges of polytheism could bring out the worst in the followers of Israel’s one God, including threats to murder any prophets who spoke in the names of other gods. Gosh, what kind of religion is that?
Fast-forward many centuries to the first in the Common Era and find St. Paul counseling the church at Corinth on the knotty question whether Christians were allowed to eat meat that had been offered in sacrifice at a pagan temple. Some things just don’t change. The old-time religion of many gods had a long shelf-life.
Today, I suppose our assortment of idols, household gods, and lesser divinities could include fame, wealth, beauty, athletic prowess, popularity, tenure, retirement… And, in our national pantheon, what? Nuclear supremacy? Single-party control of the House, Senate, and White House? A balanced budget? Winning the race for outer space? They all have their worshipers. And what is worship—worth-ship—but the repeated actions we take in service to what we value most?
That could be a sermon for another time. Let’s return to Paul. His answer to the Corinthians’ question carries a message that would outlast anything we think we know about the idolatries of his time. Paul constructs a careful argument asserting that idols have no real existence beyond the way that carved wood or hammered metal occupies space on a shelf, so it ought to make no difference whether the food offered to please the idols gets sold at the back door of the temple and taken home by Christians… or not. More important, he insists, is what message is heard when new Christians, in whom a fresh new conscience is being formed, converts from those pagan temples, watch church leaders serve up that lamb stew at the potluck supper as if it doesn’t matter.
Mattering, in other words, can’t be determined by logic alone. Compassionate thoughtfulness trumps reason in how believers treat one another within the intimate community of the Body of Christ. “Getting it” matters more than getting. The knowledge we claim must be a knowing of people, a knowing of God, more than a knowing of principles. And if we forget that, and make decisions and choices that wound our newest, weakest, youngest members, then we sin against Christ. The church family is that intimate: What we do to one another we do to him.
What made the apostolic community known and respected in Paul’s time was the way their communal intimacy trained them to be that way in the world. They didn’t just take care of themselves: they were generous neighbors and gracious citizens, a powerful antidote to the brutality and cynicism of imperial Rome, the force that occupied their lands. They practiced what their teacher Jesus had modeled: table fellowship that set equal places for poor and rich, Greek and Jew, female and male, free and slave, mainstream and marginalized. They took him at his word when he instructed them to treat the poorest and sickest as if they were treating him. They found their fulfillment in what he had announced he had come to fulfill: the binding-up of the broken-hearted, release of the prisoner, bringing good news to the poor.
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Paul’s words, but they surely were Jesus’s words, too; at least they spoke his Spirit.
In the civic and political life of our nation in a year of presidential campaigning that puffs up anyone aspiring to lead, in this long season of partisan wrangling, listen, watch for anyone who demonstrates love that builds. Vote for that person!
Be astounded when you encounter such authority, as Jesus’s first hearers were at Capernaum, when he did much more than speak. In the same intimacy that marked his table fellowship and would characterize his Church, Jesus fully encounters, entirely engages a very troubled man.
If there are many gods in the background of our first two readings, here in the Gospel stands someone with multiple personalities. The result is not dissimilar. What is inherently one, meant to be one, necessarily one, has become fragmented, fractured, chaotic. In place of a confident, centered, peaceable, creative spirit there is about this man a constant competition within him, a being-at-odds with himself that consumes his vitality, distracts from pleasure and joy, an endless appeasing of conflicting demands.
Facing this splintered person, Jesus unifies him, reconciles his oppositions, speaks into his chaos the Word of re-creation.
I want to say that we need Jesus to do much the same thing for our fractured dysfunctional nation, for we are in the grip of our oppositions and show signs of having an unclean spirit.
But as I hear myself say those words, I shudder at sounding like a right-winger who would insist that the United States of America is a Christian country that must become an entirely Christian country… and I recognize how easy it is turn a source of unity into a disintegrating influence that could shatter the very equilibrium we need.
So I will ratchet down my rhetoric, having heard a certain degree of puff in myself, and ask that we keep committing ourselves in this parish family to allowing love to build up an intimate community where taking care of one another informs not only our religious life, but also our citizenship in this country and our role as good neighbors beyond our borders.
To commit ourselves to this caring will keep requiring us to examine our little shrines, our household gods, to answer unafraid the question: Just what do we value?
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